Love the Romans? This is your chance to investigate one of the oldest Roman settlements north of the Humber.
Two thousand years ago, the Romans marched north and established a centre at York. But while archaeologists have found many later Roman settlements from AD 200-400, only a handful of sites inhabited by the earliest Roman settlers in the region have ever been found… until now.
In 2015, three metal detecting friends uncovered a hoard of 18 silver coins. The friends reported the discovery to the Portable Antiquities Scheme, and together we began investigating the site to find out what else we could learn.
We now know that the hoard was just one small remnant of a much wider Roman settlement, with buildings, mosaics, more silver coins, hundreds of Roman pottery sherds, and a tiny brooch, found on one of three neonatal burials.
What’s more, with many of the finds dating to the middle of the first century AD, it appears to be one of the earliest Roman settlements ever discovered in East Yorkshire.
There were hundreds of Roman pottery sherds, including decorated bowls and amphorae, in which olive oil and wine would have been transported from the Mediterranean.
And then, when we started exploring another area nearby in 2019, we found traces of a Roman villa. Evidence included hundreds of mosaic tiles (or ‘tesserae’), parts of a hypocaust system (underfloor heating), loads more Roman pottery, and even a beautifully preserved bone hairpin.
Such a significant site can hardly be left – there’s still so much more to investigate.
This year, we want to continue the excavation and unearth more of the site so that we can understand this early Roman settlement, and how it developed over the next few generations.
We’ll examine the pottery, the bones, the coins, the environmental samples, and put everything together to build up a chronology of the site, in order to help tell the bigger story of some of the first Roman settlers ever to make their home in East Yorkshire.
Love archaeology? Always wanted to give it a go? Crowdfund this dig, and you can:
👀 watch the discoveries online
⛏ excavate alongside our team
⚱️ get hands-on in the Finds Room
👪 bring your kids to DigCamp (or DigClub!)
👕 receive one of our FAMOUS archaeology team t-shirts
John Fenton has tended his farm, near Driffield in the East Riding of Yorkshire, for a lifetime. Over the years, it has produced an extraordinary number of archaeological riches – Roman coins, Anglo-Saxon burials, Bronze Age weapons and even a cache of stone tools. That’s 5,000 years worth of evidence!
So far, John and the detectorists who have made so many of the discoveries have done a marvelous job of keeping all this archaeology safe, and this project has grown out of their exceptionally strong personal commitment to the land’s heritage.
But it’s still a working farm, and with every passing day it becomes more and more important to figure out exactly what archaeology survives and where.
With such a huge and unexplored chunk of history lying just below the surface, more needs to be done, and together we can help them!
In previous years of excavation, we’ve taken an exploratory look at the medieval remains, proving that they’re full of evidence that can help us chart the ebb and flow of life at this well-preserved village.
Then, we made our first foray into the Roman ruins, and found something took us completely by surprise… not only were they very well preserved, they turned out to be some of the earliest ever discovered in the region.
We’ve also explored another area nearby and found hundreds of mosaic tiles, traces of a Roman hypocaust (underfloor heating) system, loads more pottery, and even a beautifully preserved bone hairpin. Together, it all points to the idea that within a few generations, the settlement and its economy had grown large enough to sustain a Roman villa.
Early Roman sites this far north are rare, at least compared to 3rd-4th century settlements, which makes our site incredibly important for the understanding of what happened when they first arrived.
But there’s far more to it than that. It’s also obvious that this has the potential to become one of Yorkshire’s most important multi-period sites. There are strong links with the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Deira, Roman ruins, and traces of Iron Age settlement.
For archaeologists, there’s little more precious than a multi-period site like this, because these are the ones that really help us tie together the stories of all the different people, traditions and cultures that have come and gone over the millennia.
Each year, we hope to head further back into time, and only with continued excavation can we reveal the full picture, and really begin to understand the stories hidden in this land.
Dig Team(10 – 22 August 2021)
9am – 4:30pm
Finds Room Team (16 – 22 August 2021)
9am – 4:30pm
DigCamp (14 August 2021 only)
9am – 12pm, or
1pm – 4pm
Please arrive in plenty of time! This is especially important on your first day, as you’ll need to complete your Archaeological Briefing before we can get you out on site. Don’t miss it!
Little Driffield is the nearest village, and it won’t be more than a few minutes drive from there.
We’re keeping the exact location private for now, and will send specific information about exactly where to meet us ONE WEEK before the dig begins.
Buses aren’t very reliable – if you don’t have your own transport please join our Facebook Group Chat to make shared travel arrangements with your fellow DigVenturers (you’ll have received a link to this in your welcome email).
Dig Team
Tuesday 10th – Sunday 22nd August 2021
You can choose to join us for a day, two days or the full week, but you can only start your dig experience on Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday.
Finds Room Team
Thursday 17th – Sunday 22nd August 2019
You can join us for a day, or two days, but you can only start your finds experience on Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday.
Daily schedule
Our excavations run from 9am – 5pm.
You’ll need to plan your journey to ensure you arrive in plenty of time.
This is especially important on your first day, when you’ll be given an in-depth archaeological briefing. We can’t let you into the trenches unless you have completed it.
We’ll email you an exact meeting location ONE WEEK before the dig begins. As long as you can get to Little Driffield, you’ll be fine!
Daily schedule
Our finds days run from 9am – 5pm.
You’ll need to plan your journey to ensure you arrive in plenty of time.
This is especially important on your first day, when you’ll be given an in-depth archaeological briefing. We can’t let you into the trenches unless you have completed it.
We’ll email you an exact meeting location ONE WEEK before the dig begins. As long as you can get to Little Driffield, you’ll be fine!
If you’re joining us on site, we’ll give you your t-shirt when you arrive.
If you’re watching from home, we’ll send you your t-shirt at the end of dig season… that’s usually October.
And it will be well worth the wait to be the proud owner of one of the BEST archaeology team t-shirts in the field!
We’ll send you an email when the dig begins, reminding you how to watch the dig online, and what you can expect… there’ll be videos for you to watch, virtual artefacts for you to examine, and plenty of live updates so that you can follow our progress.
Once the dig is over, it usually takes 12-18 months for us to write the official site report. We’ll keep you posted with any significant updates from the lab during that time.
We’ll provide all the tools you need. You just need to bring yourselves, plenty of enthusiasm and:
- Packed lunch and water
- Sturdy boots (walking boots, DMs or similar)
- Clothes for hot weather
- Clothes for wet weather
- Sun hat, sun cream, bug spray
We’ve set our crowdfunding goal to match the level of excavation and analysis we think this site deserves. Obviously, the closer we get the better, and the more people who join in the more we can discover, but we won’t abandon our plans if we fall shy of the target – this archaeology is too important to miss!
If we don’t reach our goal, we’ll stick to our guns and do the dig anyway – we’ll just scale down the size of the excavation to suite.
For example, we’d excavate a smaller area and send fewer artefacts off for scientific analysis, but the dig would still happen and you’d still be part of our team.
That being said, we’re confident we’ll reach our goal because we know there’s incredible archaeology waiting to be found and people like YOU are willing to help us prove it!
We are the only field school officially accredited by the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists in the UK, and we will make sure you get to try an archaeological problem, skill or technique that you’ve not tried before.
We run our excavations to the highest professional standards, and you’ll get to try some of the latest, and most cutting-edge techniques.
We can either transfer your dig days to another excavation at our discretion, or you can bequeath them to someone else… go on, pass on the archaeology love!
