What they found

Bringing out the sceptic
Mention of a possible Roman temple or religious site brought out the sceptic in the older hands on Time Team. The Team doesn't have a great record when it comes to Roman temples; in fact they've never actually found one.

Nevertheless, it did seem that the nature and value of the metal-detectorist finds at Godstone pointed towards them being deliberate offerings rather than casual losses. In particular, the coins – of which more than 600 have been discovered in this one field – were of disproportionately high denominations – 'the £5 and £20 notes of their day', according to Time Team Roman expert Guy de la Bédoyère. They also spanned virtually the whole of the Roman occupation, in a relatively even spread, suggesting that they had been deposited over a long period rather than in one or more individual hoards.

There were two particular concentrations of finds on which Time Team focused attention. It was thought that these might represent specific locations where the pagan Romans made offerings to their gods. But as the sceptics might have predicted, neither of them turned up concrete evidence of a temple or religious site.

This doesn't mean that there wasn't one there. Many pagan sacred sites would have left little evidence that they existed at all. They could have been centred on, for example, a shallow pool, a sacred tree or some other natural feature that has long since disappeared. The use of the term 'temple' is misleading because many such sites would not have had any significant or permanent structures associated with them.

Ritual pits and corn sheds
Brigid Gallagher did excavate a deep, narrow pit that may once have been the site of ritual offerings. It contained at least two sealed layers of burning, one of which contained a horse's jaw. According to Roman expert Mark Corney, in the south and south east of England there is a ritual tradition that starts before the Roman conquest of burying horse heads and jaws in pits. He said he could think of 'a number of examples from both the Iron Age and the Roman era where you might get a deposit of animal bone or pots capped by a layer of organic material or clay, followed perhaps by a sterile layer – and then the whole sequence starts again.'

Beyond Brigid's pit, however, there was nothing that could be tied to a specifically religious or ritual context. Indeed, although there was no shortage of potential targets identified on the geophysics surveys (Phil Harding excavated what might have been a corn-drying shed on one such 'hotspot'), and there were large quantities of Roman finds coming out of the trenches, there was no sign of any permanent settlement or structures.

A seasonal fair?
Guy de la Bédoyère had a theory as to why this might be. He pointed out that the site stood on the boundary between the territories of the Cantiaci and Atrebates. He thought it could have been the location of a seasonal market or trading fair between the two tribes, which perhaps came into being for just a short period each year, linked to the pagan equivalent of a medieval saint's day or feast day. These fairs would have left a lot of waste material – hence the large quantities of finds – and they could have had associated ritual activities, including making offerings to propitiate the gods.

On the road again
Once again, then, the quest for a Roman temple proved elusive. Time Team did find a great deal more to keep local archaeologists busy for many years to come, however – and the Team also made a discovery that may require redrawing our maps of what the area was like during the Roman period.

The Team had been puzzling over why the Roman remains at Godstone were concentrated some distance from the nearby Roman road between London and the south coast, rather than more immediately adjacent to it. The excavations over the three days provided a likely answer, because Time Team uncovered a major Roman road following the same line but much closer to the site itself. The excavation, further 'geofizz' surveys and Stewart Ainsworth's landscape investigations all pointed to the likelihood that the Roman road had been wrongly mapped and that Time Team had revealed its true course.

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