HS2 archive reveals gladiator clues and Roman wishing well (Full Transcript)

[00:00:11] Speaker 1: Come on in, and welcome to the HS2 archives.

[00:00:17] Speaker 2: Thanks so much for having us Charlotte. Charlotte's invited us to this store, the location of which is a closely guarded secret. All I can say is it's in Yorkshire. So Charlotte, what wonders are stored within this store?

[00:00:38] Speaker 1: So I wanted to very quickly show you one of my favourite items. This is something that has been said in the media previously.

[00:00:47] Speaker 2: Wow, look at that. Now, if I remember, she's Roman, right? Absolutely. Wonders to us, everyday items to our ancestors. A Saxon comb, a hand axe used more than 40,000 years ago. A medieval sower's needle case and a smoker's clay pipe. Even gladiators left their mark.

[00:01:10] Speaker 3: So this takes us into the Roman period. This is a small piece of carved bone. The full inscription, we understand, would be a phrase associated with gladiators. Gladiators, so this would have belonged to a gladiator? Potentially belonged to a gladiator, a former gladiator perhaps. It was discovered in Northamptonshire. It just gives us that glimpse of a connection to that sort of event happening.

[00:01:43] Speaker 2: There are around 450,000 items in this one warehouse in boxes waiting to be cleaned and fully researched. But where to store them and who owns them is still often undecided. Some discoveries were rare, such as unearthing a Roman wishing well.

[00:02:00] Speaker 3: And what I've got here is some examples of coins from the period that were represented in that well. The easiest way for us to understand it, it was a well on a natural spring and coins have been deposited. And that's what people do now. Go to the Trevi Fountain, you throw a coin in the Trevi Fountain. You normally get tight date ranges of coin hordes that have been deposited in a single event. So to have this chronology through the coins of people visiting the same place in the landscape is really special.

[00:02:30] Speaker 2: The high speed railway line had to be assessed for its archaeology before construction, with each dig bringing new finds. Building HS2 has changed the landscape along its route, cutting into fields and communities and dividing opinion. The archaeology discovered can be dazzling, but some will ask, is it worth it?

[00:02:54] Speaker 4: I think from an archaeological perspective, it absolutely is worth it. It's very exciting from an archaeological perspective. The length of the scheme, 140 miles. We can use all the archaeological data we have to compare change across time, across large areas and between different regions.

[00:03:12] Speaker 3: I've just read gold dental prosthesis.

[00:03:16] Speaker 1: Yes.

[00:03:17] Speaker 3: The fancy word for dentures. But not dentures like we have now. Wow. Look at the gold on that. I know. So this is post-medieval. It's from one of the cemetery sites that were excavated along the scheme. I mean, that's probably the most bizarre thing.

[00:03:36] Speaker 2: Yes. That's the right word for it, I think. Yes. Bizarre. You must be making discoveries every day here. Yeah. Every box has a surprise. You're at the very start of all of this.

[00:03:47] Speaker 1: But what is the hope for the future of these items? So I would love to see the majority of these items being able to be deposited with the local museums.

[00:03:57] Speaker 2: An ark holding the tales of our ancestors, spanning thousands of years of history. Their secrets just waiting to be uncovered and told. Harriet Bradshaw, BBC News.