VIΛNOVΛ

Community engagement

Fun few days taking the Roman Coin handling collection out and about this summer.

1st a lovely Saturday in Dunstable for the town’s Around the World and Festival of Archaeology event (organised by the Dunstable High Street Heritage Action Zone team).

Then 2 equally lovely days taking part in Archaeological Research Services Ltd’s Open Days at their Milton excavations near Cambridge. Great to be on site and brilliant to see so many people visiting an archaeological excavation (even during the epic rain showers!).

100s of people spent time at the Roman Coin & Money Workshop and the handling collection was extensively handled. We did lots of coin rubbings and coloured in lots of pictures of Roman coins that children could take away with them. The new Design Your Own Coin activity went very well indeed too. The designs were all brilliant but if I had to pick a favourite or 2, I’d go with the one of ‘My Mum’ and another celebrating the ‘Macaroni Penguin’ (which I’d never heard of so it was great to hear Astrid tell us about her love of animals).

August 2023

Excavation archive

The digital archive for the PRIORY FIELD excavation at CAERLEON is now available on the Archaeology Data Service website!

Called ‘Spreadsheet Data from the Caerleon Priory Field Project, 2008-2010’, the collection includes 6 spreadsheets containing the full stratigraphic sequence of the Roman legionary store building in Priory Field, as well as selected finds assemblages:

• CPF Contexts & Phases
• CPF Registered Artefacts
• CPF Registered Artefacts – Artefact Categories
• CPF Faunal Remains Summary
• CPF Ceramic Building Materials
• CPF Nails & Window Glass

The data is provided so that anyone, anywhere, can interrogate the excavated archive for themselves, exploring the site’s full stratigraphic record and the origins of finds recovered during the excavation.

The formal excavation report of the Priory Field project, including extensive analysis and discussion of the site’s stratigraphy and its very large finds assemblages, will be published later in 2023 as: Guest, P. and Gardner, A. Excavations in the Roman Legionary Fortress at Caerleon: The Priory Field Store Building. Oxford: Archaeopress.

May 2023

Excavation – research, training and engagement

As the sun sets on this year’s excavation at Hinton St Mary, it’s worth taking a moment to look back on what has been an unbelievably successful season.

We excavated 3 trenches around the location of the famous mosaic discovered in 1963 (the 3rd trench was inside the corrugated cow shed in the photo on the right), and have shown that it cannot have belonged to a typical courtyard villa as has been proposed for the past 60 years. Instead, it appears that it decorated the floor of a building that possibly stood alone (to be confirmed!), but with other contemporary buildings around it. The largest of these was long and rectangular and divided into smaller rooms, one of which was also furnished with a tessellated floor (sadly heavily disturbed by later ploughing).

We trained 9 undergraduate archaeologists from Cardiff University / Prifysgol Caerdydd University and 11 other volunteers at the beginning of their archaeological careers. We invited 33 children with special educational needs from Yewstock School to work with us in the trenches and showed over 300 people around the site during our various open events too. We made lots of friends in the area and we’re very grateful to the Hinton St Mary Estate and the local community for making us so welcome during our time in the village.

This is a truly collaborative project and lots of people and organisations chipped in to help. Prof. Keith Wilkinson from the University of Winchester provided training in surveying as well as geophysical prospection and also undertook a new GPR survey of the site, while Porf. Mark Maltby of Bournemouth University explained the mysteries of zooarchaeology to help us understand the faunal remains we were collecting. The original mosaic was painted by Dr David Neal in 1963 and it was brilliant to see him back on site 59 years later helping us record the new mosaic!

Archaeology is about people – past and present – and special thanks to all the DHSM22 team for making this such a rewarding and enjoyable experience. Firstly, the inspirational staff from our commercial partners Albion Archaeology – Mike Luke, Kathy Pilkinton and Matevz Groselj – as well as Phineas Elmore, Chris and Steve Waite, and the legendary Archie Gillespie. Thanks also to the fantastic students and volunteers who were just – well, fantastic!

Finally, a special thank you to Drs Jill Cook and Richard Hobbs from The British Museum for making all of this possible.

More info about the Hinton mosaic as well as previous work at the site can be found at here, which will be updated soon with a summary of this season’s results.

July 2022

New publication

An article describing the hoard of 309 late Roman coins from Hengrove in Bristol has been published in the new volume of Numismatic Chronicle! The photo on the right shows some of the large number of Magnentian coins from this unique coin hoard.

Discovered during a watching brief carried out by Cotswold Archaeology in Sept. 2019, the 309 bronze coins were cleaned and conserved by Drakon Heritage and Conservation before arriving on my desk in late 2020 for identification and reporting.

So, just over 3 years after the hoard saw the light of day for the 1st time in something like 1,660 years, this collaborative project has ended with a research article in the prestigious Num Chron!

Thanks to my co-author Ed McSloy from CA, Pieta Greaves ACR from Drakon and the developer Bellway Homes for making this happen. If you don’t have your own copy of Numismatic Chronicle, you can find out more on Peter’s Academia page, or here.

Perhaps you have a hoard of Roman coins hanging around waiting for someone to take a look and reveal its secrets?

April 2022

New research project

We are delighted to announce a new 3-year archaeological science project funded by The Leverhulme Trust that will examine how the Roman army in Britain was provisioned. ‘Feeding the Roman Army in Britain‘ is the largest project of its kind to date and will use cutting-edge technology to find out where the animals consumed by Roman soldiers in their forts on Hadrian’s Wall, the Antonine Wall and in SE Wales were reared. This will lead to new insights about the impact of 1000s of Roman soldiers on the native populations in newly-conquered provinces, as well as how the Roman Empire functioned economically.

Archaeology is about discovery and adventure. Uncovering important new evidence about the past is core to what we do at Vianova, and we will continue to be ambitious, innovative, collaborative and focused on delivering excellence to each and every one of our clients.

Find out more about the project here.

July 2021

101 years ago, an event took place that would change the study of Roman Britain forever. In 1920 R.E. Mortimer Wheeler submitted an application to the new post of ‘Keeper of the Archaeological Department & Lecturer in Archaeology’ at the National Museum of Wales. Mortimer Wheeler’s application was successful and his appointment in Cardiff began a remarkable career that would have an enormous impact on how archaeology was done in this country, as well as how Roman Britain was taught and presented to the public.

Wheeler is a controversial figure now, but he was an extraordinary man who led an extraordinary life. It was in Wales that he established his reputation as an innovative field archaeologist, developing the principles of methodological excavation and recording of archaeological stratigraphy (influenced by the work of earlier pioneers such as Augustus Pitt Rivers and Flinders Petrie). The ‘Wheeler Method’ (or ‘box and section’ method), was first put into practice on his excavations of the auxiliary forts at Segontium (Caernarfon) and Brecon Gaer, before he turned his attention to the remains of the legionary fortress at Caerleon. Wheeler’s excavation of the Amphitheatre in 1926 and 1927 (which, like his later excavations, was carried out and published with his first wife, Tessa Verney Wheeler), was a colossal undertaking that captured the British public’s imagination only a few years after Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. Today the Amphitheatre is one of Roman Britain’s most iconic surviving monuments.

Archaeologists have returned time and again to Caerleon since the Wheelers’ excavations, and recent surveys, excavations and cutting-edge scientific projects are generating new information that is changing our understanding of Isca and the Second Augustan Legion (you can find out about these projects at https://vianovaarchaeology.com/roman-caerleon/). 101 years after Mortimer Wheeler’s arrival in Cardiff, Caerleon is still a key site for the study of the conquest of Wales and the assimilation of its native tribes into the political structures and economic networks of Roman Britannia.

May 2021

New pages about Roman Caerleon now available! Details of 4 innovative research projects, including the excavations at Priory Field and the Southern Canabae. Check them out here.

April 2021