2,000-year-old Roman road discovered in England, archaeologists believe

A potentially 2,000-year-old Roman road was uncovered in Worcestershire, England a few weeks ago during routine waterworks, Metro reported on Tuesday.

The stretch of road that was uncovered is 10 meters long and 2.9 meters wide.

Although the exact dating of the road is unclear, it was constructed with large stones that were a typical design used by the Romans, and similar roads have only been discovered in Rome and Pompeii.

The exact location of the road has not been publicized, but Metro reported that it was found in a field near a river where a Roman-era villa complex was found four years ago.

What kind of testing is being done on the road?

Further investigation is underway to try and discover the exact origin of the road and when it dates back to.

Archaeologist Aidan Smyth told Metro that all the evidence seems to point to the road being Roman, but that investigators are keeping their minds open.

“If it turns out to be medieval then it could still be considered to be nationally significant as nothing similar has been found in Britain to date,” he said.

“If it is a first-century Roman feature, it is the only one of its kind to be found in Britain to date. There’s not really anything like this medieval either.”

Aidan Smyth

Part of the road was dug up and sent to be tested by optically stimulated luminescence testing which will tell researchers when the sediments were last exposed to sunlight.

The area where the road was found is believed to be near what was the Roman city of Vertis, and the area has produced a lot of Roman archaeology over the years.

Early medieval female burial site is ‘most significant ever discovered’ in UK

Find dating from about 650AD in Northamptonshire includes jewelled necklace and changed archaeologists’ view of the period

Archaeologists don’t often bounce with excitement, but the Museum of London archaeology team could hardly contain themselves on Tuesday as they unveiled an “exhilarating” discovery made on the last day of an otherwise barren dig in the spring.

“This is the most significant early medieval female burial ever discovered in Britain,” said the leader of the dig, Levente Bence Balázs, almost skipping with elation. “It is an archaeologist’s dream to find something like this.”

“I was looking through a suspected rubbish pit when I saw teeth,” Balázs added, his voice catching with emotion at the memory. “Then two gold items appeared out of the earth and glinted at me.

These artefacts haven’t seen the light of day for 1,300 years, and to be the first person to see them is indescribable. But even then, we didn’t know quite how special this find was going to be.”

What Balázs had found was a woman buried between 630 and 670 AD – a woman buried in a bed alongside an extraordinary, 30-piece necklace of intricately-wrought gold, garnets and semi-precious stones. It is, by a country mile, the richest necklace of its type ever uncovered in Britain and reveals craftsmanship unparalleled in the early medieval period.

Also buried with the woman was a large, elaborately decorated cross, buried face down, another unique and mysterious feature of the grave’s secrets, and featuring highly unusual depictions of a human face in delicate silver with blue glass eyes. Two pots were buried alongside her, also unique in that they still contain a mysterious residue yet to be analysed.

“This is a find of international importance. This discovery has nudged the course of history, and the impact will get stronger as we investigate this find more deeply,” said Balázs.

“These mysterious discoveries pose so many more questions than they answer. There’s so much still to discover about what we’ve found and what it means.”

So much about the dig in April was inauspicious. The small, isolated Northamptonshire village of Harpole, whose name means “filthy pool”, was previously only known for its annual scarecrow festival and its proximity to arguably one of the worst motorway service stations in the UK.

There were no ancient churches near the dig or other burial sites. But thanks to the practice of developer-funded archeology, the Vistry Group housebuilders commissioned a search of the area they were building on.

“I’ve worked for Vistry for 19 years and so I’ve had a lot of interaction with archaeologists,” said Daniel Oliver, Vistry’s regional technical director. “I’m used to Simon [Mortimer, archaeology consultant for the RPS group] ringing me up in great excitement about pot shards.” Beside him, Mortimer visibly stiffens in protest, and Oliver quickly adds: “Pot shards are very exciting, of course.”

“On the day the team discovered the Harpole treasure, I had five missed calls from Simon on my phone,” said Oliver. “I knew then that this was about more than pot shards. Exciting as pot shards are.”

The woman – and it is a woman, even though only the crowns of her teeth remain – was almost certainly an early Christian leader of significant personal wealth, both an abbess and a princess, perhaps. Lyn Blackmore, Museum of London archeology team specialist, said: “Women have been found buried alongside swords, but men have never been found buried alongside necklaces.” Experts agree she must have been one of the first women in Britain ever to reach a high position in the church.

Devout as she clearly was, her grave is evidence of a shifting era when pagan and Christian beliefs were still in flux. “This is a fascinating burial of combined iconography: the burial bling has a distinctly pagan flavour, but the grave is also heavily vested in Christian iconography,” said Mortimer.

Vistry has waived its rights to the treasure, which now belongs to the state. The team hope it will be displayed locally, once their conservation work is complete – a painstaking endeavour that will take another two years at least.

Oliver is cagey about where the actual dig site is. It hasn’t been built over but, equally, it hasn’t been marked. “We don’t want people coming with metal detectors,” he said. “That would be a bit much.”

4,000-Year-Old Toolkit Found Near Stonehenge Was Used for Goldwork, New Study Finds

Archaeologists determined that an ancient toolkit found near Stonehenge was used to make a variety of gold objects.

According to new research published in the journal Antiquity, microscopic residue on the surface of the tools is ancient gold, revealing these stone-and-copper-alloy items were used as hammers and anvils, and to smooth the objects being crafted.

“This is a really exciting finding for our project,” said Rachel Crellin, lead author and archaeologist at the University of Leicester, in a statement. “What our work has revealed is the humble stone toolkit that was used to make gold objects thousands of years ago.”

Originally excavated in 1801, the toolkit was found in the Upton Lovell G2a burial which is thought to date to the Bronze Age, around 1850–1700 BCE. Marked by an earthen mound near Stonehenge, initial investigations revealed two individuals and a wide assortment of grave goods.

One figure was placed sitting upright, with her head close to the top of the barrow, and buried with a fine shale arm ring and a necklace of polished shale beads. The other figure was wearing a ceremonial cloak, with pierced bone points as a necklace, thought to be a specialized costume.

Early speculation referred to the cloaked figure as a ‘Shaman’ who had special ritual significance, or an important and skilled craftsman. Now, researchers have discovered that the toolkit was used to make objects in which a core material—like jet, shale, amber, wood, or copper—was covered and decorated with a layer of gold sheet.

Processes in which the objects are thought to have been used involve making rib-and-furrow decorations, producing perforations, fitting the core object with the sheet-gold, and smoothing and polishing the finished objects.

Some of the tools were already ancient, making them thousands of years old by the time they were reused. There was even a complete battle axe, which was repurposed for metalworking.

“Such battle axes were far from the only smooth stones that could have been selected for these purposes,” the paper explains. “In intentionally repurposing these objects, their histories rubbed off on the materials they worked.”

Researchers used a scanning electron microscope as well as an energy dispersive spectrometer to confirm their findings. The gold residue is present on five artifacts, where they found gold flecks on the surface as well as characteristic wear traces from the goldworking process.

The team additionally suggest that the bone points from the ‘shaman’s costume’ could have been used for goldworking.

“By exploring the use of materials through a technique called microwear analysis, that determines microscopic marks on objects, [we can] better understand how they were made and used,” said Oliver Harris, coauthor and University of Leicester archaeologist, in an email to ARTnews. “We have shown how the central stone is to the process of making gold, and how stones with certain properties and histories were preferentially selected to be part of this practice.”

According to the paper, “there is far more complexity here, in relations, histories, gestures and processes, than could ever be captured under the label ‘shaman’, ‘metalworker’ or ‘goldsmith’ … [our] analysis suggests that goldworking may be different from other forms of metal production and may not, from a Bronze Age perspective, have been considered to be a metal at all, but rather something with its own relational properties that were quite different from those that entwined copper and tin.”

The toolkit and associated finds are currently on view at the Wiltshire Museum in Devizes.

1,300-Year-Old Gold Necklace Unearthed in England

Archaeologists have found a “once-in-a-lifetime” gold necklace dating back to 630-670 AD and described as the richest of its type ever uncovered in Britain.

The jewellery, found near Northampton, has at least 30 pendants and beads made of Roman coins, gold, garnets, glass and semi-precious stones.

The 1,300-year-old object was spotted in a grave thought to be of a woman of high status, such as royalty. Experts hailed the discovery during the summer as internationally significant.

Archaeologists from the Museum of London Archaeology (Mola) found the necklace during excavations ahead of a housing development in Harpole, west of Northampton.

“When the first glints of gold started to emerge from the soil we knew this was something significant,” said Levente-Bence Balazs, who led a team of five from Mola.’

However, we didn’t quite realize how special this was going to be.

“We are lucky to be able to use modern methods of analysis on the finds and surrounding burial to gain a much deeper insight into the life of this person and their final rites.”

The rectangular pendant with a cross motif forms the centerpiece of the necklace and is the largest and most intricate element.

Made of red garnets set in gold, Mola specialists believe it was originally half of a hinged clasp before it was re-used.

The burial also contained two decorated pots and a shallow copper dish.

However, X-rays taken on blocks of soil lifted from the grave also revealed an elaborately decorated cross, featuring highly unusual depictions of human faces cast in silver. Mola conservators said the large and ornate piece suggests the woman may have been an early Christian leader.

Experts said the skeleton had fully decomposed apart from tiny fragments of tooth enamel. However, the combination of grave finds suggested it was of a very devout high-status woman such as an abbess, royalty, or perhaps both.

A handful of similar necklaces from this time have previously been discovered in other regions of England, but none are as ornate as the “Harpole treasure”, experts added.

The closest parallel is the Desborough necklace, found in Northamptonshire in 1876 and is now in the British Museum’s collections.

Simon Mortimer, RPS Archaeology Consultant, said: “This find is truly a once-in-a-lifetime discovery – the sort of thing you read about in textbooks and not something you expect to see coming out of the ground in front of you.

“It shows the fundamental value of developer-funded archaeology. Had they not funded this work this remarkable burial may never have been found.”

Early Medieval period timeline:

• 410 AD: Roman rule of Britain ends

• 5th-6th Centuries: People from modern-day Germany, southern Scandinavia, and The Netherlands settle in southern and eastern Britain

• Late 6th-7th Centuries: Christianity gradually spreads across southern and eastern Britain and starts to appear in elite burials

• 640-680 AD: The Harpole Treasure, a high-status burial, is buried in Northamptonshire

• 793 AD: A Viking raid on the monastery at Lindisfarne, off the coast of modern-day Northumberland, marks the start of Viking raids on Britain

• 899 AD: King Alfred the Great dies

• 1066 AD: William the Conqueror defeats Harold and becomes King of England, ending the Early Medieval period

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Liz Mordue, the archaeological advisor for West Northamptonshire Council, said: “This is an exciting find which will shed considerable light on the significance of Northamptonshire in the Saxon period.”

The discoveries will be featured on BBC Two’s Digging for Britain in January, with Prof Alice Roberts getting an exclusive look at the objects and delving deeper into the ongoing conservation and analysis.

Wealthy Medieval Farm Excavated in Northern England

The site, four miles from Helmsley, was known to be the location of a grange built shortly after the abbey was founded in 1132 to supply it with produce, yet this was the first major excavation.

The farm was managed by the Cistercian monks until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539, and items including rosary beads, pottery and glazed tiles were all found.

It is now thought the grange was of high economic importance and reflected the status of the abbey itself. The glazed roof tiles are ‘almost unheard of’ in farms of the period, and evidence iron smelting took place on the land was also discovered.

The National Park Authority’s head of historic environment Miles Johnson said:

“Whilst it’s not surprising that we found evidence of medieval farming, the prestige, and range of the uncovered artifacts point to this being a place of high economic importance.

“For the archaeologists to find a cellar and what we think are glazed roof tiles from a medieval farm of this period is almost unheard of. Some find also relate to the process of iron smelting, which was clearly happening onsite, and indeed there was also an iron hunting arrow.”

The community dig was led by archaeologist John Buglass, founder of North Yorkshire-based JB Archeology, with close involvement from Keith Emerick, Inspector of Ancient Monuments at Historic England. Sixteen volunteers took part, contributing the equivalent of 129 days across six weeks.

John Buglass said: “This is one of those unexpected digs that shows just how much we can still learn from sites we thought we understood.

“Through the hard work of volunteer archaeologists from inside and outside the National Park, we have managed to add some significant understanding to our knowledge of the monastic granges of Rievaulx.”

Keith Emerick of Historic England added: “This is a truly remarkable discovery. Although we know where many monastic farm sites are located, relatively little is known about them. The excavation of such impressive remains and their associated finds adds a huge amount to our understanding of the medieval world.”

The excavations, which covered only a small part of the site, have now been completed, but work on analyzing the finds and interpreting the materials recovered will continue over the next year.

As successful farmers, the Cistercian monks at Rievaulx Abbey had a significant impact on the landscape of the North York Moors. They developed large-scale moorland grazing and stimulated the rapid growth of the wool trade that became so significant in England’s later history. The monks even diverted the course of the River Rye on more than one occasion to allow for their development.

The lead mining, iron ore, and wool sales operations were all highly profitable until the Black Death, after which it became difficult to recruit labour.

Rievaulx Abbey fell into ruin after the monks left following King Henry VIII’s campaign against the power of the Catholic Church. The site is now owned by English Heritage and welcomes visitors.

Ancient barn conversion with steam room found at Roman villa in Rutland

If you thought barn conversions were a relatively recent development for the property-owning classes, you’d be wrong – probably by 16 or 17 centuries.

Archaeologists at the site of a Roman villa complex in the east Midlands have discovered that its wealthy owners converted an agricultural timber barn into a dwelling featuring a bathing suite with a hot steam room, a warm room and a cold plunge pool.

Fresh evidence of the villa owners’ lavish lifestyle comes two years after a family found fragments of ancient pottery on a ramble through farmland in Rutland. Archaeologists from the University of Leicester, in partnership with Historic England and Rutland county council, later unearthed a rare mosaic depicting Homer’s Iliad.

The finding – now protected by the government – was described as “the most exciting Roman mosaic discovery in the UK in the last century”.

Now the same team has unveiled further discoveries at the site, including the conversion of a barn the size of a small church.

The barn was supported by large timber posts and may have had two storeys. It was converted to stone in the third or fourth century, with one end becoming a dwelling with many floors, and the other retained for agricultural or craft work.

The main feature of the dwelling was a Roman-style bath suite with sophisticated underfloor heating and heating ducts built into the walls. A tank outside the building may have been used to collect water from the roof.

The team also revisited the area of the mosaic which was thought to be laid in a dining room, known as a triclinium, within the main villa building. They discovered fragments of polished marble, broken stone columns and painted wall plaster that hint at grand decoration.

The dining room had been built as an extension to the main villa, suggesting that the owners wanted a special area for feasting as they gazed over the Iliad mosaic.

The new excavations also revealed additional mosaics in the corridors leading to the dining room, including one with a kaleidoscopic geometric design.

John Thomas, the deputy director of the University of Leicester archaeological service, said: “It’s difficult to overstate the significance of this Roman villa complex to our understanding of life in late Roman Britain.

While previous excavations of individual buildings, or smaller-scale villas, have given us a snapshot, this discovery in Rutland is much more complete and provides a clearer picture of the whole complex.

“The aim of this year’s work has been to investigate other buildings within the overall villa complex to provide context to the Trojan war mosaic. While that is a wonderful, eye-catching discovery, we will be able to learn much more about why it was here, and who might have commissioned it, by learning about the villa as a whole.”

Duncan Wilson, Historic England’s chief executive, said the site had “posed many questions about life in Roman Britain”. Its significance would become clearer as the evidence was examined over the next few years by specialists, he added.

How Did Humans Boil Water Before the Invention of Pots?

On a blustery day in October, Andrew Langley and 13 other graduate students headed to the woods to learn to boil water. They were allowed no obvious cooking vessels: no pots, no pans, no bowls, no cups, no containers at all. But they did bring deer hides, which Langley had carefully procured from deer farms. They were to boil water the Paleolithic way.

Langley is a doctoral student in archaeology at the University of York, and he studies how prehistoric humans cooked without pottery. Ceramics are a relatively recent invention in the long arc of human history.

Pottery shards appear in the archaeological record only 20,000 years ago, first in China and then many millennia later in the Near East and Europe. Metal cookware is an even more recent innovation. For tens or even hundreds of thousands of years before all this, our ancestors were building fires and using heat to make food tastier, safer, and easier to digest. The invention of cooking, anthropologists have argued, helped make humans human.

It’s easy to imagine how prehistoric people could have roasted their food. It’s much harder to imagine how they could have boiled it without pottery. But that’s what Langley, who was helping lead a class of master’s students in archaeology, set out to attempt that October morning. Their boiling experiment was part of a course, and it took place at the York Experimental Archaeological Research Centre, a lakeside grove where researchers try to re-create the prehistoric by hafting arrowheads and weaving baskets out of reeds—and, in this case, boiling water. The students were divided into groups of two or three, and they set out on this extremely simple yet daunting task.

A couple of groups dug pits, filling them with coals and then lining them with either wet clay or deer hide. Others poured water into birch bark or pig stomachs (procured from a Chinese supermarket).

One group hung a deer hide from a tree and started heating small rocks in a fire—a technique inspired by the discovery of fire-cracked rocks in Paleolithic sites. These rocks had split and changed in distinct ways that suggested repeated heating and cooling. Archaeologists think that these stones were heated in fires and then dropped into water for cooking.

But you can’t use just any old rocks for boiling. “The stones are the most tricky part,” Langley says. Wet stones, such as those that have been sitting in a river bed, will explode when the water inside turns into steam. So will stones with air trapped inside them. “Things like granite and basalt are very good,” he says. For safety reasons, Langley provided the students with massage stones that he knew would not explode. Still, the students had to heat the stones gradually to make sure that they did not crack at all. They ended up slowly nudging the stones into the fire over the course of 10 to 15 minutes. Using multiple stones, they were able to get the water inside the deer hide to boil.

Another group was also attempting to boil water inside a deer hide hung directly over a fire—a technique admittedly less grounded in physical evidence from archaeological sites. In 2015, John Speth, a retired anthropologist at the University of Michigan, wrote a paper pointing out that you can actually boil water in a plastic water bottle.

The paper, he was happy to explain to me, was inspired by watching the reality show Survivorman, in which the outdoor expert Les Stroud boils water in a plastic bottle, with his son. Speth quickly found YouTube videos and other evidence of people heating water in paper cups, coconut shells, bamboo tubes, wooden bowls, and even leaves. It turns out that as long as the cooking container is filled with water, it does not get hot enough to ignite.

But when Speth began talking with other archaeologists about this, he found that they had rarely thought about Paleolithic humans boiling water this way, using seemingly flimsy and flammable containers long before the introduction of pottery.

However, ethnographers in the 19th and 20 centuries documented the Celts, Assiniboin, Cree, Ojibwa, and Blackfeet cooking without stones in birch bark, hides, and animal stomachs. These organic materials would have rotted, of course, leaving no artefacts for archaeologists to study. Speth wondered if humans could have boiled liquids this way long before the evidence showed up in the archaeological record.

One group of students decided to put this method to the test. They hoisted their water-filled deer hide directly over a fire, and they planned to let it go as long as the hide stayed intact. The hair on the outside singed, but the skin itself held up just fine. So the students waited and waited and waited. Four hours later, the hide was still intact. It did get very hard, but neither sprung a leak nor burned.

The water reached 60 degrees Celsius, or 140 degrees Fahrenheit, but it did not come to a boil. And the deer hide definitely added some extra flavour, if you will, to the water. “If you stuck your head over it while it was cooking, you could smell it,” says Christopher Lance, one of the students. They were, I was disappointed to learn, not allowed to drink the hide-boiled water for food-safety reasons.

The students are now writing up the results of their different pot-less boiling techniques. And Speth was incredibly pleased to hear that a group of students decided to put his idea of wet cooking without hot stones to the test.

It’s extremely speculative, he admitted. But archaeology always has to deal with the problem of an incomplete record, and certain types of evidence (i.e., anything that will rot) are always going to be more incomplete than others. It’s about considering the things we see and also the things we don’t see. “If nobody asked the question,” Speth said, “nobody would even think it’s worth thinking about.”