Interview with Victor Ambrus

As Time Team starts another of its excavations in an open field, illustrator Victor Ambrus faces the scene. How does he create those fantastic illustrations when both he and the archaeologists start their work with so little to go on? The Time Team website caught up with him at the excavation of the Roman villa site at Dinnington, Somerset, for the 2003 series.

How do you first get an idea of what you are going to draw?
'The first thing I did here was to go out on the site and track down the only evidence we had for the archaeology,' says Victor. 'That was a rather nice aerial photograph, which showed a shadow of where the villa was situated. That gave me the setting with a good idea of the location of the actual building. It also told me that we were looking at a rather large 'U' shaped building. At this stage I couldn't do an awful lot and I had to wait for the geophysics to come in. The geophysics results got better and better as we went on, which was an enormous help as things got clearer as we progressed.'

When did you start drawing?
'Initially I did some rough sketches on a piece of scrap paper and floated them around all of the archaeologists involved with the building,' continues Victor. 'This gives me a good idea of what they think about the kind of building that I have in mind. We had quite a few bits of evidence for the layout of villas in this area and ours appeared to be quite similar. On the basis of my fact finding I started to draw up a plan of the villa in a larger scale in pencil and located it in the landscape of the picture. Then I did some more research on the type of building we were dealing with and how it may have been finished on the outside: for example, was it rendered or just left as stonework? In the end the general conclusion – following finds in the field – was that the structure was rendered with a plaster/cement mix and painted over.'

Do you need to do additional research on top of the evidence from the trenches?
'Oh yes. The next step is to look through as many books as I can lay my hands on to try to identify typical features of the period. I also keep a close eye on what is being found by the excavation. Here I started to come around to the idea of an aisled building with long internal corridors. Gradually the evidence was coming out and we found the mosaic, which would have been in one of the rooms opening onto a main corridor connecting the wings of the villa.

'The status of the evidence started me thinking along the lines of a terraced courtyard between the wings of the villa. David Neal, the mosaic specialist, said that another basic mosaic surface would have gone around the edge of the courtyard and that it would have required some protection from the weather, so I constructed a series of pillars with a roof to protect it. It has even been suggested that shutters could have been installed between the pillars to give extra protection during the winter and help keep the house warm. So I went along with that theory as I gradually brought the picture together.'

Do you need to keep redrawing parts of the picture as new evidence is found?
'All the time. We started to get more evidence as to where various walls and gateways would have been, so I could take the picture quite a long way. We also have foundations that are very big, so it looks like we are definitely dealing with a two-storey building. Towards the end of day three there was also some talk of possible towers at either end.'

What do you do while you wait for the archaeologists to sort their story out?
'While the specialists discuss the options on the archaeology I can get on with a few other things like working on the landscape in the picture, adding some watercolour, and drawing a few caricatures of people who may have lived here.'

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