Issue 105

Mar / Apr 2009

Contents

news

Welsh find may be key to mysterious mounds

Sissinghurst Castle has Elizabethan pavilion

Engraved stone found at ancient ritual site in Cheshire

In the press

In Brief & Phase 2

features

THE BIG DIG: Catholme
Henry Chapman on extraordinary prehistoric earthwork remains in Staffordshire

The bad teeth dividend
Karen Hardy reports important new evidence in how poor oral hygiene is key to understanding early diets

Wroxeter (Viroconium)
Roger White on 150 years since the first dig at Roman town

Shopping and Digging - NEW
James Dixon explains an unexpected archaeological story behind the changing faces of our towns

spoilheap

Pension advice from an archaeologist – theory you can trust

requiem

Our fourth annual celebration of antiquity lovers who have died in 2008

on the web

Recommended websites
The new CBA website and Caroline Wickham-Jones goes in search of world heritage sites

letters

your views and responses

Archaeology in Britain

Mike Heyworth takes stock in very difficult times with a special focus on the crisis

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

features

Wroxeter (Viroconium)

The first excavation at Wroxeter, a village in rural Shropshire that has given its name to the fourth largest town in Roman Britain, was 150 years ago. It is time to excavate there again, says Roger White, as he considers the work of earlier archaeologists.

On February 3 1859 Thomas Wright, a noted Victorian antiquary, ordered his men to begin excavating beneath Wroxeter's Old Work – one of the greatest pieces of standing Roman masonry in this country. By April of that year they had uncovered the spectacularly well-preserved remains of a Roman bath house, quite the largest ever found in Britain up to that time and the focus of much publicity and excitement.

Using the newly established railway network, people of all classes flocked from across Britain to see the remains, and were catered for on site by a marquee where they could get refreshments and find a guide to take them round the ruins. Excited miners from Cannock Chase were shown the burial site of one of the last inhabitants of Wroxeter: he had, allegedly, fled from the Saxon terror into the hypocaust, the baths' under-floor heating system, clutching his life savings and had perished there. Charles Dickens, writing up his visit, was much entertained by the guide's account of the tenant farmer who had thrown Wright off one part of the field so he could plant turnips. Wright was less amused: "I wish I could cram that farmer with turnips 'til he burst!", he complained to his wealthy Liverpool businessman sponsor Joseph Mayer.

The ruins, the marquee, and indeed some of the workmen, are recorded in a remarkable series of stereoscopic photographs taken by Francis Bedford in that year. These must rank as among the earliest, if not the earliest, photographs of an excavation in Britain. By September of that year, Wright had persuaded the owner of the site, the Duke of Cleveland, to hand over four acres of land (1.6ha) as a visitor attraction to be administered by the newly formed local archaeological society. Pretty soon, a custodian had been installed who lived on the site alongside his own purpose-built corrugated tin shed that functioned as a museum.

Photographs taken 70 years later in the 1920s show bushes and trees growing on the spoilheaps while the ruins had disintegrated due to lack of consolidation. Visiting children recall playing ducks and drakes with the loose tesserae on site, while the custodian had a nice sideline in making teapot stands from the same mosaic floor pieces. Excavations continued, but not on the baths site. In 1912–14 Jocelyn Bushe-Fox, accompanied by a youthful Mortimer Wheeler and other students, excavated town houses and a temple nearby. Of the students, only Wheeler returned from the first world war.

From 1923–27, Wroxeter once again became the centre of attention when the extensive remains of its forum were excavated by Donald Atkinson. Spectacular finds included the fabulous inscription from the forum, said to be one of the finest to have survived from Britain, and a solid silver mirror. In the second war the ruins bizarrely became the base for a searchlight battery defending nearby Atcham airfield, so the site was closed to the public. It reopened in 1947 when the ruins at last came under the ownership of the state as a scheduled ancient monument. The chief inspector, Ballie Reynolds, promised the local society that extensive areas of the Roman town would be opened up and would become an archaeological park. It may take some time, he said, to achieve this ambition.

Professional visions

In the event, it took over 50 years just to deal with the baths site. The first priority was to make the ruins safe for the public to visit, and intelligible as a monument. Clearance of the spoilheaps, shrubbery, custodian's house and museum was followed by a thorough consolidation of the walls that initially seems to have been undertaken with little record. This posed severe problems later in interpreting the standing archaeology of the baths. In 1953, Kathleen Kenyon, who had family connections with the county, ran a training excavation for the University of Birmingham on a town house identified from the air just south of the baths, aided in the following year by Graham Webster.

After these two seasons working on the town house, Webster was invited to move onto the baths site to record its below-ground archaeology. He ran his training excavation there for the next 30 years from 1955. His work was hampered both by the then fashion for box-excavation and the standing walls on the site, which combined to inhibit understanding of the complex sequence. In 1966 Philip Barker, who was acting as supervisor for Webster, was famously given the task of evaluating an area at the north end of the site before a new house for the custodian could be built, "just in case there was anything there". His meticulous, and to Webster's eyes painfully slow, unravelling of the archaeology revealed a timber building.

In a meeting with the government inspector, Barker persuaded the ministry to excavate the whole of the area north of the Old Work. For this he used the new technique of open-area excavation. Thus developed a unique situation in which visitors could contemplate the old and new styles of excavation next to each other, with a sea of rubble traversed by roving teams of diggers on one side of the Old Work, while on the other another set of diggers popped in and out of holes like rabbits. (Looking through the list of diggers and supervisors one realises just how many senior archaeologists of today first dug at Wroxeter, either with Webster or later with Barker).

The mid-1970s was a period of excitement and discovery at Wroxeter. Barker's excavation soon demonstrated that the rubble layers held the faint traces of timber buildings, one of considerable size, that extended the sequence of occupation deep into the centuries after Roman withdrawal. Meanwhile Webster had triumphantly found the evidence for a longsuspected legionary fortress, the town's precursor. The initial evidence came from his own excavations when he finally found the rampart of the fortress, and realised that the fragmentary buildings beneath the baths he had been trying to make sense of were the remains of barrack blocks.

At about the same time Stephen Johnson was re-examining trenches cut across the eastern town ramparts by Kathleen Kenyon in the 1930s. He realised that under the town's defences was an earlier phase that was legionary in type and first century in date. Finally, Arnold Baker's persistent flights over the town were rewarded during the long, hot dry summers of 1975 and 1976 when the stone buildings of the town centre were revealed in startling clarity, along with the northern defences of the legionary fortress.

Coinciding with all this, the Duke of Cleveland offered all of his land and buildings within the walled area to the Department of the Environment, who seized the opportunity to take the town's remains out of cultivation. This enlightened act immediately removed the greatest threat to Wroxeter's archaeology, the ploughing that had increasingly been eroding the site. In the euphoria of the moment, the department drew up an ambitious plan that would have seen the modern roads diverted around the town walls and the whole town centre excavated and presented to the public as an archaeological park, realising Ballie Reynolds' vision.

As with so much in Britain, the election of Margaret Thatcher led the development at Wroxeter in wholly new directions. By 1980, it was already clear that the long-term excavations funded by the state would no longer be continued. Both Webster and Barker were given five more years to wind down their digs and reach a sensible stopping point. In point of fact, Barker continued on a small scale until 1990, running the training school until his retirement. The fully consolidated ruins reopened to the public in 1992 with a temporary museum, first opened in the mid 1970s, refurbished to extend its life. Activity was redirected into writing up Webster and Barker's long and complex excavations, which appeared in print as three English Heritage monographs (1997–2002).

The involvement of the University of Birmingham continued, since the post-excavation projects were run by Birmingham Archaeology staff. It was from here that the next research impetus came in the form of the Wroxeter Hinterland Project, led by Vince Gaffney (1994–97). This was an innovative attempt to research and reconstruct the landscape around Wroxeter using the new tool of geographic information system modelling. While fieldwork was concentrated outside the town walls, the opportunity was also taken to survey for the first time an entire Romano-British town using geophysical instruments. This was to test what was actually in the blank areas within the town walls shown on the aerial photographs.

That the survey could be contemplated was the result of advances in geophysical techniques and, especially, computing power. The results startled even the normally sanguine and experienced teams from GSB Prospection Ltd and English Heritage who carried out the work. Overnight the number of visible buildings in Wroxeter more than doubled. The work on the hinterland, including the excavation of a fine villa at Whitley Grange near Shrewsbury, was published in 2007, while the geophysics results are being written up as an Atlas of Wroxeter, drawing together all the evidence for the town for the first time. The question is now: what next?

• Wroxeter Guide Book

Professional visions

It is to tackle this question that a symposium was held at the Society of Antiquaries on February 6 – the day this magazine was published – to present the results of current research and to discuss some options for the future. In spite of all the activity on the site, Wroxeter is still the least excavated of any of the major towns of Roman Britain. Our knowledge is derived largely from geophysics and aerial photography: yet we know that any excavation will discover far more buildings than are visible through these techniques. In excavating the baths basilica, Barker found 70 additional buildings. There are still whole fields in Wroxeter that have never had a single archaeological trench cut in them.

One answer, therefore, might be to excavate more, but where to start? Of course, potential targets for excavation should be determined by a research strategy, but how to choose from the multitude of research possibilities offered by the site? Should there be lots of small-scale excavations to evaluate the whole town or a single large-scale excavation? Is excavation the right thing to do? The whole site is under the ownership and care of English Heritage, who has a duty to preserve it for the future. Allowing large areas to be excavated would seem to fly in the face of that. And yet, if the site is owned by English Heritage, then surely it has a duty to research the site as well as protect it? Its remit is to explain and explore as well as to conserve.

It is certainly true that visitors today have to work hard to understand the significance of what they see. Since they are limited to experiencing only a single building complex in a whole town, people can be forgiven for failing to realise just how much is there. Stand on the viewing platform overlooking the baths and look to the south at the hedge line at the edge of the field. There in front of you can be seen in a single glance the whole side of a legionary fortress. The field that you stand in takes in one half of the fortress, and yet the fortress is just one quarter of the whole area of the town. Cross the road and stand at the highest point of the town. In the middle of this huge field you can experience why the town and fortress were built here. In front of you lies a glorious swathe of central Shropshire, with the Welsh hills beyond, still largely unspoilt and recognisable from 18th century watercolours of the Old Work. The surrounding hills, crowned by more than a dozen hillforts visible from this spot, give it a real power of place. This is somewhere to see, and be seen.

My contention is that it is time to excavate at Wroxeter again, not just to discover more about the town but to keep alive the ethos of training and research that has driven work on the site over 150 years. This is potentially the largest archaeological research and training laboratory in the country. Work here need not be driven by commercial pressures. In the model farm buildings adjacent to the museum, also owned and protected by English Heritage, we have the nucleus of a research centre and permanent museum. If we excavated the forum again and consolidated it we would have the only visible forum and baths complex north of the Alps. The site was badly damaged by Atkinson in the 1920s and would prove a challenge for any archaeologist, as well as providing an opportunity for engaging the public's interest in Wroxeter and in archaeology in general.

There is an interesting parallel to Wroxeter. On the Dutch border lies the small German town of Xanten. Adjacent to it lies the abandoned Colonia Ulpia Traiana, one of Germany's largest Roman urban centres. It is virtually identical in size to Wroxeter and was acquired by the regional government at much the same time as Wroxeter was acquired by the state. It too is crossed by modern roads, but has been extensively excavated.

From the 1970s, however, there has been a consistent policy of reconstruction of the town's public buildings: its gates, town wall, inn (complete with working baths), amphitheatre, temple and now shops and houses have been recreated. A brand new museum and cover building have been erected over the town baths, themselves of similar dimensions and plan to those at Wroxeter. The museum opened in September 2008, largely unnoticed in the British archaeological press, yet on its first weekend it attracted more visitors than come to Wroxeter in a whole year. Annual visitor figures to the site are 350,000, and seem set to grow. While I would not advocate development such as this at Wroxeter, it does give pause for thought as to what could be achieved if the will power, vision and investment were available. At the moment Wroxeter is a sleeping giant. Has the time come to waken it?

Roger White is senior lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity, University of Birmingham. He was supervising archaeologist (Leverhulme research fellow) on the Wroxeter Hinterland Project; other core staff were Vince Gaffney (project director), Simon Buteux (project management and development) and Martijn van Leusen (information technologist, Leverhulme research fellow).

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