"See this?" "That is ten Roman coins." "If I found these all together in the ground, they'd officially constitute an archaeological "hoard"." "So imagine finding this many coins." "55,000 to be precise." "That was the size of Britain's largest coin hoard found here in this Wiltshire field." "But, take a look at this." "I'm standing roundabout here." "These crop marks are Roman walls." "But the scale means they're about a kilometre long." "So, could I be standing outside an entire Roman town?" "Welcome to Cunetio." "A field full of giant walls and lost buildings, about which we know almost nothing." "This is the single largest site we've ever attempted to investigate." "And, as usual..." "SPEAKS LAT!" "N" "That's "Three days to dig it."" "The lost Roman town of Cunetio lies half way between London and" "South Wales, just outside Marlborough in the heart of Wiltshire." "Bounded by the river Kennet and the medieval village of Mildenhall, bizarrely known to locals as Minal, it's hard to imagine a whole town lying under the stubble of this wheat field." "It's a fantastic notion, this idea that underneath this field is an entire Roman town." "But when I look at it, all I can see is the sweep of the stubble." "I can't see any lumps and bumps or anything." "It doesn't look like much, does it?" "." "But actually this is the site of a Roman town called Cunetio." "But this site was lost for almost 2,000 years until aerial photographs in the 1940s showed unmistakeable parch marks, ditches, big stone wall," "Roman buildings," "Roman street." "You're quite confident, just from that, to say it's a" "Roman town rather than anything else?" "I'd stake my mortgage on it." "Well, fair enough." "There's no doubt about it." "But we know where this place is, we know what it was, do we really need to dig it?" "." "Just putting it on the map is not enough." "The air photograph alone demonstrates that we've got big buildings, we've got small buildings, we've got roads." "We've got no idea how these layers relate to each other." "And we've got the coins." "The coin hoard, as well, strongly suggests there's another dimension to the function here." "We have no idea of the base of this town." "And we've only got three days." "Are we really going to be able to do anything concrete in such a short time?" "Yes." "We're going to have to be focussed." "Mark would like us to still be digging here in his retirement." "Mark would like us to still be digging here in his retirement." "Absolutely." "What we are going to do, is the biggest geophysical survey Time Team has ever done." "John and his crew are going to do a geophysical survey of the whole Roman town." "That will look fantastic, it's going to blow you away." "From that, we can target in on particular points that answer specific questions." "Well, geophysing a whole town is surely a Time Team first." "John and his team have clearly got wind of our mammoth task and set off at dawn without waiting for a green light." "But geophys is just the start." "We're going to have quite a job deciphering the jumbled layers of history in their survey?" "And in order to do that we need to excavate." "Mark, have we sorted out what we're going to do?" "Yeah, we're just looking at the plot from all the air photographs that have been accrued over the last 50 years." "And what really stands out is this big black line which is the wall, with big projecting towers, and particularly just here, which is where we're standing, on the site of the south gate which appears to be quite a monumental structure." "How does that marry up with what you've done, John?" "Not quite as clear as that, I'm afraid." "I think Mark's actually cherry picked the main features." "And what the geophysics is showing is there is far more complexity to what's going on here." "It's obviously got a long period of history, and so there's different things from different periods, and they're all on top of each other." "So it is a bit of a jumble." "We don't really know what is what." "It is so we've got to get a trench in." "There's only one place where your survey, John, matches Mark's, which is the line of this wall." "So I guess you've got to get a trench in there." "What do you think, Phil?" "I couldn't agree with you more, Neil." "I mean, one thing we really must do is confirm that that is the wall." "But I think we can go better than that." "Why don't we pull the trench back from the wall and, with the eye of faith, there might actually be a white line coming round there, which might actually be the front of a tower." "So, trench one is going in across a break in the southern wall, where the team suspects we might find the gateway and a watch tower." "Well, well, well." "Digging in Wiltshire again." "Aaaah, it warms the cockles of your heart." "Dark, isn't it, that soil?" "Isn't that dark?" "Yeah." "I'd love to see this wall, supposed to be very big, isn't it?" "." "There's our first Roman find." "I'd say that's a piece of Roman pot." "Yeah, without a doubt, that's from Dorset, so yeah that's probably going to be later Roman." "I didn't want an address for it." "With up to 400 years of Roman history to unpick, every piece of dating evidence is going to be crucial in working out a chronology for Cunetio." "What is it that you want to find out from this site?" "Ha!" "Where can I start?" "." "I think for these three days, the thing I'm really interested in is getting some good dating evidence for these walls." "In the early Roman period, they expressed the power of the state by provision of big public buildings, a forum, basilica, amphitheatre." "In the late period, it's not focussing on these public buildings." "It's big, flashy walls with immensely strong gatehouses and projecting towers." "That's the statement of power of the late Roman state." "So I'd like to see whether we can tie a date down for that lot." "What are you after here?" "These small towns are something that we largely tend to find in the north-western provinces, in France, in Germany, in Britain." "And we know very, very little about those so we're reliant on the archaeology." "What we have here is an almost unique opportunity to really investigate what's going on inside and to put the whole thing together." "Despite centuries of destructive ploughing on this field, geophys are producing cracking results and that's reflected in the archaeology." "Phil, how are we getting on?" "Superbly, Tony, just as on the geophysics." "We've got the wall here, it ends about here, and then, I think, we're going in to the ditch." "It's much darker through there." "And it gets chalkier round there and at the back, round the corner, we've got this big, black blob with pottery." "And we've got bone in it." "I think that's our pit." "And apart from that, we've got other bits of pottery." "We've got coins." "It really is all coming together." "So already it looks as though our" "Roman town is beginning to appear in the field." "How much more is there?" "We'll find out later." "Oh, and of course this being Time Team, it looks like it's going to bucket down any minute." "Welcome back to the Roman town of Cunetio." "We're about 1.5 miles outside of Marlborough in Wiltshire, and according to the archaeologists, the town itself ought to be right under my feet." "And it seems that they're right because we've got this robust-looking wall here, and this black ditch here..." "Apparently, there's some sort of pit just round the corner there." "But in order to get a picture of the whole town, we've set John the extremely ambitious task of geophysing the entire site." "And in order to do that, he's employed some rather unusual help." "John, what is that contraption?" "This is Jimmy in the future." "We've got such a big site here, the only way we decided we could tackle it was to try this new bit of kit that the Swedish have developed." "And, basically, it's radar on wheels." "Jimmy, is this usually used on archaeological sites?" "No, no, this has been designed with utility mapping in mind... looking for pipes and cables." "It hasn't actually been used in archaeology in Britain before." "Well, that's quite exciting!" "It really is a first and it is absolutely amazing." "This has got ten times as many antennae." "And it's all on this cart." "And it's ten times as quick." "In 18 years of Time Team, I've never heard you so excited before." "Yeah, but a bit worried." "Because?" "I could be out of a job!" "There's no such help for Henry, though." "It's Shanks' Pony all the way." "Our ultimate goal is a complete picture of how Cunetio developed over time." "So we'll use Henry's field work as a template and then spend three days adding evidence from aerial photos, John's geophys results, and 3D models." "And as the predicted rain starts to fall, Trench 1 gives us our first classy find." "Ah, yeah." "It's a spoon." "Yep, that's the handle." "You've got a little drop and you've got just part of the bowl." "Would have been a circular one and they tend to be earlier rather than late Roman, so more likely second century, early third." "These types of spoon were usually silvered or tin plated, and were a cut above the regular day-to-day wooden variety." "And equally lavish objects were unearthed here during the '50s and '60s." "Unfortunately, the excavation notes were never published but the amazing finds did make it to a local museum." "David, one of the problems we've got on the site is that of the small amount of digging that has taken place hasn't been written up." "But you've got all the finds in the museum." "That's right, and you see them all here." "Here is a piece of stone from an arch." "It would have sat like that." "And the arch for the gateway would have sprung from there." "It just shows how monumental the building was." "And then, back here, we have some painted wall plaster, and you can see the decoration, the designs on here." "Do we know where that was from?" "I know it's from "Trench BB", but I'm not quite sure where that's from." "So that's something, hopefully, you'll be able to find out." "So that does suggests that there's a building of high status, presumably of plaster, maybe with a hypocaust, that kind of thing?" "Could be." "Coins are always important in looking at Roman sites." "Philippa, you've gone through all of them." "What do they look like?" "Well, first of all, they obviously give us a really good chronology for the site." "We've got a late Iron Age coin here, all the way through the Roman period, right through to this early 5th-century coin here." "Where does the hoard fit in here?" "Well, the hoard would fit in around the 270s/280s." "And it's at a time when Roman Britain is really prospering." "These rich pickings covering a 400-year period have triggered a tantalising hunt for Trench BB." "Laid out immediately south of Trench X..." "Each trench seems to be six foot wide..." "Joined with the long wall of the house at the south end..." "We've got a little sketch..." "Trench BB..." "Trench BB..." "Trench BB." "Back out on site, we've now identified a second target." "We're in the middle of the walled town and there's this massive building which we think is a "mansio"." "Oh, that's one of those hotel type things that high status-people used to stay in when they were wandering around the country." "That's right." "It's a building made up of a series of rooms, and it's ideal for radar to work on." "So we thought this is the best target for us to try." "If we look at" "Mike's computer, we can actually see the results on screen already." "I mean, you've seen these time slices before." "We've put the results together and what we can see are several rooms here." "We think this is part of the mansio." "So the plan is to put a trench across one of the walls from inside the room into the courtyard, to see if we can get some dating evidence, and see the state of preservation." "So, our investigation expands from Trench 1, looking for the southern gateway, to Trench 2, which takes in this substantial building in the interior." "And the radar results are good." "There's the wall... ..As we're straight down onto the archaeology." "Your work here is done I think, Ian." "But with Trench 2 looking to ID this building," "I'm concerned that we're overly confident it's a mansio." "Well, in the aerial photographs, there is a very clear large building which has lots of rooms within it, arranged around a courtyard." "And these you very often find in towns, and so this looks like a mansio, it's in the right kind place, therefore it's highly likely to be one." "What do you mean it's in the right place?" "Do you mean that it's slap bang in the middle of the town inside the walls?" "You actually have to imagine that the walls aren't there, because if they're 4th century, then the mansio was probably built before this." "So, what I mean is, it's right in the centre of where all the roads come together, all the major roads are coming together and joining." "What you're providing is somewhere for people to eat, somewhere for people to sleep and somewhere for them to change horses." "So, you have a whole sequence of bedrooms." "In the earlier stages of them, the bedrooms were two different sizes, as to whether you had important officials staying, or the common or garden soldier, or messenger, or postman staying." "If what we have got is a mansio, what does this tell us about this site?" "It tells us that it did have a formal function within the Roman imperial system." "If they're right, then Cunetio was built around a Roman Travelodge, with important visitors coming and going on a daily basis." "But proving it has just got a bit more difficult as the heavens have opened and the drizzle is now a deluge." "So to make sure the search for the mansio isn't interrupted," "Trench 2 gets its own rain cover." "But Trench 1, and its hardy diggers, have no such luck." "But their toil in the mud is paying dividends by giving our metal detectorists a bonanza of small finds." "Is that all coins you've got there?" "Yep, I've got 13 here." "Where'd they come from?" "But they've come from the spoil heaps just around this trench." "But they've all just come from this trench?" "Yep." "I mean, have you got any dates for them?" "Well, there's one here that dates to about 270, and that's a coin of Gallienus." "But the rest of them really date to the middle of the 4th century, so around 320 to 340 AD." "I mean, I suppose... it's a lovely little collection, but the sheer fact that it's all from the spoil tip, it's all unstratified, it actually only tells us that the Romans were here in Cunetio at that time." "That's true." "But the interesting thing here is that 20-year period the coins come from." "And I'm wondering whether, at some point, a plough has hit a little coin hoard perhaps?" "Another one?" "Yep, another coin hoard from Cunetio." "See, when you say that, I was thinking this morning..." "Tony said he had a handful of 10 coins, and he said that constitutes a hoard." "You've got 13." "Yes, so what we're looking at here is another case of potential treasure." "Well..." "But the weather has caused one major setback." "Rain has seeped into the radar machine's computer, forcing it to retreat from site." "Geophys have lost their ultimate weapon." "Man will have to triumph where machine has failed." "Under the marquee, though, work goes on unhindered." "Matt, can I come in your trench?" "Yeah, quick get under the tent." "It's getting worse and worse out there." "It's miserable, isn't it?" "." "I think you're in the best place." "This is where we thought there might be a mansio, isn't it?" "." "Yes, and I'm pretty sure we've got it." "We've got this lovely packed chalk surface." "In the middle, we're just starting to get the stones of this wall, and that goes down this way, behind me there." "And that side, we've got this courtyard area, or yard surface, and on top of it, in front of Christo there, can you see stone roof tiles?" "Slid straight off the roof and landed right there." "So, we know we've got a building, we know it's Roman, but we don't know it's a mansio, do we?" "True, but this fits in perfectly with the geophysics." "So I'm pretty sure that we've got it." "So you're happy to continue?" "Oh, yeah, I'm well up for it." "I'm not surprised." "You're the only dry people on the site." "Back in Trench 1, Phil has now confirmed the stone wall." "But the gatehouse remains elusive." "I reckon the edge of our trench is coming about there." "Really, we should be where you're standing, actually on the entrance into the Roman town..." "should be, and maybe we might actually find a tower." "But, whatever way, this should prove it." "So that's what two "should-be's" and a "maybe"?" "We're nearly at the end of day one, although, quite frankly, we can't do much more anyway." "I don't know if you can see it, but the weather is really grim now." "Nevertheless, it has been a good day, archaeologically." "But I can't help feeling that there must be more good stuff around here, particularly if you look at some of the finds from the 1950s." "The problem being that they were found in Trench BB and no-one's got the faintest idea where Trench BB was." "Although, given that Stewart has wandered over to this end of the field, I can't help thinking that you might have a hunch." "A bit more than a hunch." "I think we can say quite confidently where Trench BB was." "It's down in that hollow down there." "This is what he was looking at, and he put a whole series of trenches in to investigate that." "I've been going through them and you can see one of them here is quite clearly labelled..." "BB." "That's clearly on the edge of what he thought was an apse here, but there's a whole load of stuff going on here." "He thought this building down here was something not domestic." "Is it a villa-type of building, is it a religious complex?" "I'm going to stop now." "Just come here a minute." "Take a look at that." "These are the conditions that we're working in." "I think we really need to call it a halti" "But will we find Trench BB?" "We'll know tomorrow." "Beginning of day two here in this giant field just outside Marlborough in Wiltshire, and under my feet there's an entire Roman town." "You can just see the beginnings of it coming up in this field." "One of the tasks that we set ourselves over the three days was to get a picture of the entire town, and you may remember that yesterday, in order to do that, we deployed some cutting-edge technology." "And the good news is they managed to geophys half this entire field in just one day." "The bad news is the weather was so lousy that the rain got inside the computer and all the information they gleaned is trapped inside it and we can't retrieve it." "So for today, we're going to have to resort to the old -fashioned methods of geophysing, which is basically Jimmy trudging up and down looking a little bit sad." "You want to keep your hat on today so the water doesn't get inside your head." "I think we'll have to make the most of this sunny spell, for certain." "I think we'll have to make the most of this sunny spell, for certain." "It is rather good." "The foot soldiers of geophys have at least managed to survey Stewart's building in the north-west corner of the field, so there is now hope for another trench." "John, we've got really good crop marks in this corner with this villa-type building." "You've the geophysics looking?" "Look at the detail." "We can see the main front corridor there, all the rooms behind and then the back wall and the apse in here." "What we want to try and do is test this area out." "Anna will put in a little trench." "I think he called it BB." "And we know from that there was good chunks of painted wall plaster, so I would have thought maybe something like a ten by two, taking in that room and a bit of the apse." "OK, we'll mark that out for you." "So while trench one continues to search for the gatehouse and trench two tries to ID the mansio, trench three goes in to date the posh building in the corner of the field." "And judging by previous finds in trench BB, there are high hopes for classy stuff here." "Oh, look." "Here we go." "And the first scrapes are promising." "Bit of Oxford ware, yeah." "Oxford ware?" "Oxford ware?" "Yeah." "So that's going to be fourth century?" "Yeah, late third into fourth." "Yesterday, it was tipping down with rain." "Today, it's really windy, and the problem is inside this tent, which, now they've put the sides on, does look a bit like something from a wedding reception, is Matt's trench and because of the wind it's really noisy in here!" "Can hardly hear yourself speak most of the time, can you?" "But, Matt, this trench has really come on, hasn't it?" "." "Yeah, it's really clarified itself." "The courtyard is actually over there." "You can see this wall coming straight across here." "And we've got the corner of a building." "This is the building that we think may have been the mansio?" "This is the building that we think may have been the mansio?" "Yeah, that's it." "How does what Matt's excavated tie in with your geophys?" "Well, it's brilliant from my point of view, because it is confirming the yellow lines are wall lines." "And now I know that, when I look at the bigger picture, there's so much going on now - a whole series of wall lines, rooms." "We've clearly got a massive building here." "And the problem is there's just so much going on, unpicking it is just so difficulti" "But unpick it we must, so we put another trench in on the strongest anomalies in the building." "A mansio would likely have had both a bathhouse and heated rooms, so if we can find them, then we've as good as got our ID." "Back over in trench one, Phil's confident he's finally found the gateway." "What I've got here is the butt-end of the wall that John got on his geophysics." "You can see here these flints set into the mortar, where the flints that way are just in loose soil, and what I'm wondering is whether or not this wall here, or this lack of wall here," "is where they've actually demolished it or whether in fact we might be looking at Mark's original entrance." "Are you talking about perhaps there was a big archway coming through here or something?" "That's exactly the sort of thing I am thinking about." "The point is that there is a hole in the wall." "That could either result from them actually punching a hole in it when they demolished it, but equally it could mean that there was a hole in the wall originally, like a gateway." "And maybe there was some rather nice stones here that they thought were worth having and that they robbed away." "So it's crucial to find out what sort of a tear line we've got there." "So plenty more digging down in here, then?" "Plenty more to do there." "The geophys team, still without their speedy radar on wheels, are putting in the miles and getting the acres done." "That should line up with those defences." "And their survey is gradually adding key features to the rich tapestry of our 3-D map." "But we have another, somewhat surprising source of information about our field." "Local boy Phil Harding has previous on this site." "Of course, the one thing we haven't mentioned about this place is that you've been here before, haven't you?" "I've been here all me life, Tony." "I mean, I went to school down in Marlborough, used to come through here, we used to do cross-country runs, and then of course I've been digging here as well." "When were you digging here?" "Coin hoard!" "You dug the coin hoard?" "Oh, no, I didn't dig it up." "I cleaned up the mess after they'd dug it." "We went into Marlborough nick, I remember, and there was coins everywhere." "There was coins in buckets, there was coins in bowls, there was coins in blankets, curtains, and you'd go into one room and it was, all over the bally place." "It was a stunning sight." "I'd never seen anything like it." "This feels like an episode of This Is Your Life, but, er..." "Oh, ar!" "..do you remember that person?" "Oh, ar, I know that one!" "Oh, ar, yeah, look at that?" "." "See?" "Hard at work again." "Oh, and that's where the pot come out of." "And you haven't had your hair cut since." "And you haven't had your hair cut since." "No, that I ain't." "So how old would you have been then?" "I'd have been late twenties, I suppose, yeah." "Have you been back since?" "Yeah, well, I did a job." "I watched a water pipe from Minal down to Marlborough, and that was..." "Sorry, from where?" "Minal." "Where's Minal?" "You've been down there filming the village." "You've been down there filming the village." "Mildenhall?" "No!" "Not Mildenhall, if you want to go to Mildenhall, up here to the north, M4, M25, M11." "That's in East Anglia." "And you call this one Mine'all?" "No, we call it Minal." "This is Minal." "This is how you call it!" "I never thought I'd be taking English lessons from Phil Harding!" "Back in the real world, our posh building has appeared in trench three." "This trench has really moved on, Tracey, much thicker than I was thinking." "Yes, and it's certainly a two-storey building." "It's got to be that thick a wall." "So you're actually in the room in front of the wall here." "So do you think if you dig down through this, you're going to get to floor levels underneath it?" "." "It's possible." "It could seal floor levels." "It may even be that it was built up originally and they've gone, but we'll have a look once we've got it all cleaned back, I think." "And Ian, you're in the apsed area." "What have you found there?" "Just there, a little Roman coin, a nice little bronze coin." "And we also had this bronze brooch." "Oh, that's lovely, isn't it?" "." "Tiny." "Now, that is nice, isn't it?" "." "Finds like these are going to be invaluable in our quest to date the building and work out its function." "There's no such luck in our search for the mansio, though, with no sign of a bathhouse in trench four, just a complicated series of floor layers, and nothing that will positively identify the structure." "But 20 metres away, on the other side of the Roman courtyard," "Matt has at last pinned a date to the mansio." "You know, Matt, the thing about this trench was it had great plan, didn't it?" "." "And it absolutely matched the geophysics like a dream." "But we didn't have any dating for any of it." "But it looks like it's changed." "We've just done this tiny little hole up against the wall here, must be half a metre by about 30cm." "We've got pottery from the chalk floor itself." "We've got pottery from the layer below the chalk floor and another layer below that and there's pottery coming out of that as well, so plenty to choose from." "Well, just from quick inspection, the immediate thing is it's not late Roman." "Samian ware is always classically first and second century AD." "That looks likely to be second century." "So it does suggest that these floors are being laid around about the second century AD." "But there's absolutely no late Roman pottery, nor is there any sort of later floor levels." "But it sort of suggests that this building was built around the second century AD." "But perhaps by the time that the stone walls were going up and the fancy house in the far corner was being built, this could be out of use." "Yeah, pretty sure it was." "We've now spent a lot of time investigating the walls and the buildings of the town, but I'm worried we don't yet know much about how Cunetio fitted in to the Roman urban landscape." "You had your major administrative towns, then below that there's a whole range of what we call small towns." "The most basic level is a roadside settlement and that's just a few houses springing up beside a road." "But that's not what we've got here." "No, what we have is the next rank up which could have a specialised function." "So some of them might have a religious function, such as Bath, which is just down the road from here, or they might have an industrial function so be involved in metalworking, salt extraction." "Or the final level, they might have an economic role - serve as a market town, because the Roman state is extracting taxation from them, so they're increasing their agricultural productivity and then bringing their goods to market to sell to exchange for coin, which then goes to the Roman state." "We haven't got any evidence of industry so far, so what kind of town would you put your money on?" "I reckon it is one of these small economic market centres." "A bit like Marlborough today, down the road." "Yeah, exactly." "So if Cunetio was a market town and taxation centre, that may explain why there were so many coins around in the third century." "But can the incredible hoard discovered in 1978 shed any light on Cunetio?" "Well, maybe, if we can locate where it was actually buried." "Carry straight on." "That's it, up to the right." "Yeah, go right." "You need to go back on yourself a little bit." "Watch out for John's canes." "This is really lazy surveying!" "It's brilliant, I love it!" "This is the British Museum map of where the coin hoard was." "I've rectified that into the computer so I can get some co-ordinates... 421596.65..." "John, I hear you've found our coin hoard plot." "Henry's marked on the ground where he thinks it should be, from all the records." "We've done a block of geophysics, and look, there's a mass of responses, a whole series of pits and so on." "But look at this response here." "It's a really strong spike, and that particular response actually coincides where he marked on the ground." "The wall of the town is over there, so we are outside of the town." "We're well outside, and what surprises me is there's still so much going on." "There's so many strong anomalies, masses of pits and other features." "But to actually get a spike where Henry marked on the ground, we've got to look at it." "Are we going to dig it?" "." "Definitely." "Trench five takes our investigation outside the town walls for the first time." "But if we can find the exact spot where the hoard was buried, we might give it some context, perhaps a building, temple or yard, and from that work out why so many coins were buried in the first place." "With his mansio trench closed down, Matt steps in to oversee the digging." "I know it's been a struggle, guys, but this geophys is absolutely fantastic, isn't it?" "." "It is a great survey, isn't it?" "." "And I absolutely take my hat off to John and his team for doing it." "But there is a problem with it." "It's a bit of a mess." "What do you mean, it's a bit of a mess?" "I" "It's 400 years of history squashed flat onto a piece of paper." "What we've got is lots of different features, which never existed at the same time." "We've got the stone walls, we've got the mansio, we've got the fancy house in the corner." "We need to recreate the history for this site." "How do we do that, John?" "Well, as Neil says, what we need to do is ignore this fourth-century stone wall." "We've confirmed that now in the trenches." "So if we do away with that, then if we look at the landscape that the geophysics is showing, and what we can concentrate on is the earlier town." "So tomorrow, we're going to try to recreate a picture of this valley when 55,000 coins were buried here 1,750 years ago." "Beginning of day three here in North Wiltshire and under my feet is the entire Roman town of Cunetio which is pretty exciting, but it's also very complicated because what we've got is nearly 400 years of continuous activity." "Just behind me are what we've established are the fourth century town walls so what we're going to do today is try and find out more about the earlier town and a big clue as to what that might have been like should be in Matt's trench." "Matt, why have we put a hole in here?" "We were trying to find the original spot where the coin hoard was found." "The way you're saying that it sounds as though we haven't found where the hoard was." "It could be within metres of me here, but it's certainly not in this three by three square." "But you have got something?" "Yes, you can see you've got this chalk wall coming out there." "It goes out along that way and then there's an arch of burnt plaster or something going around there." "What kind of building do you reckon they might have buried our hoard in?" "A hoard like that would have been used like a bank account." "So it would have been in a large building, a stronghold almost." "You know, they wouldn't have buried the hoard up in the woods somewhere to be recovered years later." "Could Matt's building be a strongroom that once guarded the hoard?" "Or even a temple with an offering to the gods?" "One thing is for sure, there's plenty of early occupation evidence outside the town walls leading Stewart to go back to basics in the search for early Cunetio and there are some major clues in today's landscape." "Looking at the wider map, what we've got is this main north/south route coming through here and the main east/west route comes through on here." "If you mark those in and translate them to our site that gives us the actual crossroads in this area in here which is actually outside the walled town, this focus of activity here." "I mean, what date do you think this primary crossroads would have evolved by?" "If that's one of the major route ways through" "Roman Britain, that's going to be in existence by the end of the first century at the latest." "But it could have been as early as the 80s AD when the Roman army is marching on into Wales and heading out to Caerleon and that kind of area and so you get the road being formed as part of the extension of the frontier." "And you can see a pattern of lanes and roads all in this area and it's very different from this area up here." "Well, that has more of the look of a planned Roman town in that you have one major straight road and then you have these coming in at right angles to it." "That's really nice because you've got this focus which really does suggest this is the earliest part of the town, then a secondary phase with all this and the town sort of moves up there and then finally, this final phase, a wall is put round" "and that becomes the town so it's like moving towns." "Central to that middle phase is the mansio, which Neil is now bold enough to identify." "So we've got a date for the building, no bath house, no heated floors, we still don't know what it is." "No, we don't." "What do you want?" "." "An inscription that says "welcome to the mansio"?" "I" "Yeah!" "Well, you ain't going to get one." "All you can say is it looks like other mansios, but if it's not a mansio, what else could it be?" "So, before huge walls dominated Cunetio, the heart of the town was a mansio with its many bedrooms, stables and bustling kitchen providing an important staging post on the imperial highway to the West." "It was somewhere on the road heading south from that mansio that the massive coin hoard was buried and Matt seems to be a step closer to finding its location." "Philippa, this has just come out of the ground down there." "It was just in the subsoil, churned up, leaning against the structure here." "Well, it's the earliest coin that we've found in the past three days, definitely." "It's an As and it's the Emperor Nero." "So what date's that?" "." "That's 64-68 AD." "That's pretty precise!" "So how much is that worth?" "What could you get for that in the first century?" "We know from graffiti and literary sources that you could either get yourself a haircut or an hour with a lady of the night with one of these." "Well, I do need my haircut, but..." "Can I have that back please?" "I" "While Matt ponders his new-found wealth," "I join two respected academics to, well, play with a pile of coins." "Is this really 55,000 coins?" "Not a penny short." "Not a penny short." "How do you know?" "Because we got them from the bank, so it must be right!" "When you saw the original hoard, did it look like that?" "." "Yeah, obviously they were green and dull because they were Roman coins but in sheer quantity," "I'm told there was three and a half hundredweight of coins." "That's 200 kilos." "Let's see if that's anywhere near three and a half hundredweight." "That's not very bad acting, is it, Phil?" "No, that's three and a half hundredweight!" "Come on, let's have a go." "That is seriously heavy." "How on earth would they have buried all this stuff?" "Well, we know they buried them in a pot." "And we've got a pot here that was very similar to the one in which they were buried." "So going on the idea that three and a half hundredweight into one pot would be a very heavy object to bury, we reckon they must have buried the pot first." "Go on, you show us how, you're the digger." "Why's it always me?" "Cos you'll do it." "'As we bury our own 21st century treasure,'" "Matt's excavation can now reveal that the building framing Cunetio's original coin hoard was rather more mundane than a temple or a stronghold." "Just from the top here we have had a few bits of this chunky pottery." "Big storage jar rim, likely to date to the second/third century." "So that would put it when the focus of the town is over here, before it moves to the stone walls of the fourth century." "Before the stone walls are put up." "So what we've got here is this oval coming round like that set into this chalk structure." "You can see the chalk blocks coming round and it looks to be coming to a point round there." "I must admit looking at the shape, the way it's emerging, oven is what springs to mind." "Yeah, you've got potentially then, a sort of oven set inside a building, domestic occupation and probably earlier rather than later?" "." "I would have thought so, Neil, up here, yeah, so we're in someone's kitchen." "As Phil heads underground, my questions are on the money." "Do you reckon these were buried in panic?" "." "It's a possibility and that's the traditional interpretation of Roman coin hoards, buried in a time of unrest." "People would come back and collect them when things had calmed down." "Do you believe that?" "." "It's a possibility, but I think there are lots of other reasons why coin hoards might have been buried." "Like what?" "." "Who might have access to this kind of money?" "Well, I don't think it's going to be one individual, but moneylenders maybe would get this sort of number of coins." "Or we could look at this as being a sort of community collection and that it's been buried for a religious reason and they've come together to give this to the gods." "Well, I reckon that's about it." "It's not very deep, is it?" "." "The rim's practically at the surface." "But you've got to remember that the original Cunetio hoard was roofed over with a slab and that slab probably was at ground level so this is probably what it looked like." "Well, if it had a slab on top, then maybe it wasn't the kind of hoard we've been talking about, maybe people just put handfuls of coins in as they were earned and then covered the slab up again." "Well, why don't we open our account?" "." "All right." "Ready?" "LAUGHTER" "The biggest hoard currently in Britain, I think." "Mind you, how long did that take us?" "Three quarters of an hour?" "." "I think so, yeah." "If there's one thing that surely we've proved it's that the original Cunetio hoard wasn't buried in a panic." "With this valuable experiment completed, and day three nearing a close, it's time to conclude our last couple of trenches." "What are you excavating right there now?" "Well, we've got these layers of demolition that come off either side, so the idea is to put a slot down through these, thinking that there was a chance that they'd be covering intact floors," "but unfortunately it looks like this is actually build up and the floors would have been higher, so we've lost them." "So it's a very high-status building, but we're not going to be able to tell just from this one trench?" "No, unfortunately not." "The dating evidence for this substantial building points to activity in the third and fourth centuries, the same date as the stone walls." "So it's likely to have played an administrative role over the late town." "We've had some really fascinating archaeology from all over the site." "We've got the mansio, we've got the big high-status building that Stewart identified, we've got the building where the hoard originally came from, but we keep being drawn back to this trench for one very good reason," "this wall." "It's huge, isn't it, Mark?" "It's monumental." "We knew it was big, but to actually now see it exposed is incredible." "I mean, you've got the front face there, the rear face is here and then we've got another big foundation beyond that, probably for a gatehouse." "I mean, it's absolutely astonishing." "But when this gatehouse was at its apogee, what would it have looked like?" "Let's go and stand up where we would have been in the middle of the gate." "So we're roughly now standing in the middle of the road." "You've got a gate that's at least five to six metres wide." "Then you're going to have a great single arch coming up four to five metres high." "The wall itself is going to be six to eight metres high." "We've got the block behind us telling us there's a tower structure." "So there's probably another storey above that, it's very impressive." "We believe this place is being used for a regional tax collection centre so we could envisage carts of grain coming in through here after the harvest." "Let's say your name is Lucius Ludicrous, you're a local farmer, you've had your tax demand, 25 bushels of grain, you'll come up through here in your cart." "I'll be standing here in all my great, late Roman regalia." "I'll tick your name off." ""Yes, OK, he's paid his due." ""You can go away now, my good man."" "Mate, I'm off." "With dates for the buildings and walls of Cunetio, we now understand the phasing and can complete our 3D picture of the town through time." "So can you just get rid of the walls?" "Yeah, sure." "The mansio dates to 120s." "That gridded layout of roads is probably contemporary with it, but some of these houses were probably built up afterwards." "And Philippa can help us complete the story of Cunetio's remarkable coin hoard." "These are really lovely, but they're not from our site." "These are from the British Museum." "They're from the British Museum handling collection and they represent what would be a good selection of coins from a site in the first and second centuries AD." "So what have we got?" "." "So we've got two denarii here which are good silver coins." "And here we have a sestertius, a dupondis and an as and these are all good, solid bronze coins." "So are these the kind of thing that were found in our hoard?" "No!" "These are the sort of thing here." "They don't look as good." "No, they're what archaeologists call "grot."" "And these coins are actually called radiates and that's because the Emperors have these little radiate crowns." "Why are they so different to the coins up the top?" "Well, they're much lower quality, for a start." "They don't have that metal content that the denarii have here." "Why are they so grotty?" "Well, in the 260s, 270s, there were real problems in the central empire." "There were Barbarian incursions and quite a lot of coin didn't really make it to Britain so people had this demand for coinage, but they weren't getting any, so they started minting their own." "The coin hoard that we buried was 55,000 1ps, wasn't it?" "." "So presumably that was worth £550." "How much would 55,000 of these be worth?" "These were the coppers of the Roman period, so they were probably not worth much more than 1p each, so what we're looking at is probably a hoard of about £550 in Roman terms." "It's a bit of an anti-climax really, isn't it?" ".I" "There's no such disappointment with the geophys, though, as our foot-slogging team have pulled off one of Time Team's greatest ever triumphs." "When you first pick one of these things up, it seems pretty light, but the more you hold it the more you can feel its weight in your biceps and, for me, in the small of my back and yet you guys have been going up" "and down this field non-stop for three days!" "Yes, and you've just walked about 20 metres." "Yeah." "If you kept going for another 55km in total, you'd have walked what the team have walked in the past three days." "They've collected just short of half a million data points and surveyed 27 acres of ground." "It's the biggest survey we've ever done on Time Team." "And the result has been an entire Roman town." "Is there anything about it that surprised you or you didn't expect?" "There's just so much going on, it's unbelievable." "You know, there's the enclosure ditches, the defences, the track ways, the fields, the paddocks, the buildings - a complete plan." "And it's coming right through the field and we've not found a limit to the archaeology." "It's quite brilliant, you've got 400 years of history on one piece of paper." "So our findings suggest that Cunetio began in the first century, as the Roman army drove a road west." "A small settlement grew around a major crossroads and early in the second century, a mansio developed to cater to passing travellers." "Attempts to formalise the town resulted in a gridded street plan, but all that was done away with in the fourth century when town planners slapped down huge walls and cleared the interior, administering the town from the big villa in the corner." "'All a far wy from the field today.'" "Phil, why do you reckon Cunetio eventually disappeared under the ground whereas other Roman towns like Cirencester survived?" "Well, the way I see it, Tony, probably in the early Romano-British period, you had a perfectly peaceable, prosperous little community thriving here." "Everybody going about their local business, minding their own business and getting on perfectly well and then in the later Roman period, you have the might of bureaucratic, administrative Rome coming here and building this whacking great wall," "bringing in their taxation, their administration and all those nasty things and I reckon that killed the local community." "They cluttered off and then, of course, when the Romans went away, the locals didn't want to come back." "the locals didn't want to come back." "So where did they go?" "If they were like me, they'd have probably gone to the pub." "Shall we go now?" "I think that's a very good idea." "Where's the nearest pub, then?" "Minal, down in the village." "What, Mildenhall?" "No!" "Minal!" "I keep telling you it's Minal!" "M-I-L-D-E-N..." "It's just a noise, it's not a word!" "It is a perfectly good word!"