Time Team S07E05 hadrian's.wall,.birdoswald

this is Hadrian's Wall the 80 mile long barrier between Roman Britain and the barbarian north and this is baaad Oswald one of the forts that protected this far-flung corner of that empire now we know a lot about the buildings from these remains but what about the soldiers who lived and died here what do we know about them this is bad Oswald Cemetery and it's under threat from the elements in fact some of it could have already fallen down that escarpment we've been given the fantastic opportunity to excavate this site to find out what's here what's been lost and what's going to happen to it in the future this is the first time ever that a military cemetery has been excavated on Hadrian's Wall and it'll give us a rare insight into the lives and beliefs of the people who lived here 1700 years ago and as usual time team have got just three days to find out Hadrian's Wall was built between 122 and 138 AD as the northern boundary of conquered Britain for the next 300 years soldiers from all over the Roman Empire manned the 1740s along the wall one of their main bases being here at Byrd Oswalt the rectangular wall of the fort is still visible today as are some of the encampments remains but it's in the Fords visitor center that we begin our investigation into the final resting place of pedasi walls Roman soldiers well that's a very nice little modules wonderful isn't it yeah but we don't actually know that it looked like that doing well I think we do because apart from the fact that some of it actually sort of surviving as walls and so on we know a lot about the layout of Roman forts well in Britain don't we the evidence on which most of this models based is geophysical every roman fort had the same buildings in it basically um not necessarily in the same order i said most of us geophysics but this whole area here this whole quarter of the fort has been totally excavated over the last twelve years mainly by you mainly by me i'm where's the bit where we're going to do it's over there in the corner of the model here among yeah i don't have these little tombstones yes because in fact we know a lot about the forts and the settlements but we know almost nothing about the cemeteries on the wall don't we know no symmetry on hedges all's ever been excavated but do we actually know there's a cemetery here yes it was found as a result of plowing in 1959 1960 so why are we going to dig it up now it has been it has been damaged first of all by plowing and subsequently by just the rutting of farm vehicles going over when it's damp but we have had a recent episode of erosion a piece of the edge of the cliff has gone over leaving a clean section so is there less of this now than there was in Rome and considerably less the River Edge now it's back to here and perhaps on the line from the trees there so I mean in the same sort of curved round to here so it's sort of like this that's right round two here has gone I think we better start don't you this is a big site for GFS but they do have some earlier results to help them concentrate their resources and help us plan our first trenches as well as the Roman burial ground we're interested in the field adjacent to the West Gate of the fort and in particular this large elliptical area the previous geophysics of this part of the site have suggested two roads joining just outside the West Gate surrounded by anomalies now many roads out of major Roman settlements had roadside burials and monuments so these blobs could be tombs or more saliyah but we'll start up in the so called cemetery field to assess what's left of this burial site and whether or not it's damaged so we're slap-bang in the middle of the cemetery now just hit the rivers over there and the fort's down there do we yet know where we're going to put the trench here but I think we've got a vague it's you in this area really our first priority at the moment is to establish how well the remains are still preserved so we want to dig in the area that's least that's most damaged because everything else to be better than that and it looks like this sort of area but yeah I mean we only thought here because it's rotted and lumpy anyway you know it's where that where machinery is coming to the field now although we keep referring to this field as a cemetery we don't expect to find coffins and skeletons here Roman soldiers tended to be cremated and their ashes then buried sometimes in a pot or an urn so we're going to be looking for telltale signs such as dark circles in the soil a bit of ash pot or charred bone but it's time-consuming work on such an important site as this everything has to be done by hand this is a World Heritage Site yeah so we haven't just turned up here and started digging oh no I mean we've done here what we have to do on all the sides which is to write a project design as does the archaeological jargon for ease a document that says why you why you want to dig how it's going to be conducted you know what the reasons for coming and so on except here because it's a World Heritage Site it's it's a massive document this is our business plan for the next three days absolutely I don't think many people realize this but but in the end archaeology's destruction and you have to take the site apart to understand it and if people in future are going to understand it then you've got to leave a lot of good records so there's got to be good plans good sections notes about it all photographs so that in theory somebody could come back and at least mentally put the site back together well we seem to have got off to a good start we've just turned up some glass that could possibly have come from a Roman urn look wow it's nice that it's Roman doesn't it miss out on bluey green colour ops isn't modern that's a really nice but that's just our first bit of Roman artifacts probably those well as one of the reasons for this dig is to assess the threat of erosion Stuart's looking for clues as to why the escarpment has moved almost a hundred meters closer to the fort in the last seventeen hundred years that's quite impressive isn't it what a drop in salutely it's like being caused by the river do you think it may be started by the river but the the main operation seems to be rainwater soaking into the boulder clay and seeping into fishes and taking plates of all the clay off and of course now it's the erosions got this far those fishes in the boulder clay are the archaeology itself right there they are the ditches of the fort here and the Vallum ditch and all the other features the archaeologists causing the erosion come the archaeology causing the erosion which is destroying the archaeology is slowly instead of yeah yeah so what have you proved you got in it wet well I can tell you go ahead yeah very wet no or our first human bone so Jeffers I don't hate to tell - yeah how can you tell that for instance I think it's probably feet of tibia if you run your finger down the front of your tibia it's very sharp you know the shin bone the bit that hurts with somebody cracks you wanna be the hockey foot of it's a broken my leg yeah that that you see that's very sharp edge to it there and that's that's what gives that particular blood own away that we're finding this stuff coming up the top so do you think that means most of our formations gonna be disturbed we've got the sort of bitter we reckon at the top of one here oh yeah that's that's lucky really yeah yeah and there's a bit of tile yeah yeah tenuous one which I sort of got part of you know box yeah around but if we're finding the bone in the top so does that mean my son probably cloud away or does that always happen we may not just have very old oaken comater bones and turnip you know the types of deposit as well and for instance you didn't collect all the bones very it only cuts for clowns yeah so you may have Piatt debris with bits of you know bits of the pie that was left over with the creative bone in it and that's just been lying around on the surface and being to spread about during the plowing so we may or may not have found the site of our first cremation burial but our early optimism that trench one is awash with Roman artifacts is beginning to fade that characteristically Roman bluey-green glass we found isn't as old as we thought this is the base ring of bottle I'm not totally convinced it's Roman I thought she was gonna say it's plucked from the neck of a Roman courtesan or something no no I am not doing too sure about that I think it might be the bottom of a 17th century bottled roma stirred had glasses oh yes they did I would never be lucky to have glass up here oh yes and there certainly you find glass bottles square bottles and occasion you find pieces of very elegant drinking vessels painted glass and chipped glass and that sort of thing these Romans have been buried here they're not Italian Romans are there such a way the Legion comes from the unit came originally from Asia which is modern Romania first cohort and updations a thousand strong Hadrian's own so they're not they're not they're not it's or even that the Romans and they're not from Rome they're not even from Italy no no no they're from somewhere else in the Iran Empire which is normal isn't it absolutely normal yes we've actually got cohorts of Britons in geisha with trench one well and truly under way it's time to check out the field beside the fort and it's intriguing geophysics extraordinary thing out on this west side a village green is it yeah it really is odd so we've home in on part of that okay one hmm there you can see just part of that quiet area yeah nose to the north Hadrian's Wall itself here yeah and then these blobs which we're not quite sure what they are would you think that's what you get from occupation from buildings and so on it looks a bit like that but it's just possible it's associated with some sort of burning now whether that's industrial burning or whether it's something to do now with this particular blob there's some Xhosa Stinson amélie's that might just be a structure right so my feeling is roadside mausoleum homing on there so trench two finally goes in to check this section of our mysterious elliptical area yes invite a little hopefully you're joking ready here nothing so hyper smug building additional options it is Josh say mr. commissioners boot so it looks that way to get an idea of what we may find in our burial field we've asked Jackie our cremations expert to build us a Roman funeral pyre this is much more than just building a bonfire in fact it's the first time anyone's recreated such a pyre these particular types are known as their busting burials custom busting and this is actually quite a large hole that we've got over here there it's about 70 centimetres wide by that wider and about a meter 20 long so about so long and the idea of these particular types of pyres was that the pie was constructed or was something which was going to form the place of burial so the idea is that as the pyre burns down in body drops in but it burns straight into the what will be the grave what did they think would happen to them after they've been cremated the idea of creating the body was that it would be an immediate release of the spirit yeah as opposed to just sort of burying it in the ground and the body having to decompose by cremating you'd immediate in free the spirit so you'd go straight to heaven there was also a certain amount of cleansing the idea of cleansing fire as a cleanser it common and ideas make yeah I would listen to this oh yeah mostest grassi's yellow isn't it isn't it so war probably mm-hmm oh you're off it dear Oh what no no BAE that three stones must be a war on one stones a stone two stones a wall three stones building almost owns a palace that's what that's that's that's what we're at Raths taught me at universe they don't they're back in the cemetery field things are hotting up look at roots about quite a happy place some very old looking wood has been uncovered in trench one it's obviously not the coffin somebody was cremated in because that's what has been there I wouldn't have thought Woodward five for that long we're wondering now if it's some kind of wood lined cremation thing we do occasionally get Commission's in wooden boxes it's quite rare because I was the would rarely survives and people don't know what the Novation was in intrigues at the burial site but it's so late in the day that fills only got time for a cursory inspection of his trench in the field beside the fort just got another piece of pot over here but it's still very very very very rounded look just play on it just turns it round makes all these makes all these edges really really rounded so we're still reeling in sir oh god ah yeah but I mean this this is a totally sealed layer I mean she's right at the boat bottom of the the actual soil honey it was just the turf which is peeling off where is this one then Corrine so that you've got oh well oh yeah it's just under where we have that cremation yeah so that's what it turned out to be is it well the most that we can see in a still more of the correct motive material and set yeah well you can sit and again you can see it was set right on top of this bit of wood but um that's weird well it looks as if he's actually going under the clear I think it's maybe amazed or which has been laid on top of it and maybe that's just created very very good preservation conditions there's only Roman pottery coming from this layer over the top of it so since it be completely sealed and it doesn't seem to be burned itself but it's clearly very very closely associated with the cremation the other possibilities it's a tree root but it's a it doesn't look like a tree isn't doesn't but I'm here under it for it to be Roman wood surviving is too much to hope isn't it as the end of day one approaches there's just enough time left to finish our busting promotion and to see what happens to a body during a Croatian we've added some cuts of meat wort from a local butcher it may be too early to say what's going on in our trenches but if the gods are with us and the rain holds off there's at least one result we should get by the morning beginning of day two of our excavation of the Roman soldiers cemetery but Oswalt this is trench to which as you can see we've hardly started and is still a bit of a mystery but Mick already wants to go ahead and dig a trench three what's your problem me well we've decided not to pursue any more geophysical anomalies in this area here but to go back and look at the geophysics results for the area near of the fort and the reason for that is we think that we might be dealing with a veikkaus on this side of the fort as well as on the other side hang on Tony remind me what a V curses civilian settlement on the outside of the thought the place where the wives dependents families pubs shops traders in various of knickknacks but in the beautiful model that you showed me yesterday morning there was the fort and then green fields and then a cemetery somewhere away yes well the model was made before we got the Jesuses we've actually got the veikkaus buildings on the other side on the model but not on this can you see what we were thinking is that perhaps the cemetery up there is up there because there was actually a veikkaus in that open space that's on the model so we're now searching for a large settlement of veikkaus in a field we originally thought contained just two roads and some tubes trench three we'll look at the area where gf is suggests these two roads meet what's not clear at the moment is why there might be veikkaus buildings on this side of the fort when we know from previous excavations there's a large village on the other side to get a broader picture Mick's gone up in the chopper with Stuart yes every time that we're out in the squirrel to the west now there's there's trench to look and you can see the cemetery is actually somewhere waste it here we see our white storage box and then cleansers James James well at the top such a quite a distance yeah that is a high spot of ground which the Romans like for the cemetery areas if you look below you now the line of the Pedro's wall would have been where the road is this first ditch line that you see is the earlier hatreds wall that was built in turn but later on they replaced it with stone but the rounded Oswald they didn't build on the same line but stone wall on two separate lines based on the wall where that's right there's gonna be a reason absolutely like a trench - we've unearthed something of interest it's a really good condition in it yes worries I can yeah yeah that needs to be cleaned up quite a bit to be sure but you are gonna be able to tell us what it is exactly I've got a feeling as well as committing ourselves it's not just lovely dateable coins we're finding in trench tooth there's also a lot of evidence of habitation like flag stones and bits of wall but the weather conditions aren't helping us our amphibian friend may have enjoyed the overnight rains but our attempt as a Roman cremation is literally fizzled out we'll try again later but first of all our emotions and mysterious buried wooden trench 1 are looking decidedly damn so there's a lot of mopping up to be done this is this er daughter would mm we've been talking about if I see I was so friendly intrigued about its call that cremated stuff straight on top of yes Reina tears straight under this clay here good scene they were thinking that clay might be a sort of clay floor or something I suppose it could be Rome and I'm tempted to think it's just a piece of rubbish but um have to look at more of it I guess it's not a bashed about as we thought it might be is it I'm glad you think it looks better than you feared it is going to ask it well that was one of our aims up here Sicilian preservation was the move with the preservation sufficiently good we've got word Pacific that's really can't be bad get it no back in the incident room Mick and Stuart are taking a closer look at possible reasons why the escarpment behind bird Oswald has changed so dramatically over the last seventeen hundred years it's actually happening here is that all this area here we bowled a clay yeah this is the sort of mix of sand and silt and it's very unstable set orangey yellow stuff we've got some of the trenches isn't it yeah say well it all that eventually they get so much water we just flush some towels or we're slumps what happens is that once it finds a weakness yeah the whole thing gives way and user happens all at one go it's not just a tip a little bit falls off the end the whole lot goes presumably you're talking about heavy rain storm and erosion from the river is there any other possibility that yeah what was it that you've hit on what that's a very serious flood of the river and it really sweeps down yeah the other is an earthquake you do have earthquakes in this mother I know I know and interestingly if you look at the geological map this is a major fault line cook rain right across the edge of this escarpment yeah and and if you're on a earthquake or not it's time to see how the changes in the landscape have affected the site and most importantly to discover if any of the burial ground has disappeared over the edge of the escarpment Katy no no yeah I'll give it a clean and see if I can see anything if it's quite clean like you say it is presumably you'd be able to see anything like charcoal or astral stuff any hair yeah I mean I can't see any skeletons or anything secure that's right so it doesn't look what you can see is it three extended this far not as far as I can see no so the burial field is still all on the top of the hill despite this good news I can't help but feel despondent as yet another wave of rain passes over our dig MIT we're at this beautiful place World Heritage Site they're probably the most important site that we've ever dug at the longest single roman monument in the world and look look what we've got we've got three main key holes like this covered in soggy stones a hole here and these other finds what is Bissell yeah yeah yeah really are a miserable devil what we've been able to show at the top yeah is that while we haven't got an individual cremation at the moment the whole area is covered in bits of cremated bone within the area of the cemetery we've been over the cliff and I say we I mean Casey's in over the cliff and she's found nothing but that's good that's good because it means that the cliff isn't eroding back into the cemetery yeah we don't have to dig a trench long there to save that it's all within the site down here you remember we started out with your idea that there might be a cemetery here yeah on the model there's nothing at all because they didn't know what was here yeah the early geophysics had this peculiar shape and all this noise around it these two holes have shown us that we're in the middle of another bit of the veikkaus as soon as you came out to the West Gate of the fort over there you'd have gone into it and when you end up in that direction you'd have got to the cemetery about where our white boxes and so you've got this long linear settlement then the fourth and then a long linear settlement the other side so you know we didn't know this before we came here this isn't similar this is settlement so while I'm moaning you're saying we might have found a small town exactly and I said I said to Tony before lunch I said where are the nearest big Roman settlements around here and he said well Carlisle that way and core breeds that way I said so if you wanted a market in this part of the country this would be a very good candidate he said yeah it's somewhere in the middle so I thought we hadn't got anything and we've got Milton Keynes maybe I'll be things looking like that yeah but I mean well this is something we hadn't expected and the good news doesn't stop there geophysics have finally finished there survey of the burial field I hey you think you've come up with something yeah we've just finished the season vapor measurements and what is caesium vapor season visits one of the ways we measure the Earth's magnetic field but in fact it's far more sensitive than the usual instruments that we use and can you see we've got some nice individual blobs which may actually be cremations not certain about this but these green things are green things yet and can you see in here there's a semicircle coming around there that's about three meters across now fact that as far as I can work out we may find some cremations that are actually surrounded by a small ditch that could be a small ditch that's what happens with those promotions educate you on this well apparently so yes I mean I've never seen them before but I have something could be a small ditch about three meters across or so in the middle of what's meant to be a cemetery I think they should really have a look at that so trench four goes in the top field to look for geophysics burial the early results look good Tony's found cremation evidence although there's no sign yet of an urn house their enigmatic trench going then carrenza that's being very enigmatic right open why wait well we uncovered a bit more to try and find the rest of this wood a piece of wood here which is curving on underneath that dark BAM they see a few bits of it we now find a very sort of ashy patch that we think might be a cremation there's another dark shark early patch there this wood is coming up all over the place now we've got another bit there there's another bit right over there that wood Jackie looks remarkably like the size of wood that you and I were humping around yesterday late afternoon could it be anything to do with the cremation well hmm what I would be unhappy about there is that one the piece of wood itself obviously hasn't been burned I mean it's that it's a dark color but it is yours this water we can try again later so could it be a structure time it could be I am I'm still a bit worried by you know having wet Tim I mean over the top of this hill is is very wet but you know wet timber and interpreting is being Roman on the top of the hill but it's also difficult to see well I see so you might not be that old anyway well it's wrong as it's going underneath that clay deposit there yeah upon which there are there are various sort of none of you are slightest idea now I'm god I think we really need to get a move on we need to get more of these Timbers uncovered we're going to see if they make a path and I think we've we've really got to go into if you're happy with that tone yeah we've got got to be done yeah while carrenza and Tony attempt to solve the mystery of the wood in trench one it's time to relight our own busting funeral pyre which has had a chance to dry out I don't get too close it's a little bit on the warm side you've done it you've got it alive from over there I do it was another phonier thank you see we should have had faith in me oh I was dead the others didn't I just got to let that warm up a little bit now you can tell how incredibly hot it is there's really shimmering matter where it's actually cool on this side you can't get anywhere near the other side what sort of temperatures do they get up to wow you can get up to a thousand degrees no problem certainly the centre of the pie when it's it is hottest and you can see why this kind of structure actually enables it to keep burning yeah well the idea of the structure is that it's quite an open lattice work and the brushwood infill which we had was just to help it get going in the first place and that will maintain temperature good temperature for a long long time which is what you need really to get rid of all the the tissues in the body when you're creating it how long do you think it'll burn for oh well it'll it'll probably start to collapse before too long I mean about three hours to get the main body down but it'll just keep going all night probably so success with our pyre but after so much optimism disappointment entrench one the wood that had promised so much for the last two days now seems to be at best a few hundred years old put there by a farmer to give easier access into this wet boggy field originally we thought it might be Roman wood because it was under Roman cremation debris but that now seems to be due to the soil being churned over by ploughing what you got Mick why don't you seen these up Tony that's the a silver coin of the emperor Domitian yeah and that's a Roman intaglio what's an intaglio that's the glass bit out of a fingering that's used as a seal and it's sort of purple glass and these come off that big settlement down the bottom there how are you crying - have you got any fines well just about yeah we had a really frustrating afternoon while all day really chasing all this wooden structure we thought might be a roman pyre or something for a while but it's not it's modern which is a bit depressing but we now started hit cremations we've got a couple they're not very good condition we've got this wonderful bit of pot that it's just come up is this anything to do with promotion I think it's the base of a cremation urn yeah um hopefully we'll find some more tomorrow and we tried to find the extent of the cemetery going that way it's been a typical topsy-turvy time team day the rains been tipping down the diggers have been struggling through it but round about lunchtime I think virtually all of us thought we weren't going to find anything at all in this wonderful site and then after lunch the cremation started popping up and down over here it now seems that we might have the largest Roman settlement between Corbridge and Carlisle but the odd thing about it is that even though the Romans didn't leave here to about 400 AD all the finds around here stopped around 200 AD beginning of day 3 and what looks like a completely empty field now seems to be the site of a big Roman settlement but the weird thing about it is that none the fines coming out of it a later than second century this is a coin that we got out of the earth about five minutes ago with roma sitting down the goddess Roma with the shield they're looking very much like Britannia on the old Kenney so we're trying to sort out what was going on in that trench there and in that trench there and we've got two other trenches up there where we think we've got a Roman soldier Cemetery so what's Mick doing he's putting in another big why do we need another hole in the ground because we're looking at the other side of this open elliptical area based on the geophysics this is where we are now Tony yeah in the middle here you've just come from trench - yeah and we decide to put a trench on the northern side this ellipse where we've got again all these strong responses what's so weird is that the whole project seems to have drifted away from what we originally thought we were going to get which was the Roman cemetery and this is fantastically interesting but it's not what we were looking for well no it's not but at least we know that we haven't got high status burials and mausolea in this area between the fort and the cemetry explains possibly why the cemetery is so far away because it was servicing this side of town time now we've got a you know a complete Roman settlement that's sort of organized organized settlement around us yeah fantastic discoveries almost a green yeah yeah so yet another trench goes in in an effort to explain the complex archaeology of our newly discovered veikkaus in the elliptical area God is gonna take forever and it's this right just do you know Barney as one trench opens another closes in this case trench one hate is just finishing excavating the one decent in situation we've had we've had about four or five six maybe other sort of concentrations of the material that I think are cremations but not that many we're not doing an awful lot better over here at the moment we've got one decent Commission than that trench one in this trench we've got five or six other bits obviously where Commission is all very disturbed no and I mean this this hasn't really worked has it Chris from what was on the jib we thought we had a dead sir yeah but I've you know had a dead sir realized it's sir it's quite interesting actually given where we want to find the condition of the cemetery yeah I'm afraid Chris's dead cert was a medieval furrow this is genuinely a really difficult area for maybe there's not enough Crowe mentions that sounds about since part of our brief is to find out if there are any cremation burials left intact we're going to continue searching using geo fizzes other results meanwhile our attempt at a Roman cremation called a busting has survived the elements and been a success yes is brilliant this looks just right our first attempt at busting if I do you know anyone who's attempted one before no no not really so think of me one what have we learned well the PI has collapsed down into it as we thought and what you've got at the base is fine wood ash you've also got some of the larger bits of of charred wood which didn't completely burn away and then you can also see the bone still lying on top of the wood ash with a bust on cremation the pit was just filled in after the flames had died down a more common form and the evidence we're finding on our site involves the ashes being taken and buried in an urn we do have debris turning up we've got pied if you remember the bits of charcoal and little bits of what looked like baked clay and that debris looks like this day right that day P looks like that yeah back in the burial field Kris is now certain that he's onto something yeah we definitely we have got a possible pate or cremation yet it's shown on both the season Boober and the fluxgate I rat which that didn't know that was only on the caesium vapor right so where is it well Sam back about there all right okay - bye - hopefully this new trench will yield that elusive intact cremation urn meanwhile trench - in the field beside the fort continues to support the theory that it once contained a busy settlement that ceased to operate sometime close to 200 AD we have just had a bit of semyonov here I don't know if you can put a date on that date this basically tied trionic so it's in the frame you know yeah 2nd century again um we've got root no real clue as to whether it's um domestic or industrial so we've got those bits of what look likes the furnace Leininger li ER on video down down in here you've got a rich families discrete little feature in here haven't you the pink with the pink played there which is only undefined on that side over there you could get that defined and get it excavated it's right at the head of this drain or there's Luther you might have the the business end of one of these industrial dryers or something about to forget a chance to look at that coin that came up from trench - well this is the coin yes this is the coin it's a bronze coin this time and I think it's Antoninus Pius one two eight two one six one although the coins are fantastic finds Linds is most excited by yesterday's discovery of an intaglio the inset from a ring that was used as a seal it's made of glass and the figure is carved out you can see on the screen here its Achilles you've got his helmet there and that's his cloak coming down here a spear coming up there now what he's doing is he's carrying the spear and round shield foetus and he's holding outstretched the helmet the crested helmet that's the body the helmet there's a crest coming down here of Palace mm-hmm so this is a very nice scene for a soldier because the kinney's of course was the ideal hero the sort of hero that a soldier was trying to pretend to be something he's aiming to be so it's a very nice one ah - yes or is he is he naked apart from the club I've done these that a lot on oh did you look closer well heroes don't worry a lot of clothes on the hole they don't feel the cold so the entire gives us an idea of what ideals the soldiers based here aspired to and like all the finds from the elliptical area it's pre 200 AD but the more intriguing these trenches get the more careful we have to be as first impressions aren't always what they seem look at this not these great big slabs of Roman roof tile go well these were the legionary stamp on knowing do you want look how sharp it is it's very fresh that has not actually been rolled around there play I recognise coming up from from some depth and I reckon that probably the explanation is it's been cut through boy that land rain and it's coming up you know this is Dona what's wrong route Oh horseshoe-shaped land rain horse she's already landed you here we get it up here here yeah I once had some pieces of this Roman roof tile with nice lettering incised in them one had an RN yeah a one had I N and they were to complete one said drain happy sorry you've been fooled by the clear oh yeah thankfully Phil's disappointment short-lived gotta find for us we've been talking about enough now look we got this super rosette molding on the side of a semi in Bowl this yeah and it's beautiful these figures yeah it looks like two human figures both naked what are they doing look can you see huh but what would it in this one these down here look like phone sticks Lego Bolin's is a posh name for them but what's the trying stick where's the stick you throw it something kill it chilly you're calling us photo look we'll talk about our later all day laughter could that be pornographic it could be indeed yes we need to look at it carefully I won't make a decision on that but it's a minute oh yes definitely Rome this is just the most amazing it's the biggest glass bead I've ever seen then it's beautiful right I'll be this nice lastly I'm Jason yes I'd bring at the colors oh look at that it's a nun wonderful what is it there's a bead but it's probably wise to be a pendant than a necklace speed worn by women or men could be either it's something like this oh look at inside see the swirly design of the white and turquoise glass what sort of period you think their mother and it could be 1st century BC 1st century AD it's early so is that the sort of thing they'd be making here or are they importing that from oh yeah I think this is likely to be something which is made in Britain but possibly further south in Britain it's something which is perhaps come up right from Somerset area something like that but you've got these stripes here these are actually inlaid into the molten glass they make up strips of lots of little different colored stripes and then they end lay it and smooth it down afterwards it's called marvering right you call me over yes I thought you might last last well that's been better but that really doesn't much more encouraging that's the rim the funeral it looks like with the right way up doesn't it it does doesn't it and then it really encourages me because in the other trenches all we've had is a sort of scraped off moved around destroyed bottoms yeah but this is possible is it we might have something that's intact and the contents inside it's really looking good is that after all the fretting that this great site wasn't giving us the goods geophysics final suggestion for a trench has with only hours to go come up with what looks like an intact cremation burial and if this find wasn't enough what we've got here is a big story about this section of Hadrian's Wall this is the only area where there's a two sections of wall in fact one is a turf wall which is earlier than the stone wall and Byrd Oswald is the only place where these are separate and there's got to be a reason for that so I'm trying to work trying to work out why that happened and I think it relates to the geological processes and erosion here what we've got is the escarpment this is before the Romans arrived in effect you've got an escarpment with a tongue of land sticking out here River down below and what happens next is the building of the turf wall in this section here later on they replace this with a stone fort here now what happens very quickly all this area is built over the problem they've got here is that they they're right close to the edge of the escarpment and what appears to happen at some time it goes just like that this huge great part of the escarpment just slumps away down to the riverbed at the bottom so the closeness of the escarpment could have forced the stone wall further north and if the cliff face fell away in such a dramatic fashion that would certainly explain why the veikkaus west of the fort suddenly stopped being used Tony there is one piece of bad news of course which is that that beautiful model that you showed Mick and I on the first day is now wrong we'll have to get this Stanley huh oh what's that I don't know it's incredibly oh it's one of those it like seseri vessels joking twice oh it looks like lights it's a tired little sort of yeah little wrong wonderful so rim on it here that's beautiful be any idea of date for it oh well it's color coated worth third century well I think by the thickness of the rim I think it's probably in the zoo somewhere in France like that really so would that have been quite expensive then yes it's an important pot on this is this is what really looks of things yes it's a century as well but um this one you see it's just is it's readable to know whether this is part of the actual funeral right where the drinkers have been having a toaster of the departed and thrown the potty and afterwards or where this is part of sort of packed lunch to carry you from the grave to the underworld okay after finding lots of trashed burials we now have one that's fully intact but how has this one survived and the others haven't and why in the cemetery that would have been very ordered is the burial evidence all over the place Mick has a theory it's all to do with plowing if you imagine the field surface originally this is a section right with the various cremations in the ground underneath like that yeah and then in the mid medieval period there's written for oh and if I draw a section through it so it was like that with the ridges and furrows some of this would have been wrecked to plow it away whereas we've got the ridge with the greater depth of soil the cremation is preserved intact which is what that one in the corner was and then in the 20th century the farmer comes along and plows it all flat again and of course we're within you know centimeters or inches of record the things that have survived from while at the time so it's entirely due to the medieval region furrow that any of these things have survived at all it's very very very it fragile again I totally feel this let let me slide it in from the higher I think you I thought it and we think that that would have contained some kind of ritual could have been wine on the journey up here for people in funeral procession could have been wine for the dead person on their journey fee under it or it could have been oils or something for pouring to the grave or quenching the flames of the pyre anything like that but it's a beautiful piece it's third centuries French is imported it's a really exotic items and it's absolutely beautiful it looks like we're only minutes away from lifting the first intact cremation urn found on Hadrian's Wall while the delicate work continues it's time to close down the trenches in the field beside the fort and the results are more surprising than we could have thought possible we've got a flagstone floor yeah that's dystonia yeah and then it carries on underneath that wall over there yeah yeah then it's cut by probably a 2nd century Rome rubbish pit right here and the latest phase is this rather rubbishy stone wall and where we had a half oh this is the red here this yeah oh right and we're gonna go for domestic rather the industrial and look at this I think it's the most incredible thing and intaglio from Oh Lord look at that it's a crike a charioteer driving for horse yeah three days ago we thought this elliptical area contained a road from the fort to the cemetery lined with more salir now with the evidence from the trenches we think it must have been a busy veikkaus crammed with shops houses and farmyards and with Victor's help we can envisage how this busy thoroughfare may have looked in its heyday a settlement that went out of use around 200 ad possibly because of some cataclysmic earth slip outside the towns edge the fines that allowed us to find this out have been spectacular but as we approach the end of the third day I never thought I'd be so close to the remains of someone who actually lived in this town this is the first complete excavation of a crow motion at Bird Oswald possibly abba roman soldier who patrolled this distant frontier 1,700 years ago however and civilization next the team are back searching for the secrets of the mysterious light Templar here on Discovery Channel though Mark Williams remembers a dangerous time to be on the rails you

Channel: Reijer Zaaijer

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Rating: 4.8871331 out of 5

Keywords: time, team, full, episodes, season

Id: gY0kTN_5aOM

Length: 46min 29sec (2789 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 26 2013