In my experience, there is nothing in archaeology quite like tracing someone’s home. My first experience of this was at Roman Verulamium in Britain. This walled city was strategically placed on Watling Street, and one to which Queen Boudicca and the Iceni made a beeline when trying to kick out the Roman invaders. When you dig into a Roman city, the chances are high that you will come across houses. Think of the streets of Pompeii, the fast-food outlet recently identified, or the room with two victims of the eruption still lying contorted where they died. At Verulamium in 1959, we uncovered a fabulous mosaic floor. The centrepiece was a lion with the severed head of a stag in its mouth. My brother John was lucky enough to be on the team exposing it.
I was elsewhere on the site, working on a shop that fronted the Watling Street. Crowds must have passed by, on their way to the theatre just 50m away, or by turning right, to the forum. I worked in the back room behind the shop front. No mosaics here, but successive thin clay floors, which peeled off one by one. In the corner, there was a pit, where the shopkeeper had swept the rubbish. In one afternoon, we found about 30 coins, all low denominations, small change lost to the owner. With each one, we rubbed and cleaned the surface to reveal the face of the emperor and inscription of his name, and so we were able to date the building.
Since archaeology is necessary destruction, we worked our way down through the house to its foundations and beyond, and came across a thick layer of bright-red burnt daub. The first Roman settlement hove into view. No coin under the burning layer post-dated AD 60; we had uncovered the remains of Boudicca’s sacking of the city. The emperor Claudius, anxious to gain a military triumph, had ordered the seizure of Britannia under General Aulus Plautius in AD 43. As in most instances of unwarranted invasion of someone else’s land, there was fierce resistance, and the heroine Boudicca rose to the challenge. So here, we had just 17 years of Roman occupation to open up with our trowels. The first houses bore no resemblance to the fine residences that came later, with their concrete walls, mosaics, and hypocausts to warm the inhabitants during the cold winter months. They were quite ephemeral, with wooden foundations and small rooms, and they certainly went up in smoke when the Iceni warriors poured in.
