Excavations at Snodland Roman Villa

Description: Roman villas, what's it like to excavate one? What can we learn from them? Giles Dawkes, Senior Archaeologist at Archaeology South East talks to KAS Trustee Fred Birkbeck about the excavations that he led at Snodland Roman villa and his experiences leading projects in Kent. Giles answers questions from local groups during a Teams live event and gets some interesting and useful information from the KAS 'hive mind' in return. 'The talk focused on the 2008 excavations undertaken by Archaeology South-East on the western edge of the villa complex instigated after the finding of a hoard of 3,000 coins. The principal findings were centred upon a somewhat enigmatic concentric building in use between the late 1st and 4th century AD, and represented a distinctive, if poorly understood, building type found mainly in Kent. Finally, the main villa buildings excavated in the latter 20th century and the future plans for a reconsideration will be considered.'

Transcript: [Music] my name is fred bertbeck and i'm one of the trustees of the kent archaeological society if you're watching live many thanks for giving up your friday night i promise it will be worthwhile and if you're catching up on our youtube channel please remember to click the thumbs up below and also click on the subscribe button to keep yourself up to date with what we load onto the page it's thanks to our membership subscriptions that we're able to provide these events and we're so appreciative of their support so if you aren't currently a member of the society please consider joining us by visiting our website which is www.kent archaeology.org uk and click on the join link where you can access our online membership form and read about our aims to promote the research and publication of the history and archaeology of ken and we're making a slight departure from our regular trustee talks which have been held on tuesdays the last was with dr sheila sweetenberg on the foundation painted pillar and if you attended that i hope you enjoyed it and if you didn't attend it all recordings of these events are available again on our youtube channel a few days later tonight we've been joined by giles dorks who's senior archaeologist with ucl's archaeology south east and he'll be taking us through his team's excavations of the snotland roman villa giles is a hugely experienced and respected archaeologist who's worked on significant projects in kent for many years so we're extremely grateful that he's agreed to give up his time to talk about where he what was found and answer questions about villa dig in particular or generally how local archaeology plays such a huge part in informing the professionals um so during the course of this feel free to submit or to comment yeah submit questions or comments on um the content of the talk um you'll see a speech bubble on the top right hand side of your screen um and uh you can submit your questions and comments there so without further ado i'll pass you over to giles and who will take you through snotlout and roman villa thank you fred good evening i'm josh dawgs um yes tonight uh i'm going to be talking about snotlout on roman villa a site that we excavated almost 15 years ago now but um it was just one of those sites that i always felt a lot a lot of attachment to and i've often thought about the site so it's a pleasure to revisit it so this is the location in the lower medway valley this is the site here the site is actually bisected by the modern railway and it abuts the river med way there this shows some of the important sites in the vicinity particularly the roman burial mound which was excavated in 1950s at holbrook just off screen down here is uh the nearby villa of eccles the much better known villa and that's only one or two kilometers away so um this is a plan of the excavated remains and the history of excavation at snodland kind of represents the history british archaeology the first finds were identified in 1800 when a bath was discovered in a field and then there was further antiquarian discoveries but virtually no recording and then in the 1920s during the building of some modern buildings um there was some salvage of a stone sarcophagus and a local doctor was brought in to view the the body in the sarcophagus and he said that the the individual was was handsome strong and imposing and was clearly a frenchman which i've always quite liked that description um and then after the 1920s the first formal excavations began in 1964 with the mainstay archaeological group undertaking excavations there um these continued intermittently until the 1990s when they were joined by wessex archaeology who and they took and took two trenches here and then the finally my team did an excavation on the other side of the railway line [Music] away from the main villa this is the main villa here you can see and so we would dig in on the periphery about 80 meters away from it but we also found masonry buildings and a lot of other features in an open area excavation which hadn't really been seen at the main excavation like ditches pits the cemetery etc okay so um these fantastic pictures are from the mainstone area archaeological group and they give they're a very given very evocative sense of excavation in the 1960s and 70s uh from an archaeological point of view they show just how truncated the site was i mean here here is a the you can see the building remains there but then where this van is parked you can see this is all gone all been removed so that when when the kind of in the 20th century the site was already chopped about and a lot of the archaeology had already gone by the time archaeologists really got there so we're just looking at fragments and this is why scotland is unfortunately one of the more poorer known um villas in kent because just the state of preservation is is so poor relatively um [Music] so yeah these are some of the photographs um you can see they are beautifully excavated particularly these bath houses and uh if you go on here i think these are from my open day because some of these signs say hot water tank so i think it's clearly to show people around um and uh it's the ambition of myself and mag to uh to actually write the kind of final publication on these excavations and bring the whole work of the site together into one kind of final application so um well we haven't started doing that yet but uh watch this space okay so um the archaeology southeast work in 2008 was initiated by the finding of the snod and coin horde in uh it was found by a digger and the digger driver it said it made a sound like breaking glass as his bucket uh lifted out a pot which smashed in 3 600 copper allen coins came out um these in here i've never actually seen the coins or to my knowledge they've never been reported upon um they're they're still at the british museum um but it would be great one day to get a formal kind of publication and identification with the coins but we'll come back to the this coin holder a bit later on so these are my excavations on the west of the site um so this is the earliest phase we found which was the uh the neuron neuronian phase um and we didn't find any buildings all we found was was a ditch which was probably part of the field system but in the ditch was a neuronian uh bath uh ceramics uh ceramic building material um and particularly there was some flanged half flu box tile which had also been found in london and at eccles and it may have been made there at the the kiln clamp there and this was clearly showed that in the close vicinity there was neuronium bath house almost certainly in the in the area of the main villa just to the east um some of the other ceramic building material we found was this one here t15 t16 and that's a channeled pipe and that would have contained lead pipe work for hot water so again clearly indicating a bath house very close by in the vicinity some of the other um cgn we found that was also from the flavian period so there was the there was a successive bath house to this so this is it but here away from the main uh building complex all we had evidence for was this uh field system ditch and these are some of the examples of the bath house ceramics here okay oh yeah i was just going to say that um there was no evidence of any this kind of mid first century day from the main excavation the main excavation um by mag had mainly found buildings dating to the second century so this is by far the earliest dating evidence for the villas occupation also dating to the first century was um this barrier that i mentioned earlier at holbrook holbrook quarry this is uh excavated in the 1950s here and uh it was a roman borough quite unusual captain chalk so it would have been very visual it would glisten and in it were um very high status lead coughing um and also lots and lots of votive deposits so there was burnt sheep skeletons they were smashed down for all of the base and also importantly there was this folding chair uh i think they're called a stellar curious um there's very few of these known from the uk most of them from hadrian's wall i think there's only like three or four um and they are important because the folding chair was part of the old regalia of roman kings and these were generally owned by people who were very high up in administration or were military officers so the location of this in the borough indicates there was somebody of very high status nearby and snotland was um the nearest villa to it it's a it's a matter of a kilometer in half there's also the possibility that this individual resided at echoes um but if that's the case because scotland is between the two then perhaps snoglin was also owned by eccles um it's tantalizing glimpses of the possible ownership of these villas okay so on moving on this is the uh on the left is the flavian occupation so this is the late 12th century and then into the antenna or second century occupation and for the first time we get them we get masonry remains this year this is b1 and this is a form of kentish building called concentric building um i'll address more of that later um and then around this building see we only just clip the edge of it unfortunately we're a series of paddocks field systems ponds yard surfaces wells you can see all this year going on here and then um in the second century this was rejigged and um the layout was changed also the building building one uh seems to have been refurbished and a masonry drain was installed um now what this drain was for i mean what exactly was it for we are not certain but it seems to have drained into this ditch here um maybe it's indicative this had a perfect function but there was so little surviving in the building we just don't know most of the walls had been robbed so there was very little in-situ remains no flooring etc etc so unfortunately what the function of building one was we are not entirely sure um but um what was recovered was a large amount of second century bath house cvm including crew tegula from the barrow vault of a hot room so there was clearly a later bath house probably replacing the aeronium bath ice um again this was probably the location somewhere in the main villa to the east okay um then into the third and early fourth century this was kind of the kind of the high point of the occupation uh building one was demolished and replaced by another concentric building but with a much larger footprint and then immediately adjacent to this building was a huge pit just full of demolition demolition clearly from building one which basically just been pushed into this massive pit and in the pit was a half a ton of cbm 50 kilos of pottery and usually a late bronze age sword pommel and a large amount of metal tools chisels punches padlocks hammers lots and lots of things you can almost imagine the builders making uh building building two and then as a tool breaks they just throw it in the pit there was also fittings from furniture personal effects lots of coins brooches and these are some of the fines we have here these are some of the tools uh hairpins brooches coins uh decorated glass here and then either side of uh building two here this large masonry building with two timber buildings uh building three and building four and the building four was um even though it's it had quite scanty relays just post pads and post post holes it did have excellent dating evidence um underneath one of the large stones that one of the timbers was supported on there was a foundation deposit of a coin dating from 275 to two eight five and then the after the building had burned down the building had been cut by a pit which contained 16 coins dating to roughly 350 so we've got really good bracketing day dating evidence for the use of this building basically between the the late third century and the kind of the middle of the fourth century so this is um building two these are the remains again this is this photograph here is a rare element of masonry that survived again most of these walls had been robbed out in a later date and all the all the rage stone and chalk had been removed um so what what we could tell from the um the the building was that uh he had internal walls of tree almost certainly waterloo adored and may have been painted um have been highly decorated with a scheme of white pink and red and we were finding plaster with this on and also in one of the rooms room d with two infant burials buried on tegulay and generally infants buried in this way located close to hearths um so it is likely that this was either some type of shrine or possibly even a kitchen it's quite a common phenomena that type of infant burial and at some point the rooms were rejigged was taken down and uh put back up okay so this is an interpretation of what building two looked like roughly in the year 300 as you can see this is building two here this is building three here here this is building four there and then this is the ditch the enclosure ditch the main villa is over here to the right so concentric buildings are a kentish phenomenon they're not really found elsewhere and they're pretty poorly understood but they do seem to be like a local vernacular um so where else they've been found there's so far there's three at snodlin building one meal two and there was one found by mag to the south of the main building um now they are difficult structures to understand and um paul booth has written probably the best account of describing them and what we find is they are they do have a variety of uses despite being very similar um in form so for instance uh minster in thanet and these hads uh clearly they were accommodation they had hyper calls bath sweets um but at hawkton kirkby they had lots and lots of tightly packed sleeper beams which is the classic indication that they were a granary and slot snotland um we did actually have some evidence that they were used for crop processing um there was some burnt assemblages of um macro botanicals which suggests that these like hulk and kirby could have been going on and this could be a story specifically but then we're not sure um but then again it could have been both it could have been part accommodation part storage we're just not sure but what it does seem that these buildings have various functions and a similarity in form does not necessarily mean a similarity in use okay okay um so the fourth century uh the the villa basically continued on um and the building seemed to have lasted until about 370 when they were demolished and then overlapping slightly at this time um was the a cemetery was inserted just here and uh unusually um cemeteries close to villas are quite unusual they're not as common as you think they would be um so and this was enclosed and so we found five individuals all unfortunately it suffered truncation from modern services and they all had grave goods he was he was an infant graveyard i don't know if you can see but these are coffee nails so this child um was buried in a coffin with coffin with um grape goods um it's quite an aberration for a child generally infants don't get um they don't get a lot much elaboration of burials uh and again this was an outlier over here buried ontario um and also in this period uh two coin wards were were there it was the there was um a small group of 16 coins including iron tools were buried cutting building four and these were dated 350 to 353 and then we also had the huge coin hoard which was actually cut through this the cemetery enclosure ditch uh and and that also was the late roman and also in the 1920s there were some very tantalizing finds recovered there was a military uh buckle plate which is known in the british museum and that's late fourth century uh we didn't have any evidence really uh apart from a few coins of any occupation so um but we think mainly that the the buildings were gone by 370 and these coin hordes were inserted late um and they were perhaps referencing the ruins of the building as being like a handy visual indicator for where the hordes were okay and these are plans of the the the small cemeteries you can see um and uh yeah the the posteriors could only broadly be dated to the fourth century and here you can see a better indication of the coffin there so yeah the formal burial of children is unusual and they think often they just get they're in ditches or they're just put into middens so children of this age maybe they they had some quality like they could speak and therefore they were considered um worthy of burial in a formerly with adults okay so um looking further afield uh this is the midway valley um and these are it's probably one of the densest clusters of villas in the country um an incredible amount especially when you consider consider just the north grain where there's virtually no villas and around country where there's very few villas so and people have often wondered why is there such concentration here one of the reasons is it had ex communication links there was the med way and also there was root ways running across and it's also a region the geology is very favorable for farming it's it sits on the lower green sand and this is free draining uh very fertile and this seems to have attracted uh villas um also the darith valley to the to the west that was also very first line there was a lot of villas there but less so on the star to the east um and erdes black has written about this and he's uh he's pointed out that um in kent that uh the the period between 260 and 310 was a period of intense disruption for villas in the southeast because of seabourn radios like the frankish pirates for one of a better word um and a lot of the sites are going out of use they're declining they're ending but not in the med way the med way as we can see from snodland continues on and it's actually for snotlout at least it is kind of almost like the golden age of the occupation but why is this well we don't really know but one possible reason is the presence of rochester and the bridge at the top which offered protection to the rest of the valley and was also like a handy marketplace for the goods so and uh other things that people have considered specialization with villas and although we there's not a lot of evidence from snotland one possible specialization was um as a type of mancio type function as a kind of accommodation for travelers because it was roughly halfway between maidstone and rochester this would just be convenient and the building one building tune would be offered accommodation um okay and fight here's the hard sell so uh if you'd like more information then um check out my book it's quite old and it's about eight years old now so uh which is available from ucl okay thanks fred i can't hear you i can't hear you fred sorry about how audio turned off yes it's it's quite a long period of occupation that particular building um the uh the various phases um being done by different groups as well i mean how important is it that uh that you as a professional archaeologists are working on commercial uh jobs gets access to the material and uh the fines and the the reports of what people have done with their local groups oh very important yeah they're in a way the lifeblood of archaeology um because often the local knowledge is is it's so in-depth and they can give you great help um so and they've often the starting place where we begin as we look at their reports and see what they've done and um i've worked with them across kent and sussex yeah it's vital really so um yeah yeah so i mean in a way all archaeology is kind of local archaeology so um it's especially interesting especially with uh topography um the names people call in the kind of like like the local knowledge about streams about hills they can be very informative and very kind of they can add color to the kind of like often quite dry series of pits and ditches so um you talked about the uh the likelihood of some of these uh large you know villas being owned by um high net worth individuals uh other villas um echoes is a very famous girl you know named after it so it's a type site um and uh it's it's unfortunately a lot of the records have been unwritten and unpublished um so do you find that that's a challenge when you have um sites that you know have been investigated perhaps perhaps the information hasn't been made available to the public yeah huge i mean it's a it's a big problem for for i mean for british archaeology i mean uh every period really has a publication backlogs but villas in particular are i mean everyone thinks in roman studies there's villas are falling out of fashion because they have been so dug and they're kind of they dominate the kind of literature on uh roman rural britain but in reality when you look at it so many villas have just never been published or they've been published in fits and starts and they've never been brought together um so yeah it's it's a bit of a misnomer thinking that we know too much about villas we really don't there's still a lot a lot left to know and and i mean the ambition of myself and mag's ambition is to kind of you know hopefully try and say something finally about schneiderlin so bring it to fruition and maybe one day eccles um you know can get written up as well um so so we've got a a question from um richard new who said uh you said the developer could have been a mansion because it's half over to rochester and mainstone um now may there have been another road that would have linked them because the road the roads are shown on the last amount included yeah didn't include a direct road um that includes snotland i'm just going to send that live so that everyone can see that slide that you've put up okay so talk us through that slide josh so there's a prehistoric trackway going along the north stones and it lightly folded at snodland so this would almost certainly have continued in use into the roman period so in effect scotland bisected mainstream in rochester it was halfway there but it was also on route between the darith valley and the starwar valley to the east so it was on two routes basically a land route east west and the water routes north south so it was well positioned to accommodate um travellers i mean proving uh what's amancio and is very difficult um even even uh buildings by roman rhodes i mean working out what is actually just um emancion what is just a kind of a villa is very difficult so um but this is just one of the things but it's long been suspected that these kind of large you know villas just took on a variety of functions so um because there's just not that many mancios out there so people have to stay somewhere so but i i mean getting kind of tangible evidence prove it is very difficult um okay i know that there's been some research on simon elliot in particular speaks to mine with the um the quarrying um industry if you like from uh the registered quarries along the midway and how that import how important that was and as you mentioned before about the transport links uh being so fantastic from from the medway river um is there any sign or any indication of what's the um the occupants or the owners of snotland and how they made their money um no well no not really we we just don't know um so um i mean generally it almost certainly would have been a mixed farming regime like all villas i mean i think every villa that's been excavated you know the excavator believe they have mixed farming regimes because at the end of the day a villa was a high status farm they were at the center of this large agricultural estate so they would um so these buildings around the periphery they would have been you know for storage that you'd probably have corn dryers etc etc so they they probably would have been they would have produced foods um which they would have traded to cities like rochester and even london and then they would have consumed purchased and consumed high status goods from the markets in rochester and london um and we did have some late roman amphora so they would clearly you know they had they had the money to buy these kind of imported goods um so so we so that was basically that a two-way relationship with kind of urban centers supplying food and consuming the high status goods really [Music] okay we've got some more questions actually we've got quite a lot of questions coming through now and so what significance do you think the sarcophagus has at the main side giles um well the sarcophagus if we go i don't know if you can see uh the sarcophagus we actually know the location i think the sarcophagus has been lost so yeah it was the our cemetery was here but the sarcophagus the stone coffin was found very close to the main buildings and so it was clearly a much more important person than the ones than the kind of wooden coffins that we had so it was clearly somebody very important in the life of the villa potentially a later owner um so yeah it would have been so it seems that snodlands had um there was different uh cemeteries they would they were separated so maybe for instance the cemetery that we excavated could have been for the workers and then the ones very close to the main villas could mean for the actual kind of like the family that lived there so there seems to be distinctions tantalizing we [Music] well yeah that's uh that's the the problem we have isn't it with the commercial archaeology we um to preserve it before it's covered up forever those buildings may not last forever some stage someone else's job will be to dig up what's underneath that um okay so the um i've got a a message from um an anonymous here it says as a teenager i worked a bit on mike alcock's excavation and i have a photo that i took which i thought was of a pot set it pot set into a wall that contained bones of a small baby does that tally with anything you've found or read about in the uh material uh yeah i mean that's so that's kind of a roman practice they would they would take vessels and place babies in it um you get amphiberals in fact you get um so get a vessel like a poultry vessel and and basic but what placed in a wall was it yeah set into a wall yeah that is unusual that is very unusual almost like a kind of reminiscent of catacombs but roman burial practices are never normal i mean there is no such thing as normal burial practice in the romans so i wouldn't put it past them you alluded to early on when you're saying that they were building um you know adolescent they're sort of burying adolescents as real people and as we as we've as often being said and has reported that that you weren't a real person until you reached a certain age in a roman world anyway so the significance of being a body may not have been the fact that it was actually a body the fact it was the bones of something or some sort of um kind of abstract thought of the person burying in yeah yeah i mean that i mean he could just say i mean if it was like an infant and they didn't consider it to be kind of like a formal person yet i couldn't speak i mean it was too young to speak then um well i mean some of the practices seem callous now but but they do seem like the ones we have like the neonates the very young ones they were carefully placed by presumably a half on the tabulate so there was some kind of you know care taken to it um but alien alien to us now yeah yeah yeah um chris asks um whether you've seen the concentric building at ikem i don't know it's uniquely has a row of columns down the middle that is unusual yeah yeah kind of reminiscent of an old barn like which yeah that is um that'll be interesting i must check that out yes yeah okay that's a good little tip there from our local um our local groups coming in with the goods uh we we um there's one from anders who's the um kcc community archaeologist he says that he helps have the medway lidar online this year so you can look at some really good topographical um data um that show might show some better sort of ideas of relationships and networks within wow yeah that'd be really useful for if there's any kind of open fields around snogland if we could see there's anything kind of like uh like root waves might show up like holloways might show up on the lidar so we could actually work out where the forward was so very useful okay um there's a one one person's asking and on your map um there were sites labeled one and two west of gillingham can you tell us what they were let's go back to it one and two um yes so this this uh illustration accompanies a large table that i did which is in the in the kind of publication so that would be one would be uh strewed and two what would two be i think it seems that rochester's in the wrong place where is that where is it maybe cloxton i haven't got the table in front of me actually so i don't actually know so um they're down eyes they're down as villas they're ones who are villas so they'll be villas just outside of rochester right now okay um then chris is back in his boxley villa sits between 28 and 19. but that's been that's unpublished so you might not right you have to appreciate i did this diagram over 10 years ago so it is a little i mean the amount of work in the midway valley there'd be a lot more dots nice yeah i mean this we have one of our trustees chris blair myers who you might have heard of um he does a lot on the mapping right marks and various things in in kent and uh yeah he's got he's got a lot of dolls it's all about the dots [Laughter] there is um another one question here do you think the interpretation has been affected by the assumption that snodden was a villa um assumption that it was a villa that's leading uh yeah i mean it has snotline has all the classic hallmarks of being a villa so um you know it has you know evidence of bath houses there's a bathing suit in the main one it's very large has mosaics so um yeah i mean we're quite we're quite secure in our interpretation that it's a villa so sometimes you get this the much smaller it's kind of stone buildings and they're kind of borderline between kind of like a just a well-appointed kind of farmhouse in a villa like but uh i mean labels they're always problematic so and they would have been meaningless to the romans probably so um yeah yeah once they threw those vitruvian principles out of the window it was all you know it was open season wasn't it um looking at google maps seems to be an imprint of a building on the opposite side of the river to the roman villa caves asks okay suggests has that been investigated and do you aware of that um the the the only thing i'm aware of really off the top of my head from the other side of the mirror was the very unusual connor sellard built building at woodham um which uh was lost quarrying in the 1930s which was fantastic it was a subterranean barrel vaulted cellar with a stream emanating out of it and uh so this had all the kind of hallmarks of being some form of cult room so um yeah just i mean there's photographs of it from the 1930s and it is it's the most amazing looking structure sadly now gone though but um that was very close by so almost certainly that was that was involved in some part of the kind of ritual religious life for the kind of the inhabitants of the midway yeah the um there is a fair amount of research available i know that um archaeology southeast are making a lot of their monographs available for free on their website aren't they and we at the kent archaeological society obviously we have thousands of articles and publications and and uh reports on archaeological digs if you go onto the cat's website and use the search bar or go to the publications page you can actually look up you know free text searching for all these kinds of things that's a it's not useful exercise it's just we small hours of the morning just looking up them various things on there we've also got a geographical um map to search on so i'm just doing a bit of promotion there obviously um we have another um question from anonymous was there any evidence of cultic or religious activity um there was we had kind of foundation deposits so some of the walls had uh pottery vessels smashed in the base before the walls were built and we had some wells which had um perfume bottles thrown into it and almost as a kind of like final use um so once the well had kind of filled up with deuteritis and silting then these seems to have been deposited on top because they're quite unusual thing to find in a well um so i mean generally the romans like to make votive deposits and they are very common the the trick is um it's very often very difficult to identify what's just kind of normal rubbish and what is actually structurally placed special deposits so um we also had i forgot to mention there was a yard surface it's outside a bit building two and there was a copper alloy mirror underneath it um and that may have been placed as some type of kind of like foundation deposit underneath the yard surface so all broken they're always broken so yeah ritual is rubbish yeah but nothing um nothing overtly kind of religious unfortunately so okay um we've got a question from um gordon um the bronzer oh that runs our coins were of a relatively low value is it usual to find such a large horde of low value coins um i'm not sure i'm not great on hordes it's a very specialist subject the only thing i can and the british museum has never released any information about it uh despite our request so it's kind of unknown really the only information i can remember is the fact that there is virtually no copies or coins which have been clipped in it so it seems that these coins originated from an official source and haven't been circulated so they seem to have been quite freshly minted uh and there was a possible interpretation there was some type of kind of pay chest so they were quite fresh but they obviously never reached their destination so but again we don't know which museum haven't let us know anything about them well i've got a point on that actually which is it's fantastically showing off wonderful network because they're david holman who you may have heard of he's um an envisionist in in kent he's uh saying that the large schnodlin coin slaughtered one coin orders that made the museum he's actually got a list of the contents so that's this one sorry is that that is this snodland one [Music] um yes i think it possibly is yeah he mentions oh that's great that's great okay so then yeah i can certainly hope that i can put your details up on there the youtube channel afterwards so um when i when i post the video uh the recording of this talk i'll put in the comments uh your contact details if i may and people can search for the recording and get in touch with you after to put some comments on there as well that will be monitored um for a good while afterwards we've got so many questions coming through i'm sorry i can't get to all of them but i'll try and pick a few more and we've got a bit of a bit of time left um yet so um the late sid harker at bringhead excavations mentioned that baby barrels were found at the corners of buildings as a token ensuring good luck for the building so there's a little observation sir might explain this um looking for more okay what are the main building materials used uh the main building materials were rag stone and chalk where we found them um so a lot of a lot of the building materials had been robbed out like so they were gone so what we were left with is ghosts of the wall lines so you you basically find an affected trench a robber trench and then you you find those in those mirror where the walls were so um so there were very few kind of masonry walls in situ still there in the ground so wow i didn't say the um i forgot to say in the flavian period uh the roof seems to have been yellow a yellowy orange color and then it was replaced in the second century with a red one so we could identify just from the fabric types that the the roof had been changed color basically and uh newer tiles have been put on it so but in the classic tegulay in brax type of roman roof that you always get okay um right well i mean we've got more more comments than um in questions for the moment as i say that the height of mind is is going uh full full throttle on a friday night obviously been nice and relaxed now so um these i'm gonna record all the comments and pass them on to you because some really interesting and useful stuff here as well with your research and we do have another question what do you think the significance of the bath is the bath the the bath house i i guess oh yeah i mean um uh so so every villa had at least one bath um often many i mean often there was there was you know even the workers had their own bathing suit and they could be quite simple they could be very elaborate so in this one like here i think um in this one they're thinking that this kind of upsidal end this is where the hot plunge bath would have been so they'd be very close to the furnace um and then these would be the hot rooms so you see these these hyper cores so this would be a hot room uh close to the furnace if i go back to the main plant you can see here so these are the bar so these would be bars for the um like the main villa but there's probably an another bath which would have been servicing for these buildings here so there'd be a whole sli and they'd probably be divided between men women workers you know different statuses would have their own bathing suits and stuff so um they're very common very common in villas so every villa has one okay um another question could number one be friendsbury uh well i'm actually i'm actually working at fringsbury at the moment um so i think it's just off the page and where is the where is it oh i'm right at the bottom um so i think frinsbury should be a just off screen more on the isle of grain so um if you like i can i can uh what if you buy this the tables in it you can history will be revealed so this is the teaser trailer there you go it's all part it all ties into the hard sell so well of course we can um ask we can uh look at the pas record for um the the details so the portable antiquity scheme for the details of the horde it should be on there as well right and and i'm just going through um apparently the um we said bronze age bronze alloy coins meant copper i like coins of course um there was a sorry question someone just pointed out i asked a question about the google maps but i think we answered that didn't we yeah i'm not sure i'm not sure what the uh the building is yeah okay um is there any evidence of mosaics such as that langston there are there are some there's some very poor ones um there's nothing um i mean unfortunately there probably were almost certainly there was i've got a picture of one there almost certainly was mosaics but um if you go back you see i mean this has just been destroyed so these almost certainly would have had mosaics so but see here we are here's the mosaic there and you can see the different colors so this was dug in the 1960s okay but uh my excavation was the west all the floor levels had gone so um but they were almost certainly had tessellated floors mosaics etcetera etcetera yeah in a hallmark of a high status building yeah yeah i mean the other thing about scotland it's huge it's the same area and the same number as rooms as equals so all the appointment um was clearly nowhere no there's no evidence there's anything like echoes in terms of size it was massive it was a huge it's 150 meters across so it's a big estate yeah any evidence of any industrial activity there some of the questions come through some minor evidence of kind of smithing bottoms and things but um the area we seem to be in was more kind of agricultural cross crop processing which tends to be the main thing but they they almost certainly did do their own kind of iron smelling but that would have been somewhere else in this kind of wider periphery so so no nothing really specific to that okay i've got clarification of the bath question as well um the question that was asked was referring to the square bath oh yes that was um i know what you mean yeah um yeah there's some it's almost this is it here so um in the 1960s they weren't sure what this was and there is still i don't really know what it functioned as now so um it seems to have been lying so it would have held water so it was either the bath itself potentially the plunge bar or it was the cistern it basically held the water and then the water was piped elsewhere we know that these definitely had piping because we found the channel pipes which housed the lead piping like so the trouble is it's in isolation so joining the dots is difficult we don't know how it fits if i go back up uh it's here so we don't know how it fits with the rest because of the truncation so difficult difficult to interpret and also look it's only a few courses high so again difficult to know exactly what it was for um you talked about the difficulty with uh excavating a concentric building obviously because when it collapse you've got to identify that it's that it's collapsed at different levels i mean i could see why there's there's these complications are now and how did you date the roof when you think about talking about standard um inverses integrity um construction um so we're fortunate and there's been a lot of work on ceramic building materials carried out in london i think by ian betts and uh echols so these fabrics are known so when they're using these types of clays and the forms and the forms do change and the if we go back uh so these type of the kind of the um the kind of marks they're putting on them not so much these are keying but sometimes you get roller stamping and that's very dateable but uh generally it's the fabric the type of clothes they're using are dateable um it's it's a very well studied area so we know from the fabric and the form that these are neuronian and then the later ones are we no we they're different from the later flavian ones and the later second century ones okay so there's a typology and there's a exactly afterwards there is a typology for these things yeah yeah yeah i know i know ernest black did an awful lot of research on on on their box through tiles as well he yeah yeah he's very very excited by a bunch of fox guitars we found at the um bourne park room villa just so right yeah they're one of those um there's one there's one of those prosaic finds which um doesn't fire the imagination immediately but they can tell you so much about the site and it's useless yeah unglamorous but vital yeah yeah yeah absolutely um can you explain more about the relationship with the rivers it's a good question actually because then did you find any evidence of a key or a landing stage or anything else that might indicate that there was commerce going on there yeah i mean that is a very good question because i think um the river is vital to snotland i think it's one of the main reasons why it was put there and it's very close you can see it is that i mean currently well that's 25 meters who knows where the river was in the roman period it would have been somewhere in the vicinity but we don't know exactly and the trouble is with rivers is when they move they can erode and also they can deposit so if there was a key then it may have gone or it may be buried under meters of alluvium the potential still exists but i'm sure snogland had a very close and intimate connection with the river and it's an abstinence used it almost daily so [Music] okay so did you find any echoes flagons at snodland i haven't asked you that yet am i no eccles flagons i don't know actually i'll have to wade through the pot report we found a lot of pot i think we were getting on for you know we were talking about in the pot there was almost half a ton of pottery so um um i'm not sure exactly on where it was from so okay all right but that's all available in your book which is free yeah good job that's another reason to buy it okay um just this is from linda and she's wondering in the name the dots quiz which you should should definitely she's wondering whether one is up nor and two is some mary's island what do you think are we back to the numbers okay yes abnormal could be could be yeah actually i'm gonna have to look this up it's bugging me now i won't do it now i'm gonna log into my work server like um but um i will do it and i will post the answers to the quiz to the numbers quiz brilliant brilliant i'll stick with your facebook um i'll update the facebook page with the with your um um ursula answers the um and then i'll say it's gonna be on youtube as well so any comments anyone thinks of anything afterwards and they've forgotten to ask today today post it on the comments on the youtube and i'll make sure that jars gets to know um what you're what you're thinking and and did you establish a fresh water supply uh it would be the it would be the midway yeah okay obviously it wouldn't be the kind of thing the condition it is now now you didn't mention um a group well you mentioned that it might have been used as a granary i believe before um oh the uh there's some great evidence from these bugs concentric this one yeah autumn kirby yes i mean this this is i mean the the central bit is akin to a military granary so yeah i'm in very good evidence for use of a granary at scotland oh it's not we had tantalising evidence of um crop processing um kind of detritus which is being fortuitously burnt and preserved so they seem to have been doing things like thrashing and de-husking in the vicinity of it so they were clearly doing something with the kind of the produce they were getting from the fields but it was a very small amount because these things burnt by accident so there's never going to be a lot of them like so it just hinted that um these buildings might have been connected to crop storage crop processing so as you would expect really from like what in essence is a massive farm yeah yeah i mean people people tend to forget that the romans essentially were farmers even soldiers mm-hmm just followers if their aim was to do it 25 years get back to their farms and finish them yeah for all of the villa's opulence it was essentially the day a massive farm i mean that was there that was what we were there for okay um and uh the um bathroom we discovered um panas was um was asking whether is you just found a hot bath so did you you got a caldera did you find any of the other the the cool bath and the no i mean again these are the um so i was digging to the i was digging further west on the periphery so slot right in the middle wasn't there yeah if we go back to this so the bars the only known bars we know about are here in the middle um what we did we found um but what we're getting we're getting like the destroyed remains of bath houses so we did actually find curved moldings from bars so the broken up bits of them uh so no but they almost certainly were there but imagine this where it says baths this area all around here had been destroyed so it was just fortuitous that this one survived i'll go back to the photo see um that's it there that that's the tank there so all this area here where there almost certainly were coal bars rooms etc had been destroyed by the 1960s okay um there's another comment here actually it's about um frinsbury is friendsberry quarried out late 19th century is it is for is the four amherst villa so i don't really understand the context yeah um okay i'll skip over that perhaps chris could sense the question in a slightly different way he must be getting late on a friday um the um is another question and would you elaborate in the late roman period of snotland being its golden age and most villains in candace is from elizabeth most builders in kent seem to have been occupied into the fourth century though often after periods of abandonment and often with buildings being repurposed for more utilitarian uses okay like a squatter type occupation delayed surrender period yeah so i think uh this is i mean i'm i'm kind of quoting ernest black's work here um so it seems to be the the most of the villains are there they'll yeah there's a change of function they're kind of they're going out of use there's probably still people there almost certainly there's still people there but they seem to be declining and use declining in the amount of consumption um this doesn't seem to be the case at snogland in the med way when there's much more investment in buildings so they're building bigger buildings like building two is bigger than building one so they clearly like put money into them and stuff so saying um obviously there's there's like there's local differences and i'm sure there were other kind of places in kent which were also you know uh prosperous during this period as well but just generally so we'll just look to the kind of um a lot of the sites and he just said that most of them are in decline during the fourth century right yeah but this one seems to have sort of kept its allure or kept his status to a degree um okay there's been some more work actually by uh and assassin the darren valley landscape partnership into the granary at lollingston um which was recently re-dug so it's been uh suggested as uh maybe it's a store for a number of the villas in that area um do you think that perhaps the um the concentric building at scotland was the granary supporting all the villas in that area uh it well i don't know i'm not sure it was a grind if we go back to the granary so so for a kind of the formal granary so corn weighs a lot so you have to have a very strong floor and that's why you have all these sleeper walls here so uh we didn't find that um so whether if they were they may not have been storing in it like they were halting kirkby but they may have been processing like doing the various activities excuse me um so again i mean we had a very small assemblage of child macro botanicals but they were potentially informative it's very difficult to say either way exactly what it was from such i mean they were just chance discoveries of child grains so all right okay i've got clarification from chris number one is the quarried out frinsbury villa whilst number two is developed found under the lines above chatham fort amherst there we go there we go thanks chris okay well um there are lots of other comments people have been really um engaged and motivated by your it's really so very kind of you too to come along and talk for us tonight as i say this can continue on youtube i'll also post a link to this um this event when it's loaded up on youtube on our facebook page so anybody who wants to go on facebook and make any comments or whatever past charts if you wouldn't mind keeping an eye on that sure and perhaps sort of addressing some of those questions that are coming and as they do so um okay well again i'm just gonna say thanks very much for for um taking part tonight and um i really appreciate it we've um we've really enjoyed it you've been a fabulous guest presenter thank you so much for um coming along um we uh thanks everyone for joining us as well and uh for your comments absolutely fantastic i've been glad that i have 70 comments and my mind is doing so much to deal with that as well so thank you ever so much she's really not wasted and then and john's gonna get to see every comment that's been made um if you've er enjoyed this talk obviously please go and make a comment on youtube thumbs up or something to just acknowledge that you've seen it and you've liked it um i wish charles all the best um in his uh his career and uh and with his book obviously she'll be um available for more good bookshops and some bad ones so um the uh the next event will be another trustee talk and that's with um vice president rodrigo and he'll be talking about the kent underground research group and that's kent's hidden archaeology which is really quite intriguing uh so i'll be there to learn lots of new stuff about that and that will be on tuesday the 13th of april at 7 30. as usual if you go onto our website and go to news and events you can see the events calendar you can see a full list of all the things we've got going on if there are any events that you want to suggest anybody out there who wants to come and do a talk uh and share their information and their research uh with with our audience then please feel free to do so again if you're not a member please consider joining the society we'd love to have you on board and it would be fantastic if you could support the work that we're trying to do okay thanks again to giles thank you fred enjoy thanks for everyone for taking part and we'll see you next time take care bye you