Ancient Section of Roman Watling Street Discovered Beneath London

A part of a 2,000-year-old Roman road beneath the modern-day Watling Street in south-east London was unearthed while work to install new utility pipes was taking place — BBC News The road was built shortly after the Romans invaded Britain in A.D. 43 and when people actually traveled anywhere it went from the Roman port at Dover, through London out to the West Midlands. Archaeologist Chris Constable from Southwark Council and workers at the Museum of London Archaeology said the roadway is made up of well-preserved layers of compressed gravel and two chalk seams, capped off with a section where sand and gravel had settled. Details were unclear about the course of part of the road, which was exposed in the 1990s. Constable said the length of road still standing is amazing “In planning for this project we had expected to answer this question but not in quite such a deep way.” For a story about the origins of a second-century a.d. man who had been buried fewer than two miles from the town of Godmanchester, in what is now Cambridgeshire, England, see Ancient DNA Revolution: A Stranger in a Strange Land.