Last week, I received an email out of the blue, from Geoff Dannell. It is over 62 years since he and I last met, when we excavated together at Verulamium, the third-largest Roman city in Britain. Verulamium is located on the outskirts of St Albans, and I had two wonderful summers there under the direction of my Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, Sheppard Frere. Geoff was then a site supervisor at Verulamium and already an expert on Samian Ware. Attached to the email was a photograph of me helping Martin Aitken with a Mark 1 proton magnetometer survey within the walls of the city, during which we traced a ditch that ran a long and straight course until it turned a right angle. I asked Geoff who my companion was in this photograph; he replied: Felicity Wild. She and I have since engaged in a lively email correspondence, replete with memories of that hot summer of 1959, when we excavated a splendid town house with a complete mosaic of a lion with a stag’s head in its jaws. She has since also become a specialist in the analysis of Samian Ware, the range of ceramic vessels mass-produced in moulds that incorporate the name of the maker.
I sent a copy of the photograph to son Tom, who replied at once from his new base at the University of Vienna with a reference to a current series of resistivity surveys that are mapping the complete plan of Roman Verulamium. I was fascinated to read the regular internet reports on their progress and contacted Kris Lockyear, who is a leading member of the group undertaking the geophysical survey there. My diary for 1959 records that it was on 1 September that Martin Aitken came with his proton magnetometer. I have no idea how Felicity and I were chosen to help him; perhaps because I had already done so on a previous occasion at Dane’s Camp in Gloucestershire, where he unfailingly identified pits for us to excavate in the interior of that Iron Age hillfort. Martin was then an emerging leader in identifying subterranean features from his base at the Oxford Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art. Felicity and I were assigned the task of holding the sensor at fixed intervals while he recorded signals, the sensor being a set of wires wrapped round an old whisky bottle emptied of its original contents and refilled with water. It certainly worked; Sheppard Frere was delighted when the line of this ditch emerged from his readings. But until this past week, I had no inkling of its date or function.
Kris directed me to the report in the Antiquaries Journal of the 1959 excavation season, which has an appendix by Martin on our enterprise with the bottle. Excavations of the ditch revealed it to have been the perimeter of the early city and that by AD 100 it had begun to silt up. The later brick perimeter walls, which were to be recycled into St Alban’s Cathedral, were much more extensive. I don’t know why, but I had never read the report on our 1959 excavations until last week, so looking at them revived not only a host of memories, but also the pleasure of reading a succinct and beautifully illustrated summary of what we found. For some of the time, I was assigned to excavate in the back room of a shop that fronted Watling Street, the main thoroughfare that linked to two main city gates and ran past the theatre. There were thin layers of clay flooring that peeled off to reveal occupation remains. The occupants had swept their floor into a pit in the corner of the room, where in one afternoon, I found about 30 coins. We cleaned each of these to identify the Emperor and, of course, therefore the date of the shop.
