What they found

In the week that this programme was first screened, a drought order came into effect covering most of south-east England. But when Time Team visited Alfoldean, in West Sussex, the previous year the excavations took place in heavy rain that almost washed out the dig altogether. The water settled on the heavy clay, and any attempt at digging churned up the surface into a thick, cloying mud that all but obliterated the underlying archaeology under a uniform brown sludge.

Not to be deterred, Phil Harding and the other diggers worked around the worst that the elements could throw at them. And with the help of some of the clearest – and most extensive – geophysics survey results ever achieved on Time Team, they were able to get a detailed picture of what the site was like in Roman times.

The site at Alfoldean, where the former Roman road, Stane Street (now the A29), crosses the river Arun, had long been known as having a significant Roman presence. First excavated in the 1920s by the classicist Samuel Edward Winbolt, it has yielded many finds since – and was the subject of a report that won local enthusiast Mike Luke the Young Archaeologist of the Year award in 1981 (an award for which Time Team expert Miles Russell also entered but failed to be short listed). Mike was to return to the site many times over the next 25 years, and there have been several fieldwalking surveys carried out, but no one apart from Samuel Winbolt had actually excavated there until Time Team was called in.

The first thing the Team's experts did was to dismiss Winbolt's interpretation of the site as a military staging post, with a major structure that he described as being 'officers' quarters'. Instead, it was generally agreed that all the evidence pointed towards this being the site of a 'mansio' – a stopping place for officials of the Roman empire or travellers on imperial business.

Winbolt's assessment of the site as a military camp had been influenced by the fact that it was surrounded by two large rectangular ditches and a rampart. Time Team's excavations revealed just how large these were. Each ditch turned out to be as much as four metres wide and four metres deep – with the rampart as high again. The construction of these huge defensive structures was dated to around 90 AD by pottery finds from sealed contexts that hadn't been disturbed since the ditches and ramparts were first built. Time Team was also able to put a date on when they went out of use, because the excavation revealed that the ditches had been filled in with a mixture of earth and rubbish, including large quantities of pottery, none of which dated from later than the early or middle of the third century AD.

Although they were massive in scale, and clearly served an important protective function, the absence of finds associated with the Roman army meant that the perimeter defences were definitely not military. Time Team's experts determined that the most likely function of the site was that it served as a centre for tax collection and a sort of customs post, controlling the iron industry based in the Weald. Located at the strategically important crossing of Stane Street and the river Arun, it would have been a major staging post on the route from Chichester to London. It fell out of use in the middle of the third century AD at the same time as the decline in the iron industry locally.

Excavation of the mansio itself uncovered evidence of what would have been quite a grand structure. Fragments of painted wall plaster gave a hint of its interior decoration, while the size of the wall foundations excavated by Phil suggested that it would have been a two-storey building. Other finds, including limescale-encrusted tiles, revealed that there would have been at least one bath house on the site. And the geophysics survey results, confirmed by trenches dug to identify the lines of key walls, enabled the Team to draw up a detailed floor plan of the building – which was erected around a courtyard, with large numbers of associated structures stretching over a 600-metre-square area.

Outside the ditches, further geophysics surveys revealed an extensive settlement that pre-dated the mansio, with pits, ditches, trackways and even a roundhouse, which Miles Russell thought at first might be a Roman mausoleum, showing up clearly. The roundhouse appeared to have been abandoned when the mansio site was built and the great ditches cut through its land. What appeared to be a Roman cremation urn was uncovered adjacent to where it once stood, suggesting that the site was later reused for burials.

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