"We might be a small island but we've got a big history." "Everywhere you stand there are worlds beneath your feet." "And so every year, hundreds of archaeologists across Britain go looking for more clues, who lived here?" "When?" "And how?" "You can even see the architecture of the bone inside the jaw there." "Archaeology is like a complex jigsaw puzzle, drawing together everything from skeletons to swords, temples to treasure." "She's got a very cartoon-like face." "From Orkney to Devon, we're joining this year's quest on sea, land and air." "We'll share all of the questions and find some of the answers as we join the teams in the field..." "Digging for Britain." "From Romans times, the mystery of a man buried face-down on a bed of meat... a fabulous treasure trove of coins dedicated to ancient gods... and the shocking evidence of 97 murdered babies buried beneath this field." "The story of Roman Britain is a story of military occupation and there's no better known or more well preserved monument to the power of Rome than Hadrian's Wall in the North of England." "The wall is a visible legacy of that occupation, and from their arrival in 43AD, the Romans would introduce a new language, a political system, buildings and a culture which still influences us today." "I'm heading towards a place close to Hadrian's Wall where archaeologists are finding signs of that Roman influence writ large." "This narrow road with its passing places is known locally as the Stanegate." "It is one of hundreds of similar roads which criss-cross part of northern England." "But what makes this one stands out is that it was once the northern frontier of the entire Roman Empire." "And guarding the central section of the Stanegate, that important East/West supply route, was the fort of Vindolanda." "Each year from April to mid-September, an army of over 500 archaeology volunteers comes here from all over world, and every week they make new discoveries." "What you have got there, John, is a beautiful, great big, dark blue, glass melon bead." "There is a bit of a debate about those." "Some people think that Roman soldiers simply wore these as decorations, or ladies wore them as decorations." "It is a very, very corroded lump of metal." "What we have actually got here is the back of the helmet, by the looks of things." "It is very badly bashed but you can see on the side profile, this is the neck guard at the back and this is the start of the top of the helmet coming up." "Vindolanda has been excavated for over 40 years, but they estimate they have only uncovered 15% of it and it will take another 150 years to finish the job." "It's utterly remarkable because the site as it stands is absolutely massive." "Vindolanda was bought in 1929 by the renowned archaeologist Professor Eric Birley." "His grandson Andrew is now its director of excavations." "The Romans built four forts here by the time Hadrian's wall was built." "So the first ones predate the wall?" "Predate the wall by a good 40 years." "They are long way down, they are seven or eight metres beneath where we are standing." "Would they have been stone-built?" "No, the first six forts here are built in timber and the last three are in stone." "They knock them down, build them up, knock them down, build them up very, very quickly." "In perhaps only 125 years you get the landscape really shooting up to the fort we are standing in at the moment." "So this is the last fort?" "There is an enormous amount of it still in place." "It's because nine forts have been built right on top of each other here, that so much archaeological evidence survives." "In just the last couple of weeks, the team working here have uncovered this wonderful flagstone street which leads from the northern gate of the fort, straight up to the headquarters building." "The stones are really worn with centuries of use." "You can just imagine the sound of those hobnailed boots as the Roman soldiers marched in and out of the fort." "As well as the excavations within the walls of the stone fort, this year a separate team is working in the vicus, the civilian village which lies just outside the garrison here at Vindolanda." "So what are you excavating here?" "It is all part of the garrison settlement that sprang out side the last stone fort that was built at Vindolanda." "It's a combination of workshops, shops and houses, wagon parks and trading areas to supply and link in with the fort there, so it was a bit like Retail World outside there." "All sorts of shops flanking the roads." "A little bit of evidence for a pub as well, we had a building on there where we found a room right on the street front there, and inside, all the artefacts we found were drinking beakers and gaming counters." "Fantastic." "It's one of those sites when you could almost be there, you can virtually hear the Romans because of all the artefacts and buildings in super condition." "For the past three weeks, Justin and his team have been working on a cobbled roadway which ran through the heart of the Roman village." "We have been lucky with this one because we got some super dating evidence - trapped in among the cobbles we found a little silver denarius of Severus Alexander which was minted in AD 222." "Because it was trapped in the road surface, the road surface can't have been made before that coin was minted." "Just beside the Roman fort is the conservation area where the daily finds are taken to Barbara Birley and her team." "Are all of these artefacts coming out this year?" "Most of them are, yes." "This is amazing, this little griffin." "Yes." "Let's have a bit of a closer look." "You can see it's got the fabulous wings here and you can actually just make out the detail of the feathers and then he has got the hind quarters here of a lion." "The Romans had a lot of superstitious beliefs." "They felt that this type of being would have been very good for protecting, maybe something precious and things like gold or treasure." "We know that he is a little statue but we don't know what he was possibly guarding." "Some recent finds from Roman Britain are just made by pure chance." "300 miles further south in rural Suffolk an artefact has emerged which really does cast light on the time the Romans were here." "This is a Roman lantern that dates from between AD 50 and AD 300." "It was actually found in a field in Suffolk in September 2009." "It is such an ordinary object but it becomes extraordinary through the alchemy of time." "This distance of 2,000 years has made this very plain-looking object absolutely astounding." "This lantern is in incredible condition." "You look at it and you think it is fairly scrappy, it is broken, but, by comparison to other finds we have of this type, it is in fantastic condition." "Another interesting aspect is that it has a story before we discovered it." "There would have been three feet originally, we only have two now, but by comparing the two, we can see that they are different." "One is much smaller, much cruder, and this tells us that the lantern was repaired in antiquity." "This is because it was an expensive piece of kit." "Whoever owned this was not going to throw it away lightly and has gone to the effort of soldering on this replacement foot, probably from another lantern that got broken." "We know that Suffolk has a lot of evidence for second-century villas and it's likely that this could be a farm set-up, that there are outbuildings, that this lantern was used to move between these buildings after dark." "It's not every day that discoveries like this are made." "When objects like this come into the museum, as an archaeologist, that excitement never fails to hit me." "Suddenly, you are given another opportunity to shake hands with somebody in the past, and when you get items like this that are so rare, it is why kids are interested in Indiana Jones, it is why people are continually interested in the past, in their own family histories" "and it's a fantastic journey to be on and I'm just really glad that we have this object now in Ipswich Museum and people can come on this journey with us." "The lantern connects us to the Romans' everyday life." "But some finds remind us how very unlike us they were." "A site on the banks of the Thames speaks of a sinister vanished world." "When the Romans were here, this river would have been the main thoroughfare downstream to London and ultimately the Empire beyond." "Scratch beneath the surface and you find a story which shocks our modern sensibilities and reveals a darker side to Roman society." "The village of Hambleden near the Thames has always been a desirable place to live, even so it seems for the Romans who built villas here." "I'm just up from the river now, walking along on the edge of this beautiful field which seems to be growing some kind of cereal crop, but it's not the crop I'm interested in at all, it's what's in the ground underneath it." "Almost exactly 100 years ago, this woman, Miss Glassbrook, was walking along in this very same field and started to find some strange pieces of pottery, very much like these ones." "She decided they were worth further investigation." "Miss Glassbrook approached a local archaeologist, who in 1912 would make an extraordinary discovery beneath the soil in this Buckinghamshire field." "The archaeologist Alfred Cocks had discovered the foundations of a high status Roman villa which he would call Yewden." "Over the course of a year Cocks would excavate and photograph the villa while collecting the finds but in so doing he would uncover a dark secret which is still troubling archaeologists almost a century later." "The main villa house is what we see in this photograph." "There is a little bump in the middle of the field here." "The bump is entirely due to that building beneath the surface." "It's nice, you CAN work out where you are, you know it is that bump because you can actually see the scene in front of you." "Look at that house there." "It has got a white front on it, white gable end." "It is now pebble-dashed." "That's right." "This is a huge excavation." "It is massive." "He had to have a huge team of labourers to do this." "It was all by hand." "It was all by shovel and wheelbarrows." "That would have been a huge labour force and an enormous cost." "So this is all still there, underneath that wheat?" "Still there, it has got the backfill, then the soil layer reinstated and crops on it for ever more." "For many years, the finds from Yewden Roman Villa were kept in the special museum at Hambleden." "When that closed in the 1850s, they were moved to Buckinghamshire County Museum in Aylesbury, where appropriately enough, Alfred Cocks was once curator." "Cocks published his results in 1921." "But it's the way he reached his conclusions that's interesting archaeologists today." "Alfred Cocks was unlike most of the archaeologists are operating in the early 20th century, many of whom were, to be honest, just treasure-hunters." "But Cocks was different, he paid careful attention to each and every find, he labelled them with the name, the location and even the precise depth at which they were found." "The artefacts from the 1912 excavation fill over 300 boxes." "So, Brett, all of these boxes here are from Yewden, are they?" "Absolutely." "'Brett Thorn is keeper of Archaeology at the Buckinghamshire County Museum.'" "This is all the objects he recovered from the 1912 excavations." "These, as you can see, these are Roman brooches." "But he's not just collecting the brooches, there are little pieces, random bits of metal." "Exactly." "He didn't differentiate, he just picked up absolutely everything." "Not only did he collect even the tiniest little cruddy bits like that little section there, he labelled everything, even these tiny pieces." "Just to show you an example, this one, a rather crude bit of card..." "Is that Cocks' writing?" "This is Cocks' handwriting, yes." "East side of Yard, 35 inches north of east of enclosure wall, Yewden and the date, 02.10.12." "So this is his original display piece." "Fantastic." "So this must be really unusual for the time." "Hugely unusual." "People, these antiquarians, just went in and dug." "They just took out the goodies, the pretty items to put on show and they weren't interested in anything else." "All these little bits of bronze wire, little tiny shreds of pot where the label is actually bigger than the pot piece, they wouldn't have kept that, they would have dumped it back on site, wrecked the stratigraphy and we'd know nothing about the site." "There's so much more information available to you now because he has done this work, because he has been so careful and so meticulous." "Exactly, yes." "Over the past year Jill has been taking home the Hambleden boxes to try and re-evaluate Cock's 1912 findings with the eye and the techniques of the 21st-century archaeologist." "But there was one particular set of remains which Alfred Cocks was uncharacteristically reticent about." "In Cocks' report he obviously tells us about a good number of the finds - selectively - he doesn't discuss all the finds." "I was rather surprised to find in his report that in actual fact he did find 97 infant burials." "He only gives them a paragraph or so of a mention, which, even in 1912 that is a very important find, it is an unusually high number." "It was rather odd the way he just described them rather informally as being wrapped as little bundles and potentially buried secretly after dark." "A tiny little bag here of..." "little infant bones." "Absolutely minute, beautifully preserved, though." "The bones are incredibly well-preserved." "Some little pieces of skull there, it's almost eggshell-like, it's incredibly thin but brilliantly preserved." "'The infant bones were thought to have been lost until last year 'when Jill and Brett re-discovered them packed away in old cigar and gun-cartridge boxes.'" "How many infants were there buried at Yewden?" "Well, that was the key thing, we've got 97." "It's an astounding number for the one villa." "It's quite a shocking number, actually." "It is." "It is actually quite normal to have infant burials, you are not considered to be a proper human being ready for the cemetery until about two years old in the Roman world." "You do bury any babies that are lost between being born and two years and you put them in the garden or the yard or perhaps under your floor." "But not 97." "There is something different about Yewden." "There is something very strange going on, isn't there?" "So these are the boxes that the bones...?" "Yes." "This is how Cocks packed them." "Cigarette boxes, all with his detailed notes on about where that particular infant was buried and again the date and all of the information he loved to record." "But what doesn't seem in keeping is the fact he squirrels these away, he doesn't really look at them again." "There is no mention anywhere in the published report of them other than a short paragraph saying he thought because the bodies cut and recut each other - they are buried in a very small area - that he thought it must have been done surreptitiously, after dark and hidden." "I do handle human bones, obviously, but it's the first time I've really had to deal with infant bones and it's quite a strange feeling, isn't it?" "It actually quite upset me because they are obviously very small skeletons." "They were clearly very young babies." "It just has that effect on you." "Nearly a century after Alfred Cocks first discovered them, the infant bones are once again coming under scientific scrutiny." "This time by Dr Simon Mays." "It is quite common to find a handful of burials at Roman villa sites but what is unusual is to come across quite so many." "There is no other site with anything like the 97 infant burials that we have got from Hambleden." "Something that struck me as I laid out skeleton after skeleton was they all seemed to be a pretty similar size." "The best way to determine how old an infant was when it died is to measure the bones." "We measure the bones of the arms and legs - by doing this we can age an infant to within about two weeks." "Simon's measurements confirmed his initial hunch." "The babies looked the same size because they all died around the same age of 40 weeks' gestation." "It seems what we are dealing with is infants that died around the time of birth." "If this was NATURAL infant mortality, there would be a wide range of bone size, but this wasn't the case." "That made us think that perhaps these individuals had been deliberately killed." "The shocking evidence is suggesting infanticide." "At Yewden Villa the Romans were murdering their newborn children." "I think the fact that we have got 97 infants makes us look for something systematic that was going on." "In the coming months, Simon will carry out further tests on the bones of those babies once buried beneath this Buckinghamshire field." "These investigations may shed light on the motives behind these awful killings." "It seems like there is something quite disturbing going on here." "To some extent we expect to see this." "We know infanticide was there in Roman society, but at this scale, what is happening?" "The Roman army happened to coincidentally be just over the hill, there is a track leading off in that direction." "There is a Roman road and a Roman army encampment for some time." "The only explanation you keep coming back to is it has got to have been a brothel." "Really?" "It really is the only explanation." "You can think of a wealth of other reasons but they just don't hold water." "At the moment, the story of Yewden Roman Villa hasn't been told in its fullness, has it?" "Absolutely not." "That is just my opinion." "I have no proof, of course, but it is what works for the moment and I will continue investigating." "100 miles away in Kent, there are new investigations into the beginnings of Roman rule... almost exactly where the Emperor Claudius invaded these shores." "In the year 43 AD, the people living here on the Kent coast looking out to sea would have been greeted by the sight of an armada of ships approaching." "It was almost 100 years since Julius Caesar had first invaded these shores, and the Romans were back." "This time, they were here to stay." "Just half a mile away from where the Roman army came ashore we are getting a glimpse into the Britain of the first century." "And it's all thanks to an £87 million road being built here in Kent." "Six miles long and covering 100 acres, it's the last part of a road project which links the Channel Tunnel and coastal ports to the motorway network beyond." "The new road here cuts right across a part of the country that is incredibly rich in archaeological terms." "For thousands of years, this tip of Kent jutting out into the English Channel has been the gateway to Britain, not just for the Romans arriving in 43 AD but for those who preceded them and those who would come much later." "Archaeologically speaking, this place is something of a gold mine." "For the last few months, Digging For Britain has been following the teams from Oxford Wessex Archaeology." "They've been tasked with excavating and recording the evidence uncovered by the diggers and bulldozers... before the ground is once again covered up, this time by a four-lane highway." "The entire length of the new road has been carefully stripped by earth-moving equipment removing the top-soil, without damaging the archaeology below." "Andrew, this is a massive area of excavation, this is a only a small part of the whole scheme." "It is a very small bit." "This is the biggest dig in Britain this year." "It is a road scheme just over six miles long, but it is one big archaeological site." "Almost every single bit is an archaeological excavation." "And how many archaeologists have you got working here at any one time?" "At the moment, there are about 130 archaeologists on site." "Working in the offices, backing them up, there are others, so, about 150 people." "So you have got this big new road being built and all the way along the length of it, archaeology has to happen first?" "It is one of these bitter-sweet opportunities - the archaeology will be destroyed but the sweetness is we get the opportunity to make a record and investigate this part of the archaeology in east Kent." "Turn the clock back 2,000 years and this part of Kent where the new road is being built would have looked very different." "Then, the Isle of Thanet really was an island, separated from the mainland until medieval times by a stretch of water called the Wantsum Channel." "And it's here that the new road is being built and, more importantly for us, where the excavations are taking place." "One of the things I find so extraordinary about this place is the sheer wealth of archaeology." "Here we have a busy, 21st-century road with people rushing up and down that, many of them probably unaware that just under the fields at the side of the road there are the artefacts and traces of buildings and even human remains of the local people who lived here" "one, two, three, even 4,000 years ago." "And it's one of those people, this time a Roman, who archaeologists Vicky Jamieson and Al Zocholski have just discovered." "We have got a complete Roman vessel with it." "We had some Roman coffin nails come out along the far edge." "Any idea why his head is tilted back like that?" "I am thinking that as he has been placed in the coffin, he may have had a pillow behind him." "As that has decayed, over time, his head, the skull has fallen back over, consequently, that has gone that way and the mandible has fallen forward." "'This Roman had already lost a number of teeth during his lifetime 'and one of the remainder would have given him serious tooth-ache.'" "This tooth here is quite rotten." "He would have been in a fair amount of pain." "'Clues within the grave suggest that the Roman is from the 1st or 2nd century.'" "Given the fact that the grave is on an North-South alignment would suggest a pagan, Roman burial as opposed to Christian." "Lovely." "Hence the grave and hence the coffin." "I'll just pop that back and make sure it doesn't break." "It is very careful, painstaking work but it is also archaeology that needs to be done to a deadline." "If you look over here, the diggers are moving in and the road is starting to be built." "Only a few weeks ago, the archaeologists were in this area excavating an Anglo-Saxon cemetery." "Now all of that has disappeared." "The important thing is, this is a precious opportunity to record the archaeology here before it disappears forever as the new road comes through." "The rolling deadlines for completing different sections of the new road means that the team have had to develop a fast method of systematically recording the objects at the time they are excavated." "Every find is individually numbered, plotted by GPS and photographed as well as being accurately drawn by archaeologists in the field." "Back at the construction compound nearby, the data is fed into computers, then the photos carefully traced." "Here is our Roman skeleton and its associated pot." "In a separate area, the pot is cleaned." "Even the earth from the grave is carefully sieved for any material that may have been missed in the original excavation." "Finally with the GPS co-ordinates and the computerised drawing, it's now possible to place the Roman Skeleton and grave goods back on the map - exactly where they were found." "I have come a bit further south to an area rather poetically known as "zone six"." "But there is really interesting archaeology here." "2,000 years ago, this would have been the neck of the peninsula sticking out into the Wantsum Channel." "The archaeologists are finding evidence of the very people who would have been living here when the Romans arrived." "And it's here that the team have discovered the foundations of an Iron Age Roundhouse." "This is a typical building of the period before the Romans arrived in Britain." "Yes." "For hundreds, thousands of years before the Romans arrived, people lived in circular houses with conical, thatched roofs." "Sometimes there would have been one or two in a small farm or, as is the case here, maybe a small village with eight or more houses." "Very typical of the Iron Age." "You think this was a village then?" "We think so, yes." "As you can see, we have got many more of those curvilinear ditches that we think indicate where the houses were." "This one is a nice complete circle, but we are catching the edges here." "Little arcs, edges of round houses." "We are really lucky with this one." "It has got such good preservation." "So it would have been at timber house, none of the timber is there but we have still got this ditch that goes around the periphery." "Is there any dating material that has come out of that ditch?" "We are quite lucky in this respect as well." "We have had some pottery from the outer ditch and it suggests it is a Belgic pottery which would put us about 100 years before the Romans arrived." "That gives you a really precise date." "We are really lucky." "A few feet away, the team have just uncovered a cobbled surface littered with animal bones." "They seem to be kind of embedded in the stones." "'They believe that this was the butchery and food preparation area for the village, 'whose very inhabitants would have seen Claudius's army arriving in 43AD.'" "We've got these two parallel marks, could be from the knives." "This is the remains of animals that have been butchered just here?" "It looks like it, yes." "Here we've got a tiny gold coin..." "'This coin reveals that the inhabitants of the village already 'had European connections before the Romans invaded.'" "On the back you have the horse and the charioteer and on the other side there's the very faint remains of the head." "We find coins like this, some just a few miles away at Minster, but in France as well." "We think it may well have been made in France and used in Britain." "That beautiful coin from the Iron Age village in Kent suggests we already had links with France at the time of the Roman invasion." "But I'm now headed west to Dorset where there's hard evidence of trading with the Romans themselves well before they thought of making us the latest addition to their empire." "For more than two hundred years the Romans had been expanding their empire across the Mediterranean, but in the first century BC, they started setting their sights further afield." "Britannia to the north-west might have seemed like the end of the world, but it had things which the Romans wanted, and what the Romans wanted, they usually got." "Britain already had a reputation for its mineral wealth, for its gold, silver and tin." "But there was something else the Romans wanted from us." "It was this - grain." "There was plenty of it growing in this part of Dorset back then just as there is today." "In fact, Britain would go on to become the breadbasket of the Roman Empire." "For those living in these agricultural areas, some of them became very rich indeed." "Traditionally, it was thought that the Durotriges, the Iron Age tribe who occupied this part of Dorset, were warlike and resisted the Roman invaders, but archaeologists from Bournemouth University seem to be finding very different evidence at this late Iron Age farmstead." "This magnetic survey shows us the Iron Age ditched enclosure we call a Banjo enclosure." "That's because it superficially resembles a banjo with the body and the neck." "Some of these necks are very long." "Where are we standing in relation to the structures there?" "We're standing right at the entrance here." "There would have possibly been a gate." "We are looking at this ditch just here?" "That's right." "That's this ditch here and it forms round and then it curves around and back down." "This is where you would have entered the site and you would have seen one substantial round house and a number of subsidiary round houses and a lot of activity going on within this large enclosure." "Do you think this was a defensive enclosure?" "Not at all." "This is effectively an undefended farmstead." "It does seem a bit peculiar because we are so familiar with the idea that there are lots of hill forts around here and people were holed up in those hill forts defending themselves." "I think that's an idea this site has shown can't be correct." "These sites are effectively wealthy, well-appointed, undefended." "But there's something else on the site which is intriguing the Bournemouth team." "They've found more than 30 cylindrical pits carved into the chalk bedrock by ancient tools and now excavated by the hands of modern-day archaeology students." "Miles, what are these pits?" "These are large, cylindrical storage pits." "It's been cut down straight into the chalk." "We're assuming that what they are storing is grain of some kind." "Have you found grain in these pits?" "Indeed." "We've got small pieces of oats and barley which have come out from the lowest levels of these pits." "Iron Age barley." "Presumably that's not just for their consumption?" "No, this, I would imagine is stuff being exported." "To some extent we can see the results of that exportation from the artefacts that are coming up in these pits." "There are artefacts as well?" "It appears that once the grain is coming out, they are putting a whole range of artefacts in." "We've got these large slabs of Iron Age pottery." "Were they using this as a rubbish pit then?" "No, I don't think so." "We are not seeing a random deposit of domestic waste." "We seem to be seeing a deliberate selection procedure." "We've got fragments of horse and cow and sheep." "It suggests there's something symbolic about placing these objects in there." "Yes." "It might be that having emptied the pit, you've got to put something back in as a kind of offering, perhaps to ensure the long-term fertility of the land." "Perhaps it's an offering to the gods." "'But the pits also reveal that these Iron Age farmers had developed sophisticated tastes." "'Miles has found evidence of chicken which in the Iron Age 'was not the familiar meat we know today, 'but an exotic food which they were importing from the Roman world.'" "Presumably they're selling their produce, their grain, and getting these luxury food items in return." "This particular fragment is the handle of an amphora, a large storage vessel that stood up to the height of an adult." "We can tell by the fabric and by the shape that it's from Spain and it would have probably held wine." "That's lovely." "It is, so you can imagine they are eating chicken, they are drinking wine, they are plugged into the Mediterranean world." "It seems that Roman culture from the Continent is seeping over to Britain even before the Romans officially arrive here." "Very much so." "They're generally living the same kind of lifestyle and picking and choosing aspects of Roman culture that they find most appetising." "The pits that the archaeologists are finding all over this site seem to have a very obvious, practical use for storage of grain." "But there is definitely something else going on." "Objects are being placed in the bottom of these pits that have some kind of symbolic value, and it's not just objects, it's not just animal bones and pottery that the archaeologists are finding." "'Of all the deposits I've seen on the site, this has to be the strangest.'" "It's an adult male who is lying face-down on what best can be described as a bed of meat." "How strange." "You've got horse and pig and cow bone underneath him." "It looks as though he has just been thrown into the hole, as if he has not been placed there with any ceremony." "It's not a formal burial." "To our modern eyes, it looks like he's been rolled in." "He's lying face-down and his legs are slightly tangled up." "There's no obvious order or reverence to that." "It's difficult to see whether this is a grave in the conventional sense and the bone represents food for the afterlife, or whether the adult himself represents just part of the deposit." "How strange." "There's something very odd going on with these pits, isn't there?" "There is." "It's almost like, I suppose, an ancestor burying an aunt or an uncle in the cupboard in the kitchen." "It doesn't make sense to us." "This is the area where they're living, working, but their dead are going in these disused pits." "Very peculiar." "Whatever the meanings of the bones deposited in the pits here in Dorset, it's clear that the people who farmed this land prospered from trading with the Romans." "And eventually, they even adopted a Roman style to their houses." "From the evidence the team are finding on the ground, the wooden round houses are being replaced by rectangular buildings with stone foundations." "The people are probably living very similar lives but they're taking on the fashion of Roman rectangular building." "The Romans did like corners, didn't they?" "They did." "We've got - you could say - square, round houses." "The Bournemouth University dig is showing that far from the popular image of Roman invaders locked in combat with the local tribes, this settlement at least is suggesting a much calmer transition." "Becoming part of Roman Britain is no significant shock to these people at all." "There was just a great deal of continuity." "That's pretty much for the whole of Roman Britain, because we get so awed by the high visibility of villas and temples without realising that these represent less than one per cent of what's going on in the countryside." "The bulk of the population are living the same lifestyle and doing the same things completely unaffected." "30 miles north in Somerset, evidence is emerging that here too local people were keeping hold of their ancient beliefs and ways of honouring the gods." "There's nothing around to suggest there's anything particularly special or significant about this Somerset field." "But I know for certain that 1,700 years ago somebody, or a group of people, came here and did something right here on this very spot." "In late April this year, metal detectorist Dave Crisp was searching this same field." "He was about to make the discovery of a lifetime." "I got this funny signal and it was an iffy signal, it really was." "So I dug down and I dug a bit deeper and it was still there." "I dug a bit deeper." "I am literally 12, 14 inches down, now." "I put my hand in and I pulled out a black thing." "I thought, I've got a rock." "No, it looks like a bit of pottery." "It looks like... a Roman bit of black burnished ware." "That's quite interesting." "I put my hand in again and pulled out a bit more clay and there was a little bronze Roman coin." "Very small, about the size of my fingernail." "Then I realised that the piece of burnished ware I had was the top of a pot." "I thought, I've got a hoard." "I went..." "I'm in the middle of nowhere saying, "I have got a hoard!"" "I've been 22 years detecting and I had never had a hoard before that weekend." "Dave was convinced he had found treasure, but instead of digging it up he contacted The Portable Antiquities Scheme, which records archaeological objects found by the public." "Finds liaison officer Anna Booth suspected that this was going to be a job for a professional archaeologist." "We actually had no idea how big the hoard was going to be at this stage." "It was very exciting for us." "We uncovered the neck of the vessel and what we could see was a small dish on the top of it." "It was acting as a lid." "At first we wondered whether this was the bottom of quite a small vessel and it was turned upside-down." "But when we dug a bit further, we realised it was actually a lid sitting on top of an absolutely enormous vessel of the size that none of us had seen anything like before." "It was absolutely fantastic." "It was only at that stage that we realised it was actually a huge hoard of coins that we were dealing with." "That must have been quite breathtaking." "It was amazing, it was absolutely fantastic." "Over the following two days we actually undertook the excavation." "It did take us a full two days, starting first thing in the morning until last thing at night until the sun went down, just excavating thousands upon thousands of coins and bagging them up." "It took a huge amount of time, but it was absolutely fascinating and an amazing process to go through." "Because Dave Crisp got archaeologists involved right from the very start, they were able to systematically excavate the pot layer by layer." "It's meant we have a much better chance of finding out why that pot full of coins was buried in this field all those years ago." "The Frome hoard is looking like it might be the biggest coin hoard ever discovered in Britain." "They've estimated that there are around 50,000 coins, weighing in at 160 kilos - that's about the weight of two adults." "But the coins need urgent attention, and that's why in early May they were brought here to central London." "The Roman coins arrived at the British Museum still wet and stuck together with heavy Somerset clay." "Pippa Pearce is a metals conservator at the museum." "For several weeks now, Pippa has been fully occupied carrying out the first stage of the coins' conservation by carefully washing the contents of the 67 bags which made up the Frome hoard." "So, into the fume cupboard for a quick dry..." "The coins span 40 years - from AD 253 to 293 - and the vast majority are made of debased silver and bronze." "Roman coin experts Roger Bland and Sam Moorhead have dropped everything to concentrate on the Somerset coins." "Here's another coin of Tetricus..." "That's Claudius - that's the Emperor standing holding a branch." "'They've been sorting the coins by emperor at a rate of nearly 6,000 a week!" "'" "It's now eight weeks since the Frome hoard was raised, and all the coins have been cleaned and sorted." "But are we any closer to finding out how and why such an enormous hoard was buried in that Somerset field?" "Roger, this is just a small fraction of the whole hoard - how many coins do you think there are?" "Well, we think the final number is going to be just over 52,500 coins." "How big is this hoard in the context of other hoards that have been found in Britain?" "It's the largest ever hoard found in a single pot in this country." "There was another hoard found in 1978 which had just a couple of thousand more coins, but that was in two pots." "Do you have any idea of the value of these coins?" "Maybe about the equivalent of four years' pay for a Roman legionary soldier." "So, if you were to turn that into present-day values, that might be about £100,000, in present-day terms." "So, Sam, this is a piece of the pot, is it?" "Yes, this is a piece of the pot that it was found in." "When they excavated, the pot was already broken." "And you can see, it's quite thin." "Neither I nor the conservator believe that this would have been able to hold 160 kilograms of metal without breaking." "Yes, that is very thin." "And so, it's almost certain that the pot was actually buried in the ground first, and that the coins were added after it had been put in the ground." "Sam doesn't think that this pot was one person's savings scheme - but more likely part of an ancient ritual." "I don't believe myself that this is a hoard of coins intended for recovery." "I think what you could see is a community of people who are actually making offerings, and they are each pouring in their own contribution to a communal, ritual votive offering to the gods, or whoever it is." "Just because it's communal doesn't necessarily mean it's ritual - people could be burying something they were worried might be taken from them?" "If you're going to bury this for security and safety, you'd put it in lots of different pots so you could easily take them out of the ground later." "Also, if you wanted to get these coins out of the ground, you'd have to dig down to the pot, smash the pot and then shovel them out, which also would be a very lengthy process." "So, I believe that it was never intended for recovery." "And you're seeing echoes here of a more ancient tradition, pre-Roman?" "I think so, yes, absolutely." "The same people." "We know from other studies that the people of the West Country were the same people as they were in the Bronze and the Iron Ages, so why not continue the same practices?" "I am naturally quite a sceptical person, and I tend to look for the most obvious explanation for things." "But it really does seem, from talking to the experts, that whoever it was that buried that pot full of coins in the ground wasn't intending to come back to it." "In which case, perhaps this is an echo of an ancient tradition that we're seeing." "Maybe those coins are a votive offering, and perhaps this was a sacred field." "Not all archaeological recoveries happen as fast as the Roman coin hoard." "There's one project involving a catastrophic fire and a Roman shipwreck which has lasted for over 30 years." "St Peter Port, Guernsey, in the Channel Islands." "Jason Monaghan is museums director here." "As a young student in the 1980s, along with diver Richard Keen, he was involved in the biggest archaeology project the island had ever seen." "In the course of my diving in the harbour and the pier heads picking up pottery and scallops and whatever else I could find," "I came across a wooden wreck." "Richard thought it was an old barge used to build the harbour wall." "But it would be another year before he realised the significance of what he had found." "There was the wreck, more exposed, and great big chunks of Roman tile." "You know, you can't mistake Roman tile." "I thought, crumbs!" "This is going to be really interesting." "Richard had found the remains of a Roman ship - uniquely preserved on the seabed for over 1,600 years." "But how did it come to be here?" "The St Peter Port would have had a wide, sandy harbour, and this ship would have been somewhere in the entrance - possibly anchored, possibly moored." "It caught fire - the reason, we don't know." "The fire raged for some time, then the water came on board, quenched the fire, and the ship sank." "The Roman ship lay undisturbed and covered in silt until the early 1980s, when a new breed of super-ferry started coming into Guernsey." "The ferry's propeller wash exposed the wooden wreck lying in the harbour entrance." "They were only clearing our wreck probably by a metre or two at low tide." "And indeed, we lost one or two very large timbers off the ship that we knew once existed, but were actually probably pulled out to sea by these ships." "If we hadn't raised the ship, it would have been destroyed very quickly." "What the maritime archaeologists had found were the remains of a Gallo-Roman trading vessel which transported cargoes from as far south as Spain through the English Channel and possibly even up into the North Sea." "The ship was carrying blocks of pitch - a natural resin - which would accidentally preserve the wreck." "We believe the fire raged in the back of the ship." "The back of the ship is the best-preserved, because the cargo of pitch the ship was carrying melted during the fire." "And this spread out to cover an area of about eight square metres." "So when the ship sank, this quenched into a solid mass and effectively held the back end of the ship down." "In a warehouse in the centre of St Peter Port," "Jason has come to look at the evidence from the fire on board." "Down here, we've got pitch..." "Yep. ..amphora, metal..." "Mmm." "'It was the fire which certainly sank the ship, but it was the fire, too, which preserved so much of the Roman vessel." "Erm, this is..." "This is..." "Is that some of the pitch?" "Yes, that's a loose piece." "Have a sniff at it, actually." "Oh, yeah!" "You can just smell it." "It's got a very sort of distinctive, almost like burnt coffee smell." "We've got... a couple of dozen lumps like this, and this has come straight off the top of one of the timbers." "There's a bit of amphora stuck there." "Oh, yes!" "So it's a little treasure box, really." "Yeah." "We know the ship was carrying amphora - possibly full of wine - but much of the rest of the cargo is missing, perhaps unloaded, burnt, or simply swallowed up in the melted pitch." "But what do remain are many of the timbers of the ship which nearly three decades ago were raised from the seas off Guernsey." "The Roman timbers have now crossed the Channel to Portsmouth and the Mary Rose Trust, where for the past decade they've been treated and dried." "The timbers have been more exposed presumably." "Yep, they were sticking out of the seabed at this end here..." "'For Jason, too, it's been a long journey.'" "This was my first job after leaving university, so it's very strange, after two-and-a-half decades, to be coming back and seeing the timbers in the final state that we talked about very excitedly all those years ago." "The conservation process has worked beautifully there..." "But there's one final problem to overcome." "The timbers are wrapped, boxed and ready to go home, but there's nowhere big enough on Guernsey at present to house the re-constructed ship." "This is a very important ship for Guernsey." "Roman archaeologists talk a lot about trade, in inverted commas, but actually, we have very little evidence, apart from inferring that this pottery went from here to there." "So here, we have a very solid example of how the trade was carried out - ships like ours sailed from port to port, carrying stuff in their holds." "30 years might seem like a long time for an archaeological project." "But back here at Vindolanda, they've been digging for even longer, and during that time, it's here where we've come closest to knowing the Romans who occupied Britain." "It is tempting to think that we know everything about the Romans already." "After all, they wrote things down, they left us records." "But archaeology gives us a different perspective." "It helps to fill in details and paint a fuller picture." "But it can also challenge our preconceptions, and that's when sites like this get really interesting." "So, Andrew, what have we got here...?" "'Until recently, it was believed that temples were never sited inside Roman auxiliary forts." "'That was until last year.'" "So this is all part of the temple?" "This is all part of the temple." "It actually stretches from the gate, all the way up to the angle tower." "This is all three rooms of quite an impressive building." "What's awesome about this is that we absolutely do not expect to find temples to pagan gods, particularly eastern cult, inside auxiliary forts." "This the first one that's ever been found anywhere in the Roman Empire." "We were actually looking for a toilet block under here, because we've got the barracks behind us." "Looking for a loo and we found a temple." "There is some sort of poetry in that, I'm sure!" "So these pillars, are they supporting a floor?" "Is this a hypocaust system?" "That's exactly right." "To warm the floor..." "You can still see the burning on some of the stones." "It shows that they had to fire it up in the winter time at least." "Where would the fire itself have been?" "The furnace is in this room behind." "The hot air comes through there..." "It comes through the flume..." "And then circulates round here." "That's right." "And they even know the identity of the god who was being worshipped in this newly-discovered temple, because amongst the ruins they uncovered this remarkable find - an altar to a god from Turkey, called Jupiter Dolichenus." "Here, you've got the beautiful iconography of Jupiter Dolichenus, riding his bull on this side." "He's got his thunderbolt clutched in his hand." "And an axe..." "And the axe in the other hand." "So was this altar set up by a military man?" "This altar is set up by the big chief himself, the commanding officer of the fort." "If we just read the front of it here, we can see, IOM, for Jupiter Optimus Maximus." "Jupiter, the biggest and the best!" "Yes, everybody's got to be a little bit beneath Jupiter." "Underneath him, you've got the actual name of the god himself" " Dolocheno." "D-O-L-O-C-H-E-N-O." "Very, very clear on that line there." "Underneath that, you've got the dedicator" " Sulpicius Pudens." "And the very, very bottom line, very common on most inscriptions" " VSLM - and that really just means the guy fulfilled his vow." "And what you're looking at here is the end of a contract." "It's a personal contract between Sulpicius Pudens and the god, Jupiter Dolichenus." "So he's promised to erect an altar to this god?" "He has." "And he's now fulfilled his promise." "Exactly." "The sides are so beautifully preserved, with the relief carving and the writing, but obviously the top's been exposed - this is all very weathered." "It's really well worn, but also it's been very badly damaged as well by people coming in when they were demolishing the temple." "The demolition of the temple we think happened sometime in the 350s or 70s." "And you've got this power struggle - with Christianity becoming the official religion, a lot of the ancient pagan cults and shrines end up going by the wayside." "And poor old Jupiter Dolichenus here eventually fell victim to such a new movement on the northern frontier of Roman Britain." "Christianity had arrived at Vindolanda, but just 50 years later, in 410AD, the Roman army departed Britain - this time for good." "Vindolanda, too, would slowly be abandoned, and would fall into ruin." "It's the remoteness of this part of Northumberland which has allowed Vindolanda and its archaeology to survive as a legacy to the Roman occupation of Britain." "In the 400 years the Romans were here, they transformed our country, from its language to its landscape, leaving a lasting legacy that remains with us today." "And yet, 1,600 years later, we're still discovering new things about their society, from that terrible infanticide on the banks of the Thames to that massive coin hoard found just earlier this year in the south-west." "There's so much more to understand about the Romans in Britain." "And so the digging continues." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk"