Time Team’s 3 Most Ancient Digs…

A long time ago, in a field far far away…
Full episodes below:

00:00 – ‘In the Shadow of the Tor’
Bodmin Moor
Series 14, Episode 13

19:24 – ‘A Port & Stilton’
Stilton, Cambridgeshire
Series 14, Episode 6

31:52 – ‘The Puzzle of Picket’s Farm’
South Perrott, Dorset
Series 12, Episode 10

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Cornwall behind one of the wildest and most romantic coastlines in Britain lies bodmin Moore Baron Windswept and dominated by huge craggy tours weird Granite outcrops that have been sculpted by millions of years of harsh Cornish weather this is a landscape that’s been witnessed to thousands of years of human

History a recent archaeological survey recorded hundreds of prehistoric settlements here but no one can say for sure how old they are or even if they’re all the same age do we have any idea how many people would have lived here during the Bronze Age yet when we carried out the survey

We recorded at least 200 settlements and 1500 individual houses within those settlements but what we can say with certain is there are at least a couple of hundred people up here at any one point maybe even a couple of thousand is always it is yeah it is Eerie the idea

Of going into somewhere that’s maybe five thousand years old what exactly are we going to do here Francis we’re going to do an excavation dig a hole and find evidence that will suggest yes this was a house or no it was used for livestock and we’ll also date the thing I mean we

Don’t actually know that all of these around houses I mean some of them could be stock pens they could be clearance cans if we can identify areas of burning that may indicate hearts and so help with the interpretation then we’ve got the whole landscape Beyond but no one’s

Been able to accurately date the whole settlement some structures on the Moor could be thousands of years older still because 500 meters away to the Northeast is another huge man-made feature Expect it’s Neolithic and if it is we’re talking at least 2 000 years before the Bronze Age but our local experts think that the first settlers here were drawn towards Roe or Rao tour they’d have been in awe of these Rocky outcrops and as evidence that they were worshiping here

We’re at a router we’ve got the hilltop enclosure which we know was probably Neolithic in date with other examples Elsewhere on Boardman and these almost certainly some kind of tribal Gatherings centers for ritual ceremonies a meeting place for people to come together and sort of celebrate their lives within the landscape I think

It’s from those sites where what’s below ground actually might not be as informative as actually what’s above ground there’s the stone sizes there’s the shape and size of these Banks or Cairns whatever they are we can look at how the constructed what they’re lined up within the landscape so this is a

Classic case we’ve got to start looking at the obvious and try to understand what it’s telling us nope in Phil’s trench he’s beginning to suspect this bank is far from being a random pile of stones and what I’m noticing too this is bang on loin with the edge of the Cairn there’s a

Load of upstanding Stone they just stick up out of the ground oh yeah and they go right the way through here I reckon this is going to prove to be the edge of the care the build up and the makeup of it is going to be over that side and on that

Side is a collapse where it’s fell out and I’ve got exactly the same thing on my side the light here on road tour would have been as dramatic to the Ancients as it is to us today they worshiped the Sun and ran their lives by it and thinking about it so do we

Despite the impetuous weather it’s been a good first day in our two house circles the diggers have finally got into their stride over on the can they’re now looking at stones that haven’t been seen for thousands of years and look at this we’re now deeper than the antiquarians

Got down to and this surface too is maybe 5 000 years old and tomorrow we’re going to dig into it to see whether this was a place where people lived or maybe where they buried their dead I think you can vaguely see across here where it

Used to be in there’s fewer stones but um we’ve gone out beyond that and you can see here with these collapsed Stones here which just go over the wall of the house there it’s massive it’s huge I think there might be even too many for a

Wall here yeah and we have had a few a couple of finds as well there you go a little thumb scraper wow look at that and it’s been burnt yeah it’s burnt flint and it was found outside the walls just over there oh that’s interesting because the two scrapers that were found

By Dorothy Dudley’s team were also outside look they’re these dots there just outside the entrance and have you seen anything it might be a target for carbon dating possibly you see these the lake they’ve come down onto there yeah nice dark black and in

The very center of it there is in fact a quite a strong concentration of charcoal I think we if we put a slot across the back or something and got a section down there got a good sample of it yeah we probably could get something at last we’re getting to grips with

These Stone circles we’ve got trenches open in two separate buildings and it would be fantastic if they were both part of the same potential Bronze Age Village but without doubt the biggest mystery on the site is Phil’s Neolithic can built six Thousand Years Ago by the earliest farmers who only had stone tools The this Monumental structure is over 500 meters long and Francis believes it’s no coincidence that it Points East and towards the tour he’s also convinced that it’s Unique in Britain with only one or two other Neolithic monuments even remotely like it when we were up here yesterday in the

Pouring rain it looked to me like a rather random jumble of stones that you might put up to stop sheep wandering about but looking at it now it looks like a really big structure well the thing is Tony about these really big structures that very carefully put

Together or the whole thing collapses so I’m hoping that Phil has got good evidence for however thing was actually built I mean you can actually see it on the surface Tony I mean if you look up the monument you can see that there are actually two parallel rows of stones

Running right the way up its length and we’ve actually got some evidence of it in the trench here look there’s that big boulder which is sticking up through the surface of the grass and we’ve got these big boulders coming down here and actually the infill is much smaller

Boulders and if you really want to see the other side much more clearly look at that whacking great stone in there yeah so what you’ve got are these these two parallel they’re they’re like walls so do you think the original shape would have been like a gentle slope and then a

Flat top yes I think it is I think it’s definitely got a real definite shape to it what about the varied soil wow we’re just beginning to get a point where I think we’ve got it at the top is this sort of brownie gray stuff but the

Important bit is this very black stuff now that black stuff is the buried soil but the important thing is that he’s underneath this Stone here okay we’ve got something that looks like a wall but how do we know it’s prehistoric why couldn’t it be from any period Well it’s the formality of that

Facing which is very very striking it’s been deliberately placed there and I think place there to be seen from either side and this is exactly what you get around the huge Neolithic burial mines the chambered tombs of orkney and Ireland and all over the place and that

Is very much a Neolithic feature or even an earlier Bronze Age feature I’m actually quite excited about it because I think that’s as diagnostic as anything else absolutely it would have been a heck of a lot of work oh yeah well the whole point of these huge monuments is

To bring families and people together from a from a large area of Countryside so the big Monument represents a whole series of of gatherings of the tribes there’s job creation it’s keeping the unemployment to think that people were designing and building structures like this up to 6 000 years ago is mind-boggling Gone bodmin Moore Ben and Henry have been able to track how man has changed this landscape ten thousand years ago in Mesolithic times hunter-gatherers would have roamed through forests here searching for food and shelter three thousand years later at the dawn of the Neolithic period they began to

Choose places to settle and cleared this landscape to graze their animals a few thousand years later still in the Bronze Age they began to farm on a big scale clearing even more of the Woodland so when do people start chopping the trees down about 4000 BC at the

Beginning of the Neolithic how did they do it Stone axes it must have taken forever well yes that’s how we used to think but we do now know that throughout the Mesolithic people were managing the edges of Woodland using fire and then every so often the fire would get out of

Control and burn down a great swathe of land so they did both I think Foreign We’re losing the light now and The Mists coming in you can hardly see rotor anymore and all day we’ve been beavering away at this Stone Circle although frankly to very little of veil until in the last few minutes Ian discovered this it’s a hearth in other words people were

Living here this isn’t just an animal pen or a can it’s part of a settlement there is a half and that half has got charcoal in it and that charcoal will give us a radiocarbon date that will fix the period when this house was in use

But science can be fallible and none of our radiocarbon samples subsequently prove to be conclusive so actually the best method for dating these houses will be good old-fashioned archeology piece of pottery would be nice over at Phil’s trench the Neolithic Bank can is proving to be a far more complex

Structure than we could ever have expected so rather than going for a second trench Phil’s decided to concentrate all his efforts on deciphering this cross-section of the monument it’s just after lunch on our final day and at last something’s come up in trench three that could focus this whole dig it’s a small

Shirt of pottery and this could be the first piece of evidence that puts our house Circle firmly into the Bronze Age oh I’m so so excited about this because this is the first piece of Potter we’ve had in this trench well I think you’re very right to be excited um this is

Bronze Age Pottery it’s what we call travisca wear here in Cornwall it’s dates from the middle Bronze Age so yes this is a very exciting piece and I’ve just noticed on the interior if you look carefully you can see the black area yeah that’s actually internal residue

And that’s the last meal that was cooked in this pot so we’re thinking it’s about 15. it’s around about 1500 BC it’s odd that something that looks so insignificant can tell us so much this piece of Cornish traviska wear confirms this was a Bronze Age home and

What’s more we know they were cooking here three and a half thousand years ago The Farmhouse Ben and Emma are beginning to run tests on some floor surfaces from the house in trench one and material from Phil’s cairn organic matter such as discarded food or animal dung rots down and leaves phosphates

Animal dung was commonly used as fuel in Bronze Age houses and by running these tests it could give us an indication of the level of human activity oh look you can see it going already over here which is always good you can just see here you see the Blue Halo

We’ve got developing there now the faster the sample goes blue is also meant to be a sign of the high levels of phosphate so if we keep an eye on which samples are going quickly but it’s quite interesting that’s because it’s the half ah now there you go because

Well obviously sat around the fire just waste rubbish being dropped onto the ground and that’s that’s persists in the soil over the Millennia basically Emma what are your initial Impressions um basically we’ve got the half sample that’s gone very blue very quickly lots of phosphite lots of activity all the

Way through the center of the house we’ve got you know again evidence of phosphite and even outside of the door and that’s really gone quite blue and that went quite fast yeah then again we’ve got evidence of phosphate on the lower line there are three that have

Hardly any phosphates at all and one with just a tinge where were they from Phil’s trench in the bank can and as you can see we’re not really getting much evidence for Phosphate High phosphate levels in those at all so you know clear distinction between the different trenches in terms of the concentration

Of phosphates in the soils this is the sort of science I can really identify with these organic remains have been locked in the soil for thousands of years the phosphates also tell us there was little human or animal activity near the can it was possibly a place kept sacred

To the memory of the ancestors back on the more real archeology is catching up with the science Bronze Age Pottery seems to be coming up everywhere in trench one match found some more near the hearth for two and a half thousand year old pot this is really special

It’s got that decoration on it hasn’t it yeah where the chord’s been pressed into it yes it’s traviska wear it’s exactly like what Carl was showing me earlier on sometime in the Bronze Age isn’t it Francis yes it is it’s in the middle of Bronze Age to be precise between roughly

1500 BC and a thousand BC right and this is another piece also of travisk aware but I think slightly classier that one with the cording press Chevron zigzags absolutely and that came from rakshar’s trench along with another little bit in here now the importance of that of

Course is that all of this Pottery is identical and that means that the three houses that we’ve dug out of all of these houses are all contemporary and that means I would guess a penny to acquit but all of the houses are part of a village so we have ourselves a middle

Bronze Age Village that is absolutely fantastic this is the first time that anyone’s been able to confirm that this is a Bronze Age Village which is a great achievement and our environmental team can add to the story there’s no evidence in the pollen analysis that our Bronze

Age Farmers grew any crops up here it seems They carried on clearing the trees for fuel and over the centuries the soil became too acidic to support anything else it would seem that unwittingly generation after generation of Bronze Age people were responsible for changing the face of bodmin Moore forever

Raksha’s team were the first to find that much needed dating evidence and with just an hour to go they’ve uncovered something else that could take the history of this settlement back much further fine just put those two pieces together there I think the brilliant thing about

This is that is an old break you can see the dirt in there and so they’ve used it it’s broken and they’ve just thrown it back in there and you’re actually at the bottom now aren’t you I am yeah that’s fantastic that’s like the best dating evidence that we could have

Our fines people are very excited by this manky bit of Flint technically it’s a bit of rubbish a byproduct from making a prehistoric blade or scraper they believe it could be early Neolithic about 6 000 years old and this tells us that this settlement actually goes back

To the time the earliest settlers were building the can it’s one of the most enigmatic structures we’ve ever investigated on time team and fills the first archaeologist to have been allowed to excavate it fully I don’t think television can give you a sense of the magic of this Monument it’s

So big in the landscape there’s so much work involved in it and it points so dramatically at the tour so what do we do guys we dig a sucking great hole in the middle of it why did we do that Francis well I think it’s essential Tony

That we actually get down to the buried land surface the old topsoil under the monument right at the center why what’s so important about that well you know throughout this whole project we’ve been thinking and talking about the buried soils what that does is represents the the environment that was there when they

Began the monument it’s the first part of the story and the first part of the story of this part of the site is that they took the turf off and that’s crucially important because we know from other sites in Britain that the the actual alignment of of the bank or the

Barrow was actually cleared of soil first it’s a sort of religious ritual purification of the ground before you put bodies in it what been unbelievably spectacular I must say Phil often you show me prehistoric fines and your eyes are full of crazed excitement and I’m thinking it’s actually a bit boring but

This has got to be one of the best pieces of archeology that we’ve ever done on time team isn’t it it’s certainly one of the best I’ve done in oh donkey’s yours this feature shows us just how sophisticated the ancient people were in their relationship with the landscape

Tour as we now think of a cathedral or mosque and on solstices and other significant feast days they’d have left their homes to process towards the Rising Sun to commune with their ancestors and the spirit of rotor is as potent now as it was then continuing to draw pilgrims here for

Thousands of years from the Roman times up to the present day time team is a hundred percent independent and funded by our incredible fans joining patreon gives you access to exclusive interviews 3D models master classes and more please join us on this exciting Journey we need more support to make more episodes

Stilton sits just off the A1 near Peterborough and it’s close to the Neen Valley a major center of the Roman Pottery industry for 250 years so it’s no surprise that the fields around this town have been producing bits of Roman pots bowls and vases for years four there’s just pieces oh there’s

Another one there no gosh yes it hasn’t come very fast I’m pretty braided is it but it’s the sheer amount and quality of the fines coming out of these ditches that have really caught the team’s imagination so we’re not wasting any time and we’re going to have to open a very big very

Deep trench before we reach any archeology previous finds are anything to go by it’ll be worth the effort we were just about to do a scene about this coin that Philip has just found when there was a yell from over here so let’s have a look

At this one too I really are starting to come up aren’t they Helen well I suppose it’s it’s when you look very hard you’re going to find things on these interesting bumps of land what’s this one the Celtic silver unit goodness oh fantastic this Celtic or native British

Coin dates to the first century BC suggesting there was trade or at least activity going on here at least 100 years before the Romans arrived and what’s the coin that we were going to do a scene about well it’s silver and it’s actually a penny but for some reason we

Call them Shadows or Skeets these days and it’s one of the most common kinds of Series E dates to the early 8th century and they’re found all over Eastern England and Holland as well Fabulous Finds for so early in the Dig but do they actually tell us anything

Well it tells us that activity stretches back a few hundred years before the Romans were here making pottery and a few hundred years afterwards as well so it looks like we’ll have more than just the Roman archeology to deal with here I think the signal is so strong here that

There was undoubtedly a kiln at this point so could could could it be possible that the Kiln is totally gone and what we’re looking at is the clay underneath that has been heavily burnt it’s possible yeah be disappointing but the real shock is in trenched too where we’ve just

Discovered the last thing you’d expect on an industrial site we definitely seem to have got the the shin bone here but then look a very nice set of metatarsals which our footballers are very fond of breaking what we seem to be missing in the middle is the whole of the rooms the

Ribs and the vertebrae which we definitely need because from the teeth where we might be able to say something about the age of the adult and from the shape of the skull we might be able to say something about its sex yeah in fact we seem to have two burials as Matt’s

Just uncovered some more bones at the other end of trench too this site just gets curiouser and curiouser and we now have two very different investigations on this small hill so as the delicate unpicking of the burials gets underway The More Physical industrial dig continues with Phil and

John opening a third trench over another anomaly that John’s also convinced is a kiln look at this burnt clay that’s coming around there and it comes around there buckle on there which is completely well I want to say it’s nearly circular it’s unusual well it is we’re on the other side they’re still

Digging through meters of dark thick clay but over here just inches below the surface we’ve already got a really good archaeological story haven’t we met yep you can see we’ve got the second body here head to the West there feet to the east it’s very delicate very thin bone

Something it’s probably quite a young child or something like that um we don’t know the date of it yet but it looks to me like it’s cutting through these layers with all the pottery and bits of broken up Kiln in it so definitely post Roman post kill so would

Your best guess be Anglo-Saxon could be yeah and the first body is over here you’ve got the skull yeah it’s a bit of a jumble mess because um we’ve had a bit of cloud activity in this region but um you know we’ve got the lower jaw and

Look at its teeth it’s fantastic Kerry come over here mate so what are you seeing on that level what we’ve got is a much earlier uh Roman surface to uh well at least one and a half two meters below and it’s absolutely stuffed for the pottery wow and that’s from One Sweep of

The bucket and that hasn’t been broken by the bucket nope that’s all breaks you can see the dirt on the sides there Francis can you see it’s got all this Shelly stuff in it yeah it used to add shell it made the pottery dry better when they were making it so what’s your

Strategy going to be now what I’m going to do is finish this and get up to the section there then we’ll clean it up and then we’ll dig down into it it’s not you know really chunky we’ve got no big kind of muscle attachment so if anything that’s looking more like a lady

But as we start to remove the skeletons from trench too it becomes apparent that we haven’t just got two burials but the remains of up to seven different individuals including children and babies I just wanted to show you this so I heard you talking about the teeth

There can you see oh wow molar popping through so obviously it was a young child I was wondering kind of what how old that would be the way is that yeah you don’t put that tooth there it’s very small so that’s you could almost say those and it’s milk teeth still I think

That makes this as a pretty young it’s about seven about seven yes it’s now clear that this was a significant Saxon sight the task for us is to try and work out what was happening here 300 years after the Romans left I do think we have

Finally got the full extent of it I reckon you’re right thankfully the Roman element of this complex field is beginning to make more sense in trench 3 Phil now has something that’s Beginning to Look remarkably kill like and now that the burials have been removed we can also confirm that trench

2 contains a kill although it seems to be of a different construction to the one in Phil’s Trench I think what you’ve got actually Helen is a stone-lined cut in other words it could be the actual chamber of a kiln and this is the like the stone lining for the cut that’s the

Kiln interior and then you would have had the fire bricks or clay lining the inner face of that wall forming the actual furnace chamber for the Kiln it’s now almost the end of day two and it feels like we’ve got more to investigate than ever and that doesn’t even include

The masses of newly uncovered archeology in the ditch Trench cool gray look at that lot you see the amount of pot we’ve got yeah crammed into the center there the other thing about it not only is a lot of pot but you can see the dark

Color of the soil there’s a lot of charcoal in there and of course there’s water on wood in there not a lot but it’s there it’s quite incredible I mean it must mean there’s a whole lot of stuff under this field isn’t it extraordinary and this is the trench

That everyone’s getting really excited about yesterday they were speculating that in it is a Neolithic Causeway enclosure which is very very rare Francis has only ever discovered one in his life Francis now you’ve had a look at it is this the second well I’m very excited Tony first thing this morning we

Found this superb Neolithic Flint it’s beautifully sharp and you know I’m very excited about it well I was for about 10 minutes and then we found this and this is a piece of anglo-saxon Pottery that’s just as exciting well hang on what are you saying are you

Saying it is a Neolithic ditch that’s been reused in Anglo-Saxon times or you’re saying it’s not Neolithic at all I’m saying if it was nearly thick and reuse I’d expect a great deal more Flint than this um I’m afraid I think it’s Anglo-Saxon end of story so why is that exciting

Well because they don’t turn up very often and to actually have the ditch we have post holes we have barrels it all starts to look like an Anglo-Saxon settlements that’s tremendously exciting this is time team we find something we think it’s very exciting it turned out to be something else it’s even more

Exciting yeah that’s it that’s it that’s it we’ve got some pots in there definitely pot siding in there yes other parts of our investigation here have been more straightforward thanks to some experimental archeology we’ve now established that the local plays around Stilton were perfect for the Roman

Pottery industry so how do you feel that Winters are firing then Rick well as a piece of experimental archeology I think it’s been great um successful yeah I mean back on the hill more evidence from the Anglo-Saxon periods emerging brace yourself for treasure huh even I as a Romanus would recognize that

As a significant object absolutely Saxon eighth ninth Century so it fits in brilliantly with the shatter and with the pottery that seems to be coming out of the ditch which is really tremendous it’s really exciting oh I mean I know it’s building Castles in the Air but an Anglo-Saxon ditch and with Anglo-Saxon

Ditch round an island yeah it’s beginning to look like oh it could be a monastery there are now all sorts of theories running around the site that we may have discovered a significant Center of anglo-saxon religion oh my goodness what’s that what is that it’s another wall

And it’s butting against the wall of the kiln somebody’s built a wall into the kiln goodness Hermits were effectively the first and if this is a Middlesex and Hermitage we’ve found something incredibly rare because most hermitages now lie under some of Britain’s most impressive abbies and cathedrals

We know that the way the early church was organized that’s what people did they went and lived miles from anybody else on Retreat we call it today wouldn’t we sort of you know in isolation no it is speculation but it fits the archaeological evidence for that period so you know I’m really

Reasonably confident that’s all we’ve got if it is a Hermitage how important a site does it make it but every so often we do a program and I think what we find that’ll go into the textbooks because it’s a good example of this or a or a better example of that

And I think this is one of those you know you’ve got an enclosure from the geophysics you’ve got um Saxon Pottery you’ve got burials you’ve got post hole buildings that’s the sort of thing that’s going to get mentioned in any discussion about this period or this topic so I think it’s one

Of those in so many other places this would have evolved into one of the great Saxon and medieval abbies and monasteries of Britain for some unknown reason that didn’t happen here and as a result we’ve uncovered the rarest of archaeological finds a Hermitage and this site still offers more as the

End of the day approaches it turns out that the Saxons and Romans weren’t the first people to recognize the importance of this small Cambridgeshire Hill it’s been a good day for you hasn’t it you’ve got your kill and you’ve got an Anglo-Saxon enclosure look what I’ve got for you another enclosure

Look once you focus in on it you can see it if I turn it that way it’s like a pair of spectacles but this is a double one on this side isn’t it yeah I I think that’s that’s your prehistoric one so we’re suddenly back into the Neolithic again it could be it

Was the amazing amount of pottery in that field over there which led us to the Kilns in this field here which thankfully we’ve found at last but in fact it was the discoveries on the final day that really got us excited not least the possible Anglo-Saxon Hermitage

Complete with an enclosure in fact this whole story has gone from the Neolithic to the Anglo-Saxon and now in the final half hour back to the Neolithic again with John’s geophys and what we think is a Neolithic enclosure time team is 100 independent and funded by our incredible fans

Want us to make more episodes joining patreon gives you access to exclusive interviews 3D models master classes and more and you get to have your say in the process as we develop new sites well rain’s forecast for the next three days but at the moment it’s spectacularly nice isn’t it it’s

Beautiful isn’t it when did you first realize that there might be something under that well I’ve played this field about 25 times in the last 30 years and as a rule we would break two or three of these sheer bolts every time we plant it but then these fines started to

Come up yes that’s right so metal detectors they found a number of Roman coins and brooches which were confirmed by Dorset County Museum and Bournemouth University and then this year a shadow appeared in the field a square shape of lighter chalky color about how big about four times the size of that

Reservoir four times this big there’s going to be some stretcher isn’t it guy if there’s a building that size on the top of the hill it will be very very exciting we’ve got some structural debris here which I started looking through some of that not Roman so I’m

Not quite sure yet but there’s a real Enigma up here one of our Legion of Roman experts has been looking at the building material that’s already been found from the fines that we’ve got can you tell what sort of Roman building it is well not from this because none of this

Is convincingly Roman you’re kidding no I’m not I can see why people have thought it at first glance some of you think oh yes that looks like it’s a piece of Roman in bricks but it’s actually very hard and got among characteristically smooth surface same with this it looks like a piece of

Tequila the flange rooftop but it’s actually far too thin and it’s been molded and Roman brick and tile is handmade this is going to be one of those digs and the news gets worse the field Walkers finds have been washed and mapped and there’s nothing Roman and your fears are looking even glamor

Than usual I wonder if our Spectators have got any idea of how close to disaster we are everything now seems to hang on the only trench we’ve opened the trouble call in the ring called Professor while we’re at it foreign but look there’s summer looks coming around here

And we appear to have an edge what I was requesting is to take out a bit of this and and see whether or not we can I mean this if this is a a ditch or something like this coming round yeah let’s see that natural the other side

That’s what it’s exactly what I’m saying okay let’s do that what Phil thinks he’s got is a man-made ditch cut into the natural geology he’s found one Edge and to confirm it he needs to find the other one look at that it’s curving rain this curving rain looking better ain’t it

He’s pleased about that look at that Hallelujah there is some archeology here we now have two edges to our ditch thinking flints and patriano [Laughter] they didn’t build in curves but the people who came before them did which is great for Phil because he loves the prehistoric

That’s got to be good Mick gotta be good farmer Rogers mysterious shadowy Square might yet be evidence of something Roman does your geophys indicate anything which might have shared his bolts I hear you saying no before you’ve even said it look with the eye of faith you might just see something in there

Yeah if I didn’t know it coincided with Roger’s sort of area I wouldn’t have bothered with it where is it well we’re stood on it now so do you reckon it’s worth putting a trench in here oh we’ve got nothing to lose well this is not the most scientifically placed trench we’ve

Ever had but we’ll have a go John we’ll ever go not so another trench goes in without very much Precision it is a rather obvious ditch in it yeah right the way down but that couldn’t matter less to Phil who’s now revealed a very nice curving feature which is producing

Artifacts Bronze Age particle I’m not mistaken oh I’d agree with that that looks like sort of good early middle bronze exactly exactly what you’d expect with a ring ditch like this which is right I mean I’m certainly going to turn into a barrow yeah that’s perfect not a Roman Insight

Excuse me while I just Pummel you if they’re right and this is a barrow then Phil’s found part of a ditch that ringed a man-made mound in the middle of which may be a burial we’ve lost the middle of it because of the the modern boundary but it’s there

Guy do you think that this Barrow has got anything to do with the Roman fires well grab it isn’t exactly what I expected when I came up here but the reality is that the Romans did pay a huge amount of attention to pre-historic monuments after they were dotted around

In the landscape they were impressed by them they made offerings to them that could explain the Roman stuff up here Phil of course has had the advantage of modern metal tools the people who first dug it would have done so with deer antlers that’s a very interesting looking

Section you got there Phil been a pleasure to dig Mick it really has and even better to clean up I mean it does look glorious and we got the full story there aren’t we that’s right it is the complete story from the construction of the Barrow literally right through to

The present day see what they’ve done is that they’ve they’ve dug this very impressive ditch and and they’ve had to go through this big scene of green sand Church the first thing that’s happened is at the top of the sides of the ditch up here of weathered down that’s this

Material here and it’s covered up the base and the sides all this top bit I think that’s plow soil which is actually washed into the top of the ditch but this is plowing the Barrow Mound itself probably as well but if you look here see what we got there oh crikey that’s

Grotty old stuff in it it’s beautiful it’s a piece of an urn Bronze Age urn it’s got the finger pinching oh yeah these are the finger marks of the putter on this side so where’s this from well it’s actually from the ditch itself but you see it’s late Bronze Age right and I

Think that what we’re looking at here is is um an urn that’s actually been placed in the mound and as the mound has been plowed away that fragment of urine has worked its way down so this is out of the middle of the Barrow I think this is out of the barrel itself

Even though the mound itself has been plowed away bits of Bronze Age pot are circumstantial evidence of cremation burials in a classic Barrow it’s one of the practices that arrived in Britain in the Bronze Age so what was the difference between the Bronze Age people and the people before them well

Primarily we see the kind of monuments they’re building in round barrows and we see very rich Graves we’ve seen people accumulating wealth for the first time so perhaps we can talk of the first time of Kings or defined leaders the historic monuments are never just

Placed by chance on the top of any old High Ground neighboring Hills and rivers and other local monuments can all shape where they’re constructed Stewards looking at why this Hilltop was favored with a barrow he’s already found one possible clue our site appears to be almost completely encircled by Rivers why that’s significant and why the Romans took an interest in the site he’s now got to figure out so does that mean

That this is a Bronze Age story well what we’ve got is you know an Undiscovered Bronze Age Barrow that we’ve come across by accident almost which is obviously why the Roman stuff is here and I think we’ve got the opportunity to have a good look at it

Now we should do that most surround barriers that we see in the UK it’s got a nice round ditch and the center we’ve got a mound and somewhere in the center there’s going to be a burial but the more of these we dig the more we realize

That the mound itself covers sort of a multitude of sins sometimes there are burials sometimes there’s a remains of a house structure sometimes there’s a remains of a fire sometimes the mound itself just contains a whole range of different artifacts they have a sort of tribal material Pottery Flint work

Animal bone is all accumulated in the mound as some kind of tribal marker some kind of statement so not all of them have a burial smack in the center but by and large are they around shape you usually I mean when you see them in the

Landscape what you see is like one of these sort of Comedy kneecaps sitting up there that’s the mound but you never know what’s actually inside there could be anything sometimes it’s a body but sometimes not in our case not we’ve now excavated what we think’s the center and there’s no evidence of a

Burial from the ditch Brigid has come up with a few fragments of bone some little bits of bone here it’s incredibly poor and degraded isn’t what worries me is if you’ve got a burial yeah I don’t know if we’re actually going to find the body itself that’s all

There is yeah yeah but I mean there’s charcoal in this soil as well there is yeah and there may be another promotion or something that’s been placed in the top of the tip exactly you can’t see anything in the Sun stains associated with after later examination none of the bone

Could be positively identified as human so still no definite evidence of a burial here any evidence may have been scraped away with the mound itself unless we’ve missed something in the middle and there still seems to be some doubt about where that actually is indeed Henry was so perplexed that he

Decided to plot the exact shape of our feature using his extremely expensive global positioning system which is accurate to a few centimeters and he’s made an extraordinary discovery the plan this is our the ditch of our oh crikey whatever we have here now you see it’s not a circle because he’s not

Circular he’s difficult to find the center very difficult to find a center you sort of got a blob about two meters where it could be right around the center there and where is that on the ground the center of that yeah is just down we can see that that stone there

But it’s actually a whole area around that thing but yeah you want to be taking it at least meter meter and a half around that to give you an idea so potentially under the section here can I borrow that because that’s that’s a real conundrum that is I need to go

And think about that and while Mick’s struggling to digest this unusual shape Bridge has turned up yet more surprises it looks like we’ve got a piece of burnt Timber and what’s interesting about it it looks like it’s been burned somewhere else and then it’s been dumped into the backfill

Of this ditch how big is it well you can see we can see this much here but there is a lot of burning up the other end there as well where everyone’s digging that’s also associated with some burnt dorb what’s that telling you mate well it isn’t quite what I’d expect with

A burrow although you know you do get funeral pyres for burning bodies and so on but it’s rather helping with with what is a very odd sight it seems to be now I mean I’m going off the idea of it being a barrow oh really yeah but we’ll

Look at the shape of it if that was your bike you wouldn’t get home well no that’s right and you know we we’ve hardly got any pottery from it at all you know I mean we’ve got a few odd bits that might be a bit cremation earned and

We’ve hardly got any bone from it either cremated or ordinary bone so I’m beginning to wonder whether it’s a barrow at all or whether it’s in some other type of site and you’re extending the whole thing over here what’s going on we’ve got some geoffiz anomalies here

What do they look like they’re just blobs on it but given that that is looking very instant exciting now we’ve got to spend the whole day looking at it we’ve got to look at this as well to go with it what do you reckon it is I’ve no

Idea I just I just feel in the water that it’s going to be very significant you’re a professor you ought to be able to tell us yeah but I think we’re back in pre-history here and that’s that’s you know we need some Specialists I mean miles is our man for this without any

Doubt we’ve left the first field behind all our efforts are now in the second field investigating the Barrow and the geophys blobs they might be an entrance which would be unusual in a standard Bronze Age Barrow it’s one of a number of puzzles that have got the archaeologists scratching

Their heads about this Monument okay right Matt if we can get a nice little meter section through that charcoal that’ll be absolutely brilliant unlike most Bronze Age round barrows our Barrow isn’t circular as Henry revealed and after his bombshell we double check the middle area in case there was a

Burial there but no and no burials anywhere else either and our puzzling Monument seems to have had a palisade as well we’ve got the ditch swinging around here our army of diggers have got just one day of scraping and shoveling left to find out what this prehistoric thing is

And barrows have a Big Timber facade in the outer edge encouragingly there are plenty of fines one that may be very significant has got Phil in raptures amazingly to an expert like Phil a stone tool can be dating evidence the trimming on this scraper suggests skilled craftsmanship from the Neolithic or Stone Age

These skills were largely lost in the Bronze Age when metal replaced stone tools it may add yet another thousand years to our Monument and that would definitely account for the odd features the thing about this range it’s amazing it’s the finds that are coming out they’re coming out left right and center

And it’s Ian who’s really finding them and I’m just looking at them jealous as anything what have you got well he’s just writing all these tools here cool look at them all I mean we’ve got he’s got this one here wonderful thing it’s a scraper you used to scrape off hides and

Things like that there’s this one here there’s another scraping Edge you found this one here there’s all sorts of things they’ve also gone some pottery in here absolutely brilliant stuff this one here can have a thumb decoration there or a lug that’s fallen off what kind of period you’re in this

Head well I go for Bronze Age but very early Bronze Age maybe transitional I think you’re probably about right and I think one of the really good key indicator that sort of provoke discussion is from this piece of pottery here but it’s a rim and it’s got whip

Cool decoration what do you mean by that well can you see here you’ve got like a piece of string has been pressed into the wet clay before it’s dried the string decoration would have been applied before this massive colored urn was fired about 4 000 years ago absolutely wonderful it’s just the most

Exciting trench I’ve worked on I don’t know for how long it was so excited about this pottery that we asked you to drop everything and come up here from Salisbury to see us what is it um well this is a very interesting little collection of early Bronze Age

Pottery there seem to be several different vessels represented here of which this is probably the best example this is a rim from an early Bronze Age collared urn do we know what that would have been likely to have been used for these vessels are quite often associated with funary remains they’re used as

Burial urns but they can also be used in a domestic context give us a date what do you reckon I say somewhere between 2000 and 1500 BC miles what about the tools well there’s a nice sort of range of scrapers and knives and Notch flakes coming up so quite a dense collection of

Tools now earlier today you said to me I’m sure this is Neolithic and yet you’re now saying that it’s Bronze Age do we have a problem here well certainly with the Flint work there so I would say late in the Olympic and or early Bronze Age yes so there could be a chronological

Overlap between the two what I don’t understand is we’ve got this huge egg which is representing our site right and we’ve got our hedge here all these finds came from a trench just here on the ditch these ones came from here but nowhere around the rest of the

Ditch have we found anything at all what do you think is going on I think it’s important to bear in mind that all this material is coming from a very sort of organic Rich charcoal Rich layer in the upper levels of the ditch so there’s there’s some kind of deposit going on

This is not rubbish material this is some kind of deliberate deposit of Flint tools sorry tools and pottery why are people burying their tools and their walls people are coming up here in the very late nearly thick and early Bronze Age depositing these tools this Pottery

In the upper levels of the ditch in much the same way I suppose at 3 000 years later the Romans are coming up and doing the same thing with their coins this site has produced one of the biggest range of finds we’ve ever seen on time team

From 5 000 year old Neolithic Church tools to 500 year old medieval coins there’s something from every period together they’ve unlocked the secrets of this site I came here looking for a Roman Temple and instead found what we thought was a classic Bronze Age Barrow but it’s now clear that our thing began its life in the Neolithic about 5 000 years ago as an enclosure ringed by a ditch and quite possibly by a palisade

Which was later burnt the enclosure may have been used to display dead bodies tools and pottery were also deposited in two sections of the ditch in the Bronze Age a mound was thrown up using material dug from Quarry pits just outside the ring ditch the mound was probably still visible in

The Roman period and local people passing by were moved to bury their coins next to it which is where we came in hello my name’s John Gator time team is fan funded by patreon this vital support helps us to make new episodes joining patreon gives you access to exclusive interviews 3D models

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