The dig

As modern Ancaster has grown, more and more Roman finds have been made locally. The surface of the local fields well beyond the defensive banks and ditches is scattered with Roman brick, pottery and other artefacts. This indicates that the Roman town was actually much bigger than the defence works would lead us to believe. Many of the finds are early, indicating that the town was settled very soon after the Roman invasion. Even a cemetery has been found, containing more than 250 Roman burials, including 11 stone sarcophagi.

Much of the site of the Roman town has been scheduled as an ancient monument, which means that excavation can only take place in special circumstances. So, in its quest to discover the full extent of the town, Time Team has restrictions on the areas it can excavate. Starting work in gale-force winds and driving rain, two areas outside the 4th-century defences are targeted.

Time Team field archaeologist Phil Harding sets to work on the western side of town, looking for the extent of the Roman cemetery previously identified in the area. On the other side of the town, Carenza Lewis is looking for evidence of settlement. Dr Jeremy Taylor, Roman small towns expert, is very enthusiastic: 'Judging by the finds from the village there are very good indications that the Roman town would have extended outside the earthworks in all directions.'

By the end of Day One Phil has hit and gone through some iron deposits, and found a number of small features in the ground, but no human remains. Carenza, meanwhile, has found lots of human and animal bone in mixed deposits. As the site begins to look more and more confusing, the geophysics team is stretched to the limit of its resources to try to come up with a fuller picture.

Day Two brings with it the relief of good weather. Two new trenches are started for Phil over a possible ditch and another anomaly picked up by geophysics. Carenza also opens a second trench to try to make sense of her mixed remains. Stewart Ainsworth, of course, is busy walking the landscape with his maps and notebook.

'Ancaster would have been very near the original Roman shoreline,' says Stewart. 'Perhaps the defences were connected with that. They would also have helped control the road through the town.'

In Phil's trench some late Iron-Age pottery fragments from a storage jar are unearthed – evidence that there was settlement here before the Roman invasion. Carenza also has some luck when she discovers the foundations for Roman walls outside the defence works. It's starting to look as though the defensive walls cut a large part of the town off. The excitement builds as Phil uncovers what looks like a stone coffin, but he has to wait until the final day before he can investigate further.

Day Three, and Carenza's field on the east of the town has revealed five enclosures on the geophysics survey. She also discovers walls built on top of earlier finds. This indicates that these Roman 'suburbs' of Ancaster were in use until quite late in the Roman period. The general consensus among historians is that Roman towns expanded rapidly in the early years of the occupation but then fell upon hard times in the later Roman period. Saxon raiders on the eastern southern coasts from the end of the 3rd century onwards meant that the Romans had to build a series of fortifications. Many towns were also forced to build their own defences in the 4th century as the threats increased and the society of the time became more hostile and dangerous with the decline of the empire.

Phil's trench yields the most exciting discovery of the whole dig. What looked like a stone coffin is actually a cist (pronounced kist) burial. This is one in which stone slabs are used to line a pit into which the body is laid; a further flat stone (or stones) is used to cover the top.

The individual buried here turns out to be a male who was around 70 years of age when he died. Both of his legs had been broken at some time in his life and he would have walked with a pronounced limp. One of the stones used in the cist has an inscription to the god 'Viridios' (possibly meaning 'great god') who may have been worshipped locally. Was this man an old pagan buried with a credit to his old religion, or was the stone just reused material? We will never know.