Caesar in Kent: Do we now know where he landed?

Description: Caesar in Kent: Do We Know Where He Landed?. A talk hosted by KAS President-elect Kerry Brown with Richard Taylor on the evidence of whether Caesar landed at Pegwell Bay near Ramsgate. Professor Kerry Brown, KAS President-elect is in conversation with Richard Taylor, archaeologist, KAS Trustee, Director of Darnley Archaeological Services and TV Presenter who worked on the excavations led by Andrew Fitzpatrick of the Universiy of Leicester at Ramsgate to investigate his theory that Pegwell Bay was the site of Caesars landing party in 55 and 54 BC. This highly contentious subject has stirred debate for decades. Can they reach a conclusion?

Transcript: good evening everyone many thanks for everyone joining in this event tonight with the kent archaeological society uh the kent ideological society has existed since 1858 and has an illustrious history in telling about the archaeology and history of the ancient county of ken we are involved in education in the publication of journal archaeological cantiana and also in being able to assist in funding projects different projects with different parts of the endowments we've been given over the years the kent archaeological society has over 650 members and some institutional members and we're one of the longest established and best known of all of the similar local archaeological societies in britain and we must be one of the most well established globally this is a series of events that we're doing for our members especially during a time like this when it is more difficult to get to public events we are therefore reaching out to our current members but also wider public and in particular to our student membership initiative we just started um younger members who are engaged in the kind of interests that we have as a society tonight we're going to be talking about a particularly important but also contentious issue and that was the caesarean arrivals in britain 5 bc these have been a matter of enormous controversy since the time when they were first discussed in the kent archaeological society uh archaeological cantiana in i believe 1858 so almost as soon as we were established there was discussion about where did caesar actually land there have been a number of contenders for the places where he landed on these two separate visits but i thought before we would talk to richard taylor tonight um about the involvement he had with the excavations in 2017 we might um want to give ourselves some ken context by looking at the particular source um for the information about these arrivals and that is by caesar himself in the war in gaul in book four of um that account there's a reference to the place in which he landed it says the nature of this place was this sea was confined by mountains so close to it that a dart could be thrown from their summit upon the shore considering this by no means a fit place for disembarking caesar remained at anchor till the ninth hour for the other ships to arrive there then he said that they bought their ships um to a place against an open and level shore and also mentions the size of the ships being so great that they could only be stationed in deep water and the soldiers be placed um unknown to them with their hands embarrassed depressed with a large and heavy weight of armor uh coming onto the shore richard taylor uh has been an archaeologist in kent for a number of years um he is a bbc television uh presenter he's also um a trustee of the candid archaeological society and the director of dining archaeological services services so it's a great pleasure tonight to have him to give his account of the excavations whether it does actually answer the question is this the place where caesar arrived so i suppose my first question is what are the um kind of archaeological evidence for caesar's arrival in britain and his presence here i'm pleased that kerry actually mentioned um that this was first discovered uh or it's first discussed in the kas is archaeological cantiana the first ever edition in 1858 and people are still discussing and arguing it to this day so it's a really good topic to start off with so i guess the first question is um what did we know about the cesarean visits to britain from from documentary sources carrier um well i guess from my reading there are a number of sources not not least caesar's own writings i suppose and looking at these i think the key points to consider for me were in 55 bc he comes to britain with we think two legions about 6 000 men and he's here for about five weeks in 54 bc he comes over with five legions which is approximately 15 000 men and that also includes 2 000 cavalry and 800 vessels and he's here for about 14 weeks um the first thing that strikes me about 54 bc is that you're going to need somewhere quite expensive to park all this gear now on both occasions caesar looked for a suitable area along the east kent coast to to disembark and a key bit of text i think for the 54 bc landings is that caesar describes uh how he was faced by steep cliffs which we've always presumed was dover and he sailed on for about seven roman miles before he landed his his vessels so that's the the technicalities if you like the other thing i think we need to consider uh from caesar's own writings is uh why caesar came to britain i think that's really interesting and if you think about caesar's character that the visit to britain i think undoubtedly embellished his own reputation at home i think caesar was the sort of person who understood celebrity what it meant uh to inflate his own image venturing into the unknown land on the edge of the known world this would not be lost on caesar and this was all done i guess under the sort of strategic pretext that britain was actually assisting caesar's enemies in gore so i think a combination of all that gives us a nice picture of kind of sets the scene if you like for why caesar actually came to britain how does that sound kerry sounds good so i mean in terms of the actual um you know kind of evidence of him ever actually being here what does the archaeological record show i mean presumably you when you were undertaking this dig um and i presumed that dick was sort of consciously to look for this evidence yeah what were you looking for and what what did you find well first of all the archaeological record um in terms of its number there's very very little in fact i think the only artifact to my knowledge is the caesarean era helmet that was found a bridge near canterbury which is exhibited in the canterbury museum so this is the only piece of direct evidence we have for caesar's visits the sort of things that we'd be looking for uh during the course of the excavations i suppose it would concentrate on militaria really iron weapons hot nails that sort of thing so that that's what we were looking for in particular so the archaeological record is actually very slim so we're going into this much like caesar did rather into the unknown i mean so to the sort of really kind of i suppose the most contentious issue and the one that you know i guess the sort of dig in 2017 was meant to address yeah um you know kind of where are the likely candidates as you say it seems that there's sort of a very narrow group of um you know places and i think someone emailed us when they saw the um you know kind of advertisement for this event and said that there were digs i think in walmart in um you know kind of i think the 1960s where they uncovered a roman burial ground and this was because you know roman centurions were often sort of buried near the place where they had a bat law or kind of landed and you know it was a meaningful place so this was a candidate but there's obviously been been quite a few different candidates so could you sort of go through the list of the most likely and maybe go through the pros and cons of them yeah there's it's there's been a lot of uh potential or sites purported throughout throughout the years not just in kent by the way but we'll stay with the ones in kent for now um there are numerous locations along the kent coast that have been argued as caesar's landing sites but nobody actually knows for sure whether they were true or if it was indeed the landing sites the one work or piece of work that i've looked at was the book ancient britain by thomas rice holmes and he makes uh quite a number of good cases i think for the 55 bc visit he suggests between walmart and deal and i think this is probably correct actually if you look at the documentary sources for 54 bc uh he talks about a site between deal and sandwich which i i'm slightly less sure about um and we also have to remember that when when he when he wrote his work there was actually very little evidence for archaeology and coastal landscape change at the time and 100 years later things things have moved on and things have changed so i i sort of lean towards this idea of 54 bc being between deal and perhaps sandwiched slightly slightly more north which is what led us to peg weather bay ultimately and peg world base so peg world bay is the um kind of place that was talked about and very excited uh bbc and other news reports in 2017 as the place where these uh caesar landed so it's a pretty sort of emphatic statement and um you know it seems that this sort of mystery has been solved um you were obviously very involved in that excavation so was this the sort of final solution to this problem that finally you know we now know where the sort of great future emperor of uh you know the roman empire sort of landed and this we can actually say this is definitely the place but possibly is the the political answer to this um i think the best way around this and people can make their own conclusions at the end is is to tell you uh the story of excavations at pegwell bay so the story begins uh in 2010 during excavations for the east kent axis road in thanet between manston and port richburg where incidentally there were many exciting archaeological discoveries um from prehistoric right up to medieval so this is a picture and the course here is where the current road now is and this area here was where excavations took place now amongst the discoveries that were made here professor andrew fitzpatrick uh was interested in a large first century bc ditch that was located here where this red circle is and also over here where that red line is now this is uh near absolute farm on the ebsley peninsula just south of of of manston so why why was interested in this then and what could he see well andrew was particularly interested in this ditch which was five meters wide and two meters deep and it had walls sloping at about 45 degrees suggesting that it is actually defensive and it was exposed this ditch in places uh 500 meters apart and it's on a very low lying peninsula that's less than a kilometer from high ground now the east can access road excavations also revealed an iron age village that lay within the circuit of this ditch and what's interesting about this village is it seems to have gone out of use around 50 bc now that's a very interesting point andrew noticed that this ditch was very similar in size and shape to caesarean defensive works that were found at alicia in france dating from about 52 bc and in addition to this uh andrew argues that the location of peg well bay matches much of caesar's own accounts so the key points here the location matches caesar's own accounts from these excavations we've got this large defensive ditch the ditch surrounds an iron age village that village on the activity of that village stops around 50 bc all of a sudden and the ditch itself is very similar to other caesarean works on the continent so the question is was this ditch that we have absolutely uh a similar caesarean fork defensive that we found elsewhere so this was quite exciting um and i guess there's there's three problems with this idea the first is for over a century it's been thought that caesar landed a deal or in the region of deal about 15 kilometers to the south also in the iron age fanuc was considered or it was an island separated from the the rest of kent by the the watson channel so it was it was an island self-contained island and thirdly there's no evidence for julius caesar's camps ever been found anywhere in britain so once the uh east kent access road excavations finished and as part of the footsteps of caesar project a partnership between kent county council university of leicester which was funded by the lieber hume trust and led by andrew fitzpatrick it was decided that a three-year community archaeology project would investigate this ditch and the area around it to see if it was in fact part of caesar's landing sites in 54 bc so in order to carry this out uh kcc community archaeologist andrew mayfield and myself led groups of volunteers from across the county to excavate and investigate this ditch so work started in 2015 with a geophysical survey and in 2016 and 17 with actual excavations so we've got a big project ahead over three years we've got plenty of time and our goal was to prove or find evidence of caesar actually being absolute we okay to go on yeah um just very quickly on on that map that you've just shown yes um obviously today i mean that's all continuous coastline isn't it so really it's the sort of um and then the the sort of um you know the kind of river snakes around that yeah so could you sort of just say what it must have sort of looked like um 2 000 years ago as you came i mean you would basically be looking really a very wide kind of channel entry and then an island and the mainland i mean that would all be pretty obvious i presume yeah i i think the watson channel uh it wasn't so much like a flowing river i think it was probably more mud flats with perhaps a navigable river very small river going up it through the through the course of it right so it wouldn't be this vast sort of estuary or anything like that it's it's quite a tame sort of mud flats with with a tidal river going through the middle of it the kind of um vessels that caesar was using i mean i've seen the source that i mentioned right at the beginning um that it mentions they were pretty substantial so i presume they wouldn't have been able to get in very far i wouldn't have thought so no um and and this i suppose is related to the question why would you land on sanit well i don't think crossing the the watson channel will be too much of an issue for for the roman military um if if it wasn't an issue for the locals you know i'm sure the locals of the thani the local lion age tribes or whatever would quite easily get to uh the kent mainland so i'm pretty sure the roman engineers would would easily filled the the wants and channel no problem so i personally don't see a a problem logistically militarily with with landing on fanet and crossing the watson just i mean just one final little thing on this um there's a reference to um storms you know destroying some of the vessels i mean a very bad storm i think that was one of the i was can't remember where it was the first or the second landing so no evidence has ever been found of you know kind of uh you know sort of um roman period boats sort of buried deep in the kind of sil or stuff like that that's never been discovered no nothing's been found of that nature but what's particularly interesting about the ebb sleep peninsula here is it would have been a perfect ground to repair ships if you like because it's you close to the channel just over peg well bait and you can land ships there no problem whereas up here you've got more it's it's the land is is raised it's it's cliffs where this is very low lying so be absolutely perfect for mooring ships or repairing them and just for reference where is richborough um today's sort of rich remains are they um whereabouts would they be yourself that would be south okay right great so the actual excavations if you could say a bit about the challenges of the excavations because at the beginning obviously you said um you can't really sort of be definitive um so there must have been quite a few challenges in this kind of dig and what were the key questions that it answered and what are the key questions that it left unresolved and maybe you know what what are the things that you could do that might be able to address that in the future people that want to you know continue to address this question okay right so in in 2015 as part of the community project that was devoted to a geophysical survey so where the actual road was the east kent access road land adjacent to that we got permission from the local farmer to conduct our excavations and surveys in that and this is where we believed that the ditch that andrew found uh continued into so our first job was to try and locate that ditch using a geophysical survey and this is what we found so we've got a lovely picture here this is this is a very sizable field it was about uh 20 hectares and here is where the the road actually goes and just up here was where uh andrew viewed the ditch and you can see over here this is a magnetometry map of the agricultural field and we found that the ditch continued on this red line all the way down there's a nice little gap there which we thought could be an entrance and another potential entrance way there and then it continues round here and this ditch we believe actually is self-con it contains a an iron age village which you can see here from the vast amount of magnetic disturbance which is classic of any sort of occupation so in 2015 we've managed to identify some potential targets for excavation which was this gap here and this gap there so with that done in 2015 2016 we actually got to excavate so in 2016 uh we excavated two large trenches which were here and here and if we look at this you can see the picture on the right we've actually got the course of the ditch going north south and one of the key finds we had was a tip of a roman pelin on the left there which was actually found in the lower fields of this large ditch over here and this particular peelum has been identified as more than likely caesarean so that's good artifact evidence we've got what looks like genuine cesarean weaponry found within the fill of this large ditch in 2017 we sort of up the ante and excavated the other large entrance way in more detail and what we were looking at was an uh an actual road surface if you like which is this here so what we're looking at here is the ditch itself is going that way and this here is an entrance way with a metaled surface for a road into the iron age enclosure now this was fascinating because we were thinking if it's a roadway it's going to have lots of footfall possibly soldiers could have walked up there things get dropped on it etc so it's usually a treasure trove for artifactual evidence so i don't know if you can see but on that picture you can actually see bones uh yeah yeah yeah right so this this surface this road surface was crammed full of fines and we had several iron objects off the surface they were badly corroded we couldn't identify them straight away but they included a probable sword and at least two spearheads the spearheads were potentially cesarean this particular sword was definitely iron age so we're looking at sort of you know 200 to 50 bc in addition on the surface of this road there were lots of human bones also found on the surface now these came from at least two people and they included thigh bones arm bones and actual fragments of skull and this is one of the skulls actually being very carefully removed the interesting things about these bones is that they had cut marks made by weapons so these people obviously died a violent death we don't know how that happened but we know that it did and their remains were pressed into this road surface so we've got evidence so far of human remains we've got iron work and we've got lots of footfall from the actual surface we also had a look inside the ditch itself and one of the things we found whilst excavating the ditch was lots of iron age pottery and at the base of one of the ditch terminus we found a cattle skull which looks like it's been placed at the bottom now this is a common prehistoric practice indicating perhaps that this ditch the the large ditch that we found was originally of iron age date so in other words pre-caesarean and this and adding to this we also found quite a lot of mid to late iron age pottery within this ditch so it's sort of suggesting that this large ditch that we've seen was perhaps originally inh what what we had to think about was if this ditch is containing iron age artifacts and cesarean artifacts was it actually recut or adapted by caesar's troops if they landed in 54 bc so that's a big big consideration so that's some of the evidence to consider to look at when we excavated just small areas of this field so i guess this is a it was a very successful community excavation lots of engagement uh and if you think strategically peg wall bay would be an ideal place to land 15 000 men 2 000 cavalry and 800 vessels the ebbsfleet peninsula as we we've already discussed was probably an ideal site to station repair vessels the geophysics actually confirmed the presence of a defensive ditch and we've got probable caesarean weaponry recovered from that ditch as well as iron age material and we've got a vibrant iron age village which ended abruptly in about 50 bc but we can't say why so our search for all this evidence that i suppose the big challenges the biggest challenge was that we were looking for evidence of a single event you know it's like looking through a keyhole at a slither of time so that in itself it is quite difficult to tie down and i suppose also that uh caesar's clues and the remains discovered at ebb's fleet suggests the site may well have been fought to protect and to repair his fleet the other things we've got to consider are that parts of the ditch appear to be iron age so they almost certainly date from 350 to 200 bc most definitely so this ditch may actually be earlier than cesarean so we need further work if you like to to examine whether caesar actually adapted this ditch it certainly looks like it so there's a there's an awful lot to consider there i think um and i guess the big question is is that enough to say caesar was there that's that's the million-dollar question isn't it so you you um have right at the beginning said possibly and what you've got here seems to be quite a lot of evidence i mean the um or quite a lot of quite a strong argument that this must be you know kind of a very strong contender um is there anything that makes you think this you know kind of maybe isn't the place uh that there may be another place or another kind of aspect that you know that the sort of dig may have missed uh and that that's what makes you kind of just a little bit hesitant to completely endorse this this option well i i think that the most important thing is to say that more evidence is required i think uh further excavation of other locations within the site uh to look for additional evidence i don't think the evidence we've got at the minute is enough to say categorically caesar was there i i'd like to see more evidence perhaps of of boat repair uh if you're looking at military life you're looking at accommodation you're looking at latrine pits tent pegs hobnails all the things you associate with the the roman military a helmet the helmet would be great and also we need to definitely look at whether caesar adapted or re-cut this large iron age defensive ditch looks like it was already there at least in part so have roman troops adapted this to suit their own means so i think this site has lots of potential i think it has a lot to offer in terms of archaeology and and the secrets it still has both cesarean and of course iron age there is a huge iron age village here that was very vibrant and had evidence of trade with the mediterranean back to two to three hundred bc a fantastic place so it would make sense if i was coming over the channel with 15 000 men to to locate there so i i think there's there's lots of potential for this site and really we would like to go back and excavate other areas to find this additional evidence is that possible do you think that that will be happening in the future i sincerely hope so i know that the landowner is is quietly keen to do so and i think the other important point to mention is is the vast majority of the work done here from 2015 to 2017 was done by volunteers uh and i can't tell you how important community engagement through archaeology is even for you know more high-profile projects like this so i think that the potential to go back to this site and engage people is enormous um i um so just in the final few questions if um anyone does have particular questions that they would like to ask richard then please feel free to put it in the chat function and um i can read it out so there's a chat function at the bottom of your screens it's just um where you kind of have the mute and the video and everything there's a chat function so if there is a question then do please ask it um because richard is here to be quizzed on this um one thing that i was thinking as you were speaking was um i mean both of these visits were very short right i mean they weren't more than i think a couple of months i think you know in the time that we're thinking about um so i i mean it's a little bit curious that um you know this there must be many many many events in the whole of the last 2000 years where there were you know kind of two months of visits you know kind of maybe by other invaders and what have you um so you know do you think when you were doing the excavation or or you know kind of people in the past when they were doing excavation that because this particular kind of visit was so high profile that people would just desperately looking for things um and they found what they were looking for i i think subconsciously that always happens whatever excavation you're on you know you want to find what it is you're looking for so when you're doing it you've got to try and be as objective as possible i i would love to stand here and say this is where season definitely landed you know but the the archaeologist in me says look you've got to look for the look at the evidence and and what how do you interpret that what does it tell you and it's very difficult especially when you're looking at the archaeology of short events you know if you're looking at the archaeology of occupation place for hundreds of years it's much easier but these very short events i think it's very difficult to actually pin them down so we've got some questions i'll just um actually unless you want to refer to the powerpoint again shall i just bring it onto the full screen now yeah okay so we have quite a few questions now you'll be pleased to know they're coming in uh thick and fast so the first from amanda thomas is um has any additional analysis been done on the bones that this that were discovered on the rna age road that you you just showed i think in slide nine or ten yes they they they uh currently being radiocarbon dated the initial results um show dates of about 100 bc to well about around 100 bc plus or minus 50 years or so but those are still those results are still to be confirmed okay and then this is from jessica um is there any evidence uh that the romans may have been welcomed at planet and were fighting externally with the assistance of the locals i mean um i think in the sort of caesars and the galactic well he just sort of mentioned that one of the arrivals they couldn't see anyone there was no one around maybe it was lunchtime but um is there any evidence that they were welcomed um i think there's perhaps more evidence or suggestive evidence for the claudian invasion of ad43 perhaps the the the british were definitely aware of the roman presence i think um they were aware of roman potential they were aware of roman trade so it wasn't like the romans and caesar were complete aliens i think there's there's probably much more interaction than what we probably think especially through trade whether or not they were welcomed it's a possibility because there's no genuine evidence for any large-scale battles i mean if you're coming to another land with with 15 000 men you'd think you were coming for a bit of a tear up but there's there's no categoric evidence of anything like that happening on a large scale so uh because the the battles that did yeah sorry no i mean the battles that did happen were afterwards weren't there i mean the battle at possibly big brew fort near canterbury or i think there was maybe a conflict um uh near the midway i mean over the midway i mean those those happened after leaving the landing place and and they're more likely to be you know large skirmishes rather than huge battles i think perhaps you're talking more what we consider to be guerrilla warfare almost um there's a just a point here i suppose um when talking about the want some channel on the boat repair it's worth noting that the tidal range um of the once between 3.5 and 5 meters uh so the high and low water navigation would be quite different and boats could be brought in at high water than allowed to settle so i suppose that's yeah um i mean that's sort of worth um remembering um then um yeah this is from richard new um how does the potential fortified area fit onto the 1st century bc ebbsfleet peninsula it looks too narrow for it to fit and surely if it was a peninsula it would not have needed a north-south ditch just to ditch across the top of the peninsula well i mean that that's an interesting question from what we can gather from the the projections of of the ditch it literally just fits onto that peninsula and it does raise the question if it was built in the iron age why would you need such a big defensive ditch i mean you can understand um later on why caesar would perhaps you know adapt that ditch to make it more defensible but it is very curious that you've got this low-lying peninsula that's quite narrow and you've got this great big defensive ditch plonked in the middle of it so that's a very good question and that's something really we could only answer with with further archaeological investigations the other problem on the um the eastern side the ditch is now under a golf course um and i'm pretty sure they wouldn't crash the 13th fairway right so there could be the final the sort of final uh you know clue for this um so this is from uh christopher uh just thanking us for thanking you for a useful update and then he said um you know you emphasized the scale of the existing native settlement i think that was on the um ninth or the tenth slide um could not the defenses be a response to caesar thrown up against his arrival um further south on the coast so i mean they were kind of put you know there in response to his arrival elsewhere possibly yeah um particularly if you take into account that caesar was there in in 55 bc uh the local iron age tribes might have thought well if this has happened you know caesar's gone but he's coming back you know we need some sort of defense now but yeah absolutely i think that that's a good point and one i would uh look to answer if if we ever went back there to excavate yeah um because historically it was always sort of people talking about the deal you know the deal beach you know that's where they arrived and uh i guess it's a difficult thing to give up isn't it because when you look out to the english channel you think you think of that place as being the place where this happens but um so there's a question from roseberry hub um if the one if they want some channel was mud flats with a narrow river why was the absolute peninsula a good place to moor ships and where could the rest of the vast fleet more um well i i guess that's that's more to do with the fact that the the eastern side looking out across the peg well bay is if you're looking towards the channel it's it's just convenient as a place to to more ships up because it is that the peninsula itself is um it's it's it's a nice spit of land it would function perfectly as somewhere to keep to more ships because you've got you've got the channel just just there in in front of you and of course you've got the the added bonus if you like that those ships could also or or vessels of a certain size could go through to want some and more on the other side i suppose just thinking thinking aloud so because it's a spit you've actually got room either side of of the peninsula to actually more ships yeah something like almost like a natural port i suppose yeah and this is from andrew appleblee and applebee we talked about the walmart possibility earlier the excavations done there in the past um and he says um i think a mechanical digger trench in the field directly below warmer castle uh would show whether caesar landed there or not um i did hear of a vast pit of human bones just above there and a high status horse burial with human bones and attain a bronze with a french handle beaker so uh is that something that factored into your thinking or have you heard of that and and um do you think that that's sort of worth considering uh i hadn't i had hadn't been aware of that no but that that itself is is interesting yeah i mean you you really want to radio carbon date the bones in there to to gauge the uh a more exact time of death for the conflict then this is from gordon was there any recap of the ditch which not only expanded and deepened the ditch profile uh or was there a realignment of the ditch you know the sort of big defensive ditch um i appreciate there has only been a small amount of the ditch that has been sectioned but is there any kind of evidence of a recap and um kind of expansion well he's he's he's hit the nail on the head himself there we already looked at a small section and we couldn't see any evidence within that section of a re-cut but bear in mind we were close to the entrance so were we to go elsewhere we certainly look to find recuts into that ditch yes they will be crucial then this is elizabeth banning one of our trustees aside from the spearhead what material evidence was there for a roman presence if there was um uh where the ships were being repaired you would expect some evidence for daily life and activities such as smithing even if the military were only there for a few months um or is truncation the answer and i think the later presence of the saxon shaw thoughts that either entered the watson channel suggests that the channel was navigable so apart from the spearhead yeah what sort of other evidence was there for a sort of daily roman life there nothing that we could categorically say with cesarean and this is one of the things that we would need to do is go back and look for exactly those we think that the or in fact we know that the site was occupied a much later time after the claudia invasion so there's lots of evidence actually of mid to late roman activity it's there in abundance but we're actually looking for things that are deeper and the sort of things that we found that were mid to late roman we just didn't find for the caesarean period but of course it comes back to that argument of if it was occupied for two to three hundred years after the claudia invasion it was literally only occupied for weeks during caesar's campaign so it's that whole argument of a slither in time is what you're looking for but elizabeth's absolutely right we we need to find further evidence of daily life to be to be sure this is from nick watts um taking into consideration the pottery report by the late nigel mcpherson grant how do you explain the large quantity of mid and late iron age pottery um from 150 to 75 50 bc in the lower fields of the caesarean ditch that's a that's a very good point uh if it's in the lower fields of the ditch then it can't be cesarean at that point it would have to be re-cut elsewhere and he's absolutely right um i personally think that the ditch was more likely to be of that iron age date and we just need to find evidence if it was re-cut elsewhere to prove any any cesarean presence so maybe just a couple more questions um this is a game from andrew appleby um it's a hypothesis um i think that if caesar wanted to make a fortification on the site you investigated he would have made his own pattern of thought and ignored the local works presumably meaning that you'd have a slightly different kind of um findings um do you think that sort of argues against this site kind of um my argument to that would be why why reinvent the wheel if there's already a you know a defensive structure there that you can adapt utilize um why not the problem with that is if if you look at how the romans move across across the country there you have marching camps and and things like that the difference with this is it's it's more of a um it's a stationary base it's it's it's there to serve a purpose we think of repairing the fleet [Music] so yeah i could i can kind of see where he's coming from but it's the reason why that peninsula is actually being used for boat repair then my own final question i suppose somewhat sort of naive one um what is the relationship between these and then the final conquest of britain the sort of cloudian um you know or the claudius or the claudian invasions from like 100 years approximately 100 years later i mean presumably the archaeological evidence for that is much much stronger or is that sorry i didn't catch that last bit kerry or is that not the case i mean i'm presuming that the archaeological evidence for the uh 44 a.d invasion um and conquest was much stronger but presumably perhaps perhaps not now the the evidence for the for the claudia invasion is is much more forthcoming um this is the problem with with the caesarean visits and it's the problem why that there is no or very little artifactual evidence it's just such an enigma and it really is like looking for a needle in a in a haystack which i think is is why we got so excited about the the pegboard bait uh because it was it was suggesting that caesar might have been there but but i think you know in conclusion to confirm that caesar was there more evidence is required both artifactually for everyday life and a real examination of the ditches to see if they are actually re-cut in caesarean times are you are you optimistic that we'll find that i suppose food work archaeologists are naturally pessimistic until they do actually find something i i would like to think so i would certainly like to try uh and i think the site itself because it's such a fascinating site it deserves it that there is so much more to find there and if we don't find evidence of caesar what we have what we would have found is some spectacular iron age evidence which is important in itself so i'll actually final question from jessica butt again does the quantitative service mean it rapidly went out of views i think i didn't catch that kerry sorry um um does the quantity of bone in the road surface mean it rapidly went out of use yes i think so um because the the actual road surface itself it i don't think it was exposed that long after those events because there was silting over the top of it which pretty much sealed those bones so they were in very good shape they were quite fresh so yes i think that particular surface went out of use very quickly after those events and i guess the final question is um why does it matter why does this particular sort of event matter so much because it's like you know he didn't conquer britain that happened later so why do you think this has fascinated people as you say you know yeah um archaeological cantiana has had asked was on this since you know the 1850s so so what what is the kind of um fascination with this particular you know couple of events i think there's there's two reasons one is the mystery element to it and two is the fact that it is about caesar i mean we're talking about one of the most famous people that ever lived and he came to this country twice uh and he only went back because of the the awful weather um the problem is we don't know where so it it's it makes sense to our nature i suppose to actually find out where he landed and what he did whilst he was here but i think it's more about the cult of personality more than anything yeah um so now i just got a message from andrew mayfield um who was also involved in the project she says says um so unfortunately he just um actually managed to get in but i'm going to ask andrew if if um if it's okay andrew if i'm gonna ask to unmute you and if you would like to maybe say a bit about the project is that okay so i think andrew i'm going to ask him to um you um if he can hello hello andrew hi hello yes sorry so i believe you've been patiently waiting to get and i really do apologize we had a limit of 100 which i wasn't aware of but um yeah so andrew i mean what richard's been talking about is just how the excavation went what it discovered and how it was producing evidence that did produce evidence that is a bit sort of ambiguous so what was your sort of um kind of view of this this excavation what did it prove for you well i think i mean most importantly it was a fantastic opportunity for the community to get involved in us or research excavation um you know on the back of all the work of these can access project that had gone on in the area and building on all the work of um dave perkins and the islamic archaeological society and the trust for sanity over many years but i mean it it was a really interesting project to be involved with just to sort of actually uh answer a question i've got to stop my video you know you don't you don't often get to ask ask or answer questions in the same way that we did with this project um particularly one which is such a sort of contentious issue as i think rich is probably outlined most archaeological sites you go to and obviously you have uh questions about how you're going to undertake the excavations but in this case we had a very specific research question that we wanted to try and answer um and it was quite fascinating to do now um i mean richard and his discussion with me is um sort of correctly very very hesitant to give it a full endorsement would you share that or would you say that it definitely answers the question i think from the evidence we uncovered we can't say for definite i think there are certainly some features there that we'd like to go back and look at again um we'd like to place a trench squarely over the entrance uh to the site uh where the trackway was and we were just too far to the west um to actually get the the entrance area and entrance areas if it is a military uh installation at any point they're very diagnostic in terms of this or the outline of the post holes the sort of evidence you might have from that entrance area there's also a very interesting area to the west of the main entrenchment within a separate enclosure which had a very high metal working spike a magnetic spike which could be metal working and if we're looking for something a site where you're looking at sort of repairing ships and and i'm working that looks like an enclosure sort of purpose built for that purpose so it would be great to go and sample that feature and see if it ties in with the right the right period i mean as it is it's a fantastic site anyway beer to solve a middle to late iron age site and with later roman occupation on the top of it and obviously there's a lot of early prehistoric evidence from the area as well you've got some fantastic bronze age um sites just on the tip of weather leads to the south um so it's a very sort of rich archaeological area um whether we can save a definite caesar was there i don't think we can yet just finally on um uh there's been quite a lot of sort of um mention of walmart and a dig that was done at walmart i think in the 60s maybe even um a bit later um do you think that's worth more exploration or it's not not really kind of shows the same potential as the site we've been talking about um there's i mean obviously the deal warmer area are sort of suggested as uh caesar's first uh landing point during his first invasion and that ties in with the evidence and this all written account of perhaps a steep-sided beach and the fact that the um standard bearer had to sort of jump into deep water um the wide sandy shore which is the sort of reference to the second invasion certainly ties in much better with the pegwell bay site but there is a site of worth as well and obviously i don't know if richard covered that but worth we looked at briefly as part of our the wider project and i know keith's on this um zoom as well and is a very interesting iron age site to gain um and i think that would be worth going back to because um that that's a very large enclosure uh around the village of worth so there are other sites in the area that i think we could sample and then of course you've got big bree and home store woods both sites which you know are within this old days march and could be associated with um the wider the wider sort of caesarean invasion as well great well look thank you very much everyone um i'm sorry about the uh issues earlier with people getting in um we have recorded this event so it will go up on our youtube channel and also be available on our website uh many thanks to richard for um explaining this and in such detail um and to andrew at the end before also making some comments um this is obviously a you know huge and topical issue it's great that we've had um well more than 100 people attending tonight but only 100 managed to get in so i will be sending the link out to this whole event to everyone on our mailing list so that they can uh re-watch it at their leisure um and maybe be able to ask further questions of richard um if they uh think of anything um that hasn't been answered during this session so very many thanks this is for the kent archaeological society and we hope to be doing more of these events uh to cover the incredible archaeology and history of our county um and i'm very very grateful for everyone uh taking part tonight thanks very much take care and be safe cheers and bye