Digging for Britain (2010) s12e02 Episode Script

1
These islands we call home have a rich
and varied history
stretching back thousands of years.
But hidden below the surface
Look at that!
..are some amazing treasures just
waiting to be found.
- Wow. Look at me, I'm shaking.
- So each year, across the country,
archaeologists dig, dive, and explore
their way down,
searching for fresh discoveries
There's something quite magical about
digging down
through this dark soil, and then
suddenly there's a gleam of gold.
..uncovering traces of ancient
lives
- It's amazing, isn't it?
There's nothing like this anywhere
else in Europe.
- It still moves.
- Yeah.
- ..and finding fascinating objects
I've never seen anything quite that
profound.
..as every dig provides a new piece of
the puzzle,
new details of Britain's forgotten
past.
This is the epic and unfolding story
of our islands.
This time, I'm travelling around the
central region of Britain
to dig out the most intriguing
archaeological finds.
Travelling back around 165 million
years,
we witness an earth-shattering
discovery
- There's nothing like this anywhere
else in Europe.
- ..as we go walking with dinosaurs.
- I won't forget it.
I'll never forget that moment.
- One of the largest single excavation
sites ever
- We know they were having great big
feasts
and making a really good life for
themselves out here.
- ..brings startling new revelations
about Iron Age farmers.
- We're looking at pioneers heading
out into the wilderness.
- Really?
And a metal detectorist's chance
discovery
Was there any clue that this was here?
- No, none whatsoever.
- ..reveals a Roman treasure trove.
Ooh! There's mosaic everywhere!
Digging For Britain is an archaeology
series.
You know that. This means it's about
humans.
It's about the things that humans
made,
the places they lived in.
But every now and then, something
comes along which is much older -
in this case, more ancient than
humanity itself.
And when my friend Richard Butler told
me that he was looking at
the most extensive dinosaur trackways
that have ever been found in Europe,
I wanted to take a look.
And I thought you might like to see
them as well.
Our first discovery comes from
a quarry near the town of Bicester in
Oxfordshire.
When Gary Johnson started just another
ordinary day's work
at this limestone quarry, he had no
idea that he was about to make
a ground-breaking discovery
..dating back around 165 million years
ago
to the Jurassic period.
Gary, you were the person that first
realised what was here.
- Yeah.
- What happened?
- Well, I would scrape off down to the
hard ground,
there's a layer of clay about 2ft,
something like that.
And I was dragging it off, scraping it
off,
and then you get a bump, and then
another bump.
- OK.
- So I come the other side and did it,
and you could see it -
it looked like footprints.
And obviously, I knew they must be
pretty old
because they were fossilised.
- They were underneath metres of
limestone.
- That's what I mean, yeah.
- Yeah, yeah.
- But the thing about it is it's had
all that weight on it,
and yet that bump is still there.
- There's something incredible about
the fact that something
as kind of slight, as ephemeral as a
footprint
- Yeah.
- ..has stayed there.
- Yeah. With all the millions of
tonnes it's had on over the years,
and yet that footprint is there.
- Yeah.
- When you start thinking about it,
you think,
"If it is, I'm the first human being
to see that footprint."
Yeah, I won't forget it.
I'll never forget that moment.
- Gary hadn't just found one or two
dinosaur footprints.
There were long trackways of
footprints
stretching right across the quarry
floor.
So the quarry foreman called my old
friend,
palaeontologist Richard Butler
Richard.
- Hi, Alice.
- Hello.
- Great to see you.
- ..who assembled a joint team
from the universities of Birmingham
and Oxford
to investigate the footprints.
What an incredible sight.
- It's amazing, isn't it?
So, if we have a look over here
What we've got here is we've got this
incredibly long trackway.
So, it's going probably for about 150m
in total length.
- It goes all the way back to there.
- Yeah, it's incredible, isn't it?
- It's as far as we can see.
And then you're back
- There's nothing like this anywhere
else
in the UK. Probably nothing like this
anywhere else in Europe.
It's one of the longest trackways
anywhere in the world.
- Really?
- Yes.
There are some very long trackways in
North and South America,
but this is one of the most
significant dinosaur track sites
anywhere in the world.
- And, Richard, can you tell what
species this was,
or at least what group of dinosaurs it
could have been?
- These are enormous tracks.
This is probably about a metre in
length,
and there's only one group of
dinosaurs that are big enough
to produce tracks like this
- Yeah.
- ..which are the sauropod dinosaurs.
There's a sauropod called cetiosaurus,
which is known from Oxfordshire,
one of the earliest dinosaurs ever to
be discovered,
so it's possible that these could be
cetiosaurus tracks.
- Sauropods were large, herbivorous
dinosaurs with long tails,
long necks and tiny heads.
Cetiosaurus is considered to be on the
small side
for a sauropod, but it could still
grow up to 18m in length
and weighed around 11 tonnes when
fully grown.
Richard's colleague, Professor Kirsty
Edgar
from the University of Birmingham, is
interested in the environment
that these dinosaurs would have lived
in.
I've come to help, Kirsty.
- Oh, thank you very much!
- How easy is it to work out where
the overburden, the mud,
stops and the footprint starts?
- Today, it's actually quite
difficult, I have to say.
So, as soon as you hit the white rock
underneath,
you can stop scratching.
- So, it is hard, actually, isn't it?
- It's really hard.
You're not going to damage it too much
if you
use the scraper on it.
- What's important about having such
long trackways?
How does that help you as a
palaeontologist?
- Yeah, so, we can get lots of
information from dinosaur tracks.
We can find out how big the organism
was,
how fast they were moving.
If we have lots of tracks,
we can start to understand behaviour.
- Yeah.
- We can also figure out potentially
the environments
in which they lived, so other aspects
of their ecology.
- Paint me a picture here, then.
What's the landscape like?
- So, around 165 million years ago,
the UK was much further south on the
globe.
So we would have been in subtropical
climate conditions.
And actually at this time, we would
have been on sort of
the edge of a series of lagoons,
possibly a little bit of water
the dinosaur would have been walking
through,
or just the edge of the lagoon.
- I find it really quite weirdly
unbelievable, you know,
that that is athat's a moment in a
dinosaur's life.
It's
It is actually mind-blowing.
- Yeah.
- As the excavation continues,
the full extent of the trackway is
slowly revealed,
and the team realise that they have
more than one set of tracks
crossing this landscape.
- One of the things we want to try and
work out this week
is how many sauropod trackways we have
here.
- Yeah.
- And is there evidence that this is a
group
moving in one direction?
- Yeah.
- So we have two teams here at the
moment
uncovering different trackways. And
there is another possible
sauropod trackway just to the left of
where we're standing now.
- OK.
- And so if that is a sauropod
trackway,
it's also moving in the same
direction.
- So it could've been a herd
- It could be that there was a group
moving through.
- Yeah.
- And that one seems to be a bit
smaller
and it's less deeply impressed, so
maybe that's a younger individual.
- Yeah. Do we know that about
sauropods?
Do we know that they were gregarious?
- We're pretty confident,
and trackways actually are one of the
main lines
of evidence that they did live in
groups,
they did live in herds
- Yeah.
- ..with age structures. I mean, so I
think you have to imagine
a bit like elephants today.
- Yeah, yeah.
Incredibly, the plant-eating
cetiosaurus is not the only dinosaur
that has left tracks in this quarry.
Hello, Emma.
- Hey.
- Hi.
- How's it going?
- Very good.
Richard sent me over to talk to you,
because I've had a look at
the sauropod tracks with him, but he
said you're digging
a very different trackway.
- Completely different.
- I can immediately see it's
different, actually.
- Yeah.
These are very, very clearly
tridactyl.
They've got three toes.
This is a megalosaur trackway.
- So, what kind of dinosaur was a
megalosaur?
- So, megalosaurus is a mid-Jurassic
bipedal carnivore.
So walked on two legs, bipedal.
- Yeah.
- And as far as we know, it was the
apex predator
of the Middle Jurassic of Britain,
certainly of Oxfordshire.
- Really?
- Yeah.
- So this is our T-rex of the time,
basically.
- It is, absolutely.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Megalosaurus was the first dinosaur
to be named, in 1824,
based on fossils found in Oxfordshire.
Originally thought to be a quadruped
or four-footed creature,
palaeontologists now know that
megalosaurus walked on two legs.
I'm going to play devil's advocate,
though, because how do you know
that this is a megalosaur?
- So, Oxfordshire does have other
carnivorous bipedal dinosaurs.
- Yeah.
- But the megalosaurus is the only
animal that we have
fossils from, that we know about,
that could possibly be the animal that
made these.
But as you say, you can't be 100%
sure.
Sadly, we've never found a skeleton, a
fossilised skeleton,
at the end of a trackway.
- So, it's running around in this
landscape,
which is a lagoon landscape, quite
coastal.
- Yeah.
- What's it eating?
- Whatever it liked.
- Yeah!
That is the answer, isn't it?
It's a top predator.
- Yeah, whatever it fancied.
- A complete skeleton of megalosaurus
has never been found,
so we're left with lots of questions.
This discovery will help to fill
crucial gaps in our knowledge
of these awesome apex predators.
What I find utterly incredible about
this is that no human
ever saw these animals alive.
- Mm.
- And everything we know about them,
we know from science,
we know from finding the evidence and
then reconstructing their lives.
- The area where we are,
there were other tracks that have been
found
that the megalosaur starts by walking,
and the footprints are sort of side by
side like this,
but then it actually breaks into a run
and it changes the way that it's
placing its feet on the ground.
So then it becomes like this, where
it's one in front of the other.
So now we know that they're agile,
bipedal predators.
- Yeah.
And the footprints continue up there.
You're excavating them all by hand.
It seems quite a laborious process.
- Well, so, when there's a lot of mud
in the footprint,
you can get rid of a lot of it quite
quickly using a pressure washer.
Would you like to give it a go?
- OK.
- Shall we do it?
- Yes, please.
One of these things you never even
knew was on your bucket list
until you get there.
THEY LAUGH
When the team have finished
excavating,
they'll make plaster casts of the best
footprints,
enabling them to identify different
species.
Analysis of the trackways can also
reveal how fast
these animals were moving.
How many footprints do you think we've
got in just this area?
- Hundreds, I'd say.
- Hundreds.
- Hundreds, yeah.
- Yeah.
It's the end of the day. The team have
been so busy here
that what we can see now is this
sauropod trackway in all its glory,
from the far end of the quarry site
here,
right up to up there behind me.
And you've just got this incredible,
incredible record of this wonderful,
awesome animal loping, lumbering,
through the landscape here
165, 166 million years ago.
It feels like vertigo.
It feels like you're standing on the
edge of something,
looking back through that incredible
depth of history, of prehistory,
to the moment that these dinosaurs
ruled the Earth.
Since the age of the dinosaurs,
continents have shifted and the
climate has changed.
Ice ages have come and gone.
When the ice finally retreated 12,000
years ago,
the climate settled to become
favourable to a great range of
plants, animals and humans.
Here in the Midlands, the fertile
landscape has been shaped by farming
activities over thousands of years.
Our next dig takes us to a very
special patch of farmland
near Kettering in Northamptonshire.
I'm at this fairly secret location in
Northamptonshire
which, as far as most people knew, was
just a field.
But then a metal detectorist uncovered
a concentration of coins
and that sparked the archaeologists'
interest.
This very ordinary-looking field is
where the coins were found,
hinting that there could be more here
to discover
..from the Roman period.
When David Erickson and Chris Chinnock
were on the hunt
for a new training site for their
students
from Cranfield University,
the coins were intriguing enough to
warrant an investigation,
but nothing prepared them for what
they would uncover here.
David.
- Hello.
- Hi, how are you?
- How are you?
So, I'm excited to show you what we've
got.
We've been here for now four weeks.
- Ooh! There's mosaic everywhere!
- Yeah, there's a lot of stuff kicking
about.
- Ah!
This is fantastic, isn't it?
- It's really nice.
- Was there any clue that this was
here?
- No, none whatsoever.
- It's just lovely. Look at that
lovely twisting pattern.
- Yeah, that guilloche knot.
Apparently, according to
the county archaeologist, it's one of
the top three in the county.
- Really?
- So we're taking that.
- Ah!
This incredible mosaic has collapsed
down into a void.
The original floor was supported on
stacks of tiles known as pilae.
The pilae allowed warm air to
circulate beneath the floor.
This was a hypocaust, the underfloor
heating system
that the Romans installed in their
most luxurious buildings.
Do you know what this room would have
been with this lovely
underfloor heating?
- Yeah, so, we, completely by
accident,
within our first year, came straight
down onto the bathhouse.
So, what we're looking at essentially
is the caldarium.
So, at the back there is a furnace,
and the furnace is coming in
underneath the floor.
So, the Roman central heating system.
- Yeah.
- And then, yeah, these stacks would
have been
the room for the caldarium.
- So, the hot room
- The hot room.
- ..in the bathhouse, yeah.
On the other side of the metre-thick
wall of this
once-beautiful caldarium,
the team have uncovered the large
furnace that kept
this part of the bathhouse heated.
And you can see where all the clay is
burnt there from the furnace.
- That's right. Nice red colour.
And we had a lot of ash and charcoal
in here as well,
but we've sampled all that
to hopefully get some dates on it as
well.
- So, you've got your slaves out here
stoking the fire,
sweat pouring off them.
And inside there, you've got the
wealthy owners of the villa
- Yes.
- ..having a lovely time.
- I mean, this would have always had
to be going, as well.
So it would never have gone out. It
would've just been
continually manned.
- I mean, it's interesting, isn't it?
We always think of what was it like
to live in Roman Britain, and you
always think of the people
in the villa.
- Yeah.
- But that's such a tiny proportion of
the population.
- Yeah.
- It's the people here who were the
- They're the ones keeping it going.
- The vast majority of people
would have been slaves or very, very
poor people.
- Yeah.
- No expense has been spared in this
luxury bathhouse.
The wealthy owners followed a trip to
the caldarium
by a dip in yet another custom-made
room.
- We just head around to this side
..and we can have a look.
- This is lovely.
- A nice tiled surface.
- I mean, it looks like it's
waterproof.
- It is. It's got this opus signinum
running through around the edges
of the tile, so we know that it was
something to do with water.
- Yeah.
- Because it's, er
- So, opus signinum is this type of
What is it, mortar or plaster?
- Yeah, it's like Roman cement.
They had it..had everything, the
Romans, it seems.
- So this is completely tanked,
effectively.
- Yeah, completely sealed.
- How far up would it have gone?
- It would have kind of come up a
significant height.
- Yeah.
- And it would have been a plunge
pool,
or the base of a Roman plunge pool.
- Yeah.
- Probably cold water, but we're not
entirely sure yet.
And then if you imagine some steps
going up to the top
and then somebody jumping into it.
- Yeah.
- It'd be quite nice on a
..after being in the caldarium.
- Yeah, yeah.
It's unusual to find a bathhouse on
its own.
And when the team extended the trench
to the east,
they uncovered the remains of some
more buildings -
one of them with very thick walls.
The bathhouse began to look like just
a small part
of a much larger estate.
Is it a villa? I mean, we're looking
at a bathhouse here.
- Yeah. So, we're fairly comfortable
with it being a villa of sorts.
We're not sure on the type of villa
quite yet.
The geophysics shows that the main
front of the villa sat north-south
across thisthis kind of field
plateau here.
The geophysics also shows we've got a
corridor running off
on the south side, and a corridor
running off on the north side
all the way to the hedgerow.
So it's big. Very big.
- Right.
That hedgerow there?
- Yeah.
- Basically, what you're saying to me
is that this trench is just
opening up a window onto, what, a
tenth of it?
- Yes. A very, very small slice.
- Yeah.
- We haven't even got into the
reception,
the domestic quarters, the kitchens.
- Yeah.
- There's so much more to go.
- It's not the only villa around here.
This part of Britain was prime real
estate,
with plenty of fertile farmland
providing a lucrative income for
estates.
There are at least four other
impressive villa complexes
in a 30-mile radius from here.
And we're close to a number of
important Roman settlements
like Kettering, Towcester and
Irchester.
While I'm visiting, even more new,
exciting finds are emerging.
Ooh!
What is it, Chris?
- So, Brian's just uncovered this just
now,
and it looks to be a finger ring
- Isn't that lovely?
- ..with some gilding on the surface
there,
and then looks like there was space
for a small setting on the top.
- Most of what we find is incomplete,
but that is complete.
- Yeah, yeah. It's perfect.
It's quite small, but it won't even
fit all the way on my little finger.
- This is one of several objects that
were found from this side
of the site, and most of them have
been personal adornments.
So bun hairpins, pieces of brooch.
We've had some fragmented pieces of
bracelet as well,
decorated bracelet.
- Mm.
- And all of them come from this end
of the site.
It's a really good indication that
we're in a domestic space.
- Are we inside the house here?
- So we think that this side of it,
we think, at this stage, is the
internal space.
- Right.
- And that side is external.
- This whole site has turned out to be
incredibly rich in finds,
and illustrates just how much money
and labour was lavished
on the villa complex.
OK, Chris, so, we've got some big
pieces over here.
That must be roof tile.
- It is, yeah.
- Yeah.
- Two different types of roofing
material.
We've got the ceramic stuff, and then
we've got these big stone
roof tiles as well, which you can see
the hole through the top.
- So, a stone roof.
So maybe that's why those walls are so
thick, then,
if it's having to support this.
- Yeah.
So this would have been extremely
heavy roof.
- Yeah.
- We assumed that they would be a nice
rectangular shape,
but this one came out complete and
it's got this nice kind of
diamond shape to it.
- Yeah.
And you've seen that in modern roofs.
- Exactly.
And finds like this help us to imagine
what the
..what it would've looked like in its
heyday.
- Very smart house.
I love this, when you've got tiles
that have been left out to dry
- Yeah.
- ..and animals have walked over them.
- I assumed that this was dog, but our
CBM specialist thinks
that this is more likely to be fox.
And then we've got a really lovely
hobnail boot.
- Oh, is that what that is?
- Yeah, yeah.
So these are the bottoms of the
hobnails on the base of the boots.
- Oh, so not just animals walking
across
these drying roof tiles, then.
- Children as well, maybe.
- Yeah.
- So, again, it helps to kind of
visualise the process.
So, I think a lot of the attention
with villa sites like this one
is on the dining guests and the kind
of owners
and the prestige and all the rest of
it.
But this kind of gives us a sense of
the other people
who would have been working on that
agricultural estate,
either construction workers building
the villa
or people kind of working and
maintaining the villa during its
- The whole industry around it.
- Exactly.
- We've got coins as well.
What's the range of dates in terms of
those coins?
- The vast majority of the coins are
mid-to-late third century
into the fourth century, which I think
is quite typical.
So, we think that's probably when the
villa is at its height.
- Yeah.
- And then falls out of use in the
late fourth century.
There's probably a settlement here,
maybe a farmstead
that could develop into the villa.
- Mm.
- So, the activity here goes back
quite a long way,
and I suppose the subsequent years
that we come back here
and start to put in trenches
elsewhere,
we're trying to understand not just
the villa,
but how it came to be and what else is
happening.
- And why it becomes abandoned.
- Why it becomes abandoned, yeah.
- It's incredible that one man's
weekend metal detecting
in the right field has opened the gate
to this amazing new
Roman villa site.
The team from Cranfield are just
getting started here.
It's a research project still bursting
with potential
and unanswered questions about Roman
Northamptonshire.
This gorgeous mosaic has lain in this
field
for over a millennium and a half,
and nobody knew it was here.
It's just a small piece of a much
bigger story,
and I can't wait to see what else they
find in these fields.
Farming made many a rich Roman even
richer,
and their spectacular country villas
litter the counties of central
England.
But the Romans weren't the first to
farm here.
# And the beech is lifting me
# Ash is reaching me
# Wind is holding me
# Time is folding me
# Under the trees
# Down through the lea
# And on to the path that you came to
that day. #
Hill forts like this are the most
obvious feature from the Iron Age
in our landscapes. They're very eye
catching.
They demand our attention.
And yet, I'd argue that if we really
want to understand Iron Age society,
we should turn our backs on that
and look down there.
Our next dig takes us to the
Cambridgeshire Fenlands,
near the town of St Neots.
National Highways England are spending
over £1 billion
widening the A428 road that runs
across the county.
But before work can start, the
commercial archaeology unit MOLA
are sent in to uncover the stories
beneath the soil.
This is a huge dig,
covering land the size of 85 football
pitches.
And the most fascinating evidence
emerging from this excavation dates
..to the Iron Age.
On the flat, exposed Cambridgeshire
claylands,
the MOLA team are battling gusting
winds,
rain, and even the odd hailstorm.
Despite the weather conditions,
they're finding traces
of the farming community that lived
here 2,000 years ago.
- This site is a really good
representation
of an Iron Age settlement.
The circular enclosure is the main
centre of this settlement.
You can see the circular shape one end
of that ditch.
To my left is the other one.
And right in between, this pathway
would have been how people came in
to do the activities inside the
enclosure.
- The large Iron Age enclosure is
marked by a 3m-wide ditch.
And ditches like this often contain
interesting archaeological finds.
- Hi, welcome to the A428.
So, one of my colleagues is digging a
slot just here,
and my colleague Rea is excavating
this terminus.
- Hi.
- Hi. What are you digging over here?
- We've got pottery, but underneath
the pottery, there's pieces
of animal bone, little bits of
charcoal,
and then also some heat-affected
stones.
- Inside the circular ditch, they find
traces of a roundhouse,
a traditional Iron Age dwelling.
The structure itself has long since
rotted away,
but the team can reconstruct its
appearance
from traces left in the soil.
- A roundhouse is the shape and type
that the Iron Age people
used to build. It basically will have
a conical roof
and then will have walls made of
wattle,
which is intertwined grass, and lots
of clay
making the sides of it.
- The finds from this site are
starting to provide insights
into the way of life here.
- Here we have an Iron Age pot that
would have been used
for a large communal meal.
So, here, it's a beautiful example.
Incredible to get one with this much
intact.
So, we know they were having, you
know, great big feasts
and making a really good life for
themselves out here.
- This isn't the only Iron Age
settlement the team uncover
over the course of their huge
excavation along the A428.
- We've actually been able to find a
lot of similar Iron Age sites
like this one dotted all across the
landscape,
which allows us to see how they relate
to each other,
how the community worked across the
Iron Age.
- Project managers Simon Marcus and
Paige Savage
are joining me in the tent to tell me
what they've learnt
about this Iron Age community.
So, it looked like that dig was
happening
in quite challenging circumstances.
You had some really wet weather.
- Yeah, it's possibly one of the
wettest sites
I've ever worked on.
- And it went on a long time.
- Yeah, the entire project was about
23 months or so.
- Yeah. And you've brought some of the
finds in here.
So take me through these, then. What
do they tell us about
this evolving Iron Age landscape?
- So, we've got things like this,
which is a antler pick.
So, it would've been what they used to
dig the ditches.
- That's a huge antler.
- It's massive.
So this would have come from a royal
stag, and it is quite large.
- That would have been a beast of an
animal, wouldn't it?
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
And that polish at the end, that's
from digging, is it?
- Yeah, so that would've been from,
like, over time
where they've used it, it'd have
stripped away
the rough surface and left a nice
smooth one.
- That's a hefty tool. Yeah.
- Yeah.
- It's useful, isn't it?
- Yep.
- So, what else have we got here?
We've got a lovely tiny little thumb
pot.
- This tiny pot.
It's probably made from a very, very
small ball of clay
that someone's punched their thumb
into.
- It's lovely.
- We can't think of any real function
for it,
because it is so small.
- Holding something tiny?
- Holding something tiny,
or a child's play set?
- Yeah, it's nice to think
of that being a child's plaything,
isn't it?
We often overlook children, I think.
And, of course, there were loads of
children in these settlements.
- Mm-hm.
- Yeah. What about these other
objects, then? What's that?
Is that clay as well?
- It is, yeah.
So, this is a loom weight.
Erm
- Oh, is it?
- Yeah.
So
- A hefty loom weight.
- It is massive.
- Oh, my goodness.
- It's quite large.
Obviously, we've lost the bottom. It
had been triangular in shape.
- Weights like this would have hung
from the bottom of warp threads
to keep them taut on a loom.
And there's evidence of other types of
textile production here, too.
- This would have been What we
think it is, is like a base
for practising drilling techniques
through leather.
- Right.
- So they'd have put the leather on
and pushed through,
and pushed an awl through it.
Something kind of like this.
- Yeah. What, so those holes at the
end are original holes, are they?
- Yes.
- Yep, yep.
- Oh! Do you know? I spotted those,
and I thought that was probably, you
know, sampling or something.
But this is original Iron Age holes.
- Yeah.
- That's just lovely.
So, overall, what are these finds and
all the features
across that excavation telling you?
- So, essentially, what we're seeing
is how communities are starting
to establish themselves in the
claylands of Bedfordshire
and Cambridgeshire that were not
heavily occupied
in the Bronze Age at all.
- So it's wilderness, effectively.
- Essentially, yeah, we're looking at
sort of almost pioneers heading out
into the wilderness to establish
themselves, and eventually,
how it succeeds and then expands to
quite an astronomical level,
to the point where we get fairly well
established settlements
about 500m apart in certain areas.
But what's interesting is, considering
how many settlements
we have, we don't have huge amounts of
finds from those locations.
- Why do you think there's that
discrepancy?
- It might just be the types of
material they're using.
The other possibility is that because
the settlements
are so close together, they're
actually not permanently occupied.
- So you might have a kind of seasonal
pattern where you're moving herds
up onto the high land in the winter,
and then maybe herding them
back down into the marshes in the
summertime?
- Potentially, yeah.
- Mm.
- So, here's a sort of slightly
closer-up view
of a number of the sites we had.
And we start off with this sort of
unenclosed area of roundhouses,
just sort of two or three at a time,
no ditches surrounding them or
anything.
And then they sort of plan out almost
these linear systems
with small enclosures with them.
- So that line running through the
middle, that's a ditch, is it?
- Yes. We have another set of
enclosures of the same type
with another long ditch between them.
And then again continuing down into
this one here,
and then cornering and heading to the
north.
So
- What are these ditches for?
- Well, essentially, what we think is
they're marking out land boundaries.
"This is where we're farming.
"This is where we're managing," type
thing.
- Yeah.
- And this landscape is so wet,
they're going to need pretty
substantial ditches
to keep that water away from where
they're corralling animals.
- And what animals are they
corralling?
Have we got evidence of what they were
farming?
- Yeah, so, I mean, a lot of what
we're finding is what we'd expect.
So things like cattle and sheep and
things like that.
But we also have a reasonable amount
of horse.
That makes sense given the landscape
we're looking at.
We don't have any streams or rivers or
anything
to transport things down, so
everything is by track or road.
- Mm.
- And some of the horses that we found
were quite elderly.
They were clearly sort of worked and
used in this landscape
for a fairly decent amount of time.
It almost feels like they've gone out
and surveyed
this landscape before they've
established their settlements,
to choose where to be, to pick those
best locations.
- They're good at farming, they
understand farming.
They understand a landscape which is
amenable for farming.
So they know what they're doing.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- Big construction projects give
archaeologists the chance
to look at how people were using the
landscape on a grand scale.
Here we can see just how resourceful
and organised Iron Age farming was,
and these farmers also seem to have
been partly nomadic.
We know from archaeological finds that
Iron Age Britons
were exchanging goods with their
neighbours in mainland Europe.
And over the centuries that followed,
trading networks would develop into a
massive maritime enterprise
in the time of empire.
New goods arrived on our shores from
far-flung lands,
bringing untold wealth for some,
changing our culture and sometimes
even our health.
In any archaeological investigation,
the dig is just the start,
and then there's a huge amount of hard
work
interrogating and interpreting the
evidence.
And I get really excited when I hear
about the development
of a new scientific technique
allowing us to unlock even more
secrets from ancient remains.
This technique is being used to
investigate a unique set
of skeletons from a site in Leicester.
Back in 2023, I joined archaeologists
excavating
ahead of a new development right next
to Leicester Cathedral.
Ooh.
- Hi, Alice. Welcome to Leicester
Cathedral.
- Matt, hi.
Beneath later burials, the
archaeologists got down to
Roman archaeology, including evidence
of an ancient shrine.
How fantastic to have found this
sacred object in this sacred place.
- It's an incredible find.
- It was an unexpected discovery
underneath a medieval cemetery.
In earlier phases of the dig, the team
recorded their discoveries
from this extensive burial ground.
The cemetery was in use from the
Middle Ages
right up to the 19th century.
- So, we're just exposing the coffin
plate for this burial.
And we knew it was there, so we've
left it until the very end
so that we can get it exposed in one
go
and hopefully have the best chance as
possible of being able
to read what's written on it.
It looks like there's a number eight
there,
maybe a one, and then another eight.
Erm
..and then it looks like maybe some
letters down the bottom there.
- Many of the burials were in a good
state of preservation
and, thanks to the survival of coffin
plates,
can be precisely dated.
In total, the team uncovered around
1,200 skeletons,
young and old, rich and poor,
a cross-section of the population of
Leicester
over many centuries.
- So it says, "Joseph Wright.
"Died 10th of February 1849,
"aged 56 years."
- Fantastic.
- Awesome.
- And that will be our sixth named
individual.
- Now the excavation is complete,
the Leicester skeletons are part of an
archaeological science project
that is a world first,
shedding light on a whole new chapter
of Leicester's history
..from the Early Modern period.
Over four years, a team of scientists,
archaeologists
and historians will use these remains
to understand
the impact of one of the deadliest
substances
to ever reach our shores.
Tobacco.
Tobacco arrived in Britain in the 16th
century from the Americas
..and historical sources suggest that
its use spread quickly
from the returning sailors into the
general population.
Dr Sarah Inskip is the project lead,
and she's joining me in the tent
to reveal what they've discovered so
far.
Sarah, what are you learning from
these bones?
Because you're throwing quite a lot of
different scientific techniques
at them to try and unlock their
secrets.
- So, one of the things we're really
interested in is a biomolecular
approach to try and detect the remains
of tobacco,
or impacts of tobacco on people's
health,
directly from the bones using
chemistry.
- So, what particular period are you
interested in?
- So, the skeletons we're primarily
looking at date from
about 1600 to about 1870,
with a few individuals that are
pre-tobacco
to sort of act as a control.
- What evidence do you actually find
in the bones?
- Well, it's the teeth. So, on the
teeth,
tobacco leaves stains in the form of
tar and nicotine.
And we can see that on this individual
here.
What you can hopefully see is this
very dark brown staining
here on the inside of her teeth.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- So this is a good clue that this
woman was using tobacco
in some kind of way.
- OK.
- The other thing that we can often
see are so-called pipe notches.
And these pipe notches are caused by
holding a clay tobacco pipe
between your teeth, which is quite
abrasive,
and it causes a round hole.
So, we have a nice example of it here.
You can see a round hole there.
And if you take one of the pipes.
- Take that one there.
- And you can fit it in this gap here.
- Oh, yeah. Look at that.
So, there's a semi-circular hole
across those two incisors.
- Yeah.
The use of pipe notches and staining
only gives us a very partial picture
of who is consuming and how they are
consuming.
So, we know that a lot of tobacco was
coming in,
but then how that is distributed
across the population,
we don't know.
- So how do these chemical analyses
come into that, then?
- So, we've been developing a
metabolomic-based method.
Now, metabolomics is the study of
small molecules.
And so what we've been trying to do is
take the bone of individuals
where we know they're using tobacco,
and then individuals where we know
that they're not
- OK.
- ..look at the different molecules
that these individuals have,
and then we can create a model to give
an estimation of tobacco use.
So this would actually allow us then
to look at whole populations
to see who is using tobacco and who is
not using tobacco.
- Even if they have no physical
traces.
- Even if they have no physical
traces.
- Yeah.
- And what we're finding is that there
are differences in
who is using between different
socioeconomic groups.
- OK.
- But most importantly, most
significantly, what we have found
is that women are using tobacco far
more
than historical sources have led us to
believe.
- Really?
- Yes. But they are not typically
using
this kind of clay pipe, and we think
that that is because these notches
are extremely visible,
and historical satire tends to depict
women pipe smokers
in a very derogatory way, and
associated it with very
sort of undesirable characteristics at
the time.
- Mm.
- So what that leads us to think is
that women
are using it, and they're using it a
lot, but they're using it
in private and in a very different way
to the way that men
are using it, which is a very public
and social activity.
- Yeah.
And anything else which has surprised
you?
What about the age profile?
- Yeah, knowing that pipe notches take
quite a long time to form,
we find teenagers that have multiple
notches.
So we know that they're smoking, and
smoking a lot
while they're in their childhood.
It wasn't uncommon, which is quite
sad.
- Yeah.
Where are you going next with the
research?
- So, the plan next is to look at the
relationship between
the use of tobacco and how that
relates to the diseases that existed
in this period, and what role is
tobacco potentially playing
in changing the disease-scape?
- So, you're doing epidemiology,
but you're doing epidemiology back in
the 17th century.
- Yes.
- This new metabolomic technique
provides a fingerprint
for tobacco use, allowing us to see
how widespread
that was in a population.
Beyond tobacco, archaeologists of the
future
could apply similar techniques to
other environmental stresses,
meaning we'll be able to tell even
more about health in the past.
Many great rivers flow through central
Britain.
For centuries, they've been the
arteries bringing food, fuel
and prosperity to the heart of the
country.
# Just a lonely radio
# Just a makeshift show and tell
# Playing out the lives of the lost
and found. #
The Nene, the Avon and the Great Ouse
rivers
spring from the ground in
Northamptonshire,
where our next dig takes place
..close to the small village of
Irchester.
This is Chester House,
and it's home to some fairly exciting
archaeology,
with evidence recovered from its
grounds spanning
10,000 years of human history.
Chester House is run by the council as
a heritage centre
aiming to engage schoolchildren,
but actually the whole community,
with the history here in this
landscape.
And that's even more exciting, of
course,
if there's active archaeology
happening.
The most stunning archaeology on this
estate dates to
the Roman period.
Roman objects have long been
discovered in the fields
surrounding Chester House
and, for many years, locals believed
that there was a military fort
lying somewhere near the river.
In the 19th century, an amateur
archaeologist investigated
the estate and discovered an entire
lost town.
The walls of the town are still
clearly visible
as a rectangular earthwork,
and everything inside them is a
scheduled monument.
But just outside this protected area,
a team from the University of
Leicester
are trying to discover more about the
Romans that lived here.
In what would have been the town's
eastern suburb,
I'm meeting archaeologist and site
supervisor Jeremy Taylor.
- We're in the part of the town where
we're looking at the streets
and houses of the Roman suburb.
We're standing right in the middle of
one of our east-to-west roads.
- OK.
- The limestone rubble that you see
underneath us
is the make-up for our road surface.
- Yeah.
- And that's the kerb by the side of
the street.
- That's the kerb there!
- With a kerb on the other side at the
far end down there.
- Oh, it's quite a wide street, then.
You could get two carts passing each
other here.
- Yeah.
- And are you getting good dating
material out of this road?
- At the moment, one of the
interesting things
that's coming up is that these roads
seem to broadly date
to when the defences of the Roman town
were built.
- The team think the Romans would have
had a military outpost
at this important crossing point on
the River Nene,
and the Roman town developed out of a
preceding Iron Age settlement.
The walls were built in the second
century.
- It's an intriguing characteristic
ofthat we see in
about half of the Roman small towns in
the country,
is that in the later second and early
third centuries,
many of them were given defensive
circuits,
which seem to incorporate just the
core of the town
where we have shrines, temples, public
baths or important monuments.
But the construction of the defences
often really affects
the existing geography of the town,
and so significant parts of the town's
population are having to move
because they're basically being shoved
out as these defences
are constructed.
- And I bet they were going,
"We don't like this gentrification."
- Absolutely.
And what we know from survey and
excavation of the rural landscape
here is that it's thriving at that
time.
- Yeah.
- So, the defences are probably more
about the status
and significance of the town, rather
than any concern for defence.
- This east-west aligned road leads
into the walled town,
and it's lined with the remains of
workshops and their rubbish pits.
Roman Irchester was growing,
spilling outside of its walls to form
suburbs.
The pits here contain debris from
industrial activity
and other clues to life in the town.
So, this is interesting.
Got a couple of pots and some animal
bones.
- Yeah, and this is only a small part
of the very large assemblage
of material that we had coming out of
this large pit.
- So, all the pots are a similar kind
of age, are they?
- All of a similar age and deposited
together
as a couple of major groups as this is
being backfilled.
- Why?
- It's a very good question.
This is happening just at the point
that we're seeing those other
changes in the layout of the
settlement in this area.
So the layout of these new streets and
roads.
- Yeah. And it looks like they've just
about got that pot ready to lift.
- I think they're just about ready.
John, do you reckon it's about ready
to go?
- Yeah, I think it's very loose.
I'm just getting this last little bit.
- OK.
- It's moving, it's moving.
Ooh.
- Ooh.
- Look at that.
- Fantastic. Looks pretty well intact.
- Oh, wow.
- Will I take it, mate?
You got it?
- It's completely intact, isn't it?
- So, a little sort of channel-rim
jar.
Beautiful. Completely intact, with a
sample inside.
- Absolutely beautiful.
- That's great.
- Lovely.
This pot will join other finds
recovered from the site
in the purpose-built store right
beside the dig.
Archaeological curator Ben
Donnelly-Symes
thinks some of these pots may be more
than just rubbish.
- So, these are a group of six pots
that were found in the pit on site.
But they're unusual because they're
complete.
It's quite unusual for us to get any
complete pots
from any excavations, but it seems
that they were deposited
into the pit deliberately by someone,
or a group of people.
- So, it's the fact that they're
intact that makes them special
compared with the other pottery that
you're getting on the site.
- Yeah. And what's also unusual is
these pots, they've got
..holes on them that have been
deliberately placed in.
- Have they all got something like
that?
- Just this one and the flagon.
So, just those two have it.
- Oh, yeah, yeah.
On the side there.
- Yeah. And it's not clear why they've
done this,
but it's likely it may be something to
do with killing the object,
so making sure that the object is
unusable.
- Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?
You see ideas like that going right
back into the Iron Age
where people are doing things like
bending brooches
so they can't be used, that kind of
thing.
So, you're getting a hint at some kind
of ritual practice,
even if we can't get at exactly what
it was.
Back out on site,
I find Jeremy again in a different
part of the dig.
- Welcome to the cemetery.
- Thank you.
It was a Roman tradition for burial to
take place
outside of a town's walls,
and that's exactly what the team are
finding in Irchester.
That looks a bit strange.
- Yeah, it's one of the more confusing
ones.
- Hmm.
- I'd be interested to see what you
make of it.
This one appears to be in a coffin,
because we've got a whole series
of iron nails.
- Oh, right.
I mean, the skull's upside down.
- Yeah.
- And, then, the knees have got
completely separated.
You've got the lower legs down there.
- Yeah.
- And then you've got a real jumble of
foot bones here.
So
- Mm.
- Do you think this has happened
inside the coffin, then?
- I think it probably has.
This is one of the earliest phase
burials,
and this hollow that we're sitting in
is actually filling up in the Roman
period.
So we have multiple layers of burials
on top of this.
This is actually the earliest of three
burials on top of the other.
- Yeah.
This burial collapsed under the weight
of those placed above it.
This was a jam-packed cemetery.
The team have uncovered 115 skeletons
from this small area alone.
In total, around 800 burials have been
discovered here
from excavations over the years.
Considering all the evidence that this
Roman town was thriving
with a substantial population,
there's almost no activity here after
the collapse of the empire.
- Roman small towns, by and large,
don't exist before the Roman conquest,
but they become a very important part
of the Roman
landscape of the province.
But with the end of Roman Britain,
they then disappear.
So they Whatever role they're
playing,
it's clear that they're part of the
glue of the province, if you like,
during the Roman period.
- The skeletons from Roman Irchester
will give the team
a unique opportunity to study the
health of the population here
through time.
Osteoarchaeologist Dale Munn has
uncovered a striking story
in the bones of one individual.
Dale, tell me about this skeleton,
then.
- Really interesting skeleton,
and you can see immediately
from the neck down to middle back,
it's collapsed on itself.
- Yeah.
So, we've got relatively normal
upper neck vertebrae,
cervical vertebrae, C1, C2,
and then that is just extraordinary.
I've never seen anything quite that
profound.
The whole spine here is going through
a hairpin bend, isn't it?
And it's all fused together.
So, what do we think caused this?
- So, we think this is probably
tuberculosis.
So, tuberculosis would create lesions
in the vertebral bodies
and they would collapse on themselves.
- What I find amazing is that there's
still space for the spinal cord.
Do you think that, in fact, the spinal
cord was affected?
- Erm, absolutely. So, if you look at
the arms,
the humerus and the leg bones,
they're extremely slender. So it
suggests that very little stress
was put on those bones.
There are almost no muscle
attachments.
So I think that this person did not
use their arms and legs.
- Yeah. I mean, that is that's
extraordinary.
I don't think I've ever seen a humerus
in an adult -
because this is clearly an adult -
that is that tiny.
- Yeah. This is a young man in their
20s.
This would be a person who normally
would be extremely active.
- So, if we put this together, this
does suggest that, actually,
if had got to the point where this
person was paralysed.
- Yeah, yeah. This person would have
had to have been cared for
by the community or the family in
which they lived.
- Yeah, yeah.
Erm, the teeth look quite good.
- Teeth are in really nice condition.
- So, this person wouldn't have been
able to
care for their teeth themselves.
- No.
- Erm, so it looks as though somebody
was helping them.
What's really interesting about it is
to see somebody
with that profound level of disease.
You know, a disease that we can treat
with antibiotics now.
But also to see that, you know,
they have survived a while, at least,
with other people caring for them.
- Yeah. Yeah, very much so.
- There are still plenty of wider
questions to answer here,
including understanding why this town
was abandoned
after the Roman period.
But the team are painting a detailed
picture of life
when the town was thriving,
bringing us face-to-face with some of
the people who lived here.
There's a really lovely feel to this
dig,
to the community here being involved
with it in a very real way.
And I'm left thinking about that young
man with TB in his spine
and what his life was like in Roman
times,
and suffering with a disease like that
when you knew there was no cure for
it.
I think it makes you feel quite lucky
to be alive today.
Next time on Digging For Britain
From beneath the waves,
a landscape roamed by ancient people
is revealed.
- Features of it are features that
people 100-200,000 years ago
would have seen.
- Divers finally identify a shipwreck
lost for over a century.
- Finding a wreck as significant as
that, it's unbelievable.
You just can't buy that experience,
really.
- And a 5,000-year-old tomb gives up
its secrets
- Ooh.
- ..untouched since they were laid to
rest.
I'm blown away, because we just
haven't seen this before.
# Come and search
# For we who search
# And looking for a scarred land
# And 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. #