LONDON, ENGLAND—BBC News reports that a section of a 2,000-year-old Roman road known as Watling Street was discovered in southeast London, directly under a modern road, during utility work. The route was constructed soon after the Roman invasion of Britain in A.D. 43, and once stretched from the Roman port at Dover, through London, and to the West Midlands. Southwark Council archaeologist Chris Constable and researchers from the Museum of London Archaeology determined that the ancient road consists of well-preserved layers of compacted gravel and two layers of chalk topped with a layer of compacted sand and gravel. Another section of the road was uncovered in the 1990s, but researchers were not sure of the road’s course. “In the planning for this project, we’d expected to solve this question but the extent of survival of the road is remarkable,” Constable said. To read about the origins of a second-century a.d. man buried less than a mile from a Roman road in what is now Cambridgeshire, England, go to “Ancient DNA Revolution: A Stranger in a Strange Land.”
