Uncovering Roman Silver Coins! | Expedition Unknown

john hi josh good to see you nice to meet you you too josh this is historian and landscape archaeologist john pegg who has been rewriting the book on the location of boudicca’s final act let’s talk boudicca okay this question of her final battle and her burial is a huge mystery so why church though 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 two roman historians one’s tacitus and the other’s dio what do the roman writers tell us about this final battle 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 side okay so in terms of the campaign we’ve

got port general paulinus the leader of the romans he’s in anglesey north wales uh suppressing the druids on hearing of the rebellion he started to move southeast to try and deal with the icini threat at the same time boudicca and the icini were moving from their homeland in norfolk through colchester which they destroyed the destruction of london and then they moved up to saint oban’s 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 and we are right in the middle of these two areas you’re right in the middle of the two arrows on wattling street now watling street is is this amazing road that’s still in use today that was effectively a roman highway right absolutely okay so we’re in the right area 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 tastis 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 there wonder weapon the chariot right too steep for a chariot 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 church stone john shows me a topographical map of the area just take a look at how steep this ridge is and how good a bottleneck this valley makes right so this goes all the way around this area absolutely all the way around the top fortifiable

at the top but at the base you’ve got a valley that narrows significantly that could trap the icini as they try to escape which is one of the key factors in the battle 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 as for the queen herself daio 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 convinced that he’s discovered the location of the battlefield john thinks he’s found this costly burial site as well john brings me to a field directly south of the church a place with an extremely intriguing name this is dead queens mall this is dead queens more it’s a real lord of the rings name so why did they call it that 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 okay 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 get out of here this is a huge sculpted head of a woman yeah but it’s not any woman it’s a very angry looking woman and what looks like a talk in her hair oh there is look at that we’ve got something in her hair here it looks like a torque and it’s a romano british in style rather than roman and it’s dated to the mid first century that’s like a smoking gun that could definitely be a smoking gun no significant survey work has been done at this exact site

until today look at this we are not alone up here nope we got a whole team awesome hi there how are you very well thank you how are you this is alan allen josh nice to meet you how are very well you have a regular army out here today yeah we certainly have i noticed that everyone has these orange vests on that say narc that’s correct you guys are a bunch of narcs no we are indeed it’s with stanford northamptonshire artifact recovery club ah okay the northamptonshire artifact recovery club has a different connotation in the states yeah so how’s it going so far any any sign of uh boudicca’s horde not yet but we only just started so fingers crossed we can find something okay great we’ve got a lot of ground to cover 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 this is bruce and john from aerodate hey bruce how are you nice to meet you please pleasure what is this beast this is a broadband ground penetrating radar system whoa wait a minute this is a radar unit attached to a drone yes i have never seen this before so when you fly this with the radar unit attached how high off the ground do you fly about five foot and how far underground can it see 10 to 15 feet 10 to 15 feet underground wow 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 all right should we fly yep yeah let’s do it and ready for takeoff 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 all right are we getting data yes we’re getting great data wow we got something here right there how deep is that hit less than five feet we got something out there 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 anything john nothing so far but metal detecting is all about persistence [Music] and dave here didn’t earn his narc vest

for nothing alan hey you got something go still here what do you got oh you got oh my word look at that that’s silver yeah yeah that’s roman silva and you can see there’s there’s no later silver looks like that alan come here look at this oh my god silver coin wow definitely roman grassian gratian so he’ll be late 4th century for 370s look at the condition of this hey nice one fantastic day so we’re looking at about 300 years after boudicca here yep 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 yeah okay let’s see what else we’ve got yeah i got a little shake nowhere another hit let’s see what comes up

oh and i got one here as quickly as we can dave and i dig in and just like that we got another one another coin yeah is it another silver coin yeah i got something here double jackpot yes yes wow look at that another silver coin this could be a treasure horde holy you