Edit 2: p346. He could smell the trail

[In my view, Edit 1 is still rubbish. It looks irremediable. Is that the word? Past help. But, never say never. Here's one more go.]

Alan stretched back on the grass. It was a warm day, another warm day.

There was a trail here. Alan was sure of it. He could smell it. What he was not so sure of was whether it was the trail of the artefacts themselves or whether it was something else. Something else like people. Gold or people? He couldn't tell. Both, perhaps.
The people fascinated him; the idea of them. The people who lived here at the end, whenever that was. It would be either side of the year 400, he thought, give or take ten or fifty years. To hell with it! It was impossible. How could you connect with them when everything was so uncertain! He should be used to it, he knew. He'd been doing this job for long enough. He should be more sanguine. Take it as it comes. Accept the limitations.  And he did, by and large.
But this was different. For some reason. This place was ... well, he didn't know. There was something about it that made it different. This time he needed to know. For sure. For definite.
Maybe it was because he had discovered it, in a manner of speaking. That desk job he had done two years ago. All those aerial photographs. All the maps. All the intuition. All the good ideas. It had all been his. He had done it. He had identified the site and the others along the valley. He had known, even then, before he had the evidence, that this was something special; something different. He had taken the evidence to Broderick and the rest was history, as they say; or archaeology, perhaps, in this case.

Alan regrouped.
Say, he thought, say, three-fifty to four-fifty but, no, more hopefully, 380 to 420. Difficult to say. It was always so difficult to say. What sort of people were they? Were they people we would recognise if we met them in the street? Are they people we would understand? Were they farmers? Villa owners? Whatever a villa owner might mean. They were people. Alan was sure of that. They were ordinary people, people like you and me. (If the you was anybody in this context, for Alan, it was Jane waiting back at home; his better, critical self. Or it could be Broderick, of course; his better, critical, professional self.) Yes, they were ordinary people. All people are odinary. By definition. They were people with families, friends, colleagues, associates, wives, children, acquaintances, neighbours. But: Who is my neighbour? That is always such a good question.

All life was here. He knew that. Buried, hidden just beneath their feet. The whole of life, lives lived. Here. In this place. At a certain time. And at other times, come to that; however far back the archaeological record went: Late Roman; early Roman; pre-Roman. The whole web of life. The whole social network. An ecosytem of archaeologies. He laughed. He imagined the occupants of this villa-farm using Facebook and mobile phones; the whole web of life. Twitter! he thought. Hey! What would be the equivalent of Twitter in 417 AD?

That was the date: 417. He didn't know why. He didn't know how he knew. It was enough to know. He smiled and stretched himself back into the grass to soak up more of the July sunshine. Hey! Just imagine.

Yes. He could smell the trail of gold and people. And there was something else. There was the unmistakeable stink of something fishy going on. Something not at all Roman. It was not Saxon either. It was something now; something very twenty-first century. He sighed and closed his eyes. Why did life have to be so complicated?

[Perhaps, sometimes, more is more?]