Our Neighbours in Empire: a tour of Belgium and Netherlands in the Roman era

Description: Dr Steve Willis, KAS Vice President and Senior Lecturere at the University of Kent, takes us through a rapid tour of the archaeology of the Roman period in Belgium and the Netherlands, where we see similarities and marked contrasts with Kent under the Romans. Steve draws on both the work of research students from the University of Kent and that of continental colleagues, in tribute to their endeavours and discoveries, as well as in celebration of the enlightening nature of the remains.

Transcript: [Music] good evening everyone and welcome to the psychological society's latest trustee talk and this talk is given by uh the um trustee vice president of the society no less and senior lecturer at the university of kent it's dr steve willis who's a long-standing um friend and colleague of the society and he is going to be talking to us about our neighbours in empire which is a tour of belgium in the netherlands in the roman era now um for those of you who've attended conferences and uh other events from the kas in the past people will be very familiar with uh steve and um today he's he's it goes slightly off the beaten track as it were and um looking at the perspective of kent in to his neighbors during the roman period and um i'm not going to go to too much into what he's going to be talking about because it's going to be after steve to present it in his normal inimitable fashion and these events are very well supported and we're very grateful for everybody who who comes along and views them everyone who supports us on social media and um and gets the word out about these talks and because we're getting a lot of views on on youtube had nearly uh 2 000 views for all the videos we've had so far so we're doing very very well um so uh without further ado i'm going to hand you over to dr steve willis who will um introduce our neighbors in empire okay Welcome good evening everyone uh hopefully you can hear me it's a little bit strange to be addressing you um this evening from uh the campus of the university of kent i'm looking at a screen i can't see you it's very different from the normal scenario we have of course with the ks with our um archaeology conference gatherings and other events where it's very face-to-face and i can see you and you can see me so it's a bit sort of anonymous for me looking at this screen and talking through the slides it's a little bit like um you know if you're on stage and it's a well-lit stage you're on the stage and you just have to imagine there's someone out there um you can't see them you'll just have to imagine that so so um this evening i'll be uh giving a whistles stop tour around some of the archaeological highlights of the roman period in belgium and the netherlands and i'll draw one or two parallels with um what's happening in britain at that time so quite a lot of that will obviously be familiar to us and um i'll pivot it now and again to casing kent now i wanted to start actually because i i think this is um the first ks event um since we've had you know um double bad news in the county of uh the passing of two really esteemed colleagues um so um i wanted to pay a short tribute to chris pout who was of course the Tribute to Chris Pou president of this society for six years um some while ago there as you see 2005 to 2011 many of you will know chris um a tremendous guy someone who really made things happen he led from the front he was a great diplomat he phoned people up he wrote he went to see them he really was a dynamic president and really we were very very fortunate to have him in that role particularly with the anniversary museum display that he organized the exhibition there and of course he was a leading light with the um major excavations at abbey farm villa so it was particularly sad to hear his passing recently Tribute to Pete Clarke indeed as many of you will know we've also just recently lost pete clarke deputy director of cat a very distinguished archaeologist again i had the pleasure to uh meet and know pete a little bit really early on in my career when i was a young impressionable student and he was just like a bundle of enthusiasm theory dynamism talk he wanted to talk stratification theory pre-history how you're going to change archaeology and a lot of that he wanted to happen in the venue of the pub so he was a he was a he was a a good pedigree for an archaeologist there and the only problem was i mean i was taken along with this um but um the pub sessions seemed to start very early in the morning so this is a deep shock to us to have lost pete and well you know frankly god bless him The Roman period right so uh to to move on to move on so um to to set the scene a little bit um we're thinking about um the roman period in um belgic gold northern northern gall northern france into the low countries and at the end of the iron age of course this is a landscape which is very well organized with farming opera type settlements which are big agglomerations timber buildings society is organized into tribes with political organization and we see in the issuing of coins we see dynasties and dynasts this is obviously a very uh uh cartoon version obviously it's asterix and obelisk here and they're visiting um iron age paris in the ilda city there at the end of the iron age a couple of years later what happens well it's had a roman makeover because caesar has conquered had conquered call and before too long things are changing politically um and socially and culturally and that's a bit of a story really for the first part of our talk today so this is happening from julius caesar's invasions in the in the 50s bc Early statehood so in um belgium in the netherlands at this time we're talking about societies which um have probably close social cultural ties uh political ties um early statehood if you like power systems authority systems hierarchy they're sophisticated farmers they're warriors um they have a lot of martial culture to them and they have a lot of gold so we see um these neck rings here talks and early um disc coinage uh here from an assemblage found at uh bearing in eastern belgium and rome wants a piece of this pie literally as we'll see so um gall is attractive for caesar to conquer conquer for his own political ambitions but also it's a source of slaves of gold of wealth of farming resources now um in the region we're looking at today a really important figure at this time is empirics and here we see a statue of him erected in the middle of the 19th century in the town square in tongren we'll be looking at tonga in more detail later on and this is a statue it's more or less contemporary really with the buddhica statue um on on the victoria embankment by the houses of parliament around you know 19th century statehood messages which were being constructed this time france has its um uh own statue and history of um verse and generics but in the region we're looking at today if we can focus in on the revolt of the eberone tribe so we know about this revolt led by ambirex through the documentation of his conquest by julius caesar now in 54 bc there's poor harvest and um one of caesar's legions and five cohorts are sent into the land of the baroness basically to eat their lunch the eberones here we are told um lie between the uh well in the area of the river mers and the between the nurse and the rhine in the area now that um is uh associated with tondren and maastricht and we can see that through the distribution of coin issues attributed to that tribe there's a distribution map drawn up by nico roymans and colleagues that's their inage coinage now the revolt that everyone is um so um in caesar's book five of the Caesar conquest of god he tells us about the treachery the deceit the lies the lack of mercy of anvirex um and the um tribe that he's leading they ambush and slaughter roman soldiers but um they have an upper hand to begin with but really did ambirix and uh his tribe have much of an option in this because you know basically they were being put under the roman yoke now um caesar has sweet revenge in 51 bc after he's conquered the other tribes of gold and so we've we're told about his campaign then against the eberones and literally he removes them from the map Maastricht and one of these key sites uh to this um disappearance of the eberrone um is here south at of maastricht at the caster or hill fort if you like of saint petersburg um just by the river mass we've got tom grant on the map here at a maastricht this is the area where um there's a a promontory of limestone you can see the great limestone quarry there which is still active and i think actually was being mined and quarried out in the roman period and just to the left here you can see the canal the albert canal which was cut through after the first world war um creating this sort of spit of land which has a complicated border between belgium and the netherlands so just south of that quarry in the highland there we have the caster of saint petersburg and here it is with a view from the side of the albert canal so perhaps it's an operative site a site of um central power and authority there in the center of the land associated with the eberrone this is an Old Survey Map old survey map which is published in archaeological belgica some decades ago a new survey shows that there's outer works to this enclosure as well so it's much bigger site than people have previously seen on the side of the river mers there's basically a cliff there and then on the side pointing towards belgium you have these earthwork defenses uh with a flat top plateau inside it's a bit like big bree hill fort or albury um hill fort with which it would be contemporary Hill Fort and here we see the earthworks so you can see the ditch there on the left of your screen and the top of from the ram parts here on the right that's quite a quite a rise there and of course um it's been eroded of course since the for the roman uh period and it probably had a wooden palisade at the top of these fortifications and we know that um if you if you look around the soil here you can see there's a heck of a lot of burnt and singed clay and vitrified material and burnt stones burnt flint testimony to the site that the fact that this has been a major conflagration at this site so just consider your the eberones here making your last stand or defending yourselves at the top of this hill fort the roman army is down there and the old story plays out i'm afraid a very soon the roman army will be alongside you and you'll be toast Caesars Victory and caesar will have a victory so here are some of caesar's victory uh issues you can see here with captive slaves um a trophy um his name there and glorification um and um a celebration which would receive laurels and a triumph in rome uh in normal times now we know that the New Tribes tribe disappears from the map because it's no longer mentioned in the ancient histories and new peoples are bought in to settle the borderlands um on the on the frontier of what becomes the roman empire and that solidifies itself in the decades following caesar's invasion so we have new tribal entities formed here such as the batavi uh in the area of nijmegen and the up in there in the area of the hague and delft near rotterdam i talk about those uh tribes later they you can see the tungri on the map here now they are again they're replacing the eberone in that area north of the mers or the mass now um just to pivot back to britain for a moment or two um thinking about sort of development of towns we're going to look at the development of the earliest roman town in belgium at tongren and it has a military origin that's somewhat like the military origin of colchester for instance it's not exactly a parallel but we know that underneath um modern and medieval colchester underneath the norman tower there the norman keep is the roman town and below the roman town was the fortress of the 20th legion following claudius's invasion of britain in 43 a.d so this is a much later development of course but um the precedent is for the fortress Norman Keep um here we can see the plans made by philip crummy which were published um in the uh early to mid 80s after he'd realized that the fort fortress actually underlay the modern town you can see there on the on the left the layout of the fortress of the 20th legion um the barracks etcetera headquarters building and the road to which would be going down to the thames to towards london and then um that is developed from 50 a.d to be a colony so there's this precedent of um fortresses being um turned into towns uh with the settlement of retired veterans so we know that that happens in in cultures and of course colchester becomes perhaps the second most important town arguably in roman britain it's the center of the imperial cult there which um in the temple of claudius which underlies the um the norman keep there so let's just bear that in mind and we know some of the early um uh cityscape if you like of colchester through the buddhican uh burning horizon and also claudian copies claudine copycoins so let's go and have a look at tongren then in eastern belgium so it's just to the west of maastricht and um east of brussels somewhere east of brussels there Roman Congress it lies on the roman road that goes from beloin the major roman port of the loin through to the rhine and ultimately to cologne so it's on a really important arterial route and there's a minor river that runs next which probably had barge traffic on it the yurka so here we can see a plan of roman congress this is published by alan vanderhoffen who i'll mention a few times and you can see the roman street grid pattern the grid iron pattern that we're very familiar with uh here and um just look at the scale of this site here because essentially it's about two kilometers across uh within this enclosed wall here with its bastion points all the way around there's an aqueduct that comes in from the northwest side and there's an important granary complex here an absolutely massive building there you can see there on the scale 100 meters 200 meters this is a massive building against the collection of grain from a very productive agricultural district as it is indeed today in the haspangal of eastern belgium and that grain is probably being collected there not just simply for the citizens of congress but to be exported to the roman army uh on the lee maze the german frontier which i just mentioned so it's an important um collection point and this is also um congruent develops into the first town as i mentioned of belgium the kivitas capital of the local local area so it's a really big big place we don't know where the forum basilica uh is yet but there have been a number of excavations in around the time increasingly so in recent times outside of the town walls are important burial grounds some of which have been excavated for instance by willie van vincen roy um he published an important type series of the pottery from tom grant followed up by sonia williams uh in about 2005 an important corpus of pottery types the roman period from from tongren um the late roman wall is here and i'll talk about that a bit later on so this is a tongan this is on the roman road coming in Roman Town from the west and at the the rise there you can see the tower of the basilica church of our lady we're already within the area of the roman town here the basilica church there lies really at the core of the roman town so you can get some idea if you're you know where we're looking at here on the tarmac that's some this part of the area of the roman town it's really massive Roman Town Wall this is the outer early roman town wall here and you can see the the church of our lady tower there which she has been looking at through the trees there it's so large that even modern tongren um it doesn't extend to the to the limits of it and you can see some maize growing behind that roman town wall really quite an important survival of the monuments there the the town wars are really quite well preserved comparatively speaking and uh if we go up the tower if we go up that tower of our lady the pacifica church and look to the north here you can see some excavations have been opened there beyond the town beyond the town wall and the suburb areas you can see some archaeology at work Roman Archeology here looking back towards the tower from the site we were just looking at from the tower and there's roman archaeology there so in these outer suburbs this is we would have i think in canterbury you know areas of burial kilns or pottery and tiles uh industries um farms in association now an important sequence was discovered at tongren um in the eastern side of the town some years ago and was um overseen by alan vanderhoffen and published by him he's basically the city archaeologist for the flemish heritage institute as it was then at the um uh kim hinderland site an important sequence was found there showing us the development of the town at the very bottom of the sequence um there was an orderly layout of pits and um gullies and drains and other features you can see them highlighted in black here aligned with the roman later roman road and from those features and that horizon as we see elsewhere in tongren um are augustine period um terracidulata pottery and coins and this is testimony to there being a military camp laid out here so this slides a bit fuzzy but um that's the nature of the beast so um there's a orderly road layout in the augustan period we're talking bc here with a a military camp under under tents under leather tents there and that is the the fountain head of roman thompson there's no iron age occupation there so it's it's in contrast to the situation we see at uh for instance canterbury which does have this iron age horizon below and also as we saw leticia there um um paris you know roman paris uh in its as it's uh iron age origins but not so at tongan it's the de novo site Elephant Echelon in that same area then as we move into the earlier first century a.d we see a series of houses these are long these are short long houses if you like with central post holes so if we look at this one here they have these characteristic square pits and this is to hold up the aspects of the roof there's a whole footprint of one here it's on the side the side of the building won't be really weight bearing the weight goes through the um the apex of the building and through those large timbers in those pits there and a couple of these buildings characteristically are buyer houses in other words um you have your cattle in at one end of the of the building um over winter and they keep you warm and they produce obviously a lot of manure which in springtime you can you know put out into your manure heap and in time of course it fertilizes your land now this type of building this type of structure is very readily recognized if you have these pits for the posts in alignment and they're classic they're a classic type for this area at this time they're known as the elephant echelon types after two type sites in the netherlands where they were first identified it's a bit like the pottery we have that we call aylesford swarling in kent you know two two sites um put them together and uh they become the type name so there's a reconstruction then of these elf and their current uh buildings at uh tongren of course uh this is just the ones that are known from that that site at that time um that it's not just four buildings at uh tongren it's just what we can reconstruct from the plan from that excavation area and here indeed we see one of these alpha necron buildings actually the type Alphan example from alphan excavated just before the second world war and excavators have put in some very helpful um vertical um uh stakes there just to emphasize where the post settings are for this timber uh timber building it's quite pioneering work at that at that time the buildings would have looked something like this so i'm fairly sophisticated actually and there we have that type then in tongren and uh that could be consistent with Tongren people being settled uh as we see to kind of like populate the borderlands this is what the roman agenda is at this time to populate the borderlands so they're not empty so that we you know the vacuum created by removing their barone um is is filled up um and populated uh with people who brought in from the german frontier area who were then um you know brought into the roman fold and eventually become frontier soldiers obviously the batavi the tungri are very famous um uh for their roles as auxiliary troops in the in the roman army so moving on at um the um Strat Site strat site um into the mid to later first century a.d so it's still quite early on what we call the flow into the flavian bering flavium period we have a more much more roman house um then developing in this area and that can be reconstructed to be this uh u shape here so um a remarkable sequence um and if you if you're uh attuned to um roman change you can see that a remarkable sequence seen here in the stratographic record of how things change and choices are made and perhaps um you know investment and the adoption of roman ways of doing things or the influx of more roman roman people or people with more roman culture that they wish to express now just up from that area there um is Gallo Roman Museum the gallo roman museum here and this is really a fantastic museum it was a fantastic museum uh before it was rebuilt 15 years ago and then they decided just it wasn't good enough so they they've built an even more spectacular uh one to uh house the treasures from uh the region and and the town there um and um in advance of that um uh excavations were undertaken i just point out actually that our phd student um carl goodwin who um successfully completed his phd recently he um part of his work for his phd looking at museums included work relative to um this museum in tongan they have a Urban Excavation good good website in advance of that new building of the um uh museum extension museum we see an urban excavation here in tongren and it looks very much like you might see in canterbury um with all these kind of like trenches here looks like something out of world war one because these are robber trenches where stone from the roman foundations has been mined out and quarried out in later times because just like you know much of kent um and the southeast of england there isn't a great deal of um suitable building stone to be found locally it has to be brought in as we'll see uh later on so um um uh a site that then continues into the medieval and modern period as tumblr does just like canterbury we have a lot of rubber trenches here but you can see where the the floors of various uh structures were this is one of the first excavations actually by commercial uh unit in tongren and um on the far side by the bulk there we can see petra there who's one of the co-founders of one of the earliest um archaeological digging units uh in in belgium and uh so there's pretty good Commercial Excavation preservation there actually yeah you can see a lot of a great opposite island floor sunken floor here for a hypercoast Roman Road and here's another commercial excavation here um a few years back now just north of that area and the two archaeologists there are standing on a roman gravel road there's not much hard building material around so that passes as as gravel there and you can see going down to the natural sands there you see this great streak by the roadside which is actually a roman drain roadside drain with a lot of staining in it from organic material and this roadside was collinated that's one of the strange differences i think between towns and even small towns on the near continent and britain is that um they're much more inclined to have colonnades along them and i think really they're covered walkways um they're but a major investment so that's a raymond road um now um we were lucky enough to be involved with um uh projects at tongren uh from the university so i was involved with that um excavation you've just seen uh um in advance the new um or relatively new uh museum that we've just seen the slides of but um uh we had a season working with um the flemish heritage institute at the vulneran strat site uh here which i suppose it's a sign of the times an old school building and then we can see it here was being converted into a bank and they needed the bankers needed an underground um car park and um that was um uh the reason for um major excavation in the area of the moon strat and this is one of the phases of the moonland strat site here and the uh area excavator is actually ins inside one of the insuli inside one of the they're kind of like the blocks of the gridiron street pattern so this is kind of the back quarters of properties that fronted onto roads uh on all sides of what we're looking at here so we're kind of looking at the backyard features here so typically it's um pits which some of which well cesspits water pits small mixing pits ovens uh furnaces uh rubbish pits there so a lovely bit of archaeology there with all sorts of detritus and to get uh get to get your hands into Archaeology students and there indeed are three of our um archaeology students there on the dig um and that's vanderhoffen there in the in the green helmet instructing them on what they found graham woolley who some of you will probably know did the part-time degree over at tunbridge when we had the archaeological degree at tunbridge part-time there he is there um next to alan Pot washing and there's us looking at some of our fines and in those days of course we even filled out risk assessment for junior members of the team who undertook some useful pot washing for us in fact the little lad in the front here found the best item from that season which was a stamped um samian same vessel Lead ingot now from the vermouland strat site whole series of interesting finds came along and so building building remains of course but also this lead ingot here which is intact absolutely weighs a ton just looking at it makes my muscles ache and you can see it's delightfully inscribed um but this is no ordinary lead in god because it tells us something which is really very very intriguing so if you read it it says you know for emperor and then t i caesar so um caesar at this time is tiberius t.i for tiberius um c is augustus and then we are told after the alg a v g [Music] germany and then the tec will be the location of where the mine was now livius uh in his website pages has pointed out what an important find this is because it is telling us that the romans are extracting lead and presumably also silva in germany during the period of their reign of tiberias that shouldn't be happening that shouldn't be happening because obviously the um the prospective prospect of a province in germany uh was developing until um 9 a.d when varys uh is massacred in the teuterberg forest in northwest germany not so very far from the netherlands in fact and um and then the romans retreat in terms of conventional thinking essentially to the rhine and the province of gomania is then never realized so it's telling us that for that there's something going on in germany very important at the time of tiberius obviously who's the successor to augustus so this is a very significant find from the vermouth strat Window grill tongren is very rich in archaeological finds here and you can see some of the items in the store in the yoga strat uh headquarters of the flemish heritage institute and um you can see here a bit of rusty old iron now that's no rusty old iron that of no significance because actually that is a window grill um a relatively rare find um comparatively well preserved and you can see you can see its function there and of course that would have fitted over a roman window of a town house of course the romans were absolutely paranoid about security that's why you find so many locks and keys and chests and guard dog imagery for instance also from tongren we have a beautiful Mosaic wall painting mosaic and wall painting uh evidence here and the one on the left is from the hauntstrat site um that's from a corridor actually that mosaic and a beautiful realization of a figure there in the painted wall plaster and again from the moonland strat site um a really remarkable find here of a panel from a painted room which presumably showed all the months of the year here you can see an avg in this case it's not um augustus it is of course showing us the month of august um the month of augustus's birth in fact and you can see a pastoral scene here you can see a cart with oxen being um pulled up outside the farm and the goods are being carried into the into the farm yard and the store with the fencing there so it really is a window on the past here um and um we're used to of course from time to time seeing wall mosaic uh well we're seeing floor mosaics of Floor mosaics the four seasons in britain there's quite a few from southern britain for instance uh surviving um the romans did like to show the seasons and the months uh where possible this is an extraordinary mosaic from north africa here showing that so that's a beautiful reconstruction there now just to round off with our tour of tongren um Church of Our Lady one of the most remarkable finds is um actually underlies the basilica church of our lady where excavations were carried out it um in the naughties uh directed by alan vanderhoffen um and um it goes right back to the roman church there so we think of romans as uh you know adopting christianity well actually we see that a remarkable continuity in the in the basilica church here that arose from the excavation so they were being carried out to create a new kind like undercroft uh in the in the in the um area of the of the nave there and so there's a church there dating to the late roman era and there's a succeeded by a miravinjan one going into the early medieval period and then into the later well the later early medieval period the carolingian church there and of course it's all over the line by the present church of our lady um and all these excavation evidence have been uh written up and published quite recently by um alan hoffman you know in a series of publications so um it's really quite remarkable um continuity there it really does raise the question of what underlies some of our churches um in and around and uh and cathedrals um it's a it's an extraordinary prospect so uh as very often actually um dutch and belgium archaeology can lead the way very good with their methodologies now um one of the features of this uh Burial Mounds area around tongren um and um central uh flanders are tumuli mounds burial mounds dating to the um earlier roman period now of course in britain we associate um barrows with the bronze age perhaps to some extent um to the saxon period as well uh round barrows but in the roman period um they're quite a feature of this landscape and they're quite mighty and it is thought that they are the burial mounds of the rich burgers um who lived in the in the villas very often there are adjacent to roman roads as well see so this is one um uh just outside of tongara near tahersh um at um uh guccifan um there and this has been excavated this one and reconstituted it's protected behind this fence and you can see the rich farmland there there are a lot of pears and fruits there so it's a bit like the area of kent in many ways here's the Typical Burial Mounds burial mound being reconstituted so you want to know what was found inside it i know you're bursting to find out well a typical this is a typical assemblage from one of these tumuli maybe a cremation burial um dating as i say between the sort of flavian period in the end of the second century typically and they're well furnished with vessels to do with serving and eating food and drinking so um uh platters and bowls and dishes the same in where uh flagons as you can see here one in glass one in pottery fine drink fine drinking vessels of pottery as well in this case it caused a lamp there in the front and actually a glass beaker at the back um with that sort of polychrome effect there so um really quite quite luxurious this is typical of um the mounds when they've been excavated to produce assemblages like this and uh several of those have been published are in the museum now if we move a little bit to west Three Burial Mounds along the roman road from tongren uh we come to this roadside settlement or small town at tienen um and alongside that road we have uh something that looks like it should be out of tolkheim or the rings or the hobbit or something here because here we have three burial mounds um as you approach um roman tienen uh at the grimmed uh site it's quite a famous site in belgium and uh these were excavated you can see here they've been shown of their growth here this is a very recent um municipal photograph in the background here and they're sort of set off and displayed and you can go up and visit them now as you can see here the one on the west and that's on the right here was excavated um decades ago and that produced a similar type of assemblage but actually richer than what we've just seen and in amongst that was actually this cameo of augustus um which have survived superbly i've got color slide of it but i think in some ways the um the black and white is is is more attractive so you can see the augustus is portrayed there this is a signal telling us that someone is being buried there this is probably an heirloom because it's probably late um you know date the assemblies dates to later than a period of grasses they are they are hearkening back to a heritage perhaps where their forepairs had a strong connection with roman authority perhaps they're in the red soldiers as auxiliaries in the roman army and then subsequently they um you know they're elite people who can afford these sorts of graves um so it's a really quite a sort of remarkable testimony to the adoption of roman ways and roman authority roman hierarchy and um to come back to britain we see exactly the same thing remarkably at the lexton tumulus lexington tumulus just outside of colchester that was excavated in the um 1920s and from that assemblage of course came this medallion of augustus and the lexington tumulus dates to around about 10 bc um so it's in a contemporary with augustus um and so this is a contemporary burial again in this case of course in iron age britain um suggesting that there's that diplomatic or um political social cultural connection between iron age britain the eastern kingdom as it would be at this time and and rome you know um decades of course um before the claudian invasion so there's a remarkable parallel there with these barrows or joomla if you like with similar similar finds in them one of the curiosities of course of um east kent The Roman Road is that it does have barrows itself of the roman period and so um it is thought that underneath the mound at danger um the um the early urban medieval um compound there uh if you like the molten bailey um there's probably a roman tumulus there and the excavations in the vicinity here in the uh area developed for some of the christchurch buildings has identified the footprint of what's interpreted as another barrow and of course if you go down stone street the roman road from canterbury to limb southward county you see here on this uh something i've just taken from the heritage website of kcc we can see on stone street here we have tumulus farm so just by the roadside there where that gold star is tumulus and so does that mean that there was an iron age um that that's iron age um mound um and that the roman road we know is stone street is actually a prehistoric trackway with an iron age burial or possibly a bronze age burial next to it or is it indeed roman with a roman barrow next to it i think probably the um it's conventionally interpreted as all entirely roman but you know perhaps we need to test some of these possibilities this brings me to actually the work of one of our phd students marlene martins who did a a phd co-supervised by myself and niko reumens it was published and uh we're really based on her extensive excavations and and thorough analysis of work one of the suburbs at tienen that she excavated one of these um joomla in advance of an industrial um uh you know an industrial park being developed there and so these are some of the um figures taken from her phd thesis so i did want to make a lot of acknowledgment to her um superb phd now moving on we've talked about um tonga we've talked about the burials and let's move into the countryside a bit more this is a map showing kind of like environmental possibilities um soils and agriculture here and it's one of nico royman's maps and um so with the area of tongren he in this productive zone of um central flanders here he calls that the villa landscape we have a lot of villas in that area there and those the people who are probably erecting those um barrows now to the north of that of course this is the low these are the low countries of course you have um much damper wetter lower lying soils um there which are not so well trained so they're not really um conducive to arable agriculture and growing the grain that was going into those granary that granaries or at um thompson there's a similar granary actually at tenant and in that area it's much more conducive as you'll know too if you think about friesian cattle and dutch cheese um i mean that's a little bit of a cliche but this is much more lower lying land is really much more suited to pasture for horses and cattle um in that northern zone there and these are some of the farm sites that nikko had logged on these these polygons are areas we think are associated with particular uh particular tribal entities so it'll be the target there and the tongari here so let's have a look at um some of these sites in the countryside so we circle around green there and just uh further up north of maastricht there on the top right um we um find the site the exhausted site um that was exposed by dirk pauls at near har reckon um and here here at this site you can see a sequence um there of timber buildings you can see a the footprint of an alpha equine type building there um at the top of the of the plan there so that's presumably the the iron age farm of the first century lady approximately and then it's replaced by a roman stone founded structure there um a villa with its bath suite there and you can see the hype of course there so it's um it very much parallels what perhaps we see at fernand for instance in in kent where uh round houses iron age round houses are paid replaced by um you know a monumental structure that um has been conventionally interpreted as as a villa and of course we see we see uh roundhouses underneath um various other villas um across uh southern uh and central britain and of course canterbury architectural trust found that to be the case underneath the um villa bitter sequence at foxton and a similar case actually at who glue Whobloon here in the area of that cattle country and uh horse country that we've just been looking at very suitable of course for supplying beef and leather to the roman army on the frontier and also horses and fodder to the to the roman army that type of landscape now the um the site at who bloon the roman period site at hublin here um to the um uh to the west southwest of neyman uh was excavated by um a very celebrated figure in the historiography of um dutch archaeology and that was yan slofstra it was quite a charismatic um uh archaeologist uh excavated in the early 1980s and the site here this is an early plan um and it shows these long houses they're kind of like a development of the alpha necron type um you can see the footprint this is what these kind of like blocks are these are the footprints of where these long houses were and there was a couple there's a sequence of two underneath an area that is then developed into a villa so we have that sort of similar sequences into this time it's enclosed within a an enclosure there so it would look as if there's kind of like a there was once a central uh house or a tribal leader or somewhere there and they had kind of like have a zone around their um compound which is not intruded on by other buildings um and um slostra's work also coincided with a metal detector is finding two fragments of a really important find here a roman military discharge diploma it's basically um what you're given in bronze by the roman army when you retire from being an auxiliary soldier it tells you you have gained roman citizenship and your marriage to someone who is not a roman citizen is recognized as legal and your offspring will be roman citizens as well and so you've done perhaps 25 years in the service of the roman army and one of these would go up be nailed up in in rome and you'd keep the other copy so this being found at hoogloon uh slofstra kind of like saw kind of like a shift to romanization he saw that their people were being recruited to the roman army as auxiliary soldiers in this area of the tavi tribe and then perhaps someone comes back from their service in the roman army they've got money they've got roman ideas and um they're coming you know they might be the um you know the first son of the tribal uh chief or something and they can like invest in in producing a roman villa um they are replacing their timber timber building um what we know now is it's probably not quite as simple as that now in 2014 2015 roy mans ton dirks and um um what's his name uh [Music] hiddenk um forgot his first name um wrote up the uh the the site um uh at um who bloomed at um yeah had not um hidden uh wrote up the site uh that had been excavated there and what they found actually was these um these long houses weren't all contemporary um so what's actually happening you've got a small community here and these buildings kind of replaced uh every sort of generation or a couple of generations with another one so you see lots of these the footprints where all the buildings were but only two or three of them were standing at any one time some of them actually quite roman in form and this is what this uh this main villa building would have looked like so it's really spectacular it goes through a sequence of of development and investment so someone who is really very rich and making money out of this landscape and investing in a villa form here and um the conventional interpretation by um romans and dirks is that this is from raising cattle to supply to the tongren and to the roman army um since we're looking at um Hatriani non-town sites if you like the port site at forum hatriani can be briefly be mentioned and this is very interesting site because it's on a canal made by the romans uh in the mid 1st century a.d and kind of gets town status under hadrian and it's in the area of uh well between the hague and rotterdam north of uh delft um in fact it was the site of the first um formal excavations uh in the history of um dutch archaeology in the in the 1820s this is an excavation that was undertaken much more recently of course here by mark driessen and his colleagues uh here it's all been published and really we see the waterfront here we see a war frontage here uh being excavated in these sands you can see the preserved timbers of the water frontage um there for the canal by the canal and behind that you have had warehouses so with the eye of faith we move from those stakes to to that in fact um of course one of the highlights of dutch archaeology and also in belgium too actually and in the cologne areas the five love river craft of the roman period quite a few are known in fact mark thinks that one of these burnt down at this location because he's found ship nails um in that excavation and probably lost cargo as well so here we see a reconstruction view of the um cabello canal here it's named after the um roman general who who commissioned its construction in the mid first century a.d and we see here a an amphora which came from those excavations which we've just seen that um this amphora is a prized wine outfit because it's a type which would have come from crete it's come all the way from crete Beer production and then another sort of flag waving for one of our phd students julie van kerkov who is um again i'm jointly supervising her with nikko reuments and she wrote up the poetry from forum hatriani excavations and it's one of um some of the slides from um the material dating to the um uh and tonight into the third century um pottery to do with drinking and the transport of liquids in fact that's one of the very interesting things about this part of the world you have a type of amphora called the skelt valley anthra and that is associated we think with the production of beer and um sadly in britain in the roman period we don't really have any m free which were associated with um beer production it would be quite exciting if we if we did because obviously their testimony to trade and consumption julie actually has uh rip for her phd she's writing up the pottery from the hoogloon site that we've just been looking at [Music] moving on moving on um another one of Water altars the joys of the archaeology of this um uh area of the roman period are the um altars that have come from uh the water world which is zealand um there north of middleburg uh in the skelt estuary there this sort of water waterland as it were and these have come from two locations um domberg on the north sea coast and just into the interior there of one of those fingers of water there at collins flat um and these were originally found after storm uh storm surges um in the mid 17th century and then again in 1970 with dredging and i ran about fragments from two or whole examples of about 200 alters have come from these locations and they show us the local goddess the hellenia now if we think about the context here by the by the north sea um things begin to make sense so she's a protector goddess here she looks a little bit like a female pope in this um uh 17th century illustration you can see here a um a scallop shell here and the prower boat in a more sort of like aquatic type idea and she's obviously in a classical setting there with company accompanied by a dog and fruits as you often have within her um you know mother goddess but that maritime narrative is seen here um in several of these altars so she's really a protective goddess that you give thanks to for safe passage across the um southern north sea uh if you're crossing to britain or if you're coming up the coast from gall france um or in anticipation of a journey and so it's no surprise actually that we have no less than four altars dedicated to people who are traitors in salt for instance probably sought from the area around calais the monarchian roman period and uh three of those are actually um dealing that salt to to cologne down the down the rhine so uh this is one of the treasures of uh dutch archaeology and it came came from this uh this sort of uh un pre-possessing setting so you never really know what's uh uh uh going to turn up so here we are at the coast of bloomberg uh in december uh looking across towards the area of britain there it looks slightly uh inhospitable i'd like to say that that attracted digger there is looking for more alters but sadly it's not it's to do with that pipe work that you can see just by the uh the break of the waves there so that's uh infrastructure not archaeology but that's the setting of where um a lot of the corpus of these waters came from so anyway it marries uh marries up with uh what we see in more latter-day The Virgin Mary context of course so here's a depiction of our lady um the virgin mary here from the basilica church at buloin uh there if you go up into the citadel area and you go into the um church of our lady there you can see um uh on the wall da fixio's on the wall saying thank you to the virgin mary in a sort of catholic way uh for um answering your prayers and for safe passage so um uh you know nothing there's nothing new under the sun Temple of the Goddess indeed the um at the cotton splat site uh temple was reconstructed uh that you can go and visit and also a virtual tour there of the nehelenia as she's called goddess Oldenburg that's on the opening ceremony now as we move to towards the end of the talk here we've moved the later roman period i'm going to mention the site at um um oldenburg here which i think i've uh seems i've left out the um l uh um no no that's right that's all bug uh ordenberg uh here on the um belgium coast um and this is really uh celebrating the work of the um flemish heritage institute again and particularly sophie van hoot so um some of you have been talking about the belgium coast you'll know um austend you'll know that it's um uh very built up these days and enjoys that sort of seascape so this is a line the current line here depicted in red of the current coast and all the land behind that has been reclaimed of course it's the polder lands of flanders but in roman times um a finger of drier land um uh met up with a water channel uh oldenburg and as a saxon period shaw fort was developed there well in fact actually there's an older pedigree there because it dates from the second century a.d a bit like um recalva and brancaster do in britain so it's an early establishment of a military settlement there on this finger of land Dry land this is a dry land there and it's known from burials and the fortifications there Roman Fort so that's the um uh the um morphology of the landscape now and you can see superimposed on that is the position of the of the roman fort protecting that inlet and guarding the coast and the graves there the cemeteries are in these you can see picked out uh here i'll bring your attention to um uh the football field here because we're going to revisit that football field in a moment now a series of important excavations are undertaken at the site jacqueline up here in the northwest corner and also uh in advance of a supermarket being built in the southwest corner so uh here in the northwest corner um this is a photograph taken i suppose in well about 2004 um this this these buildings have now been uh redeveloped there um there's further excavation but you can you can't what's going on here you can't really make out what's going on but um actually it's the corner of the fort here and what's happened is that um the stone has been taken away and reused i think in the medieval period there's testimony to it being um mined out and quarried out there's a very small stump of um war was found by professor mertens in the 1960s but you can see where the line of the wall was by the detritus of stones the stone robbers left behind and we can see that there these are the small um scree stones that weren't collected up so it shows us where the the robbing took place of the fall wall here so it's something that's very common to us of course it's happening in belgium as as in britain now the excavations here by sophie van hoot um revealed an important sequence to the um the fourth from the second century uh right up into the fifth century here we see one of the phases here and this pink building is quite um unusual within the fort because um it is evidently a hospital we have some forts with um hospitals inside them it has small quarters it had decorated rooms with wall plaster on it some bigger rooms at the end it may have been two stories and there's a shrine in in the middle there for dedications you know for um well-being there um so um this is just one of the phases uh within the forge found a remarkable uh remarkable sequence uh here's one of the wells here the late roman wells from ordenberg that she and her team excavated it's double lined um and so you can see the the proper well shaft through the middle here it's filled up with interesting detritus and environmental remains and you can see the preservation of the timbers just like we saw at um forum hadriani where they're below the kind like the water line as it were so dendro dates were taken on those and the outer skin here and of course you can see a different filling now why it was double lined was because you don't want to be uh you don't want your well to fill up with sand uh and you want to be drinking clean water so what the romans did and what was discovered by the environmental analysis was that um in um in the um area the cavity between the two um wood surrounds was stuffed with moss stuff moss collected locally and it was a filteration system here are some of the fines from one of the open days on display in the open days here at the uh ordenberg and uh some of you members of ks will remember uh that sophie came and gave a talk at the university uh years back before she even started her phd and you can see uh her good self there and anthony ward who many of you will will remember he may even be tuned in this evening and she gave a very well attended talk here at the university and so sophie went on to conduct a phd again it was a joint uh supervised phd it was a collaboration between the university of kent and a free university in brussels and she can successfully complete it and she got two phds because you've got one from the free university in brussels and one from the university of kent you can see that uh this is just some of the samian we're laid out on the table here you may recognize this lady here he's known to us in kent very well and here is sophie giving a talk at the inaugural um uh kind of like event at the new museum at odenberg where she designed the the cabinets and layout here of the um of the museum that's now under the directorship of our colleague uh vaulted des who i'll um mention later on and here's sophie getting her phd actually in the summer of 2019 in the in the days when we could actually meet together there you can just about see um she's receiving her her scroll um uh in the summer uh graduation ceremony there now um i make no apology for these um fuzzy fuzzy images here so it's it's always good in an archaeological talk to mention geophysical survival and one of the collaborations we did with um valdez i just mentioned at the museum and and sophie was geophysical survey around audenberg with resistivity and magnetometry and you might recognize some of this students as they were then with the lloyd balsworth here and they were delighted to have completed their survey of various green areas around audenberg including the football pitch here where they are celebrating uh either finishing their work or someone's someone scored a goal and valtter actually has published a book just a couple of months back now which developed out for his phd on the very really important book in english it is uh on the north sea defenses and channel defenses um which is a kind like going to be a standard go-to book on the saxon shaw sequence and um this just looks like a bit of us an old spear here on the front but actually it's the tip of a lance that came from the excavations at ordenberg and you can see there's a nail here and there's some fabric scientific analysis revealed fabric and textile remains here so there would have been a standard to this it would have been a fluttering waving um flag or pennant there at the end of this lance with the mounted cavalry of the late roman army that would have been patrolling out of sites like audenberg right to round off um what happens in the very end of the roman period so we go back to tongren go back to tongren the major site there and as i mentioned the outer town wall here of the early roman period is really quite expensive but there's a contraction a typical contraction the late roman period late roman towns are not like early roman towns and they typically have defenses for a sort of inner sanctum or in a citadel area and that's what happens at tongren so it remains an important place we see defenses going up also at the roman center river crossing at maastricht and we have a statue here obviously it's a modern statue of um the emperor julian uh dating to the later fourth century uh here julian the apostate and before he becomes emperor he's um he's in this region defending it from frankish invaders germanic invaders and there's some people who settle to the north of tongren in the roman in roman lands who are frankish germanic and white hands rather go to war with them they get incorporated into um the roman province they're giving that land to to defend it um so that's why there's a statue of um uh julianis as he is there emperor emperor julian uh there in tongren it's about sort of like defending the frontier in the late roman period the frontier in its sort of like roman early roman heyday was all down the rhine here but we see something in this area that we also know happens in kent along the coast and eastern kent and in east anglia um there seems to be depopulation and sites are abandoned rural sites in particular are abandoned so we know um keith parfait often mentions how villas are abandoned in late roman kent particularly around the shores there's a can i can contraction and we see the same thing happening uh in this region as well so the um area of the um uh canna uh up here as i mentioned earlier on the area forum hadriani between what's now you know rotterdam and and the hague um that seems to be kind of like you know vacant land in the fourth century um so there's kind of like a a retreat from the frontier perhaps because of um possibly um less people around the threat of the frontier so um we see town walls going up this is a reconstruction at reems of course in eastern france just to give you an idea of what these town defenses this time they have looked like often with artillery platforms on the bastions and just to round off um you know um this is a again this is something that really needs um much more further investigation but um we basically see people taking to the hills at this time of uncertainty an example of that seems to be the site that was excavated some years ago and published in archaeological beltica um at um uh in the old dance center of the ordinaire um south of namur [Music] and this higher land here becomes a citadel area uh on top of that rock basically this is from the art um archaeology in uh in uh parkland belgica publication so um this would be really the frontier zone subject to um a periodic raiding from germanic peoples so by the late third century the population of villas seems to have kind of taken flight so there's an earlier villa in the lower lying area here as you can see on this google map here which i've overlaid the location of it and then that seems to um be eclipsed it's abandoned and people take to this sort of citadel refuge sort of latter day hill fort if you like at the top of that rock that we've just been looking at there it has these massive defensive earthwork rock cup defenses around it here these ditches and then a a skirting wall around it here so um perhaps this is where the rope the villa goes to the people who you know the descendants of their people who owned the villa take to this area it's been excavated you can see it's got coins there dating to the end of the fourth century so it is occupied at this time this time of uncertainty it's um it's very well built as you can see here with this um roman stone work here with the um tile courses and uh an important assemblage of late um singing if you like argon wear terracidulata their forms with that characteristic um uh roulette roller stamping on them so um there's posh pottery here um going on into the very end of the roman period probably into the fifth century and uh this is my final slide actually so we go back to ordenberg and um so what's happening at oldenburg the saxon drawful well one of the interesting discoveries of sophie's work uh at audenberg is that in a way the site is never really abandoned um the army unit there seems to be almost abandoned it remains a bastion into the early fifth centuries you can tell that by the argonne pottery there that we've just been looking at from the site in the ardennes um so it's still being is getting us occasional supplies so it's probably network still with a roman military political organization but it's like an island of roman-ness um there on the north sea coast um looking out um you know into into the north sea of infinity uh and as the as the dark ages as we used to call them come on and it kind of again eventually loses its romanness i think that's me done thanks ever so much steve that was a whistle-stop tour of refrigerator with some um intriguing um similarities and and differences as well um between what we've come to know as the roman period in kent and uh and what was happening across the channel um the the most interesting i mean there's something there for everybody really because you're covering such an extensive period um but looking at the relationships between the the the uh local tribes um at the beginning of the period um one of the interesting things you said about the tribes replacing the tribes uh or tribes replacing those um original tribes in on the frontiers um is that something that we see replicated in in britain that's a that's a very interesting question because um we don't we haven't really had that research uh narrative here um and um we don't have we don't i suppose have the inscriptional evidence for that um and it's never really been a question that has been on the on the on the on the landscape map if you like we know that there's almost certainly a reorganization of of settlement once the romans arrive after all a lot of veterans are settled in in the area around you know lincoln and gloucester and colchester so it'd be highly disruptive and i'm sure that the same sort of things happened that peop that peoples were moved around um to some extent and areas were settled but we don't kind of like see the same we haven't seen the same sort of pattern on the interpretation that we see there in in in the netherlands but probably some of those areas like the coastal area that i was mentioning uh they probably have very low i mean there's there's there's very little trace of people living in that area um between say you know what is now rotterdam um and and the hague uh before the roman period so um uh it's kind of like becomes colonized if you like um but that might tell us about something about those you know this the nature of the conquest in britain that um you know that um tribes weren't um weren't completely destroyed or wiped off wiped off the map uh and that um that the uh certainly the south and east of england that the roman peace was quite quickly um established you know um the voodoo can episode aside yeah that's an interesting um thought because of course um there are many reasons why there may have been that replaced um on those borders in europe because of the on the continent rather because of the uh either the tries were completely dispersed um or more accommodating tribes were put in their place and uh we know there'd been a certain amount of um leg work done prior to the claudia invasions in terms of establishing relationships establishing who was on whose side and probably before the the actual invasion by claudia um so um that may be that that we that was already kind of settled by that stage to some degree what do you think i think it's a very good i think it's a very good point actually and um you know obviously the you know roman had a template for invading britain you know for decades before claudius uh you know actioned it and they knew a heck of a lot about about about britain beforehand we can see that because of you know where they went to to get their resources very early on um so um yeah that's a that's a valid valid point where it's like you know um caesar traveled um a great distance in a short period of time um you know and and met people who you know had various um you know interactions with the romans and attitudes it was a very checkered reaction to um the roman invasion of gore so it kind of like there wasn't that kind of backstory of diplomacy and and connect uh connectivity uh connections that there will have been a uh softening up you might call it you know as a shorthand in britain um that happened in britain um you know there wasn't the time for that to develop on the continent with um with caesar's uh conquests i mean you know obviously there is a there is a narrative that says that um you know that uh you know there was romanization before the conquest of britain you know that was a that was a narrative that was around you know the latter part of the 20th century it's still still got some uh legs in it i think okay well we we've um i would encourage anybody who's who's watching to comment on the live q a there's a speech bubble on the uh in the corner i can't i don't know which corner it is because these things get reversed but one of the corners um and uh we have a comment actually from somebody about uh hugeland and uh it's coming on the roman army discharge badge um yeah do you know of any examples in britain oh yes there's um there are there they're kind of something that's very well studied by you need to kind of google up margaret margaret roxanne um for for that um i mean obviously they're metal so they've got some chance of surviving in some cases uh but they are they are um they're well they're well studied uh they're well studied types yeah also val maxfield would be someone who you know wrote about those but particularly margaret roxanne one of the things that i was incredibly impressed i mean obviously i i um studied um at the university of kent in the classic psychology you're one of my lecturers i was fortunate enough to listen to you talking every um every week first three years so um the one of the things that i'm quite impressed with is the number of researchers that you have working in in continental europe on phd programs and something i think ken is very proud of his connections to the european european um centers of academia do you want me to comment on that well i mean yeah i um i think it's not quite i don't think the universities quite recognized how connected connected we are and every now and again there's kind of like you know there's a new initiative like the university has one now to um connect up with our university partners in the near continent but actually in in archaeology we and classics we were i mean that's that was uh the resonant for for my appointment to um to to some extent was to to make these um connections with with the continent um and uh particularly to bolster m a uh provision here so but i don't always have that that interest um so uh several of us have had some connections it's just that um it's also become an area of interest and teaching for me as well i mean it was actually before i i came to kent and that's probably why i got the post but i think we under we undersell it um we undersell it so i thought there was probably an opportunity to mention some of the names we also had a couple of really interesting um visiting phd students who were doing their phds elsewhere but came here for a term or longer as visiting um research associates research fellows and one of those was vince van tienen who has went gone on to have a very distinguished career he was here in in 2013. he knows a lot about for instance crossbow broaches uh but uh he has a very good um scholar in all sorts of fields to do with the roman period um and also uh barbara borges i didn't mention her i didn't get a chance to mention her uh she was here for two or three years actually she's finishing her her phd although um uh that was a registration in the free university of brussels um she was here for several years um you know um uh really with our tuition um although um you know very established scholar she is now [Music] okay um well jillian's commented you might see that yourself i've just published it that she's uh giving giving her a lot to think about and something else actually is now we're we've got our red amber and green travel areas that you've given a lot of inspiration to to me personally and i'm sure to a lot of other people to tour some of these sites in europe um and um um i'll certainly be sort of thinking about that as a as a future trip myself when we were allowed to get out of the of the country so um thank you so much for giving us so much time today um and for uh committing this to uh to video so that we can share it with the rest of the the world on our youtube channel um and um i wish you a lot for your terms wrapping up now but uh wish you luck for next year with your student intake at the university of kent and we've got we're lucky enough to have two fantastic universities in canterbury um with archaeology programs that are still going despite what's uh happening with funding for that so the sort of disciplines so um thank you very much for that and uh thanks to um everyone for um watching the the the steve's talk and uh for supporting us in that way um anybody who's watching who isn't a member of the kas and please um join the supporters by joining um or even just interact with us and send us messages or interact with us on social media and thanks again steve it's been fantastic having you here um any um any last words on them on any particular places that you'd recommend visiting well well well i mean um the belgium is very well known for its beers of course so well that's a very good reason to travel uh um tongan actually is very faint it's a kind of like very genteel place actually it's um it's it's well known for um not only having defense most fantastic museum but also um for um uh antiques there's always a there's a sunday antiques fair there which i presume will be up and running again soon uh but if you go to the netherlands they've got they've got tremendous museums and facilities there they make a great they make a fantastic uh uh you know advert of their heritage for instance a great museum at night megan okay um i've just got another couple of comments that here that i will go through with you i know i've said already said goodbye but there's some some interesting stuff coming through um just just one last thing given the waterlogged lower levels of the sights andrew bell's asking this have you shown me the slide are there any equivalents of the vinderland of tablets that's a very very good question um very good question not that i know off no but you would think there would be i said i mean you know that could there be could there have been some of those tablets down the well um no they didn't get there i suppose that i mean one of the i mean there's a lot preserved at vindalanda um and um what i think part of the explanation for vindalanda uh is that they were kind of like burning some of the old records as i understand it um there and some of them got burnt and some of them never got burnt and those that didn't get burnt you know got preserved um you know to uh to cut cut matters short so it was it was kind of like an uh a process that um had not been completed um that you know a number of aspects came together for an extraordinary find because there are um tablets from elsewhere or parts of tablets you know from elsewhere on the bloomberg site is is one of them um no that's a very very good point uh that you would probably expect expect more of that uh probably someone to ask about that is probably tom dirks at um at the free university in amsterdam but i don't know of any striking ones myself that uh that i could mention well maybe we need somebody else to take a phd in the area um just to see if we can get some more of those um water preserved um artifacts there okay well thanks again steve um it's been an absolute pleasure as always that's good and uh we'll um we'll speak again soon we'll have another trusty talk coming up next month and um she's going to be um our curator um honorary curator um elizabeth blanning so and she's going to be joined by our finally as an officer for kent who is joe armett but thanks again to everyone for watching live and watching on youtube and please support us thanks again good night cheers [Music] you