Digging the Past

I think I've finally come up with a solution for my garden - I'm going to write to Time Team and tell them that I think there's a Roman villa under it. Then, with any luck, they'll come and dig it up, then restore it to some semblance of order and tidiness, all at Channel Four's expense. OK, I'd have to put up with Tony Robinson and that idiot with a hat wandering around my property for three days, but I feel that's a small price to pay for tidying up my back garden. Now, I know what you are thinking - won't they be a bit suspicious when they don't actually find a Roman villa under the garden? Well, I've seen enough editions of Time Team now that it's obvious that most of the time they don't ever uncover anything of archaeological interest - mainly because they seem not to a have a clue what they're doing. Luring them to my garden should be straightforward - all I need to do is present them with some old Roman coins covered in dirt, and a few bits of twisted wire I tell them are Roman bracelets.

This tactic certainly seemed to work for the owner of a field in Surrey in the edition I saw yesterday. Mind you, to be fair, they did actually find some evidence of Roman habitation. However, the conclusions they were drawing from the evidence seemed wide of the mark, to say the least. Early on, they seemed to have decided that the area had been the site of a temple and then proceeded to try and make everything they discovered fit this theory. Unfortunately, as the dig progressed it appeared to me that this theory was less and less credible - everything pointed to evidence of ovens or furnaces being there, contained within non-domestic buildings. First of all they decided that there might have been some kind of market there (possibly with a shrine attached), then it became an industrial site, with smelting facilities, which might have been built on the site of a shrine. Frankly, it seemed obvious to me, bearing in mind that the site was right beside the main Roman London-Brighton road, that it had been a Roman transport cafe or service station. Perhaps with chariot repair facilities (explaining the smelting capabilities). It's just as credible as anything they were coming up with, and better explained the facts. You never know, there might well have been a shrine there - if modern motorway service stations are anything to go by, Roman travellers would probably want to pray to some deity or other before actually eating anything there.