Uncovering Roman Silver Coins! | Expedition Unknown

John: Hi, Josh, good to see you, nice to meet you.
Josh: You too, John. This is historian and landscape archaeologist John Pegg, who has been rewriting the book on the location of Boudicca’s final act.
John: Let’s talk Boudicca. Okay, this question of her final battle and her burial is a huge mystery.
Josh: So why church, though?
John: Well, that’s interesting. I’ve been fascinated by the story since I was a child. So if we take it right back, the only thing we have to base any study of Boudicca’s final days on is the writings of two Roman historians. One’s Tacitus, and the other’s Dio.
Josh: What do the Roman writers tell us about this final battle?
John: Well, the key one is Tacitus, and he gives us the overall picture of the campaign but also some very specific terrain descriptions that help us identify the battle site.
Josh: Okay, so in terms of the campaign, we’ve got Roman General Paulinus, the leader of the Romans. He’s in Anglesey, North Wales, suppressing the Druids. On hearing of the rebellion, he started to move southeast to try and deal with the Iceni threat. At the same time, Boudicca and the Iceni were moving from their homeland in Norfolk through Colchester, which they destroyed, the destruction of London, and then they moved up to St. Albans. So we have a force coming down from the north, a force coming up from the south. So we need to start looking in the center.
John: And we are right in the middle of these two areas.
Josh: You’re right in the middle of the two arrows on Watling Street. Now, Watling Street is this amazing road that’s still in use today that was effectively a Roman highway, right?
John: Absolutely.
Josh: Okay, so we’re in the right area.
John: I would hope so. According to Tacitus, the Romans are outnumbered 25 to 1. So they use the local topography to their advantage, stationing their troops around the edge of a steep valley. Tacitus is very specific that the Roman victory was dependent on his massively outnumbered troops holding a piece of terrain. We need a narrow valley with steep sides so the British couldn’t bring into play their wonder weapon, the chariot.
Josh: Right, too steep for a chariot.
John: Too steep for a chariot to go up, but not too steep for the Romans to advance down once they’d started their attack. And that’s the description we have, and that’s what we’ve got at Churchstone.
John shows me a topographical map of the area.
John: Just take a look at how steep this ridge is and how good a bottleneck this valley makes.
Josh: Right, so this goes all the way around this area?
John: Absolutely, all the way around. The top’s fortifiable, but at the base, you’ve got a valley that narrows significantly. That could trap the Iceni as they try to escape, which is one of the key factors in the battle.
John: Tacitus describes a slaughter. 80,000 Celts died that fateful day, while the Romans suffered just 400 casualties. In one fell swoop, Boudicca’s uprising is crushed.
Josh: As for the queen herself, Dio claims she falls ill and dies, likely from poison, and is given a costly burial, which means ceremonial offerings were likely made at the site.
John: Convinced that he’s discovered the location of the battlefield, John thinks he’s found this costly burial site as well.
John: John brings me to a field directly south of the church, a place with an extremely intriguing name.
Josh: This is Dead Queen’s Mall?
John: This is Dead Queen’s Moor. It’s a real “Lord of the Rings” name.
Josh: So why did they call it that?
John: It’s possible that something at some point was found that suggested someone of royal birth was buried up here, like Queen Boudicca. But there’s more.
John: In 1880, they were building a waterworks just over there, a few hundred meters away, and they came across a first-century Roman temple. But the big thing they found was this.
Josh: Get out of here.
John: This is a huge sculpted head of a woman.
Josh: Yeah, but it’s not just any woman. It’s a very angry-looking woman. And what looks like a torque in her hair.
John: Oh, there is. Look at that. We’ve got something in her hair here. It looks like a torque, and it’s Romano-British in style, rather than Roman, and it’s dated to the mid-first century.
Josh: That’s like a smoking gun!
John: That could definitely be a smoking gun.
John: No significant survey work has been done at this exact site until today.
Josh: Look at this, we are not alone up here.
John: Nope. We got a whole team.
John: Hi there! How are you?
Team: Very well, thank you. How are you?
John: This is Alan.
Alan: Hi, Josh. Nice to meet you.
John: How are you?
Alan: Very well.
Josh: You have a regular army out here today.
Alan: Yeah, we certainly have.
Josh: I noticed that everyone has these orange vests on that say “NARC.”
Alan: That’s correct.
Josh: You guys are a bunch of narcs?
Alan: No, we are indeed. It’s with Stanford Northamptonshire Artifact Recovery Club.
Josh: Ah, okay. The Northamptonshire Artifact Recovery Club has a different connotation in the States.
John: So how’s it going so far? Any sign of Boudicca’s horde?
Alan: Not yet, but we only just started, so fingers crossed we can find something.
John: Okay, great. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.
John: While the narcs try to rat out Boudicca’s horde with metal detectors, John’s called in backup to help narrow down the search zone—a remote sensing team using cutting-edge new technology: aerial GPR.
John: This is Bruce and John from Aerodate.
Josh: Hey, Bruce, how are you?
Bruce: Nice to meet you.
John: What is this beast?
Bruce: This is a broadband ground-penetrating radar system.
Josh: Whoa, wait a minute. This is a radar unit attached to a drone?
Bruce: Yes.
Josh: I have never seen this before. So when you fly this with the radar unit attached, how high off the ground do you fly?
Bruce: About five feet.
Josh: And how far underground can it see?
Bruce: 10 to 15 feet.
Josh: Wow.
Bruce: Aerial GPR sends high-frequency radio waves into the ground and measures how these waves are reflected back. It can cover more area than a ground-based unit and detect disturbances in the soil from above—signs that something might be buried here.
John: All right, should we fly?
Bruce: Yep.
John: Let’s do it.
Bruce: And ready for takeoff.
John: Okay, let’s back it up.
Flying the drone low and slow, Bruce gets to work running a grid pattern over the field. After a few passes, the ground-penetrating radar picks something up.
Bruce: All right, are we getting data?
John: Yes, we’re getting great data.
Bruce: Wow, we got something here. Right there.
John: How deep is that hit?
Bruce: Less than five feet.
John: We got something out there.
Bruce: Yep, this thing works.
The GPR detected a disturbance in the soil nearly seven feet long, potentially big enough to be Boudicca’s tomb or maybe a treasure trove of offerings.
John and I join Alan and Dave from the narc squad, and we begin to sweep the area where the GPR spotted the anomaly.
Josh: Anything, John?
John: Nothing so far, but metal detecting is all about persistence.
[Music]
John: And Dave here didn’t earn his narc vest for nothing.
Alan: Hey, you got something?
John: Go still here. What do you got?
Alan: Oh my word, look at that! That’s silver!
Josh: Yeah, that’s Roman silver. And you can see there’s no later silver that looks like that.
Alan: Come here, look at this!
Josh: Oh my god!
Alan: Silver coin!
Josh: Wow, definitely Roman. Gracian.
Alan: So he’ll be late 4th century, like the 370s.
Josh: Look at the condition of this!
Alan: Hey, nice one. Fantastic.
John: So we’re looking at about 300 years after Boudicca here.
Alan: Yep.
Josh: But there’s no problem with that at all. Because if this were a burial site, then why wouldn’t there be people passing by here, visiting here, even making offerings? So I think the trick is now to take a more measured approach. Keep looking around here.
Alan: Yeah, okay, let’s see what else we’ve got.
Josh: Yeah, I got a little shake, nowhere.
Alan: Another hit, let’s see