Digging for Britain (2010) s11e03 Episode Script

These islands we call home have a rich
and varied history
stretching back thousands of years.
But hidden under the ground and
underwater
are some amazing treasures just
waiting to be found.
Wow!
So each year, all across the
country,
archaeologists dig, dive
and explore their way down
Oh, this is brilliant.
searching for fresh discoveries
And it is completely intact.
revealing traces of ancient
cultures
- This shoe is 2,803 years old.
- Oh, wow.
and unearthing fascinating
artefacts.
Ooh, that's a nice thing.
- What is it?
- I've never seen anything quite like it in my career.
Every dig adds new pieces to the
ever-growing
- archaeological jigsaw
- That's so cool, isn't it?
That is the epic story of our
islands.
This year, I visit digs in some
extraordinary locations
The ceiling just got a bit lower.
and I call on the help of a trio of
expert investigators
It's quite difficult to find any
other evidence or things
that just leave a mark in the
archaeology.
This is a really powerful document
because we're getting to hear
the voices that we don't usually hear.
Who delve deeper to answer the
questions raised by the finds.
Is all of this already recorded in
books?
There was none of this in a book
anywhere.
Finally, the archaeologists bring
their most amazing discoveries
into our tent
Astonishing
for up-close analysis.
Genuinely rewriting history.
Welcome to Digging For Britain.
This time, I'll be making my way
around the west
of the United Kingdom, looking at the
region's most interesting digs.
We travel to the shores of the Severn
Estuary
Discovered a human footprint
that probably dates to around 7,000
years ago.
Where archaeologists are racing
against time.
It's possible next time we come
back,
there's nothing to see here at all.
In Gloucestershire, Stuart
investigates a medieval site
littered with 10,000 historic objects.
They're the best preserved ones I've
seen - ever.
We've got to see what's here and
then protect it for the future.
And in the Cotswolds, a mysterious
burial
We've been jumping back and forth on
ideas of what it actually is
- for weeks now.
- ..Is baffling the archaeologists.
It's the kind of archaeology and the
kind of landscape
that really makes you get up in the
morning.
The River Wye rises in the mountains
of Mid Wales.
It meanders its way south,
tracing the border between Wales and
England.
It's here in Monmouthshire that our
first dig takes place
on the west bank of the river in the
village of Tintern.
Nestled down in the Wye Valley
are the ruins of a masterpiece of
Gothic architecture.
This is Tintern Abbey.
It was founded by Cistercian monks in
the 12th century,
and by the 14th century,
it had grown into a magnificent
medieval church.
But in 1534,
Henry VIII began his iconoclastic
dissolution of the monasteries,
and monastic life at Tintern came to
an end
during the Tudor period.
This is the extremely beautiful
Tintern Abbey and its whole setting
is gorgeous, sitting here in the
wooded Wye Valley.
And then the ruin of this medieval
church is just stunning.
It's not surprising it became an icon
of the romantic movement
in the 19th century, inspiring
painters like Turner,
who was always in search of the
sublime,
and poets like William Wordsworth.
For centuries,
visitors have travelled to marvel at
this iconic landmark.
But today it's in desperate need of
restoration.
It's got to the point where it's
actually dangerous.
And so conservation work has to
happen.
There's a five-year project under way
now to consolidate these ruins,
and as part of that,
archaeologists are getting an
opportunity,
a really precious opportunity,
to excavate and look at what lies
beneath.
Hidden under once-ornate floors and in
the burial grounds
around Tintern Abbey, the team are
revealing evidence
of how its sacred era came to an end.
But they're also discovering
evidence of covert religious activity
after its surrender to the crown.
Richard Lewis from Black Mountains
Archaeology
- Richard.
- Hi, Alice
is one of the project leads.
So, this is a huge conservation
project.
It's a five-year project to
stabilise the masonry,
which has suffered over the past
nearly 900 years.
To enable the conservation
specialists, the stonemasons,
the building archaeologists, to get up
to these upper levels,
they need to put scaffolding up.
So our job is to actually look to see
what effect
that could have on any potential
buried archaeology.
We're learning a great deal from these
investigations.
Show me what you've found so far.
Some of what happened at Tintern Abbey
in the aftermath of the dissolution is
evident above ground.
So, tell me what happened at the
moment of the dissolution, then.
The monks had disbanded
Most of the monks were pensioned off
and then the lands were gifted or
given or bought by the
the Marquess of Worcester.
And he came in and he asset-stripped
it, essentially.
So, they stripped the roof out.
They stripped the lead off the roof as
well, to sell it.
And the windows as well.
Preparation for the conservation
work is for the first time allowing
archaeologists to investigate beneath
the floor of the abbey.
- This is our most exciting discovery to date.
- Oh, wow.
Oh, they are beautiful. Are they
medieval?
They are definitely medieval. So
they're 13th, 14th century tiles,
but they may not be in their
original location,
so they may have been re-laid as a
floor
- OK.
- ..maybe a few hundred years later.
There are no surviving floors at
Tintern Abbey.
So, irrespective of what date this is,
it's really, really, really
significant.
You've got some gorgeous designs
here,
I can see a bit of a Fleur-de-lys
there.
- And is this a little lion?
- Yeah, a rampant lion.
See his claws there.
And what about this one over here?
That's the one that's most known at
Tintern Abbey,
a sort of floreated design.
When we're looking at these
beautiful, patterned tiles,
these encaustic tiles, we're only
looking at fragments.
We are. They stripped a lot of tiles
out of Tintern Abbey.
- So if he's selling off nice, complete ones
- Yeah.
- And the ones that are fragmentary stay here.
- Yeah.
So back in the, say, the 12th, 13th
century, would the entire floor
- have been covered in beautiful tiles like this?
- Yes.
This whole area would have had a huge
mosaic of tiled floor.
It would have looked absolutely
amazing.
- It would have been really, really special.
- Yeah.
And we're just seeing a little glimpse
of that here.
Archaeologist Ross Cook from
ArchaeoDomus
has another find that helps us imagine
how Tintern Abbey once looked.
One of the most exciting discoveries
that we've been having on-site here
is this. And now this is window
glass
- Oh, wow. That is lovely.
- ..from stained glass windows.
Within this church, there's not just
the church itself and the beauty
of the architecture, there would have
been a soundscape
and a lightscape, which all of this
would have helped create inside.
They're beautiful objects in their
own right,
- these tiny fragments of glass.
- They are, yeah.
The team are also digging outside
the abbey.
Here, they're uncovering the remains
of those who would have known
Tintin Abbey in all its glory,
and they've captured their discoveries
on our Dig Diary camera.
We have got two sets of human
remains here.
This one down here was probably buried
first, and this one
was buried on top of it.
So far, they've found 24 burials
dating to the medieval period
when Tintern Abbey was an active
cemetery.
They are carefully exhuming some of
the bones
to allow the conservation work to go
ahead.
One, two, three.
Nice.
Burials in the churchyard are
expected
but they've discovered two very
strange graves.
The first, discovered near the south
entrance of the abbey,
is an adult skeleton in a tightly
crouched position.
Unlike the other burials, the grave
is shallow and ill-fitting.
The second mysterious burial
was discovered at the east end of the
abbey
in an area reserved for high-status
individuals.
Here, the archaeologists discovered
a double burial
containing two small children.
Osteoarchaeologists Ciara O'Brien
Butler
and Richard Madgwick from Cardiff
University
are examining these mysterious
burials.
As an anatomist, I'm intrigued to hear
their initial assessments.
Richard, this was the individual
that was buried in that slightly
odd-looking, crouched position.
That's right.
So this individual was in really quite
a tightly crouched position
in quite an irregular grave.
Our initial assessment, we've got a
female individual.
Right. OK. And what about age, then?
Age was problematic for this
individual.
We would normally use the teeth. The
longer you've been chewing,
- the more worn down your teeth will be.
- Yeah.
But they don't align very nicely,
these teeth.
This is the nasal cavity here -
so, the nose - and the teeth are
projecting straight out.
- Oh, my goodness. Facing straight out.
- Mm.
And what do we think this is?
We think it's going to be a
congenital disorder.
So we think this would have affected
the individual from an early age.
Because if you just look at these
molars, this looks like
- quite a young individual, perhaps in their 20s, even.
- Mm.
But then, as you say, if those teeth
weren't grinding against each other,
then she could be a lot older than
that.
That's exactly what we're thinking.
- I think 30s to 40s is probably more likely.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
Anything else about her skeleton
which is standing out at this point?
So, we have fusion of two cervical
vertebra here.
So, this is the fifth and sixth
cervical vertebra
- are completely fused.
- Yeah. So spin a bifida, in fact.
- Yep.
- Yeah, yeah.
So, possible impacts on mobility
- Yeah.
- ..In terms of maybe breathing or moving.
And do you have any idea about the
date of this burial?
Evidence suggests it's after the
dissolution,
so the cut cuts through some
post-medieval material,
so we think it's later.
So that's really interesting.
Do you think there are any links
between that pathology
and how she ended up being buried
in that unusual grave in a burial
ground
- that's no longer a burial ground?
- Perhaps
someone who'd lived a difficult life
with some mobility issues
and some facial disfigurement,
perhaps,
was laid to rest by their family in
some way
that was considered very important.
- And then you've got two much smaller skeletons there.
- Yeah.
So, we have a five-to seven-year-old
here,
and we can see the first of the
permanent teeth
start to erupt there. And then we have
an infant on this end.
So not all of the deciduous or milk
teeth are even erupted yet.
So it's around two years old.
We do have some indications of chronic
ill health
- in both individuals.
- OK. What have you got?
So, we have in this individual
porosity of the eye socket there,
related to nutritional stress or
general ill health.
- Yeah, I can see that pitting.
- Yeah.
And we also have with this young child
some
inflammation of the soft tissue
within the skull.
- So, potential indicators of general ill health.
- Yes.
The team here also believe that
these children were buried
after the dissolution.
These children were found at the
eastern end
of the church outside.
So when this monastery was in use,
that would have been a very high
status area,
so we wouldn't have found children
there.
So what do we think is going on
here, then?
Because the burial ground is no longer
officially in use and yet
you've got these post-medieval
burials.
Well, this was still considered a
special place by some.
And I think family members
were going to, in some instances,
great lengths to bury their loved ones
in this special place.
And returning to this place for
burial of individuals
with very obvious pathological
conditions.
And it's interesting that the burials
we have here are unusual
in context and in the skeletal remains
as well.
I think when you come and look at
Tintern Abbey today,
it seems as though it is frozen in
time,
that it's stuck in this moment,
which is the dissolution, the time
when it lost its roof,
when it was plundered for resources.
And it's almost as though nothing's
happened here since then.
And what the archaeology is showing
is that people continued to see it as
a sacred space
in the centuries after the monks left
here.
That they still came back and buried
their dead
right next to the church.
From Tintern, the River Wye continues
its journey south
meeting the River Severn
which widens into the Bristol
Channel
before it meets the Atlantic Ocean.
Most archaeology takes place on dry
land.
Some happens underwater.
And then there are a few
investigations which take place
between high and low tide.
This liminal intertidal zone
can be a very challenging environment
for archaeologists to work in,
but it can yield up astonishing
discoveries.
Our next dig takes us five miles
south-east of Newport to Goldcliff
on the edge of the Severn Estuary.
Here, a small team of intrepid
archaeologists are setting out
to explore an area of the estuary bed
only exposed at extreme low tides.
Martin Bell from Reading University
has been excavating here for over 30
years.
It's a very challenging environment,
really, to do archaeology.
We have to get down there, identify
what our target is, photograph it,
plan it, lift whatever we're going to
lift and get out again.
Coastal erosion and unpredictable
silt and gravel movement
mean exposed archaeology is never
guaranteed.
It's really a matter of recording
what the sea has exposed,
so you just never know what you're
going to find
in a landscape like this.
This waterlogged landscape
contains traces of prehistoric
hunter-gatherers dating back
to the Mesolithic period.
During the Mesolithic, this landscape
would have looked
very different, as this computer model
shows.
Martin's team have discovered evidence
of camps
and even found footprints on the
estuary bed -
glimpses of the nomadic people that
once moved through this landscape.
In the spring of 2023,
the team spotted a number of wooden
stakes,
which they suspected could be part of
a fish trap.
Today, the tide is once again low
enough for them to reach the site.
Who knows whether it'll still be
there?
It might be covered up by a great big
gravel bed,
or it may have been ripped out by
rushing tides.
If they can successfully locate and
confirm that this is indeed
a Mesolithic fish trap,
it will be the first of its kind to be
discovered in Britain.
En route to the site, Martin spots a
footprint.
Just discovered a human footprint.
There's the heel there.
Side of the foot. Big toe.
Other toes going round there.
It's, I would say, probably the foot
of an adult male
that probably dates to around 7,000
years ago.
We record all the footprints that we
find because, over the years,
we build up a whole picture of them.
We've got over 350 footprints so far.
This one is heading away from the
island,
where the Mesolithic settlements were,
out into the river channel.
That's good. Well done.
Right, we're off, then.
After two hours out searching in the
estuary,
Martin and his colleague Tom spot the
wooden stakes of the fish trap.
They have just 90 minutes
to carefully and accurately record the
site
before it's once again submerged
beneath the rising tide.
It's perfectly possible, next time
we come back,
there's nothing to see here at all.
So the site of the fish trap is marked
by a line
which runs over about four metres of
wooden stakes.
Some of them are quite substantial,
about five centimetres in diameter,
like this one here. Others, smaller.
And those smaller ones we think
had wattlework woven between them
to create, like, a wattle fence
and in a V-shaped arrangement pointing
upstream,
the fish coming down on the retreating
tide
would have gone into this V
and been trapped in a basket at the
end,
or maybe just in the V itself.
There are very few sites in Britain
where you've got preserved wooden
artefacts from the Mesolithic.
We're going to excavate one of these
so that we can radiocarbon date it
and have a look at the cut marks on
it.
We have to be very careful.
Although it looks in great condition,
it's extremely soft.
Touch it with the metal tools, it's
One would damage it
really badly.
But then suddenly you start seeing the
tide coming in here,
- creeping nearer to us.
- Time is of the essence.
That's in excellent condition.
So it would have been in like that
and they've driven something down
to split off the flake there.
There's that one.
It's a bit buckled where they've
driven it into sediment.
But we've got the cut mark very
clearly here.
The fact it's a cut mark shows that
it's humanly worked.
The condition is just amazing, really.
This gives us a new insight, really,
into the fishing techniques
of these people.
The tide is now rising very rapidly.
It's just as well that we've recorded
everything
that was exposed.
I've invited Martin to the Digging
For Britain tent
to show me this rare waterlogged
wooden artefact.
Until it's properly preserved for
display in a museum,
Martin must keep the stake wet to
prevent decay.
I'd like to see some of this
archaeology in sit
- What are we looking at there, then, Martin?
- These are the wooden stakes
of the Mesolithic fish trap.
- And this is the one that you've recently excavated?
- That's it, yes.
Eels, I think, principally, which were
coming down the river
- Yeah.
- ..on the retreating tide
would get trapped in this V-shaped
arrangement.
- And when does this date to? Do we know?
- About 7,00 years ago.
- And what about these other finds?
- Take me through these.
Well, these are heat-fractured
stones that form
a roughly circular area. And this is a
little temporary campsite.
- Yeah.
- One can see that on the surface of this stone, you've got
many fractures, which are the result
of it being heated up
to considerable red hotness,
as it were, and then having water
thrown on it.
So that was really the Mesolithic
oven, actually.
You imagine people sitting around
that, eating their eels.
Yes, a hearth would have been a real
sort of focal point
in the Mesolithic world for social
interaction and everything.
And we've got traces of the people
themselves as well.
Some of the footpaths that we've
found
actually lead to the areas where we've
found the wooden fish traps.
You can imagine that people have
been off during the day,
putting in fish traps, taking eels
from fish traps,
maybe going off and hunting waterfowl
and then coming back
together at the end of the day.
Yeah, that's the really exciting
thing about this site, really,
is the patterns of connectivity
between different activity areas.
So we've got an idea of what people
were doing in the settlements
and then we've got the footprints
- telling us about how they were moving around the landscape.
- Yeah.
I love the way this site also
resurrects that ecology
- and that environment of the past.
- Yes. - It links us to nature.
Following on from the Mesolithic,
the Neolithic period marked a gradual
transition
from the nomadic lifestyle of hunting,
fishing and gathering
to one of settlement and farming.
Our next dig takes us to the Eastern
Vale of Glamorgan,
just north of the Severn Estuary, to
the hamlet of Fonmon.
Here, just outside Fonmon, is a
fortified medieval castle
dating to the 12th century.
This is Fonmon Castle.
Now, it's been extended and rebuilt
over the centuries,
but at its heart, it is a Norman
castle.
But archaeologists have found
something within its grounds
that dates to much, much earlier.
Taking us back to
the early medieval period.
It seems we have an adult but in the
flex position.
In summer 2022, a team from Cardiff
University,
researching the landscape around the
castle,
discovered some medieval burials.
We began by finding some pieces of
the toes.
As they continued digging, they
began to find evidence
that this site wasn't only a place
where people buried the dead.
We've been finding animal bones,
charred bone, lots of charcoal,
evidence of feasting, perhaps. And,
yeah, it's a mysterious burial,
but definitely an exciting one.
This year, they're back to
investigate this curious cemetery,
which appears to be a place where the
living and the dead
existed side by side.
Andy Seaman is leading the dig.
- Hi.
- Hi. This looks intriguing.
- Hi. Welcome to Fonmon.
- Thank you very much.
How did you even start to think that
there might be something here?
We came and did some geophysics, and
the geophysics brought up
- a series of interesting features.
- Yeah.
So, including this little sub-square
enclosure here.
- Yeah.
- And then a much larger outer enclosure
- Yeah.
- ..within this enclosure. We found a series of inhumation graves.
- East-west aligned. Sites of that period are quite rare
- Mm.
- In this part of the world.
- How rare? - Very rare. - Mm.
The post-Roman period in the west of
Britain is tricky.
- And, yes, it's the period that we really want to know about
- Yeah.
Because we haven't got so much
literature.
- So we really need the archaeology.
- This opportunity to explore
a community in such detail is really
exciting.
- Can we have a look at the trench?
- Yeah. Definitely. - Where do we start?
We'll go over here to the enclosure
ditch.
The large outer enclosure would have
been a very visible feature
in the landscape when this cemetery
was in use.
Well, this ditch that showed up so
well on the geophysical survey
- is really obvious coming through, isn't it?
- Yeah, yeah.
- It clearly cut through the bedrock.
- Yeah. And it's deep.
Yeah, it's about just under a metre
deep.
I presume that they're levering out
these rocks,
hoiking out all this material and then
piling it up to make a bank?
- Is that right?
- Yes. Yeah, that's what it seems like.
- It's clearly not defensive. Not big enough to be defensive.
- OK.
But could well be defining
the space around the cemetery.
- Yeah.
- Marking this out as a special place
- Yeah. - ..within the landscape.
- And that's one of the graves
- over there, is it? - Yes.
- Let's go and have a look.
Andy estimates that there could be up
to 80 burials in this cemetery.
So far, the team have excavated eight
graves
and they've just uncovered another.
I'm looking at this pelvis and I'm
just seeing the apex
of the greater sciatic notch just
there.
It's really tricky because there's not
much of it to see
- Yeah.
- ..but it's looking fairly narrow, I would say.
And just looking here, actually,
there's that mastoid process
- which is large.
- Yeah.
I'd like to look at the rest of the
skull as well
but from what we've got here it's
looking as though it might be male.
- Yeah.
- And that molar's heavily worn.
So that's a useful indication of age.
- Yeah.
- And it's quite interesting how the body is arranged here.
What have the other graves been like?
We had expected that the majority
would be just on their backs,
which is an early medieval tradition
of burial.
But we've had two in tightly flexed
positions.
A proper crouch burial,
- which you would usually expect from pre-history.
- Yeah.
And this one's on its side.
- We have another one on its side as well.
- So there doesn't seem to be
a kind of standard way that everybody
is buried.
Which may be to do with chronology.
- Yeah.
- But, yeah, there's more diversity
- than I would have expected.
- And it makes you wonder about
the relationship between burial
practice and religion, doesn't it?
Were they still approaching death and
burial in a way
that would have been familiar from a
few centuries ago?
Or were things dramatically changing?
It's not just bones that are being
discovered.
Archaeology student Jamie has just
made an interesting find.
Oh, wow.
So we've just pulled it out of the
ditch lot that we've got in here,
going all the way through the trench.
What are we looking at, then, Andy?
We're looking at a dish.
This is the foot ring.
- Yeah, so that was the base of it.
- That's the base of it.
- There's no native tradition of making pottery in this period.
- OK.
So pottery is very, very rare.
- Yeah.
- And the stuff we do find is often imported.
Presumably, it's related to feasting
activity.
What could it be telling us about
the site?
I think it's telling us that it's
not just funerary activity.
- It's not just burial. - Yeah.
- There's domestic activity
of some form taking place alongside
the funerary activity,
potentially graveside feasting,
which this material is often
associated with.
- So, sort of life and death together.
- Yeah. - That's brilliant, isn't it?
- 1,500 years ago.
- It's exciting, isn't it?
- Yeah, yeah. - Well done.
- Yeah, really good.
Jamie's find is adding to a body of
evidence that suggests
that there was feasting activity
taking place amongst the burials.
Tiny bit of glass.
Wow, that is tiny.
- Can you see the white trail?
- Yeah, yeah.
That's very diagnostic. So that has
been imported
to here probably from the Bordeaux
region, in France,
- in the most likely the sixth century AD.
- Right, OK.
It would have been part of a cone
beaker
- associated with drinking wine.
- Yeah.
So these people have got access to
luxury goods
that are being imported.
And those luxury goods are being
consumed
and used in this funerary environment.
As well as feasting activity,
they've also found signs of industry.
We've also got things like slag.
So this is smithing slag. So, for the
manufacture of iron tools.
So you've got metalworking happening
right here
- within the cemetery enclosure.
- Yes, yeah.
There is a metal-working hearth in
front of us.
- Yeah. And we're right next to a grave.
- Yes, yeah. - Yeah.
Is this happening at the same time?
The evidence we've got so far
suggests it is.
So we're seeing people eating, people
drinking, people making tools
within the same space that they're
burying their dead.
It does seem unusual that you've got
this metalworking hearth
- in the cemetery.
- It's not unparalleled.
Across Britain and into Ireland,
in this period, we're starting to find
recognised sites
that have got both funerary activity
and domestic activity as well.
They're often described as a cemetery
settlement
or a multi-functional cemetery.
What we've got is this association
between death and life in some way
- that we don't fully understand.
- Yeah.
It's a reminder, isn't it, to us not
to, I think,
impose our own culture on the past.
And again, just because we wouldn't go
and light a bonfire
and do some metalworking in a
graveyard,
that doesn't mean that it wasn't
normal
- Yeah, completely.
- ..back in the mid
- first millennium.
- Yeah. Sites of this period are few and far between.
It's really helping us to understand
this
- this really important but poorly understood period.
- Yeah.
There's some very obvious history here
at Fonmon,
but what's really fascinating is that
archaeology under the ground
that's lain hidden for so many
centuries
and it's so intact and so complete
that we can start to see real
similarities with other places,
with West Wales, with Ireland,
and so it's already telling us
something important
about this community and its
connections and the identity
of the people who lived and died here.
Coins for the eyes
And keys for the door
Fortress, grave goods, chambered
tomb
Abandoned villages, rumours of war
We dig for pattern
Reap the ♪
Much of the archaeology we get to
explore in Digging For Britain
is born of big commercial developments
or university research projects.
But anyone can volunteer to take part
in an archaeological dig.
And in our ancient landscape, history
can be found everywhere,
even in your own backyard.
Our next dig takes place in South
Gloucestershire,
seven miles east of Bristol, in the
small village of Siston.
Here, a remarkable community dig is
under way,
led by Zillah and David Savage.
After retiring, David completed a
degree in archaeology
and then discovered traces of a
building
hidden in the couple's field.
We have the remains of a foundation
wall.
Nobody is absolutely sure what it
could be.
These remains date to
the medieval period.
It all started when David discovered
that his very own field
was a registered site of
archaeological interest.
David came home and said, "Let's do
some digging."
And it grew from there.
- It was like opening the floodgates.
- We had so many artefacts coming up.
For the last 20 years, I've been
riding my horses round here,
not knowing that just below the
surface was all this archaeology.
David and Zillah's archaeological
adventures soon caught the attention
of their neighbours.
Most of us are complete amateurs,
but it's so infectious.
- It's the feeling you get, isn't it
- Yeah.
When you take something out and
I'm the first person
- to hold that for
- For a very long time.
- Hundreds and hundreds of years?
- Yeah.
And together they have catalogued an
astounding 10,000 small finds.
- What do you think you have?
- It's a whetstone.
- Whetstone? Wow!
- Yeah. - Whoo!
We have found what I think
is the pottery foot of a pipkin -
a medieval pot used for cooking.
The alkaline soil means that metal
finds
have been particularly well preserved.
The front of the horseshoe is round
there.
So we've found one definite buckle,
a small brooch and the lead cane.
That's quite exciting because that is
high-status stuff.
The responsibility of it now is
enormous because now we've started,
we can't stop.
We've got to see what's here and then
protect it for the future.
The biggest question, really,
is whether it's the beginnings of a
very small church,
a high-status manor, or just a
farmstead.
To help answer this question, I've
asked Digging For Britain's
medieval expert, and David's old
archaeology tutor, Stuart Prior,
to visit the site.
Good to see you, mate.
Nice to see you. What have we got
going on here?
So, we have this well-defined
enclosure
that you can see on the geophys.
Oh, wow, yeah, absolutely.
- So that huge circular enclosure there.
- Yeah.
- And then this is your series of buildings in the middle here.
- Yeah.
Often, a circular feature enclosing
a small number of medieval buildings
points to evidence of ecclesiastical
use.
So what we're looking at then are
stone foundations for presumably
- a timber building
- A wall, about 3ft high.
And then this amazing feature
here
- Yeah.
- ..which looks to be some sort of, I mean, larder,
where you're storing your cheeses and
your cold meats.
- Potentially, Yeah.
- Is there a building associated with this thing?
- Well, there has to be somewhere.
- OK. - We found a hearth. - Yeah.
We found small shards of metal.
We've got fragments of horseshoe,
evidence of blacksmithing.
- Can I see some of the finds?
- Of course you can, yeah. - Perfect.
Zillah has gathered some of the best
finds to show me.
So, Zillah, I see a table full of
finds before me.
Can I ask your opinion on this?
It's a beautiful piece of copper
alloy.
That to me looks like it was wrapped
around something like silk,
- or to weigh down the end of a scarf.
- And then I have this tiny, beautiful
- copper alloy strap end.
- Looks like a snake head or a dragon's head.
- The decorative end to a belt.
- So, in terms of class,
you're seeing everything from high-to
middle-ranking
- group of people being here. - Yep.
- I can see a couple of pieces of iron.
- Let me show you our best find ever.
- Wow, spurs. - Two spurs.
- Prick spurs. - Yep. - So, late Saxon, early Norman.
- Yeah. - Yeah. Beautiful.
They're the best-preserved ones I've
seen - ever.
Then on my birthday David gave
me
- What, he found it?
- Yeah! - On your birthday.
- A beautiful little arrowhead.
- Wow.
- Oh, that's beautiful.
- Yeah. - Look at that.
That's so well preserved as well.
All of this isn't necessarily
screaming
- monastic. - No.
- It's screaming more
towards the farmstead end of it.
- Yeah.
- This site starts probably as an early monastic site.
You know? You've got that beautiful
earthwork bank surrounding the site,
but then, at some point,
it turns into a settlement of some
description,
- a small settlement. - Yeah.
- But it's an amazing site.
You've got some really, really lovely
finds.
And actually the fact that the
metalwork is so well preserved,
it's really useful.
We know we've got at least another
ten years' work to do here.
A forge attached to a farmstead
would most likely have been
positioned on the outskirts of a
settlement.
It would have been used by the whole
village, as well as passers-by.
I've decided to take Zillah's
arrowhead
to local arrowsmith Hector Cole to
find out how it would have been made
and what it might have been used for.
Hector!
I've got a beautiful arrowhead from
Siston.
Hector has been forging arrowheads for
over 30 years.
That's a lovely little head, that.
Yeah, the metalwork coming off that
site is amazing.
I've asked Hector to make an arrowhead
that matches the one
from Glebe Field using medieval
techniques.
I'm starting with a piece of square
section bar
because that's what they would have
forged the iron down to,
and then they would work from that.
First, Hector flattens one end of
the bar.
Then he shapes this end into a tubular
socket.
Is all of this already recorded in
books?
There was none of this in a book
anywhere.
With the iron suitably malleable,
Hector skilfully hammers out the
blade.
You make it look so easy, Hector.
It's amazing!
The edges can now be sharpened using a
grinding wheel.
So this is exactly the sort of
grindstone they'd have used
- in the medieval period?
- They would. Possibly a bigger one than this.
And the faster you turn it, the better
it is.
- I can understand why electronic tools were invented.
- Absolutely.
- And the final phase is back in the forge, right?
- Yeah.
To get the point hardened, as hard as
we can get it,
so that it will be effective when it
shoots.
There we are. And straight in the
water.
And it's done.
- And there's the finished
- Ready for your longbow. - Yeah.
That is such a beautiful and
delicate point.
- At 50 yards, that was deadly.
- Yes, absolutely.
Hector has a huge collection of
medieval arrowheads
showing how they've evolved from
multipurpose
to highly specific designs.
These are the Saxon, early-medieval
ones,
- where they were used for either hunting or war.
- Yep.
And then we come on to the later
warheads.
- The standard bodkin, war bodkin.
- Mm-hm.
For plate arm our. It's a diamond
section.
It cuts better, penetrates better.
- To this one - Very nasty-looking one.
- It is a warhead.
- That looks like it's designed to go in and never come out.
- Yep.
And from the war bodkins, we then go
on to the hunting heads.
The larger it is, the larger the game
that you're shooting.
- Right. I take it that ours fits in at this end?
- In there.
So the arrow from Siston
is in that early-medieval range,
Anglo-Saxon or early Norman.
And it could be used for hunting or it
could be used for people.
- Thank you, Hector. That's amazing.
- My pleasure.
We may never know quite what was
happening at Siston.
You know, there was a blacksmith's
forge there.
Somebody was making arrowheads, either
to order or for sale,
preparing for war or for hunting.
And Hector has made this beautiful
12th-century arrowhead.
A testament to the people that used to
live there.
The landscape of the west of Britain
is full of historic spectacles,
traces of our ancestors,
and it continues to evolve today
through natural erosion and human-made
change.
Sometimes archaeologists can set out
with a very clear idea
of what it is they're trying to
investigate
and even hoping to find.
At other times, they can be taken
completely by surprise.
And that's exactly what happened in
our next dig.
This dig is taking place on the edge
of the Cotswolds,
five miles south of Cheltenham.
Here, a road development project is
under way,
and after trial-trenching revealed
Iron Age activity,
excavation began in earnest.
We've stripped a huge amount in this
area. It's about five hectares.
As an archaeologist,
it's the kind of archaeology and the
kind of landscape
that really makes you get up in the
morning.
And they've found something that is
baffling them.
It's called a banjo enclosure
because it looks like a banjo.
It has a long entrance, which looks
like the neck of the banjo,
and then a kind of round enclosure,
which is the body of the banjo.
Every day we're evolving a new picture
of what this might be.
This enigmatic, banjo-shaped
enclosure dates to
the Iron Age.
Archaeologist Jim Keyte from National
Highways
is leading the dig.
Now, all we see is the ditch. There
would have been a bank next to that,
all the material that came out of it.
So the overall impression
would be something that is cut off
from the outside world
and something, whatever is happening
inside,
is actually kind of special,
potentially.
We thought this could have been an
agricultural enclosure.
It could have been some kind of
settlement.
Or it could have been what we would
class as ritual - a place people
come to undertake the things that
aren't necessarily
part of their day-to-day existence.
The banjo enclosure isn't the only
Iron Age feature in this landscape.
200 metres away, there's a small
settlement.
And just to the west of the site,
Crickley Hill is home to an Iron Age
hillfort.
We know what those things are.
They're places where people worked and
lived and carried out
their daily lives. This is sandwiched
between them.
It's on a slope and it kind of sits
between them, both physically
and probably metaphysically for them.
The first clue as to what this site
might have been used for
was discovered in the western boundary
ditch
the skull of a cow.
Project officer Kinga has the cleaned
skull.
We only found the skull of cow.
We didn't find any other parts.
So we're thinking the cow didn't die
here,
it was butchered somewhere else.
And the skull, being a waste, was
chucked into this ditch.
So the presence of the skull in this
ditch might tell us
that there was possibly a feast going
on in the area
of this boundary enclosure.
Inside the enclosure,
the team find further evidence of
cooking and feasting,
as their Dig Diary shows.
We're inside the enclosure ditch
and we've got a sort of large terrace,
we think,
where they've dug down to bedrock
and created a level surface as a
working area.
Archaeologist James has some finds
from this terraced area.
We've got some large bases off of
plates or big clay vessels.
It was designed to be hard wearing.
It's probably a storage jar, maybe, or
something like that.
We've got a really nice, detailed
piece here.
It's an Iron Age rim with incised
details cut into it.
We've also got possibly a hook
that came out of one of the lower
fills as well.
I don't think I've ever actually
seen an Iron Age hook before.
Maybe attached to It will be on a
post or something like that,
maybe for just attaching some kind of
implement.
We've also had quite a bit of bone
come out of it,
- but none of it's burnt.
- The meat that they would have been cooking
had been stripped off of it before
cooking.
These finds are the sort of things
that you'd be expecting to find
in a domestic setting, but we're
getting nothing around it
which suggests that people lived here.
So these things are going to
have been brought in and used here and
deposited here for a reason.
And we don't know what that reason is
yet.
We've been jumping back and forth on
ideas of what it actually is
for weeks now.
After digging at the site for two
weeks,
the team make a major discovery right
at the heart of the enclosure,
providing key evidence that this site
was ceremonial in nature.
Archaeologist William filmed the
discovery.
So here we've excavated this pit,
and at the bottom we found
a crouched burial of this skeleton.
As you can see, he's sort of buried
with his knees up towards that area.
And you've got his feet sort of
sticking up and then his arms
crossed over the chest.
And we're just carefully working
around it to expose it
and so we can record it and then
finally lift it up.
I've asked Jim and
osteoarchaeologist Sharon Clough
to bring this skeleton to the Digging
For Britain tent
for a closer look.
Jim and Sharon, thank you very much
for bringing in the skeleton,
which I'd love to have a look at in a
bit.
- But tell me about the site itself. What do we know about it?
- OK.
So this individual was found right in
the centre of the enclosure,
- in this spot here.
- Right in the middle? - Yeah.
And so when you would have walked up
the valley, up here, into here,
it would have been the first thing you
would have seen.
It's such an unusual thing to find.
It's so obviously the focus of what's
going on.
Sharon, what do you think is going
on with this burial?
- Who are we looking at?
- Before you even look at the skeleton,
you know this is probably a very
special, significant person.
It was immediately obvious
- that they aren't actually quite a fully adult person.
- Yeah.
You can see here on the skeleton
that some of the bones
haven't been fully fused yet,
because we know they fuse at a set
rate at different ages.
- So - That's partially fused at the top of the humerus.
- Yeah.
The inferior angle of the scapula is
nearly fused.
- I notice that the sacrum
- Hasn't quite fused. - ..hasn't fused yet.
So I think this person was about 17
to 20 years old when they died.
It's an unusual age to die,
because mortality is concentrated in
the early years
- and then in older years.
- And they're dying in the prime of their life,
just before they're about to become a
fully adult person.
And then sex, biological sex?
So we're looking at sort of mixed
features in the skull area.
- What about the pelvis?
- The sciatic notch is usually quite narrow
in males and much wider in females.
And here it's sort of somewhere in the
middle.
And then you've got, as you hold it
up, you can look at the angle here
and then the pubic symphysis there.
- So I think this individual is male.
- Yeah, I'd agree.
It's not as male as you would
normally sort of expect
someone to appear, and I think it's
due to the age that they're at.
- Yeah.
- So the only thing that I did notice
is there's a slight difference here on
the upper leg and the femur.
So on the left side here, this is a
nice, straight femur.
But on this side, if you have a look,
there's a slight turn here on the
femoral head.
It's quite obvious, looking at this
bone,
how different it is from the other
side.
And then you wonder, actually, how
different his gait was
- and whether people would have been aware of that difference.
- Yeah.
I think it would have been noticeable,
but not so much, maybe,
that they needed a stick or anything
to help them along.
Yeah. It's curious, isn't it?
So we don't know the cause of death.
As you said,
there's something special about him.
We don't know what that specialness
is.
It could be positive or negative, of
course.
But what we can say at the moment is
it's an isolated burial
- in a special place. And he's unusually young.
- Yes, that's right.
As archaeologists, we desperately
want to interpret this.
We desperately want to give meaning to
it.
You know, it's a really unusual sight,
and it's really exciting
to be part of that cos it really adds
to our knowledge
of what's going on in the Iron Age.
When the team began this dig,
they expected to find evidence of Iron
Age life.
But with the discovery of this
mysterious banjo enclosure,
which now appears to have held
ceremonial significance,
it's a reminder that with each
archaeological discovery,
we are evolving our understanding of
the past,
but finding even greater mysteries to
solve.
Next time on Digging For Britain,
I'm exploring the best digs in the
east.
Henry VIII's lost palace is uncovered.
We have been looking for this for
about three years, yes,
so we're very pleased to see this.
We explore the mystery of the Battle
of Waterloo's disappearing dead.
- It's not just a rumour, then?
- No, it's not.
And I'm lost for words
at the strangest Roman object I've
ever seen.
This is just extraordinary.
Look at that!
Come and search for we would
search
And looking for a scarred land
And dig for those whose stories lie
With buried pasts 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. ♪