Digging for Britain (2010) s04e02 Episode Script
East
1
Britain has an epic history,
but within it there's a wealth
of untold secrets
still to uncover.
It's a really key
find, find of the week!
So every year
hundreds of archeologists
set out hunting for clues
to solve the mystery
of who we are and
where we've come from.
We've just found
this amazing pendant.
Over the past
year, their discoveries
have been more
exciting than ever.
This series will explore
the best of them.
Just found a coin.
Oh, marvelous.
Brought to you from the
field in a very special way.
Each excavation has been
filmed for us as it happened
by the archeologists themselves.
It looks absolutely fantastic.
He had a bad day when
he never brought these back.
Their dig diaries mean
that we can be there
for every crucial
moment of discovery.
- Oh, wow!
- Oh!
Oh, do we have a winner here?
I think it's stunning.
Our archeologists
will be joining us here
in our special lab to take
a closer look at their finds
and to figure out
what they really mean.
This is so exciting!
Welcome to "Digging
For Britain."
In this program, we're
joining teams of archeologists
across the east of Britain
to share in their
biggest new finds.
We're there for the grim
discovery at a Crossrail site
that reveals the brutality
of Roman rule in Britain.
If they show signs of injury,
then these are
beheading victims.
We dive deep in the Thames,
searching for clues to explain
a mysterious naval tragedy
It was really amazing, actually.
That's been under the
water for 350 years.
And we explore a
British story in Belgium,
as a team reveals
the secret advantage
that helped Wellington
snatch victory at Waterloo.
What you have here is
basically a hollow ball,
packed with gunpowder.
To understand how these
discoveries and more
fit into the story of Britain,
archeologist Matt Williams
and I have been
given special access
to the Museum of London.
Its unique collection
tells the story of the East
from this area's
earliest inhabitants.
So these people
beginning to settle
in the landscape around London?
The first Londoners.
And we'll get to see
parts of the museum
the public rarely get access to.
There are 20,000
skeletons down here.
Our first Dig Diary is not from
Britain, it's from Belgium,
but it explores a
very British story,
Wellington's
victory at Waterloo.
In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte
faced the Duke of Wellington
and his European
allies at Waterloo.
Wellington's victory
ended Napoleon's rule
and settled the fate
of modern Europe.
200 years later,
an international team of archeologists
traveled to Waterloo to
excavate the battlefield
for the first time,
hoping to understand
how one farmyard
had become pivotal
to the outcome of the battle,
and how the allied army
successfully defended that
farmyard against the odds.
According to
Wellington, Waterloo was
"the nearest-run thing you
ever saw in your life."
We know that his victory hinged
on finding a way
to get ammunition
to his outnumbered troops
stationed here at Hougoumont Farm,
but we don't have proof
for how he did it.
Now, archeologists from
Waterloo Uncovered are searching
for clues, and for evidence
of the French onslaught
fought off by Wellington's men.
We've been working
down in the stubble field
for the past three days,
and that was an area
that at the time of the
battle was occupied by a wood.
The French did advance
up through that wood,
and that fight within the
wood is not fully understood.
There are some eyewitness
accounts, but it's fairly vague.
We know Wellington's
men occupied the farm,
and now, for the first time,
we can understand how fiercely
they had to defend it, as the
team's investigations revealed
the intensity of
Napoleon's opening attack.
This tree faces
onto an open area
where we know there
was a lot of fighting.
There would have
been shooting coming
from the wall over
there, 40 yards away.
So either way, these
trees are gonna be
right on the backstop
for any sort of musketry
that's going on round here.
And, of course, at
chest height, balls
that have hit trees are gonna
be fired at human beings
who are milling
around these trees.
It's pretty remarkable, eh?
200 years later,
it's all still here.
Wellington had 1,200
men defending Hougoumont.
It's believed that Napoleon
sent 4,000 to take it.
And now metal detecting is
revealing definitive proof
of that savage
assault by the French.
By the wall, picking
up multiple targets.
They look like
French musket balls,
all concentrated within
probably a foot square.
I've picked up four; one
of them, if you can see,
that's if I don't
drop it, is embedded.
It's still got brick dust on it.
The shot
struck the southern wall,
which the records say
was where Napoleon ordered
his attack to begin.
Now, inside the farm, the
team uncover great quantities
of French musket balls,
which reveal how desperately
Napoleon's army
fought to get in.
Further in, we're
looking at musket shot
that has been fired at
close range, it's impacted.
So what it looks
like we've got here,
is French making it at
least to the top of the wall
and firing down
into the enclosure,
possibly also through
the loopholes.
All of which has
gotta be defended,
so I think what we've
got is a picture
of a very, very brutal
fight on the wall top,
much more so than the accounts,
in some cases,
lead us to believe.
Records tell us
that the British defense
of the southern wall held firm,
while on the north side of
the farm, more French troops
desperately attacked the
heavy gates of the farmyard.
It's a pretty formidable
target once it's closed.
But you have to close
the gates first,
and that's where the whole
battle could have turned.
So we're opening the gates;
check, no Frenchmen, okay.
The gates had been left open.
30 French soldiers seized
their chance and burst through.
If reinforcements
managed to join them,
a British massacre and a
French victory at Waterloo
would have been inevitable.
An absolute desperate fight,
and the men who came
to close this gate
left that fight
going on behind them,
turned their backs on it,
and pushed the gate closed
against this great
press of Frenchmen
who had seized the advantage
and were trying to get in.
So, a pretty key
moment in the battle.
According to the history books,
Wellington's Coldstream
Guards forced the gates closed
and saved their
army from disaster.
But on day seven, the team
finds possible evidence
to show that Napoleon only
intensified his efforts
to seize the farm.
What you have here is
basically a hollow ball,
packed with gunpowder; it
was fired by the French
from the ridge
behind the complex.
That fire happened in the
afternoon of the battle,
and the idea was, basically,
to burn down the buildings.
And they succeeded in that.
These explosive shells
set fire to the chateau,
the house, which
burned to the ground,
and the various outbuildings
were burned as well.
And so, from this,
on the face of it,
fairly unexciting lump of rust,
we've added another
piece to the jigsaw
that is the battle of Waterloo.
Napoleon followed this barrage
with an attack on the blazing
farm by another 5,500 men.
But Wellington could only
call upon an extra 800,
leaving him in a
precarious position.
To hold the farm, he needed
to keep his outnumbered troops
supplied with ammunition,
and a trench dug in a sunken
road at the back of the farm
may reveal for the first
time how he did it.
I think that
is the 1815 surface.
What makes you think it's 1815?
The pottery and the
coin that came out.
The artifacts from
the bottom of this trench date
to the year of the battle,
showing that 200 years ago,
the road's surface was several
feet lower than it is today.
- I think
- That would have provided
the Allies were crucial
cover from the French.
- I think what
- And the team also think
that this sunken road gave
Wellington hidden access
to the farm, to get
his supply wagons in
without the French noticing.
If you've actually got
quite an enclosed hedge line
and you've got, literally,
almost a tunnel,
then that would have given
him so much better cover.
And although it was
still their feat,
to get the horse and wagon
down here under French attack,
and then to get it
across to the gate
and into Hougoumont Farm,
it does, actually, to me,
give me a better picture of what
the surroundin'
must have been like.
This dig may have
finally revealed
Wellington's secret
advantage, a hidden road
that enabled him to
keep his troops armed,
to defend Hougoumont Farm,
defeat Napoleon and win
the Battle of Waterloo.
To explain more about
how the battle was fought
and its grim aftermath, the
dig team have brought some
of their finds into our lab.
So Charlie, how important
was Hougoumont Farm
in the battle here,
in the context of
Waterloo, or generally?
Certainly for Wellington's
army it was very important.
The French are in blue and
the British are in red,
and Hougoumont, here, stands
together with the wood
to the south and the orchard
in front of this ridge,
guarding Wellington's
right flank.
Had the French got
through at Hougoumont
and seized control of that,
they would have been able
to secure, potentially,
a battle-winning advantage.
I think we always tend to think,
or at least I always tend
to think, of Waterloo being
a battle of the British
against the French.
But, Dominique, there were
other people there as well?
Oh, yes, there's a lot
of other nations involved
in the conflict and
you have Hanoverians,
Anglo-Dutch,
Brunswick, Belgo-Dutch
and, of course, the Prussians.
They played an essential
role in the English victory.
We've got some
of the finds here.
Dominique, can you
tell me what that is?
Well, I can tell you that
it's a French musket ball,
because it's smaller
than the English one,
as you can see, very clearly.
I think we've uncovered why
there was an Allied victory.
They simply had
bigger musket balls!
And the fact that the
French one are smaller
than the English one means
that the English can
re-use French musket balls,
which is not the
case on the contrary.
So the English could
fit the smaller bullets,
the smaller musket balls,
back into your own rifle.
Oh, so it IS a
significant advantage, yeah.
So the documentary sources,
the eyewitness accounts
and the archeological finds,
they do agree on one thing,
this was a brutal battle.
Do we have any idea what the
total human cost actually was?
Yeah, probably
around 12,000 killed.
And you have to add to that the
wounded and the disappeared,
so around 50,000 people.
And what happened to
all the bodies then?
Most of the armies
would have moved on
by the time we get round
to burying the dead,
so we're talking about
local people, the farmers,
the peasants, the people
who lived on the land,
trying to get rid
of these bodies
that will be stinking,
causing a great mess
and getting in the
way of agriculture.
So they're tipped into
a grave and got rid of.
Anything that is useful,
can be used, can be sold,
will be stripped from them,
and the bodies will be disposed
of as quickly as possible.
Scavenging among the dead
for valuables was grim enough,
but around at the time of
the Battle of Waterloo,
this common practice took
an altogether darker turn.
I've come to see the
evidence for myself,
right in the depths of
the Museum of London.
Well, this is the Museum
of London's bone store,
and every one of these boxes
contains at least
one human skeleton.
In total, there are 20,000
skeletons down here.
Amongst them is
remarkable evidence
of a macabre but
lucrative trade,
one made possible by the
vanity of London's rich,
and the huge death rates
at battles like Waterloo.
So this is an incredible
bit of dental work
that's been carried out?
Yeah, I mean,
this is remarkable.
So this is the mandible,
the lower jaw of a female,
and she was buried at
St. Marylebone Church
and we know her name because
she had a coffin plate,
and that survived
in enough detail
for us to be able to
read what her name was.
So she's Mrs. Charlotte
Bampton Taylor,
and we know that she died in
1837 and was 77 years old.
And to be buried where she was
would indicate she had money,
she was high-status,
and, looking at this
that you can see here,
which is a rather remarkable
piece of dentistry.
Is that a
real tooth that's there?
Yes, yes.
It's a false tooth in her mouth.
Yes.
But it looks
like real human tooth.
Yeah, it does, it's fantastic.
So it is a real human
tooth, from somebody else,
and it's been put into an
ivory plug to fit it in,
and then to actually stabilize
it within her own mouth
and around the teeth
is this metal wire
that's been wrapped around,
and that, from tests,
has come back as being
platinum, so, very expensive.
It's an extraordinary piece
of 200-year-old dentistry.
But more extraordinary still
is where the tooth itself
may have come from.
When we see this sort
of form of dentistry,
we have a term that we relate
to as "Waterloo teeth."
Related to the
Battle of Waterloo?
Yes, and that's because
we know that, unfortunately,
when these men were
involved in these battles
in somewhere such as Waterloo,
you've got very
high death rates,
you've got lots of
people that are dying,
you then have an opportunity
to actually claim something
to make money, and that
would be the teeth.
The teeth were very lucrative.
So people would
actually then go around
extracting the
teeth to then sell
and use in other
people's mouths
It's extraordinary.
So you've got this
well-heeled woman,
she's lost quite a few
- Yes, yes.
- She's lost this tooth
right in the front, which
does affect her appearance,
and she's paid to have this
expensive dental work done
so that she can
smile at somebody
with a dead man's
tooth in her mouth.
Yes.
Stories like these are
why I love archeology.
It has the power to shock us
with grim revelations like this
about what London's rich
did in the name of vanity.
And it can surprise us, too,
with new insights
into an iconic battle
that defined Britain and
Europe for centuries.
But few of
archeology's surprises
come as unexpectedly as
in our next dig diary.
It comes from Lenborough
in Buckinghamshire,
where one amateur made
the find of a lifetime.
In the early 11th century,
marauding Vikings
terrorized southern England.
Ethelred was the
Anglo-Saxon ruler
who attempted to buy peace,
paying off the invading armies
with sack loads of silver.
It was a waste of money.
Within a generation, England
was ruled by a Danish king
and the Viking
conquest was complete.
1,000 years later,
in Buckinghamshire,
an amateur metal detectorist
made an astonishing discovery,
including evidence of the
desperation of the Anglo-Saxons
in the face of
the Viking threat.
And luckily, he had
a camera with him.
In December 2014, Paul
Coleman was taking part
in an annual metal-detectorist
rally in Lenborough,
and he was planning
to call it a day.
After an hour and a half,
we'd got back to the same point
we'd virtually started
from, and decided that,
with only one musket ball
to show between three of us,
that there wasn't a
great deal in this field,
or if there was, it was
too deep for us to pick up.
My friend's detector
interferes with mine.
The radio frequencies
are very close,
so I asked him if
he would move over.
He said his was fine,
so I should move.
So I did, I moved four
or five yards away
and walked immediately
onto a large signal,
which turned out to be
a really large signal.
As Paul began to dig down,
he saw something unmistakable.
So as soon as I saw that shiny
disc, I knew it was a coin.
I also know that it was
potentially more than one,
because the signal was
really large, so I just had
an inkling that this was
gonna be something special.
When I bent down to pick that
one up and I saw the others,
that's when I realized that
this was a large hoard of coins.
With the help of the
Portable Antiquities Scheme,
Paul uncovered a lead
container overflowing
with silver and gold coins.
He could scarcely
believe his eyes.
There's some
serious cash down there.
- He had one job.
- Yeah, one job.
All he had to do was
look after the find.
I bet he had a bad day
when he never
brought these back.
Straight away
they began to wonder
where this huge
fortune had come from.
Then they spotted a
clue, the name of a king.
That looks like Ethelred.
Is it?
Wow, I think, is that Ethelred?
Well, it says
on there, can you not?
Yeah, I think it's Ethelred.
Ethelred was the English
king from 978 AD to 1016.
He was so desperate to
end the Vikings' raids,
he tried to pay them to go away.
Ethelred's name is crucial
to dating these coins
to sometime in his
reign, 1,000 years ago.
It's getting
to the bottom, in't it?
It's gettin' dark in here.
Lot of people
Yes.
Be careful, 'cause some of
them are really brittle.
Light was fading.
Under the guidance
of an archeologist
from the Portable
Antiquities Scheme,
Paul and his friends worked
quickly and carefully
to rescue the treasure, but
the stash seemed never-ending.
- Oh!
- It's a sad day
when you run out of bags
to fill silver coins
up with, in't it?
Oh, just bring up
Especially when
they're that deep.
Shall we just
leave the rest, then,
because we haven't got any bags?
- Like you could afford to.
- Yeah, we have.
Oh, we've got some
more, okay, okay, okay.
Just put less in.
E-mail head
office and see who's
See if they know whether
the coin guy's in.
They took the hoard back
to the safety of a
local farmer's kitchen
and spent the rest of the night
counting out their treasure.
5,252 silver coins,
each one a millennium old,
many in near-mint condition
and priceless to historians.
They were sent to
the British Museum,
where numismatist Gareth
Williams began piecing together
what this remarkable
hoard could tell us
about Britain 1,000 years ago.
Now he's brought along the
most revealing specimens
for us to look at in our lab.
Well, Gareth, these coins are
looking absolutely beautiful
now that they've
been cleaned up,
and this is just a small
sample of the collection.
That's right,
altogether, over 5,000 coins,
so one of the largest hoards
of Anglo-Saxon coins
ever discovered.
And when do they date to?
They date to the late
Anglo-Saxon period.
And we've got coins
in here of two kings,
Ethelred II, who ruled
from 978 to 1016,
and his successor Canute,
who ruled from 1016 to 1035.
We've got the savings
hoard of the earlier part,
and then a currency
hoard, coins withdrawn
from what was current
at a time of burial,
which is the last few
years of Canute's reign,
so probably sometime
in the 1030s.
Can you pull out
one of each ruler?
May I
Yes, certainly.
Here is Ethelred II.
And here is Canute.
Now, these aren't portraits
of either of them.
Coins of this period generally
just imitate late
Roman imperial designs.
And both of those are just
images of late Roman emperors
with the king's name on.
Canute was the
Danish king determined
to seize power in England and
to establish Viking rule here.
In desperation, King Ethelred
resorted to throwing money
at the problem, earning himself
an unfortunate nickname.
The English kingdom,
which was more or less
quite a new creation
by the 10th century,
was under a lot of
pressure by Viking raids,
from Viking armies,
increasingly,
during the reign of Ethelred.
And we know Ethelred as
Ethelred the Unready.
The indication is that it's
a contemporary nickname.
And the response to
these Viking raids
seems to be paying in
greater quantities of money
to Vikings quite simply
to go away, as well.
And we know the
Vikings don't go away.
They see the English
kingdom, which was very rich
by this time, as a
great source of wealth.
The coins in this hoard reveal
how desperate Ethelred became
when faced with a
full-scale Viking invasion.
So Ethelred tried
paying them to go away.
That didn't work; he tried
fighting them to drive them away.
That didn't work, but he
also tried a third method,
and that's also
represented in this hoard
by a rather unusual
type of coin.
And, you can see, this doesn't
have a royal image on it.
Yeah, I can see
this is a little lamb.
He's carrying a
cross under his arm.
He's got a halo as well.
So we're quite clear about
it being a holy lamb.
This seems to be part of
a sort of coordinated year
of prayer and increased
piety in the year 1009.
The point was that the Vikings
were seen as God's judgment
on the English for
their ungodly behavior,
and so the theory was if the
English became more godly,
maybe God would
reward them for that
with support
against the Vikings.
So literally reduced
to praying for help?
Exactly.
This new hoard reveals the
last hope of a desperate king.
Coins minted with
Christian imagery
in the hope that God would
help him beat the Vikings.
But Ethelred's
piety was in vain.
Canute seized power, and the
Viking conquest was complete.
Finds like this have
made it a remarkable year
for archeology in
the east of England.
And in London, one giant
engineering project
has offered an
unparalleled opportunity
to peel back the layers
of the capital's history
to reveal how the city
first began to boom.
Since Roman times, men and
women have flocked to London,
driving its population from
30,000 two millennia ago
to seven million today.
And the capital
is still growing.
This is one of its newest
and biggest developments,
Crossrail, London's high-speed
underground rail network.
It's a massive piece
of civil engineering.
But it's also a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
for archeologists.
The vast excavations are
revealing what life was like
for Londoners as the city
mushroomed over two millennia.
But what we're also discovering
is the cost in human life.
Liverpool Street railway
station, in the very heart
of the city's buzzing
financial district.
Right outside the station,
archeologists from Crossrail
and Museum of London
Archeology have uncovered clues
to the brutal violence
at the heart of Roman
rule in Britain.
We're workin' on
excavating this Roman road,
which is a major
Roman thoroughfare.
Yeah, so what we've
uncovered just in the last day
is a number of skulls
appearing in this area.
They're actually
mostly upside down,
so they're not
completely obvious.
There's literally a line
stretching from there,
is the last one we
found, all the way back
to the end of the dig.
The possibility is that
these are beheading victims.
Just a few days later,
another remarkable burial
shows more evidence
of Roman execution.
How's it goin', okay?
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, we've just had a
really interesting find
down here at Liverpool Street.
We're in the eastern
ticket hall excavation.
And we've just found
an intact burial
that most likely dates
to the Roman period,
and the most interesting
thing about it,
as you can probably see,
the skull has been
detached and placed
between the knees
of this individual.
There could be a number
of different reasons.
The first one, obviously, is
an execution and beheading.
We know that
Rome ruled its empire
with an iron fist, but
can remains like these
really be evidence of its
rough justice in Britain?
As an osteologist myself,
I want to see the
bones with my own eyes.
So Don and Jay have brought
one skeleton into our lab.
It's interesting to have
such explicit evidence
of decapitation at this site.
And I believe this skeleton
shows decapitation again?
Exactly, what we have here
is the remains of a male adult
that we found in the cemetery.
And what's very interesting
to see is in the neck area
on the first thoracic vertebra,
we have a very clear cut mark
going through the skeleton.
For example, this facet
would normally fit on here,
but it's been sliced off
by a very sharp blade,
and this cut has properly caused
the full decapitation
of this individual.
There's a polishing of
the bone, isn't there,
where the blade has
come through here?
So right at the base
of somebody's neck.
Do you think this would
have been a blow coming in
from the back, then?
We believe so, it seems
for the blade to have come in
and to have not affected
the other spinous processes,
it seems that the neck
probably was flexed,
in which case you'd suspect
that the cut did
come from the back.
Yes, so by looking
really carefully
at the orientation
of those cuts,
you can reconstruct
the grisly last moments
of that person's life.
Severed vertebrae.
Decapitated skulls.
It's chilling evidence
of the brutal reality
of Roman rule in Britain.
These discoveries have been made
thanks to Crossrail's
massive excavations.
But not all archeology involves
digging into the ground.
In the Thames Estuary,
a team of divers is
battling the elements
to solve a maritime mystery,
and they've sent
us this dive diary.
In 1665, Britain was gearing
up for war with the Dutch,
primarily to win back
valuable trade routes
to the New World.
Among the Royal Navy's
flagships was the London,
a mighty gunship 140 feet
long and armed with 76 cannon.
It's thought that on
the 8th of March, 1665,
she was still
crammed with guests
yet to disembark
further down the river,
when suddenly, in the
mouth of the Thames,
an explosion blew her to pieces.
No one knows what
caused that explosion,
and to have any hope
of solving the mystery,
the first challenge is
to rescue the London
from the savage currents
and ravenous wildlife
of the Thames Estuary
before she's lost forever.
In 2014, Cotswold
Archaeology, Historic England
and local Southend residents
launched a rescue mission.
The team returned in
the summer of 2015,
when they recorded this footage.
So this is day two,
and we're back out on
site of the London.
Our main objective
for this season,
which is the excavation
of the gun carriage.
This was found at
the end of last year,
and we just sort of
uncovered the very top of it.
So the priority for this season
is to continue excavating
the gun carriage.
We are ready to commence
dive operations now.
Unfortunately,
the wreck's location means
that the London isn't going
to give up her secrets easily.
Well, as you can see here,
we're right next to the
main shipping channel
in and out of the Thames.
So this is a very
busy shipping lane,
and some of the bigger ships
are churning up the water.
We know that because
when we're down there,
visibility goes from
okay to nothing,
and the noise kind of
vibrates through your chest.
But noise and poor visibility
aren't the team's
biggest problems.
As turbulence from passing
ships stirs up the sediment,
it exposes the site to the
destructive forces of nature.
So we've got marine organisms
like teredo and gribble
that eat the wood, and that
kind of just destroys it,
and that can happen
very quickly.
So this is what's
really important,
the work that we're doing,
and especially recovering
this gun carriage,
because if that remains
in situ as it is,
it will not be there
for very much longer.
Despite these
treacherous conditions,
the team has recovered
a wealth of finds,
which show how the Thames
silt can perfectly preserve
the artifacts hidden beneath it.
This looks really in
really good condition.
You can see the grain.
It doesn't look like
it was used very much
- at the time, either.
- No.
- There's not much in the
- Not much wear.
- Very nice.
- Yeah, nice.
- Well done, Steve.
- Some more recent finds.
This is what I recovered
a few weeks ago.
A little sundial compass.
To me, this would have been
like a Rolex watch of the day.
You would have the sundial,
the compass in there,
match it up, that
would have lifted up
and they could get
the dates or the time.
Steve believes
that this probably would have
belonged to one of the
higher-ranking crew members.
See now, the chap who had this
would be in the nice
cabin, you know,
far more comfortable than
down towards the bilges.
These are just a fraction
of the objects recovered
from the wreck so far.
But time and tide
wait for no man,
so the team's focus soon
returns to the star attraction.
The gun carriage is the
main objective of this week.
And we've been progressively
digging out that carriage
and trying to uncover
it as much as we can.
Once we've uncovered it,
the aim is to recover it.
Working in such poor visibility,
the team relies heavily
on the underwater survey,
which reveals much more detail
about the location of the
carriage within the wreck.
So this line here we think
is the bottom of it, you know,
close to the bottom of the ship.
And this kind of dark line here
is where the carriages are,
which looks like, well, what
we think is the main gun bit,
'cause that's what we think.
We've got the side of the
ship here, lying on its side
because the carriages
are pointing downwards
rather than lying horizontal.
And the fact that
the gun carriages,
or at least the one that we're
excavating at the moment,
has got all its associated
gun furniture, tackle,
kind of tells us that this
object, this artifact,
hasn't moved very far from
its original position.
Finally, on the
very last day of the dive,
and after three and a half
centuries lying on the seabed,
the wooden gun carriage is
rescued from the depths.
We've finally recovered
the gun carriage,
and that was a real effort.
It was in a really
awkward position
to try and get to the bottom
of it, it was, you know,
trapped under many artifacts,
very fragile artifacts,
so we had to recover them
carefully without destroying them.
But eventually we've got it out
and stropped it up
and recovered it,
and it was a great relief when
it finally broke the surface.
It was really amazing, actually,
to think that that's been
under the water for 350 years
and then suddenly it rises up.
Weighing in at around a ton,
this is the first
complete gun carriage
to be recovered from the London.
It's just one of a wealth of
clues rescued from the seabed.
Some of which offer
intriguing insights
into the final moments
on board the doomed ship.
These finds were all
made in a small area,
suggesting that the
London was jam-packed
with supplies and ammunition.
It sounds like the gunpowder
was all together then
in one place, to cause
such a massive explosion
to rip this whole ship apart.
The area that a lot of
the material has come from
is not much bigger
than this table.
These are only sort of a small
selection of what we found,
and yet we've got over
80 fragments of linstock,
a huge number of hand spikes.
And, well, it's early
days, but we would think
that perhaps we've either got
excess supplies on the ship
or, because it was fairly
early in the voyage,
perhaps they were putting
everything out on deck
to redistribute it
between all the guns
that were on the London.
So the ammunition
had yet to be safely stowed,
but one find shows how the
cannons would have been lit.
An incredible achievement,
to get that gun carriage
out of the water.
But here we have some of the
other artifacts, as well.
And what have we got here?
We've got a
selection of linstocks
that were used to light the
cannon from a safe distance.
I'm intrigued by these
items, how do they work?
They are turned wooden
sticks, basically.
And you would have a rope
wrapped around these,
which we call a slow match.
And the end of it passes
through this hole here
and is slowly smoldering
away at one end,
and then you hold it at the
end and light the cannon.
And on this particular one,
we've got some scorch marks,
obviously real evidence to
show that they have been used
and have been scorched
by the slow match
that was around them.
It seems, then,
that the London was
crammed with ammunition,
and she may also have
been crowded with guests
who were yet to
disembark downriver.
But the archeologists
also made further finds
which hint at a possible cause
of the terrible accident
waiting to happen.
There's some quite personal
items as well, really.
These are little
tobacco pipes, are they?
Yeah.
Tobacco pipes, though, I mean,
this was a ship that
was going out to war,
that obviously had
cannon on board,
you've got a ship that is
packed full of gunpowder
and you've got people smoking?
I know, it's a bit of
a recipe for disaster,
really, isn't it?
I guess Health and
Safety might have been
a bit different 350 years ago,
but with crew members,
you've got visitors on board,
you've got over 300
barrels of gunpowder,
naked flames from both the
linstock and people smoking,
from the candles; they're
going on their outward voyage
and then something
happened and it blew up.
So we don't necessarily
need to be looking
for a suspicious reason
for this explosion?
It doesn't need to have been
arson or done with any intent,
it could have purely
been an accident?
I think that's
probably most likely.
And I think a really
important message, as well,
which is, "Do not
get on a warship
"full of gunpowder and smoke."
Yes.
We may finally
have a plausible theory
to explain the London disaster.
A flagship vessel fully
loaded with gunpowder,
a distracted crew, and
someone's disastrous mistake.
The Museum of London bone store
holds more evidence of
the dangers of naval life.
This man served in
Nelson's Navy in the 1800s,
and lived to well over 50,
but his skeleton tells us that
his life at sea was brutal.
Although, obviously, we're
looking at him as a skeleton,
and he's dead, what we're trying
to do is look at the things
that we can see on
the bones to tell us
what actually then may
have happened in their life
and how then they coped with it.
And looking at his
skeleton, he's remarkable,
because when we see lots
of the things that we do,
he obviously had a hard life
and managed to survive lots
of nasty insults and impacts.
This collarbone has
got a healed fracture in it.
- Yes.
- Now, that must have happened
years before this
individual died,
'cause it's healed quite nicely,
although it has never
regained its original shape.
So these are the kind of
fractures that you might sustain
from a fall onto the shoulder;
are there any other injuries?
There are, he's got some
fractures to the ribs,
again, all on one side, and
they would appear to follow
a similar pattern to the
clavicle, so that might indicate
that that's happening
at the same time,
it's the same event.
We've then also got the
fracture of the femur.
- We can see there.
- It does make you wonder
if this all happened
at the same time,
it's all on the right-hand
side of his body.
- Yes.
- And these are the kinds
of fractures that you
might get, for instance,
from falling from a height;
what else, Jelena, then?
And he's also got a fracture
to the first metacarpal.
And then we've got the fractures
are there on the radius,
where you tend to sort of
fall, you put your hand out.
- He's got a broken nose.
- Yeah.
So you can sort of see, there,
you've again healed, but you've
got that sort of deflection.
Well, again, this is most likely
not to have been
caused by a fall,
but actually to have
been caused by some,
what shall we call
it, how do we say,
- interpersonal aggression?
- Interpersonal aggression.
- Punched in the face?
- Yes.
With the vertebrae
that you can see here,
they are all very frilly,
they shouldn't look like that.
And then you can see
where you've actually got
some crushing of the
vertebrae, so if we come there
to that one
Oh, yes.
That's lost a lot of height.
So a thoracic vertebra,
a vertebra from the
back of the chest.
There's a fairly
normal-looking vertebra
and there's the one
that suffered this
- Rather thin, yes.
- wedge fracture.
Yes, yes.
So that's been completely
squashed, reduced in height,
so he's got a whole
suite of changes
that you would be looking at,
but also then you're thinking
of the consequences and impact
of how he would be able to
function in a daily life,
but also how he was functioning
while he was still at sea,
and then also later
on in older age,
the potential pain, discomfort,
that you might have from these.
It's phenomenal when you're
looking at the skeleton
and you can see so many things
that have affected them in life.
But the fact that they
actually were able to survive,
and particularly when
we think of the times
in which they lived, they
wouldn't have had all the things
to help them that we do now,
so that's even more amazing,
that they've actually
survived, really.
So they really were
hardy and tough.
The London set sail in 1656,
just as our navy began to assert
its will across the world.
Within 200 years,
Britannia ruled the waves.
Sailors like this man
made that possible,
and he was left with the scars.
But in the mid-20th
century, the tables turned,
and Britain was on the back foot
as it desperately
defended itself
against savage attacks
by Hitler's Luftwaffe.
But one thing remained the same,
Britons put themselves on
the line for their country.
Our next dig takes
us to West Sussex,
where archeologists
are shining a new light
on a story we think we know so
well, the Battle of Britain.
But their new discovery
reveals forgotten heroes,
a machine and a pilot.
In the summer of 1940,
waves of German Luftwaffe
filled our skies.
Hitler's plan, crush
the smaller RAF
and then launch a
full-scale invasion.
Standing in his way,
the iconic Spitfires
and their daring British pilots.
But a dig on this
hillside is reminding us
that Spitfires didn't
win the Battle of Britain
on their own, and that
our British pilots
weren't the only heroes.
We are excavating the remains
of a Hurricane shot down
in the Battle of Britain on
the 9th of September 1940.
Hawker Hurricanes
actually shot down
50% more enemy planes
than did Spitfires,
yet it's the Spitfire whose
name has become iconic.
The Hurricane was, if you
like, the forgotten hero
of the Battle of Britain,
I mean, it's not forgotten,
but it didn't get all the
glamor of the Spitfire.
Unfortunately,
this Hurricane never made it
back to base.
This is the impact crater,
it's slightly ovalled.
It's where the aircraft's
come down and hit.
Then, obviously, the
weight of the aircraft
has displaced all the
earth and the chalk.
We've had pistons and valves
and bits of engine cases.
So now we've cleaned it
up, we can see where it is.
We can now proceed to go down
and see what else is there.
Amongst the
finds recovered is evidence
of the sheer violence
of the impact.
This is part of
the ammunition box
that contained the 303 rounds
for one of the machine guns.
It's just a thin aluminum box,
but when the aircraft crashed,
there was a lot of
ammunition on it,
and what happened was the
force pushed all the ammunition
down into the box, and
we can actually see here,
this is one of the bullets.
It's actually punched
its way through the box
and made a very neat
little hole there.
So that's a cracking find.
75 years to
the day after the crash,
one of the larger
pieces is discovered,
part of the propeller assembly
from the nose of the plane,
and it has survived intact.
This is where the
propeller blade would go,
so the propeller blade
was sticking out here,
and that would be rotating.
And there'll be
another one about here
and another one about here.
So you've got the
three-blade rotor hub.
Here to help
with the heavy lifting
is a group from
Operation Nightingale,
an initiative to
rehabilitate British soldiers
recently returned
from active service.
The team today is largely
composed of military veterans.
Excitingly for us, we've
got three Polish soldiers
that have served in Afghanistan.
And they're working
alongside British veterans,
people who've fought in
Afghanistan and Iraq,
but also people who've
served in Northern Ireland
and, indeed, in the
Falklands campaign.
For these Polish
veterans, this is a chance
to celebrate the other
unsung heroes of the story,
the Polish pilots who fought
for the Allies in
squadrons like the 303.
This is great for me,
because the pilots
with the Division 303
is Polish heroes.
Polish flying heroes.
And Sergeant Wunsche,
this is great, great pilot
with the Squadron.
303 Squadron was
a predominantly Polish unit,
and it became the most
successful in the Battle of Britain,
shooting down 108 German
planes in a single month.
The Polish pilots, they
were almost, if you like,
the forgotten heroes of
the Battle of Britain.
They were relatively
small in number,
and what they did, it's just
like the Hurricane, really,
was disproportionate
to their numbers,
but they achieved an
incredibly high kill score.
Their determination to get at
the enemy was second to none,
for obvious reasons, their
country had been invaded.
So consequently, their kill
rate of enemy aircraft destroyed
was significantly higher
than any other squadron.
21-year-old Kazimierz
Wunsche was a sergeant
in 303 Squadron; when his
Hurricane was shot down
on the 9th of September 1940.
Luckily he managed to
parachute to safety,
and as the presence
here of his daughter
and granddaughter testifies,
he lived to tell the tale.
He was slightly injured.
The oil blew into his
face, so he had some burns,
and he had, there
was something injured
in his leg and in his back.
But after staying in Hove
Hospital for a month,
he went back to flying,
so he was flying until
the end of the war.
My grandfather died
when I was six months old,
so I never got to
really know him,
and I'm amazed that
we've found this plane.
The last person to see it intact
before it went into the
ground was my grandfather,
and that means a lot to me.
There's a piece, I
think I'll remember it
till the end of my days,
it's the Morse panel.
He would have touched that,
he would have looked at that
on a daily basis, every
time he got into the plane.
If his radio had gone down,
that might have saved his life.
And so to see the words
"Morse" and all the other bits
on that piece is
just incredible,
and it does make me feel a
real connection with him.
The 75th anniversary
of the crash is marked
by a rare sight, a fly-past
by a fully restored original
World War II Hurricane.
- You've got really quiet.
- Yeah.
Now what are you
actually hoping to discover
by undertaking an
excavation like this?
Because we know that Hurricanes
were used in the war.
We know that Hurricanes
went down in the war.
And in fact we know that
this actual Hurricane
went down in the war,
so what other information
are you hoping to glean?
This really is not
going to change the story
of the Battle of
Britain, clearly.
However, you can get
little vignettes from it,
and it's the personal stories.
Occasionally you get bits
of kits from the pilot.
The ammunition will
also tell you a story
about that particular
day in September 1940
in the hope that this aircraft
was gonna bring down some
of those attacking aircraft.
I think that's really
important to remember,
that the Poles played
a very big role,
but there were pilots from
Czechoslovakia, as well as
French pilots, there was
a couple of Americans,
South Africans, Australians,
people from all around
the world contributing
to this global effort to
stop this hideous entity
from being able to invade.
And so this artifact,
although it is just a bullet,
it's way more than that,
because this has got a
narrative of those days in 1940
and, you know, a critical part
of our island's history, really.
What do you think it was
about the Polish pilots
that gave them such
a good kill rate?
I think there's
almost a visceral hatred
that goes on with
the Polish pilots.
We've been talking about
the defending of Britain,
with the Battle of Britain.
Now the Poles didn't
have that luxury in 1939.
Their country had been invaded.
It's the reason, substantially,
Britain goes to war.
And so they are fighting to
try and liberate their country,
and the only way they
can do it at that time
is to fight back
at the Luftwaffe,
and so they are a
determined bunch.
They're a group with anger.
They're a group that
perform incredibly well.
And despite this plane
crashing, of course,
Wunsche himself
escapes, and as we saw,
his daughter and
granddaughter in the film,
and I think the archeology
was very important to them.
It was, and to be able
to have that hands-on
for your family tree,
that's a physical
manifestation of your heritage
which is really,
really powerful.
So you're able to
put your fingers
where your grandfather or father
had put his in the cockpit,
or to look through a piece
of Perspex, a bit of glass,
so you are looking through
that same viewing screen
that your relative had,
and that's a really strange
feeling in archeology,
to be able to have
that direct connection
with people from the past.
This dig has
helped a family connect
with their war hero
from a brave generation,
and reminds us all
about the foreign pilots
who risked everything
to save Britain.
It reveals the
power archeology has
to tell our stories,
whatever the era,
from a bloody battle
fought in our skies in 1940
to the brutal oppression
of Roman rule.
While from the
silt of the Thames
and from a trench in Waterloo
new clues have helped us
solve age-old mysteries,
to reveal not only
what came before us,
but to show how our past
still shapes who we are today.
Next time on "Digging for
Britain," we're in the North
scrambling for clues to
the first kings of Scotland
I think I got it.
We're there for the
Viking find of a lifetime.
- Oh, wow!
- Oh!
Oh, do we have a winner here?
And unearth
a forgotten graveyard
of ancient warriors.
It looks absolutely fantastic.
Britain has an epic history,
but within it there's a wealth
of untold secrets
still to uncover.
It's a really key
find, find of the week!
So every year
hundreds of archeologists
set out hunting for clues
to solve the mystery
of who we are and
where we've come from.
We've just found
this amazing pendant.
Over the past
year, their discoveries
have been more
exciting than ever.
This series will explore
the best of them.
Just found a coin.
Oh, marvelous.
Brought to you from the
field in a very special way.
Each excavation has been
filmed for us as it happened
by the archeologists themselves.
It looks absolutely fantastic.
He had a bad day when
he never brought these back.
Their dig diaries mean
that we can be there
for every crucial
moment of discovery.
- Oh, wow!
- Oh!
Oh, do we have a winner here?
I think it's stunning.
Our archeologists
will be joining us here
in our special lab to take
a closer look at their finds
and to figure out
what they really mean.
This is so exciting!
Welcome to "Digging
For Britain."
In this program, we're
joining teams of archeologists
across the east of Britain
to share in their
biggest new finds.
We're there for the grim
discovery at a Crossrail site
that reveals the brutality
of Roman rule in Britain.
If they show signs of injury,
then these are
beheading victims.
We dive deep in the Thames,
searching for clues to explain
a mysterious naval tragedy
It was really amazing, actually.
That's been under the
water for 350 years.
And we explore a
British story in Belgium,
as a team reveals
the secret advantage
that helped Wellington
snatch victory at Waterloo.
What you have here is
basically a hollow ball,
packed with gunpowder.
To understand how these
discoveries and more
fit into the story of Britain,
archeologist Matt Williams
and I have been
given special access
to the Museum of London.
Its unique collection
tells the story of the East
from this area's
earliest inhabitants.
So these people
beginning to settle
in the landscape around London?
The first Londoners.
And we'll get to see
parts of the museum
the public rarely get access to.
There are 20,000
skeletons down here.
Our first Dig Diary is not from
Britain, it's from Belgium,
but it explores a
very British story,
Wellington's
victory at Waterloo.
In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte
faced the Duke of Wellington
and his European
allies at Waterloo.
Wellington's victory
ended Napoleon's rule
and settled the fate
of modern Europe.
200 years later,
an international team of archeologists
traveled to Waterloo to
excavate the battlefield
for the first time,
hoping to understand
how one farmyard
had become pivotal
to the outcome of the battle,
and how the allied army
successfully defended that
farmyard against the odds.
According to
Wellington, Waterloo was
"the nearest-run thing you
ever saw in your life."
We know that his victory hinged
on finding a way
to get ammunition
to his outnumbered troops
stationed here at Hougoumont Farm,
but we don't have proof
for how he did it.
Now, archeologists from
Waterloo Uncovered are searching
for clues, and for evidence
of the French onslaught
fought off by Wellington's men.
We've been working
down in the stubble field
for the past three days,
and that was an area
that at the time of the
battle was occupied by a wood.
The French did advance
up through that wood,
and that fight within the
wood is not fully understood.
There are some eyewitness
accounts, but it's fairly vague.
We know Wellington's
men occupied the farm,
and now, for the first time,
we can understand how fiercely
they had to defend it, as the
team's investigations revealed
the intensity of
Napoleon's opening attack.
This tree faces
onto an open area
where we know there
was a lot of fighting.
There would have
been shooting coming
from the wall over
there, 40 yards away.
So either way, these
trees are gonna be
right on the backstop
for any sort of musketry
that's going on round here.
And, of course, at
chest height, balls
that have hit trees are gonna
be fired at human beings
who are milling
around these trees.
It's pretty remarkable, eh?
200 years later,
it's all still here.
Wellington had 1,200
men defending Hougoumont.
It's believed that Napoleon
sent 4,000 to take it.
And now metal detecting is
revealing definitive proof
of that savage
assault by the French.
By the wall, picking
up multiple targets.
They look like
French musket balls,
all concentrated within
probably a foot square.
I've picked up four; one
of them, if you can see,
that's if I don't
drop it, is embedded.
It's still got brick dust on it.
The shot
struck the southern wall,
which the records say
was where Napoleon ordered
his attack to begin.
Now, inside the farm, the
team uncover great quantities
of French musket balls,
which reveal how desperately
Napoleon's army
fought to get in.
Further in, we're
looking at musket shot
that has been fired at
close range, it's impacted.
So what it looks
like we've got here,
is French making it at
least to the top of the wall
and firing down
into the enclosure,
possibly also through
the loopholes.
All of which has
gotta be defended,
so I think what we've
got is a picture
of a very, very brutal
fight on the wall top,
much more so than the accounts,
in some cases,
lead us to believe.
Records tell us
that the British defense
of the southern wall held firm,
while on the north side of
the farm, more French troops
desperately attacked the
heavy gates of the farmyard.
It's a pretty formidable
target once it's closed.
But you have to close
the gates first,
and that's where the whole
battle could have turned.
So we're opening the gates;
check, no Frenchmen, okay.
The gates had been left open.
30 French soldiers seized
their chance and burst through.
If reinforcements
managed to join them,
a British massacre and a
French victory at Waterloo
would have been inevitable.
An absolute desperate fight,
and the men who came
to close this gate
left that fight
going on behind them,
turned their backs on it,
and pushed the gate closed
against this great
press of Frenchmen
who had seized the advantage
and were trying to get in.
So, a pretty key
moment in the battle.
According to the history books,
Wellington's Coldstream
Guards forced the gates closed
and saved their
army from disaster.
But on day seven, the team
finds possible evidence
to show that Napoleon only
intensified his efforts
to seize the farm.
What you have here is
basically a hollow ball,
packed with gunpowder; it
was fired by the French
from the ridge
behind the complex.
That fire happened in the
afternoon of the battle,
and the idea was, basically,
to burn down the buildings.
And they succeeded in that.
These explosive shells
set fire to the chateau,
the house, which
burned to the ground,
and the various outbuildings
were burned as well.
And so, from this,
on the face of it,
fairly unexciting lump of rust,
we've added another
piece to the jigsaw
that is the battle of Waterloo.
Napoleon followed this barrage
with an attack on the blazing
farm by another 5,500 men.
But Wellington could only
call upon an extra 800,
leaving him in a
precarious position.
To hold the farm, he needed
to keep his outnumbered troops
supplied with ammunition,
and a trench dug in a sunken
road at the back of the farm
may reveal for the first
time how he did it.
I think that
is the 1815 surface.
What makes you think it's 1815?
The pottery and the
coin that came out.
The artifacts from
the bottom of this trench date
to the year of the battle,
showing that 200 years ago,
the road's surface was several
feet lower than it is today.
- I think
- That would have provided
the Allies were crucial
cover from the French.
- I think what
- And the team also think
that this sunken road gave
Wellington hidden access
to the farm, to get
his supply wagons in
without the French noticing.
If you've actually got
quite an enclosed hedge line
and you've got, literally,
almost a tunnel,
then that would have given
him so much better cover.
And although it was
still their feat,
to get the horse and wagon
down here under French attack,
and then to get it
across to the gate
and into Hougoumont Farm,
it does, actually, to me,
give me a better picture of what
the surroundin'
must have been like.
This dig may have
finally revealed
Wellington's secret
advantage, a hidden road
that enabled him to
keep his troops armed,
to defend Hougoumont Farm,
defeat Napoleon and win
the Battle of Waterloo.
To explain more about
how the battle was fought
and its grim aftermath, the
dig team have brought some
of their finds into our lab.
So Charlie, how important
was Hougoumont Farm
in the battle here,
in the context of
Waterloo, or generally?
Certainly for Wellington's
army it was very important.
The French are in blue and
the British are in red,
and Hougoumont, here, stands
together with the wood
to the south and the orchard
in front of this ridge,
guarding Wellington's
right flank.
Had the French got
through at Hougoumont
and seized control of that,
they would have been able
to secure, potentially,
a battle-winning advantage.
I think we always tend to think,
or at least I always tend
to think, of Waterloo being
a battle of the British
against the French.
But, Dominique, there were
other people there as well?
Oh, yes, there's a lot
of other nations involved
in the conflict and
you have Hanoverians,
Anglo-Dutch,
Brunswick, Belgo-Dutch
and, of course, the Prussians.
They played an essential
role in the English victory.
We've got some
of the finds here.
Dominique, can you
tell me what that is?
Well, I can tell you that
it's a French musket ball,
because it's smaller
than the English one,
as you can see, very clearly.
I think we've uncovered why
there was an Allied victory.
They simply had
bigger musket balls!
And the fact that the
French one are smaller
than the English one means
that the English can
re-use French musket balls,
which is not the
case on the contrary.
So the English could
fit the smaller bullets,
the smaller musket balls,
back into your own rifle.
Oh, so it IS a
significant advantage, yeah.
So the documentary sources,
the eyewitness accounts
and the archeological finds,
they do agree on one thing,
this was a brutal battle.
Do we have any idea what the
total human cost actually was?
Yeah, probably
around 12,000 killed.
And you have to add to that the
wounded and the disappeared,
so around 50,000 people.
And what happened to
all the bodies then?
Most of the armies
would have moved on
by the time we get round
to burying the dead,
so we're talking about
local people, the farmers,
the peasants, the people
who lived on the land,
trying to get rid
of these bodies
that will be stinking,
causing a great mess
and getting in the
way of agriculture.
So they're tipped into
a grave and got rid of.
Anything that is useful,
can be used, can be sold,
will be stripped from them,
and the bodies will be disposed
of as quickly as possible.
Scavenging among the dead
for valuables was grim enough,
but around at the time of
the Battle of Waterloo,
this common practice took
an altogether darker turn.
I've come to see the
evidence for myself,
right in the depths of
the Museum of London.
Well, this is the Museum
of London's bone store,
and every one of these boxes
contains at least
one human skeleton.
In total, there are 20,000
skeletons down here.
Amongst them is
remarkable evidence
of a macabre but
lucrative trade,
one made possible by the
vanity of London's rich,
and the huge death rates
at battles like Waterloo.
So this is an incredible
bit of dental work
that's been carried out?
Yeah, I mean,
this is remarkable.
So this is the mandible,
the lower jaw of a female,
and she was buried at
St. Marylebone Church
and we know her name because
she had a coffin plate,
and that survived
in enough detail
for us to be able to
read what her name was.
So she's Mrs. Charlotte
Bampton Taylor,
and we know that she died in
1837 and was 77 years old.
And to be buried where she was
would indicate she had money,
she was high-status,
and, looking at this
that you can see here,
which is a rather remarkable
piece of dentistry.
Is that a
real tooth that's there?
Yes, yes.
It's a false tooth in her mouth.
Yes.
But it looks
like real human tooth.
Yeah, it does, it's fantastic.
So it is a real human
tooth, from somebody else,
and it's been put into an
ivory plug to fit it in,
and then to actually stabilize
it within her own mouth
and around the teeth
is this metal wire
that's been wrapped around,
and that, from tests,
has come back as being
platinum, so, very expensive.
It's an extraordinary piece
of 200-year-old dentistry.
But more extraordinary still
is where the tooth itself
may have come from.
When we see this sort
of form of dentistry,
we have a term that we relate
to as "Waterloo teeth."
Related to the
Battle of Waterloo?
Yes, and that's because
we know that, unfortunately,
when these men were
involved in these battles
in somewhere such as Waterloo,
you've got very
high death rates,
you've got lots of
people that are dying,
you then have an opportunity
to actually claim something
to make money, and that
would be the teeth.
The teeth were very lucrative.
So people would
actually then go around
extracting the
teeth to then sell
and use in other
people's mouths
It's extraordinary.
So you've got this
well-heeled woman,
she's lost quite a few
- Yes, yes.
- She's lost this tooth
right in the front, which
does affect her appearance,
and she's paid to have this
expensive dental work done
so that she can
smile at somebody
with a dead man's
tooth in her mouth.
Yes.
Stories like these are
why I love archeology.
It has the power to shock us
with grim revelations like this
about what London's rich
did in the name of vanity.
And it can surprise us, too,
with new insights
into an iconic battle
that defined Britain and
Europe for centuries.
But few of
archeology's surprises
come as unexpectedly as
in our next dig diary.
It comes from Lenborough
in Buckinghamshire,
where one amateur made
the find of a lifetime.
In the early 11th century,
marauding Vikings
terrorized southern England.
Ethelred was the
Anglo-Saxon ruler
who attempted to buy peace,
paying off the invading armies
with sack loads of silver.
It was a waste of money.
Within a generation, England
was ruled by a Danish king
and the Viking
conquest was complete.
1,000 years later,
in Buckinghamshire,
an amateur metal detectorist
made an astonishing discovery,
including evidence of the
desperation of the Anglo-Saxons
in the face of
the Viking threat.
And luckily, he had
a camera with him.
In December 2014, Paul
Coleman was taking part
in an annual metal-detectorist
rally in Lenborough,
and he was planning
to call it a day.
After an hour and a half,
we'd got back to the same point
we'd virtually started
from, and decided that,
with only one musket ball
to show between three of us,
that there wasn't a
great deal in this field,
or if there was, it was
too deep for us to pick up.
My friend's detector
interferes with mine.
The radio frequencies
are very close,
so I asked him if
he would move over.
He said his was fine,
so I should move.
So I did, I moved four
or five yards away
and walked immediately
onto a large signal,
which turned out to be
a really large signal.
As Paul began to dig down,
he saw something unmistakable.
So as soon as I saw that shiny
disc, I knew it was a coin.
I also know that it was
potentially more than one,
because the signal was
really large, so I just had
an inkling that this was
gonna be something special.
When I bent down to pick that
one up and I saw the others,
that's when I realized that
this was a large hoard of coins.
With the help of the
Portable Antiquities Scheme,
Paul uncovered a lead
container overflowing
with silver and gold coins.
He could scarcely
believe his eyes.
There's some
serious cash down there.
- He had one job.
- Yeah, one job.
All he had to do was
look after the find.
I bet he had a bad day
when he never
brought these back.
Straight away
they began to wonder
where this huge
fortune had come from.
Then they spotted a
clue, the name of a king.
That looks like Ethelred.
Is it?
Wow, I think, is that Ethelred?
Well, it says
on there, can you not?
Yeah, I think it's Ethelred.
Ethelred was the English
king from 978 AD to 1016.
He was so desperate to
end the Vikings' raids,
he tried to pay them to go away.
Ethelred's name is crucial
to dating these coins
to sometime in his
reign, 1,000 years ago.
It's getting
to the bottom, in't it?
It's gettin' dark in here.
Lot of people
Yes.
Be careful, 'cause some of
them are really brittle.
Light was fading.
Under the guidance
of an archeologist
from the Portable
Antiquities Scheme,
Paul and his friends worked
quickly and carefully
to rescue the treasure, but
the stash seemed never-ending.
- Oh!
- It's a sad day
when you run out of bags
to fill silver coins
up with, in't it?
Oh, just bring up
Especially when
they're that deep.
Shall we just
leave the rest, then,
because we haven't got any bags?
- Like you could afford to.
- Yeah, we have.
Oh, we've got some
more, okay, okay, okay.
Just put less in.
E-mail head
office and see who's
See if they know whether
the coin guy's in.
They took the hoard back
to the safety of a
local farmer's kitchen
and spent the rest of the night
counting out their treasure.
5,252 silver coins,
each one a millennium old,
many in near-mint condition
and priceless to historians.
They were sent to
the British Museum,
where numismatist Gareth
Williams began piecing together
what this remarkable
hoard could tell us
about Britain 1,000 years ago.
Now he's brought along the
most revealing specimens
for us to look at in our lab.
Well, Gareth, these coins are
looking absolutely beautiful
now that they've
been cleaned up,
and this is just a small
sample of the collection.
That's right,
altogether, over 5,000 coins,
so one of the largest hoards
of Anglo-Saxon coins
ever discovered.
And when do they date to?
They date to the late
Anglo-Saxon period.
And we've got coins
in here of two kings,
Ethelred II, who ruled
from 978 to 1016,
and his successor Canute,
who ruled from 1016 to 1035.
We've got the savings
hoard of the earlier part,
and then a currency
hoard, coins withdrawn
from what was current
at a time of burial,
which is the last few
years of Canute's reign,
so probably sometime
in the 1030s.
Can you pull out
one of each ruler?
May I
Yes, certainly.
Here is Ethelred II.
And here is Canute.
Now, these aren't portraits
of either of them.
Coins of this period generally
just imitate late
Roman imperial designs.
And both of those are just
images of late Roman emperors
with the king's name on.
Canute was the
Danish king determined
to seize power in England and
to establish Viking rule here.
In desperation, King Ethelred
resorted to throwing money
at the problem, earning himself
an unfortunate nickname.
The English kingdom,
which was more or less
quite a new creation
by the 10th century,
was under a lot of
pressure by Viking raids,
from Viking armies,
increasingly,
during the reign of Ethelred.
And we know Ethelred as
Ethelred the Unready.
The indication is that it's
a contemporary nickname.
And the response to
these Viking raids
seems to be paying in
greater quantities of money
to Vikings quite simply
to go away, as well.
And we know the
Vikings don't go away.
They see the English
kingdom, which was very rich
by this time, as a
great source of wealth.
The coins in this hoard reveal
how desperate Ethelred became
when faced with a
full-scale Viking invasion.
So Ethelred tried
paying them to go away.
That didn't work; he tried
fighting them to drive them away.
That didn't work, but he
also tried a third method,
and that's also
represented in this hoard
by a rather unusual
type of coin.
And, you can see, this doesn't
have a royal image on it.
Yeah, I can see
this is a little lamb.
He's carrying a
cross under his arm.
He's got a halo as well.
So we're quite clear about
it being a holy lamb.
This seems to be part of
a sort of coordinated year
of prayer and increased
piety in the year 1009.
The point was that the Vikings
were seen as God's judgment
on the English for
their ungodly behavior,
and so the theory was if the
English became more godly,
maybe God would
reward them for that
with support
against the Vikings.
So literally reduced
to praying for help?
Exactly.
This new hoard reveals the
last hope of a desperate king.
Coins minted with
Christian imagery
in the hope that God would
help him beat the Vikings.
But Ethelred's
piety was in vain.
Canute seized power, and the
Viking conquest was complete.
Finds like this have
made it a remarkable year
for archeology in
the east of England.
And in London, one giant
engineering project
has offered an
unparalleled opportunity
to peel back the layers
of the capital's history
to reveal how the city
first began to boom.
Since Roman times, men and
women have flocked to London,
driving its population from
30,000 two millennia ago
to seven million today.
And the capital
is still growing.
This is one of its newest
and biggest developments,
Crossrail, London's high-speed
underground rail network.
It's a massive piece
of civil engineering.
But it's also a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
for archeologists.
The vast excavations are
revealing what life was like
for Londoners as the city
mushroomed over two millennia.
But what we're also discovering
is the cost in human life.
Liverpool Street railway
station, in the very heart
of the city's buzzing
financial district.
Right outside the station,
archeologists from Crossrail
and Museum of London
Archeology have uncovered clues
to the brutal violence
at the heart of Roman
rule in Britain.
We're workin' on
excavating this Roman road,
which is a major
Roman thoroughfare.
Yeah, so what we've
uncovered just in the last day
is a number of skulls
appearing in this area.
They're actually
mostly upside down,
so they're not
completely obvious.
There's literally a line
stretching from there,
is the last one we
found, all the way back
to the end of the dig.
The possibility is that
these are beheading victims.
Just a few days later,
another remarkable burial
shows more evidence
of Roman execution.
How's it goin', okay?
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, we've just had a
really interesting find
down here at Liverpool Street.
We're in the eastern
ticket hall excavation.
And we've just found
an intact burial
that most likely dates
to the Roman period,
and the most interesting
thing about it,
as you can probably see,
the skull has been
detached and placed
between the knees
of this individual.
There could be a number
of different reasons.
The first one, obviously, is
an execution and beheading.
We know that
Rome ruled its empire
with an iron fist, but
can remains like these
really be evidence of its
rough justice in Britain?
As an osteologist myself,
I want to see the
bones with my own eyes.
So Don and Jay have brought
one skeleton into our lab.
It's interesting to have
such explicit evidence
of decapitation at this site.
And I believe this skeleton
shows decapitation again?
Exactly, what we have here
is the remains of a male adult
that we found in the cemetery.
And what's very interesting
to see is in the neck area
on the first thoracic vertebra,
we have a very clear cut mark
going through the skeleton.
For example, this facet
would normally fit on here,
but it's been sliced off
by a very sharp blade,
and this cut has properly caused
the full decapitation
of this individual.
There's a polishing of
the bone, isn't there,
where the blade has
come through here?
So right at the base
of somebody's neck.
Do you think this would
have been a blow coming in
from the back, then?
We believe so, it seems
for the blade to have come in
and to have not affected
the other spinous processes,
it seems that the neck
probably was flexed,
in which case you'd suspect
that the cut did
come from the back.
Yes, so by looking
really carefully
at the orientation
of those cuts,
you can reconstruct
the grisly last moments
of that person's life.
Severed vertebrae.
Decapitated skulls.
It's chilling evidence
of the brutal reality
of Roman rule in Britain.
These discoveries have been made
thanks to Crossrail's
massive excavations.
But not all archeology involves
digging into the ground.
In the Thames Estuary,
a team of divers is
battling the elements
to solve a maritime mystery,
and they've sent
us this dive diary.
In 1665, Britain was gearing
up for war with the Dutch,
primarily to win back
valuable trade routes
to the New World.
Among the Royal Navy's
flagships was the London,
a mighty gunship 140 feet
long and armed with 76 cannon.
It's thought that on
the 8th of March, 1665,
she was still
crammed with guests
yet to disembark
further down the river,
when suddenly, in the
mouth of the Thames,
an explosion blew her to pieces.
No one knows what
caused that explosion,
and to have any hope
of solving the mystery,
the first challenge is
to rescue the London
from the savage currents
and ravenous wildlife
of the Thames Estuary
before she's lost forever.
In 2014, Cotswold
Archaeology, Historic England
and local Southend residents
launched a rescue mission.
The team returned in
the summer of 2015,
when they recorded this footage.
So this is day two,
and we're back out on
site of the London.
Our main objective
for this season,
which is the excavation
of the gun carriage.
This was found at
the end of last year,
and we just sort of
uncovered the very top of it.
So the priority for this season
is to continue excavating
the gun carriage.
We are ready to commence
dive operations now.
Unfortunately,
the wreck's location means
that the London isn't going
to give up her secrets easily.
Well, as you can see here,
we're right next to the
main shipping channel
in and out of the Thames.
So this is a very
busy shipping lane,
and some of the bigger ships
are churning up the water.
We know that because
when we're down there,
visibility goes from
okay to nothing,
and the noise kind of
vibrates through your chest.
But noise and poor visibility
aren't the team's
biggest problems.
As turbulence from passing
ships stirs up the sediment,
it exposes the site to the
destructive forces of nature.
So we've got marine organisms
like teredo and gribble
that eat the wood, and that
kind of just destroys it,
and that can happen
very quickly.
So this is what's
really important,
the work that we're doing,
and especially recovering
this gun carriage,
because if that remains
in situ as it is,
it will not be there
for very much longer.
Despite these
treacherous conditions,
the team has recovered
a wealth of finds,
which show how the Thames
silt can perfectly preserve
the artifacts hidden beneath it.
This looks really in
really good condition.
You can see the grain.
It doesn't look like
it was used very much
- at the time, either.
- No.
- There's not much in the
- Not much wear.
- Very nice.
- Yeah, nice.
- Well done, Steve.
- Some more recent finds.
This is what I recovered
a few weeks ago.
A little sundial compass.
To me, this would have been
like a Rolex watch of the day.
You would have the sundial,
the compass in there,
match it up, that
would have lifted up
and they could get
the dates or the time.
Steve believes
that this probably would have
belonged to one of the
higher-ranking crew members.
See now, the chap who had this
would be in the nice
cabin, you know,
far more comfortable than
down towards the bilges.
These are just a fraction
of the objects recovered
from the wreck so far.
But time and tide
wait for no man,
so the team's focus soon
returns to the star attraction.
The gun carriage is the
main objective of this week.
And we've been progressively
digging out that carriage
and trying to uncover
it as much as we can.
Once we've uncovered it,
the aim is to recover it.
Working in such poor visibility,
the team relies heavily
on the underwater survey,
which reveals much more detail
about the location of the
carriage within the wreck.
So this line here we think
is the bottom of it, you know,
close to the bottom of the ship.
And this kind of dark line here
is where the carriages are,
which looks like, well, what
we think is the main gun bit,
'cause that's what we think.
We've got the side of the
ship here, lying on its side
because the carriages
are pointing downwards
rather than lying horizontal.
And the fact that
the gun carriages,
or at least the one that we're
excavating at the moment,
has got all its associated
gun furniture, tackle,
kind of tells us that this
object, this artifact,
hasn't moved very far from
its original position.
Finally, on the
very last day of the dive,
and after three and a half
centuries lying on the seabed,
the wooden gun carriage is
rescued from the depths.
We've finally recovered
the gun carriage,
and that was a real effort.
It was in a really
awkward position
to try and get to the bottom
of it, it was, you know,
trapped under many artifacts,
very fragile artifacts,
so we had to recover them
carefully without destroying them.
But eventually we've got it out
and stropped it up
and recovered it,
and it was a great relief when
it finally broke the surface.
It was really amazing, actually,
to think that that's been
under the water for 350 years
and then suddenly it rises up.
Weighing in at around a ton,
this is the first
complete gun carriage
to be recovered from the London.
It's just one of a wealth of
clues rescued from the seabed.
Some of which offer
intriguing insights
into the final moments
on board the doomed ship.
These finds were all
made in a small area,
suggesting that the
London was jam-packed
with supplies and ammunition.
It sounds like the gunpowder
was all together then
in one place, to cause
such a massive explosion
to rip this whole ship apart.
The area that a lot of
the material has come from
is not much bigger
than this table.
These are only sort of a small
selection of what we found,
and yet we've got over
80 fragments of linstock,
a huge number of hand spikes.
And, well, it's early
days, but we would think
that perhaps we've either got
excess supplies on the ship
or, because it was fairly
early in the voyage,
perhaps they were putting
everything out on deck
to redistribute it
between all the guns
that were on the London.
So the ammunition
had yet to be safely stowed,
but one find shows how the
cannons would have been lit.
An incredible achievement,
to get that gun carriage
out of the water.
But here we have some of the
other artifacts, as well.
And what have we got here?
We've got a
selection of linstocks
that were used to light the
cannon from a safe distance.
I'm intrigued by these
items, how do they work?
They are turned wooden
sticks, basically.
And you would have a rope
wrapped around these,
which we call a slow match.
And the end of it passes
through this hole here
and is slowly smoldering
away at one end,
and then you hold it at the
end and light the cannon.
And on this particular one,
we've got some scorch marks,
obviously real evidence to
show that they have been used
and have been scorched
by the slow match
that was around them.
It seems, then,
that the London was
crammed with ammunition,
and she may also have
been crowded with guests
who were yet to
disembark downriver.
But the archeologists
also made further finds
which hint at a possible cause
of the terrible accident
waiting to happen.
There's some quite personal
items as well, really.
These are little
tobacco pipes, are they?
Yeah.
Tobacco pipes, though, I mean,
this was a ship that
was going out to war,
that obviously had
cannon on board,
you've got a ship that is
packed full of gunpowder
and you've got people smoking?
I know, it's a bit of
a recipe for disaster,
really, isn't it?
I guess Health and
Safety might have been
a bit different 350 years ago,
but with crew members,
you've got visitors on board,
you've got over 300
barrels of gunpowder,
naked flames from both the
linstock and people smoking,
from the candles; they're
going on their outward voyage
and then something
happened and it blew up.
So we don't necessarily
need to be looking
for a suspicious reason
for this explosion?
It doesn't need to have been
arson or done with any intent,
it could have purely
been an accident?
I think that's
probably most likely.
And I think a really
important message, as well,
which is, "Do not
get on a warship
"full of gunpowder and smoke."
Yes.
We may finally
have a plausible theory
to explain the London disaster.
A flagship vessel fully
loaded with gunpowder,
a distracted crew, and
someone's disastrous mistake.
The Museum of London bone store
holds more evidence of
the dangers of naval life.
This man served in
Nelson's Navy in the 1800s,
and lived to well over 50,
but his skeleton tells us that
his life at sea was brutal.
Although, obviously, we're
looking at him as a skeleton,
and he's dead, what we're trying
to do is look at the things
that we can see on
the bones to tell us
what actually then may
have happened in their life
and how then they coped with it.
And looking at his
skeleton, he's remarkable,
because when we see lots
of the things that we do,
he obviously had a hard life
and managed to survive lots
of nasty insults and impacts.
This collarbone has
got a healed fracture in it.
- Yes.
- Now, that must have happened
years before this
individual died,
'cause it's healed quite nicely,
although it has never
regained its original shape.
So these are the kind of
fractures that you might sustain
from a fall onto the shoulder;
are there any other injuries?
There are, he's got some
fractures to the ribs,
again, all on one side, and
they would appear to follow
a similar pattern to the
clavicle, so that might indicate
that that's happening
at the same time,
it's the same event.
We've then also got the
fracture of the femur.
- We can see there.
- It does make you wonder
if this all happened
at the same time,
it's all on the right-hand
side of his body.
- Yes.
- And these are the kinds
of fractures that you
might get, for instance,
from falling from a height;
what else, Jelena, then?
And he's also got a fracture
to the first metacarpal.
And then we've got the fractures
are there on the radius,
where you tend to sort of
fall, you put your hand out.
- He's got a broken nose.
- Yeah.
So you can sort of see, there,
you've again healed, but you've
got that sort of deflection.
Well, again, this is most likely
not to have been
caused by a fall,
but actually to have
been caused by some,
what shall we call
it, how do we say,
- interpersonal aggression?
- Interpersonal aggression.
- Punched in the face?
- Yes.
With the vertebrae
that you can see here,
they are all very frilly,
they shouldn't look like that.
And then you can see
where you've actually got
some crushing of the
vertebrae, so if we come there
to that one
Oh, yes.
That's lost a lot of height.
So a thoracic vertebra,
a vertebra from the
back of the chest.
There's a fairly
normal-looking vertebra
and there's the one
that suffered this
- Rather thin, yes.
- wedge fracture.
Yes, yes.
So that's been completely
squashed, reduced in height,
so he's got a whole
suite of changes
that you would be looking at,
but also then you're thinking
of the consequences and impact
of how he would be able to
function in a daily life,
but also how he was functioning
while he was still at sea,
and then also later
on in older age,
the potential pain, discomfort,
that you might have from these.
It's phenomenal when you're
looking at the skeleton
and you can see so many things
that have affected them in life.
But the fact that they
actually were able to survive,
and particularly when
we think of the times
in which they lived, they
wouldn't have had all the things
to help them that we do now,
so that's even more amazing,
that they've actually
survived, really.
So they really were
hardy and tough.
The London set sail in 1656,
just as our navy began to assert
its will across the world.
Within 200 years,
Britannia ruled the waves.
Sailors like this man
made that possible,
and he was left with the scars.
But in the mid-20th
century, the tables turned,
and Britain was on the back foot
as it desperately
defended itself
against savage attacks
by Hitler's Luftwaffe.
But one thing remained the same,
Britons put themselves on
the line for their country.
Our next dig takes
us to West Sussex,
where archeologists
are shining a new light
on a story we think we know so
well, the Battle of Britain.
But their new discovery
reveals forgotten heroes,
a machine and a pilot.
In the summer of 1940,
waves of German Luftwaffe
filled our skies.
Hitler's plan, crush
the smaller RAF
and then launch a
full-scale invasion.
Standing in his way,
the iconic Spitfires
and their daring British pilots.
But a dig on this
hillside is reminding us
that Spitfires didn't
win the Battle of Britain
on their own, and that
our British pilots
weren't the only heroes.
We are excavating the remains
of a Hurricane shot down
in the Battle of Britain on
the 9th of September 1940.
Hawker Hurricanes
actually shot down
50% more enemy planes
than did Spitfires,
yet it's the Spitfire whose
name has become iconic.
The Hurricane was, if you
like, the forgotten hero
of the Battle of Britain,
I mean, it's not forgotten,
but it didn't get all the
glamor of the Spitfire.
Unfortunately,
this Hurricane never made it
back to base.
This is the impact crater,
it's slightly ovalled.
It's where the aircraft's
come down and hit.
Then, obviously, the
weight of the aircraft
has displaced all the
earth and the chalk.
We've had pistons and valves
and bits of engine cases.
So now we've cleaned it
up, we can see where it is.
We can now proceed to go down
and see what else is there.
Amongst the
finds recovered is evidence
of the sheer violence
of the impact.
This is part of
the ammunition box
that contained the 303 rounds
for one of the machine guns.
It's just a thin aluminum box,
but when the aircraft crashed,
there was a lot of
ammunition on it,
and what happened was the
force pushed all the ammunition
down into the box, and
we can actually see here,
this is one of the bullets.
It's actually punched
its way through the box
and made a very neat
little hole there.
So that's a cracking find.
75 years to
the day after the crash,
one of the larger
pieces is discovered,
part of the propeller assembly
from the nose of the plane,
and it has survived intact.
This is where the
propeller blade would go,
so the propeller blade
was sticking out here,
and that would be rotating.
And there'll be
another one about here
and another one about here.
So you've got the
three-blade rotor hub.
Here to help
with the heavy lifting
is a group from
Operation Nightingale,
an initiative to
rehabilitate British soldiers
recently returned
from active service.
The team today is largely
composed of military veterans.
Excitingly for us, we've
got three Polish soldiers
that have served in Afghanistan.
And they're working
alongside British veterans,
people who've fought in
Afghanistan and Iraq,
but also people who've
served in Northern Ireland
and, indeed, in the
Falklands campaign.
For these Polish
veterans, this is a chance
to celebrate the other
unsung heroes of the story,
the Polish pilots who fought
for the Allies in
squadrons like the 303.
This is great for me,
because the pilots
with the Division 303
is Polish heroes.
Polish flying heroes.
And Sergeant Wunsche,
this is great, great pilot
with the Squadron.
303 Squadron was
a predominantly Polish unit,
and it became the most
successful in the Battle of Britain,
shooting down 108 German
planes in a single month.
The Polish pilots, they
were almost, if you like,
the forgotten heroes of
the Battle of Britain.
They were relatively
small in number,
and what they did, it's just
like the Hurricane, really,
was disproportionate
to their numbers,
but they achieved an
incredibly high kill score.
Their determination to get at
the enemy was second to none,
for obvious reasons, their
country had been invaded.
So consequently, their kill
rate of enemy aircraft destroyed
was significantly higher
than any other squadron.
21-year-old Kazimierz
Wunsche was a sergeant
in 303 Squadron; when his
Hurricane was shot down
on the 9th of September 1940.
Luckily he managed to
parachute to safety,
and as the presence
here of his daughter
and granddaughter testifies,
he lived to tell the tale.
He was slightly injured.
The oil blew into his
face, so he had some burns,
and he had, there
was something injured
in his leg and in his back.
But after staying in Hove
Hospital for a month,
he went back to flying,
so he was flying until
the end of the war.
My grandfather died
when I was six months old,
so I never got to
really know him,
and I'm amazed that
we've found this plane.
The last person to see it intact
before it went into the
ground was my grandfather,
and that means a lot to me.
There's a piece, I
think I'll remember it
till the end of my days,
it's the Morse panel.
He would have touched that,
he would have looked at that
on a daily basis, every
time he got into the plane.
If his radio had gone down,
that might have saved his life.
And so to see the words
"Morse" and all the other bits
on that piece is
just incredible,
and it does make me feel a
real connection with him.
The 75th anniversary
of the crash is marked
by a rare sight, a fly-past
by a fully restored original
World War II Hurricane.
- You've got really quiet.
- Yeah.
Now what are you
actually hoping to discover
by undertaking an
excavation like this?
Because we know that Hurricanes
were used in the war.
We know that Hurricanes
went down in the war.
And in fact we know that
this actual Hurricane
went down in the war,
so what other information
are you hoping to glean?
This really is not
going to change the story
of the Battle of
Britain, clearly.
However, you can get
little vignettes from it,
and it's the personal stories.
Occasionally you get bits
of kits from the pilot.
The ammunition will
also tell you a story
about that particular
day in September 1940
in the hope that this aircraft
was gonna bring down some
of those attacking aircraft.
I think that's really
important to remember,
that the Poles played
a very big role,
but there were pilots from
Czechoslovakia, as well as
French pilots, there was
a couple of Americans,
South Africans, Australians,
people from all around
the world contributing
to this global effort to
stop this hideous entity
from being able to invade.
And so this artifact,
although it is just a bullet,
it's way more than that,
because this has got a
narrative of those days in 1940
and, you know, a critical part
of our island's history, really.
What do you think it was
about the Polish pilots
that gave them such
a good kill rate?
I think there's
almost a visceral hatred
that goes on with
the Polish pilots.
We've been talking about
the defending of Britain,
with the Battle of Britain.
Now the Poles didn't
have that luxury in 1939.
Their country had been invaded.
It's the reason, substantially,
Britain goes to war.
And so they are fighting to
try and liberate their country,
and the only way they
can do it at that time
is to fight back
at the Luftwaffe,
and so they are a
determined bunch.
They're a group with anger.
They're a group that
perform incredibly well.
And despite this plane
crashing, of course,
Wunsche himself
escapes, and as we saw,
his daughter and
granddaughter in the film,
and I think the archeology
was very important to them.
It was, and to be able
to have that hands-on
for your family tree,
that's a physical
manifestation of your heritage
which is really,
really powerful.
So you're able to
put your fingers
where your grandfather or father
had put his in the cockpit,
or to look through a piece
of Perspex, a bit of glass,
so you are looking through
that same viewing screen
that your relative had,
and that's a really strange
feeling in archeology,
to be able to have
that direct connection
with people from the past.
This dig has
helped a family connect
with their war hero
from a brave generation,
and reminds us all
about the foreign pilots
who risked everything
to save Britain.
It reveals the
power archeology has
to tell our stories,
whatever the era,
from a bloody battle
fought in our skies in 1940
to the brutal oppression
of Roman rule.
While from the
silt of the Thames
and from a trench in Waterloo
new clues have helped us
solve age-old mysteries,
to reveal not only
what came before us,
but to show how our past
still shapes who we are today.
Next time on "Digging for
Britain," we're in the North
scrambling for clues to
the first kings of Scotland
I think I got it.
We're there for the
Viking find of a lifetime.
- Oh, wow!
- Oh!
Oh, do we have a winner here?
And unearth
a forgotten graveyard
of ancient warriors.
It looks absolutely fantastic.