Digging for Britain (2010) s09e06 Episode Script
North
1
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
revealing the imprint
of ancient civilisations
So we are looking at
a completely unknown Roman town.
That's crazy.
and unearthing priceless objects.
Might be a pendant, or
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
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 not 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 Yes.
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.
Same technique as the Romans used.
Finally, the archaeologists
bring their best finds
into the studio
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, because there's so much
fantastic archaeology to discover,
we're heading back
to the north of Britain.
Under a majestic town hall,
a city's role in a new global era
is unearthed
The Industrial Revolution
is arguably the most important event
in human history.
and inspires a new generation
of archaeologists
Would you like to do it as a job?
Yeah! It's fun, isn't it? Yes.
a Scottish fortress reveals
ancient inhabitants
with unexpected skills
We think it might be a stylus.
Ooh! Do we expect the Picts
to be literous at this time?
and a spectacular Bronze Age find
shocks the experts.
Our first dig is 20 miles
east of Carlisle
in a small village called Gilsand.
From George I I to William
the Conqueror, back through time,
rulers have often struggled
to control the rebellious North.
And, soon after their arrival
in Britain,
the Romans found
they had the same problem.
To shore up the empire's
northern boundary,
Emperor Hadrian came up with
a 73-mile-long
coast-to-coast solution.
I'm here on Hadrian's Wall,
which has to be
the most famous landmark
in Roman Britain.
It was started in 122 AD,
when the Emperor Hadrian
said that he wanted to separate
the civilised Roman Empire
from the barbarians to the North,
in his words.
And these are perhaps
the best preserved remains
all along the wall.
This is Birdoswald Roman Fort.
The fort is built into the very
structure of Hadrian's Wall,
and, in its heyday, it was home
to around 1,000 Roman soldiers.
Huge sections of the wall and fort
are still visible today.
But what we can see above ground
is just the tip of the iceberg.
Geophysical surveys reveal a huge
settlement surrounding the fort,
and even stretching into the land
north of the wall.
This year, a team
of archaeology students
from the University of Newcastle
are lucky enough to be digging here,
just outside the fortress walls.
They want to investigate
the relationship
between this settlement
and the fort itself.
And they've been recording their dig
on one of our cameras.
This is the first of our dig diaries
for Digging For Britain,
the Alice Roberts show.
So, behave. No language.
Finds from this trench have included
a few Roman nails, some pottery
I'm joining them to see what they
think of the experience so far.
How much digging
have you done before this?
What, before this trip? Yeah.
None. None?! None.
Yeah, it's my first experience.
Brilliant!
We've found so many things already.
Literally all over the site,
no matter where you dig,
we're finding stuff.
I found this earlier -
a tiny little glass blue bead
Oh, isn't that lovely? ..which was
just there. That was well spotted!
So, what's it like digging
a Roman fort on Hadrian's Wall?
Er A little bit daunting
to begin with,
but now it sort of just
feels incredibly rewarding,
and an incredible privilege as well.
Also incredible is the double act
of Roman expertise
running this dig.
Ian Haynes specialises in
the archaeology of Roman frontiers,
and Tony Willmott
has spent much of his career
digging and studying Hadrian's Wall.
So, tell me what we know
about Hadrian's Wall
and the forts and settlements
along it,
and tell me what we don't know.
It's salutary to remember
that there are 15 words
in classical literature
concerning Hadrian's Wall -
'" Hadrian was the first
to build a wall 80 miles long
'"to separate the Romans
from the barbarians.'"
That's it. That's it, yeah.
Everything else we know
comes from archaeology.
And that wasn't even a contemporary
account. No, it wasn't. Yeah.
It was 200 years later? Mm-hm. Yeah.
Parts of Birdoswald were first
excavated more than a century ago,
and generations
of archaeologists since
have come to unearth
more of its secrets.
But there is still a lot to learn.
Today, in the first major dig here
for over a decade,
Tony and Ian are investigating
this mysterious area
just outside the fort gates.
This part of the site
was last excavated
by a giant of Roman archaeology,
Sir Ian Richmond.
When was he digging? 1930.1930.
Yeah. They said in unison!
And he came here, and there's
one sentence that says,
'" I came upon a good building 20 feet
square with three foot wide walls
' "going down 13 courses.'"
And then he was flooded out
and went home.
That's it! That's so tantalising!
Yes. No photograph.
No drawing.
So you don't know where it is, even?
His survey plan was really good, and
we linked it in with the geophysics,
and it's this. Yup.
I mean, what do you think
this building is,
and what's happened to it over time?
The honest answer is, we don't know
what this building is.
It's free standing.
We can't see that it is part of
a greater complex, can we?
No. At the moment. At the moment.
While the purpose of this particular
building remains a mystery
I want to appreciate what it's like
when we get down into it.
it's so well preserved,
it helps me to imagine
how imposing the rest of the
stone fortress must have been
when it was first built.
Looking at a wall like that,
I'm thinking about the difference
in the landscape
when the Romans arrive
and how that must have felt,
actually, for local people.
It must have been a really
shocking experience, I think.
There's definitely a brutality
to it.
I mean, you can stand here
and you can admire
what the Romans are doing
You can but on the other hand,
you're very much faced with
that oppressive nature
of the Roman Empire. Yeah.
In another trench right beside
the gate of the fort and a road
more buildings
have been uncovered,
whose purpose
is perhaps a little clearer.
And what have you got going on
in this trench, then?
You've got two walls very close
to each other. What is it?
Basically, it's two buildings.
That's the alley
between the two buildings.
They're long, narrow buildings,
as befit the sort of structures that
would be facing onto the main street
that runs out of the principal
east gate, which is behind me here.
So what are these buildings, then?
Do you know?
Well, narrow frontage onto the road,
well placed to actually exploit
the passing traffic
that's coming through here.
And the presence of gaming counters,
fine wine, table wares
All of these might suggest
that this is a bar-type environment
on the front.
Outside the fort's gates,
roadside taverns,
run by entrepreneurial locals,
would serve off-duty soldiers
food and drink.
While useful cottage industries
went on out the back
Oh, like a glass version of slag?
Yeah.
and the students are finding
plenty of evidence
in this largely undisturbed
Roman site.
Bit of Samian ware,
with the pattern there.
It's easy to get swept up in the
simple joy of discovering something
that hasn't seen the light of day
for over 1,600 years
like pieces of Samian pottery,
which is often marked
with a factory stamp.
Samian ware coming out.
And we've got a stamp.
Mm-hm! So you'll be able to
find out where this is from. Yes.
She's as bad as the students!
' "Oh, my God! '" Oh, my God!
Oh, my God!
That's great stuff.
When you go off to tea,
I'm going to jump in and do it!
I'm not.
I'm not. I wouldn't do that.
But amongst all these discoveries,
there is a star find
Here, we have Izzy
captured on our diary camera
during excavation.
in the final stages
of revealing our portable altar
up against the wall.
This small altar was probably
used by members of this household
to pray for good health, wealth,
or to fend off evil.
It's a very nicely made altar
that seems to be
in a small gap in the stones
that maybe formed part of the floor
of the building.
How many altars have you found
in your archaeological career?
A portable altar perhaps shows
the transient nature of life
for some here on the northern
frontier, supporting the army.
While the military presence
is well documented,
these new finds help me imagine what
the bustling local community here
might have looked like at the
outermost edge of the Roman Empire.
And, if we go back nearly 2,000
years, I'm just inside the fort,
and all around me is this vast town.
And it's great to draw it,
to try to understand
what I would have been looking at,
with the fort in the centre
and a town, not just to one side,
but around the back of me here,
spreading off to the west as well,
the cemetery over there
in the distance.
And you're just getting a real feel
for the Roman landscape up here
on Hadrian's Wall,
with this new generation
of archaeologists
cutting their teeth here,
and there'll be generations
more to come.
The Roman Empire's impact on Britain
during almost four centuries
of occupation can still be seen
all across our landscapes
rock solid infrastructure
left by a vast superpower
that shaped much of Europe
and beyond.
We get a real feel for the Roman
sense of style and aesthetic
from archaeology,
looking at their buildings,
their bathhouses, amphitheatres,
opulent villas
with beautiful mosaic floors,
and from their gorgeous metalwork
and their pottery
and stone sculptures.
But it's incredibly rare
to find anything from that period
carved in wood,
and that's why this next find
is so utterly extraordinary.
In York, inside a laboratory
that specialises
in preserving waterlogged
archaeological finds,
a special guest from Roman Britain
has just arrived.
Here he is.
This wooden sculpture
was uncovered during excavations
along the HS2 route
in Buckinghamshire.
As archaeologists
dug through the clay,
containing pieces of Roman pottery,
they noticed an unexpected
shape emerging.
Amazing, isn't he? It's fantastic.
Diana Fernandez was on site
as a colleague excavated the find.
It was literally
just with his bare hands
to try to take some mud
out of the way.
He said, '"Oh, there's something
here. There's wood.'"
He was so excited
that he could not stop
"just digging around and saying,
'" It is a wooden man!
' " It is a wooden man! '"
And no-one believed him.
Everybody thought, '" No, this is
just a degraded piece of wood.'"
It was literally
a carved figurine, and
the excitement was
waswas big.
Head of conservation at
York Archaeology is Ian Panter.
I think it's extremely rare.
I mean, this is the first one
like this that I've seen
in my, sort of, 40 years
in archaeological conservation.
Incredibly, this figure
is largely intact,
having been buried
in waterlogged sediment.
Oxygen feeds the fungi that would
cause the wood to rot away.
But in this lab, they can stop that.
Basically, we put it into a tank
with a water-soluble wax in it,
leave it there for six to 12 months,
and then put it into a machine
called the freeze dryer
which takes out all the water.
And so it's going to be at least
a year before the item
is dry and stable.
And we're incredibly lucky,
as Ian has kindly brought
this fragile figurine to
the Digging For Britain tent.
I'm looking at it and thinking,
" Is it quite wet enough?"
And I'm getting an exclusive look
at this amazing find
Can we lift him out? We can, yeah.
before it disappears to Ian's lab
for preservation.
Wow! It's incredible, isn't it?
It is stunning,
and I can see that, actually,
we've got something really special.
I mean, we've got a figure of a man,
wearing a toga?
That's right, yeah.
It looks like it.
Within the carving,
you can see what looks to be a belt
going around his waist And these
lovely folds of the cloth. Yeah.
We can see how finely
this has been carved.
And I think the thing
which really blows me away,
this leg in particular.
I mean, that knee - the shape of
that knee and the shape
of the muscles swelling,
it's beautiful,
and it's very naturalistic.
It is, yeah.
Now, his face has suffered
some damage.
Unfortunately, yes,
his eyes and nose have gone,
but we have got his neck
and it's so smooth there.
It's such a beautiful bit
of carving there. Yeah.
And there also seem to be
some curls of hair. That's right.
Yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah.
So, do you have any idea
of the date of it?
The style of it - the tunic,
the bare legs, everything about it,
it's a well carved figure -
I think it's something
that's come in with the Romans.
It transpires that there were
small shards of pottery
found in the same context,
and they're closely dated
to about 40 to 70 AD.
Oh, so if it is Roman,
it's very, very early Roman.
It's nice to think it as coming in
with the invasion fleet, you know?
Yeah. Is there something to see
on the other side? There is.
So if you go Ah.
It looks to be running Yeah.
..diagonally across his back.
It may be a belt, or maybe
something for a sword, or something.
It's been carved all the way round.
That's right, yes.
That is beautiful!
Well, if it is Roman, who is it?
Who knows?
It's just amazing. I mean,
you know, potentially the figurine
of a Roman God that's come over
with the legions -
protecting the legions,
but also a symbol of
oppression and terror
Indeed for the Britons. Yes, yes.
We'll return to Ian
and his extraordinary work
at the preservation lab in York
later in the programme,
where a much bigger, even more
ancient wooden artefact
is under investigation.
Beyond the northern boundary
of Roman Britain
lay a vast, majestic
and largely unconquered landscape.
This was home to communities who,
as far as the Romans were concerned,
were uncivilised barbarians.
The first history of Britain
that we have
was not written by Britons at all.
It comes from literate
Mediterranean civilisations,
the Greeks and the Romans.
And the Romans in particular tell
us that the people who inhabited
these islands were utterly barbaric.
Now, that is
so obviously propaganda,
and we'd like to get
a more objective view
of those ancient societies,
and that's precisely
what archaeology can offer us.
Our next dig
is in northern Scotland,
35 miles east of Inverness,
in the coastal town of Burghead.
Here, a huge promontory juts out
into the sea.
The modern town
was built in the early 1800s,
and, as it sprawled across
these wild cliffs,
workers uncovered evidence
of an ancient fort
which is now thought to have been
a major seat of power
for the mysterious tribes
called the Picts.
Documentary evidence of the Picts
is thin on the ground,
but their name may have come from
a custom of painting their skin -
"picty" means "painted" in Latin.
The Picts dominated
north-east Scotland.
From Iron Age tribes
grew a Pictish kingdom,
thriving in the early
medieval period.
Now, a team from Aberdeen University
is here on this headland fortress
to learn more about Pictish culture.
Dig leader is Gordon Noble.
So, up here gives you a fantastic
vantage point so you can see
the two forts here.
We are standing
on the middle rampart,
which divides the lower fort
from the upper fort.
This is how the site
would have looked at its peak
in around the 9th century.
This reconstruction
is based on new archaeology
and a survey drawn up in 1793,
before half the site was cleared
to make way for the new town.
With cliffs on three sides
and huge ramparts all around,
protecting two groups
of dwellings and outhouses,
we are seeing the Picts
as a far more advanced society
than those "painted barbarians"
of some written history.
This must have been one of the key
royal centres of the northern Picts.
And simply, the resources needed
to build, for example, the ramparts,
suggests that whoever is living here
is drawing on a very large
population in order to build
the fortifications here.
This year's dig aims to find
evidence of how these Picts lived -
their customs, lifestyles and diets.
The team captured some
of their early discoveries
on our diary camera.
We've got a mace headed pin,
made of animal bone -
probably about 1,200 years old.
And, yeah, a fabulous find
for today.
Oh, beauty! That's a coin.
Amazing.
What do you think of this?
Well, quite exceptional
because it's actually gold.
It's been gilded.
It might have been for some sort of
fine, kind of, silk cloak,
or something like that -
a really, really fine button.
But it's so, so beautiful.
As the team carefully sift
through the fine sand,
the site's fragile nature
is posing problems.
So we're in the upper fort tier
in the upper citadel trench,
and you can see, it's like
digging in a sandpit.
Basically, the whole fort
is constructed on top of
a series of sand dunes,
which is fantastic for things
like bone preservation
but has its own challenges
in terms of excavation,
trying to keep section edges
not collapsing all the time.
So it's very, very delicate,
but it does produce
amazing conditions for survival.
You can see house floors
and layers of occupation.
We're just recording all these
layers, taking samples for dating,
taking samples for ancient DNA
to tell us more about
the everyday lives of the people
who lived in Burghead fort.
Good bone preservation means
any artefacts made from bone
remain remarkably intact
and may be able to tell us
more intimate details about
these supposed barbarians,
such as how seriously
they took their grooming,
as the very latest find shows.
I just said at lunchtime,
' "We need to find a comb now.'"
And look at that.
Fantastic.
So it's a fragment of a double-sided
comb there, made of bone.
And I don't know if there's any
known from mainland Scotland,
or very few certainly,
but that's hot off the press.
So that's good decoration on it,
too, so that's That's lovely.
These carefully made objects
suggest a rethink is needed
on how history
has depicted the Picts.
Gordon has brought some
of the Burghead fort discoveries
into the Digging For Britain tent
so I can have a closer look.
So, Gordon, we've got your trench
from this year,
and then the wider context
of the headland
where your trenches are placed.
And I think you can see that as
a very obvious place to have a fort,
but a lot of the finds that you're
getting are domestic. Exactly.
So it shows that this site was
much more than a military outpost.
And these are some of the objects
from the site.
Those bone pins
are really beautiful.
What would these have been used for,
Gordon? Are they for hair,
or are they for attaching clothes?
In this case,
these are very small examples,
so they may well have been
hair decoration. Yeah.
But this one's got a beautiful
little mace head,
all these little knobbly bits
on the end of the pin.
That's really detailed, isn't it?
And that one almost looks like
a tiny thistle.
Let's get the magnifying glass over.
Yes.
I mean, these are just straight
out of the ground. Oh, yes!
It's something
which is so functional,
and it could be really plain -
it doesn't need to be decorated.
And yet it's got this, you know,
just those touches of decoration.
Oh, it's incredible.
And it shows the preservation levels
we're getting in Burghead.
It's actually very unusual
on a mainland Scottish site
to get that kind of preservation.
And what's this odd little object?
So it doesn't look like much,
but this is actually a hilt guard
from a Pictish sword.
What's it made of?
It's made of iron, and it gives you
an idea of the shape and form
of Pictish swords, which would
have been really quite small.
Well, the size of that,
it's almost like a large dagger,
really, isn't it?
A large dagger, essentially, yeah.
Whereas Vikings
had much larger swords -
entirely different sets of weaponry.
Yeah. Different battle tactics.
And these were the challenges
that the Picts had to face
in the 9th and 10th century,
in which Burghead demises as a site.
And finally, Gordon, what are these
mysterious-looking objects here?
Well, these are
copper alloy objects.
The one you picked up first
is particularly fun.
We've got to get this confirmed,
but we think it might be a stylus.
Really?! So for writing
on wax tablets and the like.
Ooh! Do we expect the Picts to be
literous at this time?
Well, this is maybe one of
the first pieces of evidence
that suggests that the Picts were
writing within secular settlements
like Burghead. Yeah.
And, you know, my question there,
are the Picts literate?
I think I've been infected
by that view of the Picts
as being slightly backward Yeah.
..and barbaric -
that view that we basically
get from the Romans,
but the archaeology is telling us
a different story. Exactly.
It's those tiny bits of evidence
that you really piece together
to create this much more
sophisticated picture
of the Picts and their society.
Yeah, we've underestimated them.
Archaeology can bring a better
understanding of ancient cultures
and civilisations
from the long forgotten past,
but it can also help us reconnect
with more recent times
such as when a period of seismic
change shook the north of Britain
and the world -
the Industrial Revolution.
Our next dig takes us to
the heartland of that revolution,
just ten miles from Manchester,
in Rochdale.
As Britain was gearing up
for the Industrial Revolution,
Rochdale was leading the charge,
and I'm walking
this historic routeway
that holds the key
to this town's success.
This is Packer Street, where,
since medieval times,
pack horses loaded with goods
could rest
and merchants do business
as they travelled the textile
trading routes across the North.
Later, industrial traders
flocked to Rochdale,
and so did their money.
By the 1850s, Rochdale had developed
into a prosperous mill town,
and some of the wealth that
it had created through the cloth
manufacturing industry
was poured into this
imposing Victorian Gothic town hall.
These decorations celebrate
the role of the textile industry
in Rochdale's success,
and the town hall itself
is often claimed to be
one of the country's most
spectacular municipal buildings.
But there's less evidence
of the lives of the men and women
whose hard work created this wealth.
This year, though, thanks to
a Ł250 million regeneration project,
a community dig beneath the car park
is a unique opportunity
to investigate the lives of
Rochdale's workers
during this transformative era.
What's this? That's
a bit of Tarmac!
Graham Mottershead
is the site manager.
What have you found so far?
What levels have you got down to?
Well, Packer Street is interesting
because the wool merchants
would have had their houses
and their warehouses along here
on Packer Street. Right.
And we think that the remains
of some of these houses
is what we're digging up here.
The team are unearthing brick walls
from these workers' houses
that are so well-preserved,
they look like they might have
been made last year.
Do you know when
this wall was built?
I think that's late 18th century
Mm from the bricks
and particularly with the mortar
in it.
You can actually see some
lime mortar down at the bottom.
So this has been made
in the 1770s, 1780s.
It's kind of taking us back to the beginning of
the industrial age in Rochdale. Absolutely, yes.
Right at the beginning
of the Industrial Revolution,
this would have been built,
you know, the row of houses here.
As industry exploded, the population
and demand for housing did as well.
So, these houses were transformed -
and not for the better.
So if I step up here,
what am I in now?
These don't look
quite as well built as that.
No. That's what you've got here.
You've had these formerly
quite nice, affluent houses.
The houses get broken up
into smaller houses
to accommodate a lot more people -
cos you've got a lot more mills,
you've got a lot more factories,
so you need houses for the people
that are coming into work there,
so they just start to decline.
I think the things we're looking at
here, like this floor is a bit
of a mishmash of different
types of bricks, stones.
There's even the odd bit of
a cobble.
Just using whatever
you've got to hand, isn't it,
to make that floor? Yeah, exactly.
There are features outside
each of these small houses
that have become
accidental time capsules.
Here we've got outside privies.
These little square
brick-built chambers.
Yes. That's what they are?
Yeah, yeah.
As outdoor toilets like this
fell out of use,
they became convenient rubbish dumps
for residents.
There's probably more finds
come out of these sort of
three little chambers Yeah.
than have come out of
almost anywhere else on the site.
Things like drinks bottles, plates,
teacups - you name it -
just coming out of these.
Combined with everything else,
it gives us a real picture
of what life was like.
You can't argue with this.
This is kind of what
This is like everyday life,
what people were doing,
it's just there.
The thing I love about
local community digs like this one
is how they give
archaeologists of all ages
the chance to get excited
about the past.
Ahh! Do you know what?
I think that is the bottom
of a handle of a pot.
It could be, yeah.
It's interesting, isn't it, to think
about the different ways that people
lived in the past, and how their houses
might have been different from ours?
Yeah.
Yeah.
What do you think about archaeology?
I mean, I know you've only
been doing it for a few hours,
but would you like to do it
as a job? Yeah!
It's fun, isn't it?
Also here on their first dig
are Sandra and Julie.
Do you think it's kind of
connecting you
with local history in Rochdale?
Yeah.
I mean, you're from Rochdale.
My grandad and my grandma used
to work in the mills around here.
So to me, it's a bit of
a connection. Yeah.
I've lost them all now,
so it's a bit like, ' "Wow! '"
But, yeah, it's just lovely,
having a bit of knowledge -
you think you know everything,
and, actually, you know nothing,
until you start going underneath.
Yeah, yeah.
With the dawn of the steam age,
and the arrival of railways
in the mid -1800s,
the residents of Rochdale
could enjoy better connections
to what was happening
right across the country.
Jenny, Yvonne, somebody said
you found something really exciting.
Yes. What is it?
I'll show you. We find
lots of clay pipes, though.
That is amazing!
Clay tobacco pipes were commonplace
before ready-made cigarettes arrived
at the end of the 19th century,
but many were featureless
and disposable.
This is something special, isn't it?
Yeah, I've not seen
anything like it so far.
Love that.
Is it a well-known design?
It does look a bit like
the Crystal Palace dinosaurs.
I wonder if it's a souvenir, then
that somebody's
brought back from London.
That'd be really interesting
if it was.
I think that's got to be
the star find of the day,
if not the week, if not the month.
As well as faster travel
and big business,
the Industrial Revolution also
fostered an entrepreneurial spirit
in ordinary workers.
Archaeologist Ashley Brogan
has gathered evidence of this,
found amongst this crowded terrace.
So that says S Casson, Rochdale.
Yes, so we actually know
exactly who that is.
So that's Samuel Casson, and he
lived in 1851 at 13 Packer Street.
Really? And he was about 20 years
old at the time, and his mother
was a ginger beer maker, and
he took up the business as well.
So that's directly
come from his house,
where he was making ginger beer.
So, it would have been in
his house Yes, in the yard
at the back, which is exactly
what we've got on site.
Yeah. Isn't that lovely, to find
a complete bottle like that? Yes.
So, that says J Casson.
J Casson's Superior Pull, that one
says. Yes. Not any old ginger beer.
No, J was James Casson -
that was his dad.
His dad was originally
a woollen worker,
and they would have been
quite poor on this street,
so the mum made ginger beer
to help with the household income
Yeah and then they seem
to go down that route.
And by the 1870s, you know,
they'd moved out
and they had nine employees and
it was a really growing business.
Really? And we've actually
had volunteers on site
who remember drinking
Casson's drinks, you know,
years ago, decades ago.
So, yeah, it's really closely
linked with Rochdale
and the community here as well.
Oh, that's such a fantastic story,
and lovely to see the emergence
of this business
that then flourished. Exactly.
That's fantastic, isn't it?
Yeah. Yeah.
This dig is helping
the community here
to remember the small part
that Rochdale played
in that huge revolution
that changed the world.
But it's also revealing
the power of archaeology,
I think, especially
for the children -
that they can learn
about history at school,
they can read about it in books,
but here it becomes real,
it becomes tangible,
something they can touch,
something they can
hold in their hands.
The Industrial Revolution
brought with it many innovations
and scientific advancements,
but it also accentuated the gap
between the rich and the poor -
and nowhere perhaps
as obviously as in Ireland.
Part of the United Kingdom
since 1801,
Ireland's population was booming
and depended on a staple
high yield crop - potatoes.
And then, in 1845,
a deadly fungus -
Phytophthora infestans -
swept through and wiped out
a third of the potato harvest,
plunging Ireland
into a state of famine.
The scale of the suffering
was horrific
and over a million people died.
But it's the way the British
government chose to help
those in need that is
the story of this dig.
We travel to what is now
Northern Ireland,
just a few miles outside
the county town of Enniskillen.
This dig is an attempt to uncover
evidence of work done
as part of an 1846
government welfare scheme
that resulted in the building
of new roads,
which later became known
as the "famine roads".
Eileen Murphy of
Queen's University Belfast
is the co-director
of this pioneering dig.
To the best of our knowledge,
this is the first time a famine road
has been excavated on the island,
and I think it's because they're not
formally recognised as monuments.
This is one of the largest
stretches of roads -
it goes for about a mile
and a half -
and we decided this would be
a wonderful place to have
a community-based excavation.
Building these roads was
a seemingly misguided attempt
by the British government
to support the starving population,
by offering employment
where hard labour
would earn them a meagre wage.
People died on the roads because
of the cold weather conditions,
so it was counterproductive,
really, wasn't it?
The dig aims to find evidence of
the lives of the starving workers
who built this road.
But as they uncover the thick
clay foundations,
the team get an insight
into the hardship endured.
To make a road
in a landscape like that,
you would need a lot of clay
to kind of raise up your roads,
so we think that's what they did.
They brought in the clay
and they built it up
into this platform.
It's pure clay.
We were expecting to find,
at the top, a surface
with lots of nice, compact stones,
but when we dug down,
it soon became apparent -
what we found is the enabling works,
the evidence of what came before,
you know, the actual final road
was put down on top of the surface.
So, we think basically
the road wasn't completed.
The archaeology is revealing
the heartbreaking truth
about this scheme.
Many of these roads were left
unfinished and unusable
by those too hungry to build them.
You know the expression
' "Money for old rope'"? OK.
That comes from the workhouse,
where women were actually tasked
to unwind rope.
Catherine Scott from
Fermanagh County Museum is on site
to help give the dig context.
So the famine road
and the system of famine roads,
they are literally directionless,
you know, and they go nowhere.
If you look at the map at the time,
there was a road running parallel
to this very road,
so they have no real function.
Despite the obvious futility
of asking the starving
to build roads to nowhere,
it's a largely forgotten part
of Irish famine history.
People talk about the silence
that was very loud
because nobody spoke
about the famine,
nobody spoke about their experience
and what happened to them
and their families.
But we know, for example,
in County Fermanagh,
we lose just over 25%
of the population.
That's huge.
The decisions that led to
this scheme were being made
400 miles away in London.
As the scale of the potato crop
failure became clear
and famine loomed, solutions
were debated in Parliament.
Historian Onyeka Nubia
is in London to investigate.
So, I want to know what led to
that disaster of the famine road.
I want to know what the policy was
that could mean that
human beings would suffer
for the sake of a philosophy.
I've come to Lincoln's Inn,
where the library holds
a comprehensive set of Hansard.
These are the official records
of Parliamentary debates
from 1803 onwards.
This edition from 1846,
at the height of the famine,
details a speech by the famous Irish
MP and activist, Daniel O'Connell.
The title is
' " Famine and disease in Ireland'".
'" It was certain that there was
a fearful prospect
'"of a most calamitous season
before the people of Ireland.'"
And then he goes on,
'" But the condition of the people,
'"especially of the
agricultural population'"
These are the ordinary people.
'"..All accounts agreed
in describing them
'"as in a state of
actual starvation.'"
Daniel O'Connell is one of
the few Catholic Irish MPs.
He's trying to prevent
the extermination of a people,
his people, and he's imploring
the British government
that has control of Ireland
to do something about it.
O'Connell seeks aid
for famine victims,
but the government and
the opposition are opposed to this.
Their philosophy is to reject
all requests for hand -outs.
Simple charity
was out of the question.
Sir Robert Peel
suggested a compromise.
March 9th, 1846,
right in the midst of what we now
call the Irish potato famine.
So this is Robert Peel,
the Prime Minister
of Great Britain and its empire,
and we see what he has to say.
'" Injustice to the poorer classes,
to those classes who are in
'"a state of destitution,
it would, I think,
'"be infinitely more agreeable
to their feelings
'"that they should be able
to earn their subsistence
'"by honest labour,
than by any other mode.'"
What a remarkable thing to say.
He's saying that he knows
the working people in Ireland,
he knows their feelings,
and he believes
that their feelings are
that they want to work for a living.
And he's also saying, from
a philosophical perspective,
that if relief is given to those
ordinary people without working,
that that is worse
psychologically, socially,
culturally, politically,
than that population
dying from starvation.
These ideas, of course,
weren't new to the Victorians,
but the way that
they were implemented,
getting the poor to work
on roads to nowhere
on activities
that would not produce
tangible, beneficial results
simply to enforce
a philosophical point,
and to make a statement
that if you were poor,
you had to work your way
out of your poverty,
it is utterly deplorable.
Back in Northern Ireland
at the famine road dig,
Eileen's team assess their findings.
Normally on an
archaeological excavation,
you expect to find something.
You know, cos we go after
the discarded refuse -
the stuff that people break
and throw away,
and that's priceless to us.
But, you know, in my mind,
before we started off,
I thought you might find
a little bit of broken crockery,
or maybe bits of clay pipes.
But we found nothing.
Colm Murphy is dig co-director.
I suppose in some ways
we shouldn't be too surprised
because the people
who'd be coming here
wouldn't have had anything
to bring with them.
The truth of the matter is,
from the historic accounts,
most of them have sold off
their good clothes as well,
so they don't even have coats.
They're in absolute poverty.
More than two million people died
or emigrated as a result of famine,
its effects reverberating
for decades to come.
And this dig's empty finds tray
somehow speaks volumes
about the hardship endured
during that dark period
of Irish history.
Archaeologists can reconstruct
ancient landscapes,
sometimes based on
very subtle traces -
whole villages
just from their foundations,
wooden buildings
just from the holes in the ground
where posts once stood.
But occasionally,
there's a quirk of preservation
which means that something that
shouldn't have survived does.
And that can be a real gift
and provide us
with an incredible revelation.
We return to York and Ian Panter's
specialist preservation lab.
It must be one of the biggest things
you've got here at the moment.
It's one of the biggest things, yes,
and one of the heaviest.
In this tank, a huge chunk
of an ancient tree trunk
has been kept
in underwater storage
since it was first discovered
in 2018.
Wow!
It's a bit of a beast, isn't it?
It is, isn't it? Huge!
This is a Bronze Age coffin,
discovered along
with human remains and an axe
during landscaping at a golf club
near Grimsby.
Archaeologist Hugh Wilmot
was working with students nearby
and was called in to oversee
the recovery of the coffin.
Well, I mean, it's just amazing
to see it out of the water,
all cleaned up.
It's kind of fresh now.
It's not covered in mud.
We're beginning to see
some of the tool marks -
the tools that were used to make it.
It's really a near unique object.
Yeah, it is.
Today, for the first time,
Hugh is seeing the wood cleaned
of the waterlogged mud that had
prevented it from decomposing
ever since it was buried
around 4,000 years ago.
You can see the end of it here,
which you can see it's clearly made
out of a single piece of wood -
a hollowed out tree trunk.
And you can see
the wood grain in there,
and the sort of raise of the oak,
and then they've hollowed it out.
They gouged out the coffin,
so it's made from
a single piece of oak.
And that's really quite special.
And you can see some of
the tool marks
from where they'd been
scooping out the contents
to sort of make the container.
So, it's really quite an
impressive piece of woodworking,
not just the size of it,
but the amount of effort
that's gone into creating it.
The wooden coffin was just one part
of an elaborate burial,
covered over with a mound of gravel.
The archaeologists also recovered
evidence that, inside the coffin,
the dead body had been
carefully laid out
on a soft bed of moss and leaves.
I think this is clearly
a special burial.
Not everyone's going to be afforded
this kind of burial rite.
It would take a lot of effort
from the community
just to even construct the coffin,
and then put the mound over the top.
So we're looking at somebody
who is obviously clearly
very important to this society.
The man in this grave was buried
with a beautiful decorative axe,
complete with its handle -
one of only 12 to survive intact
in the country.
It's another clue as to
who this person was in life.
It's very small, and it's probably
a more symbolic thing.
The head of the axe is kind of
made from a limestone
that actually has
fossilised coral in it,
so it seems to be deliberately
chosen as a decorative stone.
So, perhaps it acted as
some symbol of the authority
of the person buried in the coffin.
It's expected to take up to two
years to fully preserve and protect
the coffin from harmful fungi,
all part of a long and unexpected
archaeological journey.
Log coffins are very, very rare.
I mean, this is kind of
a once-in-a-career kind of thing.
I mean, I've never seen
anything like this,
I'm not going to likely
see one again,
so it's really, sort of,
a bit of a highlight for me.
Archaeology helps us learn how
our towns and cities
have changed throughout
the centuries.
And luckily for archaeologists,
that change is an ongoing process.
Redevelopment in our cities
often involves clearing cemeteries,
and archaeological excavation
represents the most respectful way
of treating those human remains
whilst allowing us to find out more
about the people themselves.
We've had some fantastic burial
archaeology from the South East
and the Midlands recently,
and now archaeologists in the North
are getting the same opportunity.
Our final dig takes us back
to Scotland,
where, a few miles from Edinburgh,
lies the port town of Leith.
Here, a new tram line linking Leith
to the city centre of Edinburgh
is under construction.
The route follows the main roads,
which have to be excavated,
but one stretch of road
was built over
part of a huge medieval
burial ground.
For the last decade,
a team from Guard Archaeology
have been excavating and analysing
hundreds of graves.
Yeah, one up there,
one here and there was
John Lawson is
the city archaeologist.
What we have is a general population
of Leith during the period of
1300 to 1650 - all ages,
all social classes,
from people buried in simple,
shrouded burials,
right the way through to
coffin graves from the 14th century.
The skeletons are revealing much
about the health of the residents,
and how long they lived
during a 400-year period
when life was often short and hard.
Likely ten to 12 years of age.
I mean, we're not looking at
an elite burial ground.
We're looking at a society.
It captures everything,
from the poorest right the way
through to your richer merchants
and everything in between.
And I've just found here
a small copper alloy shroud pin.
The team have recorded their
discoveries on our diary cameras.
With children,
they have a lot more teeth that
are just sitting up in the gums.
So what we've got here
is a juvenile.
The excavation is thorough.
Every scrap of coffin wood,
loose nail
and fragment of surviving textile
is recorded,
providing detailed insights
into burial practices
as they evolved in Leith.
And all of these so far have had
the hands behind the pelvis.
This one, this one and this one.
And the rest that are east-west
have had their hands like this.
It's been a shroud burial,
so it's been buried in a cloth.
And it's normally one shroud pin,
but so far on this burial,
there's been seven shroud pins.
This part of the burial ground seems
to have gone out of use around 1650.
In the more prosperous centuries
that followed,
many of the roads and houses
of Leith were built.
Now the team are finding evidence
that some of this burial ground
stood in the way of progress
once before.
There's a massive Victorian sewer,
which serves most of Leith,
running straight down the site here.
Given what we've found, we estimate
they probably removed about
maybe 300 to 400 burials.
We know they did it,
but we don't have the records.
There may not be
any official documents,
but the team have uncovered evidence
of large-scale relocation
of skeletons.
What we have here is a charnel pit,
which is basically a man-made pit
of human remains
that have been put in.
Charnel classes as human remains
that are no longer associated
with a full skeleton.
We reckon there's more than
20 individuals in this set place.
Reason why they've come in
could be from when the workers,
they may have found these remains
and decided to put them
behind the new wall to keep them
in sacred ground, hallowed ground.
Faced with archaeological evidence
like this, it's hard to learn much
about how these people lived
and died.
But complete skeletons can tell us
much more, like this one -
a person who had clearly been
the victim of a traumatic event.
So, it looks like they've been
hit with something during life.
This blow hasn't killed them.
And we can tell that because of
this rounded edge here.
So, this is bone regrowth
after this injury.
And it kind of looks like, because
we've got such a rounded edge on it,
it looks like they've gone in -
so, doctors have gone in -
to remove the bone
and to clean up this edge.
And that's caused it to
to regrow Right.
..In a sort of circular pattern. OK.
Oh, it's amazing, isn't it?
It's really interesting.
Just the story about how
this person would have survived
and the medical care that they had,
we just don't think about it. Yeah.
But maybe in the 1300s or 1400s
Yeah.
John has brought
that fascinating skeleton
to the Digging For Britain tent,
so I can get a closer look
at the injury.
John, thank you for bringing in
one of the skeletons from this dig.
How many skeletons - how many
burials did you uncover in the end?
385. The total count may go up,
so we're just through that post
excavation process at the moment.
And we're seeing one of these here.
Yeah.
So, tell me about this skeleton
then, John.
She's probably in her mid -20s,
and she obviously has had
a very large bump to the head.
You can actually see evidence
of blunt force trauma,
with the cracks - two lines
coming up the sides of her skull
Yeah, here and over here.
Looking at this, it's more likely to
be the result of a violent injury.
And we certainly know it wasn't
a murder because she survived this.
She did. And she survived this
by at least a couple of years
because this is all healed.
I know. It's amazing.
And to survive that long
with all the injuries
and without modern medicine
And you've had reconstructions
done, haven't you? We have, yeah.
With a skull
in such good condition,
a reconstruction artist
can put muscle, skin and hair back
and we can see the face
of this young woman
before she was horrifically injured.
We're looking at somebody
who was alive, in the 15th century?
Yeah, probably in the middle part
of the 15th century.
I think it's really important
to see faces like this because,
you know, we look at a lot of
skeletons and a lot of skulls
and you see them as individuals,
but you're actually
seeing them as people
when you do the reconstruction.
Yeah.
And it literally puts flesh
on the bones Mm.
and it allows you to think
about that human experience
of going through
that horrific injury.
I think that's part of that Our
project is trying to put us today
back into the footsteps
of the people in the past
to show they're not different.
They are ourselves, you know?
I mean, that's why we do
archaeology, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
The challenges this year
have been unprecedented,
and yet it's been
such a memorable journey.
This is Richmond Castle
This beach in West Wales
Love the Mendip hills!
The beauty of our landscape,
the variety of digs
Oh, look at this!
and the wealth of finds
Absolutely lovely.
has been breathtaking.
Some really exciting evidence
has just emerged.
Found a couple of brooches.
I found a ring
What on earth is that?
Brain eating snails?
Bizarre.
I can't believe you found that
on your first day digging.
It almost looks like a hand. Wow!
That's not medieval!
Could it be Roman?
It's a beautiful thing, isn't it?
What a mystery to have solved.
Oh, my goodness!
I'm quite emotional doing this.
It's just amazing.
I can't wait to do it all again.
Coins for the eyes
and keys for the door
Fortress, grave goods,
chambered too
Abandoned villages
Rumours of war
We dig for pattern,
reap the reward
And so a clue to who we are
And where we were and why we will
Inheritors of knowledge now
And ancestors to those who steal
I dig for those whose stories lie
With buried paths and futures won
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
revealing the imprint
of ancient civilisations
So we are looking at
a completely unknown Roman town.
That's crazy.
and unearthing priceless objects.
Might be a pendant, or
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
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 not 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 Yes.
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.
Same technique as the Romans used.
Finally, the archaeologists
bring their best finds
into the studio
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, because there's so much
fantastic archaeology to discover,
we're heading back
to the north of Britain.
Under a majestic town hall,
a city's role in a new global era
is unearthed
The Industrial Revolution
is arguably the most important event
in human history.
and inspires a new generation
of archaeologists
Would you like to do it as a job?
Yeah! It's fun, isn't it? Yes.
a Scottish fortress reveals
ancient inhabitants
with unexpected skills
We think it might be a stylus.
Ooh! Do we expect the Picts
to be literous at this time?
and a spectacular Bronze Age find
shocks the experts.
Our first dig is 20 miles
east of Carlisle
in a small village called Gilsand.
From George I I to William
the Conqueror, back through time,
rulers have often struggled
to control the rebellious North.
And, soon after their arrival
in Britain,
the Romans found
they had the same problem.
To shore up the empire's
northern boundary,
Emperor Hadrian came up with
a 73-mile-long
coast-to-coast solution.
I'm here on Hadrian's Wall,
which has to be
the most famous landmark
in Roman Britain.
It was started in 122 AD,
when the Emperor Hadrian
said that he wanted to separate
the civilised Roman Empire
from the barbarians to the North,
in his words.
And these are perhaps
the best preserved remains
all along the wall.
This is Birdoswald Roman Fort.
The fort is built into the very
structure of Hadrian's Wall,
and, in its heyday, it was home
to around 1,000 Roman soldiers.
Huge sections of the wall and fort
are still visible today.
But what we can see above ground
is just the tip of the iceberg.
Geophysical surveys reveal a huge
settlement surrounding the fort,
and even stretching into the land
north of the wall.
This year, a team
of archaeology students
from the University of Newcastle
are lucky enough to be digging here,
just outside the fortress walls.
They want to investigate
the relationship
between this settlement
and the fort itself.
And they've been recording their dig
on one of our cameras.
This is the first of our dig diaries
for Digging For Britain,
the Alice Roberts show.
So, behave. No language.
Finds from this trench have included
a few Roman nails, some pottery
I'm joining them to see what they
think of the experience so far.
How much digging
have you done before this?
What, before this trip? Yeah.
None. None?! None.
Yeah, it's my first experience.
Brilliant!
We've found so many things already.
Literally all over the site,
no matter where you dig,
we're finding stuff.
I found this earlier -
a tiny little glass blue bead
Oh, isn't that lovely? ..which was
just there. That was well spotted!
So, what's it like digging
a Roman fort on Hadrian's Wall?
Er A little bit daunting
to begin with,
but now it sort of just
feels incredibly rewarding,
and an incredible privilege as well.
Also incredible is the double act
of Roman expertise
running this dig.
Ian Haynes specialises in
the archaeology of Roman frontiers,
and Tony Willmott
has spent much of his career
digging and studying Hadrian's Wall.
So, tell me what we know
about Hadrian's Wall
and the forts and settlements
along it,
and tell me what we don't know.
It's salutary to remember
that there are 15 words
in classical literature
concerning Hadrian's Wall -
'" Hadrian was the first
to build a wall 80 miles long
'"to separate the Romans
from the barbarians.'"
That's it. That's it, yeah.
Everything else we know
comes from archaeology.
And that wasn't even a contemporary
account. No, it wasn't. Yeah.
It was 200 years later? Mm-hm. Yeah.
Parts of Birdoswald were first
excavated more than a century ago,
and generations
of archaeologists since
have come to unearth
more of its secrets.
But there is still a lot to learn.
Today, in the first major dig here
for over a decade,
Tony and Ian are investigating
this mysterious area
just outside the fort gates.
This part of the site
was last excavated
by a giant of Roman archaeology,
Sir Ian Richmond.
When was he digging? 1930.1930.
Yeah. They said in unison!
And he came here, and there's
one sentence that says,
'" I came upon a good building 20 feet
square with three foot wide walls
' "going down 13 courses.'"
And then he was flooded out
and went home.
That's it! That's so tantalising!
Yes. No photograph.
No drawing.
So you don't know where it is, even?
His survey plan was really good, and
we linked it in with the geophysics,
and it's this. Yup.
I mean, what do you think
this building is,
and what's happened to it over time?
The honest answer is, we don't know
what this building is.
It's free standing.
We can't see that it is part of
a greater complex, can we?
No. At the moment. At the moment.
While the purpose of this particular
building remains a mystery
I want to appreciate what it's like
when we get down into it.
it's so well preserved,
it helps me to imagine
how imposing the rest of the
stone fortress must have been
when it was first built.
Looking at a wall like that,
I'm thinking about the difference
in the landscape
when the Romans arrive
and how that must have felt,
actually, for local people.
It must have been a really
shocking experience, I think.
There's definitely a brutality
to it.
I mean, you can stand here
and you can admire
what the Romans are doing
You can but on the other hand,
you're very much faced with
that oppressive nature
of the Roman Empire. Yeah.
In another trench right beside
the gate of the fort and a road
more buildings
have been uncovered,
whose purpose
is perhaps a little clearer.
And what have you got going on
in this trench, then?
You've got two walls very close
to each other. What is it?
Basically, it's two buildings.
That's the alley
between the two buildings.
They're long, narrow buildings,
as befit the sort of structures that
would be facing onto the main street
that runs out of the principal
east gate, which is behind me here.
So what are these buildings, then?
Do you know?
Well, narrow frontage onto the road,
well placed to actually exploit
the passing traffic
that's coming through here.
And the presence of gaming counters,
fine wine, table wares
All of these might suggest
that this is a bar-type environment
on the front.
Outside the fort's gates,
roadside taverns,
run by entrepreneurial locals,
would serve off-duty soldiers
food and drink.
While useful cottage industries
went on out the back
Oh, like a glass version of slag?
Yeah.
and the students are finding
plenty of evidence
in this largely undisturbed
Roman site.
Bit of Samian ware,
with the pattern there.
It's easy to get swept up in the
simple joy of discovering something
that hasn't seen the light of day
for over 1,600 years
like pieces of Samian pottery,
which is often marked
with a factory stamp.
Samian ware coming out.
And we've got a stamp.
Mm-hm! So you'll be able to
find out where this is from. Yes.
She's as bad as the students!
' "Oh, my God! '" Oh, my God!
Oh, my God!
That's great stuff.
When you go off to tea,
I'm going to jump in and do it!
I'm not.
I'm not. I wouldn't do that.
But amongst all these discoveries,
there is a star find
Here, we have Izzy
captured on our diary camera
during excavation.
in the final stages
of revealing our portable altar
up against the wall.
This small altar was probably
used by members of this household
to pray for good health, wealth,
or to fend off evil.
It's a very nicely made altar
that seems to be
in a small gap in the stones
that maybe formed part of the floor
of the building.
How many altars have you found
in your archaeological career?
A portable altar perhaps shows
the transient nature of life
for some here on the northern
frontier, supporting the army.
While the military presence
is well documented,
these new finds help me imagine what
the bustling local community here
might have looked like at the
outermost edge of the Roman Empire.
And, if we go back nearly 2,000
years, I'm just inside the fort,
and all around me is this vast town.
And it's great to draw it,
to try to understand
what I would have been looking at,
with the fort in the centre
and a town, not just to one side,
but around the back of me here,
spreading off to the west as well,
the cemetery over there
in the distance.
And you're just getting a real feel
for the Roman landscape up here
on Hadrian's Wall,
with this new generation
of archaeologists
cutting their teeth here,
and there'll be generations
more to come.
The Roman Empire's impact on Britain
during almost four centuries
of occupation can still be seen
all across our landscapes
rock solid infrastructure
left by a vast superpower
that shaped much of Europe
and beyond.
We get a real feel for the Roman
sense of style and aesthetic
from archaeology,
looking at their buildings,
their bathhouses, amphitheatres,
opulent villas
with beautiful mosaic floors,
and from their gorgeous metalwork
and their pottery
and stone sculptures.
But it's incredibly rare
to find anything from that period
carved in wood,
and that's why this next find
is so utterly extraordinary.
In York, inside a laboratory
that specialises
in preserving waterlogged
archaeological finds,
a special guest from Roman Britain
has just arrived.
Here he is.
This wooden sculpture
was uncovered during excavations
along the HS2 route
in Buckinghamshire.
As archaeologists
dug through the clay,
containing pieces of Roman pottery,
they noticed an unexpected
shape emerging.
Amazing, isn't he? It's fantastic.
Diana Fernandez was on site
as a colleague excavated the find.
It was literally
just with his bare hands
to try to take some mud
out of the way.
He said, '"Oh, there's something
here. There's wood.'"
He was so excited
that he could not stop
"just digging around and saying,
'" It is a wooden man!
' " It is a wooden man! '"
And no-one believed him.
Everybody thought, '" No, this is
just a degraded piece of wood.'"
It was literally
a carved figurine, and
the excitement was
waswas big.
Head of conservation at
York Archaeology is Ian Panter.
I think it's extremely rare.
I mean, this is the first one
like this that I've seen
in my, sort of, 40 years
in archaeological conservation.
Incredibly, this figure
is largely intact,
having been buried
in waterlogged sediment.
Oxygen feeds the fungi that would
cause the wood to rot away.
But in this lab, they can stop that.
Basically, we put it into a tank
with a water-soluble wax in it,
leave it there for six to 12 months,
and then put it into a machine
called the freeze dryer
which takes out all the water.
And so it's going to be at least
a year before the item
is dry and stable.
And we're incredibly lucky,
as Ian has kindly brought
this fragile figurine to
the Digging For Britain tent.
I'm looking at it and thinking,
" Is it quite wet enough?"
And I'm getting an exclusive look
at this amazing find
Can we lift him out? We can, yeah.
before it disappears to Ian's lab
for preservation.
Wow! It's incredible, isn't it?
It is stunning,
and I can see that, actually,
we've got something really special.
I mean, we've got a figure of a man,
wearing a toga?
That's right, yeah.
It looks like it.
Within the carving,
you can see what looks to be a belt
going around his waist And these
lovely folds of the cloth. Yeah.
We can see how finely
this has been carved.
And I think the thing
which really blows me away,
this leg in particular.
I mean, that knee - the shape of
that knee and the shape
of the muscles swelling,
it's beautiful,
and it's very naturalistic.
It is, yeah.
Now, his face has suffered
some damage.
Unfortunately, yes,
his eyes and nose have gone,
but we have got his neck
and it's so smooth there.
It's such a beautiful bit
of carving there. Yeah.
And there also seem to be
some curls of hair. That's right.
Yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah.
So, do you have any idea
of the date of it?
The style of it - the tunic,
the bare legs, everything about it,
it's a well carved figure -
I think it's something
that's come in with the Romans.
It transpires that there were
small shards of pottery
found in the same context,
and they're closely dated
to about 40 to 70 AD.
Oh, so if it is Roman,
it's very, very early Roman.
It's nice to think it as coming in
with the invasion fleet, you know?
Yeah. Is there something to see
on the other side? There is.
So if you go Ah.
It looks to be running Yeah.
..diagonally across his back.
It may be a belt, or maybe
something for a sword, or something.
It's been carved all the way round.
That's right, yes.
That is beautiful!
Well, if it is Roman, who is it?
Who knows?
It's just amazing. I mean,
you know, potentially the figurine
of a Roman God that's come over
with the legions -
protecting the legions,
but also a symbol of
oppression and terror
Indeed for the Britons. Yes, yes.
We'll return to Ian
and his extraordinary work
at the preservation lab in York
later in the programme,
where a much bigger, even more
ancient wooden artefact
is under investigation.
Beyond the northern boundary
of Roman Britain
lay a vast, majestic
and largely unconquered landscape.
This was home to communities who,
as far as the Romans were concerned,
were uncivilised barbarians.
The first history of Britain
that we have
was not written by Britons at all.
It comes from literate
Mediterranean civilisations,
the Greeks and the Romans.
And the Romans in particular tell
us that the people who inhabited
these islands were utterly barbaric.
Now, that is
so obviously propaganda,
and we'd like to get
a more objective view
of those ancient societies,
and that's precisely
what archaeology can offer us.
Our next dig
is in northern Scotland,
35 miles east of Inverness,
in the coastal town of Burghead.
Here, a huge promontory juts out
into the sea.
The modern town
was built in the early 1800s,
and, as it sprawled across
these wild cliffs,
workers uncovered evidence
of an ancient fort
which is now thought to have been
a major seat of power
for the mysterious tribes
called the Picts.
Documentary evidence of the Picts
is thin on the ground,
but their name may have come from
a custom of painting their skin -
"picty" means "painted" in Latin.
The Picts dominated
north-east Scotland.
From Iron Age tribes
grew a Pictish kingdom,
thriving in the early
medieval period.
Now, a team from Aberdeen University
is here on this headland fortress
to learn more about Pictish culture.
Dig leader is Gordon Noble.
So, up here gives you a fantastic
vantage point so you can see
the two forts here.
We are standing
on the middle rampart,
which divides the lower fort
from the upper fort.
This is how the site
would have looked at its peak
in around the 9th century.
This reconstruction
is based on new archaeology
and a survey drawn up in 1793,
before half the site was cleared
to make way for the new town.
With cliffs on three sides
and huge ramparts all around,
protecting two groups
of dwellings and outhouses,
we are seeing the Picts
as a far more advanced society
than those "painted barbarians"
of some written history.
This must have been one of the key
royal centres of the northern Picts.
And simply, the resources needed
to build, for example, the ramparts,
suggests that whoever is living here
is drawing on a very large
population in order to build
the fortifications here.
This year's dig aims to find
evidence of how these Picts lived -
their customs, lifestyles and diets.
The team captured some
of their early discoveries
on our diary camera.
We've got a mace headed pin,
made of animal bone -
probably about 1,200 years old.
And, yeah, a fabulous find
for today.
Oh, beauty! That's a coin.
Amazing.
What do you think of this?
Well, quite exceptional
because it's actually gold.
It's been gilded.
It might have been for some sort of
fine, kind of, silk cloak,
or something like that -
a really, really fine button.
But it's so, so beautiful.
As the team carefully sift
through the fine sand,
the site's fragile nature
is posing problems.
So we're in the upper fort tier
in the upper citadel trench,
and you can see, it's like
digging in a sandpit.
Basically, the whole fort
is constructed on top of
a series of sand dunes,
which is fantastic for things
like bone preservation
but has its own challenges
in terms of excavation,
trying to keep section edges
not collapsing all the time.
So it's very, very delicate,
but it does produce
amazing conditions for survival.
You can see house floors
and layers of occupation.
We're just recording all these
layers, taking samples for dating,
taking samples for ancient DNA
to tell us more about
the everyday lives of the people
who lived in Burghead fort.
Good bone preservation means
any artefacts made from bone
remain remarkably intact
and may be able to tell us
more intimate details about
these supposed barbarians,
such as how seriously
they took their grooming,
as the very latest find shows.
I just said at lunchtime,
' "We need to find a comb now.'"
And look at that.
Fantastic.
So it's a fragment of a double-sided
comb there, made of bone.
And I don't know if there's any
known from mainland Scotland,
or very few certainly,
but that's hot off the press.
So that's good decoration on it,
too, so that's That's lovely.
These carefully made objects
suggest a rethink is needed
on how history
has depicted the Picts.
Gordon has brought some
of the Burghead fort discoveries
into the Digging For Britain tent
so I can have a closer look.
So, Gordon, we've got your trench
from this year,
and then the wider context
of the headland
where your trenches are placed.
And I think you can see that as
a very obvious place to have a fort,
but a lot of the finds that you're
getting are domestic. Exactly.
So it shows that this site was
much more than a military outpost.
And these are some of the objects
from the site.
Those bone pins
are really beautiful.
What would these have been used for,
Gordon? Are they for hair,
or are they for attaching clothes?
In this case,
these are very small examples,
so they may well have been
hair decoration. Yeah.
But this one's got a beautiful
little mace head,
all these little knobbly bits
on the end of the pin.
That's really detailed, isn't it?
And that one almost looks like
a tiny thistle.
Let's get the magnifying glass over.
Yes.
I mean, these are just straight
out of the ground. Oh, yes!
It's something
which is so functional,
and it could be really plain -
it doesn't need to be decorated.
And yet it's got this, you know,
just those touches of decoration.
Oh, it's incredible.
And it shows the preservation levels
we're getting in Burghead.
It's actually very unusual
on a mainland Scottish site
to get that kind of preservation.
And what's this odd little object?
So it doesn't look like much,
but this is actually a hilt guard
from a Pictish sword.
What's it made of?
It's made of iron, and it gives you
an idea of the shape and form
of Pictish swords, which would
have been really quite small.
Well, the size of that,
it's almost like a large dagger,
really, isn't it?
A large dagger, essentially, yeah.
Whereas Vikings
had much larger swords -
entirely different sets of weaponry.
Yeah. Different battle tactics.
And these were the challenges
that the Picts had to face
in the 9th and 10th century,
in which Burghead demises as a site.
And finally, Gordon, what are these
mysterious-looking objects here?
Well, these are
copper alloy objects.
The one you picked up first
is particularly fun.
We've got to get this confirmed,
but we think it might be a stylus.
Really?! So for writing
on wax tablets and the like.
Ooh! Do we expect the Picts to be
literous at this time?
Well, this is maybe one of
the first pieces of evidence
that suggests that the Picts were
writing within secular settlements
like Burghead. Yeah.
And, you know, my question there,
are the Picts literate?
I think I've been infected
by that view of the Picts
as being slightly backward Yeah.
..and barbaric -
that view that we basically
get from the Romans,
but the archaeology is telling us
a different story. Exactly.
It's those tiny bits of evidence
that you really piece together
to create this much more
sophisticated picture
of the Picts and their society.
Yeah, we've underestimated them.
Archaeology can bring a better
understanding of ancient cultures
and civilisations
from the long forgotten past,
but it can also help us reconnect
with more recent times
such as when a period of seismic
change shook the north of Britain
and the world -
the Industrial Revolution.
Our next dig takes us to
the heartland of that revolution,
just ten miles from Manchester,
in Rochdale.
As Britain was gearing up
for the Industrial Revolution,
Rochdale was leading the charge,
and I'm walking
this historic routeway
that holds the key
to this town's success.
This is Packer Street, where,
since medieval times,
pack horses loaded with goods
could rest
and merchants do business
as they travelled the textile
trading routes across the North.
Later, industrial traders
flocked to Rochdale,
and so did their money.
By the 1850s, Rochdale had developed
into a prosperous mill town,
and some of the wealth that
it had created through the cloth
manufacturing industry
was poured into this
imposing Victorian Gothic town hall.
These decorations celebrate
the role of the textile industry
in Rochdale's success,
and the town hall itself
is often claimed to be
one of the country's most
spectacular municipal buildings.
But there's less evidence
of the lives of the men and women
whose hard work created this wealth.
This year, though, thanks to
a Ł250 million regeneration project,
a community dig beneath the car park
is a unique opportunity
to investigate the lives of
Rochdale's workers
during this transformative era.
What's this? That's
a bit of Tarmac!
Graham Mottershead
is the site manager.
What have you found so far?
What levels have you got down to?
Well, Packer Street is interesting
because the wool merchants
would have had their houses
and their warehouses along here
on Packer Street. Right.
And we think that the remains
of some of these houses
is what we're digging up here.
The team are unearthing brick walls
from these workers' houses
that are so well-preserved,
they look like they might have
been made last year.
Do you know when
this wall was built?
I think that's late 18th century
Mm from the bricks
and particularly with the mortar
in it.
You can actually see some
lime mortar down at the bottom.
So this has been made
in the 1770s, 1780s.
It's kind of taking us back to the beginning of
the industrial age in Rochdale. Absolutely, yes.
Right at the beginning
of the Industrial Revolution,
this would have been built,
you know, the row of houses here.
As industry exploded, the population
and demand for housing did as well.
So, these houses were transformed -
and not for the better.
So if I step up here,
what am I in now?
These don't look
quite as well built as that.
No. That's what you've got here.
You've had these formerly
quite nice, affluent houses.
The houses get broken up
into smaller houses
to accommodate a lot more people -
cos you've got a lot more mills,
you've got a lot more factories,
so you need houses for the people
that are coming into work there,
so they just start to decline.
I think the things we're looking at
here, like this floor is a bit
of a mishmash of different
types of bricks, stones.
There's even the odd bit of
a cobble.
Just using whatever
you've got to hand, isn't it,
to make that floor? Yeah, exactly.
There are features outside
each of these small houses
that have become
accidental time capsules.
Here we've got outside privies.
These little square
brick-built chambers.
Yes. That's what they are?
Yeah, yeah.
As outdoor toilets like this
fell out of use,
they became convenient rubbish dumps
for residents.
There's probably more finds
come out of these sort of
three little chambers Yeah.
than have come out of
almost anywhere else on the site.
Things like drinks bottles, plates,
teacups - you name it -
just coming out of these.
Combined with everything else,
it gives us a real picture
of what life was like.
You can't argue with this.
This is kind of what
This is like everyday life,
what people were doing,
it's just there.
The thing I love about
local community digs like this one
is how they give
archaeologists of all ages
the chance to get excited
about the past.
Ahh! Do you know what?
I think that is the bottom
of a handle of a pot.
It could be, yeah.
It's interesting, isn't it, to think
about the different ways that people
lived in the past, and how their houses
might have been different from ours?
Yeah.
Yeah.
What do you think about archaeology?
I mean, I know you've only
been doing it for a few hours,
but would you like to do it
as a job? Yeah!
It's fun, isn't it?
Also here on their first dig
are Sandra and Julie.
Do you think it's kind of
connecting you
with local history in Rochdale?
Yeah.
I mean, you're from Rochdale.
My grandad and my grandma used
to work in the mills around here.
So to me, it's a bit of
a connection. Yeah.
I've lost them all now,
so it's a bit like, ' "Wow! '"
But, yeah, it's just lovely,
having a bit of knowledge -
you think you know everything,
and, actually, you know nothing,
until you start going underneath.
Yeah, yeah.
With the dawn of the steam age,
and the arrival of railways
in the mid -1800s,
the residents of Rochdale
could enjoy better connections
to what was happening
right across the country.
Jenny, Yvonne, somebody said
you found something really exciting.
Yes. What is it?
I'll show you. We find
lots of clay pipes, though.
That is amazing!
Clay tobacco pipes were commonplace
before ready-made cigarettes arrived
at the end of the 19th century,
but many were featureless
and disposable.
This is something special, isn't it?
Yeah, I've not seen
anything like it so far.
Love that.
Is it a well-known design?
It does look a bit like
the Crystal Palace dinosaurs.
I wonder if it's a souvenir, then
that somebody's
brought back from London.
That'd be really interesting
if it was.
I think that's got to be
the star find of the day,
if not the week, if not the month.
As well as faster travel
and big business,
the Industrial Revolution also
fostered an entrepreneurial spirit
in ordinary workers.
Archaeologist Ashley Brogan
has gathered evidence of this,
found amongst this crowded terrace.
So that says S Casson, Rochdale.
Yes, so we actually know
exactly who that is.
So that's Samuel Casson, and he
lived in 1851 at 13 Packer Street.
Really? And he was about 20 years
old at the time, and his mother
was a ginger beer maker, and
he took up the business as well.
So that's directly
come from his house,
where he was making ginger beer.
So, it would have been in
his house Yes, in the yard
at the back, which is exactly
what we've got on site.
Yeah. Isn't that lovely, to find
a complete bottle like that? Yes.
So, that says J Casson.
J Casson's Superior Pull, that one
says. Yes. Not any old ginger beer.
No, J was James Casson -
that was his dad.
His dad was originally
a woollen worker,
and they would have been
quite poor on this street,
so the mum made ginger beer
to help with the household income
Yeah and then they seem
to go down that route.
And by the 1870s, you know,
they'd moved out
and they had nine employees and
it was a really growing business.
Really? And we've actually
had volunteers on site
who remember drinking
Casson's drinks, you know,
years ago, decades ago.
So, yeah, it's really closely
linked with Rochdale
and the community here as well.
Oh, that's such a fantastic story,
and lovely to see the emergence
of this business
that then flourished. Exactly.
That's fantastic, isn't it?
Yeah. Yeah.
This dig is helping
the community here
to remember the small part
that Rochdale played
in that huge revolution
that changed the world.
But it's also revealing
the power of archaeology,
I think, especially
for the children -
that they can learn
about history at school,
they can read about it in books,
but here it becomes real,
it becomes tangible,
something they can touch,
something they can
hold in their hands.
The Industrial Revolution
brought with it many innovations
and scientific advancements,
but it also accentuated the gap
between the rich and the poor -
and nowhere perhaps
as obviously as in Ireland.
Part of the United Kingdom
since 1801,
Ireland's population was booming
and depended on a staple
high yield crop - potatoes.
And then, in 1845,
a deadly fungus -
Phytophthora infestans -
swept through and wiped out
a third of the potato harvest,
plunging Ireland
into a state of famine.
The scale of the suffering
was horrific
and over a million people died.
But it's the way the British
government chose to help
those in need that is
the story of this dig.
We travel to what is now
Northern Ireland,
just a few miles outside
the county town of Enniskillen.
This dig is an attempt to uncover
evidence of work done
as part of an 1846
government welfare scheme
that resulted in the building
of new roads,
which later became known
as the "famine roads".
Eileen Murphy of
Queen's University Belfast
is the co-director
of this pioneering dig.
To the best of our knowledge,
this is the first time a famine road
has been excavated on the island,
and I think it's because they're not
formally recognised as monuments.
This is one of the largest
stretches of roads -
it goes for about a mile
and a half -
and we decided this would be
a wonderful place to have
a community-based excavation.
Building these roads was
a seemingly misguided attempt
by the British government
to support the starving population,
by offering employment
where hard labour
would earn them a meagre wage.
People died on the roads because
of the cold weather conditions,
so it was counterproductive,
really, wasn't it?
The dig aims to find evidence of
the lives of the starving workers
who built this road.
But as they uncover the thick
clay foundations,
the team get an insight
into the hardship endured.
To make a road
in a landscape like that,
you would need a lot of clay
to kind of raise up your roads,
so we think that's what they did.
They brought in the clay
and they built it up
into this platform.
It's pure clay.
We were expecting to find,
at the top, a surface
with lots of nice, compact stones,
but when we dug down,
it soon became apparent -
what we found is the enabling works,
the evidence of what came before,
you know, the actual final road
was put down on top of the surface.
So, we think basically
the road wasn't completed.
The archaeology is revealing
the heartbreaking truth
about this scheme.
Many of these roads were left
unfinished and unusable
by those too hungry to build them.
You know the expression
' "Money for old rope'"? OK.
That comes from the workhouse,
where women were actually tasked
to unwind rope.
Catherine Scott from
Fermanagh County Museum is on site
to help give the dig context.
So the famine road
and the system of famine roads,
they are literally directionless,
you know, and they go nowhere.
If you look at the map at the time,
there was a road running parallel
to this very road,
so they have no real function.
Despite the obvious futility
of asking the starving
to build roads to nowhere,
it's a largely forgotten part
of Irish famine history.
People talk about the silence
that was very loud
because nobody spoke
about the famine,
nobody spoke about their experience
and what happened to them
and their families.
But we know, for example,
in County Fermanagh,
we lose just over 25%
of the population.
That's huge.
The decisions that led to
this scheme were being made
400 miles away in London.
As the scale of the potato crop
failure became clear
and famine loomed, solutions
were debated in Parliament.
Historian Onyeka Nubia
is in London to investigate.
So, I want to know what led to
that disaster of the famine road.
I want to know what the policy was
that could mean that
human beings would suffer
for the sake of a philosophy.
I've come to Lincoln's Inn,
where the library holds
a comprehensive set of Hansard.
These are the official records
of Parliamentary debates
from 1803 onwards.
This edition from 1846,
at the height of the famine,
details a speech by the famous Irish
MP and activist, Daniel O'Connell.
The title is
' " Famine and disease in Ireland'".
'" It was certain that there was
a fearful prospect
'"of a most calamitous season
before the people of Ireland.'"
And then he goes on,
'" But the condition of the people,
'"especially of the
agricultural population'"
These are the ordinary people.
'"..All accounts agreed
in describing them
'"as in a state of
actual starvation.'"
Daniel O'Connell is one of
the few Catholic Irish MPs.
He's trying to prevent
the extermination of a people,
his people, and he's imploring
the British government
that has control of Ireland
to do something about it.
O'Connell seeks aid
for famine victims,
but the government and
the opposition are opposed to this.
Their philosophy is to reject
all requests for hand -outs.
Simple charity
was out of the question.
Sir Robert Peel
suggested a compromise.
March 9th, 1846,
right in the midst of what we now
call the Irish potato famine.
So this is Robert Peel,
the Prime Minister
of Great Britain and its empire,
and we see what he has to say.
'" Injustice to the poorer classes,
to those classes who are in
'"a state of destitution,
it would, I think,
'"be infinitely more agreeable
to their feelings
'"that they should be able
to earn their subsistence
'"by honest labour,
than by any other mode.'"
What a remarkable thing to say.
He's saying that he knows
the working people in Ireland,
he knows their feelings,
and he believes
that their feelings are
that they want to work for a living.
And he's also saying, from
a philosophical perspective,
that if relief is given to those
ordinary people without working,
that that is worse
psychologically, socially,
culturally, politically,
than that population
dying from starvation.
These ideas, of course,
weren't new to the Victorians,
but the way that
they were implemented,
getting the poor to work
on roads to nowhere
on activities
that would not produce
tangible, beneficial results
simply to enforce
a philosophical point,
and to make a statement
that if you were poor,
you had to work your way
out of your poverty,
it is utterly deplorable.
Back in Northern Ireland
at the famine road dig,
Eileen's team assess their findings.
Normally on an
archaeological excavation,
you expect to find something.
You know, cos we go after
the discarded refuse -
the stuff that people break
and throw away,
and that's priceless to us.
But, you know, in my mind,
before we started off,
I thought you might find
a little bit of broken crockery,
or maybe bits of clay pipes.
But we found nothing.
Colm Murphy is dig co-director.
I suppose in some ways
we shouldn't be too surprised
because the people
who'd be coming here
wouldn't have had anything
to bring with them.
The truth of the matter is,
from the historic accounts,
most of them have sold off
their good clothes as well,
so they don't even have coats.
They're in absolute poverty.
More than two million people died
or emigrated as a result of famine,
its effects reverberating
for decades to come.
And this dig's empty finds tray
somehow speaks volumes
about the hardship endured
during that dark period
of Irish history.
Archaeologists can reconstruct
ancient landscapes,
sometimes based on
very subtle traces -
whole villages
just from their foundations,
wooden buildings
just from the holes in the ground
where posts once stood.
But occasionally,
there's a quirk of preservation
which means that something that
shouldn't have survived does.
And that can be a real gift
and provide us
with an incredible revelation.
We return to York and Ian Panter's
specialist preservation lab.
It must be one of the biggest things
you've got here at the moment.
It's one of the biggest things, yes,
and one of the heaviest.
In this tank, a huge chunk
of an ancient tree trunk
has been kept
in underwater storage
since it was first discovered
in 2018.
Wow!
It's a bit of a beast, isn't it?
It is, isn't it? Huge!
This is a Bronze Age coffin,
discovered along
with human remains and an axe
during landscaping at a golf club
near Grimsby.
Archaeologist Hugh Wilmot
was working with students nearby
and was called in to oversee
the recovery of the coffin.
Well, I mean, it's just amazing
to see it out of the water,
all cleaned up.
It's kind of fresh now.
It's not covered in mud.
We're beginning to see
some of the tool marks -
the tools that were used to make it.
It's really a near unique object.
Yeah, it is.
Today, for the first time,
Hugh is seeing the wood cleaned
of the waterlogged mud that had
prevented it from decomposing
ever since it was buried
around 4,000 years ago.
You can see the end of it here,
which you can see it's clearly made
out of a single piece of wood -
a hollowed out tree trunk.
And you can see
the wood grain in there,
and the sort of raise of the oak,
and then they've hollowed it out.
They gouged out the coffin,
so it's made from
a single piece of oak.
And that's really quite special.
And you can see some of
the tool marks
from where they'd been
scooping out the contents
to sort of make the container.
So, it's really quite an
impressive piece of woodworking,
not just the size of it,
but the amount of effort
that's gone into creating it.
The wooden coffin was just one part
of an elaborate burial,
covered over with a mound of gravel.
The archaeologists also recovered
evidence that, inside the coffin,
the dead body had been
carefully laid out
on a soft bed of moss and leaves.
I think this is clearly
a special burial.
Not everyone's going to be afforded
this kind of burial rite.
It would take a lot of effort
from the community
just to even construct the coffin,
and then put the mound over the top.
So we're looking at somebody
who is obviously clearly
very important to this society.
The man in this grave was buried
with a beautiful decorative axe,
complete with its handle -
one of only 12 to survive intact
in the country.
It's another clue as to
who this person was in life.
It's very small, and it's probably
a more symbolic thing.
The head of the axe is kind of
made from a limestone
that actually has
fossilised coral in it,
so it seems to be deliberately
chosen as a decorative stone.
So, perhaps it acted as
some symbol of the authority
of the person buried in the coffin.
It's expected to take up to two
years to fully preserve and protect
the coffin from harmful fungi,
all part of a long and unexpected
archaeological journey.
Log coffins are very, very rare.
I mean, this is kind of
a once-in-a-career kind of thing.
I mean, I've never seen
anything like this,
I'm not going to likely
see one again,
so it's really, sort of,
a bit of a highlight for me.
Archaeology helps us learn how
our towns and cities
have changed throughout
the centuries.
And luckily for archaeologists,
that change is an ongoing process.
Redevelopment in our cities
often involves clearing cemeteries,
and archaeological excavation
represents the most respectful way
of treating those human remains
whilst allowing us to find out more
about the people themselves.
We've had some fantastic burial
archaeology from the South East
and the Midlands recently,
and now archaeologists in the North
are getting the same opportunity.
Our final dig takes us back
to Scotland,
where, a few miles from Edinburgh,
lies the port town of Leith.
Here, a new tram line linking Leith
to the city centre of Edinburgh
is under construction.
The route follows the main roads,
which have to be excavated,
but one stretch of road
was built over
part of a huge medieval
burial ground.
For the last decade,
a team from Guard Archaeology
have been excavating and analysing
hundreds of graves.
Yeah, one up there,
one here and there was
John Lawson is
the city archaeologist.
What we have is a general population
of Leith during the period of
1300 to 1650 - all ages,
all social classes,
from people buried in simple,
shrouded burials,
right the way through to
coffin graves from the 14th century.
The skeletons are revealing much
about the health of the residents,
and how long they lived
during a 400-year period
when life was often short and hard.
Likely ten to 12 years of age.
I mean, we're not looking at
an elite burial ground.
We're looking at a society.
It captures everything,
from the poorest right the way
through to your richer merchants
and everything in between.
And I've just found here
a small copper alloy shroud pin.
The team have recorded their
discoveries on our diary cameras.
With children,
they have a lot more teeth that
are just sitting up in the gums.
So what we've got here
is a juvenile.
The excavation is thorough.
Every scrap of coffin wood,
loose nail
and fragment of surviving textile
is recorded,
providing detailed insights
into burial practices
as they evolved in Leith.
And all of these so far have had
the hands behind the pelvis.
This one, this one and this one.
And the rest that are east-west
have had their hands like this.
It's been a shroud burial,
so it's been buried in a cloth.
And it's normally one shroud pin,
but so far on this burial,
there's been seven shroud pins.
This part of the burial ground seems
to have gone out of use around 1650.
In the more prosperous centuries
that followed,
many of the roads and houses
of Leith were built.
Now the team are finding evidence
that some of this burial ground
stood in the way of progress
once before.
There's a massive Victorian sewer,
which serves most of Leith,
running straight down the site here.
Given what we've found, we estimate
they probably removed about
maybe 300 to 400 burials.
We know they did it,
but we don't have the records.
There may not be
any official documents,
but the team have uncovered evidence
of large-scale relocation
of skeletons.
What we have here is a charnel pit,
which is basically a man-made pit
of human remains
that have been put in.
Charnel classes as human remains
that are no longer associated
with a full skeleton.
We reckon there's more than
20 individuals in this set place.
Reason why they've come in
could be from when the workers,
they may have found these remains
and decided to put them
behind the new wall to keep them
in sacred ground, hallowed ground.
Faced with archaeological evidence
like this, it's hard to learn much
about how these people lived
and died.
But complete skeletons can tell us
much more, like this one -
a person who had clearly been
the victim of a traumatic event.
So, it looks like they've been
hit with something during life.
This blow hasn't killed them.
And we can tell that because of
this rounded edge here.
So, this is bone regrowth
after this injury.
And it kind of looks like, because
we've got such a rounded edge on it,
it looks like they've gone in -
so, doctors have gone in -
to remove the bone
and to clean up this edge.
And that's caused it to
to regrow Right.
..In a sort of circular pattern. OK.
Oh, it's amazing, isn't it?
It's really interesting.
Just the story about how
this person would have survived
and the medical care that they had,
we just don't think about it. Yeah.
But maybe in the 1300s or 1400s
Yeah.
John has brought
that fascinating skeleton
to the Digging For Britain tent,
so I can get a closer look
at the injury.
John, thank you for bringing in
one of the skeletons from this dig.
How many skeletons - how many
burials did you uncover in the end?
385. The total count may go up,
so we're just through that post
excavation process at the moment.
And we're seeing one of these here.
Yeah.
So, tell me about this skeleton
then, John.
She's probably in her mid -20s,
and she obviously has had
a very large bump to the head.
You can actually see evidence
of blunt force trauma,
with the cracks - two lines
coming up the sides of her skull
Yeah, here and over here.
Looking at this, it's more likely to
be the result of a violent injury.
And we certainly know it wasn't
a murder because she survived this.
She did. And she survived this
by at least a couple of years
because this is all healed.
I know. It's amazing.
And to survive that long
with all the injuries
and without modern medicine
And you've had reconstructions
done, haven't you? We have, yeah.
With a skull
in such good condition,
a reconstruction artist
can put muscle, skin and hair back
and we can see the face
of this young woman
before she was horrifically injured.
We're looking at somebody
who was alive, in the 15th century?
Yeah, probably in the middle part
of the 15th century.
I think it's really important
to see faces like this because,
you know, we look at a lot of
skeletons and a lot of skulls
and you see them as individuals,
but you're actually
seeing them as people
when you do the reconstruction.
Yeah.
And it literally puts flesh
on the bones Mm.
and it allows you to think
about that human experience
of going through
that horrific injury.
I think that's part of that Our
project is trying to put us today
back into the footsteps
of the people in the past
to show they're not different.
They are ourselves, you know?
I mean, that's why we do
archaeology, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
The challenges this year
have been unprecedented,
and yet it's been
such a memorable journey.
This is Richmond Castle
This beach in West Wales
Love the Mendip hills!
The beauty of our landscape,
the variety of digs
Oh, look at this!
and the wealth of finds
Absolutely lovely.
has been breathtaking.
Some really exciting evidence
has just emerged.
Found a couple of brooches.
I found a ring
What on earth is that?
Brain eating snails?
Bizarre.
I can't believe you found that
on your first day digging.
It almost looks like a hand. Wow!
That's not medieval!
Could it be Roman?
It's a beautiful thing, isn't it?
What a mystery to have solved.
Oh, my goodness!
I'm quite emotional doing this.
It's just amazing.
I can't wait to do it all again.
Coins for the eyes
and keys for the door
Fortress, grave goods,
chambered too
Abandoned villages
Rumours of war
We dig for pattern,
reap the reward
And so a clue to who we are
And where we were and why we will
Inheritors of knowledge now
And ancestors to those who steal
I dig for those whose stories lie
With buried paths and futures won
And dig for us as we have done
To lay the dead out in the sun
To lay us dead out in the sun. ♪