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The Roman Fort of Navio with Colin Merrony - Ep 30
501 Plays4 years ago
Archaeology and Ale is a monthly series of talks presented by Archaeology in the City, part of the University of Sheffield Archaeology Department’s outreach programme. In this talk, Archaeology in the City proudly presents - Colin Merrony on "The Roman For of Navio" This talk took place on Thursday, February 27th, 2020 at the Red Deer in Sheffield.
This month we welcome the University of Sheffield's own Colin Merrony for a chat about the Roman fort of Navio. Colin is a veteran archaeologist and a teaching fellow at the uni, he has done extensive work throughout the Peak District including at Navio. In this talk, Colin explains the history of the Roman presence in the Peak District including their purported lead mining. He takes us through the past and current (and future!) plans to excavate Navio.
For more information about Archaeology in the City’s events and opportunities to get involved, please email [email protected] or visit our website at archinthecity.wordpress.com. You can also find us on Twitter (@archinthecity), Instagram (@archaeointhecity), or Facebook (@archinthecity) Content Warning: Listener discretion is advised as there may be adult language
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Transcript
Episode Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Introduction to Archaeology and Ale
00:00:28
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Episode 30 of Archaeology and Ale, the free monthly public archaeology talk brought to you by Archaeology in the City, the community outreach program from the University of Sheffield's archaeology department.
Introducing Colin Mariny
00:00:40
Speaker
This month, our guest speaker is the University of Sheffield's own teaching fellow, Colin Mariny, here to discuss the Roman fort of Navio.
00:00:48
Speaker
The talks take place at the Red Deer, a popular pub on Pitt Street in
Setting and Preparations
00:00:52
Speaker
Sheffield. It is a busy place, so be advised that there may be some background noise and strong language may be used from time to time. Enjoy!
Hope Valley Project Origins
00:01:15
Speaker
Very disturbing, well thank you very much. As you can see I'm well prepared and I arrived in good time and we haven't just dropped the slide changer in the beer but it seems to be working so we're all right. Anyway, some of you may remember a bit over a year ago I was here talking about the Hope Valley more generally and a project that has been going on for quite some time in the Hope Valley.
00:01:37
Speaker
which started, started, there's Castleton, here's Castleton, Hope's back over here, started about there, looking at the medieval hospital. So that was the origins of this, seems a bit odd to start with that when you're going to talk about the Romans.
Roman Fort of Navio
00:01:52
Speaker
But it started there and then it sort of grew and we grew and expanded from Castleton to include Hope, which is the next village over, and we've now expanded our world to over here.
00:02:02
Speaker
So the Roman fort of Navio sits just where this valley is coming in at the side, into the Hope Valley here, so this is coming from Bradway and into the White Peak. The Romans have placed their fort just where this valley comes in and the Bradwell Beck there meets the now, it's called Peak's Hole Water here but in Hope it becomes the river now, and to command these sort of route ways. Now
00:02:28
Speaker
Where this picture is taken from is up on Mamtour, which is the head of the valley, end Bronze Age, Iron Age, Hillfort, depending on if you believe Graham Gilbert or not. And then, of course, Peverill Castle sits over here on the side of Castleton. So there's a series of
00:02:48
Speaker
are sites here which are commanding the valley and commanding this routeway through and we'll have a look at why this routeway is sort of important in a few minutes.
Historical Sites Discussion
00:02:56
Speaker
Hopefully you'll all be asleep by then and I can ramble on. I'm not quite sure what's going to come up soon because I did the first part of this talk a few days ago and I haven't had a chance to review it so many as you may have noticed.
00:03:06
Speaker
It's a bit last minute. So anyway, if we go down the other end, there is the Roman fort of Navio. So I should say, if we just go back a moment, there's the cement works. So you can orientate this. There's the cement works. We've gone to the other side, and we're looking back, and we're looking back to where that previous photograph was taken to Mamtor Hill fort, and Pebble Castle is just tucked in the side there. And here is the
00:03:29
Speaker
the Roman fort sitting on that little sort of plateau which sticks out into the Hope Valley and is just at the side. So off to the left here is where the valley is going up through Bradwell into the Peak District.
Roman Arrival in Britain
00:03:44
Speaker
So if you're not sure where I mean, I'm presuming most of you will know where I mean, but here's Sheffield, we're here somewhere, Manchester and Stoke and various places. And so we're talking about this bit here, the Hope Valley, which runs through
00:03:58
Speaker
from Hathersage, which is the normal place people encounter it at first. And the river runs in and joins the Derwent and runs away, and that's quite a significant relationship, as we'll perhaps see. So it's just about there, about 18 miles from Sheffield.
00:04:17
Speaker
So let's have a look. Right, so before we get to Roma Fort, there's a number of debates going on. There's a number of things that you hear about, Roman sites in this area. There aren't very many Roman sites in sort of Sheffield area in this edge of the Peak District. But you have to sort of think, one of the debates, which hopefully we'll get rid of very soon, relies on what the Romans did when they first came here. And I'm sure you're all completely familiar with the Romans arriving in Britain. When they first
00:04:47
Speaker
invade. They don't sweep all the way up through to wherever, taking over Wales and all of Scotland or something. They actually relatively quickly establish a boundary which it isn't quite clear where it is, but it's running from the Humber out of the
00:05:04
Speaker
the Humber is in here, and exactly where it runs to, well, that's debatable. Different people have different views. Some people say it's bounded effectively by the Fosse Way, which runs down to Syrances, and so it's between the Humber and the Severn. Other people would argue it's across somehow towards the Mersey, from the Humber to the Mersey.
00:05:26
Speaker
It's established like that. The Briganteans to the north. If the Romans are stopping here somewhere, let's not worry about the western side just a moment, then the Brigantes to the north are a client kingdom. One way there. Queen Cartimandua. There's relatively good relations. It's quite clear, if you
Roman Forts and Boundaries
00:05:43
Speaker
read Colin Hazelgrove's work recently, that there's very close relationships with the Briganteans and the Romans, and probably the Romans are operating in Brigantean territory relatively freely.
00:05:56
Speaker
There are a number of difficulties, there's a number of revolts against the Romans and so on. One of those is in Wales, the general area there, and the person leading that, Caratarchus, escapes the Romans and goes up to the Brigantes to seek refuge, and Cartimangia decides that that's not a good move given her political situation. So she hands him over to the Romans. So there's a clear case that under Cartimangia the Brigantes are
00:06:26
Speaker
working very closely with the Romans and therefore you wonder what sort of boundary is there because you'll see argued today at the moment that people are arguing this is a hard boundary that the Romans are going to defend this against an enemy and I think that's not something that can be sustained as an idea. So some people would argue certainly that we can see Roman forts established early
00:06:55
Speaker
relatively shortly after the invasion, running through Doncaster. So the idea is that there's a boundary here running from the Humber through Doncaster, across through Templeborough, which is in Rotherham, and then where does it go? Well, Chesterfield is another early fort, so some people would argue it runs offbound. This way, other people would like to argue it runs across to Bruff.
00:07:16
Speaker
And then somehow connecting to Malandra, near Glossop, Manchester, and then so on, down across towards the Mersey and across towards Chester. And that is being used as an argument at the moment. So if you consider the interpretation of some archaeological sites in Sheffield at the moment, Wurlow for example, this boundary is seen as a critical component of that interpretation.
00:07:42
Speaker
Why do you have a signal station that, well, it's because this is a Roman border, and they're keeping that on the enemy, and so they've got to communicate and things like that. Let's have a look at whether they're going to be fought along this border. So, what happens is that that border remains, as far as we know, relatively stable. You can decide what that border is, whether you see it as very permeable and relatively relaxed, or the nice hard border that some people like to see it as.
00:08:11
Speaker
But at the end of the 1860s, there is a revolt in the Brigantes, and Venutius takes control, Cantamandua's husband. She disappears off, is rescued by the Romans, goes off into Roman protection, and that precipitates a move north of the Romans.
00:08:28
Speaker
So they move north,
Roman Expansion Northwards
00:08:30
Speaker
and instead of, you know, having Hadrian's Wall built in tempera, they unfortunately go up, they go right up to the Gask Ridge very quickly, which is up here, and then they come back to the Hadrian's Wall and then Antonine Wall and so on. So it's really unfortunate that all those ... Hadrian's Wall and so on really should have been built down through Rothenham. But because of Anoutius, annoyingly because of Anoutius, they went further north. So that's it. And what you see at that point is ...
00:08:55
Speaker
a number of Roman forts being established because, of course, they're entering territory that they almost certainly know very well, but not one that they've controlled. It's been controlled by a client kingdom. So you have this idea that, do we have this border running across here? Because you'll still see people arguing that you have this border coming across to early forward to Doncaster.
00:09:20
Speaker
150, Templeborough, Chesterfield, yes. But then you start to come across to these forts over here. Why that on this map I've stolen off the internet? Northwich is called Northchurch, I don't know. Anyway, I couldn't be bothered to change it. And across towards Chester. But the problem there is...
00:09:37
Speaker
you know, the date of those forts. Some of them we know very well, some of them we don't know so well. But essentially, almost all of those forts are being established in the 70s. So after that border must have disappeared, and that includes BRUF. So if you look at some of these forts, you've got these early ones here, which are being formed
00:09:54
Speaker
on that area from the Humber. Doncaster of course because it's on that major north-south road and it's already been very quickly being established as a major route way through. But when you look at the other ones then they're just not early enough. So that the idea that there's a hard border which goes across and includes breath and must go through Sheffield just doesn't stand up. If you look at those
00:10:20
Speaker
If there is a hard border there, it's going down to Chesterfield and further south, but almost certainly, if you look at Colin Hazelgrove's work at Stanick and all the work at Olber and so on going on recently, it looks very likely that actually that isn't a particularly hard border and the Romans are operating into Brigantian territories quite comfortably most of the time. And there is not an enemy on the other side of it for you to protect against.
00:10:45
Speaker
So we can think about that when looking at the interpretations of a number of sites, but it doesn't really hold up, and the further west you go, the less well that holds up. So we've got a group of early forts, then we've got this later group in the 70s, which includes Bruff, it includes Melander at Glossop, Manchester, places like Buxton, Little Chester at Derby, and going across towards Northwich and Chester itself. So
00:11:15
Speaker
Now, if you look at these, in many cases, the forts are established. Now, we don't... Pintrich, for example, I mean, that's mostly made up. We know very little about Pintrich, Roman fort, which is down halfway towards Alfredton direction. But some of them are quite well understood, and you tend to get forts...
00:11:31
Speaker
set up and then they're largely being abandoned as far as military forts go in the second century sometime. Temple is a bit odd, it gets some major refurbishment. Brough is really unusual because it's effectively almost continually occupied as far as we can see. There is a short abandonment but it's mostly continuing up by throughout the Rome period which is really unusual for a fort. And there is another site which is
00:12:00
Speaker
They've missed off this, in a sense. Little Chester, which is just in Derby, at the south end of the Peak District, that is abandoned. But what happens at Little Chester is Deventio, the town that forms around it, actually thrives. And so the town is permanently occupied, even if the fort isn't bothered about being occupied. And Little Chester, down at the bottom of the Derwent River, where it's meeting the Trent,
00:12:23
Speaker
but may have a part to play in the story of the Peak District and the Roman occupation in it. It's difficult to say, but there's a good case to be made that we need to consider Da Ventio, Darby, along with when we're talking about things like Navio at the same time. They can't be separated out. So Navio's a bit odd.
00:12:46
Speaker
What about that frontier? Well, forget it. It's not part of any sensible story. And if you read anybody interpreting their sites in that way, then I think they're stretching the evidence in a particular direction. So anyway, but what is important about here?
00:13:03
Speaker
Well, most importantly for the Peak District, of course, it becomes a major lead-producing
Peak District's Lead Production
00:13:08
Speaker
area. We can't say it's already producing lead earlier, but it could well be yet, exactly. But it's a major lead-producing area and is, of course, for a long time after the Roman period.
00:13:21
Speaker
So there's also other, there's a major route way, you've got York up here, you've got the Vale of York and the Trent Valley, and over here you've got the Cheshire Plain, the Lancaster and so on, and you want to get between the two of them. So you've got major route ways, and of course there are sources over here such as salt, salt production is important in.
00:13:42
Speaker
in the witches in Cheshire. So you need to get across this boundary. Now, one way of doing that, of course, is to follow the Trent, and the Trent is probably a very important player in the whole of this story. But how are you going to get across there? Are you going to be coming across
00:14:01
Speaker
from the area of Chapel on the Frith, across towards the Hope Valley. And then are you going to be heading up towards Sheffield, where Sheffield is now, towards Templeborough and into the Don Valley to get across the Trent? Are you going heading down towards Chesterfield to hit the Idol and get across towards the Trent that way? Or are you going to follow the Derwent down and meet the Trent somewhere down there? All of these are possible routes. So look at that in a bit more detail.
00:14:32
Speaker
Marked on here, so there's Navio in there. Here's Sheffield. Not that Sheffield's very big in the Roman period, but it makes sense. You have to do Chesterfields just in here. And Buxton, Roman Town, gloss up with Melander, Roman Fort up there. The river's coming down. Matlock, Worksworth and Carstington down there, which are important in our world as well.
00:14:55
Speaker
if you're moving goods. And I should say that, well, Navio is here, the lead producing area is to the south of it. So you're going to get the lead off the White Peak. Now there is lead production within a few hundred meters of Navio. That side of the Hope Valley is where the White Peak starts and there are lead veins and later lead mines and so on. We don't have any evidence of early lead working or lead mining from very far north in the area that close to Navio, but it could be going on. So Navio is right on the edge, it's on the northern edge of
00:15:26
Speaker
the lead-producing area, if that's what we're most worried about. And we also think, well, how are we going to get other goods across between here? Well, salt is certainly considering one of those, and this is a major route way for bringing salt later in the medieval period. So you could be coming across... I don't think that's where Snake passes now. So you could be coming across into effectively the head of the Hope Valley from Chappellon to Frith over here, and coming in, and you could be heading up into the Don catchment up here.
00:15:55
Speaker
which we're all very familiar with, going up from how the Halasijan setting up, you could be coming further down and cutting across to Chester and moving out to where Bortree is now, the idle catchment, Navarwill River's out at Doncaster and out at Bortree. Or you could be following the Derwent down towards Matlock and Warksworth and down here and eventually meeting the Trent down there where Little Chester, where Derby is, where the Ventio is. There are all sorts of possibilities.
00:16:25
Speaker
And the big argument about Navio is it's being occupied throughout the period. Why would it be occupied? It must somehow be involved in the administration, the processing, the transport, the control of the lead industry. Because otherwise, why would they be in this place throughout the whole of the Roman period?
00:16:47
Speaker
If you look where we find identifiable Derbyshire lead, it comes from bits of the Beakley Street. There's a big cluster around the Humber. There's some on the south coast and so on. So what seems very obvious here is that it's critical you can get to the Trent and you can take your goods out. This is not just to the Roma period.
00:17:06
Speaker
a very typical route way if you're trying to get led out in the post-Roman period, you're trying to get other resources out, you get them to the Trent, the Trent is navigable. And you can take them out to the Humber, and then from the Humber, of course, you can take them up to York, just up here if you need to, or take them out the Humber to the rest of the Empire. But how do you get them to...
00:17:27
Speaker
to the trend. One problem we have is that we identify these Roman-led pigs, these Roman-led blocks in gots, because they're stamped with lutidorum. There's a darum. This place, we don't know where it is. That's a slight technical problem.
00:17:46
Speaker
It's in the Peak District, honest. So there are a number of candidates for this, none of which have managed to be proven. Where that big lake is there, that's actually a reservoir, Carstington Water. There was an excavation in advance of that reservoir because Carstington was going to be it. Carstington is where Butadaram is.
00:18:06
Speaker
There wasn't any really good evidence for it. There is Roman material there and Roman settlement there, but nothing that showed that somebody was gathering lead in, casting it in the big blocks, stamping it and taking it away. So there's a current theory that people of worksworth believe worksworth is it. I'm not sure anybody else does, but they do. So the feeling is that it's down here.
00:18:28
Speaker
There's a case to be made that, if you, considering that lead is being produced here, and one of the easiest ways of getting it out would be to follow that down towards the Trent down there, then there's a good case to be made that the place that is the centre for gathering the material together, of ministering that process, whatever that process might be, and transporting the goods on, would be down there, and it wouldn't be Navio.
00:18:53
Speaker
People argue that is it Navio, or at least that Navio is playing a major role in that process?
00:19:02
Speaker
So what do you want to start to
Navio's Archaeological Significance
00:19:07
Speaker
prove that? Well, what we really want is to find Roman-led working, Roman-led processing, preferably somewhere with a nice big stamp that says Lucidarum on it. But there are a number of candidates and a number of possibilities. Of course, they could all be involved, perhaps they are, or they could have different roles. So I should say one of the things to recognise about Navio is it's tiny.
00:19:29
Speaker
It's an incredibly squidgy little place. It's only about a hectare. Depending on which phase you're at, it's less than a hectare. The Legionary Fortress will be 20 hectares, so you're only looking at 250 soldiers in a place like Naviote. It's a tiny little contingent. It's not a major frontier, which is another argument against it being a major military frontier fort, because it's so small that it's in a slightly odd shape, but it's so small that it's difficult to argue that it has a military campaigning role.
00:19:56
Speaker
But it could take 250, that sort of number of people it's estimated. But it's occupied, and it's more, and there are people in there. So, something going on. So anyway, archeologically, it's been...
00:20:12
Speaker
looked at for an awfully long time, Navio, so it's not just something we're doing now, but it's recognised from the 18th century. There's quite a good summary of it all in the late 19th century about the earlier antiquarian finds and so on. There are excavations in the early 1900s by John Gastang, looking a lot of the early focus, as usual, with many things is on the defences. In the case of Gastang, also the Pincipio building and finding material there, probably the
00:20:42
Speaker
The most thoughtfully early excavations is that by the Enrichment John Gillum in 1938-39. It was going to continue, but it didn't continue because of the war, Second World War, and then they never managed to get the resources to pick it up again after the Second World War. They were going to, but it didn't happen.
00:21:00
Speaker
was instrumental in finding the fact that there's more than one phase to Navio Fort. They're very similar, sitting on top of each other, so the phasers move around slightly. But there's this earlier phase with this early occupation then rebuilds and then there are alterations after that.
00:21:15
Speaker
in Richmond and John Gillum sort of sought out the overall chronology of that and get the dating for that foundation in the 70s, abandonment in the sort of 120s, and then the later second century reoccupation and changes and alterations. You then get excavations in the 1950s, which look at the southeast defences
00:21:35
Speaker
and an entrance which is inserted there, which people have used as an argument to say that at least some of the troops, if not all of them there, are mounted the cavalry of some kind because of the style of entrance. You have to ask a Roman fort person as to why that would be the case, but that's what they say. And then a large campaign, particularly on the interior of the Roman fort by Manchester University, Barry Jones and John Peter Wilde.
00:21:58
Speaker
much more information about the chronology there, but they dug a large part and looked at various areas, lots of areas within the fort.
00:22:11
Speaker
Then there's other work away from the fort, further out into what you would expect the civilian settlement to be there, particularly as you go down towards where the village is now, where the no meets the Bradwell Beck, where they identified a bath house and also some other areas down by the road there in advance of construction of some of the houses and various other things that were happening.
00:22:35
Speaker
The landowners there, the air family, did discover during some construction work a couple of these things, as you would in your sort of back garden. If you dig a hole to build a very large shed, actually, it's their woodyard for the agricultural merchants. But anyway, so they found a couple of altar stones, one of which is in Buxton Museum, one of which lives on the back of the quad bike, as far as I can tell, of Janet Eyre, because she brought it out that way to show everybody.
00:22:59
Speaker
So you have Roman altar and dog sitting in the back of the quad bike, it's the smaller of the two. So there's clearly Romans happening there and they're found on the other side of the river. So you come away from the fort, you drop down to the village, you cross the river and go up on the other side and that's where these, that's the first time you've got
00:23:18
Speaker
certain archaeological evidence of Roman activity on the other side of the river because when 1970s work is looking in the modern road in the village it's on the the fort side of the Bragwell Beck. So you then get survey and excavation by the University of Sheffield. Of course that must be much better than Manchester's
00:23:39
Speaker
John Lloyd and John Drinkwater doing that, and they've looked at, substantially, the weakest, because by this time Manchester had removed most of the interior of the port. And they're very interested in the roads leaving it, how this relates to the weakest, if they can identify the weakest area. It's very small excavations for that.
00:24:02
Speaker
certainly began to get some understanding of the roads and the civilian settlement outside the fort. And then you get some further excavations, including a rescue excavation, which is sort of prompted by further developments in the area. The elders were there, so initially the excavations are over towards the fort by David Kennedy, involving the University of Sheffield, and then they get help from Chris Drage from Trenton Peak.
00:24:32
Speaker
And we'll come back to that excavation, 83, 84, and the Chris Drage excavations in a few minutes when we get back to Earth. So the Roman fort's here, there's the big river coming down, the village is sitting in here with the Bradwell back, and so you're seeing the beginnings of investigations on the other side of the river. I'm not expecting the beakers to have gone that far.
00:24:58
Speaker
Most of the effort here, you can see that people have been digging all sorts of holes in here, in 85, 86 University Sheffield there again, Keith Brannigan and Martin Dern excavate particularly out here in advance of tree planting and various things like that and find something quite different but we'll come back to that because that has relevance to a current piece of work taking place in that area, which is broadly in that area so we won't worry too much, but they found
00:25:24
Speaker
And the other ones which are looking at the vehicles, they found bits of burning and industrial waste, and you found some structures and pits and so on. Overwhelming and doing stuff, so that's down in here. That will come back to over there in a bit, but they've found some evidence of...
00:25:40
Speaker
industrial activity. Mostly it was agricultural and horticultural activity down there. But over here, it was odd because it was some ditches forming what looked like there might be enclosures. There were trackways. There were one or two structures. There was no evidence of industrial activity at all. They wondered what was going on here.
00:25:58
Speaker
because it looks like an activity area that's separated from the main civilian settlement. It's sort of separated from the fort, although it's very close, and they couldn't really work out what was going on. Was it something, they wondered whether it might be something agricultural to do with animals, or they thought, is it some group of people who would be ostracized and would have to operate on the margins of the civilian settlement? And so, in time-ordered archaeologist fashion, they thought, ah, it must be prostitutes.
00:26:25
Speaker
But they couldn't make their mind up. It could be people with herds of animals, it could be prostitutes, you just can't tell the difference. But it was quite different. There was no evidence of industrial activity, that's our key thing. And what we want is industrial activity because we want to get that sort of smoking gun of somebody doing something with lead on here to show it's going on. So you also have
00:26:48
Speaker
In 1988, Derek Riley from Air Photographs identifying an enclosure across the river, but on the side going towards Hope, so Hope Village is up here. Identifying this enclosure on there and that line running through it. It's oddly plotted on this map, but anyway, we can see sort of what that is. We'll come back to that moment. That has been interpreted as things like a slave camp, because that makes it sound very grand. It's based on the fact that there just seems to be some lines, some possible crop marks, patch marks in that.
00:27:15
Speaker
It hasn't yet been investigated but we can come back and talk about that a little bit later. So we've got these things happening. So we come back to
00:27:28
Speaker
what's going on over here. Because this matters to us because the actual area we're mostly going to talk about sort of today is the bit in here, because that's where we've been excavating over here. So there is this excavation here. That was where the altar stones were found. These are the buildings of the agricultural merchants. If you go there today, you'll still see these, mostly these sheds here. There's other buildings put in here now. But you can go around behind the sheds and you see it's where they stack all wood and all sorts of bulky materials around there.
00:27:56
Speaker
So essentially what they found was several phases of activity. They found a road, so there's a road running in the upper part here and actually you can see the road in the field as an agger there. So it looks like it's the road coming down here and running up through there that's leaving the fort, the southeast
00:28:18
Speaker
Enters of the fort. There's some very odd things said about roads there. That's argued to be the road to Chesterfield. The road to Templeborough is supposed to come out this way, down a very steep slope and across the river somehow. Never quite worked out why that's sensible. And also there seems to be supposedly two roads running this way. Probably going to Carlington and Buxton. I don't see why they can't have just one road until they have to split. And there's something about... I find that this is apparently supposed to be a really obvious feature and I can't see it, but anyway.
00:28:45
Speaker
But we've certainly got a road running down here, which isn't particularly well shown on that map, but now we can be certain of a road and it was excavated in this area up here. So there it is, there it is, dramatic piece of Roman road. Interesting thing here was that the archaeological deposits were deep, and in some cases they were underneath up to a metre of hill wash of colluvium coming down, clay-rich colluvium. But in places they were saying there was up to four metres of archaeological deposits. Not all of that Roman, but certainly
00:29:13
Speaker
something has been going on over quite a long period of time here. So the early phase, early to mid second century, you seem to get creation of terraces, including the one that this road is sitting on. The other one seems to be an enclosure. So the suspicion is that you've got something that is it
00:29:29
Speaker
agricultural or horticultural, something on the edge of the Vekas. There are apparently similar features at places like Newton-Kheim, which is near Tagcaster and also Old Carlisle. So there are other civilian settlements near Forts which have features that have been interpreted as perhaps not being, as being perhaps related to forms of agriculture, but just on the edge of the civilian settlement.
00:29:52
Speaker
But then, a little later, you get a road added which is running down towards a series of structures which are built. You get ditch recuts, so there's still a sort of enclosure there. You get yard areas. You get a kiln, which was described as looking like a pottery kiln, but it has eight kilograms of iron slag mixed in with it. So it's not entirely sure, but it looks like a pottery kiln, so that's all right. And that would be useful to us, because we would like a pottery kiln.
00:30:22
Speaker
for a point I'll make at the end. There are also two halves, and from the material from them they're interpreted as sort of smithing halves. It's not where iron is being produced and smelted or anything, but it looks like they may be bringing partially processed blooms and then forging them and smithing and that sort of thing. So there's a sort of
00:30:38
Speaker
A hint of industrial activity. Not intense industrial activity, but a hint of industrial activity. Just downslope from this. So this road running off out. And sadly, we haven't managed to find it up there. David's dug some quite dramatic little holes in it. But we haven't managed to find it here. But it's definitely running off in that direction. And so down from it, it looks like. So the interpretation there is, are the roads running in this direction? So therefore, it pulls a bit of activity and occupation along with it. They wouldn't be going in this area.
00:31:07
Speaker
The Vicus doesn't reach this far, except by the road, so therefore it's encouraging things. So the interpretation is fairly dismissive as to how much of Roman activity you will get in this area, because they think it's just because it's a little bit going on near this, because this is a main road coming out the fort, and therefore it encourages people to act in this area.
00:31:31
Speaker
I should say there's lots of other occasional finds and other bits and pieces. This was all brought together by Martin Dern in a BAR in 1993, which is difficult to track down. There's very few copies around. But when you do, you'll find out how dull it is. So it's well worth the hunt. And it's reproducing the reports from earlier ones with sort of comments. And the copy editing is terrible. The number of spelling mistakes horrifies me.
00:31:58
Speaker
Interest has continued after this. For example, you can't really see it because this is the year after, but you see a line running across. So there's the fort, there's the Roman fort, and there's this light line running across. And that light line, the previous year, was a water pipe being put in, which had an archaeological cover. Basically, I'm watching briefly, I think, from Wessex.
00:32:19
Speaker
However, 2006, the good news is that Sheffield University were back. Not in this case Keith Brannigan and Co, but it was us. So, we've come back.
00:32:34
Speaker
Hope Valley, as an offshoot of this project that's running up and down the Hope Valley, we've been drawn in for a number of reasons into also not just working on this medieval hospital and all the other things. We expanded our empire from the medieval hospital to look at other sites in Kastling and then the origins of the two villages because Hope is in doomsday book. It's really early. It looks like it's a settlement castle and isn't it supposed to be there until after the Normans build their castle there and so on.
00:33:00
Speaker
So they should have very different, they've got very different origins historically. Can we see that archaeologically? The answer is no, for various reasons. But anyway, that's not what I'm here to talk to you about tonight. And this is hope, I should say, in there, in Castleton in the background. So we've expanded and we've come down towards Bruff. Now, over the years, we've had a marvelous time in the Hope Valley. Working in Derbyshire is ace. As you can see, it's always a joy.
00:33:25
Speaker
Actually, no, it is sunny sometimes. So the project's been running for quite a long time, about 12 years now. It was a five-year project and it started. I'm still a five-year project now, and I suspect Bruff is another five-year project that's just got going for the next 20 years. So why have we gone there? Well,
00:33:41
Speaker
Part of the reason, well there's a number of reasons, one of which is sort of local politics. So we've been pretty successful in Castle, and it took me a long time to find the hospital, but we did find it in the end. And in the process of looking for that, we looked in other places in Castle, and we found an early medieval cemetery in Castle which shouldn't be there, because Castleton isn't there until after the Norman period, but there's an awful lot of
00:34:02
Speaker
7th, 8th, 9th, 10th century dead people who shouldn't be there because it's not mentioned in Doomsday. That got everybody very excited. But it also gets the Hope Historical Society quite grumpy because they're the Anglo-Saxon settlement in the valley. Carsten isn't. It's 12th century and onwards only. So that was rather nice. But New Hall in Carsten we've also been looking at this end medieval, early post-medieval building there which has fantastic plaster work in it if you're excited by it.
00:34:31
Speaker
16th and 17th century plasterwork, which I must admit, I find difficult. But there's a nice man in Lincoln who comes and looks at it and he gets really excited. And after you're with him for an hour or so, you can get quite excited yourself about it. Apparently Sheffield School of Plasterwork at that time is very important, and this is a key site for it, Newhall in Castleton. So we have to keep every flipping scrap of plaster and stuff you would normally throw away. But no, so we found some quite nice things in Castleton. Well, what does that mean? That means hope are getting a bit grumpy.
00:34:57
Speaker
And so, basically, they said, when are you going to find something nice in Hope? And I went, ooh. Soon, honest, because we did test bits in Hope, and of course they've got nothing in them, because it's a dispersed upland village, and so you can't see it until it gets to about the 18th century. So, I'm going to find something impressive in Hope Parish.
00:35:14
Speaker
Now, alongside of that, there had been work taking place, Sheffield on, for example, the Roman Road from Tampa to Navio as a long, long-running undergraduate part-time master's dissertation, which
00:35:30
Speaker
seems to have been going, well it has been going on for years. Anyway, so, and of course while that starts being interesting at the Rotherham end, that has drawn out our interest towards, and as we were working nearby in Hope and Castleton, that means you're going to start to take an interest in Roman roads in the area, and the beauty of it is you then realize that Navio is just inside Hope Parish.
00:35:50
Speaker
Some of the bits we're looking at are outside in Bradwell, but it's just inside Hope Parish, so that makes it rather nice, and it's becoming a focus. Well, of course, that Roman road undergraduate started much more interested in the Romans in the air, and that's turned into a PhD on Roman-led production and a PhD, in fact, two, you could argue, because there's another one looking at the environmental one. But I'm going to blame David for all this, I don't worry.
00:36:14
Speaker
So, and there he is. Now, you might wonder why he's not here. I'll tell you why. He's in Celtic Park watching Celtic play FC Copenhagen. I'm absolutely astounded what Rocca funding will pay for, but anyway. But he seems he's got free trips to Canada, free trip coming up to Greece, and he tells me he's in Celtic Park tonight. I mean, I didn't know season tickets were available, but presumably they are on Rocca. So anyway, so...
00:36:38
Speaker
as it's as bruff is potentially a key site in the story of lead production however you're going to look at that whether it's through environmental stuff or through landscape geophysical survey and so on bruff is a site that's of interest there it's within hope parish hurrah and so
00:36:57
Speaker
And when you look at all the previous work, it's fantastically inconclusive. People are digging little holes. They're saying relatively little. They're going on about the pottery quite a lot, because that's what people do. So I will disagree with the pottery in some ways. We've come back to that as well in the end. But actually, they're not saying very much. What you do when you read between the lines is they're failing to find very much to do with lead working. But we still think Navier must be important to do with lead somehow.
00:37:26
Speaker
Let's have a look at it. Let's see what we can do to see if we can add to that and to see if we can, because in most cases, people have been looking at the fort. They've been looking at areas very close to the fort. Is that actually going to be the sort of place you would be doing things with lead anyway? I mean, maybe there's storage in there, but if you've got actual industrial processes going on,
00:37:46
Speaker
then would you be in or very close to the fort? So what's happened is that around there we started with looking at roads, some landscape survey, geophysical survey, a bit of soil chemistry which was not undertaken by David, it was undertaken by people like Nick and Louis who was involved in it sometimes and all sorts of people involved in it.
00:38:06
Speaker
looking at holes in the ground that were being dug there, bits of test pitting. We've expanded out the area of geophysical survey and we've ended eventually undertaking some larger excavations but they're only just getting going so fortunately I don't have to tell you much about them tonight because that would have required more pictures and I was struggling to get enough into this at the end anyway. So and this means we've moved from this idea of roads and communication routes and what the Hope Valley threw to the setting of the fort and particularly an interest in
00:38:34
Speaker
industrial activity if we can identify that. And in the process, even though we've only been there a very short period of time, you've possibly come up with another problem that needs to be considered in relation to the VICUS and industrial activity down there. But primarily the focus is on the surface is what is Navio's role in production or processing or transport or distribution or whatever. What's it going to be? And can we learn any more about that?
00:39:04
Speaker
We've got the fort in here and there were small bits of geophysics done in various areas back in there.
00:39:12
Speaker
early 1990s. They're astonishingly inconclusive. It'd be nice to repress the data, but all sorts of interpretation were made from them. I don't know how. They've drawn lines all over the plot, and I can't see any lines there in reality. So we have the fort here. We have what is
00:39:34
Speaker
arguably the best known part of the Vicus area here, though it's not well understood, with a road running through it, possible road turning over, going over this way, some talk of roads going in that direction. We have evidence of something different. So Brannigan and Dern were digging over here before these trees were planted, finding this area that they thought was either agricultural or agricultural prostitutes. Something that was very different to the stuff that had been being found over there and no evidence of industry. And then you've got the enclosure that
00:40:02
Speaker
that some people have been interpreting there at Riley's enclosure over there as some kind of slave camp for whatever reason. There would be a slave camp there, I have no idea. But anyway, an enclosure possibly over there. But actually, this is just crying out. It's all pasture, so it's crying out for a decent size geophysical survey, which is what we've been doing. So here, for example, zoom me in, let's worry about these bit. There's your fort.
00:40:26
Speaker
This is magnetometer data, so fortunately it's showing up particularly well. That's missing because that's where that water pipeline went through, so there's no point. What you've got coming off here is a noisy area, but actually the noisy area is mostly down here, and some of those early excavations were in this area, but mostly this area hasn't been investigated. But what you've got is the road coming through, road coming through, going down to the river down there.
00:40:52
Speaker
Quite happily with that. Resensitivity, the fort shows up better under resitivity, although it's mostly been excavated. It's not really showing you anything very sensible in the Vicus area. Neither of these plots, I should say, really strike me as showing a road running out there to cross the river down what is quite a steep slope.
00:41:11
Speaker
Maybe, maybe that's correct or not. But anyway, starting to do geophysics on a sensible scale, the reason the resitivity stops here isn't in this area, is because this new water pipe was leaking for some years, and so the whole of this area was waterlogged for ages. It's horrible, so there's no point in even resitivity in a waterlogged area, because it won't show anything. Here is some dots from the leg levels. There's the fort.
00:41:34
Speaker
There's the fort. There is the area that's also magnetically noisy down here, which might be because this might be towards the area where the bathhouse is sort of. Although not quite sure that's the case. We've got this odd line running over here, but we'll come back to that. That is an odd line, although it relates to one of the lines drawn by Derek Riley and Martin Dern and so on. So
00:41:56
Speaker
And remind you of that, we've got these excavations over here, bit of weakest work up here. There's actually relatively little going down there, although there are a couple of excavations down there which aren't marked on here. So we've got our higher lead down here, higher lead up here, and we've got our road clearly running through in a magnetically noisy area down there. Across the field over here, looking at this enclosure, we've done geophysics in this area. So here we are, there is that area that the enclosure's sitting in. Let's have a bit of a better look.
00:42:22
Speaker
So this is turning it round, so the river is running through and round like that. The river is running through and round like that. So this enclosure will be down here, supposedly. And we do have ... but the problem is you have lots of fragments of things that look like enclosures, and you've got this long straight line which runs through there, which must be that long straight line running through there. That's the public footpath. And if you go back to this plot, that's the public footpath. For some reason people have lead on their boots.
00:42:49
Speaker
in this area. So there is our public footpath running through, our enclosure down here, but actually there's all kinds of bits of possible enclosures in there. So it may be, and the same is true also over the road, so it could be that there are a whole series of enclosures across here, not the one that Derek Riley interpreted. This is heavy soil right next to the river, it's not surprising it doesn't produce patch marks or crop marks very often.
00:43:12
Speaker
But it's certainly a field that looks interesting. It's got this strange line of slightly higher lead levels which follows the public footpath, so you can only assume it must be because of the footpath somehow.
00:43:24
Speaker
But it looks like certainly there's activity going on here. There's not one simple enclosure in there because there are fragments of things and it's a field that's worthy of further investigation, but it's not the direction we've gone into so far. So we started to do larger scale geophysics and there's more to add to that. We don't have to worry about tonight. We've also done work in this area. It's an area we'll come back to.
00:43:45
Speaker
because that's an area that's been worked on recently, so geophysics in there, but there's other things going on in that field. So there you have an overview of the sort of scale. Starting to operate at this sort of scale for these things, you start to be able at least to judge the robustness of the arguments, even if actually the geophysics isn't being incredibly conclusive. It's not really giving you very clear, straight answers, but lots of indications.
00:44:11
Speaker
but we have our road running out here through there and we know the road is up here and actually you can see the road just there you walk across it up and down it's quite clear ridge running across the field so we see where the road is there so and there's the resistivity
00:44:29
Speaker
put out as well. So let's go back to here because this is a scheduled area and obviously it's much easier to work outside the scheduled area but also there's a suspicion that what we need to be doing is be down here somewhere so it's not actually around the fort but a lot of the activity may be down here and perhaps it could be over here because you have the hints in there that may be industrial activity and
00:44:51
Speaker
As a landscape archaeologist, one of the things that's really worth doing is leaning on farm gates. Just leaning on them. It's quite a long time, I'm quite good at it. It's one of my better development skills these days, is leaning on a farm gate and just looking. And if you go to this, the farm gate here, you think, well, we know the roads there, runs running through here. They did find a little bit of sort of industrial stuff, this kiln full of ironworking waste, but looks like a pottery kiln, whatever that means.
00:45:18
Speaker
And if you stand on the gate there, or indeed if you stand on the gate up here and look into that field, there's a flat area built on, but there's a big flat area here. Big flat area. It's beautifully flat. And it would run over here, houses. So it's beautifully flat in there, and it slopes steadily up this side here. So you're just sitting, you're just leaning on that, and you're going, because we're at Landscape Archaeology, if we know this thing, there's got to be something there.
00:45:44
Speaker
It's that skilled interpretation. You're going, it's flat. It's next to where there is something. I bet there's something on there as well. And it was that difficult. And so we look at this field. So this is where there's exploration, where we know the road's here. And you look at this, and we go, it's beautifully flat there. But at this point, we hadn't talked to the people in the houses there who said, oh, when my grandfather dug the garden out, we found a Roman figurine that's down in Buxton Museum. And if you look at their back gardens, they've all got sheds with blister balls sitting on the top. They dug out of their gardens. Sort of suggests there is something.
00:46:13
Speaker
going on but not that we could just see it because we know because we're a skilled archaeologist and so geophysics so here's magnetometer plot of that field and what you've got is a noisy area it's magnetically noisy there are shapes in there that David can see i can't see them it's just magnetically noisy so i don't believe anything he says um uh particularly about football i imagine it's healthy park and it's relatively quiet up here oh there's a hint of a little
00:46:38
Speaker
I would say in the hint of a shape in there, which could be an enclosure. Nobody believed me. However, I was of course right. So we've got a noisy area down here. We've got a road running through here.
00:46:51
Speaker
We've got some hint of things going on there. Nothing was looked at when really in advance of these buildings, any large scale. So you just think noisy, magnetically noisy area. It's on the flat bit. It goes quiet as you're going at the slope. This has got to be archaeological activity causing that noise. And you've risen up several meters. You're up at
00:47:11
Speaker
sort of first-floor windows height at the back, or even gutter height at the back. So it rises up quite quickly to this terrace that runs through here. This is what's mostly built. And it also carries on this side. I should say this is a medieval Holloway, so that isn't a road that's there in the Roman period. So we discount that road, we hope. And so,
00:47:33
Speaker
You look at these features and you say there's clearly an enclosed down here, better put a trench in there. Let's try some of these noisy areas. Didn't quite work out like that because in particular they put the trench in the wrong place. But anyway, I still proved me right, so it's all right. But it was placed in the wrong place on a slightly chaotic first morning with all sorts of students rushing to there because you've just moved the field course from Wurlow. But anyway, it's worked out all right. So and here is the field we're looking at. So we're above the Roman fort here and this is the field we're talking about. So the Roman road runs through here
00:48:03
Speaker
and up there, and we don't know where it goes up there, and it comes up the slopes of Roman Fort here. That's where the altars were found, that's where the Rome Road runs through, and we have this hint of industrial activity, whatever it might be. So this is our field, flat area at the bottom slopes up. There's the trench in the wrong place.
00:48:22
Speaker
We're examining that. So what do you have in here? Well, this is some small trenches put in in May, two week field course. And what you find very quickly is that at the bottom of that slope in the flat area, there are deep deposits, which look to be almost completely as far as you can tell from the small bits we've looked at so far. Roman. And in some cases in a trench here, if you're going into there, you've got well over a metre that we can see, even though we haven't necessarily got to the bottom of these trenches.
00:48:48
Speaker
And in that there's lots of burnt material. There are burnt areas which look like they could be ovens or kilns of some kind. There's just lots of stuff and there's pits cut. Pits are full of burnt material and there's slaggy waste and all sorts of things. So it looks like a very active area industrially. That was over here. So we put in a long trench. I should say this one.
00:49:11
Speaker
over here which was pretty much in the right place so and that trench was a bit different because it seemed clearer it didn't it wasn't quite so busy but it did have with it a series of discrete features some of which made sense others didn't so you've got a trackway running across the end of it
00:49:29
Speaker
So we've got a trackway running across the end of it. And then you've got a series of features that sit, so burnt areas, little areas of hard standing, bits of walls, bits of drain, that sort of thing. So we look at that. So areas of burning in here. We've got these discrete little patches of stones. You've got features like this, which is a little bit of hard standing. It's flat stones. And where they've run out of flat stones, they've used large chunks of amphora instead of the stones to make a small platform, sort of meter across.
Industrial Activities at Navio
00:49:57
Speaker
But a platform presumably didn't take anything very heavy, because even though these are chunky bits of ampery, if you put something really heavy on them, they would have cracked at what it would imagine. But it's a bit of hard standing for whatever reason. And particularly when you're getting burnt areas like this that didn't make an awful lot of sense, we thought that
00:50:15
Speaker
Perhaps we should try and do this trench properly. I know that's unusual. It's a trial trench. We can hack a hole in it, find out what's going on. So that was happening in the other trench, David. And over here, things are going rather more...
00:50:31
Speaker
controlled pace and we thought well actually let's not try and dig all these things out we took one or two we took this platform out things and because as you take one thing out there's a different line of stones underneath it or a different area of burning or whatever so perhaps we should come back and have a look at that that's in here later so I should say so
00:50:52
Speaker
worry about up here where there should be a ditch running through it. Well, actually, unfortunately, they've gone and put the trench over here, but it has a ditch in it. Look, there it is. So I was right. It's at the latest stone wall sitting on top of it. And that ditch has Roman pottery in it. So there's some kind of enclosure or possibly, is it water management? We've only got obviously this tiny bit of it.
00:51:12
Speaker
But there's some kind of feature, cut feature there with Roman material in, so it is Roman. But it's not an area with any kind of industrial evidence. It's not busy unlike the bottom of the slope when you go into the flat area. It's not busy at all. So that's up there. So we went back a few weeks later with a little bit more time. And so what we went back was back to this trench, but we made it wider. So there is the trench.
00:51:37
Speaker
reopened in July rather than May, and we've made it wider. So there's your trackway at the bottom. And you start to see areas of burning and differences in the area that make a bit more sense, perhaps. Little lines of stones, that's a quern stone that's been used in whatever this little arc of stones is. And you've got some lines, you've got burnt areas, and as you go down slowly, they do change. And so, oh, hello.
00:52:02
Speaker
annoyingly, hasn't faded in with the second thing, it's all gone in. Anyway, there would be a nice picture of the excavation of this feature there, by Philip from Wessex, Philip Meyer, and other people involved in the excavation, I've been claimed on other days. So what we've got though is part of the trench over here, we've got the orange stuff, we appear to have a series of small ovens.
00:52:25
Speaker
We'll call them bread ovens. We've never, that's what we've been cooked in. Pizza ovens. Call them what you like. Anyway, small ovens that aren't full of ironworking slag. So let's call them bread ovens because that's what we do. That line of stones is actually a feature underneath it. So actually the line of stones carries on here if you take this off. So what you've got is a series of ovens all together. Is it one big multiple oven or is it a series of individual ovens at different times? We don't know that yet. And there are clearly other features underneath it.
00:52:54
Speaker
As you go through the area, you find that while they've got this area of ovens in here, you've got areas of sort of hard standing over here. We've got a relatively clear area on this side, although there was a big lump of lead, which looks like a molten lead had fallen into a crack and it's this big sort of sausage, a regular sausage of lead, just sitting there. There's no particular evidence of lead working there, although there was a half at the end here, which had quite high levels of lead just around it.
00:53:21
Speaker
So we've got burning, we've got things that look like ovens, we've got some areas, you know, I can imagine there's the track way at the bottom, and here is your bakery, there is your car park next to it, and so on.
00:53:36
Speaker
It looks like, and what it looks like we're doing, we're taking this trench down very slowly, is that as you go down you're going to see a shifting pattern of activity. And the suspicion is there could be a metre, two metres of, if you look at the height you are of the houses, that's been dug away. And also the trench that was just back towards us had well over a metre of deposits in it.
00:53:58
Speaker
and as you're moving towards the edge of the terrace maybe they get deeper. So there's likely to be deep deposits there. What we see is already full of Roman material straight away and so the assumption is that what we've got is a trackway and next to it we've got a series of industrial or whatever you might call activities and if we can go through those slowly let's see if we can tease out what those activities are physically from their remains but also if we do
00:54:21
Speaker
PXRF, so we get some idea of soil chemistry as you're going down. And other sampling, we might be able to see what the industrial processes are that are taking there. Although this doesn't have the big burnt areas that we did see in the other trench, but maybe it will underneath. Who knows what's going on. So if you go across this way, across towards the entrance to the field is that way, the Roman road is over here, come into the field. If you go to the other side of the field over here, there's another trench here.
00:54:48
Speaker
Big areas of burning. That does look like some kind of kiln. A drain over here. There's all sorts of features cutting through each other. And again, well over a metre depth of deposits in there. And that's right. This is the boundary. And just on the other side of that fence is that medieval Holloway. So there's no reason not to suspect these features will carry on across the Holloway into the gardens of the people across the road and along the
00:55:13
Speaker
along wherever this flat area goes because there's no lessening of activity in this trench compared to the trenches 50 meters or more to the northeast so it looks like the whole of the flat area of that field right the way up to the boundary with the medieval holloway cutting through it is full of
00:55:34
Speaker
activity, much of which involves burning. You've got slag kicking about, you've got plenty of pottery, you've got lots of brick and tile. So are they producing brick and tile there? All sorts of things going on there. So that trench is right over here in this bit. So it looks like there's lots of things going on in here. And as you go up the slope, you don't get those activities, but we have got some cut Roman features. So there is Roman features. So is that an enclosure or is it some kind of water management for water coming down the slope into this?
00:56:04
Speaker
industrial area. In fact, if you just take that away and put all the eroded hollow way back, then there's no reason not to suspect that we'll be carrying on over here into the flat areas over here. Now, unfortunately, quite a bit of that is people's gardens. We can go and ask them and see how many blister balls they have on top of their shed, like the people here have. But we may be more limited as to where we can go, but we can certainly look in the fields behind it, although you start to slope up relatively quickly. But quite clearly, while you have the road running through here,
00:56:34
Speaker
You don't just have a couple of things alongside the road. We've got an area which appears to be extending well away from the road where there's intense Roman activity over a long period of time. We don't know how long a period of time is yet. We don't know whether it's intense all the way through or whatever. But hopefully with our relatively large trench in here, which we'll continue with, we'll be able to make some kind of sense of that.
00:56:56
Speaker
And this is extending the area of the Vika, so actually this is an area that shouldn't really be the civilian settlement, it shouldn't be an industrial area, but it clearly is. And so if you think that we have evidence of the industrial area here, well, it's stretching across the Bradwell Book and going to this area, all the way actually down there. And yes, it's very different over here. So you've got quite a different thing happening over there. You've got this
00:57:23
Speaker
a series of deposits with cut features that have no industrial activity in them. There's ditches, possibly enclosures, you've got some structures, buildings, areas of hard standing. And those excavations of Brannigan and Dern are in here. And what you've also got is you've got a big quarry, you've got a big limestone quarry over here, but you've got a shale quarry in here and a small area of land there, which has an existing quarry permission.
00:57:49
Speaker
the quarry is going to quarry it. So, and as you can see from Google Earth image a little bit later, they've started stripping it, they've now stripped all of this and they're actually going to take some of the trees out at some point probably next year, but they've certainly, they've now stripped all of that and so that's been subject to an archaeological excavation by archaeological research services. This is us spying on them from the other side of the valley.
00:58:10
Speaker
with Tim's telephoto lens, so they couldn't keep us out. They gave in at the end unless they said it. What they've got is a big open area by our standards, a big open area, and in particular they've got ditches running across it. They've got a series of ditches including a large what looks like it may be an enclosing ditch.
00:58:28
Speaker
which encloses a large part of the area towards the fort. So if we go back there, we're in here and it looks like there might be a large ditch coming around which may relate to some activity to do with the fort. Now we don't know the results of this.
00:58:46
Speaker
because the report isn't done yet. This was being done this summer, and no doubt ARS will get the report out soon, and it looks very interesting. So lots of features in here. I don't see any much evidence from what they've shown so far that there's an industrial activity. You have a series of ditches, so a large enclosing ditch or a series of other ditches, different phases, but it may be that this is being chopped up into a series of enclosures or small fields or something. You do have some buildings.
00:59:12
Speaker
So, in particular, along this edge, there are buildings in here and some dumps of pottery, but it's not full of, given the area they've dug and the number of features they've dug, it's not ram-packed with material by Roman standards. So if you've got some kind of enclosure down here, some activity there, we've got something similar going on in here, it seems, from Brendan and Dern. Here's the Roman fort. There's the end of the Roman fort. I just wonder if
00:59:36
Speaker
We'll have to see what eras say when they produce their report. But whether what you're seeing is something that isn't the vicus, you're seeing something that is related to the fort, is that something agricultural? Or if this is cavalry, then is it something to do with the horses and so on? I don't know enough about management of Roman horses, but it's very different to the area down here.
00:59:56
Speaker
which appears to be where the civilian settlement is with industry in it. So there's something quite different going on up here and that's really interesting and it's really handy for us that ARS have been able to excavate a big chunk of it and we'll be able to compare that to Brannigan and Dern's little tiny trenches in here. And I think it's just something really very different, whatever it is. It's not like the VICAS on the
01:00:21
Speaker
The southeast side is something really different going on. So we look forward to the report of that. You'll have seen reports about it in current archaeology and all sorts of other things. ARS are making a big song and dance about it. They want to be the name associated with BRUF. We won't worry about that. But anyway, the report will come out soon. It'll be very interesting to compare that, look at it with Brannigan's evidence, and then also compare it to the stuff that we're
01:00:44
Speaker
we're going to get over there. And because we're going to continue with the industrial stuff. So far, we have no clear evidence of lead working. We have one or two areas with lead in them. There's one or two lumps of lead. There's a half with some slightly high lead levels. But none of that suggests anything necessarily beyond somebody using some lead. There's a Roman fort here, civilian settlement. Romans use lead for all kinds of things, pipes and fittings and all sorts of stuff.
01:01:09
Speaker
any settlement you would expect to have areas where lead is worked, because they bring in lead, they use it for things, they make things with it, they repair things with it, and so on. And there's nothing really very much beyond that that you can see. But we're going to continue in there to see whether we can work on more of this industrial activity. One thing that has popped up that's intriguing is
01:01:32
Speaker
quite a large amount of Samian pottery that looks really poorly preserved. And if actually you look back in the, I've seen this still recently, the reports from the earlier excavations there, they're saying that we have lots of Samian pottery that's really poorly preserved. It's coming from Le Marche de Vere and Le Ze and all those Samian pottery sites in the Averne that I've done geophysics on and failed to find any kilns in. And they're quite happy about that, except when you show that pottery to Maureen and she goes, there's something wrong with this,
01:02:00
Speaker
And I'm not going to argue with Maureen if she says something wrong with it. And there's just a suspicion that this isn't actually Samian. It's copies. It's fake Samian coming in, perhaps. And so it's a nice idea. So Maureen's been to look with David at the collections in museums from the earlier excavations. That's full of this really crummy, soft, poor quality Samian. Maybe it is just badly abraded and poorly preserved.
01:02:23
Speaker
But Morey doesn't seem to think so, because there are occasional sheds of better quality sending them coming up. And I'm wondering whether if it's in the later part, and all of this is in the later deposits, where saving becomes difficult to obtain in Britain, there are examples of people trying to make saving in other parts of Britain. Maybe that's what is happening here. So that's certainly a whole new direction to look at and see what Morey wants is.
01:02:45
Speaker
a pottery kiln with all the appropriate stuff in it to prove that that's where it is, the smoking gun thing. So we haven't got that, but there are interesting additional questions coming up as we go through it. But we still have to consider ultimately what is going on here, what is bruff doing. It is occupied throughout, it's very small. People have suggested that perhaps it's providing the police force for the lead working area. If you've got some mounted troops and you've got
01:03:12
Speaker
200, 250 people there. It's not an awful lot. This isn't a densely packed area of people. So far we can't see any evidence that this is where the lead is coming through, where some kind of big administrative centre is where the lead is being worked. Maybe it is passing through here. But the suspicion is that actually this is working along with places like
01:03:32
Speaker
and wherever that might be. But also, Da Ventio is a lot of most of the material going out southwards along the Derwent Valley to meet the trend near where Derby is now. And that might be where the trade is happening. And there may be some kind of administrative centre down there. Da Ventio is very difficult to look at because it's mostly built on.
01:03:52
Speaker
Where is Luther Durham? And what's Navio's role? Because it seems odd. This is a major route way, but it seems odd to have this permanently occupied fort when there are plenty of other major route ways in the Pennines, which the forts aren't occupied in. There must be a particular reason why they keep an eye on this patch. And so the feeling is that there is a good chance that it's still related to lead. And perhaps it's they're working together. You've got some ministers centers down in the south, but they still need some kind of control and security up in the north. And Navio offers that.
01:04:22
Speaker
From a nice strategic good communicator from communication point of view position. We don't know that yet I say we've just started we've only gone down a little bit in big trenches David has another whatever Nick have a year and a half or two years or something to run If you can quickly be dragged David away from football matches or Canada or what he's gonna be doing is part of his PhD There's a lot to go at so
Future Research Directions
01:04:46
Speaker
Understanding the Roman settlement here, which is where David's been moving on to next, it looks like a very different Roman settlement. I'm quite comfortable with the Roman settlement pattern around Doncaster. It's dispersed, lots of field systems, that sort of thing. It doesn't look like that in the Peak District. So understanding the settlement pattern, seeing if you can find where lead is being produced, and then trying to follow it out. I suspect we certainly won't get all the answers from Navio, because what you'd need to do is to compare it with sites to the south around either, whenever Utadarum is, is that works with?
01:05:14
Speaker
It certainly wasn't Carstington, and also possibly further south around Derby and Little Chester, and particularly the town that followed it. But this is Buxton Museum's reconstruction of the Roman fort in the Vicus. There's nothing going on over here, which is a bit unfortunate for ARS.
01:05:33
Speaker
Fortunately they do, this is the road coming through and they do have some buildings on our side but of course what we can now say is they need to extend their reconstruction drawing in this direction. But it's still pretty good and we will need to add something in there in due course once we find out what's going on. I think that's it. Now we do what the time is.
Closing Remarks
01:05:53
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Archeology Nail. For more information on our guest speaker, please see the show notes that accompany this episode or check our page on the Archeology Podcast Network. You can get in touch with us on Facebook, Instagram, WordPress, or Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Join us next month when our guest speaker will be Dr. Kevin Cookendall discussing the recent fieldwork happening at Creswell Crags. See you next time.
01:06:24
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.