Digging for Britain (2010) s12e03 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.
In this episode, I'll be looking at
archaeological sites
on some of the United Kingdom's most
spectacular islands.
An ancient tomb gives up its secrets,
untouched since they were buried here
5,000 years ago.
I've never seen anything like it.
Nobody's ever seen anything like it.
Deep below the sea,
a historically important warship is
seen
for the first time in over a century.
- A wreck as significant as that, you
just can't buy that experience.
- Sparking an international effort to
recover the ship's bell.
- It was really thrilling when the
bell rang
for the first time in 107 years.
- And after 18 years of digging,
archaeologists make some incredible
discoveries about life inside a
mysterious Iron Age tower.
Just this is amazing, isn't it?
That you're actually getting a real
sense of what this would
have been like to live in.
But first, we head to the Orkney
Islands,
an archipelago just to the north of
the Scottish mainland.
Orkney is home to some of Britain's
most spectacular and well known
prehistoric archaeology,
including the beautifully preserved
village of Skara Brae
..and the chambered tomb of Maeshowe.
These impressive sites date back
..to the Neolithic period.
The Neolithic is when the first
farmers arrive in Britain
and it's also when people start making
a mark on the landscape.
In some places, building megalithic
monuments like this,
the Ring of Brodgar.
But it's not these more famous sites
that I've come here to see,
it's a brand-new discovery.
This year, a team from the University
of Cardiff
and National Museums Scotland are
uncovering a newly-discovered
Neolithic monument, a 5,000-year-old
tomb.
The dig is being led
by Vicki Cummings and Hugo
Anderson-Whymark.
Hugo!
- Oh, hi, Alice.
- Have you deliberately chosen the
wildest, most windswept part
of Orkney to do this dig?
- Yeah, we're on top of a hill.
We get the worst of the wind up here
and it's very breezy today.
- So what are you finding? This is
incredible.
- Yeah! So this is the remains of our
late Neolithic tomb.
- There's beautiful stonework.
I mean, immediately, I can just see
the layout.
Built around 3,000 BCE,
this tomb has a single entrance and a
seven-metre long passage
leading to a central rectangular room,
which is surrounded by six burial
chambers.
The team are hoping that one or more
of these chambers
might still contain the Holy Grail -
untouched human remains
from the Neolithic.
This incredible tomb was only
discovered following some
remarkable detective work.
- Three years ago this wasn't a dot on
any map, in any records at all.
- How did you find it then, given that
it wasn't marked on a map?
How did you know where to dig?
- I was looking through the treasure
trove records.
Amongst it there was a little clipping
from a newspaper article,
The Orkney Herald up here, in 1896.
It talked a little bit about some
stonework, some walls
and that sounded a little bit like a
Neolithic tomb.
- Right.
- So a colleague of ours found the
antiquarian's notebook,
and in that was this sketch, which
clearly shows a cell and
- It says "four skeletons".
- .."four skeletons".
That sounds very much like a tomb to
me.
- Looks like a tomb, yeah.
- So the really useful bit of
information on this is this note
at the top, "150 yards east of
Blomuir".
- Brilliant!
Incredible bit of detective work.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
Armed with the antiquarian's notepad,
Hugo was able to locate the lost tomb.
So is this the original chamber that
the antiquarian saw?
- Yes, this cell is exactly as back in
- It's such a beautifully built stone
wall, isn't it?
But there are no traces of human
remains in this chamber.
It's been disturbed, with stone taken
from here
to build the nearby farmhouse around
200 years ago.
But there are intriguing details on
the stones that survive.
- One of the things we've seen is that
there's some decoration
on these stones.
- These incised lines?
- Yes.
You can see three incised lines there
and if you look across the top,
there's another stone with a few
incised lines and another one over
here.
- Yeah.
It's amazing, isn't it, to see these
just little traces of decoration?
And that gives us a clue that,
actually, you know,
the decoration was part of these
people's lives
and presumably their houses would have
been decorated, as well.
- All over Orkney we see bits of
decoration in Neolithic buildings.
- Yeah.
- It would have been wonderfully
richly decorated on the sites
and we also get some which are even
painted as pigments.
- Really?
- It has been suggested that some of
these lines were then used to mark
out where you might put your
haematite, your red pigments,
on the surface.
- Yeah.
- So it could have been wonderful and
bright in here.
- That's lovely, isn't it?
Because, you know, when we see it
today,
it all seems to be stone-coloured,
mud-coloured.
- Yeah.
- But actually, we're looking at a
little trace of the decoration
and the colour that would have been in
these people's lives.
The tomb has been frustratingly empty,
but archaeologist Kevin has just
uncovered an artefact.
- Hugo?
- What have you got, Kevin?
- I think it's a stone ball.
- What?!
- That's amazing!
- Is this the first one you found?
- Well, we've had virtually no
artefacts
in this whole excavation
- Really?
- ..but that looks absolutely amazing!
- Oh, congratulations, Kevin.
- Thank you very much.
- That's a fantastic find.
- Oh, it's got some weight to it,
hasn't it?
- Yeah.
More than 500 of these Neolithic stone
balls
have been found across Scotland.
Some are highly polished, some even
carved with intricate patterns.
They are beautiful, intriguing
objects, but their purpose
and meaning is still a mystery.
The stone ball was missed by the
antiquarians
in the 19th century.
The archaeologists are painstakingly
sifting through the contents
of the tomb, but making very few
finds.
But as the dig progresses, it looks
like part of the tomb
was left untouched.
This is the first time that this
chamber has been opened
in 5,000 years.
The team capture the moment on camera.
- Ooh!
- That is a lot of bone.
- It is.
We've got some vertebrae, ribs.
You can also see a pelvis coming
through, as well.
- The chamber is crammed with human
remains.
Usually when bones are found in
Neolithic tombs
they are separated and jumbled up.
What's remarkable here is that the
skeletons
are complete and articulated.
These amazing finds are unprecedented.
They'll transform our understanding of
life and death
in the Neolithic.
- We've got a lot to do!
- HUGO LAUGHS
Hello, Vicki.
- Hi!
- Hi.
This is astonishing, isn't it,
to have human remains in situ like
this and articulated?
- Yeah. I mean, it's absolutely
fantastic.
The vast majority of chambered tombs
like this in Orkney
the human remains were disturbed a
long time ago,
so maybe back in the Neolithic, people
went back in
in the Bronze Age.
More recently, as well, we know
Vikings were going
into these monuments.
- Yeah.
- Then, of course, we've got Victorian
antiquarians rummaging
around in these things,
so having them laid out as they were
in the Neolithic,
it's absolutely incredible.
- So highly unusual.
- Yeah, absolutely fantastic.
- I mean, it means we're seeing the
moment that these bodies are laid
into the grave for the first time,
doesn't it?
- It does, yeah.
- Do you think these are all placed in
at the same time
or do you think this is happening over
time?
- My guess would be this has gone in
over a fairly short period of time.
- So years?
- Yes.
- Possibly decades.
- Possibly decades,
yeah, but probably not centuries
because there's a real sense
that these are bound individuals that
are going in quite rapidly,
I think, after one another.
If there was a really long period of
time, you might expect to see some
kind of movement.
- Yeah.
- That isn't happening at this site.
- And I suppose the really interesting
thing to think about
is how would these people be related
to each other.
You know, could they have been family
members?
- Yeah, and we will ultimately be able
to tell that.
Once we've excavated them all and
they're in the lab
and we've done the skeletal analysis,
we will then get
ancient DNA analysis and that will
actually tell us
whether these people are biologically
related to one another.
We'll be able to do other types of
analyses,
like stable isotope analysis and that
will tell us about
the kinds of diets that these people
had,
but also potentially whether they were
local,
whether they were perhaps brought up
in different parts of the world,
so we'll really be able to get a full
picture of what these people's
lives and, ultimately, deaths were
like in the Neolithic.
- Yeah.
I mean, I'm blown away by this.
This is so important for understanding
funerary customs
in the Neolithic because we just
haven't seen this before.
- No.
And these new excavations can really
sort of change our narratives
on these monuments, even when we think
we know quite
a lot about them.
- Because actually we've got quite a
good understanding
archaeologically, of the architecture
of these tombs.
- That's right, yeah.
- The questions we've got are all
about the people.
- That's right, and to find a site
like this with so many human remains
is going to rewrite the record, I
think.
- Yeah, yeah.
The skeletons will be carefully
exhumed
and then sent to the lab for detailed
analysis.
I'm actually finding it quite hard to
articulate
how exciting this site is, how
important it is.
I've never seen anything like it,
nobody's ever seen anything like it,
and now we can throw all of our latest
scientific techniques
at analysing these remains -
ancient DNA, isotope analysis,
radiocarbon dating -
so we'll unlock so much more about the
identity of these people
and understand so much better than
Neolithic.
- # Just a lonely radio
# Just a makeshift show and tell
# Laying out the lives of the lost and
found. #
- Britain really is an archipelago of
islands,
from the rugged, often snowbound isles
of the north
to the more temperate climes in the
south
where the English Channel meets the
Celtic Sea.
Our next discovery takes us just off
the coast
of the Isles of Scilly,
36 miles west of Penzance.
The Isles of Scilly sit at a
crossroads of major shipping routes,
with sailing ships finding a safe
haven here over the centuries.
But the seas could also be fraught
with danger,
as the crew of one ship was to
learn
..in World War I.
The USS Jacob Jones was an American
destroyer built in 1914.
On 6th December, 1917, the Jacob Jones
was returning
from escorting Allied ships to France,
but, just south of the Isles of
Scilly,
the ship was attacked by a German
submarine.
The Jacob Jones became the first US
destroyer sunk by enemy action.
66 men lost their lives,
but no-one has ever been able to
locate the shipwreck.
In 2022, Dom Robinson and the Darkstar
diving team
set out to find the missing destroyer.
- Most of the wrecks within five or
ten miles of the shoreline
around the UK have been dived a lot,
but Darkstar, we push offshore and we
go deeper
and we try and find things that
nobody's been on before.
- Dom and the team compiled a list of
unidentified wrecks to explore.
Most of them turned out to be red
herrings, like coal ships.
- The first day we went out and we
dived, it was a lovely wreck,
it was also a collier.
Now there's thousands of colliers
around the UK,
so it wasn't particularly exciting.
The next day it was like, right, OK,
tick that one off,
we're going to go and try and dive the
next target.
- The highly specialised and trained
team can descend more than twice
the depth that recreational divers can
go.
- This is deep technical diving, 115
metres to the seabed,
13 or 14 times atmospheric pressure,
so that in itself poses huge
challenges for any diver.
- This remarkable footage captures the
moment
they reach another unidentified wreck,
and this time it does look like a
warship.
- Warships are full of stuff, engines
and boilers and guns
and armaments and those sorts of
things,
and warships are actually relatively
unusual.
- As they search amongst the twisted
metal, the team spot something
which could help them identify this
wreck -
the ship's bell.
Written on the side they can just
about make out a name.
It is the Jacob Jones.
- It was instantly clear what we'd
found.
I mean, finding any bell is fantastic,
but finding a bell on a wreck as
significant as that
is just, wow, it's unbelievable.
You just can't buy that experience,
really.
- The wreck is also a war grave,
the final resting place of the 66 men
who lost their lives
when the ship was sunk in the winter
of 1917.
- I've been contacted since by a lady
whose grandfather died
on the Jacob Jones and she has always
wanted to know
where her grandfather was
and it's lovely, isn't it, to be able
to give somebody that
sense of closure, really.
- Historian Yasmin Khan has joined
Digging for Britain
to delve deep into the archives.
She wants to uncover what happened on
that fateful afternoon in 1917
when the Jacob Jones was torpedoed by
a German submarine.
- The wreckage of the USS Jacob Jones
and the archaeology
help us to understand the ship,
but for me, as a historian, it's the
paper documents,
the records, the primary sources which
really bring to life
what happened for those on board that
day.
We have here this fantastic schematic
diagram
of the USS Jacob Jones and in it you
can see the bell.
It looks absolutely tiny compared to
the rest of the ship.
It gives a real sense of the size of
the destroyer.
We have a fantastic primary source
here, which is a report
written by the commander of the ship,
Lieutenant Commander DW Bagley.
He writes in huge detail for pages
about what he experienced that day.
He says, "I was in the charthouse
"and heard someone call out
'Torpedo!'"
"I jumped at once to the bridge."
So to just where the bell is.
It's from there that he sees the
torpedo
about 800 yards from the ship.
"After seeing the torpedo and
realising the straight run line
"of approach and high speed it was
making, I was convinced
"that it was impossible to manoeuvre
to avoid it."
Up on this bridge, by the bell,
Bagley must have felt sheer terror,
really,
and I feel for him because he's the
commanding officer of the ship,
he's responsible for all the men on
board and there's nothing
he can really do to stop it.
"The torpedo struck approximately
three feet below the water line.
"The after compartment fuel oil tank
and the auxiliary room were flooded
"immediately and the engine room
flooded through the door
"between the auxiliary room and the
engine room.
So we get a really horrendous sense of
how the water is starting
to fill the different spaces of the
ship.
So it's coming through here
and ultimately up into the boiler room
too.
So the next thing that Bagley has to
contend with
is that he realises he cannot send out
a distress signal.
The electricity has already failed.
It's impossible to get through a
distress signal of any kind.
So they're on their own.
There's no help coming.
Nobody knows, even, that they are
sinking at this point.
The ship sank about 4:29pm,
about eight minutes after being
torpedoed.
This is an interesting part of
Bagley's letter, because he says
about 15 or 20 minutes after the ship
sank,
the submarine appeared on the surface
about two or three miles to the
westward of the rafts.
And we actually have a picture of that
submarine right here.
This was German submarine U-53,
captained by Hans Rose.
It's quite chilling, if you imagine
it, the very same submarine
that has launched this torpedo and
caused all this chaos,
and we do know the captain of the
submarine radioed
through the coordinates of the Jacob
Jones.
Was it a way of trying to lure out
other ships that could then be sunk?
Was it a kind of gloating, boasting,
or was it actually
a humanitarian gesture? We just don't
know.
But it did mean that the alarm was
raised
and that a rescue was mounted.
The report goes on to say, "I deeply
regret to state
"that out of a total of 7 officers and
103 men on board at the time
"of the torpedoing, 2 officers and 64
men died
"in the performance of duty."
So that's more than half of the men on
board.
And we have here a remarkable
photograph of the survivors.
You can see that surviving group.
But what they must have been through,
and the memories of the men
that they lost must have still been
very, very raw at this point.
- The discovery of such a historically
important wreck kicks off
a collaboration between the MoD, the
US Navy
and Wessex Archaeology in early 2024.
Their mission is to protect the Jacob
Jones from looters,
but they also want to create a fitting
memorial for the men
who went down with the ship.
Harriet Rushton is on the MoD's
shipwreck management team.
- We manage around 5,700 wrecks around
the world.
They're normally left in situ to be
preserved,
and also as a marker of respect
because they're war graves,
essentially.
- The MoD team are using an
experimental remote operated vehicle,
or ROV,
with a robotic arm to recover a key
artefact
from the wreck.
But it's a delicate operation.
They're trying to retrieve the bell.
- The top of the bell has a
protrusion, and we manipulated
the arm around it.
You don't want to squeeze it too hard
in case you damage it,
but not hard enough and you could drop
it.
- One wrong move, and they could
potentially crack the delicate bell.
But the team's skill and patience pays
off.
- It was really thrilling when the
bell came on deck,
because the clapper came loose and it
rang for the first time
in 107 years.
- Before the ROV leaves the wreck for
the last time, the team lay
a wreath and flag at the site
as a mark of respect for the 66 people
who died in 1917.
Once safely on land
..the Jacob Jones Bell is taken
to Wessex Archaeology's conservation
labs,
where archaeologists are able
to examine it up close for the first
time.
- I think ships' bells have a little
bit of a romantic appeal.
The bell is almost the sort of
heartbeat of the ship, really,
and that goes back hundreds of years.
There are bells recorded as being on
ships
from the 15th century.
- Graham's colleague, conservator
Thomas Wicks, is looking
after the fragile bell.
- We try to keep it in as close to the
environment that it was kept
preserved in, under the water, for
such a long time,
until we can potentially preserve it
longer term.
- It's a precious and important
object.
Shanna Daniel from the US Naval
History and Heritage Command
will oversee its transfer to the
National Museum
of the United States Navy in
Washington, DC.
- Being responsible for the
conservation of this bell
is a privilege and an honour, and I
have to make sure
that it's stable and able to be
presented in a manner
for display, so we can honour those
sailors that lost their lives.
Let's do this.
Two, three.
- Two, three.
You got it?
- Yeah.
Have you got it?
- Yeah.
OK?
- After more than a century in sea
water, the bell is covered
in layers of corrosion and sea life.
Species like the Devonshire cup coral
and sea worms
have made it their home.
But amazingly, many of the bell's
features are still recognisable.
- The clapper and the whole mechanism
holding it
in place is still there.
- Oh, wow.
That is remarkable preservation.
You can still see the letters and the
date
on here.
- Yeah, the date there. 1915.
And it's still got the USS Jacob Jones
visible.
U.
S.
S. There.
- Amazing.
- The bell needs to be kept wet for
now.
Later, Shanna will carefully dry it
in a controlled environment.
- One, two.
- Three.
- Up.
If it does dry out, you will start to
see flaking,
which can actually cause damage to the
surface.
We want to make sure that that is
taken care of
because on the surface it does say
Jacob Jones.
And once we get it stabilised into the
new museum,
we would love to keep it that way.
- But before the bell returns to the
US, it has one more stop
in the UK
..Lancaster House in London for an
official handover ceremony
to the US Navy.
- Good afternoon, ladies and
gentlemen.
It's so great to be here with you.
Jacob Jones only sailed for a
relatively short time,
but this bell is a reminder of the
crew.
When this bell returns to America,
their story will be brought to life
in a museum in a way that it will be
enduring.
- This is not a straightforward
archaeological artefact.
So the idea that it is going back to
its original owners,
that's thrilling.
- Soon the bell will go on public
display in the US -
a lasting memorial to those brave
sailors on the Jacob Jones.
- # An ache for the ones
# Who've walked before me
# And joy for the ones
# Who walk beside me
# Mm-mm-mm. #
- Our next site is only accessible a
couple of times a month
when the tides are just right, so the
archaeologists
have to grab their chance and get out
there,
whatever the conditions.
That site is in Jersey,
more than 85 miles south of mainland
Britain,
but less than 15 miles from France.
The beaches here are littered with
Napoleonic era coastal
fortifications and concrete gun
emplacements
built by the Nazis
when they occupied the islands during
World War II.
And two miles out to sea,
perched on a rocky outcrop, is Seymour
Tower.
This impressive defensive tower
was built in 1782 to fend off French
and American forces
during the Anglo-French War.
But today it's home to a team of
archaeologists waiting
for their chance to explore a much
more ancient landscape
..perfectly preserved beneath the
waves
since the Palaeolithic.
Today it's a spring tide, which only
occurs twice a month,
resulting in the water receding for
miles
to reveal a landscape of jagged rocks
and shallow pools.
This is the Violet Bank, an intertidal
reef that covers
over four square miles.
60,000 years ago, during the last Ice
Age,
sea levels were over 100m lower than
today,
and this entire landscape would have
been dry land.
It's here that lead archaeologist Matt
Pope and his team
from University College London are
surveying for evidence
of Neanderthals, a species of ancient
human
with whom we share a common ancestor.
- Our team are part of an ongoing
attempt
on these low tides to map
the distribution of stone artefacts -
the spear tips
of Neanderthal weapon systems.
- Matt knows Neanderthals were here.
He's been studying them in Jersey for
the last 14 years.
Hello. What an amazing sight.
I visited him back in 2011 at the site
of La Cotte de St Brelade.
Neanderthals were coming back here to
this cave
over tens of thousands of years.
Over 250,000 stone tools have been
found at La Cotte,
more than all the other Neanderthal
sites in Britain combined.
But now Matt wants to stride out into
the wider environment
to discover more about how
Neanderthals might have hunted
and survived here.
And at Violet Bank,
the distinct contours of the landscape
have remained
unchanged for hundreds of thousands of
years.
- This is one of the most remarkable
landscapes
I've ever worked in, I'm ever likely
to work in.
It's this very large plateau of
granite and diorite
that's dissected by these gullies.
And these gullies are features that
people 60, 100, 200,000 years ago
would have seen.
They would have created lovely
highways and little routes
through this otherwise rocky,
hard-to-cross landscape.
- The classic story suggested by early
archaeologists
is that Neanderthals drove mammoths
off the cliffs here.
But Matt has a much more believable
hypothesis.
- Ice Age hunters here have the
opportunity for ambushing,
for being able to hide behind these
rocks
that are rising two metres,
four metres, five metres in areas,
creating these walls
that are breaking the line of sight.
- Now the team are scouring the
pebble-covered ground for evidence
of Neanderthal hunting.
But finding fragments of ancient stone
tools here
is like looking for a needle in a
haystack.
- We're looking for stones that have
got a bit
more angularity to them
that might suggest something is an
artefact.
- The team are trying to spot
archaeological artefacts
among all these natural pebbles.
Some artefacts will have become
smoothed and rounded
from being tumbled around on the
seabed.
But if they've only recently eroded
out of clay layers,
they can be remarkably well-preserved.
And it's not long before the
eagle-eyed team find stone tools
lying on the surface.
- OK, stop.
- Just picked that up from
- Oh, God. That's lovely.
Really nice.
And it fits perfectly in with the
Middle Palaeolithic.
- It takes an experienced eye to spot
stone tools that were shaped
by a human, or, in this case, a
Neanderthal hand.
- Just found that one.
- These tools were made more than
60,000 years ago.
- We've got a really nice blade here.
It's good quality flint.
It's relatively fresh.
It's unrolled. It's obviously only
eroded out of somewhere
fairly recently.
- Oh, I found something.
- Oh. There you go. Yeah. OK. Yeah.
Oh, no, that's really nice.
And there is some damage along here,
that when we look at it
under a microscope, it could end up
being retouch.
It looks really kind of abrupt, which
would suggest
this is actually a tool. Middle
Palaeolithic.
It's the best thing we've got to date.
That's really lovely, Stefan.
- Yeah. Brilliant.
- Yeah.
- Happy with that one.
- Oh, Stefan!
- By carefully recording where every
find is recovered, the team
are building up a picture of where
Neanderthals
may have been stalking their prey on
Violet Bank.
But with the waters rising again, this
fleeting opportunity to search
the Neanderthal hunting ground has
come to an end.
I've invited Matt and Olga Finch to
the Digging For Britain tent
to share some of their latest
discoveries
about the Neanderthals of Jersey.
Olga and Matt, this is such an amazing
site.
What is it telling you about
Neanderthals that you weren't
getting from the excavations on land?
- First of all, it gives us a chance
to actually walk on foot
into the lands that we know is
submerged now.
- Yeah.
- So we see a very unique sample of
the seabed.
- Yeah. So you've been exploring that
now?
- We have. But we didn't do it alone.
- We were quite good, weren't we,
about sort of public engagement?
- Yeah.
- So we had lots of open days, pop-up
museums.
If you've got any finds at home, bring
them in and we'll help
you identify them.
- Yeah.
- So that brought a lot of very
passionate,
enthusiastic local people.
And so they started bringing in these
Neanderthal artefacts.
- And looking at these, then, Matt,
what are they for?
- Well, in the most part, this
material is waste removed
in the course of producing tools.
So this is a piece of flint that has
had flakes very carefully
removed from it. And this is set up
for the removal
of one last nice, big, triangular
flake from here.
For some reason, they didn't do it.
Over here we've got a triangular flake
that's come from a different part of
the Violet Bank.
- So if the Neanderthal tool maker had
carried on, struck the top
of the flint here
- Yes.
- ..they could have made something
like this.
- Just like that.
- Yeah.
- Which could be attached to a shaft
and used as a spear tip.
- So that's what you think this is, a
spear tip?
- Yeah.
- It looks as though it's missing its
tip.
- It does look as if it's missing its
tip.
It's definitely got a break there.
Lots of things could account for that
break,
but hitting something hard when thrown
quite fast
could be one of those.
- Oh, it's so tantalising. You're so
close, aren't you,
to that moment when a Neanderthal
throws a spear at a mammoth?
- Exactly. Ten years ago,
we're theorising that something that's
submerged and inaccessible
was a hunting ground.
And now, ten years later, to have
accessed part
of that landscape and found a piece of
hunting kit
- Yes.
- ..that may be as far as we get in
this generation.
- Yeah.
- But it's a big leap for us and we're
quite happy with that.
- It seems incredible that evidence of
the lives of ancient people
can be preserved under the waves in
this way
for 60,000 years.
But the sea can also pose a threat to
preservation.
Islands are exposed to the elements on
all sides, meaning
that any archaeological sites on their
coasts are constantly
threatened with erosion.
And those sites can be very, very
challenging to get to.
Our next dig takes us to an
archipelago more than 100 miles
from the Scottish mainland - the
Shetland Islands.
This is the Kame of Isbister,
a 38-metre-high rocky headland jutting
out
into the treacherous North Sea.
Here, on this precipitous slope, is
one of the most inaccessible
archaeological sites in the whole of
Britain.
The headland is covered with
mysterious ancient structures.
Could this have been an early
monastery or a Viking stronghold?
This year, Aberdeen University
and the University of the Highlands
and Islands
have teamed up to find out once and
for all who was living
on the Kame of Isbister.
But first, they have to get there.
The rocky promontory is continually
being eroded by the wind and sea.
And the knife edge ridge leading to
the site grows more difficult
to traverse with each passing year.
The archaeologists have enlisted the
help of a team of professional
climbers to help them safely access
the site.
- Don't want everyone in the same
place.
So can you just wait here
- Just hang here?
- ..while I get these
guys up to the top?
- GASPING
- Now go.
- And once they're across, the local
wildlife is posing
its own challenges, too.
- Wow! Midges!
- Do you want to rethink your career?
- The dig is being led by Charlotta
Hillerdal and Gordon Noble.
- Been making great progress. So this
is our main trench
for this year.
And what we've got here is two
different buildings next
to each other. So we've got one
building with a wall here.
This is the floor here.
And we've got another building where
Lotta is.
So this is one of about 20-odd
structures on the Kame.
- The footprint of each building is
very clear.
And the walls are really well
preserved.
- This is the biggest kind of interior
of a house that we have.
This wall is a really exceptionally
nice
stone wall with a turf core.
The floor is very ephemeral and not a
lot of deposit,
so this building, and also probably
the building behind us,
at least, they have not been lived on
for a long time.
Probably not even seasonal.
It's more of a very short temporary
use of these buildings.
- Traces of any activity inside the
buildings
are frustratingly scarce,
but there's something here.
- Just popped out of the section,
this little weight here.
So you can see it's got a nice hole
at the end here that's been drilled
through,
and another hole going this way.
Not had many artefacts, but this is a
nice one,
on the last day, as usual.
- I want to discover what the finds
tell us about this mysterious site.
Gordon and Charlotta have come to the
Digging For Britain tent.
Gordon, in your mission to find the
most extreme remote sites,
you visited the Kame of Isbister.
That looked quite difficult.
- It was.
- But it was worth it in terms of what
you found.
And I think the curious thing is that,
you know, why were people
there and when?
- Yeah. Well, I mean, we've got quite
slim pickings to go on.
I mean, this is the really curious
thing.
We've got the sum total of two
artefacts over
a week.
- This is it from the whole site?
- This is it from the whole site.
- From the whole dig.
- So it's very peculiar.
And we've gone through various
possible interpretations.
- So it's not at all what we expected.
So this has been like a mysterious
site, and there's been a lot
of speculation of what it might be -
if it's a Viking stronghold
or if it is a monastic site with
hermit monks living there.
And what we can say is that it is
neither
because we have
- Oh, OK.
- But we don't know what it is.
- Yeah.
- Because there is very, very little
evidence of people
actually living there.
- Yeah.
- There are almost no cultural
deposits, absolutely nothing there.
- It's very strange, isn't it?
- It is very strange.
- Very strange.
- Given that you've only got two
objects,
what do these two objects tell you?
You've got something made of stone and
something made of iron.
This looks like a Is it an
arrowhead?
- It's a little knife.
- Is it a little knife?
- Yeah. So it tells us we're in the
first millennium AD,
Pictish to Viking.
- Yeah.
- And then this, this is a line
sinker.
A little stone object here.
Although it's had multiple lives, you
can see it's got little knife
marks on the top here.
It's maybe been a whetstone for
sharpening a blade.
Then it looks like it's been converted
into a line sinker
for nets, you know, for weighing down
nets.
- OK. Right.
- And generally that is thought to
turn up in Viking
to Norse phases
- Yeah.
- ..in Northern Isles sites.
But it all just adds to the mystery of
the site,
because, you know, we've spent a week
there digging
and we've got two objects.
- Two finds.
- So it's this site that's built with
great ambition.
- Yeah.
- Building all these houses.
But that ambition seems to have not
been realised.
It makes us think this is a failed
settlement.
You know, they've tried to make this
big statement.
They've tried to control that area
visually
in terms of dominating those sea
lanes.
But for whatever reason, that group
doesn't look like they've succeeded.
- So they've either realised it's a
really bad place
to have a settlement,
or something's happened politically,
maybe?
- Yeah, something's happened. But
whatever happened there, it must
have been something that's very, very
dramatic for you to make
this huge investment, just carrying
like all the building material
over to the island, build at least 23
structures,
and then not use them.
- Yeah.
- You feel like there must be a really
interesting story behind this.
- Yeah, yeah. A story that was never
written down.
- Yeah.
- So archaeology is the only way of
getting at it.
- Mm.
Extremely interesting, but not from
the perspective that we thought.
- Yeah. Isn't that lovely?
- Yes.
- It's great when a site surprises
you.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- The Scottish mainland and islands
are dotted with the remains
of hundreds of prehistoric towers
known as brochs.
Some of them stand up to 14m high.
But archaeologists have always been a
little puzzled
about what they are and how they were
used.
For our final dig, we're heading back
to Orkney to explore some
fascinating new discoveries on the
island of South Ronaldsay.
This is Cairns Broch
..the base of a circular tower
more than 20m in diameter.
Originally built more than 2,000 years
ago in the Iron Age.
A team from the University of the
Highlands and Islands,
led by Martin Carruthers, has been
investigating this broch
for nearly 20 years.
- Day one at the Cairns.
Straight into the thick of the action.
- We dropped in on the team in 2016,
when they were just starting to clear
the rubble
overlying the broch.
- Managed to remove a huge amount of
rubble
from the northern side of the broch.
And now for the first time in possibly
2,000 years,
we're getting to look at this northern
section of wall,
which is particularly beautiful and
stunning.
- The team were looking for clues to
explain why such a huge monument
had been abandoned.
- We're on the outer wall of the
broch, and Carolina has made
quite a startling discovery.
- A human jaw.
- Wow.
- Among the stones, they found what
seemed
to be deliberately placed artefacts.
- That human jaw is closely associated
with a very substantial vertebral bone
of whale.
It's quite a remarkable deposit so
far.
It looks like they laid out these
items as a kind of
decommissioning deposit, an active
closure at the end
of the broch.
- Eight years later, Martin and the
team are finally reaching
the layers which get us back to the
time when the broch
was still in use,
still lived in.
I couldn't wait to see the new
discoveries here.
Martin.
- Hi.
- It is so nice to actually be here.
- Yeah, well, you're very welcome.
- Hello, hello.
- Hiya.
- What a fantastic dig.
It's incredible, isn't it?
- We think so, yeah. Absolutely.
And we're getting right down into the
floor deposits
inside the broch now.
- So you're actually at the level of
the floor?
- Yeah.
- That's really exciting.
- So we can see floor surfaces,
clay floors and hearths dotted around
the piece.
- It's so beautifully made, isn't it?
- It's wonderful.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- Can we get down into the broch
itself?
- Absolutely.
- Yeah?
- Let's go and do that.
- 18 years after starting this
excavation, Martin and his team
are now beginning to figure out what
the inside of the broch
looked like when it was occupied 2,000
years ago.
Inside the five metre thick outer
walls,
a series of flat stones set upright
define a single entrance passage from
the east,
leading straight to a central chamber
surrounded by five
other distinct rooms.
Now we can enter the broch through its
original entrance.
- So we go through this passageway
first of all.
- This is
I mean, just this is amazing, isn't
it?
- Yeah.
- You're actually passing through and
getting a real sense
of what this would have been like to
live in,
to be in.
- And even just having the certainty
of knowing the pathways that people
undertook throughout the household all
that time ago
is just remarkable.
- Yeah. I'm standing just here.
If 21st century archaeologists hadn't
left this blue box here,
I'd be able to walk into this central
space.
Now, that's rectangular.
- Yeah.
And it's quite an unusual feature in
Scottish brochs, because normally
we'd expect there to be a large
central hearth
here and a more open space.
But here, actually, these tall
uprights are defining
quite a boxy, quite small-scale space.
- Yeah. And what's this?
- Yeah.
- Is that made by humans or is that
natural?
- It's artificial. Yeah. And it's an
hourglass perforation,
so it's been cut in from both sides of
the big slab.
- So drilled in from one side, drilled
in from another?
- Yeah.
- From the other until it meets and
you get the hole?
- Absolutely.
Yeah. And of course, it's aligned
right the way down
that long entrance passage.
And the entrance passage itself into
the broch is aligned just east,
south east, and therefore round about
the autumn equinox,
the sun would have risen on that sea
horizon
and shone down the long entrance
passageway along this corridor
and clipped the top of this stone,
and issued through that hole in the
stone,
possibly to be focalised on the big
slab behind it.
- That's incredible, because on the
autumn equinox, you end up
with a shaft of light and a circle of
sunshine
on that back stone.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- That's very deliberate.
- Yeah, very much so.
That time of the year is an
interesting one
and an important one for the Iron Age
community here,
because we know that about 70 to 80%
of the animals
are killed off at that time of the
year.
- So we may be talking about kind of a
later harvest festival
around the time of the autumn equinox.
This is associated with that?
- Yeah, very much. And it signals
that.
- Yeah.
- Absolutely.
- Oh, that's amazing.
- Yeah.
- The interior lighting seems to have
been very carefully arranged,
and the team have unearthed another
curious feature.
There's a void under the floor of the
broch.
Quite wet and slippery, isn't it?
- Yeah, it is.
- Yeah.
- Just as it would have been in the
Iron Age.
- Wow.
So this is all just cut out of the
rock?
- Yeah, it's rock cut.
- What is it for?
Is it? Is it a well?
- Well, we definitely know that there
was water in here
in the Iron Age because we found
waterlogged material down there.
Brushwood pinned down with wooden
pegs.
- Yeah.
- Also tangled into that were
about two dozen fibres of human hair
that had been cut at either end
from multiple individuals.
- What on earth is going on down here?
- Well, that's what we asked
ourselves.
The idea of people having a kind of
simultaneous haircut
and placing that down in there seems
far more like there's some
kind of strong, ritualised practice
that lies behind that, perhaps.
- Yeah, yeah.
They're giving offerings down here
perhaps.
- Yeah.
- Suddenly a lot more mysterious than
just a well.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- Yeah.
It's incredible down here.
I mean, it's a beautifully made space.
The subterranean chamber seems very
mysterious, but the team
are also discovering more mundane
signs of everyday life here
in the broch, including personal items
which must have belonged
to people who lived here.
And in the floor of the southernmost
room is a large stone-lined pit,
which the team believe was used to
hold water.
- Which is also associated with
heat-affected rocks, which must
have been heated on the hearth and
plunged into the cold water
to warm the water up.
- Yeah.
- So we think that they're probably
cooking food there.
- OK. I mean, that's a lot of soup.
- Yes.
- How many people do you think they're
feeding?
- Probably quite a lot.
One of the key issues for us is to
consider whether the household
who occupied this broch were largely
self-contained
and consumed the food here and made
the food for themselves,
or whether they're also offering
hospitality to the people
in the settlement that surrounds
the broch here at the same time as
well.
- Yeah.
- Perhaps sometimes people from other
houses around the settlement
were coming in and were also being
given hospitality.
- Yeah.
So you've got the community coming
together, gathering to eat together?
- Yeah. So there's a range of really
interesting artefacts -
glass beads and metal jewellery,
pins and rings, and things like that.
So whether or not that means that
people were actually almost
formally attired for the period when
they were engaged
in these feasts.
- This is absolutely fascinating.
What incredible detail you're getting
from this archaeology.
- Yeah.
- I mean, this sounds like people are
congregating
here to have something like a mass
Sunday lunch.
- Yes.
- You know, dressed in their best
clothes.
- Yeah, absolutely.
In their fine finery indeed.
Absolutely.
- I mean, you've already got so much
detail here
that I don't think I've come across
anywhere else.
I mean, it's a unique site.
- Yeah.
But the lovely thing about that
uniqueness is we're kind of
talking about intimate portraits of
ordinary, everyday lives,
in a sense.
- And it's ordinary, everyday lives
for which we have absolutely no other
sources.
There's nothing else that these people
have left us.
- Yeah.
Nothing whatsoever.
- Apart from this.
- Yeah, apart from this.
- It is fantastic to finally come here
to Cairns Broch
and to see the site for myself.
It's absolutely remarkable.
There's so many layers of physical
history here,
and it's brilliant to see how much
work Martin
and the team have done over the years
since he first told me
about looking at the end of the broch,
the ceiling of it.
Now we're going back into the heyday
when it was full of life
and we're seeing evidence of the kinds
of activities
that were going on inside it.
And we're just getting an incredibly
rich, detailed view
of Iron Age life in Orkney here.
Next time on Digging For Britain
GASPING ..in Durham, an incredible
find
There's something quite magical about
digging down through
this dark black soil, and then
suddenly there's the gleam of gold.
..in Yorkshire, evidence of an ancient
crime
- It's punishable by crucifixion.
You don't want to be caught with this
material.
- ..in Scotland, an internationally
significant find emerges
into the light
- My stomach is churning, butterflies.
- ..and in Cumbria, an unbelievable
Bronze Age discovery.
- Oh, my God, there's another one.
- Oh, my God.
- 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 past 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. #