One, two, three, four... fifty five thousand!
Wiltshire has some of the most famous archaeological monuments in Britain - Stonehenge, Avebury, Silbury Hill and, of course, Phil Harding.
Time Team were here to investigate one of the lesser known, but equally impressive sites, the Roman town of Cunetio. The town is famous in archaeological circles as the source of the largest ever Roman coin hoard found in Britain - 55,000 of them in one hole in the ground.
Our plan was simple enough: to build up a picture of how the town developed during the Roman period. There was only one problem - Cunetio is one of the biggest sites we have ever tried to tackle covering over 20 acres. Fortunately our geophysics team love a challenge and it was their job to undertake the biggest geophysical survey in Time Team history.
John Gater had pulled out all the stops for this dig - he brought a bigger team, more equipment and a new secret weapon. Known as MIRA, its cutting edge radar technology was so new it had never been used on archaeology in this country. In theory it could do the work of ten Jimmys (Jimmy being the man normally in charge of radar) and was vital to the success of our plan. Check out John's own account of the dig here.
The Roman town was surrounded by a monumental stone wall and our first trench went in to investigate this epic structure. Phil had the task of trying to uncover the wall and the southern gateway. These massive defences would have been a statement of power and dating their construction was vital to understanding the history of Cunetio.
Our second target was a huge building complex at the heart of the town. Believed to be a mansio, a hotel for Roman officials travelling the country, it dominated the geophysics and aerial photos. Matt was in charge of finding out when it had been built and how it tied into the story of the town.
We were working at Cunetio at the height of summer, so of course the weather was terrible. The rain was so torrential on Day One that a marquee had to be erected over the mansio trench to protect the archaeology and the archaeologists.
It didn't do this for three days
Phil had no such luck but his trench was coming up trumps anyway. He had uncovered the town wall which was almost 10 feet thick, definitely the biggest of the series! Not only that, he also had one of the towers guarding the southern entrance and it was equally monumental. What's more, the whole structure seemed to have been built at the same time in the 4th Century.
What had made this site unique was the fantastic hoard of 55,000 coins found in the 1970s. Why the hoard had been buried was unclear, but what we could demonstrate was how difficult it would have been to bury them. Unfortunately, we didn't have the originals, so instead we had £550 of one pence coins and it took Tony, Phil and Philippa 45 minutes to bury our stash - clearly whoever buried the original hoard can't have done it in a hurry.
Using the geophysics, aerial photos and archaeology we started to piece together a history of the town. It had started from humble origins in the late first century as a small roadside settlement. Being on an important route way it continued to grow until it was developed into a planned town with the mansio at its centre. Finally the epic stone wall was built around it in the 4th century.
By the end of Day Three John Gater was ready for the big geophysics reveal. After walking 55km and covering an area of 27 acres the team had pulled off a surveying miracle. The results were stunning and showed that the archaeology extended over a much wider area than we had expected. John held in his hand 400 years of Roman history, printed onto a single piece of A4 paper.
