Mick's last word
	Mick Aston recorded this final update for the Time Team Live phone line just after the last programme had finished. Hello this is Mick Aston with an update on the Time Team Live programme at Canterbury. A very good three days I think. Three very interesting sites. The potential site of the Roman temple in the middle of the town; then the site of the Greyfriars, the first Franciscan friary in the country, down by the River Stour; and then up on the hill outside the town, the tile kiln on Tyler Hill. Canterbury, of course, is a very interesting place archaeologically anyway, being both a pre-Roman settlement and an Iron-Age settlement, a Roman city and then very important in the Anglo Saxon period and in the medieval period – particularly because of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the sort of primate of Christianity in the country. So we were very fortunate to be able to look at these sites here. On the temple site I think, as we probably expected, we were not going to get a monumental structure. There's been too much destruction and change since then. We did find the temple floor, the courtyard floor, the gravel floor, and a number of bits of stonework which would have belonged to altars and monuments and so on there, but for me probably the most interesting bits were actually the rubbish pits that were dug through this lot later on. Pretty smelly the trench that Phil was in – mind you, any trench that Phil's in is due to be pretty smelly – but this one produced a mass of preserved objects which normally rot away. Things like leather and cloth as well as bits of bone and pottery and all manner of household items. And as many people will know, I like to get sort of close to the people in the past – which is very easy to do when you are confronted with all the debris. Perhaps one of the highlights was finding that somebody had had their hair cut rather badly and Margaret Cox was able to look at all the nits and bugs in their hair, which is sort of pre-Head and Shoulders days obviously. I spent most of the time on Greyfriars – where we had a Friar visitor who was very interested in the site because it's the origin of the order that he is in today. This is the earliest friary in the country – it belongs to 1224. St Francis of Assisi had just founded the Greyfriars and he was sending out colonies of friars to begin preaching and begin to work with people in cities like Canterbury. And although we didn't find anything of the early monastery, I didn't think really we were going to be able to do that, I think it was a pretty long shot. We were able to pretty well reconstruct the layout of the monastery from the late 13th century onwards. Only a few fragments remain but a combination of earlier excavations, good geophysics and some very carefully targeted trenches meant that we had reasonable confidence that we could produce a plan and an outline of this. It would have been nice to do a bit more work in the cloister area just to solve a few more of the problems there. And that's where, a little surprisingly, we didn't find any burials. I don't think we've ever dug on a monastery or a cemetery or a church site before and not actually found any bodies, and we didn't get any of that at all. And then I suppose really the highlight of the three days was the work on Tyler Hill. The geophysics showed there was going to be an impressive structure there. But I don't think anybody was really quite prepared for how good it was going to be. When I first went up there and saw just thousands and thousands of tiles, it was difficult to get terribly excited about that. But a mere 24 hours later you could actually see by looking through the slots in the kiln, you were actually looking down into the kiln chamber where they would have lit the fires to fire the tiles that they made there. This is clearly one of the most important and significant archaeological features Time Team has ever found and clearly now we will have to think about what happens to this site. I think I would like to see more work done and probably somehow made accessible for people to see. A very exciting find. So right now we all feel extremely exhausted and I think the next thing is we go and have a shower, then we go down to the bar and we have some food and a well-earned big glass of wine. Thank you for listening. ^top