The History Blog

Archaeologists excavating the site of HS2 high speed rail construction in Fleet Marston, near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, have unearthed the remains of a small but busy Roman town and associated cemetery that contains 425 bodies, more than 40 of them decapitated.

As was typical in the late Roman period, the cemetery predominantly contained inhumation burials but also included some cremation burials. The number of burials, along with the development of the settlement, suggests that there was a population influx into the town in the mid to  late Roman period, linked perhaps to increased agricultural production. There are two separate areas of burials suggesting the cemetery may have been organised by tribe, family, ethnic grouping.

Amongst the buried population at Fleet Marston are a number of decapitated burials, approximately 10% of those buried there. There are several instances of the head being placed between the legs or next to the feet. One interpretation of this burial practice is that it could be the burial of criminals or a type of outcast, although decapitation is well-known elsewhere and appears to have been a normal, albeit marginal, burial rite during the late Roman period.

Fleet Marston is a medieval town, but previous archaeological discoveries of pottery and coins indicated it had been preceeded by a Romano-British settlement.  The town was traversed by a major Roman road linking  Verulamium (modern-day St Albans) to Corinium Dobunnorum (modern-day Cirencester) and intersected at the town with several smaller roads. One of only two surviving intact Roman chicken eggs was found discarded in an ancient malting pit in nearby Berryfields.

The crossroads location and density of pottery and coinage found suggested the Roman settlement may have been a market town and/or government administrative center. HS2’s archaeological program, therefore, dedicated more than a year to the excavation of Fleet Marston, unearthing as much of the ancient town as possible on both sides of Akeman Street, the Roman road that crossed it.

They discovered the remains of domestic, commercial and industrial structures in a ladder pattern along the road, and remains of the limestone surface of the road itself and its drainage ditches.

The team has also discovered over 1,200 coins along with several lead weights, indicating that this was an area of trade and commerce.  Parts of the widened road may have been used as a market, with extra room for carts and stalls.  Other metal objects, such as spoons, pins and brooches, were of a more domestic nature, while gaming dice and bells suggest that gambling and religious activity occupied people’s time here too. Apart from being home to many inhabitants, the settlement is likely to have been an important staging post for travellers and soldiers passing through Fleet Marston on their way to and from the garrison at Alchester.

One the most ancient Buddhist temples in the world has been discovered in the ancient city of Barikot, in Pakistan’s Swat valley. It has been securely dated to the second half of the 2nd century B.C., but there’s evidence that it might date back further to the 3rd century B.C. when the area was part of the Maurya Empire.

Barikot first appears in ancient sources as one of the cities besieged by Alexander the Great during his expedition to India in 327 B.C. It was an important city by then, an administrative center for all the agricultural products grown in the valley which has a unique microclimate that allows two rounds of crops to be sown and harvested in the same soil in the same year. Barikot grew wheat and rice and stored it. Alexander availed himself liberally of its granaries to supply his Indian campaign.

There is archaeological evidence that Barikot was settled continuously from around 1700 B.C. to the 16th century. In October 2021, archaeologists from the Italian Archaeological Mission excavated a site in the center of the ancient city that had been dug up by looters. They unearthed the remains of the walls of an ancient Buddhist temple that had been vandalized over the centuries.

The temple is over three meters tall and has a particular structure and shape. It is built on an apsidal podium on which stands a cylindrical structure that houses a small stupa. It is clearly an example of Buddhist architecture. On the sides of the front of the monument are a minor stupa, a cell, and the podium of a monumental pillar or column. The staircase leading to the cell has been reconstructed in three phases, the most recent dating back to the 2nd-3rd century AD, coeval with a series of vestibule rooms which used to lead to an entrance that opened onto a public courtyard overlooking an ancient road.

The oldest stairway of the monument bore in situ half of a step-riser with a dedicatory inscription inKharosthi, that can be dated to the 1st century AD on palaeographic grounds. The other half of the step-riser was found turned upside down, reused as a floor slab in the later phase of the monument. Moreover, archeologists found some coins in the inferior strata, along with many inscriptions written on ceramics in Kharosthi script. The monument was abandoned at the beginning of the 3rd century AD, when the lower city was destroyed by a devastating earthquake.

During the excavations, archaeologists discovered that the monument was built on the remains of an earlier structure flanked by a small, archaic stupa which precedes the Indo-Greek period, around 150 BC, during the reign of the Indo-Greek King Menander I or of one of his first successors. According to Indian Buddhist tradition, Menander I converted to Buddhism. Yet the site held even more surprises for the archaeologists — in December 2021, a few days before the end of the mission, they noticed that some parts of the Indo-Greek monument had been built on an even older structure whose strata included pottery materials and terracotta figurines which are likely to have been used in Barikot during the 4th and 3rd centuries BC.

More than 2000 objects have been documented and catalogued from the discovery, including pottery, coins, inscriptions, seals and jewelry. The dates will be confirmed by radiocarbon analysis of the semi-carbonate soil samples.

Archaeologists have unearthed more than 18,000 ostraca documenting the daily lives of Egyptians at the Ptolemaic city of Athribis 25 miles north of Cairo. It is the one of the largest finds of ostraca ever made in Egypt, comparable only to the great quantities discovered at Deir el-Medina (a planned town housing the workers of the pharaonic tombs in the Valley of the Kings with a well-paid and unusually literate population).

Potsherds were commonly used as a writing surface in antiquity because broken pottery was cheap and easily available. Writers used ink penned with a reed or scratched directly into the surface. This group is notable for their late date and for the sheer variety of documents.

Around 80 percent of the pot sherds are inscribed in Demotic, the common administrative script in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, which developed from Hieratic after 600 BC. Among the second most common finds are ostraca with Greek script, but the team also came across inscriptions in Hieratic, hieroglyphic and – more rarely – Coptic and Arabic script.

They also discovered pictorial ostraca – a special category, says Christian Leitz. “These sherds show various figurative representations, including animals such as scorpions and swallows, humans, gods from the nearby temple, even geometric figures.”

The contents of the ostraca vary from lists of various names to accounts of different foods and items of daily use. A surprisingly large number of sherds could be assigned to an ancient school, the research team said. “There are lists of months, numbers, arithmetic problems, grammar exercises and a ‘bird alphabet’ – each letter was assigned a bird whose name began with that letter.” A three-digit number of ostraca also contain writing exercises that the team classifies as punishment: The sherds are inscribed with the same one or two characters each time, both on the front and back.

There is archaeological evidence of occupation at the site dating back to the Old Kingdom, perhaps as early the 25th century B.C., but the city of Athribis only came to prominence in the early Ptolemaic era when it was made capital of the tenth Lower Egyptian nome. Ptolemy XII began construction of the temple dedicated to the lion goddess Repit and her husband Min-Re in the 1st century B.C. It would take eight Roman emperors from Tiberius (r. 14-37) to Hadrian (r. 117-138) to complete it.

Starting in the early Ptolemaic era, Athribis had a thriving pottery industry that would still be producing through the late 4th century A.D., so the raw materials for ostraca were everywhere. The collection will now be analyzed and interpreted by an international team of researchers.

A mosaic depicting an outdoor feast has been discovered in the ruins of a 6th century villa at the ancient Roman site of Germanicia Caesarea, modern-day Kahramanmaraş, in southeastern Turkey. The ancient rager features three women dancing and playing on crotala (ancient Greek castanets) accompanied by a musician on a large pan flute, two couples snuggling as they watch the festivities, two men in front of a table with plates and vessels, one man on all fours who is either painting a krater on a tripod or drinking from it with a straw and a young boy climbing a fig tree. A profusion of flowers and trees landscape the scene.

Archaeologists believe the 540-square-foot mosaic is the continuation of a panel depicting hunting scenes that was unearthed in the 2015 excavation of Germanicia. The feast is probably a pre-hunt banquet.

The city was already an important one in the 10th century when it was the capital of the Neo-Hittite state of Gurgum. Under Roman control, it was renamed Germanicia Caesarea, likely after Germanicus Julius Caesar, retriever of the legionary eagles captured after the disastrous Roman defeat in the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, adopted son of the Tiberius and father of Caligula. Germanicia prospered well into Late Antiquity, as the mosaics attest to, and is unusual in that pagan motifs and deities were still prevalent in the mosaics throughout the 6th century.

The city was heavily damaged during the Arab-Byzantine Wars of the 7th century and eventually ancient Germanicia’s location was lost. It was rediscovered only in 2007 when illegal excavations under a private home revealed Roman-era mosaics. Authorities were tipped off to the find and archaeologists excavated the area, discovering a motherlode of about 20 high-quality mosaics that decorated the floors of elite Roman villas.

Since then, excavations have revealed about 100 villas in the area, each of them with numerous rooms. The mosaics adorned the ground floor rooms. They all date to between the 4th and 6th centuries A.D. and are exquisitely crafted out of prized materials like colored glass and marbles. The artists used the diversity of the tesserae to remarkable effect, creating scenes that are almost 3D in parts. See for example the table in the center of the party mosaic with the glassware vessels that appear almost translucent.

Digs will pick up again this year and archaeologists hope to fully excavate the remains of the villa with the party mosaic. The tentative plan is to open the site to the public at the end of the year as an archaeological park with walkways installed to keep the delicate floors free from grinding hobnails.