The Flying Archaeologist episode 3 - Hadrian's Wall
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00:00Nothing in our landscape is here by accident.
00:07It's all part of the incredible story of how people have shaped
00:11our country over thousands of years.
00:14Every ridge, every bump has a meaning.
00:20I'm Ben Robinson, and it's my job as an archaeologist
00:23to try and unpick this great story.
00:25And from my point of view, the best place to do that is up here.
00:31Aerial photography is revealing a different view of the past.
00:39I'm flying along Hadrian's Wall.
00:42The view from above is blowing apart the idea
00:45that this was just a barren military landscape.
00:49Who really lived here, and did the Romans conquer this land
00:52earlier than we thought?
00:54What we're discovering here is not just changing our understanding
00:58of the Roman frontier, but it's rewriting history.
01:21Roman rule once stretched from Syria to Spain,
01:25from North Africa to Britain.
01:28This was the edge of the empire.
01:32The Romans had established a frontier,
01:35then they built a wall across Britain on the orders of one man.
01:42In the year 122 AD,
01:44the Emperor Hadrian ordered the construction of this mighty wall.
01:49It was intended to mark the end of the Roman world,
01:52and to liberate the civilised south from the barbarian north.
02:00And there it stood, an impermeable military barrier,
02:04jealously guarded by troops until the end of Roman rule.
02:08End of story? Not quite.
02:11A new picture's emerging, and it's not about what we can see down here,
02:16but what we can see from up there.
02:18We're flying from the shores, and we're two flights backtrack.
02:21Hadrian's Wall was originally up to 15 feet high.
02:25It ran across a narrow part of Britain for more than 70 miles
02:29from what's now Tyneside, across Northumberland and into Cumbria.
02:34Near the wall was this, an extra line of defence we now call the Valum.
02:41The Valum's a big ditch with two big banks either side of it,
02:45the Roman equivalent of barbed wire.
02:47You can still see the earthworks, the lumps and bumps,
02:50tearing through the landscape, even today.
02:54At first glance, this is just a military landscape.
03:00A mile away from the wall,
03:01the Romans built a fort for soldiers on the frontier,
03:04a site called Vindolanda,
03:06which archaeologists have always thought dates back to around 85 AD.
03:11But in the 1960s, aerial photography first revealed
03:14that the site was much more than just a military base.
03:18As you can clearly see on this photograph,
03:20the fort itself was very, very prominent,
03:22but thanks to aerial photography, we could then see
03:25there's a heck of a lot going on outside the walls of the fort.
03:28That's really interesting.
03:29Here's the stuff that's readily apparent and that we can see,
03:32but what about all this slightly more vague material?
03:35Yeah, I mean, it looks sort of vague on the ground,
03:38but on the aerial photograph, it looks, wow,
03:40this is really jumping out of the ground.
03:43The earthworks actually hinted at a huge vicus,
03:46a civilian town, next to the fort.
03:50This has since been well excavated.
03:53But on this photo, there's something else
03:55which has intrigued archaeologists for all this time.
03:59You see the corner of something appearing in the field.
04:02It's a monumental sort of corner
04:04which couldn't happen in a natural sort of way.
04:06So you think, right, somebody's done that.
04:08And then the question is, who and why?
04:11Andrew Burley believes this is a fort,
04:13one that will change the history of the Roman frontier as we know it.
04:17And now his team is finally digging.
04:20What have you got there?
04:21We've just got a little piece of copper alloy that we found.
04:24So it's probably a piece of scale mail armour.
04:26Definitely soldiers then?
04:28Yes, absolutely. It would appear so.
04:30This is like the day it was buried, isn't it?
04:32It really is. It's incredible.
04:34I think it's safe to say that they're repairing their armour.
04:36You can imagine this stuff, hundreds of these little scales.
04:38They must have broken off occasionally
04:40and they take one and just get rid of it.
04:42Fix your armour.
04:43Yeah, make your armour look nice because you've nothing else to do.
04:45There's no TV to watch.
04:47Emphatic evidence that this is indeed a fort.
04:50But why is this one special?
04:52We think that it's very likely
04:54there was actually an earlier Roman fort on the site.
04:56So that's what we're looking for here.
04:58As we started excavating the ditches,
05:00we were getting more and more evidence to suggest
05:02that this actually could predate anything
05:04on this part of the site that we'd previously known about.
05:07Pottery they've found suggests the fort was built in the 70s AD,
05:11ten years before anything else around here.
05:15If so, it suggests the Roman army
05:17set up their military frontier across Britain
05:19much earlier than the history books tell us.
05:23This stuff just doesn't survive
05:25on 99% of archaeological sites, does it?
05:27Absolutely. It's very rare that we get this.
05:29You can actually still smell the leather.
05:31It's very thin. It's probably goatskin.
05:32So we would imagine that this was a bit of a tent.
05:34Goatskin tents. Good grief.
05:36And they had to patch them every once in a while
05:38because, of course, up here especially,
05:39it's important that your tent's waterproofed.
05:41So they're repairing them constantly
05:42and you can see the actual points
05:44where they've stitched through it.
05:45It has a meaning.
05:46It's about someone's life in the past.
05:48Absolutely. And every little artefact that we find,
05:50it links right to a person,
05:51at least one who actually handled it and did things with it.
05:56But it may take years for the team to find that smoking gun,
05:59the crucial evidence of the timber fort gates.
06:02The tree rings on the wood will pin down a construction date.
06:06It could prove that the Romans established their frontier
06:08before we realise and 50 years before Hadrian built his wall.
06:13This excavation is just one small part
06:15of a much bigger investigation
06:17of the whole area around Hadrian's Wall.
06:23Crucially, our view from the air
06:25is putting individual sites in their context.
06:28Although archaeologists have been taking aerial photographs
06:31of Hadrian's Wall for 70 years or more,
06:33it's only now that Dave McLeod and his team at English Heritage
06:36have finally pieced all that evidence together.
06:38Obviously, the focus tends to be, you know, this, the wall and the forts.
06:42That's what people come to see.
06:44But we know this landscape has monuments in it
06:48of all types and all periods.
06:51Here's Hadrian's Wall.
06:53English Heritage has painstakingly plotted
06:55every archaeological feature on an Ordnance Survey map,
06:58bit by bit, from one side of the country to the other.
07:04By seeing how everything fits together for the first time,
07:07we're getting the full historical picture of this whole area.
07:12It's very much a broad brush approach, obviously,
07:14because what we can't do
07:16is go into great depth on any particular site.
07:21Some of the sites have been more closely studied
07:24and these are revealing the story of people
07:26who lived and worked around the wall.
07:28Oh, that's wonderful.
07:30Oh, look at the light. The light is just perfect.
07:32It's fantastic.
07:34Roman camps are really prominent.
07:36They're a very distinctive shape,
07:38rectangles with rounded corners like playing cards.
07:41These were inhabited by Roman soldiers for just a few days or weeks,
07:45yet you can still see them from the air.
07:47There's even the corner of one under the runway at Carlisle Airport.
07:51I love these camps because they really add to the human story here.
07:55These aren't about the commanders
07:57who lived in the comfort of the permanent forts,
07:59they're more about the lowly soldiers in tents
08:02being battered by the harsh weather.
08:04White Moss Farm at the west end of the wall
08:07is particularly interesting.
08:09If you think about something like Glastonbury or Tea in the Park,
08:13one of the music festivals, muddy fields full of tents,
08:16well, that's essentially what you've got with these camps.
08:20The camps show up as crop marks.
08:23Wherever Roman soldiers had dug ditches, the crops grow differently now.
08:27And even today, in very dry summers,
08:29you can still see the imprints of these ditches.
08:32This was a site that the soldiers returned to again and again.
08:36There's three, four, potentially as many as five camps here
08:39that would have been occupied at different times,
08:42but the one that we're potentially looking at in this field here
08:45has got a whole succession of pits inside it.
08:48They just look like blobs on the photographs,
08:51but what they would have been is probably the rubbish pits.
08:54Rebecca has analysed the number and size of the rubbish pits
08:57from the crop marks.
08:59By doing that, this field really comes to life.
09:05Because we can see this level of detail on this camp here,
09:08I think that we potentially are looking at up to 1,500 men.
09:14And there are clues that there could have been ovens here.
09:17Below the round ovens, where the soldiers cooked and baked bread,
09:21fire pits would have been dug, and these can show us crop marks too.
09:25When ovens on similar sites have been excavated,
09:28they give us a fascinating insight into life in the camp.
09:31You've got massively different styles in the ovens,
09:35and that may well suggest different cooking styles,
09:38potentially different ethnic identities,
09:40because the Roman army was made up of soldiers
09:43from across the empire, from North Africa to Syria to Romania to Spain.
09:51A few marks in a farmer's field
09:53provide a window into a truly multicultural community,
09:57and it's here at the very edge of Roman civilisation.
10:02Think about the sights, the smells,
10:04the food that you could get along Hadrian's Wall.
10:07You've got Syrian archers, Spanish cavalry.
10:09If you went out for a night on Hadrian's Wall,
10:11that would be a good time.
10:13And some pretty exotic stuff to eat on your way as well.
10:18Isn't it amazing that something as fragile as a rubbish pit
10:22or an oven just used temporarily can survive all this time
10:26and come beaming out at us from the air?
10:29To show that that level of evidence is still surviving is exceptionally rare,
10:33and what makes this site so fascinating.
10:37But we can't be exactly sure what the soldiers were doing here.
10:40Were they on manoeuvres? Was it a training camp?
10:45There's another camp where we've now got proof of what the soldiers were doing,
10:49and it's been found using an aerial tool called LIDAR,
10:53Light Detection and Ranging.
10:55Millions of light beams are shot from the air onto the ground and bounce back.
10:59We can then build a very accurate digital model of the landscape,
11:03which can even reveal what lies under trees and woods.
11:07The computer allows us to change the angle of light,
11:10and this makes features that were invisible stand out.
11:14Look at this section of Hadrian's Wall, right at the bottom.
11:17There's just the hint of a Roman camp.
11:20This lay undiscovered until 2010, when from hundreds of miles away,
11:24archaeologist Bryn Gethin had a speculative look
11:27at some of the LIDAR images on the internet.
11:30One of the first bits I looked at just happened to be here,
11:33where we're walking up to now,
11:35and I was fairly sure that I could see a Roman camp on it.
11:38You're right by Hadrian's Wall, we're right on the Valham,
11:41and yet no-one has seen this site before.
11:43And you've never been here before?
11:45No, I've never been to this particular spot before,
11:48although the Valham's very impressive, it's a rough, tusky old field.
11:51If I was walking on the Hadrian's Wall path,
11:53I'm sure I'd have walked right past it and never seen it.
11:56This site seems unremarkable at ground level,
11:59but actually further investigation has revealed
12:02that the camp was next to a Roman quarry.
12:04Humphrey Welfare and his brother Adam have measured the site
12:07and are just finishing off a detailed archaeological survey.
12:11We can begin to tell the story without having to excavate anything.
12:15This camp, without the LIDAR in the air photograph,
12:18we simply would not have seen.
12:20It's quite a reasonable size,
12:22it's enough for a cohort of Roman soldiers, about 500-600 men.
12:26So what were the soldiers in this camp here to do?
12:29First of all, to quarry and select the stone to build the wall.
12:33You found the place where the wall builders actually lived.
12:36How do you feel about that?
12:38Oh, I'm really pleased.
12:40I'm very pleased that Humphrey and Adam have managed to interpret
12:43what in many ways seems like another Roman camp on Hadrian's Wall.
12:49It makes sense. It's right next to the wall.
12:52And once the soldiers had dug a big hole to get the stone,
12:55the quarry became part of the defensive ditch known as the vallum.
13:00How important is this camp to our understanding
13:03of how this frontier was built?
13:05It gives us another little insight,
13:08a little window into what happened during the construction of the wall.
13:13And that's how archaeology builds up, piece by piece,
13:17building confidence that we can reconstruct the past
13:21despite the passage of time.
13:25People tend to think that the wall was this big grand design,
13:29this masterpiece that was executed all in one go.
13:32And sites like this show us that actually the engineers, the troops,
13:37had to adapt to local circumstances and they didn't always get it right.
13:42Just occasionally you can see evidence
13:44that the quarrymen seemed to have got it wrong.
13:47Here we are in one of the Roman quarries
13:50and a huge great boulder which has been left.
13:53All around here there were hundreds of impact marks from chisels.
13:59They'd been trying to split this rock
14:01and clearly someone's come along and said,
14:03oh, for goodness sake, forget it, that's not sandstone,
14:06that's a much harder rock.
14:08And so they've given up.
14:10So this is a little monument to human failure
14:14and a lot of bad language, I'm sure.
14:24Lots of people visit this area
14:27and they look at the spectacular archaeology,
14:30but as they're walking along,
14:32they're missing all these other parts of the landscape,
14:35this fuller story.
14:42All these fragments of crop marks, all these sites,
14:45actually add up to people and their endeavours
14:48and the way that they work the land.
14:51It wasn't just soldiers.
14:53The view from above is shining new light
14:56on just how many people lived on this frontier.
14:59Early aerial photos started to change our ideas
15:03about Roman forts like Vindolanda.
15:06Aerial photography will tell us,
15:08you know what, I think you've got something out there.
15:11And really it's aerial photography that first told us
15:14that we need to really broaden our view
15:17of the site, of the fort.
15:19We need to move outside of the fort itself.
15:24And outside, excavation of the vicus, the civilian town,
15:28is revealing ever more about the communities
15:31and families who lived here.
15:33There are families of soldiers here
15:35and we see them in the documents.
15:37They're commemorated in burials.
15:39We find them on the discharge documents from the soldiers.
15:42These families were a part of the community.
15:44Excavations at Vindolanda
15:46have produced hundreds of writing tablets.
15:48Many of them are letters with fascinating details
15:51about everyday life.
15:53If you love me, brother, I ask that you send me some hunting nets.
15:56For the day of the celebration of my birthday,
15:59I give you a warm invitation.
16:01Socks from Satua, two pairs of sandals
16:03and two pairs of underpants.
16:06The most famous tablet is a friendly memo
16:09between two soldiers' wives.
16:11One invites the other to a birthday party
16:13and then puts her own little scroll at the bottom
16:15that says, you know, sister, dearest, I'd love for you to be there,
16:18the day wouldn't be the same without it, all of this.
16:20But what it's really suggesting to me, together with a few other ones,
16:23is that people are living a normal life up here.
16:32It paints a picture of a secure landscape,
16:35a frontier buzzing with life.
16:38Aerial photography in recent years has shown
16:41that the civil settlements outside the forts
16:43are much bigger than we thought they were.
16:45If you think about each fort along Hadrian's Wall
16:47holding about 500 people
16:49and then having a vicus outside
16:51where you've got up to 2,000 people, probably,
16:53strung right away along the country,
16:55you've suddenly got a lot of people.
16:58The civilian towns were also places of great economic potential.
17:02Roman soldiers had money to burn.
17:04They needed services, shops, taverns.
17:08It reminds me of the way a modern army town,
17:10like Catterick Garrison in North Yorkshire, works today.
17:15And just like at Vindolanda,
17:17there's a civilian community here,
17:19and it's a place where people can come together
17:21and have a good time.
17:24And just like at Vindolanda,
17:26there's a civilian community here outside the military base.
17:30Here there's places to gamble, places to drink.
17:34There's places where you can buy food that isn't army food,
17:37where you can buy clothes that aren't army clothes.
17:40Economically, the presence of the army here
17:42is very, very important to this place,
17:45and equally, the army appreciates
17:47having somewhere like this close by.
17:50So the presence of the Roman soldiers created a market economy,
17:54though the army still had control over the civilian towns.
17:58But what was beyond that military zone around Hadrian's Wall?
18:02There's an idea that it was a wilderness,
18:04populated by just a few scattered native tribes.
18:08This is where the aerial mapping programme is changing our thinking.
18:12Beautiful. Look at that.
18:14Oh, it's so wonderful.
18:16For many years, the only remains of native sites
18:19that the archaeologists could really see were hillforts like this.
18:24What they suggest is insecurity, warfare.
18:28What we thought we saw was a very militaristic landscape,
18:32very sparsely populated,
18:34and all we saw was what survived at the surface.
18:37Then suddenly, when we started to fly, a whole new world emerged.
18:42We started to see, instead of these very few hillforts,
18:45huge numbers, tens of thousands of isolated farms,
18:49completely undefended.
18:51You cannot have a landscape like that in an insecure world
18:55because your family's on the line, lives are at stake.
18:58You can only have a landscape like that
19:01when people are so used to peace that they take it for granted,
19:05and that utterly changes the story of how we see the Romans.
19:09It suggests that the Romans weren't just an aggressive,
19:12occupying military force.
19:14Over time, they had to forge working relationships
19:17with the native population.
19:19Wonderful sight, brilliant.
19:21This native settlement, at a place called Milking Gap in Northumberland,
19:25is an intriguing example.
19:27It's a little Iron Age farmstead, and pretty much in the middle
19:31we've got the house, which is a straightforward round house.
19:35It's thrilling to be in a prehistoric house, isn't it?
19:38I wish I still had the roof.
19:40Well, you can sort of imagine it, you can picture it all coming together.
19:47This is not a Roman structure, and they're doing things
19:50that you would expect a prehistoric population to be doing in this area.
19:54They're farming, they have a house.
19:56This probably typifies how people lived in this landscape.
20:02To the west, on the Solway Plain,
20:04crop marks show Iron Age farms everywhere.
20:07In other areas, earthworks of larger settlements are still visible.
20:11Putting all the aerial photo evidence on the same map
20:14is now showing that in many areas
20:16there were farms and settlements every few hundred metres.
20:21The aerial photography is showing us that this landscape
20:24was settled and farmed hundreds of years before the Romans got here.
20:29It was already a managed landscape.
20:33And contrary to what you might imagine,
20:35when the Romans came, they didn't destroy everything in their path
20:38to build the wall.
20:41I think there's a danger of thinking of a frontier or a military zone
20:45as a sort of sterilised zone, scorched earth, if you like, around it.
20:50But actually, it's probably not possible to sustain life in that kind of area.
20:55Is it possible that Rome actually encouraged people to live here?
21:00That's the really interesting part about this site.
21:04We're slap-bang in the middle of that militarised zone of the frontier
21:12between Wall and Valham.
21:14So the Roman army seemed to have allowed this farm at Milking Gap
21:17to stay in the military no-man's land, at least for a time.
21:21Why?
21:22Some local farmers no doubt provided food to the soldiers,
21:26but the natives didn't just help with the necessities of life,
21:29they also provided some luxuries too.
21:32When sites including Milking Gap have been excavated,
21:35surprisingly we've found jewellery made by natives but using Roman glass.
21:41Similar bracelets of this have been found at Milking Gap.
21:44This cobalt blue is particularly popular.
21:47The local population are using Roman material
21:50to make something which is purely their own,
21:52and they see glass bottles not as something useful as containers
21:56but as a useful recycling material for making a glass bracelet.
21:59Certainly several of these have been found in Roman forts
22:02where they look as if they have been sold to the Roman soldiers
22:06as probably gifts to give to their friends.
22:08Their economic thinking must have altered over a few generations
22:13to the point where they see the real possibilities
22:16of producing things to sell to the Roman garrisons
22:20because the guys in these forts, they need their comforts.
22:23It's perhaps the greatest recent discovery from the air.
22:27All these native settlements south of the Wall
22:30show just how well populated the military frontier was
22:33before, during and after the Romans arrived.
22:37Many natives will have had to learn to live with their conquerors.
22:41But what about life just outside the empire, on the other side of the Wall?
22:46There's a perception that what was going on north of the Wall
22:50was the edge of the known world,
22:53barbarian territory, barren, of no interest to Rome.
22:58Our view from the air is revealing something quite astonishing
23:02about this theory as well.
23:04Yeah, if you could whip it round in a turn now.
23:07Let's have a look.
23:09There's definitely a little enclosure there.
23:12I'm flying just north of the Wall
23:14and I can see native settlements and Roman camps, all sorts going on.
23:19Living to the north of the Wall, no different from the south.
23:22As far as we can tell, the same sorts of sights occur in that landscape
23:26as they do down there.
23:28You just have to mentally remove this, take this all away
23:31and you have a continuity of landscape,
23:34a continuity of settlement and tradition.
23:36Life goes on.
23:40This photo shows a key Roman installation north of the Wall.
23:44It's the site of an aqueduct built to provide a water supply
23:47to one of the forts to the south.
23:49But at this point, the photograph shows us that it meets a native settlement.
23:53Instead of avoiding it, it runs into the ditch,
23:57around the circuit of the ditch and out the other side.
24:00And that's really interesting.
24:02What was going on here?
24:05It shows a comfort in their own security and power, in a sense,
24:09and that they're happy for something as important as a water resource
24:13to be placed north of the frontier.
24:17Now, you don't put your water supply into enemy hands.
24:21Clearly, they were very confident that this was an area that was theirs,
24:25even though it was beyond the Wall.
24:28Small clues like this question a preconception
24:31that Hadrian's Wall was this impenetrable divide
24:34between the Roman Empire and Caledonia, the barbarian land beyond.
24:44Aerial archaeology is showing that there was not just Roman military activity
24:49on the north side of the Wall, as well as on the south,
24:52but there was movement.
24:54I'm at Port of Tyne, which is right on the eastern end of Hadrian's Wall.
24:59And just like this border,
25:01Hadrian's Wall was not there to totally stop access and to stop movement,
25:06but to control people and trade.
25:09Hadrian's Wall was not a solid barrier.
25:11Every Roman mile, there was a fortified gateway,
25:14which today we call a milecastle.
25:16The milecastles were the main crossing routes.
25:19There's a black shale, which comes from Midlothian,
25:22which is being found in carved jewellery in South Shields, York and further south.
25:28Now, Midlothian at the time is way beyond the frontier.
25:31This is very much in barbarian territory.
25:33But luxury material was being transferred through the walls.
25:38If the frontier didn't change life immediately for those north of the Wall,
25:42it certainly did over time.
25:44After all, the Romans ruled for nearly 400 years.
25:50Hadrian's Wall came to affect social change
25:53between those inside the Roman Empire and those outside.
25:57North of the Wall was a place where there was a lot of activity.
26:00There was a lot of trade.
26:02There was a lot of trade between those inside the Roman Empire and those outside.
26:07North of the Wall, they are abandoning the native settlements
26:10in the mid-to-late second century.
26:12We don't know where they're going.
26:14South of the Wall, they go on occupying the native settlements
26:17and they start to build little bathhouses and rectangular buildings
26:20and they start to have a completely different lifestyle.
26:23So the Wall is forming some sort of barrier,
26:26but it's a cultural barrier rather than a defensive barrier.
26:33We're seeing the frontier through new eyes.
26:38It wasn't just a wilderness outpost populated only by patrolling Roman soldiers.
26:44It was a multicultural place with diverse communities,
26:48south and north of the Wall.
26:51We've found where the soldiers who built the Wall camped.
26:55And aerial photography is even leading to discoveries
26:59that suggest the Romans could have established the frontier earlier than we thought,
27:04up to 50 years before the Wall finally went up.
27:10We're on the cusp of answering some more big questions.
27:15When was this part of Britain pacified?
27:17When was it conquered?
27:19When was it taken into the fold of the Roman Empire?
27:22From huge numbers of native farms
27:25to Roman camps and then large towns.
27:28There's a fuller story here,
27:30and it's about so much more than a military barrier on the edge of empire.
27:37Unless you're half a mile up in the sky and looking down,
27:40very often you don't really see how all these things connect together.
27:44Haven's Wall isn't just this thin line,
27:47it is a whole landscape that facilitated the Roman rule in this area
27:51It is a whole landscape that facilitated the Roman rule in this area
27:55for almost 400 years, and that's an incredibly impressive achievement.
28:03What the aerial photography is showing us
28:06is that this is a landscape that's about far more than just Hadrian's grand design.
28:11It's about the efforts of ordinary people, ordinary soldiers, the native population.
28:17The traces of what they did are visible to us today after all this time,
28:22and their efforts are written in the landscape.
28:25To me, that makes this place even more special.