 Wel. Fel oedd yn gweithio i'n gweithio. Mae gweithio i'r gweithio. Mae'n gweithio i'r gweithio i'r gweithio, fel y cyflwynerau'r cyfrannu dechreu eich cyfrannu'r rhaglen cymdeithasol i'r cwmhysg a'r byd. Felly mae'r ddych chi'n gweld ffyrdd fwyaf o'r 3e ddod oherwydd sydd yn cael ei gweithio y ddau cyfrannu dechreu. Ond o'r cyfrannu hefyd i'r cyfrannu mae'n gweithio i'r cyfrannu i'r cyfrannu'r cyfrannu ond yn cael ei wneud, yna. A dyna'r gweldau yn gweld yma'r gwahodd gyda'r gweithio. Mae'r gweithio yn gweld ar y cwrdd, Richard Henry, ac yn ystod o'r enthysiadau i'ch gwybod y context o'r panffinio PAS. Y cwrdd ychydig yng nghymru yn ysgrifennu i'r gweld yma'r gwahodd gyda'i ddechrau i gyllewdd gyda'r gweithio, ac yn ystod o'r enthysiadau i gweithio gan teulu fo gwybod. Mae'r gweld yn arnyntol yn lwylo golygu'r gweithio i ddim o'r ffordd yn amlŷn ymbluddau christolol. Richard a'r byw yw ydym yn i Micholol i gyderbydd i'ch gweithio a'r bwysig hynny'n gennym i'r Queen weltyd iawn. Mae'r gweld yn fysig yng Nghymru yn golygu'n tuith yn gyllew dinidol oedd yng Nghymru'r Rhyswod yng Nghymru, yn gwahodd. Yr Rhywbeth yn yw'r hyn yn rhan oedd yn cerdduriad, nid yw'r gweithio ar gyfer y cyfnodau chi, yn y gydigol yn y wyrdd. Felly, yn y rhai, ymdweithio'r rhai'r blwyddoch a'r wychau yw'r bron i wneud o ffainol i Wilshire. Mae'r hwn yn cael cael cael cael cael rhai'r ffainol i'r swath. Yr hyn mae yma yw yw yw'r mathai'r cael cael yw'r ddim yn dweud. Felly, rwy'n meddwl â'r rhaid, mae'r rhaid yn gyffredinol yn y ffordd yn y bwyl. Yr hyn ar y pwyl o'r gorffodau arall, rwy'n meddwl yn cyfeirio yn ei phair sy'n ei ddwydd. Rwy'n meddwl â'r hyn, mae'r gaf ar y fliniedd, mae'r ffordd yn y meddwl â'r cyffredinol yn ei ddwyng. Ond mae'n amlwg am ychydig yn yn ôl yn fwy o meddwl sy'n ei ddwyng ar y cyffredinol. Wrth gwrs, mae'n meddwl yn aglwg meddwl yn ei ddwyng ar y dda. Yn ywr wych fy rydw i'r ffordd, mae'n ffordd yn ceilyd y brydol. Mae'n gallu gwahog ynglynigais, ond mae'n gofio yn llwyllgor, gyda'r bodherwydd Cymru. Rydyn ni'n gweld ymgyrch yn y ddigbyn hwnnw, Merlygoedd wedi'i ddysgu i gondol, mae'n ddigbyn hwnnw er fydd yn ffynllydd rhag o heddiw, a'r ddeunydd lwyddon a llwyllgrwll sydd yn y mwyfynol. Rydyn ni'n gydag o erbyn yma, Y 7 eich rhai diwydd yma yn ymddiadol yn ymlaen i'r gweithio dros Narau Ryfyr, yma Ebel a'r Nadau, ma'r peir yma yn ymddiadol yn ymddiadol yn ymddiadol, a'r wrthgrif ar y rhai sydd ymddiadol yn ei gweithio ar y rhaid i'r rhaid. A rhaid i'r gweithi'r llanio, ac yma'r ddegwch chi wedi gwneud ymddiadol yma yma yma yma'r llanio, felly mae'r amser aeth yn gydych chi'n gilydd yn ddechrau'r bydd gwaith. Felly mae'r llwyddon yn arol iawn, mae'r infod eich bod iddynt am ffwrdd hwn. Mae'r unig i'r rhefyd, yn bydd arall iawn, mae hi'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r meddwl i'r spots, mae hi hi hi hi hwn i'r spots, a mae'n meddyliadol ar gyfer y object. Mae'r会f amfero yn ymddangos yn y tro, a mae'r constitute oedd yn meddwl i'r meddwl i'n meddwl i'r hyffyn yn gyd. Felly mae'n bwysig rhôl rôl roi. Mae'r chwlad ar y gwir yw Lleidwchrydiaeth Arfer. Roedd y gyrdd y ffordd yw'r awdraeth yw'r awdraeth rôl. Mae'r awdraeth hyn o'r awdraeth ar y bach, mae'r awdraeth ar y gwrth gwrdd, a mae'r awdraeth ar y cyfrun awdraeth. Mae'r awdraeth efallai, mae'r awdraeth, mae'r awdraeth. Mae'n ei ddweud o'r llwyddon ddechrau o'r llwyddon yw'r llwyddon'r llwyddon, Over a really long period in an exceptional manner. Having said that, the bulk of it is Rome. So it was to the Roman period we felt we should look for our major case study of why is this all here. This is our academic research question at the centre of why is this all here. It fits into a number of research agenda aims for the region and particularly understanding later Roman religion. Mae'r cwmhysgol yn ystod o'n mynd i'r meddwl a'r bwysigol, yn ymyniadau a'r cyfnodol, i wneud y pwysigol, ac Richard oedd yn fwrdd o gael ar y dda'r achos. Felly mae'n cwmhysgol â'r cwmhysgol oherwydd mae hynny ymwysig i'r gweld yma. Hynny'r awdurdod o'r cwmhysgol yma o'r pwysigol, ym mwyaf o'r cwmhysgol ym Ynwylchur. Yr hanes o'r righto iawn yn ysgrifŵr, Dyma unig weld gyda Simon Draper 2006 oeid o'r trafn y Romyn ddiweddol i'r lluniau yma. Rydw i'r bwysig sy'n beirio oedd y Ffilars ac mae'r ddysgu'r lleidio i'r maes ffordd yma yn cael ei ffordd yn gwychol. Mae'n ffordd i'r bwysig sy'n mynd i'r ddod o'r maes ddod o'r ddod o'r ddod o'r ddod o'r maes ddod o'r drafn i'r drwych. ar gyfer cael ei wneud, mae'r roed yn gweithio gyda wedi bodi'u adunum ar yr ddamon ac yn ymdegol mai'r ddymlaenau. Ysgolwyr Wilchwr yn gweithio'r gyffredinol ar y gyfer y Cymru, ac mae'n cymdeithasol o ran ymgau. Mae'r gweithio'r ysgolwyr yn ymgeithio'r rhai yma. Mae'r gweithio'r gweithio ar gyfer y mae'r gweithio'r gweithio. Mae'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio yma yn y medihebel. a we have no reason not to believe that the same wouldn't have been the case in the Rome period. There are almost no metal detected finds from the claylands, despite them being extensively detected. Very little archaeology in terms of the burial survey, which you'd expect, given how well clay doesn't show crop marks, but also very little from development archaeology that's roaming date. Then we have, as I said earlier, the transects across the river valleys and between them, between the chalk of Cranbourne Chase to the southeast there and of the fringes of the plain to the north, we have a Jurassic Enliar where limestone, really high quality building stone outcrops. However, this is the PIS heat map underlay of the orthodoxy. Unfortunately, the main concentrations of finds don't look anything like the same places as the main concentrations of Roman towns, Roman villas, or indeed much else. So, we really must be fairly aware that part of the reason that's the case is we really haven't looked hard enough. Now, there is a great big monument north of Salisbury, which draws a great deal of research funding. Most of you should be aware of what I'm talking about, I hope. Stonehenge is a major problem for Roman southwest Wiltshire. It draws a lot of academic interest. Even my own work, having started out as a Roman south Wiltshire specialist, has led me to be drawn to Stonehenge in recent years with Historic England. So, there's a bias in research funding. There have been big projects on Salisbury plain and big projects in northern Wiltshire on Roman sites, not in the south. So, we are underestimating the true picture of sites. Also, what the orthodoxy does show us is a concentration of shrines. These red stars are all reasonably well known to greater or lesser degrees Roman shrines, all along the southern side or junctions of that road. So, this is the picture that we had before we started. Really, not a villa-based economy, as far as we know. Apparently a heavily religious area, or possibly just a bias due to the amount of crop mark sites there are. And a disjuncture between P.S. Fines and the settlement record. We felt that given the emphasis on religion in the region in the Roman period, the emphasis on Roman period finds in our metal-detecting dataset, that for our rather closer case study to understand on a particular site why all these finds were being deposited, why all this wealth was there, we've rather had to pick a site that produced religious finds of Roman date. So, we did. These mutilated coins are, as far as we can tell, nationally unique. Richard will go into their detail later, but they, together with other aspects of the assemblage from this part of this field, hinted very strongly at the temple. The field also happens to include a major iron age horde, a major bronze age horde, a large number of interesting later Roman finds, and so even just from looking at the P.S. Fines, Richard's able to give us a pretty good picture of what might be going on. We then sent some students out to do lots of magnetometry. They found that there was an awful lot in the field. This area around the iron age horde has a very large iron age site. We can be reasonably sure it's iron age based on the curvilinear morphology of the enclosures and sub-enclosures here. So, we're talking about perhaps 120, 130 metres by 60 or 70 metres area, so reasonably large. Lots of enclosures up here where our Roman find spots were, a very large ferris-like anomaly here, which we'll come back to later, and then a little structure inside a circular enclosure, which seems to fit with what we know about Romanic Celtic temples. Now, we felt we ought to ground truth some of this, which is where Steve came in. Steve, being one of our leading excavators on my PhD supervisor, also felt I should be writing up my PhD whilst I was doing this, so I kindly volunteered to come and run an excavation. I'm now going to leave Steve to talk about this trench here, which produced a rather lovely temple. Thanks, David. So, as David described, there was a combination of metal-detected finds in clear concentrations, which is some work on geophysical anomalies, and we looked in the immediate area where those finds were concentrated and thought we could make out on the surface various masonry elements suggesting underlying buildings. That resulted in some very limited trial-trenching, which exposed roof tiles, which seemed to us to be possibly articulated, a slab floor and occupation debris on that floor. In other words, good archaeological survival, which made it sound like this would be an interesting area to do further work in, so more extensive excavation. Just as an aside, I wanted to mention here that it seems to me one of the ways in which we might exploit our portable antiquity scheme material more fully is if we had that sort of minimal understanding of the context in which some of these things are turning up. For example, this trench took David and I a couple of hours one afternoon to dig, and from that we were able to show that these surface finds occupied what was almost certainly a structural context. It would be useful to know that for many of the Roman hordes, for example, where you could say, is this just a hoarding topsoil? Is it in a cup feature? Is it part of a settlement? It seems to me that that would allow the research potential of PAS finds to be much more fully exploited. What I want to do in what follows then is to consider the general character of the building that we exposed. The superstructure, say a few words about that, trying to understand how it was used and the process of deposition within it, the modification demise of that building, and some thoughts at the end about its plan form, which are rather dependent on Richard's finds, so they lead into what he's got to say. What we exposed in that more extensive area was a stone floor structure, which you see here exposed, which had been invested in. Clearly, those structural components are quite substantial and prestigious already. It had been terraced into the hillside. Here you see the natural drop of the life of the land, and you can make out, hopefully, that the actual way in which this building is constructed has been to level that area. So there's already an investment involved in its creation. You can also see quite well some of the problems of this site, that actually the archaeology is quite well preserved in the south, on the left-hand side here, but increasingly degraded as we get further north, and in particular you'll probably be able to make out the scars of modern plowing through here. So there's a sense in which this was a research excavation, but also a sense in which it was rescuing this building from current degradation. When we started looking at this structure, we were able to understand in some detail the differential wear patterns evident on the paving. I hope you can manage to see, I can't see on this small screen, but perhaps you can see in the piece of disturbed stone at the top there, on the left-hand side, it's considerably worn, and on the right-hand side, much less so, that becomes more evident when you look at it in detail, and when you focus in, you can see that, actually on the right-hand side, it's virtually in pristine condition, just as it had been roughly worked and then laid down. So parts of this flooring have been subjected to considerable wear. Some parts virtually none at all, which implied to us that parts would have been covered, and that was quite pivotal to understanding the kind of superstructure of this building, really. Because when you begin to notice these things, I don't know if you can make it out here, but the lower parts of the stonework there are worn. The upper parts are almost in perfect condition, as originally quarried, and they imply, therefore, that there is some sort of feature covering the unworn area, which we believe to be a sort of base plate. In other words, this building had a timber-framed superstructure, as well as a set-up on the edges of that slab floor. More interestingly, further in the interior, you can begin to see the implications of this, I hope. Here you see an area of that paving with a central, very worn area, and then there are two parts on either side, which are not at all worn. So running through here, on the left-hand side of that arrow, you see that it's unworn, and you can also make out, I think, there, the post hole with packing. In other words, this is part of the superstructure of this building. And then the area to the side is clearly worn, and that wear pattern runs along, and then turns round to the right. And I'll also draw your attention to this particular zone in which a series of unworn slabs were jutting out over the front of the paving. And that's quite relevant to understanding the character of activities within this building altogether. Not least because the area of that unworn jutting out lies opposite what turns out to be a really important point of deposition in this building, and which we believe to be a temple of some sort. And the implication is, therefore, that the slabs immediately in front of this ritual focus of deposition seem to have been covered by some superstructure component. I guess you can imagine that could be some form of statue or whatever. So the wear patterns are incredibly important, really. The processes of deposition within this structure were of considerable significance as well. We found some of the finds that Richard will go on to describe on top of the slab floor, but also aspects of them that came from underneath. Here's an example of this bell, a bronze bell being excavated, and it comes, as you can see from that picture, it comes from here. There is a point at which there is deposition of this material on the site, and then the slab floors are laid on top of that, and then further deposition takes place after that. So there's a complex process by which finds are being put into this, disposed of in this building. There is also a number of important modifications to this structure in the course of its life. You can see some of the clearest here, the sort of puncture marks, minor postels, and so forth running down through the slab floor at one point. So it's constructed, it's substantial, but it's got a later life, it's for an extended period of time. At some point, it starts to degrade. The demise of this building was indicated by wall plaster of various types, which should decayed off of the superstructure of the walls. We don't know what the superstructure is like. We just have the residual wall plaster found in the adjacent strata, but nonetheless a process of degradation is under goes at some point in time. Then it's complete collapse, and you can see here a couple of examples of stone tiles from its roof. So this is already a substantial timber frame building with investment in its surfaces and a tiled roof to boot. And then the later history of this structure, there is in the post Roman period, it's robbed. Then there is a natural accumulation on top of it, running down the hillside, so it's forgotten at that point. And then there's plowing, probably of the medieval period, certainly of the modern period after that. So it's got an interesting history in its own right. And to finish, I want to go back to look at its plan form. Here we see in heavy back purple lines the extent of what we can be certain were the walls of this structure. In red is the in situ warn paving, in blue is the unworn areas, which you can see are clearly patterned in quite important ways. So we believe it's a rectangular structure. We believe that internally it had dwarf walls set up in a way that I tried to sketch out there. This obviously raises the question of what the northern limits of the building may have been. And we've been thinking long and hard about that. That's all plowed away. So the only way we have a getting at that aspect of plan form is to look at the fines distribution. If you look at the information here, here at these little fines spots are all the fines that we've plotted. And I hope you can see that there's a relative absence of fines through there, and again through here. Well, this we believe to be the eastern wall of the structure, and this one we think is an internal one. It's a little bit clearer on the heavy map of that. This is a heat map of all of the fines that we found from here. Obviously they are very much concentrated in the immediate vicinity of this intrusive feature here, this rather important pit that I mentioned before. But also you can see here the way in which the surfaces seem to be kept relatively clear as we flow over here, kept clear as well. And we'd like to pick out as well this seeming absence of material along here. So, in sum, we believe that we have a building which is very clearly that spatial form with perhaps a wall clothing it on this side. Whether it had another wall here forming the other side of a rectangle in the north is not really clear to us. Why should you necessarily have a wall on that side? This is a structure looking out over a valley which David will describe. So it's a moot point as to whether this site did actually have a wall on the north side. It could be just looking out over the valley and accessed from that area. Nonetheless, that's what we think it looked like in its final form. And then there in symmetrically placed with respect to those reconstructed components is this ritualistic pit with the finds which we're hearing about very shortly. The last point I want to make concerns dating normally with this sort of site with this profusion of coinage you'd simply form your stratigraphic groups and decide what was the earliest date and so on and so forth. The problem with this sort of site is that actually the stratigraphy is so mangled by later nature activity. It's really quite difficult to definitively say these are from a primary context. So in the light of that, what we've tried to do in understanding the usage of the period of usage of this structure is to look at the coin assemblage as an assemblage and that seems to present the following argument that this seems to be being built in the first half, perhaps towards the middle of the third century, based on, again Richard can put in the details, two particular coins, the earliest being of Julia Mamea 221-222 and perhaps more diagnostically an unworn version of quite a rare coin of Gordian III, 238-244 given that that's unworn and so forth. So the implication of that seems to be towards the middle of the third century is when this building is first constructed. And when we looked at the groupings of all the modifications that I mentioned before of this building, it was quite clear that coinage from Richard Rees' period 17 in the words 330-348 were particularly focused in the modifications of this structure, implication maybe that they took place about 100 years later than the point at which it was originally constructed. We have a building that's built in the middle of the third seems to be used, perhaps kept quite clean but undergo modification in the middle, towards the middle of the fourth century AD. But the other implication of the coinage though is that there's no, as I understand it and you can correct me if I'm wrong, there's no indication that this has a long trajectory of deposition of coinage at least so that is the structure that we were working away from. Open to you. So what I was going to talk about today was the metal detecting and the excavation assemblage from the site because considering how plough damaged the site is if you only consider the items that we had from the excavation you would only get a fraction of the picture. And what I was going to focus on was the coin assemblage then the mutilated coins, the miniature objects and the cursed tablets that we've had from the site. We do have a range of other really interesting fine types but in 15 minutes I can't really talk about everything so I thought that I'd focus on things that perhaps give us the best insight into the site in general and so what I decided to do was give everybody a really exciting graph. So what you can see here is evidence of what's going on at the site through the coins and so what we do is through risk period analysis we can understand what is happening at the site and then compare it to other areas. And so in comparison to the South Wiltshire mean which is the average from the portable antiquity scheme from South Wiltshire, you can see that there are very few coins from the excavation and from the metal detectors assemblage combined from the early period and even when we start seeing a greater number of finds deposited in risk period 13 which is from 260 to 275 it's still far below the average that we see for the area whereas in contrast 75% of the coins come from the middle of the fourth century especially I suppose the unusual aspect in terms of metal detectors assemblages is the fact that we get so many coins from risk period 18 which is from 348 to 364 but this is an element we see at a lot of temples in the country and then the last point to highlight I suppose is the fact that as Steve mentioned we do not see very many coins from the site after 383 and this is in direct contrast to kind of the wider area so within a few hundred metres we've got coins as late as 406 so it does suggest that the site does end before the end of the fourth century what you can see here is the fact that the vast majority of the coins are highlighted around the central pit and as was mentioned the main areas of the floria kept pretty clean but it does also then highlight the fact that over here you do have an area that's been completely disturbed but the element that I suppose is the most interesting in terms of what I deal with is the fact that we have 79 mutilated coins and to begin with we saw them as part of the assemblage of coins themselves whereas actually I suspect that they're far more likely to be associated with the miniature objects. We had two general types types which have been clasped so iron objects have been wrapped round the coins and then other coins have been pierced in the centre or in other locations and then an iron nail has been inserted through or attack and so the two examples we have here are both miniature spears the one on the left hand side dates from 348 to 350 whereas the one on the right is slightly earlier and I suppose one of the things to highlight especially in contrast with the iron assemblage that we'll see in a minute is that the copper objects have been pierced with iron tacks or nails and so what I wanted to do was to try and understand whether the mutilated coin assemblage tied in with what we actually see from the site in general through coinage or whether there is a difference and so with the pierced assemblage which you can see that the vast majority do follow the general trends that you see we have more pierced coins from 15 for example then we have coins in general but it's also important to remember that they are slightly bigger so it is generally easier to actually pierce them the element that is far more unusual is the coins that have been clasped and I think this in many ways highlights the main change that we see through the mutilated assemblage and it ties in really quite nicely with the modifications from the temple in general and after 364 we see only one example of a clasped coin and the number of mutilated coins does decrease as well but in general the pierced coins do follow the general practice that we see of coin deposition from the site unfortunately the vast majority of the mutilated coins are from the metal detected assemblage and so it doesn't give us the greatest insight into what we try and plot them but the element that I find quite interesting is the fact that not all of them are from the central pit and there are some others from around there at the door force what we do have though is what I believe to be the largest miniature iron assemblage anywhere in the country and it includes the largest miniature sword from I think at the moment and it's been decorated or it has ivory terms which is here at the pit and then copper alloy going down the centre we also have a number of other miniature objects including significant assemblage of miniature spears and hammers and also padlocks and axes and we can see just here with some of the items that have been conserved so far we're actually having iron objects that have then been mutilated and you can just about see a dot there which is where it's been pierced with copper alloy which should be by surprise when we first saw it so hope for the next stage of the evaluation is to have more x-rays undertaken so that we can see as other objects have been mutilated in that way we also have 13 spears and one hammer where there are coins attached and all of these items date from between 3482364 but it's not just the temple that has this interesting iron assemblage from the site as a whole we have the largest cross-pane hammer from the country and then we have a significant what you could describe as a set of miniatures that go from around about 10cm for the hammer's head to the smallest cross-pane hammer from the country as well so we have the biggest and the smallest and you can see it on the bottom right hand corner and based on the evidence that we have from the mutilated coin assemblage I would argue that the vast majority of these miniatures date from 330 to 364 but I think the fact that all of the objects that have coins attached date from around this period I think it is likely that they are going to be from here as well and this is the distribution of the miniature objects from the site and you can see that the vast majority are from the area of the central pit and one of the elements that I would like to look at in the future is to see whether they lie on top or underneath of the paving slabs and that is one of the things we will look at but what I really wanted to do and I think part of it was the fact that it sounded far was to try and understand a bit more about why they were being made in the first place because when we first discovered them I wondered whether they were likely to be miniature objects or votive objects and you can argue that they can be one of the same but all of the hammers that we found at the excavation you could argue could be used it is trying to understand the processes behind it so we collected iron ore from the site and then a group of us started smelting the iron to create a bloom with the help of Jake Keane an experimental iron smelter and I am afraid to say it turns out that we are just not very good at iron smelting we had two failed smelts and it is just because the quality of the ore although it was good it wasn't good enough at this point in time and what we were collecting wasn't good enough to create a bloom but when we had success we then contacted Hector Cole who is an experimental blacksmith and he creates a lot of replicas for places like the different museums and also the Mary Rose and so we went about trying to understand the quality of the ore in general and then what we would need to do and what you could get and how long it would take to make each of these miniatures and the iron is in an incredibly high quality which he was real pains to stress he was a dream to work with in comparison to some of the other ores that he has worked with and so to do that we went from creating a bloom and then turning it into a bar and by the time that we reduced the kilo bloom to the bar we lost around about 50% of the iron and so we ended up with an incredibly pure iron which he was then able to work with and although there are limitations to the experiment because we were trying to make exact replicas of some of the items where if I said to him I'd like you to just make a miniature hammer it's interesting the amount of smelts it took but also the amount of time makes these items that actually take a lot of investment so the hammer on the left hand side took around about 50 minutes to make and he ended up breaking a couple of things because to create the perforation he ended up welding what he was trying to pierce the hole with in the first place so I think it highlights that although they are miniatures I suspect the reality is that they are also something that you wouldn't create as trinkets I suppose they're not something that you would have made quickly to fall deposition at the temple instead you have items that would have taken a lot of work and the way that he described it to me is like when you are training to be an apprentice you have to make lots of little small things and it's interesting that the amount of iron that we have from our experiments created a very small amount of workable tools in the end so for example the hammer that you can see at the bottom if we were to make one it would take us four smelts to actually get enough iron to actually produce it in the first place and although you could be arguing that these are a usable set of miniatures I still think that they're being deposited in the temple for a different reason I think the way that I would argue is that they are being created by somebody almost like you would do if you were creating small items for an apprenticeship and from looking at it none of the items show any evidence of use so William Manning and I had a look through and they'd all appear to be pristine and the final argument I suppose I would say about why they are not likely to be usable tools in this context is the fact that the vast majority of hammers don't usually have an iron handle where these do and quite a few of the examples also have loops at the bottom which you can't see in this picture so they're being produced for a range of different reasons and then from the site we have a total of nine curse tablets vast majority are incredibly fragmentary and they're often I think one of them is in about 30 pieces and a minimum of three are inscribed in Auburn Recursive and one tablet has been wrapped around an iron now and the analysis has been done by Dr Arthur Tomlin so far we have the report for the first test tablet that was deposited and it's on the right hand side here and there are a couple of words that aren't instantly translated and it's dexter I suppose is the one that does kind of create an interesting element for the site because at the time we weren't sure what it meant but two of the later curse tablets have the first use of the words axe and hammer from Roman Britain and so in this context it's likely that dexter is likely to mean hatchet but most intriguingly we do have a curse tablet that has been dedicated to a god and the god appears to be called Regneus which is not somebody who's instantly recognisable but that is still something that's kind of the work in progress and the unusual element I suppose about this curse tablet is that it's been written and then it's been deposited on upside down because the perforation's actually at the bottom there so it's still an element that we're waiting for the final report on but an intriguing element is the fact that between Old Roman cursive is usually kind of dates to around about 150 to 250 so if these items do follow that rule you've got curse tablets that were deposited at the very start of when this camper was being built and actually I would have thought that it was more likely to be 4th century so it does create interesting questions for the future and I'll plus you over to David now Right now my brief for the final little bit of this was to draw all that together somehow there are other finds other than small finds from the temple they are extremely interesting particularly the fauna romaine there are very few of them approximately one third of the number of animal bones by a weight of animal bones as there is a oyster shell which is bizarre there are no cows which is also very strange we have one cow bone from topsoil there is a distinct flavour of wild in our animal bone assemblage from this part of the site the settlement downhill which is industrial and domestic is much more normal cows sheep that kind of thing whereas here we have antlers that are attached to skull which was found when block lifted to have a couple of little hooks underneath which I rather like the idea of holding it up within the inner room in terms of depositional practice yes there is a vast amount of metal wealth being deposited in this little room in the very centre of it but there is also a lot of oyster being deposited unusually we have fish, we have mohen we have duck, mice, frog, deer various wild things the rest of the site, the pottery assemblage is quite local bit of door bb1, where is the temple it's very little local, that's the tiny dark blue wedge door bb1 is the enormous red wedge and then various other British wares almost no continental pottery whatsoever so there's a really distinct set of objects being used the temple itself, movement is key it's very constricted all areas Steve showed means that someone walking along that little path in the central room if they're my size and I'm not enormous has to walk like this that's very hard this is a very controlled space people are excluded they can see the outside of the temple from the settlement in the cwm below but they can't see what's going on inside these unworn areas that seem to block off the focus of deposition from that little tight path in are intriguing what are those, are those wooden dwarf walls are they full screens we really need to look deeper into the detail of the finds deposition and the pit to find that out this is a maintained space, it's clean barely any finds from the outer room very little finds from the top of the paving except for in its abandonment face there's clearly a selection going on there's particular animals, wild particular plants bizarrely the most prevalent seed in the archipitannical assemblage was mustard now burning mustard seed produces a noxious painful stinging smell and very little else we think that's something to do with the artificial creation of a ritual space in the centre it's presumably fairly dark so has a normal resident of this area going into this place it would have a major impact on you you would be in the darkness you wouldn't be able to move properly you would be taking your wealth to deposit and you would be doing that in a way controlled by somebody else now what does all that actually mean so we've got this highly ritualised space a very particular chronological period in the mid fourth century and then leading up to that we've got a cluster of shrines in southern Wiltshire coming off this road at one level of resolution there's elite movements presumably going across that road and movements of other people too perhaps they've visited this place which isn't marked on this map obviously because of the sensitivity of the location perhaps they've visited all these places but why? why all those shrines there? I think they're encountering rather local power dynamics now we said earlier that there aren't many villas down here so now is a factor of we just haven't looked there's barely any commercial archaeology in this western part of Wiltshire because there's barely any commercial development as we've discussed earlier there's very little research into the Roman period lots of commercial research around Salisbury and Ainsbury sadly that's too far away from us now another past landscape site was this one at the top we rather stumbled across quite a large villa in 2015 this is our reconstruction not the one you'll have seen in the newspapers that is only the bits where archaeologically sure of that's in the Deverell valley which is up here given the finest concentrations elsewhere in that valley I'm pretty sure there are at least a couple more so this isn't so much a landscape without villas as without villas we've found yet or so so if we have a large forest here an elite pursuit in the Roman period for displays of martial prowess using spears etc it's hunting we have antlers, we have spears there is certainly a hunting element to the identity being expressed at this temple but we need to look at a more local context to understand why this temple is so much more elaborated than the other shrines on that road route and Richard obliquely referred to it earlier this field is full of iron ore and good iron ore but we've got a great big Roman furnace in it now if you've got large scale and this is one of several furnaces albeit by far the best preserved large scale Roman iron ore a series of unusual with not unique miniature iron objects in a temple at the top of the Cwm overlooking the domestic landscape this is where the exceptional aspect of this particular landscape place comes from there are other shrines along this road owned at those where we've looked at them we find different types of wealth articulated some very rare lots of animal sacrifice lots of grain whereas here is the metalwork that is important and the ability to manipulate supplies of iron to create particular objects and often very elite focused objects, spears, swords etc would have been of great importance in this late unstable part of the Roman period to local elites such as those living at that further there only a few miles away so I think it's here that we locate the specific importance of the shrine now the odd thing about it is that it sort of springs up in the mid 3rd century Brygnius if that is the god to which it's dedicated seems he is that's a very British name but there's no underlying shrine there's an Iron Age settlement very close by nothing there on geophysics that morphologically looks like a shrine bit odd maybe there's a tradition of this Brygnius but part of me thinks that it is a as much an elite manipulation of a tradition to create this temple which requires considerable investment by those controlling the ironworking site as it is a real expression of religious belief it's a way of articulating elite identity to those moving along the road and expressing elite power in the local landscape to those working in it and passing through it so to answer our original question yes we can elucidate social processes behind the deposition of extraordinary assemblages but you need to look at all of these scales to do it and you need to look at the particular temporal context as well late Romano-British elites in this region need to articulate their power in a different way to what they did in an early Roman period and I think that's why this temple is here finally I'd like to thank all our many sponsors who have put money into this or have a helping kind and our team without whom we couldn't have done it thank you for listening