(At the Roman Road at Ackling Dyke)

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
If there’s one thing that everybody knows about the Romans it’s their straight roads. Well, the Romans built thousands of miles of roads in Britain - not all straight by the way - but built up of a whole series of straight stretches, because that’s simply the quickest and easiest way of getting from A to B. And a conquering army doesn’t have to worry about whose land it is, or whether building a road will turf a farmer out of his farmstead.

The Roman army needed these roads because it was the best way of getting soldiers and supplies right up to the garrisons and the front line. But in the long run these roads became lines of trade and communication that brought the whole Roman way of life into the tribal heartlands of Britain.

MARTIN MILLETT
Archaeologist
As you can see, we're on the Roman road, dead straight ahead of us, cut in the period round about 80 or 90 as the Roman army were moving northwards into the northern Britain and on into Scotland. And the Roman road is just cut straight through it, straight across the valley, cutting through the Iron Age settlement and sort of dividing it in two.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
One of the hardest things to find evidence for is the way ordinary people’s lives changed after the Romans invaded. That’s where archaeologists like Martin Millett can help. He’s exploring the impact of one Roman road on an Iron Age settlement in Yorkshire - painstaking research into people’s everyday lives, something that historians like Tacitus tell us very little about.

MARTIN MILLETT
Archaeology is dealing with the ways people lived in the past, where they lived, how they lived. And that’s something that the literary sources of Roman Britain tell us nothing about. The archaeological evidence fills out patterns of peoples lives that Roman historians simply weren't interested in.

(At the dig in Yorkshire)

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
The story emerging here is that the Britons who lived in this part of the world - unlike Boudicca and her tribe - jumped at the chances offered by the Romans. One source of evidence is from fieldwalking - picking over the surface of the fields in a systematic way, collecting and recording all the left over bits of pottery, coins and other artefacts - in effect the rubbish these people happened to leave behind.

MARTIN MILLETT
It is the rubbish but it’s telling us more than that. It tells about the way that people behaved in a sense - cooking and eating and so forth, the things they traded with, that help us understand patterns of the development of the economy and so forth.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Field walking has shown how the road had a dramatic impact on the community. When it arrived the Britons began to abandon their settlement at the foot of the valley, set up shop alongside the road, and started to fill their homes with Roman goods.

And magnetometry - a way of revealing hidden structures beneath the ground by measuring the earth’s magnetic field - has revealed the foundations of their new homes: out went the roundhouses and in came a new style: rectangular stone structures, with red tiled roofs. The landscape was transformed.

MARTIN MILLETT
You have to think of this valley and the Iron Age as being very much a closed inward looking community. With the construction of the Roman road cutting right the way across it symbolically cutting it in half, it opens the community up to outside influences in a way that is natural to us today but would have been completely alien to people in the past.

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