Dig the Romans of East Yorkshire

Love the Romans? Want to help us find out more about who lived in East Yorkshire thousands of years ago?

This is your chance to investigate one of the most important Roman settlements ever discovered in the region. Support this dig and you can help us explore it!

Two thousand years ago, the Romans marched north and established a centre at York. But while archaeologists have found many later Roman settlements from the 3^rd and 4^th centuries AD, 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 2017, we took 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.

In 2018, 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.

In 2019, we 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.