Indeed, the only evidence for civilians came from outside the city and within the ruins of the abandoned Roman town: they were poor structures, made of mudbrick. It became clear that this was simply a citadel, an administrative centre for churches and workshops, with the people living around the outside. What was lacking were houses, or anywhere for the inhabitants to live. There were workshops, and there were even barracks. There were churches, two of which were excavated. It proved to be the late city of the 5th-6th centuries AD, and a very strange sort of city at that. This site had not previously been explored, and it was here that the British team set to work. There were the usual grand civic buildings at the centre, and the roads were magnificent, but it was not densely occupied – large parts were taken up by extensive ‘villa’ type dwellings, sometimes occupying two insulae (blocks) within the town. It appears to have been more Greek than Roman, and unlike in Britain, where the towns were populated by native inhabitants, at Nicopolis it seems that the inhabitants were brought in from the more civilised parts of the Roman Empire, speaking Greek – or at least putting up Greek inscriptions. The major city, laid out soon after the conquest of Dacia by Trajan in 110-117, was a classical city whose outlines can easily be determined by following the trenches of the stone robbers. There was a small church but no headquarters building as would be expected in a normal Roman fort. It seems that this fort had been built by the Romans for barbarians who had constructed their own traditional houses which were very different from standard Roman barracks. The ground floors had holes which contained amphorae and pots for storing foodstuffs while the occupants lived on the upper floor, reached by a flight of steps. In the central area, there were the ‘barracks’, again built of mudbrick, earth and stone. Obviously, during the final days of the fort, these buildings must have been used as general storerooms. They had all been destroyed by fire and the carbonized remains of grains of all types, amphorae and Roman shields were found in the debris.
On the west side of the site they contained rows of mudbrick bases that had supported a raised floor – clearly granaries but of a type previously unattested in the Roman Empire. There were rows of structures, built not of mortar but of earth and stones with a superstructure made of mudbrick.
His team set to work to excavate the interior and the character of the internal buildings was even more surprising. What was at first surprising was that it did not date to the time of the emperors Diocletian and Constantine, when most impressive late Roman forts were built, but much later, to the very beginning of the 5th century. These were not defences belonging to a village but were of such highquality that they could only have been built by Roman military engineers. The first discovery was a good stout Roman defensive wall, still standing 2m high, with two elaborate Romangateways, a curtain wall, internal towers and an outer defensive perimeter, called a proteichisma.
But once he began digging he found that – shock horror – it was not a village at all. He has also been carrying out a major survey of the countryside (using a new technique he has developed) and had chosen what he hoped would be a major village site for large-scale excavation involving almost 200 archaeologists and student volunteers per season. Andrew Poulter of the University of Nottingham was leading a major Anglo-Bulgarian expedition to investigate the complex problems of how the Roman world came to an end in Bulgaria at the hands, at first, of the Goths in the 4th and 5th centuries, and then of the Slavs at the end of the 6th. The discovery of this fortress was a great surprise. In Bulgaria, a Roman fort, probably built to contain a band of federate troops (as opposed to a regular military unit) has been excavated at Dichin.