Time Team Day 20 - There's A Villa Here Somewhere

​The Thirty One days of the Time Team continues with a mysterious villa in Litlington.

The people of Litlington believe that their villages hide one of the best-kept Roman secrets in Britain.  A vicar put in a trench and decided that there was a huge villa in the town.  Another dig discovered a cemetery.  However, the records of the dig have been lost.  So the Time Team will spend three days putting Roman Litlington on the map.  Will Time Team find the villa that was found over a hundred years ago?  What will the Time Team discover about Roman Litlington?

The Litlington site last dig happened over one hundred years ago.  So Time Team is the first modern dig on the site.  At the start, Time Team is confused due to the lack of information on the villa.  There was one piece of information left behind and it showed what the villa looked like on a map.  How accurate is this map?  If it is accurate it would have been one of the biggest villas found in Britain.  The locals had been finding Roman items for decades.  Some of the archelogy has been found on the surface and have included roof and floor tiles and hairpins.  Some of the finds suggest that there was a grand Roman Bathhouse.

As geophysics works the field and the Time Team will look in a small forested area for more finds.  Whatever was on the site covered a large area.  As they take down trees, there are immediate finds on the site.  Were these items dumped here?  Or were they part of a building that had fallen down?

As the geophysics comes back, the results are disappointing.  Upon further review with the landscape archeologist Stewart Ainsworth, the geophysics team may have been looking in the wrong spot.  Stewart believes that the map does not look as accurate as was originally thought.  So they are sent to another part of the field.

As the Time Team digs in the forested area, they are finding a tiled area.  Was this part of a building?  The tiles are not revealing anything.  The Time Team has not been able to put in a trench in the field because of the lack of targets in the field.  They will have to turn to landscape archaeology to try to find the villa in the field.  Despite the lack of targets, the trench goes in on the basis of a one-hundred-seventy-year-old map.  As trench one goes in, a piece of Roman tile is found.

The Time Team continues to dig in the forested area and has found the remains of a well, which is following the tile floor.  A second trench will go in at the forested site.  A second trench will go in in the field near the forest to find the rest of the wall.  More finds are found in this forest site including plaster with paint remaining on it.  The locals are thrilled to see the remains of a Roman floor and Roman wall.  Do these finds indicate something high status?

Tony catches up with trench one.  There are no remains of a Roman villa at the site.  There were remains of a Medieval trackway.  There was no evidence of a villa in the field.  Tony feels like this is turning into a disaster.  However, the site director is hopeful that there was a villa on the site.  Will the Time Team actually find a villa on the site?  Tune into the rest of the episode to find out more.

This would be a good episode to show for a fun history day.