Time Team S08-E05 Waltham Villa, Gloucestershire

welcome to the Cotswolds one of the most affluent addresses in Roman Britain the countryside around me is crammed with Roman villas and roads and towns but we're interested in one particular Roman des res which were pretty sure once stood in this field because these finds from a small dig here 23 years ago suggest an opulent villa built within years of the Roman occupation and what's more it's sited unusually close to two other villas once we've got the archaeological evidence from under here we'll be trying to paint a picture of the Roman Cotswolds family who lived here almost two millennia ago and as usual we've got just three days to do it in 1978 an exploratory trench was dug in this field five miles from Cheltenham although the fine suggested the existence of one of the Cotswolds earliest Roman villas no further investigation took place until now as we attempt to discover the whole story of the villa in whorfin field Mick why are you so confident there's something interesting here well there was an excavation done here in the 70s by a local chap and we're pretty sure it's somewhere in this field don't we fill it well I mean I think it seems to be pretty well precisely located I mean it says here it's two meters from the hedge line which is two meters off that hedge line and 59 meters from field gate on the north side which is that gate over there so if we come 59 meters up there and 2 meters off that hedge line we should get it yeah you've Jefferson Lee yeah if you look at the results Tony whether that's the trench I'm not sure it could be just beyond that it's about the right place though yeah but I'm in the thing that's important is we're getting clear suggestions of wall lines that look like a building yeah so our logic is for us to put a trench along the hedge there and find the edges and these earlier chaps trench because it's always useful to reopen trenches like that do you think I should have a look at these suppose of all lines as well and see what they really are I'm sure it's going through on this alignment yeah so if we do a trench across this yeah and you're only halfway through doing the jurors anyway up though so if we start that and then we see what you get over that here as well yeah so we can get on with that and it's going to do fancy do Oh what do you want well you've won well no I mean I'm quite happy to test this guy surveying really that's the law takes you into the middle so we'll put in a trench to find and extend the excavation carried out by a mr. Wolfe Cox in 1978 while carrenza will dig a second trench to help us interpret geophysical IRA's ult's for the site apart from discovering the size and style of the building there's another mystery to be solved the villa we're digging is in Roman terms and usually close to two other villas a 19th century investigation suggested one a tile Grove a kilometer northwest of our field or just off your screen to the right well just over half a kilometer southeast of the site are the scheduled remains of Whittington Court a fantastic Roman house excavated in 1948 this is just beyond that big house there yeah evidence where Roman villa isn't there yeah and about a kilometre over that way there's another one so why the heck would there be one here well there are a lot of Roman villas in the Cotswolds you know the spoon Leawood that way this Turk beam that we did on an earlier programs the shed worth which is you know one that people can visit there's a lot in this area it's one of the densest areas quite wide this one's here in relation to that one only 500 metres away we need to think about but we don't know much about this one so it's a dufus job and you know putting the trenches in hopefully we will by the end of the three days well be nice we can find you another mosaic with you well I've heard that one before but we are off to a flying start got it out it's only taken Jenny Phil and Katie a couple of minutes to confirm we're in the 1978 trench we've got to be somewhere there's not broader a lot broader there and then it just it does it just tapers in we haven't quite got anything in there yeah I reckon we were in there now this trench was originally dug after the tenant farmers daughter literally stumbled across evidence of a villa I was in the field when Dad was haymaking and I just kicking them all hills as you do and found this piece here I think yes all that one did you know how significant it was well I thought they were because year before I've been helping was a dig locally and um so it sort of so to get clued in on these bits and pieces and and of course once you start any stuffs picking up more bits what are these fines tell us well we've got pottery from occupation but the interesting thing for us is that even if we hadn't survey the place or dungy appears we've got bits of a whole building here wall plaster we've got bits of flooring we've also got two completely different types of roof tile and the pots gives you a good spread most of the sort of things the same Ian and so on late that late for second even third century but most of its quite early most of its quite early well would you like us to discover over the next day or so I'd like you to find all the pottery in building a few bits on the top and that means it had finished off quite early why might it have finished off well you've got three Villa down by the church and that doesn't seem to have been built until the fourth century it's very easy just look at the map and see Roman villas all over the place and think of them all being here at the same time the Romans were here for nearly four hundred years some houses were built burnt down reoccupied changed altered adapted there's all sorts of things that could have happened to this place so perhaps with any luck we'll develop that story here and find out whether this place has got an unusual history so the mystery deepens the evidence suggests the villa we're investigating may actually be a very early example of a romano-british building hopefully carrenza and trench 2 will give us some clues as to what it looked like the site 613 to Dry Valleys doesn't have this one still got stream going down it understand it looks if there's a change in the geology and the water is is basically springing out to the point where the pillar is situated Stuart thinks the surrounding land may also offer clothes and he's interested in how our villa connects to the rest of the Cotswolds starting with the nearby roman market town of Wickham so this is the bearish town or spoiled town to a sturgeon is thought to be a smallish settlement but over the years and particularly seeing their bill turn left this settlement has got bigger and bigger oh look at that now long as you can see buildings all over each Guardian backbone this side is where I'm here look that's fantastic but when there is a perfect example of crop marks yeah giving the layout of a big Roman settlement I don't think this is this is actually a fabulous way to fight robbing runs it's much better than walking down below to the fossa way the mayor road between Exeter and Lincoln isn't it is still very directed easy on these as you're saying these are what you are service oom to move people sued with the main Roman Road the Mosel raise we and aren't they really yeah linking all these roads into the villas into the fields are all great networks are small the road yeah I think part of our test this weekend to try and see how many of them survive around our villa complex where there's any new things to be found I should expect you home to have it sorted out however birthday prices get back on the ground our first two trenches show the 1970s excavation just scratched the surface of this massive site you happy no Phil yeah ecstatic but although we're coming up with plenty of evidence for early Roman occupation we haven't yet found the large features that we need to reconstruct the villa how's it going down here carrenza I wish I knew we're still sort of really at the rub early rather unclear what's going on there we're just planning everything now yeah there's no nothing very definite the way features coming up yet so who do you think was living here there the probability is that the local aristocracy adopted Roman ways were also used by the Romans as administrators in their local their local town councils and it's unlikely to be a Roman from Italy colorless absolutely not that's because of people here will have understood that being a Roman had certain material advantages it was a trade-off they would give in Roman power but they also they found the Roman ways of life were quite attractive we know that from literary sources we know from inscription so there's a lot of evidence to support that case it's now mid-afternoon on day one and despite the promising geophys we still seem to have more questions than answers yeah but at last Phil seems to have hit the jackpot or at least a floor look at that it's got an open signal and floor Oh solutely into a building right no question but that is what a bit that is our first definite Roman - thank you undisturbed inside the building then that's exactly it that's good innit got some green plaster so yeah oh wow so you got the floor and you've got a plaster falling off of this right yeah oh yes that's nice alright we're definitely now getting into the building yeah that's great Ernie - it's that that square with what you've got on there that's where we said the war line came through so that matches well coming this way what about the general alignment that you'd picked up this morning let's go across this trench I mean I've got the wall line sort of on this axis yeah and oh yes there you are in the trench so you can see that wall alignment there in the middle of the trench so the actual angle the alignment is a bit skewed to see the edge of the Japs is a bit off like that well since this morning you've completed the rest of that area over there haven't you and you can see we've got sort of rectilinear arrangement of wall foundation it might have buildings around a courtyard or something like that so what we plan to do is put another trench in just across here I was somewhere across here yeah because I think there should be another wall line coming through through this side yeah parallel to that one okay so we'll put this in next yeah and in the meantime we're going the other side of the hedge yeah that I know you follow fills floor and the walls on that side so hopefully trench three will explain what we've been investigating so far because it now seems that we're not looking at a villa in this field at all but probably some sort of courtyard the high-status Roman home we're searching for is obviously nearby so the next set of geophys results can't come soon enough but with almost a whole day spent digging and little to show for it the tensions beginning to tell nothing can distract our diggers as they try to untangle the archaeology on the plus side though we now know the soil in this field is consistently shallow so we can use a mini digger to help speed things up we're all now desperate to see the results of the latest geophys pressure john could do without the site is massive and he's got an awful lot of blips to interpret but as we approach the end of day one we shouldn't be too pessimistic beginning of day two and yesterday morning everything seems so simple there was evidence of a Roman villa in this field that's what we find but by yesterday afternoon geophysics was coming up with something so complex and confusing that it look more like Gatwick Airport than a Roman villa and if that wasn't problematic enough the whole thing seemed to be lurching off into this field and we still haven't got the full extent of it it seems to be huge and there's this weird ditch like feature in the corner of the geophys MiG what's going on well yeah we got a problem we're not quite sure the extent of the size in any direction and what we have got on the geophysics doesn't really look like any sort of villa plan that we know from the Cotswolds and what's this calmly an Iron Age ditch but because he cuts through or appears to cut through these two dark areas you should probably Roman building rubble it's just possible that it might be a post Roman feature Dark Ages yeah which would be fantastic because so little archaeology survives from absolutely yeah so what are we going to do well we got to dig a trench the other side of the hedge from where we started yesterday in Phil's Train Phil's trench and where we've got this interesting little corner of Roman floor yeah do you just want to see those remains carry on into this field because that that's you know the best Roman building we've got at the moment but all of that I'm inclined to wait an hour or so until we've got a lot more geophysics for the area around because if we can get something like the extent and with the complete plan then we might have a better idea of which bit to target next for the sort of living area of the villa are we going to dig the ditch I'm thinking about it yeah I mean come on with God said if we get a few more people we could probably have a crack at it yeah so GF is will continue their monumental survey of this site and as we now know the depth of the soil in these fields we can use a mini digger to help extend Phil's trench on to the other side of the hedge as he continues to hunt for the main villa building they do come a bit if you like yeah or me we might as well get it right up to the edge right let's have a bit of a trail up then the villa we thought we had in our original field on the left now appears to be a courtyard most probably a farm yard and the evidence we've accumulated suggests it wasn't all built at the same time Richard we've obviously got stone roofing material and clay roof tile so presumably we've got two different roofs what's going on well it's not only two different roofs but two different methods of making the roof the Roman idea brings over with it large flat tiles with flanges and then obviously there's a space for the rain to get in so you cap the flanges with the half-moons right so you get a series of tiles and then little ridges just like pan tiles yeah yeah but then at some stage somebody goes round and has the idea that stone will do just as well but it's a complete revolution because you're overlapping them in a totally different way so that you can build up a pattern with the tiles covering the gaps same sort of thing but somebody's had a completely new way of doing it do you think there's a difference in date between the two different ways of building roof I think there must be I think this well archaeologically most of these did turn up in early deposits these seem not to turn up till the later periods the Cotswolds were at the heart of the Roman agricultural effort and as part of our investigation into this site we've enlisted Peter Reynolds to help us reconstruct a piece of Roman farm machinery Peter what are you doing with this rustic Lego kit what are you making a robe of Roman tribulus what's a triple a-- a threshing sledge how's it work well what you've got a four pieces up like this we're going to curve the front end put a big block of stone on here and that's where you sit hitch it up to a horse have some straw with the ears on it run it round and round yeah chops it all up yeah now she'll be fascinating yeah the roamers to take their agriculture pretty seriously didn't it well yeah I mean they were very productive I mean he knows more about than anybody because he's replicated a lot of it you know you see arguably one of the reasons why the Romans came to Britain was the agriculture here which superb when they came they profited by that and I think they brought wisps of music like the science for example and perhaps they brought this as well yeah you know just in order to get more and more out more profit it's all about investment and profiting yeah so what the people who lived in our Villa basically have been farmers oh I think so I mean even if there was a an aristocracy if we could call it that in the big house they would ultimately have derived their wealth from from the farmland around and you know there would have been a hive of Industry of people processing whatever they were doing there with lots of barns and sheds rather like err you know to process the material and then send it off to the markets news market towns the Roman army I'll show you because I was was in the third or fourth century when the Roman army on the Rhine ran out of food they imported it from Britain right take care of a huge problem out there terms of supplies that gives you some idea of the wealth if you like of the agriculture here was enormous back on site we're beginning to discover evidence of what that wealth might have been spent on this is the this is the British intrigue in me what do Michael oh hey you like that yeah you obviously like it oh yeah now this really is something it's black terra and it's got an actual stamp oh yeah yeah whoops remember if anything happens to this it's your fault you're supervising me doing this mmm oh is that any better eyes and OHS and possibly an end the plate stamp turns out to belong to someone copying the style of the master Roman Potter Nanak Asst this high status piece of Terra tableware was originally manufactured in northeast France between 50 and 70 AD and it suggests the people who lived here saw themselves as sophisticated it also adds to the evidence that we're digging a very early Roman building so this is really high status pots eat stuff for the fashionable market yeah then you're going to have to pay for this if you want it because you're going to import it from the Rhineland and we have got here high status people live in within what 20 years yeah in Vasia roundabout the invasion plus 20 or something like that already importing stuff and paying for it okay I'll leave it at Lee later while the intrigue continues in the trenches do your fears are beginning to get a grip on the massive amount of information that lies just below the surface we got a nice roading this discovery of a possible road down which our high status finds would have come could also be very useful to Stewart as he tries to work out why three villas were built so close together what we've got at the moment why are these printouts of where the Roman sites and Roman villas in this area they're not particularly useable like this what I'd like to do is get them against the modern base map the filler sites there and if we can plot them on here it'd make a lot of difference in terms of understanding what's going on the lie of the land seems to be very important to the siting of our villa so we're converting the 2d world of Stuart's maps into a 3d computer model of the area a time-consuming process for race and as he has to trace every contour and feature in the two kilometers around our site so yeah should you really have some window glass well I don't know not that I know of I mean it's good solid Roman window when Roman window I think so it's got a shiny side here and then absolutely flat and then a matte side here where they cast it abed could longer find sand or something like that to look at it it's just like the stuff you put in the Green Bay the bottle back yeah yeah they come out the top so I never gave it another thought the thing which makes it not modern is the the narrow side and the shiny side what what would be the earliest for window glass sir Ida salty was going strong in the second century but I mean if we're right back in the 60s things have hardly had time to sort of come in fashion yeah but is it impossible to have no early no I mean if you've got a fish born or the Cotswolds and you could have it in there but it would have to be somewhere pretty spectacular yeah it's a nice possible anyway our discovery of glass adds to the mystery of our dig the golden age of the villa in Britain didn't really happen until the third and fourth century AD but the majority of our finds point to an opulent house built within 20 or 30 years of the Romans arriving in Britain and John's getting more evidence that the whole site is much bigger than we thought John the geophys team have been working in this field for about seven hours yeah how far have you got well we've done probably about a third of the field it feels like a lot bigger it's looking incredibly impressively I mean we're looking at the magnetic plot now because we can cover the ground more quickly and it's showing this complex of ditches and big enclosure remember that curving anomaly I'll show tonight it's just a big enclosure ditch not Roman I don't think but we appear to have a Roman Road crossing the site now is that these two parallel lines that's there yeah and then more ditches in this area and this is where fills trenches here yeah and in the resistance we have the hint of some buildings now we've expanded the survey I I think we've got a huge building range just over there if you look at the resistance plot yeah you can see clear wall lines even a curving section and land point what they look like at first glance dearly well I mean it could be the APS's that you get in the bath house but I think more likely perhaps there upon upon the highest bid perhapses you know the main dining room with an apse at the back with we had the table or the benches to to dine us do we put a trench in there I think you'll be very useful don't you need to check between so after one and a half days of digging we completely shift our search for the villa and trench four goes in to investigate what we now hope will be the main living area they are paint a bowl plaster and of course why dig one trench when we can have two so will investigate the possible Iron Age ditch as well let me go just go deep get straight in there so it we're closing down our trenches in our original field as we concentrate all our manpower on investigating geophysicist results as Roman Cotswolds expert Neil Holbrooke happens to be in the area we've decided to pick his brains too and what's interesting to me is that you've got a liberal material coming off from currencies building there now the question is this building later than that one does that one go out using they build that one or they use at the same time for another trench here to get the chronology will be very useful we've already got two trenches in that block because the one either side of the hedge are actually in that block there so be useful I mean Krenzel props you could do that today just one this end just to test each end of that we thought this was probably a big ditch of possibly Iron Age and if it is Iron Age and the question is that's really interesting cuz you know what why have we got an iron a supplement and then an early Roman settlements we've got the link between the end of the Iron Age and beginning the Roman period and it's half past five day two so yeah we gotta get on with it yep so you need to run pinch the digger I'll go and speak to John and find exactly where that need to go so there's only an hour to go before the end of the day the pressures on entrench for as we search for a curved wall evidence of a trick lynnium a high-status dining room and the extended trench one is still producing the goods as it provides us with more clues to the lifestyle of the people who once lived here it's gonna be this bit of amphora the big sort of storage rather use for transporting materials round because my young handles coming off that side and beginning of the side there right oh he's quite heavy oh yeah without weighing see the handles are going down nicely they could probably along the types that was then used to transporting olive oil right so they're having quite a good time here oh yeah so with expensive pottery like this and the plate and glass windows we found earlier we're obviously dealing with a rather sophisticated style of Roman life and as the heavens open carrenza finishes her day by hitting a floor within inches of the topsoil I start Dylan iopa signaling him slightly is no pink crushed I limit this isn't it I said dark I can hardly see colors you told me that there would be a curvy axial thing here and all right this is straight lines yeah well we're probably not quite fine if it's just water coming across here yeah and I reckon somewhere down here is that where it'll turn this has just come up from it which is a high-quality glass vessel a big glass jaw but he's you know perhaps what we'd expect from that sort of area so whatever this Roman building is when they're right at the heart of it it's the start of day three in the Cotswolds village of Whittington with the help of GF is our search for an early villa is now concentrated on this field and by the end of yesterday Phil and carrenza had started to uncover major evidence of a large Roman building but the trench that really grabs my attention is a large hole that doesn't even touch the main villa we've got this huge ditch here which everybody seems to think is probably iron yeah yeah we've got this great tangle of villa like structures here yeah we've got some more structures down there both of these are Roman yeah this clearly is before Roman time yeah what's going on well there isn't actually much difference in time between this ditch which is late Iron Age and the Roma stuff which is early Romans there's probably no more than 50 years between the two and so one possibility is that people that were living here before the conquest just up sticks and moved under yards but very quickly living in Roman style buildings using Roman pottery material like that and that would be very odd and the only comparison I can think of is born in down in Sussex which Barry Cunliffe excavated and there what happened was that the the Romans built a palace for the local tribal leader the local tribe was pro-roman it was like a sort of reward for letting them in really I'm not suggesting exactly the same thing happened here but it's hard that it is so closing date and the de bunda the local tribe were pro-roman what about the stuff that carrenza dug during the first two days over there I think that's now one of these big oil hauls that you get on one of these estates which the farm laborers and the servants and the slaves live in and whether do the craft work and look after the animals the geophysics looks like a great big open space and I talked to you know Richard and people and it's about the right distance away you don't it right outside the front door but you don't want it too far away so that's like the working part of this state this may well be the posh house just how posh a house could be answered by our digging trench for as Phil and John continue the search for the curved wall of the villas opulent dining room it's straight throughout the length of your trench it's only when you go beyond that there might be a curve I can see it yeah I don't know what it means does this mean that we're pressing to extend again I think you might be well I oughtn't but others have been luckier in their search for walls after two frustrating days in our original field carrenza new trench has unearthed no less than three of them it's brilliant obviously part of the Roman building what's really exciting is we've got two separate walls why do you say - well we've got one running along like this and we've got one there the reason we know it's not just one wall turning is that this wall is built up against here you can see the stones here stop there this line of stones runs right on so it's not bonded in it's been built up against it so we clearly got two phases of a building here if you like and then we've got another wall up here we've just got the edge off coming along like that and then even better in the middle we've got the remains of a floor level so because we've got this floor in here we know this isn't inside the inside of a building but what we don't know is which side of this wall is the inside and which is the outside so we're going to widen the trench because we know at the floor level what will be really great if we can find a door where threshold or something so we're just keeping our fingers crossed for that and the other thing we want to do is lengthen the trench slightly to get the full width of this wall and again sort of contrast the inside and outside so get a bit more of the structure so at last a picture of this site may be starting to come together and now probable Iron Age ditch is now producing evidence of a switch from a British Way of life towards a more Roman one miss dark-brown material here we've actually got two or three pieces of pottery coming out ah you've got nice deep grooves on Mads oh and you've got that's actually the rim I mean I thought it was just broken off but it's a very very simple rim just turned turned over so that must be in the late Iron Age tradition but it's well baked in a Roman fabric that's more solidly Roman it's a good Roman shape in a Roman fabric so we're going from just after the conquest up towards the end of the first century other that's all that's all right it's actually quite hot that's actually quite high up in the ditch you're still in the fill of the day oh yeah it goes down were half a meter that we can see already so so that's wall the ditch is filling up yeah a dozen when it's first dug yeah this is very very high up in the ditch right great so we carry on until we can pull yeah we've already opened six trenches but Mick obviously feels that isn't enough and seems intent on reaching double figures where do all these things always happen so glad you late I think we've got time to do a couple if we don't take more than the topsoil off well turns as trenches there yeah and we're looking at that range yeah we've got the range coming years we've got a couple of trenches in there anyway haven't we so if we had one in yes range here okay well that looks that looks sensible isn't it to go for that and as a second target we've got the ditches surrounding my the filler building here here and then in the corner this hardens so could we add note our not not necessary defensive but a garden feature or something possibly that's very right to put it straight to me to that nineteen fifteen hot penny had a coin yeah our reconstruction of a Tribune a Roman threshing machine is now well on course the sleds been finished and the blades now need to be added which gives Phil the rare opportunity of demonstrating his flint knapping skills while digging a Roman site I hope you won't feel offended I've brought my own piece of Flint Oh Castle Roy I rather suspected you would what we got to do is produce this cutter so that we can stick on lengthways into the would always show so it's like a cutting machine sherek wand I ran your average Roman was not an accomplished flint knapper I'm afraid my opinion of the Roman Romans as Flint nap which is pretty pretty low pretty low I mean I do do that though the caves come on great well you know the cows won't be long that's just about cracking all I want now is under the 48 muscle at all the stone the crows you don't want much deer back in the field trench eights going in to gauge the size and style of the villa the evidence we gather will help us interpret the geophys plan of the whole site allowing graphics to recreate the buildings that would have once stood here so we've got one clear building developed here but we also know from the GF is we've got other structure here quite a complicated building running through back to the trenches we dug on day one so it looks like we've got quite a complicated series of buildings around perhaps an open courtyard difficult to say at this stage but I think it looks like perhaps something like a farmyard with a farmyard in the middle here with farm buildings around dotted around at barns and that sort of thing okay but our model keeps changing because not all the geophys results of what they seem our idea here was that we've got one range over there one range over here almost to be typical of a lot of plans that ought to be arranged through here while we can't see it on there you've got a massive high resistance which ought to be stonework yeah and well when we look in the trench we've got basically anything got natural so although we were hoping for a range of buildings across here it actually looks as if the high resistance you've got is actually reflecting the geology rather than anything archeological and I don't think we fully understand it but we can certainly say that's not a range of a building here right so we're looking at two ranges yet rather than three yes just after lunch on day three and we now know the extent of the villa and carrenza has unearthed an abundance of walls in trench six suggesting it wasn't all built at the same time this morning we just had this wall which is very neat yes and we have this turn here yes um what we've got now is this wall carries on we've got another wall coming here which is exactly parallel with that wall both of them are just butted onto this wall so I think they're all kind of related to each other but probably two phases because it's but joints but a really confusing thing is this room in here which we've got three walls surrounding it none of which are parallel with each other this one's really poorly built so it's a really bizarre room yet for the whole trench it's got the best floor in it this is a real Roman workaday recycled floor the would use pulverized bits of tile and pottery as hard quarters pack with cement to make a really solid basic floor this roof tile had to come from somewhere and what we might be dealing with in this floor is a floor that's been made up from a roof fall from perhaps an earlier part of the phase of the house what I'd like to know is whether this work add a recycled floor has actually been used as a repair overlaying an earlier floor so there might be an earlier floor well I think that's possibility well I think in that case it would be extremely useful we just put a small Santosh in that corner to see what is below that otherwise we'll never know that's the only way you can find out hopefully this son dodged a small exploratory trench will confirm guy's theory over in trench 4 there's still no sign of the curved wall that's so clear on GF is but phil has unearthed the earliest phase of the villa a temporary kiln that may have fired some of the pots we found on this site well we got there then we got like the Stoke Cole the main firebox in there yeah you can actually see the ashes here and you can see the angle where they're being dragged out through the section there but the main thing is that it must be the earliest thing in this trench I think because we've got this yellow clay floor which I've been taken to be the floor that belongs to that building yeah and that covers that completely yeah so this has been demolished the finds just keep coming in trench 7 we've unearthed a fascinating insight into the beliefs of the villas residence look at this attorney this is a pocket-sized altar for a household shrine something that the Roman could take around with him so this will have been something from the domestic shrine in this house with the family who lived here it's like it they're like in the movie Gladiator where the guy got the little it's exactly the sort of thing you go yeah that's what the family gods to take around with the person's it was something you could have carried off with him for the day or if he moved somewhere else into taking this with him and do we know whether this would have been early in the Roman period or late can't possibly tell but it's a lovely little private piece of belief and we're still finding evidence of the Britons who once occupied this site this brooch dating from the first 50 years ad has just turned up in the extended trench one it's possible it could be a woman wearing a simple form of tunic which is not sewn across a shoulder but is held in place by broach one on either side so you sort of step into it and pull it up and pin it yes despite the excitement these finds generate we haven't forgotten one of our major tasks over these three days figuring out why this area had so many villas built so close together and Stewart now thinks he may have cracked it that's our villa site that's the excavated Whittington villa this is Wickham which is an effective Roman settlement with a temple a big street village this is the thing we could see from the crop marks from the air wasn't it that's the one and there's another one up here I'll Grove which is covered the sanctuary although I'm not fully investigated now for someone like Stuart this 2d map with all its contour lines makes perfect sense but to help mere mortals like myself we've turned the 2d map into a 3d model of this part of the Cotswolds there's Wickham settlement there with the temple our villa is here I'll grow villa Whittington Villa can you see as a big deep valley layer deep valley escarpment edge here in effect you've just got a narrow Ridge down here which dictates where the villas are going to be situated what's so attractive about this site is all the ingredients you need for a working Roman farm economy it's got nice fertile ground which is well-drained got rivers and springs it's got upland area here which you need further pastures as should animals and so on it's got heavily wooded steep slopes which unique for timber for charcoal and I think that's what this is actually telling us that we've got three working farms in if they're dividing up this landscape it's the only place they can actually put them but I can see why this is high resistance is putting up a lot resistance for me I know that is it just building rubble yep lots of stone big lumps of it fragments of broken roof tile mortar all the sort of thing you'd expect from a demolish war really and look red paint your plaster you're in the red room I'm gonna call this the red room yeah carrenza you want another floor have you found one yes we have rather bottom here there's a mortar floor now this goes underneath everything that way okay the great thing as well is that we know this wall is part of the earliest building showing a Miss trench the inside room was there this is outside mm-hmm but at some stage after its first built we've got at least two rooms built on one with that wall and one with that wall with a area of garden or something in between Richard yeah what do you think this is no it's very simple in there you've just got just coming straight up and then just the rim flattened off first bit a real Iron Age starfish that's all excellent Carol this piece of pot is final proof that we do indeed have an Iron Age ditch slap bang up against our Roman villa and thanks to all the fines from the last three days our experts now have enough evidence to formulate their theories on the man and his family who first built a villa here he's unusual he started building a big villa within 20 years that the army came here he spent a lot of money on it I think he needed a big loan and he'd got to give his land of security look if they're sitting down to dinner Tony with incidentally they will have paid for with the silver coins they've got here we know they had access to Oster shells imported we know they were able to buy wine am free because we found that they could even pay a man to put wall plaster to decorate the walls in the room that they were sitting down to dining and we know there was a woman because it was a spindle wall so there's a whole run of society here there's things like the brooch and the imported pottery that comes in late Iron Age we found it in a Roman context oh it's they're moving from the Iron Age to the Roman and yet sometime fairly early on during the Roman occupation this place closed down why the loan sharks for clothes I think that's a perfectly plausible idea but we don't know anything about land ownership it's quite possible somebody else had brought them out maybe they decided it liked a bigger and better house somewhere else and move to a nicer location well there's plenty of other villas around here that they could have gone to and the occupation started at that time that's absolutely possible yeah and as day 3 draws to a close we've just got enough time to complete our other major tasks building a tribunal now all we have to do is drag our threshing machine over some wheat under the weight of the slab Phil's super sharp flint blades are crushing and chopping the ears of wheat and it's working oh yes I mean you're going to actually see can actually see that the grains are corn in the ground yep it's then a matter of literally separating the wheat from the chaff yeah that's all you I do we know out that's it and then your almond right and you've got the chaff for the eye livestock to feed them and you've got the stuff to make the bread we came here because of one small wall and in just three days we've managed to paint a really good picture of what life must have been like in these fields nearly 2,000 years ago over there a long villa building incorporating all the new roman technology that its owner could either find or afford over there another villa building probably the business end incorporating things like the kitchen and behind that hedge a massive isle building for the slaves and the farm workers and the cattle but what about the owner maybe he got rich and moved on maybe he misjudged everything he lost his house and all his money but what we can be pretty sure of is that he was someone who dived into the new Roman culture and ideas headfirst what's been great while it lasted and our team of intrepid archaeologists will be back on your screens at the same time next week up next though Jesse James and coeds hearing off the Turner Porsche into a golf ball collector let's hope seven days is long enough for them to finish the job

Channel: Reijer Zaaijer

Views: 457,497

Keywords: time, team, full, episodes, season

Id: FDlaYlV6g8Q

Length: 46min 36sec (2796 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 21 2013