The Story Unfolds

I made my first long-awaited visit to Palencia, in the north of Spain, in September 2024. The weather had already turned and the rain derailed some of my plans but I was able to visit the atmospheric Iron Age hill fort La Loma, the site of an intense battle between besieging Roman forces and the Cantabrian warriors inside. I saw just a fraction of the enormous quantity of Roman arrowheads and projectiles found here. Dr Torres Martinez drove us to an incredibly beautiful and sacred place on the other side of the mountains. A place I didn't know I wanted to include in the the story until I saw it and realised I had found the end to my eventual film. And we saw the mountains shrouded in the sort of mist that evokes imagined images of Celtic warriors appearing in the gloom. Keep an eye out for what will be my first series of short films about this vast and extraordinary story.

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Near to Mount Bernorio the archaeologists discovered a Roman settlement. Like the other sites in this story, only a small section has been uncovered so far, enough to reveal that this was a camp built by the Romans in the aftermath of the battle at Mount Bernorio. What started out as a temporary place to house Roman soldiers, developed into a permanent settlement, with recognisable Roman features that have started to emerge. No Roman settlement is complete without a hypocaust - because soldiers far from home need a touch of Roman luxury, like warm water for baths and heating. Within the extensive network of the hypocaust a mosaic was uncovered. You can see from the picture it forms a simple pattern but is remarkably well preserved. In many ways this mosaic symbolises the final stages of subjugating the local population, replacing Cantabrian culture and customs with their own.

I'm interested in exploring the wider context of the Cantabrian War so I started reading around why capturing the north of Spain was so important to Caesar Augustus. Not insignificant were the natural resources, including gold. Las Médulas was a gold mine in Asturian territory that became, in fact, the largest gold mine in the Roman Empire. The beginning of mining here happened to coincide with the monetary reforms of Augustus. It also happens to be a stunning place that is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. Because my friend Rob Bell knows a thing or two about engineering, I tasked him with helping me to understand how the Romans extracted their gold from these mountains.

This tiny object, found on Monte Bernorio, can tell us so much about the people who lived here. In the shape of the rear half of a pig, it is a bronze document from the late Iron Age and is engraved with an inscription in a Celtic language. It is a pact of hospitality or friendship between two groups, perhaps neighbouring tribes. The inscription appears to be in a newly discovered Hispanic Celtic dialect. It is one of only two of these objects recovered in archaeological excavations, the other being found in the middle Ebro valley. Jesús Torres Martínez tells me that it seems to have been deliberately broken, in an act that signifies the end of the friendship.

I love Dr Jo Ball. I was introduced to her by Saul David and there seems to be nothing she doesn't know about the Roman army and Caesar Augustus. She also happens to have an active interest in the Cantabrian excavations. I particularly enjoy the way that Jo sheds light on the strengthsm weaknesses & motivations of Augustus and hels us to better understand the Cantabrians, how they were viewed by Rome and the brutal nature of this particular war.

Thousands of Roman arrowheads have been found at La Loma and I could choose any of them to include here. But I think this one is the one that really brought home to me the opportunities offered by this archaeological project. The arrow is itself a micro-story. 2,000 years after it was shot by a Roman soldier, here it is still lodged in the stone walls of the Iron Age fort. The archaeologists are the first people to touch this arrowhead since the Roman who launched it. It's not just the sheer number of projectiles found that allows this story to be told in such detail, but the fact that many, like this one, were found in a context that enables the archaeologists to plot the battle in forensic detail and to answer questions like, from which direction did the Roman attack? Where did the artillery assault come from? Where did they breach the walls of the fort? Where did the final moments of the battle play out? And they can do this for multiple sites that were attacked during the Cantabrian War.