Back-garden archaeology

Castle Hill, at Whitton, Ipswich, is now a large suburban housing estate, built soon after the second world war. Before that, it was open fields and farmland. And long before that, it was the site of a Roman villa.

Excavations between 1946 and 1950 by the renowned archaeologist, Basil Brown, suggested that it was a very large villa indeed. In fact, his original plans indicated that it could have been the largest in East Anglia. The children of Castle Hill primary school had invited Time Team to find out more.

While Basil Brown's excavations took place in open fields, however, Time Team was limited to people's back gardens – lots of them. This was to be back-garden archaeology on a massive scale.

Matching it all up
An immediate problem arose with Basil Brown's plans: they were not surveyed with any great degree of accuracy. If Time Team was to discover the true extent of the villa, it was necessary to match his plans to the existing landscape, and then to confirm that his presumptions (and it turned out that he made a lot of presumptions) were accurate.

The geophysics team faced an additional problem due to the huge amount of landscaping that has taken place in the area. In some places, the archaeological remains were buried deep below the surface; in others they appeared to be missing altogether.

'Basilled' archaeology
The Team eventually dug twelve deep trenches in eight back gardens. These revealed that Brown and his diggers had removed practically all the Roman evidence and had just left empty trench lines to indicate where walls would have been.

A new archaeological phrase was coined to describe these empty trenches: the site, it was said, had been 'Basilled'. As the dig progressed, moreover, Basil Brown's massive villa seemed to shrink in size. It transpired that the two wings to Brown's villa had been conjecture: they didn't actually exist. The villa was almost certainly far more modest than Brown had projected.

Non-Basilled remains
Time Team did eventually find some non-Basilled remains. The breakthrough came late in the dig when site supervisor Kerry Ely and digger Dan Dodds uncovered areas missed by Brown.

Kerry's trench revealed evidence of a burnt building, complete with burnt tile and wattle walling. Dan discovered a corner section of a flint wall, which would have been part of the villa porch. Finally, Phil Harding discovered the remains of a hypocaust system. It might not have been the biggest villa in East Anglia, but it still made the primary school children's invitation worthwhile.

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