Digging for Britain (2010) s09e02 Episode Script
South
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Everywhere you look, the rich
history of the United Kingdom
is there to be seen.
But hidden beneath our feet there's
still a wealth of
archaeological treasure just waiting
to be found.
That's why each year, up and down
the country, our archaeologists
dig down,
searching for fresh discoveries
Another one.
revealing the imprint of ancient
civilizations
So we are looking at a completely
unknown Roman town. That's crazy.
Wow.
and unearthing priceless objects.
Might be a pendant.
Oh, yeah, I can see that.
This is something special,
isn't it?
Yeah, I've not seen anything like it
so far.
Every dig adds new pieces to the
ever-growing archaeological jigsaw
Do you want to come
and have a look?
that is the epic story of
our islands.
It's been an extraordinary year
full of challenges
and yet I've been able to visit
so many exciting digs
up and down the country.
Oh, my goodness!
There have been spine-tingling
discoveries to witness.
That is the face of a Trojan. Yes.
My heart is racing!
And I'm even getting a chance
to use a trowel myself.
I'm joined by a trio of expert
investigators
I can actually see the texture
of the weave
and it's, what, 1,600 years old?
It's amazing that a small DNA sample
like this
can tell that really quite big
story.
as they dig deeper for answers.
Exactly.
Finally, the archaeologists bring
their best finds into the studio
Whisk that away.
You can see that this object has
had a life of its own.
for up-close analysis.
It's astonishing detail.
Welcome to Digging For Britain.
This time we take a look at
the latest archaeological finds
from the south of the U K.
Under a Norman church,
spectacular evidence of the demise
of Roman Britain is uncovered
She's been kind of almost violently
destroyed, I think.
Certainly the cremation urns have
been thrown into that ditch
with no care. Do you think?
a Bronze Age settlement has got
archaeologists stumped
I'm convinced we've got
a roundhouse here,
it's just a bit confusing at
the moment.
and I get my hands on some
genuine old money.
So these are among some of the first
coins made in Britain.
Wow.
With its coastline facing an often
turbulent European continent,
the south of England has been
the starting point for several
hostile takeovers.
Perhaps the most successful
started in 1066.
The sudden arrival of the Normans
would kick-start a new epoch
in the history of our islands.
Today, I'm visiting a parish that
stood slap bang in the way
of William the Conqueror's rolling
conquest - Stoke Mandeville.
As they settled, the Normans built
new churches all over England
with communities growing up
around them.
But that's not what happened here.
In this gentle valley, just south of
Stoke Mandeville,
is this isolated church surrounded
by fields
and nobody knows why it was built
here.
Built around 1080, the church
of St Mary's was strangely
located in this damp, isolated spot,
half a mile from the village.
When, in the 19th century,
Stoke Mandeville got
a more convenient new church,
the old Norman church soon became
neglected,
fell into ruin and was eventually
demolished.
Now, the new high-speed rail line
HS2 needs to pass through
the ruin of old St Mary's,
so under cover of this vast tent,
a team of archaeologists is
excavating thousands of graves
and preserving any historic
artefacts.
It's also a fantastic opportunity
to solve the centuries-long mystery
of why the church was built here.
Lead archaeologist Rachel Wood
hopes to find an answer.
Rachel, so this is it?
This is the mysterious church of
St Mary's, then? It is, yes.
And what you can actually see is
the very bottom of the foundations.
There's something really curious
about it though, isn't there,
that it's just out here
in the countryside?
It seems to be some way away from
any settlement.
That was definitely one of our
questions that we're trying to answer -
why is there a church, essentially,
in the middle of an unoccupied field?
Right, cos I think the most obvious
answer would have been that actually
it was part of a medieval village or
a medieval town.
Yes, and it would have been
serving that settlement.
But our works have proven
that that is not the case,
so the mystery is continuing.
In the surrounding area, Rachel's
team have uncovered evidence of
earlier Bronze Age, Iron Age
and even Roman activity.
But what of the centuries
that followed?
We don't have any evidence for any
Saxon activity in this landscape
at all at the minute.
That's really strange.
There's a distinct gap, yeah.
So you've got Iron Age
Roman activity
and then you've got a gap of 600
years. Something like that, yes.
And then suddenly the Normans decide
to build this church here? Yes.
So there must have been a reason.
We're hoping to find some evidence
of some earlier activity
once we get underneath
the church foundations.
So there's a real mystery here to
solve then, isn't there? Absolutely.
Why do you have a church suddenly
appearing in this space
in the landscape
in the 11th century?
The answer to this mystery could lie
somewhere beneath these foundations.
As part of the excavation,
the skeletons from the churchyard
need to be carefully removed
and they'll be reinterred.
The team's been recording
their fascinating finds
from the graves
using our Dig Diary cameras.
We've got an adult male and at his
feet a china plate,
which is an interesting find because
they're known as salt plates,
placed in with the individual
as a sign of purity,
as a sign of eternal life.
A plate of salt at the feet was
intended to offer protection
in the afterlife,
to ward off the devil.
Underneath the superstitious
Victorians
are graves from the flamboyant
Georgian era.
Though even the fanciest wooden
coffins
have often completely rotted away.
That's Ruth Jackson and you can see
just in the side of the grave there,
some gold - plated coffin studs.
Oh, yes,
I can see those standing out there.
So they're still shining and gold
because gold doesn't tarnish. Yes.
So she must have been quite wealthy
to have gold on her coffin.
Yeah, so the Jacksons are one
of the prominent families
and she died at the ripe old age of
90 Wow in 1727.
How do you know her name?
So, as we removed the original
rubble mound covering the church,
her gravestone was actually
still in place and intact.
It kind of emerged
out of the rubble.
We had no idea it was there.
I mean, graves that have been
completely forgotten about
and you're uncovering them again
and telling these stories.
I really think that's
one of the best things we can do
for the burial population here
at St Mary's is to remember them.
Gravestones make the archaeologists'
detective work a lot simpler.
Other objects take a little more
work to decipher.
This is a bone object.
It's turned and it was found next
to a gentleman's head.
Roughly the same period as
Ruth Jackson, so roughly the 1700s.
Wow, what on earth is that?
We have a theory.
The theory is you would put
a piece of cloth
with a dab of your blood on it
and some honey in it
and you would put it in
your Georgian's men's wig
and all of the fleas running around
in the wig would be attracted
by the blood on the cloth and then
get stuck in the honey in the pot.
It's a flea catcher, a flea trap?
A flea catcher, yeah.
I've never heard of such a thing.
That's just bizarre.
It's very bizarre.
There's some residue inside it,
so you might even be able to test
that and find out what it is.
Hopefully, yes.
So far, St Mary's is giving up
fascinating secrets from
the Georgian and Victorian eras but
the big mystery of why the Normans
chose to build their church here,
so far from the village, remains.
The deeper the team dig, the closer
they may be getting to the answer.
Are you almost down to the bottom
of the foundations, then?
Absolutely, yeah.
We are nearly at the bottom
of the stone walls
and it's as we get beneath those
that we're hoping to find out
whether or not there was anything
else under the Norman church.
I bet you're itching for the day
when you can start
to excavate down here.
Absolutely.
Nearby, the team has been storing
stonework from the ruin
for further analysis
and re-use in a new memorial
but something here catches my eye.
Now, this piece of stone really
leapt out at me.
It's a different sort of stone.
So this is not the same stone
as most of that Norman church
is made of.
Could it be part of an Anglo-Saxon
church
that predates the Norman church?
Could it be even earlier?
Could it be Roman?
And I think as this dig progresses,
we might get to the bottom of it.
But it represents the whole
mystery of St Mary's in microcosm.
My drawing is put on hold,
as while we're on site, there's
breaking news from the dig tent.
So there's been all this speculation
about whether there's
an earlier phase here at St Mary's
and I think some really exciting
evidence has just emerged.
Archaeologist Shirley Mihailova has
made the discovery.
Shirley, what have you found? What
have you found?
I have found a very interesting
coin.
It's a long cross silver penny.
So do you know when it dates to?
It potentially dates from
978 to 1016 AD
because it has the head of
Aethelred II on it.
Aethelred II.
That's Aethelred The Unready. Yes.
I mean, this is an Anglo-Saxon king.
Yes.
This must be the first bit of
evidence that you've had
which definitely predates the Norman
period? Yes.
This is just fantastic.
The late tenth, early 11th century,
before the Norman church.
Do you think this coin is associated
with this burial?
It does make sense with the
location,
it being around the pelvic area,
so potentially from a pocket.
So I do believe that it was
with the individual.
That's amazing. Thank you very much.
I just can't believe that's just come out of the
ground, while I'm here. Yes, it's absolutely amazing.
I'm so excited!
This coin is a really enticing
find for the dig team.
At last, St Mary's church is
hinting at a past that predates
any Norman structure.
Having been left on tenterhooks
about what else the team might find,
archaeologists Rachel Wood and
Guy Hunt
have come to the Digging For Britain
tent to give me an update.
So, Rachel and Guy, if we look at
the photograph from site,
is that the Norman church
foundations? That's right, yeah.
So you can see the Norman
foundations really clearly there in white.
And you can see a big circular dark
ditch coming around,
just around here. Oh, yeah. It's
quite dark.
And then the more exciting part
is that you can see
the foundations of a small
structure.
Yeah.
And because it's sealed by the
foundations for the Norman church,
we know that it predates the Norman
period
and it's very exciting
because it is actually Saxon.
Guy's beautiful 3D model of
the burial site
has every grave etched in.
Now he can add the newly-discovered
pre-Norman ditch
and a Saxon building.
We think it's actually
the base of a kind of tower.
So we know that in the later
part of the Saxon period
there's a tradition for building
these towers.
So there are 30 or 40 of these
known,
either from excavation or still
surviving, in England.
So this is a tower without
a church?
That's right. We think it would
have just been a tower.
So you're talking about something
that could be used as a watchtower.
It could also be used as a bell
tower.
It could be used as a private
chapel.
It's a kind of an essential part of
this lordly kit,
the stuff that you need in order
to be considered as an aristocrat
in that late Saxon period.
When the land changes and it becomes
owned by the Bishop of Lincoln,
they basically demolish the tower,
get rid of it,
and they build their Norman chapel
right on top of it, like that.
Yeah, and it's disappeared.
I mean, that mark of Anglo-Saxon
power has been
eradicated from the landscape
as well.
It's a really strong and powerful
statement of this kind of transition
of power that happens between one
set of aristocrats and another.
Yeah. So, Rachel,
what's underneath the Saxon tower?
Well, we're keeping our fingers crossed
for perhaps an even earlier building.
We would love to find, you know,
evidence for something like a Roman temple.
But whether or not something like
that was there in the first place
and then has survived
the construction of a tower
and then the Norman church
and then 800 years-worth of burials,
it's quite a slim chance really.
You've got a few more weeks left on
site.
This story is not quite
finished yet.
We're nearly there.
Little did we know then but another
even older layer of archaeology
underneath St Mary's was just weeks
away from being discovered.
Luckily, our cameras were there
to capture the excitement
and later in the programme I get to
take a very close look at what could
be some of the most important Roman
artefacts ever found in Britain.
Yeah, it's definitely quit now,
retire now!
Yeah, we'll retire now, that's it.
It's never going to be as good!
When you've got buildings
made of stone,
they're relatively easy
to interpret,
especially when they're upstanding,
like this fantastic Norman keep.
But for much of pre-history,
our ancestors were making
and living in buildings which were
made of wood, thatch, clay, turf.
Materials that either disappear
completely
from the archaeological record or
leave only the faintest of traces.
And then we've got the challenge of
working out what materials a house
may have been made of in its
entirety
and what it would have looked like,
as we see in our next story.
We move to that gold mine
of archaeological opportunity,
the Ministry of Defence's training
area on Salisbury Plain.
The plain's 300-mile-square
chalk plateau
is a wonderful setting for
the undisputed heavyweight champion
of Britain's prehistoric monuments.
Thought to have originated around
5,000 years ago,
awe-inspiring Stonehenge is actually
just one of many mysterious traces
of ancient cultures that can be seen
across this atmospheric landscape.
But a lot here remains out of sight,
just a few feet below the surface.
The results from
a ground - penetrating radar survey
have led MoD archaeologist
Richard Osgood to suspect
that a Bronze Age settlement once
stood on this patch of exercise ground,
known as Dunch Hill.
We know on the track that we've
got over there,
there were four houses found in 1995
dating to the late Bronze Age.
And I want to see if that settlement that we
know about from that track extends further.
With a team of volunteer
ex-servicemen,
Richard's been looking for evidence
of a typical Bronze Age dwelling,
the Roundhouse.
That's a nice one.
The team's been recording their
search with our Dig Diary cameras.
We've just stripped off the top area
with a machine
and the really good things for us
are these small, dark splodges
cut into the chalk.
We're pretty hopeful they're going
to be post holes
and if we're looking for roundhouses
from the late Bronze Age,
then this is the sort of thing
we're looking for.
These are the remnants of posts
that hold up the roof.
3,000 years ago, during the Bronze
Age, the population of Britain
is thought to have
numbered in the tens of thousands.
Many people would have
lived in large roundhouses,
much like this recreation.
Thick wooden posts form the circular
structure that supports
the walls and a thatched roof.
At Dunch Hill, as with most
Roundhouse sites,
the materials used to build
the walls and the roof
have degraded over time.
You can sort of see the post holes
sort of go to there
and then they sort of angle up
a bit
All Richard's team have to work with
are what appear to be
the holes that once held
wooden posts.
When they excavate the holes,
they soon find something else
often used in Bronze Age
building foundations.
That is deep with the flint packing
all round it.
They're packed with flint
and that would have kept the big
timber uprights in place.
So you've got a really nice
settlement potential coming out here.
The post holes also offer up more
clues to suggest Richard's
onto something.
It looks like we've got a nice
bit of pot.
Yeah, there we go.
Wow, that's a nice chunk, isn't it?
These are likely to be
fragments of Bronze Age pottery,
used by the villagers
who lived here.
This is quite a nice piece there.
You can see some decoration.
Great, so that's another of
the post holes producing ceramics.
But the next discovery is
indisputable evidence.
Oh, my goodness.
Let's look at that.
That's perfect for the dating
of this site, isn't it?
Isn't that lovely?
What I love about this is that this
is the sort of pin that would have
held bits of clothing together,
like a cloak or something like that.
But that directly leads us to
the farmers of Dunch Hill
in the Bronze Age.
It's a startling find for Chris,
a volunteer army veteran.
How did you feel
when you found that?
Oh, I was the happiest man
in the world!
Despite the Bronze Age finds,
Richard is still struggling
to identify the outline
of an actual roundhouse.
It's a bit confusing at the moment.
It looks a bit like a Swiss cheese.
There are holes everywhere.
I'm convinced we've got
a roundhouse here.
It's just finding that shape
and at the moment it's not
especially clear.
Because the walls have
completely disappeared,
what they were actually made of is
also puzzling.
Fortunately, work on solving both
those mysteries is under way.
To find out more, Stuart Prior,
a specialist in landscape
archaeology,
is visiting Butser Farm in
Hampshire,
where they recreate ancient
buildings.
This is actually the sum total of
the archaeology.
I've come to meet Butser's
experimental building expert
Trevor Creighton.
OK, so, Trevor, there was no
evidence for walling there,
was there? No, absolutely none at
Dunch Hill.
And that's what makes this building
so interesting.
What we see here is
a plan of the complete excavation.
All we have is this ring of posts.
Trevor's knowledge of other
roundhouse structures helps
to identify a telltale pattern in
the Dunch Hill post plan.
So if we're able to deduce that what
we've got here
is a series of post holes arranged
around a fairly irregular circle
but that's our roundhouse.
Ready?
Having figured out the layout,
Trevor assembled a team of
volunteers to recreate
the roundhouse at Dunch Hill.
From digging the post holes
then driving the posts into
the ground
To me, to you!
to mounting the lintels.
Look at that.
Up to this point, the structure was
largely based
on strong archaeological evidence.
Now, to build the walls.
One of the problems is that we're
not sure what this particular
roundhouse was built from.
And that's exactly
the point of the experiment.
They must have made it from
materials that just dissolved
and we're going to make walls that
are made of local materials that are
just so ephemeral that they're going
to disappear over three millennia.
So it's truly archaeology by
experiment?
It's truly experimental archaeology.
Trevor's version of the Dunch Hill
house has become
a laboratory for Bronze Age
wall building.
This is the Dunch Hill house.
This is the attempted
reconstruction.
We've put each of these post
holes
where the original post holes were
in the archaeology.
Trevor's team have been
experimenting with different types
of materials to construct
the surrounding walls.
Without physical evidence,
it's the best way to work out
which method could have been used
by the Bronze Age builders
at Dunch Hill.
Over here, we've got a turf wall.
OK, that's unusual to have
in association with a roundhouse.
Yeah, it is very unusual.
We're using available materials
and one of the materials that was
available was turf.
This turf here actually comes from
the clearance of this roundhouse,
so it's very plausible that that's
the sort of material people would use.
I suppose, over time, this earth
wall would have just weathered away.
Yeah, yeah. So all you're left with
are the post holes in the ground. Yes.
What we're trying to do is create
these suggestions of what might be
and test those assumptions.
Another structure wall has been
built using bog -standard topsoil.
Then, in the final section,
they're using Salisbury Plain's
most iconic naturally-occurring
substance, chalk.
So you've crushed the chalk,
which I can see in the barrow here.
What's the next stage, then?
Very simple, we just take
this material
Get a handful of it.
It's sort of lumpy and goopy
It is, isn't it?
and we just put it on our wall.
Just anywhere? Yeah.
It's not unlike a primitive concrete
in that way.
I'm amazed at how solid that is, you
know? Yeah.
It's just a pile of mush really.
But it's actually turned into
a solid wall,
which is really impressive. Yeah.
Like the turf and soil Trevor is
experimenting with,
the chalk could also disappear over
time.
If these walls dissolve and fail,
that's an excellent result for us
because then all we're left with
are the posts.
Yeah, but you've got to wait 2,000 years
for that to happen! Well, I hope, I hope!
More than one year would be good.
Yeah.
Only time will yield results from
Trevor's Bronze Age building experiment.
Perhaps in the future, this will
shed more light
on how the roundhouse at Dunch Hill
was actually made.
But today, by building up instead of
digging down,
I've had an insight into an
alternative approach to archaeology.
Seeing the different construction
methods experimented
with has been really interesting
today, and actually a fascinating
way to go about undertaking
your archaeology by experiment.
Despite the fact that at Dunch Hill
there doesn't seem to be much
surviving apart from a few
postholes,
if this is a Bronze Age house,
it could have been quite a
remarkable feat of engineering.
We now journey back to
Roman Britain,
and a dig which spans almost four
centuries of occupation.
I'm heading for a place that was
key to trade and travel
across the south - Silchester, ten
miles south of modern day Reading.
Though originally an Iron Age
settlement, it's the infrastructure
created by the Romans that's now
a treasure trove for archaeologists.
This huge wall still encircles
the massive 40 hectare site.
Silchester boasts many of the usual
features typical of a Roman
town, including an amphitheatre and,
most importantly, of course,
a bathhouse complex.
And it's these
buildings that are perhaps
the best window
into Silchester's past.
It's also one of the longest-running
archaeological digs in the country.
We've visited here before back in
2014,
with the team
from the University of Reading.
It looks like we've found what we
were hoping for
from this excavation,
and that is a Nero stamped tile.
That ceramic tile meant these
baths dated to the
reign of Emperor Nero,
between 54 and 68 AD,
proving that these were
some of the earliest buildings here.
Now the team's opened up a whole
new section,
revealing fresh layers and finds
that could tell a complex story,
one that mirrors the rise and fall
of the Roman Empire in Britain.
Mike, how long have you been
digging at Silchester? A long time.
Mike Fulford is the project
director.
Have you just opened this this year,
then? Yes, yes.
Just in the last four weeks.
When does most of what we're
looking at here date to, then?
Second and third century,
most of it,
but there's material that's
definitely later,
and there's material that
relates to Nero's time.
Bathhouses are complicated, but
I never really envisaged there was
so much going on with this
bathhouse.
Mike's been digging here for more
than four decades, but it was
antiquarians from the early 1900s
who first excavated the baths.
Those diggers eagerly ripped through
centuries of precious
archaeology and simply reburied it.
However,
they missed more than they found.
So Mike's team has been meticulously
working their way through
this archaeological backfill,
and with our Dig Diary cameras,
they recorded what they found.
I found this hairpin. It's made
of bone,
which I think's pretty cool.
This looks, to me,
like a little hook.
It's clearly made of bronze or
copper alloy.
The antiquarians also missed
the biggest story of all - how the
expansion and contraction of these
baths mirrored the ups and downs
of the Roman Empire during almost
four centuries of rule in Britain.
What are you learning this
time around that the antiquarians
didn't understand?
Above all, they didn't appreciate
that there were certainly two
successive separate bathhouses - the
first one completely demolished -
and now possibly we have evidence
of a major extension of the second,
which you might call a
third bathhouse.
We can see a much richer story
of how this bathhouse developed
through the whole Roman period.
It's down at the bottom of the dig
where the baths' transition through
time can be best seen.
This is the first Silchester
bathhouse,
built during the reign
of Emperor Nero.
Mike's team uncovers telltale
materials from this first phase.
We've got some greensand, which is
the foundations for this,
which is also inside that wall over
there. Which is
a hallmark sign of
the Neronian stuff of the site.
When you look down you can see,
first of all,
the cross-wall of the first baths.
When does that date to?
That dates to the '50s, '60s of the
first century, so
Oh, really early?
Yeah. Soon after the conquest.
By this point, Silchester's
population
had boomed to many thousands,
so the first bathhouse is knocked
down to make way for a larger,
grander second bathhouse.
So it's getting bigger?
It's getting bigger.
So then we have another major
change to the baths,
with a really huge extension,
and they're still not content,
because they build this apse.
So this is a lovely curved wall.
Isn't it, yes. Yeah. Perhaps
contained a cold pool,
maybe statues, a really distinctive
feature of the baths.
Evidence of luxurious finishes were
discovered by Mike's team
when they found
traces of decorative walls.
It's a little piece of painted
plaster.
I suspect it probably
came from the inside originally.
I think that's a stripe been
painted on. Fantastic.
This is the bathhouse at its peak
in the third century AD.
So we've got a story of expansion,
expansion, getting bigger.
It's partly a response, I think,
to maybe changing population
of the town, also perhaps expansion
to give opportunities for men
and women to bathe separately.
You can see how this building
would have developed
and changed over time.
The dig team has found jewellery
lost by bathers
Just in this find tray, found a
fragment of a brooch of some sort,
and it's a copper alloy,
and it's the part were the pin
would go when you close it.
evidence of fine dining.
Yeah, it's a really nice patterning,
feathering.
Quite a lot of bone.
Something.
Still quite interesting.
After the bathhouse's boom,
in the fourth century it
started to contract.
The Roman Empire is in decline,
and Silchester's population is
shrinking.
Mike has found evidence that the
building's structure reflects that.
The bath begins to
break into smaller units.
That wall is taken down
and a new wall built
on a destroyed foundation.
Yeah. And you're beginning
to get a kind of reduction.
The quality of the work,
not so good.
But it continued to give them
the pleasure of having heat
and warmth and a bathing facility,
which they'd enjoyed for 400 years.
Here at Silchester, Mike's been
able to map the ups and downs
of Roman power in Britain, but the
dig also tells a more local story.
Talking to Mike, I've come
to realise
that I think my view of Roman baths
was completely awry,
and it all being about bathing.
But if we look at the plan
of the whole building from Mike's
excavations, we can see
that this is the complex when it was
at its largest and most complicated.
You come in here, so the entrance is
at this end, which is
where the hedge is,
and you come into this courtyard
area which is called a palaestra,
it was like an exercise yard, and
then
you have your series of baths
going from frigidarium through to
hotter baths.
That's our one that we're looking
at there in the trench.
Just this section of that
whole complex.
But looking at the function of this
place,
I'm starting to think of it a lot
more as a leisure centre.
This is the gym at the heart
of Roman Silchester.
This bath complex must have been
a hub of activity,
and the Reading team continued to
unearth evidence that tells us
more about what went on there.
So I asked Mike to come along
to the Digging For Britain tent
with a collection of the best
finds from this year's dig.
It's fantastic to see these. It's a
pleasure. Yes.
What do they tell us,
then, about the bathhouse?
Well, there's sort of aspects of
life
and how the baths were used.
So we've got a die
And this is bone?
Yes. It looks like just any dice
you could buy today, look at it.
Isn't it lovely? Alongside that, these
are all gaming pieces, are they? Yes.
So that's another bone counter.
This one, well, they've just taken
the base of a small beaker and just
cut it out to create the shape.
So it would have been a very
sociable space to be in?
Oh, very much so, yes. It probably
was the social centre of the town.
Yeah, yeah.
One of the most exciting finds we've
got is this bronze belt fitting
and buckle. It is lovely.
What would it have been part of?
An officer, military, or
high-ranking civil servant,
part of their uniform.
It's quite thin and fine,
so it's unlikely to be
going around the waist,
but perhaps more of a strap
that's going across the chest,
something like that. Yeah.
And then the tongue has almost got
the head of a little beast
at the end of it. Yes.
Right from the turn of the fourth
and fifth century. Yeah.
So it suggests that we have Roman
officials there right towards
the end of the Roman period. Yes.
Yes, and enjoying the baths,
such as they were then. Yeah.
Mike, when I visited you on site you
had quite a few more weeks left of
the dig, so what else did you find?
I think this is from the very end,
isn't it?
This is from the very end, yes.
A really important discovery.
So, this is a massive oak beam which
is underpinning this substantial
brick extension of the bathhouse
which we think is second century.
But the beauty about the find
of these timbers
is that they have the potential to
give us a dendrochronological date.
So this is a tremendous bonus.
And it's brilliant, isn't it,
tree ring dating,
because with dendrochronology,
you get the year that
that tree was felled. Absolutely.
The year, so you can associate that
with a particular emperor,
a particular governor of Britain.
You can sort of fit it in to
some of the people
of Roman Britain that we know of.
And with this fantastic
preservation that you now know
exists on site, do you think
you're going to be going back?
I mean, you've been at Silchester
a long time, Mike, I think
from the '70s.
I mean, there is so much that one
can learn by re-examining this
build - the structure, seeing the
things they didn't really cotton on
to at the beginning of
the 20th century.
So it really would be worth doing
a little bit more.
I think I might be coming back to
Silchester to see you again
next year. Well, there you are.
Well, then we have to, we have to,
yes, we'll do another season.
We dig for the Gods that
leave no bones
For the ship that
sailed in the sunken sea
There's a lot to discarded stones
The famine road,
and the merchants keep. ♪
A big old city contains
a wealth of archaeology.
But it also presents archaeologists
with lots of challenges
because each generation builds
on what went before, sometimes
completely obscuring, or at the very
least, confusing those layers.
And because of that
intensity of activity,
it's very rare to find prehistoric
remains under our cities
unless the archaeologists
are particularly lucky.
This next dig is in the most
archaeologically
challenging of all British cities -
London -
on the southern bank
of the Thames in Barn Elms.
London is nearly always thought of
as being originally a Roman city,
given that no substantial
pre-Roman settlement has ever
been identified close to its heart.
But archaeologists have uncovered
stunning new evidence
that there was a large riverside
settlement here during the Iron Age.
In the past, tantalising clues
were dredged up from the river bed.
In Victorian times,
two battle shields
and a copper helmet dating to the
Iron Age were the star finds.
The River Thames has always thrown
up a lot of finds from that
period but no-one really knew
where the people who were putting
those things in there were living.
Jack Russell is archaeologist for
London's new super sewer project.
Excavations here at Barn Elms just
across the river from Fulham
Football Club recently revealed
traces of that classic prehistoric
dwelling, the roundhouse.
Lead archaeologist Mike Curnow has
been cataloguing these
intriguing discoveries.
What we've really found is
quite a lot of post holes
and all of them
are really quite chunky post holes.
This is one of the larger ones
that we've had,
that, as you see -
I can get my arm into it -
is really quite deep.
Such deep, wide holes must have
housed huge wooden posts
capable of supporting
a massive structure.
This one we actually think is
part of a roundhouse with these
two post holes here.
And then you've got two post
holes at the far side which form
part of a semicircle.
I remember there was definitely
a lot of excitement when
we looked down and just saw this
sort of semicircle of post holes
and realised for the first
time that what
we had here was a roundhouse
and a settlement.
The footprints of more roundhouses
have since been uncovered
and there's evidence of a bustling
community with a thriving
iron-working industry.
This is a lump of iron slag which
indicates that they were working
iron on the site, melting it down
and filtering out its impurities.
So this is definitely a site where
they're not just living,
they're also working,
manufacturing things,
and potentially shipping them
off to other places as well.
The discovery of fastenings and loom
weights suggests that cloth was also
woven in this centre of
manufacturing.
But it's one of the smallest finds
that's the biggest news.
These coins still have them maker's
tabs that would normally have been
removed, meaning an Iron Age mint
could have been sited here.
Their design suggests they were
made for the Cantiaci tribe,
known to be among the first
users of coins in Britain who traded
with other Europeans.
The site expands our understanding
of the Iron Age.
It's filling in the prehistory
of London, almost rewriting,
if you like,
this idea that there's nothing
going on in London
before the Romans.
These remarkable discoveries
on the banks of the Thames demand
a closer look.
So the site's Iron Age finds
specialist Adam Sutton has
brought some of the key finds to the
Digging for Britain tent.
Adam, I think so often we think
about London just beginning
with the Romans.
Well, you are showing us that there
very much were settlements there.
Absolutely, yeah.
So these are among actually some
of the first coins made in Britain.
There is a lot of debate
as to what the role of coins
was in Iron Age society, whether
they had a monetised economy.
But it's totally possible that
the fact that we've got
manufacturing evidence here means
that people had to come and exchange
the objects which they wanted to
buy for what is effectively money.
Yeah. There's also potentially
a ritual aspect.
They could be intended
for offerings.
The river is very nearby and we know
that people liked to cast metal
objects into the river as a ritual.
Yeah.
People still throw coins
into fountains today.
People still throw things into
wishing wells
and stuff like that today.
So it's a very long tradition of
that sort of thing.
And here are some of the finds that
have emerged from in and around
those roundhouses.
So what do these finds tell us?
We've got some really nice
examples of decorated objects here.
Yeah, that's lovely. I love these
kind of sinuous lines of dots.
We do actually have evidence
that even though these pots were
really nicely decorated,
they were still used for cooking.
And we've actually
commissioned an artist
That's wonderful.
to give us an artist's impression
of what the settlement might
have looked like. That is fantastic.
I mean, with the Thames here
and this little settlement
on the banks
Absolutely, it looks
kind of idyllic, doesn't it?
and all the activity.
It does look idyllic, yeah.
So these are completely new
communities to us and they
really give us an impression of life
in London before London was there
Yeah.
..which I think is really amazing.
Creating some epic landscapes
where you can really appreciate
the destructive power of water.
But, in fact, water can be the
archaeologist's friend.
It can be very difficult
and challenging to dig
waterlogged sites.
But then you get some incredible
preservation of organic
remains like wood.
And, in fact, that preservation
is best not even on land
but at the bottom of the ocean.
Our next dig takes place under that
narrow strip of water that
makes the Isle of Wight an island -
The Solent.
Many thousands of years ago
this was dry land.
So for Garry Momber of the Maritime
Archaeology Trust what's on the
seabed holds detailed information
about how humans lived here.
In 2019 we followed Garry
as he lifted
and reassembled a mysterious
wooden walkway.
Now Garry is back hoping to find
more evidence to fill in the many
gaps in our understanding of the
mysterious Mesolithic people.
This is the only
site we've got in the U K -
8,000 years old -
and it's telling us
stuff about this period of time
we know nothing about.
Mesolithic people roamed these
lands as hunter gatherers
from 9,500 BC
until around 4,000 BC when farming
and crops arrived in Britain.
Today Garry's embarking
on an experiment that could
challenge that traditional thinking.
Stand by.
And go.
He's diving down to take
a sediment sample, a time capsule
from an ancient Mesolithic
settlement site that's known
to date back around 8,000 years.
We're going to take some samples
for DNA analysis
so that we get an insight into
DNA from all the living
sort of creatures that were around
at that point 8,000 years ago.
Garry hopes to reveal what plants
and animals these people gathered
and hunted.
As he reaches the Mesolithic site,
evidence of their occupation
can be seen everywhere.
It's like an old haunted landscape.
It's like one of those ghost towns.
The remnants of people still there
with their flints
lying on the seabed.
Garry hammers his sample box into an
undisturbed section of seabed.
The box cuts through several
layers of sediment including earth
occupied by our Mesolithic
ancestors.
With the precious sample
captured for DNA analysis,
he returns to the surface.
Success.
Quite a weight to carry, that.
Got it!
Got it. Got a cracking sample
straight from the sediment.
Once we get the DNA analysis
we can really break
it down to find out what the
minutiae of every little
species that was
living on the site at the time,
and we're going to find out all
sorts of stuff that's going to
help us reconstruct that
landscape 8,000 years ago.
A month later bioarchaeologist
Cat Jarman joins up with
Garry at Warwick University to get
an insight into the testing
process
and learn the initial results.
So you have this brilliant, sort of,
almost like a treasure,
archaeological treasure chest here.
What's the next step now?
Well, the process will be to
get it into the lab,
we'll get ourselves nice
and suited up and nice and protected
so that we won't be contaminating
the sample ourselves.
So that way you can be absolutely
sure that what you're
looking at is the real
8,000-year-old Mesolithic sample?
Yeah, we've just got to make sure
there's no modern
contamination at all. Yeah.
Sedimentary DNA sampling is
so sensitive even the tiniest
contamination could corrupt
the results.
Covered head to toe,
no contamination.
No contamination anywhere.
OK. All right, ready?
Shall we go? That better do it.
Next, Garry opens up
the box of archaeological treasure.
Oh, wow. That's it.
That's a bit of the seabed, 8,000
years old, brought to the surface.
And this is sort of the area
that we're interested in.
The sample reveals the layers of
terrain that have built up
through time.
The bottom layer of silt shows
the land lived on
by the Mesolithic people.
So that looks like that would have
been the land surface.
Somebody walking through it would
literally be walking on this. Yes.
This was the land - people working,
playing,
sitting having picnics, banter.
Remains of the forest floor
are still preserved.
Wow.
That's amazing.
So this is an 8,000-year-old
oak leaf.
Yeah, first time uncovered.
The sediment is placed into
test tubes ready to undergo
analysis in the DNA lab.
That's actually really incredible.
Seeing that, it's like -
it's an 8,000-year-old land surface
being excavated from the seabed
and it's got everything.
We found flints, we found twigs,
a whole oak leaf, and that's just
the environment that somebody
walked through 8,000 years ago.
So the team and are now taking
samples for DNA and I just can't
wait to see what
that's going to reveal.
Professor Robin Allaby has been
interpreting the DNA
analysis from Garry's sample.
These traces were typical signs of
Mesolithic occupation.
But amongst them is a reading for
something totally unexpected.
Wheat was thought to have arrived in
Britain around 6,000 years ago.
But this discovery shows it could
have travelled north from Europe
2,000 years earlier.
I mean, that's really spectacular,
isn't it, and unexpected?
It's amazing, though, isn't it,
that a small DNA sample like this
can tell that really quite big story
about how people moved
across continents.
The combination of Garry's
underwater archaeology and Robin's
cutting -edge DNA analysis seems to
have moved the first recorded
dating for wheat back by 2,000
years, potentially a big
shift in the timetable of early
British agriculture.
This wheat is really quite special
and quite unique.
So this site really is telling a
very big story from just some very
exciting new technologies.
And this, I think, is a really
exciting one for the future.
For our last dig we're actually
returning to the
story of the mysteriously located
Norman church in Buckinghamshire.
The exciting thing about archaeology
is that it is constantly evolving.
Each new find reveals a new story,
sometimes adding detail,
sometimes profoundly changing
what we thought we knew.
Now, the site of St Mary's at Stoke
Mandeville has already delivered
archaeological excitement in spades.
When I visited a few weeks ago there
was the Norman church
that we knew existed.
But under that, an unknown
layer of Anglo-Saxon archaeology.
And then little did we know
that there was also an earlier
phase with some spectacular finds,
making this one of the most
exciting archaeological discoveries
of the year, if not the decade.
Earlier in the programme,
lead archaeologists Guy and Rachel,
told us they'd identified a large
square foundation feature
they thought was from
an Anglo-Saxon tower.
But while excavating the circular
ditch surrounding it
things get much more interesting.
The sill of the ditch is this dark
brown colour and the shape of it are
these two V-shaped edges here.
And you can see that there's quite
a lot of rubble material in it.
And it also has this kind of darker
organic preserved layer here, and
it's that layer that's producing
a lot of our really amazing finds.
It's an astonishing breakthrough.
Over two days of excavating,
the shoulders
and heads from not one but two
life-size Roman busts
are discovered, including
one by 24-year-old Cameron.
Throughout the whole project we've
been trained to look for stones that
are sculpted or worked
and there it was facing me
was a person's chest carved
out of stone and everyone joked,
'"Oh, well, it would be amazing
if you'd find the head.'"
So about five, ten minutes later,
carried on digging,
came up and it was a woman's head,
and it was just really cool.
To get something like that is
just, like, ultra special.
The ditch has still more secrets,
including a stunning glass urn,
multiple pots of cremated remains,
and an extraordinary headless
skeleton with leg injuries that
suggest a sudden violent end.
It's all beyond the archaeologists'
wildest expectations.
You can't even say
it's a once in a career.
You would be extremely lucky if you
ever found anything like that.
Never mind two or three cf them.
Well, the dig has finished
completely now, the big tent has
come down, and all the finds have
come to storage facilities like this
before being divided up and sent out
to specialists for further analysis.
So I'm really lucky to
come here today
when all the finds are still in one
place because these are some
of the most significant discoveries
from Roman Britain in years.
Rachel and Guy have gathered
up their still uncleaned star
finds from that extraordinary ditch
for me to get a good look at.
I've been so excited to come
and see these new finds.
I mean, it's an astonishing haul
of archaeological treasure.
This is a real treasure, isn't it,
to come out of that ditch?
So does that head go with
that pair of shoulders?
It does, yes,
and we can put it back on top.
Go on, then.
I mean, that's just such
a beautiful statue, isn't it?
She's really astonishing to look at.
Yeah. That face is gorgeous.
The shaping Yeah. The shaping of
the cheeks and the mouth.
Presumably that hairstyle's
really datable.
Thank you very much for putting her
back together for a moment.
It's amazing to see.
Yeah, presumably these statues
were in a building of some kind.
Yeah, so it's like a building had
been demolished into part of that
ditch but we didn't really have much
of the building structure itself.
But we have what seem to be
quite a lot of contents.
So the statues,
there's cremation urns, there was
a glass vessel as well.
Look at that, that's beautiful.
Yeah. Are you happy for me
to handle this, then?
Yeah.
It's sharp, actually, isn't it?
So you think this
is for a cremation as well, then?
It could be.
We should get that back in its
water, shouldn't we,
to stop it drying out.
So this is one of the funerary urns.
Is this definitely Roman?
Yes. The pottery is Roman. Yeah.
They've been thrown in
and that's when they've broken
and that's why it's
wrapped in the bandages. Yeah.
An inhumation.
These are the coins here,
aren't they?
Now, they're very muddy
looking at the moment
and presumably, again,
as with the statues,
you're leaving all that cleaning
for the specialists in the lab.
Yeah, cos that is a key
piece of information, isn't it?
That tells you when this material,
which presumably at that point is
being considered to be rubbish,
you know, and it's been
cleared into the ditch.
Do you think?
Yeah.
Certainly the cremation urns have
been thrown into that ditch
with no care.
Yeah.
So this is really interesting
cos then, I suppose, you've got
the question of whether that's
just expedient and you're moving it
out the way before you do
something new at the site, and maybe
that is, perhaps, building an
Anglo-Saxon tower.
Or whether this represents
a set of beliefs that are
no longer operating and so you smash
it up and move it out the way.
So at this point,
there's so much work left to do
on each of these different finds
and each one will reveal another
piece of the puzzle.
Well, please keep in touch
and I think I will definitely be
coming back to see you to find out
more about this story.
None of us can.
Next time on Digging for Britain,
a Neolithic tomb reveals its
treasure before it's lost to
the elements for ever
It appears to be
a polished stone ball.
Fantastic find.
a graveyard in a proud seafaring
city proves to be full of surprises.
He's very pleased to see us, Lisa.
Isn't he!
Hang on a minute,
let me have a look at that, then.
and at an awesome Yorkshire
castle we witness
the return of the king who built it.
So that's a tiny piece of
William the Conqueror?
It is the tiny face of
William the Conqueror.
Oh, that's superb.
Come and search for,
we would search
And looking for a scarred land
And dig for us as we have done
To lay the dead out in the sun
To lay us dead out in the sun. ♪
Everywhere you look, the rich
history of the United Kingdom
is there to be seen.
But hidden beneath our feet there's
still a wealth of
archaeological treasure just waiting
to be found.
That's why each year, up and down
the country, our archaeologists
dig down,
searching for fresh discoveries
Another one.
revealing the imprint of ancient
civilizations
So we are looking at a completely
unknown Roman town. That's crazy.
Wow.
and unearthing priceless objects.
Might be a pendant.
Oh, yeah, I can see that.
This is something special,
isn't it?
Yeah, I've not seen anything like it
so far.
Every dig adds new pieces to the
ever-growing archaeological jigsaw
Do you want to come
and have a look?
that is the epic story of
our islands.
It's been an extraordinary year
full of challenges
and yet I've been able to visit
so many exciting digs
up and down the country.
Oh, my goodness!
There have been spine-tingling
discoveries to witness.
That is the face of a Trojan. Yes.
My heart is racing!
And I'm even getting a chance
to use a trowel myself.
I'm joined by a trio of expert
investigators
I can actually see the texture
of the weave
and it's, what, 1,600 years old?
It's amazing that a small DNA sample
like this
can tell that really quite big
story.
as they dig deeper for answers.
Exactly.
Finally, the archaeologists bring
their best finds into the studio
Whisk that away.
You can see that this object has
had a life of its own.
for up-close analysis.
It's astonishing detail.
Welcome to Digging For Britain.
This time we take a look at
the latest archaeological finds
from the south of the U K.
Under a Norman church,
spectacular evidence of the demise
of Roman Britain is uncovered
She's been kind of almost violently
destroyed, I think.
Certainly the cremation urns have
been thrown into that ditch
with no care. Do you think?
a Bronze Age settlement has got
archaeologists stumped
I'm convinced we've got
a roundhouse here,
it's just a bit confusing at
the moment.
and I get my hands on some
genuine old money.
So these are among some of the first
coins made in Britain.
Wow.
With its coastline facing an often
turbulent European continent,
the south of England has been
the starting point for several
hostile takeovers.
Perhaps the most successful
started in 1066.
The sudden arrival of the Normans
would kick-start a new epoch
in the history of our islands.
Today, I'm visiting a parish that
stood slap bang in the way
of William the Conqueror's rolling
conquest - Stoke Mandeville.
As they settled, the Normans built
new churches all over England
with communities growing up
around them.
But that's not what happened here.
In this gentle valley, just south of
Stoke Mandeville,
is this isolated church surrounded
by fields
and nobody knows why it was built
here.
Built around 1080, the church
of St Mary's was strangely
located in this damp, isolated spot,
half a mile from the village.
When, in the 19th century,
Stoke Mandeville got
a more convenient new church,
the old Norman church soon became
neglected,
fell into ruin and was eventually
demolished.
Now, the new high-speed rail line
HS2 needs to pass through
the ruin of old St Mary's,
so under cover of this vast tent,
a team of archaeologists is
excavating thousands of graves
and preserving any historic
artefacts.
It's also a fantastic opportunity
to solve the centuries-long mystery
of why the church was built here.
Lead archaeologist Rachel Wood
hopes to find an answer.
Rachel, so this is it?
This is the mysterious church of
St Mary's, then? It is, yes.
And what you can actually see is
the very bottom of the foundations.
There's something really curious
about it though, isn't there,
that it's just out here
in the countryside?
It seems to be some way away from
any settlement.
That was definitely one of our
questions that we're trying to answer -
why is there a church, essentially,
in the middle of an unoccupied field?
Right, cos I think the most obvious
answer would have been that actually
it was part of a medieval village or
a medieval town.
Yes, and it would have been
serving that settlement.
But our works have proven
that that is not the case,
so the mystery is continuing.
In the surrounding area, Rachel's
team have uncovered evidence of
earlier Bronze Age, Iron Age
and even Roman activity.
But what of the centuries
that followed?
We don't have any evidence for any
Saxon activity in this landscape
at all at the minute.
That's really strange.
There's a distinct gap, yeah.
So you've got Iron Age
Roman activity
and then you've got a gap of 600
years. Something like that, yes.
And then suddenly the Normans decide
to build this church here? Yes.
So there must have been a reason.
We're hoping to find some evidence
of some earlier activity
once we get underneath
the church foundations.
So there's a real mystery here to
solve then, isn't there? Absolutely.
Why do you have a church suddenly
appearing in this space
in the landscape
in the 11th century?
The answer to this mystery could lie
somewhere beneath these foundations.
As part of the excavation,
the skeletons from the churchyard
need to be carefully removed
and they'll be reinterred.
The team's been recording
their fascinating finds
from the graves
using our Dig Diary cameras.
We've got an adult male and at his
feet a china plate,
which is an interesting find because
they're known as salt plates,
placed in with the individual
as a sign of purity,
as a sign of eternal life.
A plate of salt at the feet was
intended to offer protection
in the afterlife,
to ward off the devil.
Underneath the superstitious
Victorians
are graves from the flamboyant
Georgian era.
Though even the fanciest wooden
coffins
have often completely rotted away.
That's Ruth Jackson and you can see
just in the side of the grave there,
some gold - plated coffin studs.
Oh, yes,
I can see those standing out there.
So they're still shining and gold
because gold doesn't tarnish. Yes.
So she must have been quite wealthy
to have gold on her coffin.
Yeah, so the Jacksons are one
of the prominent families
and she died at the ripe old age of
90 Wow in 1727.
How do you know her name?
So, as we removed the original
rubble mound covering the church,
her gravestone was actually
still in place and intact.
It kind of emerged
out of the rubble.
We had no idea it was there.
I mean, graves that have been
completely forgotten about
and you're uncovering them again
and telling these stories.
I really think that's
one of the best things we can do
for the burial population here
at St Mary's is to remember them.
Gravestones make the archaeologists'
detective work a lot simpler.
Other objects take a little more
work to decipher.
This is a bone object.
It's turned and it was found next
to a gentleman's head.
Roughly the same period as
Ruth Jackson, so roughly the 1700s.
Wow, what on earth is that?
We have a theory.
The theory is you would put
a piece of cloth
with a dab of your blood on it
and some honey in it
and you would put it in
your Georgian's men's wig
and all of the fleas running around
in the wig would be attracted
by the blood on the cloth and then
get stuck in the honey in the pot.
It's a flea catcher, a flea trap?
A flea catcher, yeah.
I've never heard of such a thing.
That's just bizarre.
It's very bizarre.
There's some residue inside it,
so you might even be able to test
that and find out what it is.
Hopefully, yes.
So far, St Mary's is giving up
fascinating secrets from
the Georgian and Victorian eras but
the big mystery of why the Normans
chose to build their church here,
so far from the village, remains.
The deeper the team dig, the closer
they may be getting to the answer.
Are you almost down to the bottom
of the foundations, then?
Absolutely, yeah.
We are nearly at the bottom
of the stone walls
and it's as we get beneath those
that we're hoping to find out
whether or not there was anything
else under the Norman church.
I bet you're itching for the day
when you can start
to excavate down here.
Absolutely.
Nearby, the team has been storing
stonework from the ruin
for further analysis
and re-use in a new memorial
but something here catches my eye.
Now, this piece of stone really
leapt out at me.
It's a different sort of stone.
So this is not the same stone
as most of that Norman church
is made of.
Could it be part of an Anglo-Saxon
church
that predates the Norman church?
Could it be even earlier?
Could it be Roman?
And I think as this dig progresses,
we might get to the bottom of it.
But it represents the whole
mystery of St Mary's in microcosm.
My drawing is put on hold,
as while we're on site, there's
breaking news from the dig tent.
So there's been all this speculation
about whether there's
an earlier phase here at St Mary's
and I think some really exciting
evidence has just emerged.
Archaeologist Shirley Mihailova has
made the discovery.
Shirley, what have you found? What
have you found?
I have found a very interesting
coin.
It's a long cross silver penny.
So do you know when it dates to?
It potentially dates from
978 to 1016 AD
because it has the head of
Aethelred II on it.
Aethelred II.
That's Aethelred The Unready. Yes.
I mean, this is an Anglo-Saxon king.
Yes.
This must be the first bit of
evidence that you've had
which definitely predates the Norman
period? Yes.
This is just fantastic.
The late tenth, early 11th century,
before the Norman church.
Do you think this coin is associated
with this burial?
It does make sense with the
location,
it being around the pelvic area,
so potentially from a pocket.
So I do believe that it was
with the individual.
That's amazing. Thank you very much.
I just can't believe that's just come out of the
ground, while I'm here. Yes, it's absolutely amazing.
I'm so excited!
This coin is a really enticing
find for the dig team.
At last, St Mary's church is
hinting at a past that predates
any Norman structure.
Having been left on tenterhooks
about what else the team might find,
archaeologists Rachel Wood and
Guy Hunt
have come to the Digging For Britain
tent to give me an update.
So, Rachel and Guy, if we look at
the photograph from site,
is that the Norman church
foundations? That's right, yeah.
So you can see the Norman
foundations really clearly there in white.
And you can see a big circular dark
ditch coming around,
just around here. Oh, yeah. It's
quite dark.
And then the more exciting part
is that you can see
the foundations of a small
structure.
Yeah.
And because it's sealed by the
foundations for the Norman church,
we know that it predates the Norman
period
and it's very exciting
because it is actually Saxon.
Guy's beautiful 3D model of
the burial site
has every grave etched in.
Now he can add the newly-discovered
pre-Norman ditch
and a Saxon building.
We think it's actually
the base of a kind of tower.
So we know that in the later
part of the Saxon period
there's a tradition for building
these towers.
So there are 30 or 40 of these
known,
either from excavation or still
surviving, in England.
So this is a tower without
a church?
That's right. We think it would
have just been a tower.
So you're talking about something
that could be used as a watchtower.
It could also be used as a bell
tower.
It could be used as a private
chapel.
It's a kind of an essential part of
this lordly kit,
the stuff that you need in order
to be considered as an aristocrat
in that late Saxon period.
When the land changes and it becomes
owned by the Bishop of Lincoln,
they basically demolish the tower,
get rid of it,
and they build their Norman chapel
right on top of it, like that.
Yeah, and it's disappeared.
I mean, that mark of Anglo-Saxon
power has been
eradicated from the landscape
as well.
It's a really strong and powerful
statement of this kind of transition
of power that happens between one
set of aristocrats and another.
Yeah. So, Rachel,
what's underneath the Saxon tower?
Well, we're keeping our fingers crossed
for perhaps an even earlier building.
We would love to find, you know,
evidence for something like a Roman temple.
But whether or not something like
that was there in the first place
and then has survived
the construction of a tower
and then the Norman church
and then 800 years-worth of burials,
it's quite a slim chance really.
You've got a few more weeks left on
site.
This story is not quite
finished yet.
We're nearly there.
Little did we know then but another
even older layer of archaeology
underneath St Mary's was just weeks
away from being discovered.
Luckily, our cameras were there
to capture the excitement
and later in the programme I get to
take a very close look at what could
be some of the most important Roman
artefacts ever found in Britain.
Yeah, it's definitely quit now,
retire now!
Yeah, we'll retire now, that's it.
It's never going to be as good!
When you've got buildings
made of stone,
they're relatively easy
to interpret,
especially when they're upstanding,
like this fantastic Norman keep.
But for much of pre-history,
our ancestors were making
and living in buildings which were
made of wood, thatch, clay, turf.
Materials that either disappear
completely
from the archaeological record or
leave only the faintest of traces.
And then we've got the challenge of
working out what materials a house
may have been made of in its
entirety
and what it would have looked like,
as we see in our next story.
We move to that gold mine
of archaeological opportunity,
the Ministry of Defence's training
area on Salisbury Plain.
The plain's 300-mile-square
chalk plateau
is a wonderful setting for
the undisputed heavyweight champion
of Britain's prehistoric monuments.
Thought to have originated around
5,000 years ago,
awe-inspiring Stonehenge is actually
just one of many mysterious traces
of ancient cultures that can be seen
across this atmospheric landscape.
But a lot here remains out of sight,
just a few feet below the surface.
The results from
a ground - penetrating radar survey
have led MoD archaeologist
Richard Osgood to suspect
that a Bronze Age settlement once
stood on this patch of exercise ground,
known as Dunch Hill.
We know on the track that we've
got over there,
there were four houses found in 1995
dating to the late Bronze Age.
And I want to see if that settlement that we
know about from that track extends further.
With a team of volunteer
ex-servicemen,
Richard's been looking for evidence
of a typical Bronze Age dwelling,
the Roundhouse.
That's a nice one.
The team's been recording their
search with our Dig Diary cameras.
We've just stripped off the top area
with a machine
and the really good things for us
are these small, dark splodges
cut into the chalk.
We're pretty hopeful they're going
to be post holes
and if we're looking for roundhouses
from the late Bronze Age,
then this is the sort of thing
we're looking for.
These are the remnants of posts
that hold up the roof.
3,000 years ago, during the Bronze
Age, the population of Britain
is thought to have
numbered in the tens of thousands.
Many people would have
lived in large roundhouses,
much like this recreation.
Thick wooden posts form the circular
structure that supports
the walls and a thatched roof.
At Dunch Hill, as with most
Roundhouse sites,
the materials used to build
the walls and the roof
have degraded over time.
You can sort of see the post holes
sort of go to there
and then they sort of angle up
a bit
All Richard's team have to work with
are what appear to be
the holes that once held
wooden posts.
When they excavate the holes,
they soon find something else
often used in Bronze Age
building foundations.
That is deep with the flint packing
all round it.
They're packed with flint
and that would have kept the big
timber uprights in place.
So you've got a really nice
settlement potential coming out here.
The post holes also offer up more
clues to suggest Richard's
onto something.
It looks like we've got a nice
bit of pot.
Yeah, there we go.
Wow, that's a nice chunk, isn't it?
These are likely to be
fragments of Bronze Age pottery,
used by the villagers
who lived here.
This is quite a nice piece there.
You can see some decoration.
Great, so that's another of
the post holes producing ceramics.
But the next discovery is
indisputable evidence.
Oh, my goodness.
Let's look at that.
That's perfect for the dating
of this site, isn't it?
Isn't that lovely?
What I love about this is that this
is the sort of pin that would have
held bits of clothing together,
like a cloak or something like that.
But that directly leads us to
the farmers of Dunch Hill
in the Bronze Age.
It's a startling find for Chris,
a volunteer army veteran.
How did you feel
when you found that?
Oh, I was the happiest man
in the world!
Despite the Bronze Age finds,
Richard is still struggling
to identify the outline
of an actual roundhouse.
It's a bit confusing at the moment.
It looks a bit like a Swiss cheese.
There are holes everywhere.
I'm convinced we've got
a roundhouse here.
It's just finding that shape
and at the moment it's not
especially clear.
Because the walls have
completely disappeared,
what they were actually made of is
also puzzling.
Fortunately, work on solving both
those mysteries is under way.
To find out more, Stuart Prior,
a specialist in landscape
archaeology,
is visiting Butser Farm in
Hampshire,
where they recreate ancient
buildings.
This is actually the sum total of
the archaeology.
I've come to meet Butser's
experimental building expert
Trevor Creighton.
OK, so, Trevor, there was no
evidence for walling there,
was there? No, absolutely none at
Dunch Hill.
And that's what makes this building
so interesting.
What we see here is
a plan of the complete excavation.
All we have is this ring of posts.
Trevor's knowledge of other
roundhouse structures helps
to identify a telltale pattern in
the Dunch Hill post plan.
So if we're able to deduce that what
we've got here
is a series of post holes arranged
around a fairly irregular circle
but that's our roundhouse.
Ready?
Having figured out the layout,
Trevor assembled a team of
volunteers to recreate
the roundhouse at Dunch Hill.
From digging the post holes
then driving the posts into
the ground
To me, to you!
to mounting the lintels.
Look at that.
Up to this point, the structure was
largely based
on strong archaeological evidence.
Now, to build the walls.
One of the problems is that we're
not sure what this particular
roundhouse was built from.
And that's exactly
the point of the experiment.
They must have made it from
materials that just dissolved
and we're going to make walls that
are made of local materials that are
just so ephemeral that they're going
to disappear over three millennia.
So it's truly archaeology by
experiment?
It's truly experimental archaeology.
Trevor's version of the Dunch Hill
house has become
a laboratory for Bronze Age
wall building.
This is the Dunch Hill house.
This is the attempted
reconstruction.
We've put each of these post
holes
where the original post holes were
in the archaeology.
Trevor's team have been
experimenting with different types
of materials to construct
the surrounding walls.
Without physical evidence,
it's the best way to work out
which method could have been used
by the Bronze Age builders
at Dunch Hill.
Over here, we've got a turf wall.
OK, that's unusual to have
in association with a roundhouse.
Yeah, it is very unusual.
We're using available materials
and one of the materials that was
available was turf.
This turf here actually comes from
the clearance of this roundhouse,
so it's very plausible that that's
the sort of material people would use.
I suppose, over time, this earth
wall would have just weathered away.
Yeah, yeah. So all you're left with
are the post holes in the ground. Yes.
What we're trying to do is create
these suggestions of what might be
and test those assumptions.
Another structure wall has been
built using bog -standard topsoil.
Then, in the final section,
they're using Salisbury Plain's
most iconic naturally-occurring
substance, chalk.
So you've crushed the chalk,
which I can see in the barrow here.
What's the next stage, then?
Very simple, we just take
this material
Get a handful of it.
It's sort of lumpy and goopy
It is, isn't it?
and we just put it on our wall.
Just anywhere? Yeah.
It's not unlike a primitive concrete
in that way.
I'm amazed at how solid that is, you
know? Yeah.
It's just a pile of mush really.
But it's actually turned into
a solid wall,
which is really impressive. Yeah.
Like the turf and soil Trevor is
experimenting with,
the chalk could also disappear over
time.
If these walls dissolve and fail,
that's an excellent result for us
because then all we're left with
are the posts.
Yeah, but you've got to wait 2,000 years
for that to happen! Well, I hope, I hope!
More than one year would be good.
Yeah.
Only time will yield results from
Trevor's Bronze Age building experiment.
Perhaps in the future, this will
shed more light
on how the roundhouse at Dunch Hill
was actually made.
But today, by building up instead of
digging down,
I've had an insight into an
alternative approach to archaeology.
Seeing the different construction
methods experimented
with has been really interesting
today, and actually a fascinating
way to go about undertaking
your archaeology by experiment.
Despite the fact that at Dunch Hill
there doesn't seem to be much
surviving apart from a few
postholes,
if this is a Bronze Age house,
it could have been quite a
remarkable feat of engineering.
We now journey back to
Roman Britain,
and a dig which spans almost four
centuries of occupation.
I'm heading for a place that was
key to trade and travel
across the south - Silchester, ten
miles south of modern day Reading.
Though originally an Iron Age
settlement, it's the infrastructure
created by the Romans that's now
a treasure trove for archaeologists.
This huge wall still encircles
the massive 40 hectare site.
Silchester boasts many of the usual
features typical of a Roman
town, including an amphitheatre and,
most importantly, of course,
a bathhouse complex.
And it's these
buildings that are perhaps
the best window
into Silchester's past.
It's also one of the longest-running
archaeological digs in the country.
We've visited here before back in
2014,
with the team
from the University of Reading.
It looks like we've found what we
were hoping for
from this excavation,
and that is a Nero stamped tile.
That ceramic tile meant these
baths dated to the
reign of Emperor Nero,
between 54 and 68 AD,
proving that these were
some of the earliest buildings here.
Now the team's opened up a whole
new section,
revealing fresh layers and finds
that could tell a complex story,
one that mirrors the rise and fall
of the Roman Empire in Britain.
Mike, how long have you been
digging at Silchester? A long time.
Mike Fulford is the project
director.
Have you just opened this this year,
then? Yes, yes.
Just in the last four weeks.
When does most of what we're
looking at here date to, then?
Second and third century,
most of it,
but there's material that's
definitely later,
and there's material that
relates to Nero's time.
Bathhouses are complicated, but
I never really envisaged there was
so much going on with this
bathhouse.
Mike's been digging here for more
than four decades, but it was
antiquarians from the early 1900s
who first excavated the baths.
Those diggers eagerly ripped through
centuries of precious
archaeology and simply reburied it.
However,
they missed more than they found.
So Mike's team has been meticulously
working their way through
this archaeological backfill,
and with our Dig Diary cameras,
they recorded what they found.
I found this hairpin. It's made
of bone,
which I think's pretty cool.
This looks, to me,
like a little hook.
It's clearly made of bronze or
copper alloy.
The antiquarians also missed
the biggest story of all - how the
expansion and contraction of these
baths mirrored the ups and downs
of the Roman Empire during almost
four centuries of rule in Britain.
What are you learning this
time around that the antiquarians
didn't understand?
Above all, they didn't appreciate
that there were certainly two
successive separate bathhouses - the
first one completely demolished -
and now possibly we have evidence
of a major extension of the second,
which you might call a
third bathhouse.
We can see a much richer story
of how this bathhouse developed
through the whole Roman period.
It's down at the bottom of the dig
where the baths' transition through
time can be best seen.
This is the first Silchester
bathhouse,
built during the reign
of Emperor Nero.
Mike's team uncovers telltale
materials from this first phase.
We've got some greensand, which is
the foundations for this,
which is also inside that wall over
there. Which is
a hallmark sign of
the Neronian stuff of the site.
When you look down you can see,
first of all,
the cross-wall of the first baths.
When does that date to?
That dates to the '50s, '60s of the
first century, so
Oh, really early?
Yeah. Soon after the conquest.
By this point, Silchester's
population
had boomed to many thousands,
so the first bathhouse is knocked
down to make way for a larger,
grander second bathhouse.
So it's getting bigger?
It's getting bigger.
So then we have another major
change to the baths,
with a really huge extension,
and they're still not content,
because they build this apse.
So this is a lovely curved wall.
Isn't it, yes. Yeah. Perhaps
contained a cold pool,
maybe statues, a really distinctive
feature of the baths.
Evidence of luxurious finishes were
discovered by Mike's team
when they found
traces of decorative walls.
It's a little piece of painted
plaster.
I suspect it probably
came from the inside originally.
I think that's a stripe been
painted on. Fantastic.
This is the bathhouse at its peak
in the third century AD.
So we've got a story of expansion,
expansion, getting bigger.
It's partly a response, I think,
to maybe changing population
of the town, also perhaps expansion
to give opportunities for men
and women to bathe separately.
You can see how this building
would have developed
and changed over time.
The dig team has found jewellery
lost by bathers
Just in this find tray, found a
fragment of a brooch of some sort,
and it's a copper alloy,
and it's the part were the pin
would go when you close it.
evidence of fine dining.
Yeah, it's a really nice patterning,
feathering.
Quite a lot of bone.
Something.
Still quite interesting.
After the bathhouse's boom,
in the fourth century it
started to contract.
The Roman Empire is in decline,
and Silchester's population is
shrinking.
Mike has found evidence that the
building's structure reflects that.
The bath begins to
break into smaller units.
That wall is taken down
and a new wall built
on a destroyed foundation.
Yeah. And you're beginning
to get a kind of reduction.
The quality of the work,
not so good.
But it continued to give them
the pleasure of having heat
and warmth and a bathing facility,
which they'd enjoyed for 400 years.
Here at Silchester, Mike's been
able to map the ups and downs
of Roman power in Britain, but the
dig also tells a more local story.
Talking to Mike, I've come
to realise
that I think my view of Roman baths
was completely awry,
and it all being about bathing.
But if we look at the plan
of the whole building from Mike's
excavations, we can see
that this is the complex when it was
at its largest and most complicated.
You come in here, so the entrance is
at this end, which is
where the hedge is,
and you come into this courtyard
area which is called a palaestra,
it was like an exercise yard, and
then
you have your series of baths
going from frigidarium through to
hotter baths.
That's our one that we're looking
at there in the trench.
Just this section of that
whole complex.
But looking at the function of this
place,
I'm starting to think of it a lot
more as a leisure centre.
This is the gym at the heart
of Roman Silchester.
This bath complex must have been
a hub of activity,
and the Reading team continued to
unearth evidence that tells us
more about what went on there.
So I asked Mike to come along
to the Digging For Britain tent
with a collection of the best
finds from this year's dig.
It's fantastic to see these. It's a
pleasure. Yes.
What do they tell us,
then, about the bathhouse?
Well, there's sort of aspects of
life
and how the baths were used.
So we've got a die
And this is bone?
Yes. It looks like just any dice
you could buy today, look at it.
Isn't it lovely? Alongside that, these
are all gaming pieces, are they? Yes.
So that's another bone counter.
This one, well, they've just taken
the base of a small beaker and just
cut it out to create the shape.
So it would have been a very
sociable space to be in?
Oh, very much so, yes. It probably
was the social centre of the town.
Yeah, yeah.
One of the most exciting finds we've
got is this bronze belt fitting
and buckle. It is lovely.
What would it have been part of?
An officer, military, or
high-ranking civil servant,
part of their uniform.
It's quite thin and fine,
so it's unlikely to be
going around the waist,
but perhaps more of a strap
that's going across the chest,
something like that. Yeah.
And then the tongue has almost got
the head of a little beast
at the end of it. Yes.
Right from the turn of the fourth
and fifth century. Yeah.
So it suggests that we have Roman
officials there right towards
the end of the Roman period. Yes.
Yes, and enjoying the baths,
such as they were then. Yeah.
Mike, when I visited you on site you
had quite a few more weeks left of
the dig, so what else did you find?
I think this is from the very end,
isn't it?
This is from the very end, yes.
A really important discovery.
So, this is a massive oak beam which
is underpinning this substantial
brick extension of the bathhouse
which we think is second century.
But the beauty about the find
of these timbers
is that they have the potential to
give us a dendrochronological date.
So this is a tremendous bonus.
And it's brilliant, isn't it,
tree ring dating,
because with dendrochronology,
you get the year that
that tree was felled. Absolutely.
The year, so you can associate that
with a particular emperor,
a particular governor of Britain.
You can sort of fit it in to
some of the people
of Roman Britain that we know of.
And with this fantastic
preservation that you now know
exists on site, do you think
you're going to be going back?
I mean, you've been at Silchester
a long time, Mike, I think
from the '70s.
I mean, there is so much that one
can learn by re-examining this
build - the structure, seeing the
things they didn't really cotton on
to at the beginning of
the 20th century.
So it really would be worth doing
a little bit more.
I think I might be coming back to
Silchester to see you again
next year. Well, there you are.
Well, then we have to, we have to,
yes, we'll do another season.
We dig for the Gods that
leave no bones
For the ship that
sailed in the sunken sea
There's a lot to discarded stones
The famine road,
and the merchants keep. ♪
A big old city contains
a wealth of archaeology.
But it also presents archaeologists
with lots of challenges
because each generation builds
on what went before, sometimes
completely obscuring, or at the very
least, confusing those layers.
And because of that
intensity of activity,
it's very rare to find prehistoric
remains under our cities
unless the archaeologists
are particularly lucky.
This next dig is in the most
archaeologically
challenging of all British cities -
London -
on the southern bank
of the Thames in Barn Elms.
London is nearly always thought of
as being originally a Roman city,
given that no substantial
pre-Roman settlement has ever
been identified close to its heart.
But archaeologists have uncovered
stunning new evidence
that there was a large riverside
settlement here during the Iron Age.
In the past, tantalising clues
were dredged up from the river bed.
In Victorian times,
two battle shields
and a copper helmet dating to the
Iron Age were the star finds.
The River Thames has always thrown
up a lot of finds from that
period but no-one really knew
where the people who were putting
those things in there were living.
Jack Russell is archaeologist for
London's new super sewer project.
Excavations here at Barn Elms just
across the river from Fulham
Football Club recently revealed
traces of that classic prehistoric
dwelling, the roundhouse.
Lead archaeologist Mike Curnow has
been cataloguing these
intriguing discoveries.
What we've really found is
quite a lot of post holes
and all of them
are really quite chunky post holes.
This is one of the larger ones
that we've had,
that, as you see -
I can get my arm into it -
is really quite deep.
Such deep, wide holes must have
housed huge wooden posts
capable of supporting
a massive structure.
This one we actually think is
part of a roundhouse with these
two post holes here.
And then you've got two post
holes at the far side which form
part of a semicircle.
I remember there was definitely
a lot of excitement when
we looked down and just saw this
sort of semicircle of post holes
and realised for the first
time that what
we had here was a roundhouse
and a settlement.
The footprints of more roundhouses
have since been uncovered
and there's evidence of a bustling
community with a thriving
iron-working industry.
This is a lump of iron slag which
indicates that they were working
iron on the site, melting it down
and filtering out its impurities.
So this is definitely a site where
they're not just living,
they're also working,
manufacturing things,
and potentially shipping them
off to other places as well.
The discovery of fastenings and loom
weights suggests that cloth was also
woven in this centre of
manufacturing.
But it's one of the smallest finds
that's the biggest news.
These coins still have them maker's
tabs that would normally have been
removed, meaning an Iron Age mint
could have been sited here.
Their design suggests they were
made for the Cantiaci tribe,
known to be among the first
users of coins in Britain who traded
with other Europeans.
The site expands our understanding
of the Iron Age.
It's filling in the prehistory
of London, almost rewriting,
if you like,
this idea that there's nothing
going on in London
before the Romans.
These remarkable discoveries
on the banks of the Thames demand
a closer look.
So the site's Iron Age finds
specialist Adam Sutton has
brought some of the key finds to the
Digging for Britain tent.
Adam, I think so often we think
about London just beginning
with the Romans.
Well, you are showing us that there
very much were settlements there.
Absolutely, yeah.
So these are among actually some
of the first coins made in Britain.
There is a lot of debate
as to what the role of coins
was in Iron Age society, whether
they had a monetised economy.
But it's totally possible that
the fact that we've got
manufacturing evidence here means
that people had to come and exchange
the objects which they wanted to
buy for what is effectively money.
Yeah. There's also potentially
a ritual aspect.
They could be intended
for offerings.
The river is very nearby and we know
that people liked to cast metal
objects into the river as a ritual.
Yeah.
People still throw coins
into fountains today.
People still throw things into
wishing wells
and stuff like that today.
So it's a very long tradition of
that sort of thing.
And here are some of the finds that
have emerged from in and around
those roundhouses.
So what do these finds tell us?
We've got some really nice
examples of decorated objects here.
Yeah, that's lovely. I love these
kind of sinuous lines of dots.
We do actually have evidence
that even though these pots were
really nicely decorated,
they were still used for cooking.
And we've actually
commissioned an artist
That's wonderful.
to give us an artist's impression
of what the settlement might
have looked like. That is fantastic.
I mean, with the Thames here
and this little settlement
on the banks
Absolutely, it looks
kind of idyllic, doesn't it?
and all the activity.
It does look idyllic, yeah.
So these are completely new
communities to us and they
really give us an impression of life
in London before London was there
Yeah.
..which I think is really amazing.
Creating some epic landscapes
where you can really appreciate
the destructive power of water.
But, in fact, water can be the
archaeologist's friend.
It can be very difficult
and challenging to dig
waterlogged sites.
But then you get some incredible
preservation of organic
remains like wood.
And, in fact, that preservation
is best not even on land
but at the bottom of the ocean.
Our next dig takes place under that
narrow strip of water that
makes the Isle of Wight an island -
The Solent.
Many thousands of years ago
this was dry land.
So for Garry Momber of the Maritime
Archaeology Trust what's on the
seabed holds detailed information
about how humans lived here.
In 2019 we followed Garry
as he lifted
and reassembled a mysterious
wooden walkway.
Now Garry is back hoping to find
more evidence to fill in the many
gaps in our understanding of the
mysterious Mesolithic people.
This is the only
site we've got in the U K -
8,000 years old -
and it's telling us
stuff about this period of time
we know nothing about.
Mesolithic people roamed these
lands as hunter gatherers
from 9,500 BC
until around 4,000 BC when farming
and crops arrived in Britain.
Today Garry's embarking
on an experiment that could
challenge that traditional thinking.
Stand by.
And go.
He's diving down to take
a sediment sample, a time capsule
from an ancient Mesolithic
settlement site that's known
to date back around 8,000 years.
We're going to take some samples
for DNA analysis
so that we get an insight into
DNA from all the living
sort of creatures that were around
at that point 8,000 years ago.
Garry hopes to reveal what plants
and animals these people gathered
and hunted.
As he reaches the Mesolithic site,
evidence of their occupation
can be seen everywhere.
It's like an old haunted landscape.
It's like one of those ghost towns.
The remnants of people still there
with their flints
lying on the seabed.
Garry hammers his sample box into an
undisturbed section of seabed.
The box cuts through several
layers of sediment including earth
occupied by our Mesolithic
ancestors.
With the precious sample
captured for DNA analysis,
he returns to the surface.
Success.
Quite a weight to carry, that.
Got it!
Got it. Got a cracking sample
straight from the sediment.
Once we get the DNA analysis
we can really break
it down to find out what the
minutiae of every little
species that was
living on the site at the time,
and we're going to find out all
sorts of stuff that's going to
help us reconstruct that
landscape 8,000 years ago.
A month later bioarchaeologist
Cat Jarman joins up with
Garry at Warwick University to get
an insight into the testing
process
and learn the initial results.
So you have this brilliant, sort of,
almost like a treasure,
archaeological treasure chest here.
What's the next step now?
Well, the process will be to
get it into the lab,
we'll get ourselves nice
and suited up and nice and protected
so that we won't be contaminating
the sample ourselves.
So that way you can be absolutely
sure that what you're
looking at is the real
8,000-year-old Mesolithic sample?
Yeah, we've just got to make sure
there's no modern
contamination at all. Yeah.
Sedimentary DNA sampling is
so sensitive even the tiniest
contamination could corrupt
the results.
Covered head to toe,
no contamination.
No contamination anywhere.
OK. All right, ready?
Shall we go? That better do it.
Next, Garry opens up
the box of archaeological treasure.
Oh, wow. That's it.
That's a bit of the seabed, 8,000
years old, brought to the surface.
And this is sort of the area
that we're interested in.
The sample reveals the layers of
terrain that have built up
through time.
The bottom layer of silt shows
the land lived on
by the Mesolithic people.
So that looks like that would have
been the land surface.
Somebody walking through it would
literally be walking on this. Yes.
This was the land - people working,
playing,
sitting having picnics, banter.
Remains of the forest floor
are still preserved.
Wow.
That's amazing.
So this is an 8,000-year-old
oak leaf.
Yeah, first time uncovered.
The sediment is placed into
test tubes ready to undergo
analysis in the DNA lab.
That's actually really incredible.
Seeing that, it's like -
it's an 8,000-year-old land surface
being excavated from the seabed
and it's got everything.
We found flints, we found twigs,
a whole oak leaf, and that's just
the environment that somebody
walked through 8,000 years ago.
So the team and are now taking
samples for DNA and I just can't
wait to see what
that's going to reveal.
Professor Robin Allaby has been
interpreting the DNA
analysis from Garry's sample.
These traces were typical signs of
Mesolithic occupation.
But amongst them is a reading for
something totally unexpected.
Wheat was thought to have arrived in
Britain around 6,000 years ago.
But this discovery shows it could
have travelled north from Europe
2,000 years earlier.
I mean, that's really spectacular,
isn't it, and unexpected?
It's amazing, though, isn't it,
that a small DNA sample like this
can tell that really quite big story
about how people moved
across continents.
The combination of Garry's
underwater archaeology and Robin's
cutting -edge DNA analysis seems to
have moved the first recorded
dating for wheat back by 2,000
years, potentially a big
shift in the timetable of early
British agriculture.
This wheat is really quite special
and quite unique.
So this site really is telling a
very big story from just some very
exciting new technologies.
And this, I think, is a really
exciting one for the future.
For our last dig we're actually
returning to the
story of the mysteriously located
Norman church in Buckinghamshire.
The exciting thing about archaeology
is that it is constantly evolving.
Each new find reveals a new story,
sometimes adding detail,
sometimes profoundly changing
what we thought we knew.
Now, the site of St Mary's at Stoke
Mandeville has already delivered
archaeological excitement in spades.
When I visited a few weeks ago there
was the Norman church
that we knew existed.
But under that, an unknown
layer of Anglo-Saxon archaeology.
And then little did we know
that there was also an earlier
phase with some spectacular finds,
making this one of the most
exciting archaeological discoveries
of the year, if not the decade.
Earlier in the programme,
lead archaeologists Guy and Rachel,
told us they'd identified a large
square foundation feature
they thought was from
an Anglo-Saxon tower.
But while excavating the circular
ditch surrounding it
things get much more interesting.
The sill of the ditch is this dark
brown colour and the shape of it are
these two V-shaped edges here.
And you can see that there's quite
a lot of rubble material in it.
And it also has this kind of darker
organic preserved layer here, and
it's that layer that's producing
a lot of our really amazing finds.
It's an astonishing breakthrough.
Over two days of excavating,
the shoulders
and heads from not one but two
life-size Roman busts
are discovered, including
one by 24-year-old Cameron.
Throughout the whole project we've
been trained to look for stones that
are sculpted or worked
and there it was facing me
was a person's chest carved
out of stone and everyone joked,
'"Oh, well, it would be amazing
if you'd find the head.'"
So about five, ten minutes later,
carried on digging,
came up and it was a woman's head,
and it was just really cool.
To get something like that is
just, like, ultra special.
The ditch has still more secrets,
including a stunning glass urn,
multiple pots of cremated remains,
and an extraordinary headless
skeleton with leg injuries that
suggest a sudden violent end.
It's all beyond the archaeologists'
wildest expectations.
You can't even say
it's a once in a career.
You would be extremely lucky if you
ever found anything like that.
Never mind two or three cf them.
Well, the dig has finished
completely now, the big tent has
come down, and all the finds have
come to storage facilities like this
before being divided up and sent out
to specialists for further analysis.
So I'm really lucky to
come here today
when all the finds are still in one
place because these are some
of the most significant discoveries
from Roman Britain in years.
Rachel and Guy have gathered
up their still uncleaned star
finds from that extraordinary ditch
for me to get a good look at.
I've been so excited to come
and see these new finds.
I mean, it's an astonishing haul
of archaeological treasure.
This is a real treasure, isn't it,
to come out of that ditch?
So does that head go with
that pair of shoulders?
It does, yes,
and we can put it back on top.
Go on, then.
I mean, that's just such
a beautiful statue, isn't it?
She's really astonishing to look at.
Yeah. That face is gorgeous.
The shaping Yeah. The shaping of
the cheeks and the mouth.
Presumably that hairstyle's
really datable.
Thank you very much for putting her
back together for a moment.
It's amazing to see.
Yeah, presumably these statues
were in a building of some kind.
Yeah, so it's like a building had
been demolished into part of that
ditch but we didn't really have much
of the building structure itself.
But we have what seem to be
quite a lot of contents.
So the statues,
there's cremation urns, there was
a glass vessel as well.
Look at that, that's beautiful.
Yeah. Are you happy for me
to handle this, then?
Yeah.
It's sharp, actually, isn't it?
So you think this
is for a cremation as well, then?
It could be.
We should get that back in its
water, shouldn't we,
to stop it drying out.
So this is one of the funerary urns.
Is this definitely Roman?
Yes. The pottery is Roman. Yeah.
They've been thrown in
and that's when they've broken
and that's why it's
wrapped in the bandages. Yeah.
An inhumation.
These are the coins here,
aren't they?
Now, they're very muddy
looking at the moment
and presumably, again,
as with the statues,
you're leaving all that cleaning
for the specialists in the lab.
Yeah, cos that is a key
piece of information, isn't it?
That tells you when this material,
which presumably at that point is
being considered to be rubbish,
you know, and it's been
cleared into the ditch.
Do you think?
Yeah.
Certainly the cremation urns have
been thrown into that ditch
with no care.
Yeah.
So this is really interesting
cos then, I suppose, you've got
the question of whether that's
just expedient and you're moving it
out the way before you do
something new at the site, and maybe
that is, perhaps, building an
Anglo-Saxon tower.
Or whether this represents
a set of beliefs that are
no longer operating and so you smash
it up and move it out the way.
So at this point,
there's so much work left to do
on each of these different finds
and each one will reveal another
piece of the puzzle.
Well, please keep in touch
and I think I will definitely be
coming back to see you to find out
more about this story.
None of us can.
Next time on Digging for Britain,
a Neolithic tomb reveals its
treasure before it's lost to
the elements for ever
It appears to be
a polished stone ball.
Fantastic find.
a graveyard in a proud seafaring
city proves to be full of surprises.
He's very pleased to see us, Lisa.
Isn't he!
Hang on a minute,
let me have a look at that, then.
and at an awesome Yorkshire
castle we witness
the return of the king who built it.
So that's a tiny piece of
William the Conqueror?
It is the tiny face of
William the Conqueror.
Oh, that's superb.
Come and search for,
we would search
And looking for a scarred land
And dig for us as we have done
To lay the dead out in the sun
To lay us dead out in the sun. ♪