The Ancients - Glasgow's Roman Remains & Hadrian's Wall

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

To align with the COP26 conference in Glasgow, this episode features legendary Roman Britain archaeologist Dr David Breeze talking about his many years excavating the Roman site of Bearsden near Glasgow. We also chat about his long, star studded career working on the wider Antonine Wall and the iconic landmark that is Hadrian's Wall.

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they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, where the eyes of the world are currently on the city of Glasgow for COP26, the Climate Change Conference. And so this week, it seems like the ideal time to release our episode

about Glasgow's Roman remains. That's right. We're talking about a site dating to the mid-2nd century AD called Bearsden, part of what was the frontier we know as the Antonine Wall. And to talk through the archaeology from this site, I was delighted to get on the show the man who excavated the site a few decades ago. And this is Professor David Breeze. Now, David, he's considered royalty among Roman Britain archaeologists. He's got a long esteemed career. He's done work on Bear's Den, on the wider Antonine

Wall, and he's also done a lot of work on Hadrian's Wall. Now, as we've got David on the show, we start off talking about Bear's Den, but we also do end up talking about Hadrian's Wall, and in particular, focusing in on the initial construction of Hadrian's Wall. Why was it built? Was it built in a hurry against an immediate threat? Or were there other potential factors at play? So without further ado, to answer all of these questions and more, here's David.

David, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Well, I'm delighted to be here with you, Tristan. Now, first of all, David, what is Bearsden and where is it? Bear's Den and where is it? Okay, Bear's Den is the name of the separate council district just north of Glasgow, sort of slightly north-northwest. It's not actually within Glasgow itself. One might regard it as a suburb. It's part of Greater Glasgow. It used to be called New Kilpatrick but it got its name when the railway arrived and the railway station took its name from the local farm. So it became Bear's Den. And it's a fort, one of 16 or more forts on the Antonine Wall, which we know from literary evidence and inscriptions was built at the very beginning of the reign of Antoninus Pius, which started in 138.

of the reign of Antoninus Pius, which started in 138. And when we were looking again at preparations for campaigning, the decision to reconquer southern Scotland must have been taken at the very beginning of the reign of Antoninus Pius in 138, because by 139, they're already at work at getting Corbridge in the Tyne Valley ready for a base for the springboard to the north. And by 142, at least they'd started building the Antonine Wall. And one of these forts is Bear's Den. Now, in early 1970s, there was a proposal to demolish five large Victorian houses on the site of the fort. They had been built in the late 19th century, and they'd been bought up by a firm with the intention of building a chopping mall on them.

But they didn't get permission, so they were sold on for housing. And so in the summer of 1973, my office sent me to just do a trial excavation to see if any remains of the fort still survived. They had been recorded in the 1750s by William Roy, who planned the Antonine Wall, so we knew exactly where it was. It was recorded by the Orland Survey before it disappeared under housing. It was going to be a four-week excavation, which doubled in length because we actually found the Fort Bath House, and we excavated that and the developers decided they would give the bath house to the state to be a public monument rather than allow it to be destroyed and so the remains were good enough it was a timber fort timber buildings apart from the bath house and the granaries and so we were

allowed to come back year after year until we'd excaated as much as we could in this area of the fort. And before the house building started, it was delayed. And then the south side of the fort, two thirds of it was owned by the local authority. And they allowed me to dig up their lawns and nice flower beds in order to find out more. So we gained a good knowledge of the history of the fort. We could date it. We can see its development as a complex with a large fort then divided into two areas of fort and an annex. We found evidence for the fort rampart and probably the breastwork on top of the rampart.

Quite a lot of evidence for environmental evidence because we found the sewage from the vitrine and excavated that. And we also learned quite a lot about how Roman soldiers lived in the fort. That, the diet and food and how it was prepared were the most interesting discoveries. So first of all, the food from the sewage, wheat, barley, contaminated barley with weevils, incidentally, locally acquired fruits, strawberries, raspberries, bilberries, blackberries, various vegetables, food brought in from the continent, figs, coriander, opium poppy used for flavouring, fish sauce in wine barrels, wine and olive oil. So we got all that evidence. We almost completely excavated two barrack blocks. And we plotted the distribution of pottery and glass through the barrack blocks. And this was very interesting because practically nearly every barrack room produced evidence for

mixing bowls for cooking pots and for bowls so what it says to me is that the soldiers are preparing their food cooking it and eating it in their barrack rooms there weren't plates there I mean we found plates elsewhere in the fort but not in the barrack room so There weren't plates there. I mean, we found plates elsewhere in the fort, but not in the barrack rooms. So there's the possibility that if you think in terms of bowls, you know, you cook your food, you put it in a bowl, and then you use your fingers to eat it out of the bowl. If you try to eat food with your fingers off a plate, it was sliding everywhere, wouldn't it? So that makes sense to me. There was some salmon pottery, which is, you know, the glazed stuff which is imported from the continent. That tended to be found in the

officers' quarters. And of course, we looked at the bathhouse as well. Bathhouse was great fun. Lots of small pieces of pottery. So trying to bring this together, it was interesting. So, trying to bring this together, it was interesting, again, throughout the fort, there was very little evidence for the use of cups. I don't know what they drank out of. The evidence wasn't there. And even in the bathhouse, there were fragments of only two cups. But there were fragments of big bowls, eight of them, different ones. So I thought, right, well, why have we got big bowls? I mean, do they use for drinking wine in the bathhouse?

Are they used because it's quite a long way to get to the latrine from the hot room? So you'd have to go right through the bathhouse and outside in the cold and round the bottom side of the bathhouse to get to the latrine. So are the chamber pots. And then I thought, well, you know, if you're drinking wine in the bathhouse, you know, perhaps they were for nibbles. And when I went back to look at the botanical report, we actually found evidence for the skins of fruits and nuts in the bathhouse. And I thought, perhaps they were nibbles after all.

So for me, the excitement and absolutely excitement was the evidence for diet and eating and what one of the lecturers at Glasgow University did Jim and Camilla Dixon did all the work on the botany and one of their colleagues Brian Nikes looked at the level of cholesterol in the food in the sewage. And it was closer to a modern vegetarian diet than a general carnivorous diet or general diet. And it's what you might expect. Before freezing, you know, you had to salt your food

or keep it on the hoof. So although we know Roman soldiers ate meat, it was perhaps not so much of it. So we could see at best then the Romans had primarily a vegetable-based diet, but that included wheat and different types of wheat.

We had Emma and Spelt and Durham wheat, which these used for making pasta and pizzas. And the DNA of this is from southern Spain. And we know that southern Spain produced wheat for the Roman Empire. So there's a nice little connection there as well. So we've got all of this and we've got, I think, really nice evidence for where the Roman soldiers

cooked and ate their food. That's all astonishing. Let's then, first of all, dive into the barracks then, because you mentioned how the barracks could be where they prepared and ate their food. That's all astonishing. Let's then, first of all, dive into the barracks then, because you mentioned how the barracks could be where they prepared and ate their food. I mean, what kind of barracks are we talking about, David? Because this is a cavalry barracks. Well, we must start off from the point that we have very little evidence

for how sodas are distributed around barracks. And most of our evidence comes from anonymous treatise, possibly dating to the fourth century, but using early material, so that there's still argument of the precise date of it, by a man who used to be thought was called Hyginus, so the book is generally called Pseudo-Hygienus. It's available in translation, and it's about the Roman army operating in the field. And it states that when the Roman army is on campaign, a century of 80 men sleep eight in a tent. So this it, pseudo-hygienists says there are eight men in a tent, we assume, make a leap of faith from his tent to eight men in each barrack room. If we've got a barrack with only eight rooms in it, we know that cavalry troops had 32 men in it, which divide nicely into four barrack rooms. We've got eight men. We've got two cavalry troops in them. But it's a guess. So we have two barracks with eight rooms in.

And working on the basis that they were for cavalry, whether there were small rooms or whether there were four in or eight men in each room, we can't be certain. And we have facing them two other rooms. So it could be that the equipment was kept in two other buildings. So it could be that the equipment and so on were kept in one and they lived in the other. That would make sense. But we looked hard for chemical evidence for horse droppings and found nothing. But the next fort along had cavalry and infantry in it, and there was no headquarters building in the fort at Bear's Den initially.

So it's very possible that soldiers are outposted from the adjoining fort to Bear's Den. Ah, interesting. What did Tudor men like their women to look like? They should have broad shoulders, fleshy arms, fleshy legs and broad hips. What did 17th century Londoners think of coffee? A syrup of soot and the essence of old shoes. And what did executioners wear? A lot of these guys, they were clothes horses because it's a big public spectacle.

All the eyes are on you. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and in my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, we talk about everything from monasteries to the Medici, sex to spying, wardrobes to witch trials. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm guessing, was there some cross-referencing, some comparing with the cavalry fort that we know was a cavalry fort further south at Chester's?

Well, the interesting thing about the Antonine Wall and Hadrian's Wall is that they are so very different. I mean, there are some basics. So there's a linear barrier. There's a big ditch in front. There are forts along the line. There are smaller installations between the forts. But Hayden's Wall forts tend to be constructed for a single unit so far as we can see whereas those on the

Antonine wall are not and there's a hodgepodge of different sizes some are for complete units some seem to be not to be some are so small actually you couldn't get a complete unit in so we're sure of that and in some ways it comes back to the whole idea of Hadrian's Wall. Hadrian's Wall has lots of particular issues. It doesn't bear any relationship as planned to the topography. It's as if somebody decided far away, like Hadrian in Rome or even in the East, he was going to have a frontier built. even in the east you're going to have a frontier built and this is a new idea we have an earthwork in germany of the previous generation but we don't know much about that but this is the first serious frontier and it doesn't relate to the topography this is absolutely crucial you you can see you know come back to these two years of planning now hayden comes to britain in 122 so planning has got to start in 120 we would think and it's

very possible the building started in 121 so there's something built by the time hadron got here so we're pushing it back to 119 perhaps so that's the whole start of the process and hadron's in the east then so he's probably interviewing the bloke who's going to be the next governor of Britain. He goes past him. So where he is at the time in Romania, you know, you can assume that they actually met. They actually stopped and met. And so you can imagine. And this is historical fiction. So Hadrian says, I'm not going to expand the empire anymore. We know that bit. He stops expanding. And I'm going to close it off. I'm going to make the empire anymore we know that bit he stops expanding and i'm going to close it off i'm going to make a big statement i'm going to build barriers around the empire where they don't already exist where there aren't rivers to define the empire okay so okay and i want you to

go to britain and build a wall okay so what kind of wall do you want now this is the big problem you see because there's only about four cities in the Western Empire that have city walls at this time. All the city walls are in the east. Cities that have walls around them as a matter of course. And Hadrian knows Athens well. So if Hadrian is scratching his head and saying, now, what kind of wall do I want? A wall like that around Athens, a big stone wall and towers on it. A wall like that around Athens, a big stone wall and towers on it. I mean, this is historical fiction, but it comes back to these basic questions. Why is Hadrian's Wall so unusual?

Not like the German frontier. It's not like the Antonine Wall, apart from the fact that it's a barrier and a ditch. The maw castles on Hadrian's Wall occur obviously at every maw. Little enclosure with a barrack inside it, guarding a ditch. The maw castles on Hadrian's Wall occur obviously at every maw. Little enclosure with a barrack inside it, guarding a gate. You don't see those anywhere else except on the Antonin Wall later, but not in Germany. And you've got this regular system of maw castles every mile and two towers in between. You don't get that in Germany either. You don't get that on the Antonin Wall. And then when the forts came to be created, as you say, like Chester's, they are all, as far as we can see, with one exception for a whole unit, not a detachment,

as again does happen in some German forts, and on the Antonine Wall, certainly, therefore whole units. And unusually, they're placed astride the wall. I mean, this doesn't happen on any other frontier. And then you've got the Valum, the great earthwork astride the wall. I mean, this doesn't happen on any other frontier. And then you've got the Valum, the great earthwork built behind the wall. You've got things which are unique on Hadrian's Wall. And we have to ask ourselves why. And I think it's the intervention of Hadrian himself. It does kind of feel like a statement of power, doesn't it, David, when you look at the wall and the remains that survive to this day

and its uniqueness in so many ways? Could it be, and I guess we're going very much into theories in historical fiction, could it be like a statement of power to impress the Brigantes or that part of the world as well, to show them Rome's dominance at that time, or does that not seem likely? David Plylar I think a lot of answers to our problematic questions come down to how we see the Roman Empire. It's like, excuse my mug, but it is a mug of Hadrian's Wall. OK, so do we see, you know, a glass of water half full or half empty? I mean, it's a trite point.

I mean, it's a trite point. So for me, to take that analogy further, people tend to be pro-Roman or pro-Caledonian. So if you're pro-Roman like me, you see the Romans as this incredibly strong fighting force, which for eight centuries admittedly did lose battles, but they rarely lost a war. For eight centuries. And they were really nasty people. You see this on the column of Marcus Aurelius in particular, burning down villages. If somebody got up at it to the north of Hadrian's Wall, you can imagine they'd send out a force of a squad of men to burn a few villages to just make the point, you know, you obey us. So that's me. There are others who see Roman under pressure from their enemies in Britain, which is why I call them pro-Caledonians. And there certainly was pressure. Let's not ignore it. We've got all the references which we've touched upon at the beginning of Reigns. We've got serious warfare in 197 when the Romans had to buy peace.

And we can keep going forward, in particular into the 4th century, with quite a lot of evidence for warfare. In 305, the Emperor Constantius Chlorus and his son Constantine campaigned against the Picts, which I find really very interesting because Constantine's father, Constantius Chlorus, had only just become emperor. You had to be very safe to campaign on the very fringe of the Roman Empire, or the problem had to be very serious to take you there. So, I mean, let's not say that the Caledons and the Picts later aren't a problem, but it's whether you see they were such a problem that they kept the Romans on the back foot. And I don't see it that way, but I'm trying to acknowledge my prejudice, my bias, and that's

important. So one of the issues with the turf wall, I mean, you could be right. I mean, I'm not saying that this is a bad argument that the brigantes needed controlling, and that might be why there were outpost forts north of the wall under Hadrian at Buchastle and so on. But it's often argued that the turf wall was built in a hurry, because there was problem in the west, whether it was a brigantes or beyond but what i'd like to ask you to do is think about the stone wall and when you go today to look at my castle 42 corfields or 30 my castle 37 at house steads the stones used in building the gates are enormous. You know, not four men to manoeuvre these stones, the big ones.

No, you'd need more than that to move these stones around. And what that's saying to me is this is a project which is being built at leisure. If you wanted to throw it up in a hurry, you'd go around with stones like most of the wall was built with, a foot or so long, which one man can handle. If you look at the film of the Ministry of Works men consolidating Hadrian's Wall near Bird Oswald, you know, it's easy for them to move it. To use ginormous stones is a statement of permanency as much as anything. And if they're building the stone wall in that way, I don't think the turf wall is built as a quick fix because the Caledonians are coming over the hill. And as John Horsley said in 1732, Hadrian's Wall is not built in the shadow of an enemy to the north. You deal with the enemy first of all and then you build the wall well there you go one last thing to leave it all off on because you've talked about

hadrian's wall and its many different aspects he talks about the antonine wall bears den and the various aspects of that it does seem to really emphasize doesn't it's that hadrian's wall and the antonine wall they're both so much more than just the walls themselves. Yeah, I mean, for me, I'd have to admit that Hadrian's Wall, partly because of its greater longevity, its greater complexity, is the gift that keeps on giving. We're still learning a lot. In the last 20 years, I've written on average a paper every year about a different aspect of Hadrian's Wall, pulling together the evidence, seeing what it tells us, unprejudiced, I hope, in looking at what it tells us. And I haven't finished this. I think I've got to the end of my survey of the different aspects of the wall, and then something else comes to mind. I'm working on the 19th century paintings and depictions of part of Hadrian's Wall, which Alan Sorrell used that section at Waltham for his illustration of Hadrian's Wall.

That's the iconic section of Hadrian's Wall. And we have about six or eight paintings of it from the second half of the 19th century. And we can piece together from this the evidence of how much of the wall has been destroyed through quarrying and what it used to look like before the quarrying stopped as late as 1976. Wow, that's late. There's still a lot that we can learn about Hadrian's Wall. It's just that and the Antonine Wall and the comparison between the two helps us understand how the Roman army controlled Northern Britain and dealt with its neighbors beyond it's so interesting and it also almost in some ways feels like pompeii and

the fact that and for instance like with the vinderlander the recent discoveries there the christian discoveries of its later history how a new excavation a new find might answer one question about hadrian's wall but at the same, it opens up like 10 or 12 new questions that you now start to wonder about. Yes, there's been an awful lot of very good research. A lady called Rikki Giles, who lives in America, did a British archaeological report looking at the distribution of pottery in forts. And she came up with a wonderful idea, amazing idea.

She said, we hardly ever dig complete forts. We dig parts of them. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a database from as many forts as provide useful evidence to create a theoretical fort, if you like. And I'm going to look at the distribution of pottery, in this case, that's what she was doing, within the fort to see what it tells us. If you get that database sorted out,

you can turn it on its head, for example, and say, okay, we've looked at this, headquarters buildings produce very little pottery, or it's a particular type. So if you've got a part of a building, you don't know what it is and it produces very little pottery, among your list of what it is likely to be is a headquarters building, you see. So this is where my work, in part, I'd already done this work on the distribution of pottery in the barrack blocks.

But Ricky said, look at jars. Let's look at where jars are found. The jars generally in Roman forts are found in two places they're found in granaries and they're found on roads and she said it's as if what's happening is jars are being used by soldiers to go and collect their grain or other type of food from the granaries put it in the jars and then when they walk back to the barrack block they perhaps trip up and drop the jar on the roads or Or they use it to collect water in. And the same thing happens.

And all my jars in Bear's Den are found in the granaries and on the roads. And I didn't know of Ricky's theory until I did the distribution. So here was somebody with a wonderful idea and has put it into practice, which helps us understand what happened in Roman force. Wonderful piece of research. And somebody else will produce something, a new idea, and we'll be off chasing a new thought. Absolutely, David.

The future of archaeology on these frontiers looks to be very, very exciting indeed. I mean, David, thank you so much. This was an absolutely brilliant chat. And it just goes for me to say thank you so much for coming on the podcast. You're very welcome. I very much enjoyed our discussion. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era or yoga era, We'll see you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca.