Public invited in to abandoned town for last time to discover this year's best archaeological finds as excavation comes to an end
Professor Mike Fulford at Silchester. Fulford said: 'The site is being closed even if I have to take my little spade and spend the winter backfilling it myself.' Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
Much as it must have been 1,400 years ago, the last inhabitants of Silchester, the most enigmatic Roman town in Britain, are packing their bags and preparing to leave for ever. This time, however, those departing are archeologists, and they go with the mystery of why a major town was abandoned in the sixth century still unsolved.
"Omnibus rebus bonis finis est," one student archaeologist has written in felt tip on the plywood wall of the ramshackle shower block: all good things come to an end.
Silchester, on a low hill near Basingstoke in Hampshire, was first dug up by the Victorians. For the last 18 years staff and students from Reading University have excavated Insula IX, a single block of the wider site, producing sensational finds, including the oldest olive stone ever found in Britain – from the Iron Age, revealing the previously unimagined fact that some people in Britain were eating olives before the Roman invasion – and a penknife intricately carved with a pair of mating dogs.
Dogs became one of the many puzzles: finds included little bones with flay marks indicating a flourishing industry in puppy fur cloaks, as well as ritual burials of ravens and a cat stuffed into a jar, the bones of a tiny lap dog and of another dog found standing up, still on guard after 2,000 years.
The public is invited in for one last open day on Saturday, when there will be tours, craft demonstrations, and displays of this year's best finds, including a red pottery bowl as immaculate as if made yesterday, a massive thumb ring with an enamel inlay, and a copper alloy bottle opener, which proved to be the folding handle of a Roman soldier's skillet – apart from the decoration, almost identical to a first world war mess tin handle.
And then it's over. There's a week of tidying up, and another week or two to clear out, but the excavation of Insula IX, on which more than 4,500 archaeology students from Reading University and across the world have learned their trade, is finished. A small mountain, a spoil heap estimated at 6,000 tonnes, stands waiting to be backfilled into the site.
"Nothing left there except gravel and natural geology," said professor Mike Fulford, who has been excavating at the site for 40 years, and leading the annual training excavations since 1997. "Nothing of any interest whatsoever."
In the 19th century the site, Roman Calleva Atrebatum, produced magnificent finds now on display at Reading museum, including superb mosaics and one of the most famous Roman finds in Britain, a gilt bronze eagle which inspired the novel The Eagle of the Ninth, and the film The Eagle.
The Reading team went back in to reopen the Victorian trenches and see what they'd missed: most of the story, it turned out.
Fulford set out to solve two puzzles: when the town was built and by whom, and when it was abandoned and why. He's pretty sure he cracked the first one. The town was at its height in the Iron Age, in the century before the Romans arrived in AD 43 – bringing with them, as every school child used to be taught, town planning and the first towns.
He believes it was founded around 50BC by Commius, a leader of the Atrobates tribe, who fell out with his Roman allies and had to leave Gaul sharpish. On his defensible hilltop, near the navigable rivers Kennet and Thames, with neat building plots along well-made roads and alleys, his people were trading in grain, metalwork, hunting dogs, and almost certainly slaves, to pay for luxury imports including jewellery, glassware, delicate pottery from France, olive oil and wine.
In the last week the university team finished excavating the outline of what may be the largest Iron Age hall ever found in Britain, 8m by 50m, a massive building which could even have been the home of Commius. They also found a beautiful Iron Age brooch deliberately deposited in the foundations.
The first Roman buildings were light military structures, and within 20 years the town was burnt down, possibly in the Boudiccan rebellion. It was rebuilt, with splendid civic buildings, but was never as large or as prosperous again.
A new trench opened this year on another section of the site showed the same pattern. What had been a large and imposing Roman building, with a colonnade, and a tile roof stamped with the emblem of the emperor Nero who may have paid for it, was abandoned in less than a generation, the site levelled and never re-used.
In the sixth century the town was very deliberately abandoned: the many wells were tumbled in, and the land gradually reverted to green fields, the buried town marked only by the jagged outline of massive walls which once formed a 1.5-mile circuit.
Why? Fulford said: "I suspect it was squeezed out between the rise of the rival kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex, but why was the site never re-used? I don't know. It remains a mystery."
Now it's over, he says – absolutely, definitely over. He wants to get back to his quiet office and start writing up the mammoth project, a task which will take years.
"That site is being closed even if I have to take my little spade and spend the winter backfilling it myself," he declared. And then he looked thoughtfully towards his new hole in the ground, and the lines of that giant Roman building running away under the undisturbed green fields, and added: "Though I wouldn't mind another quick look at that one day."
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/aug/08/silchester-roman-town-closes-natural-geology-archaeological-excavation-ends
"Omnibus rebus bonis finis est," one student archaeologist has written in felt tip on the plywood wall of the ramshackle shower block: all good things come to an end.
Silchester, on a low hill near Basingstoke in Hampshire, was first dug up by the Victorians. For the last 18 years staff and students from Reading University have excavated Insula IX, a single block of the wider site, producing sensational finds, including the oldest olive stone ever found in Britain – from the Iron Age, revealing the previously unimagined fact that some people in Britain were eating olives before the Roman invasion – and a penknife intricately carved with a pair of mating dogs.
Dogs became one of the many puzzles: finds included little bones with flay marks indicating a flourishing industry in puppy fur cloaks, as well as ritual burials of ravens and a cat stuffed into a jar, the bones of a tiny lap dog and of another dog found standing up, still on guard after 2,000 years.
The public is invited in for one last open day on Saturday, when there will be tours, craft demonstrations, and displays of this year's best finds, including a red pottery bowl as immaculate as if made yesterday, a massive thumb ring with an enamel inlay, and a copper alloy bottle opener, which proved to be the folding handle of a Roman soldier's skillet – apart from the decoration, almost identical to a first world war mess tin handle.
And then it's over. There's a week of tidying up, and another week or two to clear out, but the excavation of Insula IX, on which more than 4,500 archaeology students from Reading University and across the world have learned their trade, is finished. A small mountain, a spoil heap estimated at 6,000 tonnes, stands waiting to be backfilled into the site.
"Nothing left there except gravel and natural geology," said professor Mike Fulford, who has been excavating at the site for 40 years, and leading the annual training excavations since 1997. "Nothing of any interest whatsoever."
In the 19th century the site, Roman Calleva Atrebatum, produced magnificent finds now on display at Reading museum, including superb mosaics and one of the most famous Roman finds in Britain, a gilt bronze eagle which inspired the novel The Eagle of the Ninth, and the film The Eagle.
The Reading team went back in to reopen the Victorian trenches and see what they'd missed: most of the story, it turned out.
Fulford set out to solve two puzzles: when the town was built and by whom, and when it was abandoned and why. He's pretty sure he cracked the first one. The town was at its height in the Iron Age, in the century before the Romans arrived in AD 43 – bringing with them, as every school child used to be taught, town planning and the first towns.
He believes it was founded around 50BC by Commius, a leader of the Atrobates tribe, who fell out with his Roman allies and had to leave Gaul sharpish. On his defensible hilltop, near the navigable rivers Kennet and Thames, with neat building plots along well-made roads and alleys, his people were trading in grain, metalwork, hunting dogs, and almost certainly slaves, to pay for luxury imports including jewellery, glassware, delicate pottery from France, olive oil and wine.
In the last week the university team finished excavating the outline of what may be the largest Iron Age hall ever found in Britain, 8m by 50m, a massive building which could even have been the home of Commius. They also found a beautiful Iron Age brooch deliberately deposited in the foundations.
The first Roman buildings were light military structures, and within 20 years the town was burnt down, possibly in the Boudiccan rebellion. It was rebuilt, with splendid civic buildings, but was never as large or as prosperous again.
A new trench opened this year on another section of the site showed the same pattern. What had been a large and imposing Roman building, with a colonnade, and a tile roof stamped with the emblem of the emperor Nero who may have paid for it, was abandoned in less than a generation, the site levelled and never re-used.
In the sixth century the town was very deliberately abandoned: the many wells were tumbled in, and the land gradually reverted to green fields, the buried town marked only by the jagged outline of massive walls which once formed a 1.5-mile circuit.
Why? Fulford said: "I suspect it was squeezed out between the rise of the rival kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex, but why was the site never re-used? I don't know. It remains a mystery."
Now it's over, he says – absolutely, definitely over. He wants to get back to his quiet office and start writing up the mammoth project, a task which will take years.
"That site is being closed even if I have to take my little spade and spend the winter backfilling it myself," he declared. And then he looked thoughtfully towards his new hole in the ground, and the lines of that giant Roman building running away under the undisturbed green fields, and added: "Though I wouldn't mind another quick look at that one day."
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/aug/08/silchester-roman-town-closes-natural-geology-archaeological-excavation-ends
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