Earlier this year we shared a blog about a new archaeological archives project focussing on the Mesolithic site of Star Carr. Excitingly, this is not the only major excavation to recently arrive in the collections of the Yorkshire Museum. From 2013-2016 Northern Archaeological Associates (NAA) were employed by Highways England to excavate the area to either side of the A1 road as part of the road-widening scheme and the amazing results of this excavation have recently been deposited with us.  

Over the years of excavation, a 19km stretch of road between Leeming and Barton in North Yorkshire was investigated. The modern A1 road follows the line of a Roman road called Dere Street. The excavations took in parts of four Roman settlements linked by Dere Street, including the discovery of a new site at Scurragh House. Parts of the Roman town of Catterick were also excavated. The town has been studied in some detail, starting with the 1959-1960 excavations there in advance of the construction of the A1 motorway and again in the 1980s. The Yorkshire Museum already holds the large excavation archive from these earlier phases. The A1 investigations also included parts of the motorway junction at Scotch Corner, which identified a huge late Iron Age settlement of international importance there.  

Figure 1: Extent of the A1 Leeming to Barton excavation scheme by NAA. Figure from Contact, Concord and Conquest: Britons and Romans at Scotch Corner Digital Monograph, 2020 

 

The archive 

Discoveries of objects, buildings, ditches, and fields together from the many sites on the A1 have changed our understanding of Roman archaeology in the north. The Scotch Corner site existed during the earliest Roman phases in the region and the material culture highlights the contact between Iron Age Britons and Roman invaders in the 1st-century AD. 

The sheer scale of these excavation is difficult to convey, but more than 63,000 objects were identified. In this case, an ‘object’ is a find which is recorded individually and this figure doesn’t include the bulk excavated material, of which there was a lot more! 2.8 tonnes of animal bone and 2.5 tonnes of pottery was found during the scheme. There are more than 1000 boxes of artefacts from the A1 scheme now stored, for future generations, in the Yorkshire Museum. Every object is stored in a plastic bag, with a label identifying where it was found on the site and its unique reference number. The bags are kept in either an acid-free cardboard box or, for metal objects, a tightly sealed plastic box containing silica gel which controls humidity and prevents further decay. Stonework is stored in large plastic crates or on wooden pallets.  

Curators at the Yorkshire Museum are using this site, along with the new archive of material from Star Carr, to try and better understand how we can use big datasets. Working behind the scenes we will be importing large amounts of finds data in our collections management system to make it more accessible to the public, especially to researchers of the future.  

 

The finds 

Some of the finds from this archive have already made it into the news, for example the oldest pistachio nut found in Britain (nearly 2,000 years old) and a Roman phallic carving found in 2014, but it contains a wealth of fascinating objects and biographies. Let’s take a quick look at a few of the highlights from the excavations.  

1. An amber figurine depicting a toga-clad male figure is an amazing discovery for Roman Britain. Carved amber objects other than beads are incredibly rare here because they were mostly made in Italy (in and around Aquilea). This is the only example, among a handful of carved amber objects, to depict a full human figure from Roman Britain. It’s hard to tell from the fragment missing its legs, head and arms, but it probably depicted a philosopher or actor. Its presence hints at the site being wealthy in the first century with access to internationally-traded, exotic goods.  

2. The discovery of many coin pellet moulds at Scotch Corner is the most northernly evidence of ancient coin production in Europe. The moulds are clay trays with small circular impressions in them into which molten metals were mixed to create pellets of similar weight and composition. Probably these pellets were then struck into coins.  

3. A miniature gladius (a Roman legionary’s sword) is a particular highlight. This beautifully crafted object comprises an iron blade, bone-inlaid handle, and comes with a decorated copper-alloy sheath. The blade has corroded into its cover so it can no longer be opened, but at just 11cm in length it was never an imposing weapon originally! The tiny sword may have been a gift, perhaps even a souvenir, from or for a soldier who’s sword it emulated. 

 
The miniature gladius and an altar to Mars Condates are both on display in The Ryedale Hoard: A Roman Mystery exhibition at the Yorkshire Museum, which runs until May 2023. We hope to include many more of the incredible finds from the A1 extension scheme into our future exhibitions programme. After all, these excavations have changed our understanding of many aspects of Iron Age and Roman archaeology in the north and we need to try and tell that story.

Want to delve deeper? There are now five major monographs published by NAA about these excavations. These are available for free here.