New Episode | Day 3: Secrets of Wytch Farm | Time Team (Dorset) 2024

It’s our final day at Wytch Farm, in the shadow of Corfe Castle, Dorset, where Derek and Lawrence discovered two Iron Age burials back in 2021. They’ve called in the full team to investigate. Was this a cemetery, and how long have people been living here? Where were they living, and, above all, what were their livelihoods?

Will we uncover the secrets of Wytch Farm? We have just one day left to find out!

Join us for the official three-part premiere, right here on the Time Team Official YouTube channel:

Day One: Friday 17th May, 7pm BST: https://youtu.be/mp7O9R-oV98
Day Two: Saturday 18th May, 7pm BST: https://youtu.be/NKMaeuWGwsI
Day Three: Sunday 19th May, 7pm BST: https://youtu.be/y7Ipo_K5iyY

Plus, join us behind the scenes now for our exclusive Dig Watch coverage over on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeTeamOfficial

CREDITS

This episode is supported by:
Big Dig Brewhouse
Isle of Purbeck Brewery
Omnitapps
Purbeck Cider
Raglan LLC
Sails and Canvas
Sketchfab
Smiths Gloucester Ltd
South West Domes
@CannondaleBicycles71 electric bikes provided by Cycling Sports Group UK.

With thanks to:
Mark at Dorset Safaris
The Pitman Family
The Rempstone Estate
Alex Schultz
Robert and Pat Hemingway Hall
Museum of London Archaeology
Time Team’s Patreon Supporters

Photography: Harvey Mills
Romano-British black burnished ware jar: Hugh Fiske
Stratford Iron Age Pottery: Centre-of-Archaeology

Music
Paul Greedus (original theme)
Steve Day
Jas Morris
Ninebarrow
Charles Harrison

Executive Producer & Series Creator: Tim Taylor

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[Music] We’ve got one day left of our Dorset dig in the shadow of Corfe Castle where we’re investigating how two Iron Age burials fit into the Romano-British landscape around them. We’ve got five huge trenches underway, all with complicated archaeology. Can’t see the edges to it. Sounds about right for this site. Hugely frustrating. We found post holes from some sort of Roman building close to the graves and masses of pottery, including a huge first century boiling jar. Hey, lovely! Beautiful firing shadows and colours. A couple of bits of slag from the top of this ditch. And there’s evidence of metal working on site as well as the remnants of furnaces, and I don’t mean the one that Helen and Hayden made. [Music] We’re up with the larks this morning because dark ominous clouds are building, and there’s a real danger that the storm will cut short our investigations. So we haven’t got long. We’ve got to answer some of those questions, the most pressing of which I think is… Derek, Rachael is this a kiln? I mean, what is this structure? It’s a really good question. One of the things it could be is the base of a crop processing facility. We’re not quite sure what the super structure would look like, but this would be the underneath, the sort of fired clay platform. I think, I think we’re still in the the realms of kiln because I’ll show you this here. What I think we’ve got here, all of this clay is not the base of something but the side of something that’s fallen into a cavity. And if I lift, lift this one up you can see how it’s collapsed in, and there’s even a – Oh yes! – nice fired lining just down there. But I think we need to dig into, this we need to be a bit brutal with it today, dig out this soft clay in the middle, and see what the actual shape of the base is, and then we’ll know what type of feature it is. Whatever this is, it’s just one tiny part of a huge trench. And this trench will reveal all. It’s the answer to everything. Is that you’re going to answer all of my questions? Well, we’ve got a bank here, we’ve got, we’ve got a ditch. Yeah. We’ve got a bank. This bank is coming down, then we’ve got the soil forming on top of it. So actually, where we are now is the junction of all these different elements coming together. That’s great, and what’s Meg doing? What is Meg doing? I don’t know if you remember from the geophysics- Yeah- we had this arm coming in this way. We also then had a big ditch heading off that way, so we’re trying to find sort of the relationship between the two, sort of the interface again, what’s going on there. What’s complicating it is that we’ve got loads of really nice pot and stones and so on, so we’re trying to just tease out multiple different things here. I’m going to, going to… I’m nervous. I’m nervous that in terms of bottoming this trench we’ve only bottomed a little bit more than we did in our original trench. Yeah. So we, we were talking at the end of the day yesterday about how, oh, we think we’ve got two isolated burials, probably no more, but really we’ve only opened a few more square metres to the level we’d expect to find the burials. Is there anything we can do? Yeah that’s, that’s what I’m doing here. I’m going to work down to the natural as well, just so we can get a, get a character of it, and where Jackie and John are working, remember, in our sort of first-century Roman, um, structure, what we’re going to do, we’re actually going to take that out. You can see the white soil, the white sand – that’s our natural. We know our graves are cut into that, so we’re actually going to take it down below where Jackie is, once it’s been recorded, take it down probably with a digger- Yeah- and just actually see if there’s any more graves there. The team are keen to get as much done as possible in case the forecasted rains actually stop play. So in trench 4, Miles is trying to get below the Roman features to see if the Iron Age settlement stretched down the hill. So, this was what we were looking at at the end of yesterday, this orange stuff which we’re finding everywhere, but… Absolutely, I think this is some kind of, uh, late Roman, whether pottery kilns or whatever, but that, that’s late Roman baked clay surfaces. So that’s what we saw when we first started machining. But it’s this stuff down here, so if you can see the, this linear coming through. Yep. You can see the, the baked clay and charcoal within that, so that’s giving us a really high reading on the, on the magnetometer. Naomi will get her mits on that, I suspect. But you can also see as we come down along here, we’ve got some really nice features. There’s this big sort of- Oh yep- feature here, we’ve got one there. There’s a really beautiful one here. I mean these could be our sort of late Iron Age storage pits. We haven’t got much time left Miles, are you confident we’re going to get to the bottom of this, literally? We’re going to have to, yeah, we’re going to have to start working. Once we finish machining this we’ll, we’ll go down through those features fairly speedily. Back in trench 1, Naomi is taking soil samples from the furnace, which Derek and the team are now confident that they can see in the ground. So, in front of me here, this is the raking pit. They would have built the fire, they’d have pushed that through into the middle section, which is the fire box, and then beyond that, this is the the firing chamber where the pots would have been stacked and fired. But Rachael’s not convinced. I’d so love it to be a kiln, but to be honest, all of these pyrotechnical structures have those three elements: they have the fireplace, the flue, and then the stoking pit where the fire is built, so I’m afraid the jury is still out, until we get wasted pottery. This site is littered with mysterious clay deposits, and Mike’s been taking a closer look at the one that Lawrence thought might have been inside a workshop. Yeah, it’s a slab of compacted clay. I don’t know if it’s fired, has it been heated? It’s been heated a bit, hasn’t it, but not to any substantial degree. It’s not been baked. No. And, and what about… so what’s coming up underneath it? Are we getting some dating? We are. You’ve arrived just at the right moment. Just underneath here, in this very, very dark coloured soil, is this absolutely beautiful thing here. What is it? What, what’s that? Oh my God, is that shale? I think it is shale. See the dark fabric there. Yeah, oh yes just here. Yeah, and, and if you look on the, on the side there it’s got a little impression in the middle. Yep. And if you were to push your finger through there, the soil would come out and you’d have a perfect little hole in there. It’s been cut. Yeah. Turned on a lathe. Turned on a lathe. It’s got… Yeah, you can see that. So do you think something like a spindle whorl? I think it’s a spindle whorl, yeah. And they hang upside down like that. Nice, weighty. It’s surprisingly weighty. And that is beautiful. And you can imagine it being quite a nice byproduct of the larger bracelet making industry. It was an industry, they’re very economical with their materials. Having dug the stuff out the ground, you don’t want to throw away something you could use. So it’s an indication that there might have been some sort of industrial activity, possibly workshops, outside the main banjo-like enclosure, which Harry is now pretty certain was dug centuries earlier. What we’ve got, we know we’ve got this ditch behind us, okay? Yeah. When that’s been dug out, we’ve got that soil, that sandy soil that has been dug out and thrown up, forming a bank. We can actually see that now, that’s actually sitting on top of the contemporary ground surface when this ditch has being dug. Oh, so you’ve got an Iron Age grain surface under the bank? Exactly. And look at the colour of it. This soil is really quite light. It’s grey. It’s not the black earth, is it? It’s not the black earth. So all this black earth we now know is being formed later on. Later than this ditch. Yeah and it’s associated not with the cutting of the ditch, not with the maintenance of this ditch, but actually with much later practices. Now, we’ve, we’ve got a lot of first-century pottery out of this ditch. Are we saying that actually, this ditch is probably earlier than that then? Yes. If the ditch was dug in the middle Iron Age, this would support the theory that this was a banjo enclosure. But to prove it, the ditches in Matt’s trench would need to form a clear funnel-like entrance. Okay, so at the end of yesterday I was hacking away at this huge Iron Age ditch, and the last stroke, I got that sand there, and I thought: brilliant that’s the bottom of it. But then it struck me that this ditch has been cut through this really loose sand and so the sides of it have probably fallen in and collapsed. Now, this ditch is- on the geophysics it appears to be a part of the same ditch that goes around into trench one. James has dug a section through it over there, and it’s cut through clay, so his ditch is going to be lovely, it’s going to be stable, it could well be that we’re both in the same ditch, but mine is now a completely different shape to his, uh, and there’s only one way to find out, and that’s just to carry on digging. So, we’re no nearer a resolution in Matt’s trench, and in trench 2, Hilde’s investigating another enclosure ditch which looks completely different to everything else on site. There could be a wall perhaps cutting through the ditch, but we don’t really know, uh. It’s not just collapse in the ditch? So I thought it was at first, but it seems to be a very neat line at the moment, uh, for my liking so I’m just trying to, trying to trace it back. It’s still Iron Age though you’d think? You’re not sure yet? I’m not, no. Not sure yet, I think it’s later, later than that. Yeah? Maybe it will show more clearly when it’s rained a bit. Good thing I like digging in the rain! Yeah, I like watching in the rain. And as the rain gets heavier, Helen’s wisely taking shelter. I’ve come into the Dome to have a look at this Roman finger ring. I’ve started off with the lens to get a really detailed look, but I normally work off my shortsighted eye which is a really handy thing for a fine specialist to have. She’s giving the ring a gentle clean to confirm what it is, before handing it over to conservators. You can see that it picks up the dirt, and that we can see much more clearly when it’s damp. You can see there, I hope, that it is not engraved – certainly it’s got cracks in it – but it’s not engraved. And if we take this down to the sides on the better preserved shoulder, then I think we can see already that there’s no decoration coming up there. But I will carry on until it’s not quite so- cotton bud is not quite so filthy. And it is a beautiful blue colour, which is a classic Roman colour combination, um, blue glass in a bronze ring, and I think that is as far as I ought to take it now. It’s pretty clean and I don’t want to go too far. I’d like to hand over to somebody who really knows what they’re doing, so I’ll leave it there. This ring is an indication of the gradual Romanisation that this settlement must have undergone in the first century. Outside, the rain’s getting heavier and although we’re doing everything we can to protect the archaeology, it’s becoming increasingly dangerous to continue. Don’t worry. Stop now. It appears to be raining Derek. Jon, do we want to get people off site or is this all right? It’s the thunderstorm I’m more worried about. The problem is what we’re going to start doing is actually damaging the archaeological features and deposits which we’ve been so careful with up to now. Should we have an early lunch maybe? A tea break? I think we’ll have a strategic break and hopefully this weather will pass. Okay. Let’s have a strategic break I think. The enforced break gives us time to take stock. And now this is the question: is it a banjo or not a banjo? I mean the problem is we talk about banjos as if every one conforms to a consistent plan, there’s some kind of construction catalogue that everyone follows, and there aren’t it’s a bounded space with a funnelled entrance and I think that is what we have got there. We’ve got that space, there is some kind of funnelling going on down there. I’d like to get a bit more dating evidence out of that ditch, but I’m still happy seeing that as a, as a banjo-esque enclosure. Well that’s sounding quite tenable, isn’t it? I guess I just get a bit hung up on calling it a banjo when it doesn’t look at all like a banjo. It does look like a banjo. It looks like a sort of funny little heart shape. I’d really like that half a ditch, I need Matt to go back out in the rain. How about if we call it an antenna enclosure rather than a banjo? Oh, I’d like that yeah, yeah. After a couple of hours the rain eases but we’ve lost a lot of time and more storms are forecast. I’ve got a lovely collapsed section here. I’d got that all lovely and straight just before the rain started and now it’s an undercut mess so, um, hopefully Phil Harding won’t be tuning into this one. Jackie’s cleaning and recording the post pads in trench 1 before we can get below them into the Iron Age layers to see if there are any more burials. Yeah, that’s fine. Matt’s still trying to find the bottom of the ditch to work out if he’s got an entrance way to the much discussed banjo/ antenna enclosure. So, if there’s any of this dark grey fill left, like we’ve got around here, I’m not happy. That’s all got to be gone, it’s all got to be clean. And it’s a similar story in the features in the middle of the funnel entrance. Oh, you see, he had a false bottom too, you see. Yeah, nothing of note. The only things I’ve had in here are some cow teeth. A bit of cow teeth, yeah, we’ve had a few of them around. But no pottery? No pottery whatsoever. Yeah. So we’re inside the, uh, well, what we thought was the, the kind of, uh, entrance to the banjo enclosure, but maybe we’re not. And I’ll tell you why maybe we’re not. If we go over to where Sarah is here. So, as you can see, um, we thought we had the other, uh, other side of the enclosure coming this way, so we marked out a great, big, long section for Sarah to excavate there. Digging back. And how wide, how- what’s that there, Sarah, about 40cm, max 50cm. Not much of anything. Not much of anything at all yeah. So its… if you think about how big my ditch was over there, I mean, I’d, I would say coming up to 2 metres. This is a tiny little thing. As Matt wrestles with the banjo theory, Stewart Eve’s trying to interpret the archaeology to recreate the Iron Age landscape our two women would have inhabited. If I zoom out again, what I’ve basically done is I’ve, I’ve, uh, traced over where those, um, enclosures are and just started putting some little marks on the ground where we might be. Mhm. And I’ve also started putting together a little, just a little village just. There’s a lot of people moving about, there’s a lot of industry going on. So this is, this is almost now, to me, looking like a more familiar landscape with a, a road up to a farm and then these are like paddocks, aren’t they? Yeah, they feel like paddocks, don’t they? Yeah. I mean, I think, I haven’t put it in yet, but, but these would definitely have been ditches and especially these ones we’ve, uh, in Matt’s trench we’ve found which side the bank’s on. So this would have been a ditch with a bank on the inside. And the bank could have had a hedge on it? It could have had a hedge- Yeah- or, or alternatively the ditch could have could have had some, you know, nettles and brambles in it ’cause I, um, I think they usually used it basically for cattle. And I know that, um, Stewart had an explore with Lawrence earlier, and he thinks that that might be a kind of pathway or a droveway leading into the, into the, uh, enclosure area. So you’d come along here. And then, actually, he also found, presumably from the demographic, topographic survey, that there was also a stream. So we’ve put the little stream in. ‘Cause that has actually been worrying us about the the water sources. Where the water comes from, yeah. So he’s, so he’s indicated a little stream there, so we’ve just… Again, this is very early days and this is what’s, this is what’s so fun about doing this, you know, on site so we can start building these models together. And what about the weather ,because this is actually looking rather similar now to our weather here. It does. But I was wondering if you could make it look like this morning. Why don’t you make it tip down with rain? I can give it a go. Let’s put some clouds in as well just to start everything feeling a little bit… Oh look, look at that we, we hoped that the furnace would show up like that. There we go. So, there the furnace is showing up nicely, and actually, what you really want to do now is, uh, head into that little house and have a, have a bit of, bit of a rest. So we could, we could just walk past our furnace and… Oh, it’s so gloomy. It’s so gloomy. And, and already you can see with the puddles appearing, and it’s all muddy and, you know, but at least this looks quite nice inside. But at least… yes. So, what’s in there? There’s a fire and… Yeah, there’s a fire. Actually, it looks like the roof’s leaking. That’s true, quite badly. Oh but, but supper’s cooking. There we go supper’s cooking, yeah, and we’ve got a nice bed there as well if you want to have a curl up and be… Just… Look at the rain outside. Yeah, look at the rain outside and hope that the roof doesn’t leak too much. Yes. Outside in trench 4, Miles is trying to see what he can add to that Iron Age landscape. I’m pleased to see you’re not in a swimming pool. Yes, close run thing, but I think we’re down to 3 hours now instead of 3 days, what do you think? Uh, yeah I mean we’ve been delayed a lot by the rain. Unfortunately the rain has smeared a lot of, um, what we were excavating here, but we’ve certainly got a series of pits coming up in here. My sort of working theory is that what we’ve got here is our sort of Iron Age features, the things that drew us to the site in the first place, but the reason we didn’t see them in this trench, we, we stopped when we got at the, uh, the late Roman levels, but this is, this prehistoric stuff is very much buried underneath so the question is where all that soil is coming from. That’s fascinating because in theory, then, these, these features could be contemporaneous with our banjo adjacent enclosure up there. Yeah. And yet between then and the late Roman stuff we’ve got… A lot of soil buildup. And it’s not just hill wash, there’s a lot of ash in there as well, so I think- So this is life? This is the, this is people doing stuff. That, that is a lot of activity and it’s really, as I say, it’s just covering everything. The big question then is dating down here. Yeah, we haven’t had any finds coming out as yet, but we’re hopeful. I mean there’s some really nice pit features in there, we just need to get them cleaned out. 3 hours Miles – good luck. Thank you Derek. In trench 1, Naomi is taking yet another sample as she tries to solve the debate about what the kiln-like structure was used for. So earlier this morning, I processed a sample that was taken from that end and from this end, um, and it’s interesting because I had a few carbonised grains- Oh- which is great- Yeah- but only a few which is not enough. Okay. So I’ve come up here to take, um, a, a sample that’s much further down and therefore potentially more sealed, less likely to be mixed up. Yeah. And then once I process it, hopefully we’ll know, we’ll get something nice and juicy from it which can really definitively tell us what this is. That would be amazing. At the other end of the trench, next to where the burials were, we’re digging below the Roman postholes to see if there are any more graves, or any other features dating to the Iron Age. More animal tooth. I think that might be cattle or, um, horse animal tooth. And straight away, we’ve hit some packing stones. He’s just touched these stones, but there’s ones in situ here, and it’s exactly what we’ve had before. The trouble is, this slows everything down, as each new feature has to be cleaned and recorded. The good news is Carenza’s test pits were pretty much completed before the rain and they’ve demonstrated the extent of the settlement. So, we’ve got kind of three patterns of data coming out of the test pit really. So 16 here, at the bottom end of the site, um, where we’ve got, you know, and you can see that 30cm, there’s your natural, that’s kind of, um, all done, um, and pretty much all of the test pits around here are variations on that theme, even test pit 1 where we thought we had a feature and, um as you can see here… When we’d got this far, it looked like we had – there some talk of a grave at one point – but actually you can see it’s just a series of geological bedding planes. It’s just what the, what the what natural is doing. So then we have the second category of pits which are kind of giving us where the settlement’s still just fading out if you like. Yeah, 11 over here, and 17 both did that. We just finished 17 literally a few minutes ago and you can see it started off looking quite dark so it’s not as light as the others but actually we got down here again, we’ve got this sort of sense of… There we’ve got the bottom, you can see it so clearly and it’s fantastic and there’s that orangey deposit again, and it’s at about 50cm. Yeah. So they’re getting deeper as we get closer to, to where we’ve put the trench? Yeah, and slightly more finds as well. And then we get the third category of test pits which are completely different to those, so, um, they’re like 9 here, um, where… really deep test pit, so that’s about 67cm, 60 to 70cm, burning just like we’re getting in the main trenches, um, some of these little, kind of, possible stake hole features um. Oh fantastic. So you can see we got a tray of finds from the- Oh wow- upper context. We’ve got another one from the next context, and then really once we’re getting deep down we’ve got really big chunks of finds. Yes, yeah. Pottery in there. So what we’ve got really from all of these is that sense that the, the geophysics is giving us a good reliable indicator of how far the actual site goes. So we’re right in the middle of the settlement in trench 1 where we keep finding more postholes. So this circle here Harry. Can you see it? Yeah, yeah, I’ve got that Jon. That’s, that’s got to be a posthole. It is a posthole I think, yeah, isn’t it? Okay, so looking at the data which we surveyed earlier, remember we had those, that ring of stones which we said was post packing. Yeah. This is exactly the same place, we’re just deeper down. Fantastic, so actually my eye of faith would be saying… oh, there looks to be something smaller in the middle. Basically that is where the, the wood has actually, the post has actually been in, and the stuff at the top is the packing around the upper levels of it… Just sort of waggling… Just a bit wiggling about yeah, yeah. That’s beautiful. [Music] Even though we haven’t found any Iron Age dwellings within the settlement, the finds suggest that there must have been people living here for centuries. So, Grace, if I can start with you: what is this Iron Age assemblage, do you think? What are we looking at? This is all, um, typical late Iron Age, Poole Harbour wares, the sort of Durotrigian style vessels, um. They’re all made locally, um, they’re, they’re domestic, um, vessels. We have this really nice part, this is, you know, these are probably our earliest, perhaps around 20BC to 20AD. If you, um, you can touch that, you can feel how they’ve sort of pinched up this, um, lug on that vessel there. Oh yes. It, it fits… You can sort of feel where they had their finger. Where their finger has been in. Yes, that’s amazing. And then, um, we have these nice, um countersunk handle jars. Um, these types of vessels are flat rim jars. Is this all one pot? Yes, this is all found in a ditch section in trench 1. Um, interesting ’cause you can see all this, um, variation in the colour. So, this is just the way it’s been fired. They’re fired in a bonfire, they would have had other vessels packed around them. Yes, so it’s not deliberate. No. Just lucky. Yeah, yeah just lucky. So, so this is all dating to the Iron Age, but we’ve still got our Iron Age burials. So, are they going into a domestic site that’s then immediately carrying on in use, I mean Philippa is there a gap between the late Iron Age and the early Roman? Well, there possibly could be a gap, the coins are all solidly second or third century in date, and we’ve got some objects that could be first century, but they’re probably second century, however we really have to think about who these people are who are using these Roman objects. They’re probably not Roman in-comers, they’re the local people who are just making use of Roman material culture. So how Roman do they look, Rachael? We have a sort of major break in ceramic styles in the Wareham and Poole Harbour industry round about AD120. And we have some examples of that. We have vessels, bowls, dishes with flat rims, sometimes they have a groove in, um, we have jars with slightly more sticky out rims. We are also beginning to see some imported wares. So we have some central Gaulish samian. Nice decorated bowl although not a lot of it survives, and a piece of black colour-coated ware beaker, probably made in the same area around Clermont-Ferrand in France. We’re moving later now: here we have pottery made locally again, but very, very typical of the second half of the third century onwards, so from about 250 to 400AD. These are the classic types of black-burnished ware that move all over the country and were traded very very well widely. What I find really interesting is that there’s so much late Roman pottery, but we’re not seeing any late Roman coins at all. You’d expect on any Roman rural settlement in that period to at least get a few radiates, a few fourth-century nummi, but there just aren’t any coming up from this site. So, so we’ve got a domestic… we’ve got domestic life, but they don’t seem to be doing anything that needs coins, you know, like trade, or, or whatever. Well, we’ve got one object that might give us a little bit of a clue, and that’s this shale spindle whorl, which is Roman in date as well. And this would have been used to make wool thread, so we might have some evidence of cloth production here at the site. Before becoming used as a spindle whorl, that was a lathe core from the manufacture of shale vessels or armlets, bracelets, so we’ve got shale working industry as well. And given that we’ve also got the animal bone with the cut marks and the shale cutting board, it’s feasible that it was used in craft activities: leather working, that kind of thing. It doesn’t have to be domestic, eating, cooking preparation. So the Durotriges probably lived here for centuries adapting to the societal changes around them, but, apart from the Roman postholes, we’ve found very little evidence of the buildings where they might have lived. What about the roundhouse? So the supposed, um, kind of ring ditch is supposed to be here, uh, and run around to that side with the house being on that side. However, I don’t think we have enough evidence to say that this is any kind of roundhouse. It’s not very ring-y or ditch-y, is it? No, and there’s, there’s not much other evidence that suggests roundhouse at the moment. There’s no postholes, there’s not a lot of domestic material, so I’m wondering if this, the function of this, is therefore different, maybe it’s more like an additional stock enclosure or some, some different purpose to whatever’s going on in there, so that’s really cool. Yeah. Stuart has completed his survey and thinks that our site is part of a network supporting a series of Roman villas. As well as the fields we’ve also got a spring here at the head. You can see this valley coming down here and coming into the main Corfe Valley. You’ve got spring with water coming down right past our site, which of course is going to provide water for, for animal stock importantly. This big natural gap in here that’s starting to develop, it’s like another version of, of this, isn’t it? This is the only access up onto the ridge for this field system, so we’re link, we’re able to link these field systems with these and our settlement I think. That’s nice isn’t it? So what, what we’re seeing is a really well-placed, positioned site. You can understand why our our Iron Age settlers were here. As the Roman influence grew, a number of villas sprang up, bounded by the natural geography which divided the land into portions, each estate with water, fertile land, and pasture. That industry that we’re seeing, particularly in the later phases of, um, trench 4, which is very deep with lots of Roman stuff at the top – could that be the people creating, using the resources and creating material for the village? I think there is a common, there is a common unit in all here. Green Island, you know, there’s evidence of shale working. There’s evidence of shale working from this villa next to our site. There’s evidence of shale working on our site. Yeah, and there’s evidence of shale working here down at Bucknowle. And down here, off the map, we have big source of shale at Kimmeridge. Kimmeridge. So that’s the common factor so routes will have come through here, out across the, across the dry land, and the, you know, the benign route is sort of like that, and then products can go out by sea and stuff can come in, and then can come back along, it’s… Our site is perfectly positioned to exploit that, that shale trade. The theory is that industrial black earth in the trenches could be masking earlier Iron Age dwellings. There’s something there, isn’t there? Yeah. And in trench 1, under the post pads, we might have a ring ditch. Derek’s kiln theory is looking good because Rachael now thinks that the defects in the late Roman pottery she was so excited about on day one suggest it was wasted pottery, discarded after firing. We’re now getting small grain and small charcoal, but it’s not pouring out in, in the same way that I thought it would. For example if it was like a, a crop drying kiln or something. So it seems that this furnace probably was a kiln after all. In the last hour of the dig, Jackie and John have got a bit of a plot twist in trench 1. We’ve gone through the Iron Age horizon where you ha- we had those post pipes going down that were packed at the top. And we have got a feature here. It isn’t as we, we thought. We might have some more graves but this doesn’t look like a grave. No, no, it’s definitely something. It’s linear in form, it’s got a bit of a curve to it. You’ve got that rounded end, haven’t you? Rounded end there. It’s, it’s possibly continuing to something here. Yeah, over there. Yeah. It might be a fragment of roundhouse gully. It’s, it’s potentially the earliest feature in the trench so definitely worthy of investigation. Yeah. A roundhouse here would be just a few metres from where our two women were buried, but it’s likely that it was here some time before they were alive. Feels like things are coming to a wind down, Derek. I know, we’ve come back to where it all began, and we, we finally ended day three understanding this trench. We’ve got a roundhouse ring ditch down here which is probably associated with the banjo enclosure itself, so we’ve got that lovely early late, mid-to-late Iron Age phase. We’ve got some wasters out of the kiln which finally… Don’t sound too smug. I don’t need to eat my own hat there. And we’ve got lots and lots more industrial debris coming out of the features we’re just finishing up, so the, that taste of industry, that flavour of industry, is carrying on. As the day draws to a close, Hilde’s just seen the faintest shadow of a ring ditch, possibly around an Iron Age shack or an animal enclosure. And in Matt’s trench, the rain has made it really tough to see the two sides of the funnel into the banjo. I think that in later periods this part of the banjo ditch, this part of the enclosure is delineating the kind of heavy dirty industrial side from the slightly less intensely used side, which is why Hilde’s trench is so clean whereas everything we see in this direction is quite mucky, dark soil, all this ashy dark material. That, that makes sense. I can believe that a lot. And obviously this trench was about finding the the entrance to the banjo enclosure which we didn’t quite get, we didn’t find the return ditch at the other end, but as a theory that works really nicely. After the dig, further investigation revealed that the ditch on the other side of the funnel could have been filled in during the Roman period when it’s possible the enclosure was remodelled to incorporate a series of workshops in trench 5. Chris and James have have taken out two of the ditch slots, and Chris’s one’s got actually five ditches interlinked intercutting each other so a lot of, lot to interpret. This is where we got the slag from as well. Yeah, we had that lovely piece of slag, didn’t we? Yeah, but still a few questions, it’s not fully sorted out. Just in the middle there, you can see the clay slab that Mike’s put a slot through to try and understand. And underneath that we had the shell core. Oh from the armlet. Yeah. So it might be shale working inside. Yeah, I mean that would be an absolute treat. As the storm clouds build again, Miles’s team in trench 4 are still trying to get through centuries of Roman activity to find the Iron Age origins. You’ve got a trench and a half, mate. It is, I mean it’s a monster isn’t it? But we’ve got just a ridiculous amount of deposit of this dark soil that we’re seeing in a lot of this area, at the top of the, the field. We’ve got late Roman at the top, possibly industrial activity going on, and then… so we went a lot lower down to try and find the Iron Age, and we found more… I was hoping for a really nice coherent story. Nice Iron Age, had a big deposit and then some Roman stuff on top, but it’s, it’s a mix isn’t it, and this, this black earth has been kind of plaguing us throughout the dig: what it’s caused by, where it comes from, why it’s filling up so much space on the site. I mean, we’ve had 500 years of occupation on this site, so we’ve had 500 winters, we’ve had 500 years of people warming their homes using turf as a fuel, a fuel that gives, we know gives lots of earthy, ashy remnants. On top of that, we do know we’ve had industry, we’ve had iron production, we’ve had ceramic production, we’ve had agricultural production, all of which use fuel and create more and more of this black earth, so I think that black earth isn’t a problem, I think it’s a sign of life. I think where we’re finding these deposits, we’re finding inhabitation activity, people that’s what we want. Yeah, and that’s a really nice way of looking at it. And while this is a monster, it gives us a really nice insight into that, doesn’t it? At the end of our investigations, we believe that the two Durotrigian women that brought us here lived inside a deep-ditched, banjo-esque enclosure that had been originally dug in the middle Iron Age. If this is the case, it’s the most southerly to have been identified. Around the time of the Roman invasion, the enclosure began to evolve from a farming community to a more industrial settlement as it became integrated into the villa economy. It’s, it’s a dream site for me and it’s a period I’ve always been absolutely fascinated in. It’s how do people go from being late Iron Age peoples into Romano-British peoples, and in the textbooks it can be quite cut and dry – oh you’re in the Iron Age and then you’re in the Roman/Romano-British period. But, of course, on the ground in people’s lives, it’s one generation after another. It’s a much more gradual transition and ultimately ending up in what it looks like here is kind of a, um, a villa estate type scenario where there’s a slightly more well healed individual living just down the road, but here we’ve got this kind of dirty, agro-industry type landscape with a bit of agriculture, a bit of industrial production and maybe even connected to a, a market just over there on the site next door. So it’s become a really interesting story of the people on the ground. I mean this feels like it’s an important story that needs to be told. I mean will you be continuing with this, this work? Yeah, this is the beginning not the end and it’s, it’s moved the research forward in leaps and bounds but there’s, there’s so many more questions to answer and, and I, I almost want to just keep digging. I know the three days are up but I, I’d love to just keep digging and keep learning about these people and try and piece together this really interesting and dynamic community. Over the last three days, we’ve trodden in the footsteps of the Durotriges, who lived and worked in the foothills of this awe inspiring landscape. The settlement evolved over centuries and the industrial activity enriched the soil to create the fertile farmland Derek’s family have been farming. But as we decamp, the team has given a small insight into how it might have been to live here in years gone by, at the mercy of the elements. We’ve got to find a tent, and mine was full of water when I went back to it just now. [Music] Got your instructions now Matt? Yep, all ready to roll. Literally roll back down the hill. And then when you get past Emily, go straight straight straight straight straight. Go on. Yep, well done. Keep going. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. [Music] [Music] [Music] Join Time Team on Patreon to access exclusive 3D models, master classes, and behind the scenes insights.