This Side of the Pond

When a story from the UK made it across the pond last week, I couldn’t figure out what the fuss was about. Why was everyone so excited about a Roman ruin?

In case you didn’t happen across the news, archaeologists found the remains of a Roman settlement in Northamptonshire while digging along the route that will one day be a high-speed railway.

It might seem strange to hire archaeologists for the dirt work, but it’s actually a pretty cool preservation project. The rail link will span 150 miles between London and Birmingham, which means it will permanently cover a significant chunk of land.

Britain is a small country with a long history, so there’s no telling what secrets would be sealed forever beneath the foundations. And so, before they got started on construction, HS2 (a publicly funded government company) hired 1000 experts to perform 60 individual digs along the route.

It’s the biggest excavation ever performed in the UK and so far they’ve made numerous finds, including a prehistoric hunter-gatherer site, a battlefield from the Wars of the Roses and an Iron Age settlement.

Then, last week, another announcement, and this one seems to have captured international imaginations. The newly found settlement appears to have been established in around 400 BC before developing into a trading hub after the Romans arrived.

Along with 300 coins, the archaeologists have found decorative pottery, jewelry, glass vessels, scale weights and even make-up, along with workshops, kilns, wells and an unusually wide road. The evidence suggests the settlement did well for itself, which led its citizens to take up Roman ways.

Nobody knew what was there because the site has been used for pasture for goodness knows how long, which leads me to my surprise that people on this side of the pond seem so fascinated.

The few examples I listed above of what’s been found along the HS2 route illustrate the fact that you can barely walk three feet in the UK without tripping over the detritus of history. Our land is littered with the artifacts of thousands of years, because it’s a small island that has been in constant and evolving use.

For instance, the HS2 archaeologists at one point came across Roman remains that were hidden under an Anglo-Saxon tower that was itself concealed beneath the Norman church they started out thinking they were excavating. That’s an awful lot of history in a few square yards.

Searching for Roman coins in the UK is like hunting for arrowheads: you can find them almost anywhere, even if you didn’t set out to find them. You don’t need much in the way of specialist equipment to make incredible discoveries, just an eye on the soil beneath your feet.

By 2020, the Portable Antiquities Scheme had recorded a total of 320,000 Roman coins found littering the UK. The sheer breadth of places they’ve turned up – and the fact each emperor issued coinage with his own face – has allowed historians to track the spread of the Romans and their influence over time.

Historical finds are made in the strangest of places at the oddest of times, perhaps the most famous example of which is the body of King Richard III. He took the throne in 1483 and was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field, which not only marked the end of the War of the Roses, but also of the Middle Ages.

Nobody was sure where he was buried until a team of archaeologists set out to find the lost Greyfriars Church. They located it in 2012, underneath a parking lot in the middle of Leicester, with the skeleton of the former king nestled exactly where they predicted.

A king in a parking space doesn’t even scratch the surface of the peculiar finds we’ve grown used to. In 2001, for example, some bloke with a metal detector found a cup in a field in Kent.

It turned out to be one of the oldest artifacts ever found in Britain: a Bronze Age gold vessel from somewhere between 1700 and 1500 BC. The British Museum bought it even though it was somewhat crumpled and battered (probably because the farmer kept hitting it with his plough).

Another bloke with a metal detector found a jar containing almost 5000 coins, one of which featured someone called Domitianus. Until that time, nobody was sure he’d existed, let alone knew he was an emperor of the Gallic empire.

One detectorist found thousands of fragments of war gear from the seventh century, while another came across a Viking hoard of jewelry, ingots and silver coins that may have been part of the peace deal struck with the army of Vikings that conquered Northumbria and East Anglia before turning its sights on King Alfred the Great’s Wessex.

Yet another owner of a metal detector (seems every household should have one) found an enamel-decorated pan that was made to honor the career of someone called Draco, who spent his life guarding England from the feisty Scots on Hadrian’s Wall.

While London’s transport authorities were trying to construct the Crossrail, they hit so many historic sites that they had to recruit a specialist. One find was the Bedlam Burial Ground, which contained 3000 skeletons that allowed scientists to finally identify the bacteria that caused the Great Plague; other included the jawbone of a woolly mammoth and a piece of 55-million-year-old amber.

We have a thriving archaeological community in the UK, but even the experts don’t always find what they expect. During a dig off the coast of Guernsey, for example, scientists came across a carefully dug grave belonging to a medieval porpoise – we still don’t know who buried it there or why.

Even the weather sometimes adds to our archives. In 2018, a heatwave scorched away the characteristic green of the English countryside and dried out the soil, leaving indentations that could clearly be seen from above outlining everything from barrows and Roman farms to Neolithic ceremonial monuments.

As you can see, historical finds are part and parcel of being British – while this Roman settlement is certainly fascinating, it’s far from unusual. I suppose the moral of the story is to look closely at the ground if you find yourself in my homeland – or maybe borrow a metal detector, seeing as they seem even easier to find than Roman coins.