Digging for Britain (2010) s12e05 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
It'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 island.
This time, I'm travelling around the
west of the United Kingdom,
looking for that region's most
interesting digs.
West of Oxford, a Roman villa complex
with some big surprises
Oh, my goodness, this is a huge
building.
..and wonderful small finds.
I've never seen one like that.
In Devon, exotic discoveries emerge
from a 17th-century site.
- This is not something I would have
expected
on this rural farmstead.
- Historian Yasmin Khan investigates
and uncovers the region's dark past.
- It's just so stark seeing the words
"slaves bought."
- And on Anglesey, detectorists return
to the site of an epic
Iron Age discovery
- Wow, look at that.
Unbelievably brilliant.
- ..with remarkably well-preserved
finds.
Oh, isn't that amazing?
The first dig takes us to Grove,
12 miles southwest of Oxford.
On the edge of the village, a new
housing development is under way,
but these homes aren't the first to
have been built
on this plot of land.
Archaeologists surveying the site have
discovered an intriguing
complex of buildings dating back
nearly 2,000 years
..to the Roman period.
Now, the archaeologists really didn't
expect to find much here.
When they did their test trenches,
nothing much turned up.
Then they did a geophysical survey,
and again,
there wasn't really much to see.
Then they started to excavate
and they found something really
exciting.
It's Roman and it's enormous.
The team from Red River Archaeology
had been excavating for over a year
when they started to uncover the
foundations
of a previously unknown Roman villa.
They had no idea how significant this
find would turn out to be.
Site director Francesca Giarelli is
showing me around.
Francesca, hi.
- Hi, Alice. Welcome.
- Lovely to meet you.
This is a huge site.
- Oh, yeah. It's quite a site, yes.
- I wasn't quite expecting to see
walls
as soon as I walk onto the site.
This is the villa, is it?
- Yeah. This is our villa complex.
- Wow.
The foundations are really well
preserved.
- Yeah.
- There's pottery everywhere.
- Oh, yeah. The site is completely
littered with pottery.
- Yeah.
We're walking up a corridor here.
We've got rooms to the left of us.
Another room over here.
- Yeah.
This will be the front of the building
with the two little wings.
- So this is the front of the villa
here.
- Yeah.
The front of the villa is over there.
- Yeah.
- This is the main living quarters of
the villa.
- The footprint of the villa clearly
shows a suite of rooms
linked by a corridor,
flanked with two wings.
The design is typical of a domestic
Roman building
at the centre of a farming estate.
But it was what the archaeologists
discovered next
that got them really excited -
a much larger building right next to
the villa.
Wow. This is a huge building.
Amazon warehouse-like.
Walking around the site with
Francesca,
I can't quite believe how large it is.
I can see the corner of it there,
but presumably it extends off in this
direction.
- Yeah. It stands 16 metres in that
direction
and about 55 in the other,
so it will cover about 500 square
metres.
- That's amazing.
It dwarfs the villa.
The outline of the building is very
clear,
but there are other clues to its
architecture.
We can see the bases of pillars
which would have divided the space
inside into three aisles.
Covering an area of 500 square metres,
this is already looking like one of
the largest aisled buildings
or halls ever discovered in Britain.
Do we know what it is?
What would it have been used for?
- Well, they're being used for a
plethora of different functions.
We think that whoever was living in
the villa
also lived in this aisled building for
a while.
- Right.
- But also it will be used for
storage.
In later history of the Romans' time,
they are also being used as, like, a
cultural centre.
- Yeah.
It's a fascinating site,
especially since you didn't know
anything was here.
One of the questions to be answered is
whether the aisled hall
existed alongside the villa,
or whether one replaced the other.
The archaeologists have found more
than just stone foundations on site.
There are also traces of the fabric of
some of the buildings,
helping us to imagine what they would
have looked like.
- The green matches what we've got
there!
- THEY LAUGH
Project manager Louis Stafford is
showing me some of these finds.
Now, what is this? This looks
exciting.
- It's painted wall plaster.
You've got your lovely earthen tones,
red and brown, with a very,
very Romanesque Roman banding.
- So, this bit looks interesting.
Look at that colour. That's lovely.
- So this is blue pigment that you're
seeing on here.
- Mmm.
- Normally in the Roman period, if
you're going to get a blue colour
like that, it's from lapis lazuli
that's coming all the way
from, potentially, Afghanistan.
Or it might be a slightly different
version that's coming from Egypt.
- So these people, they must be pretty
wealthy in order to
- Definitely well-connected within the
Greater Roman Empire
to get those sorts of things imported,
yeah.
- Having seen the rooms in plan, I'm
now imagining them,
just getting a glimpse of what this
villa would have been like
on the inside, you know, richly
decorated.
- Highly decorated, yeah.
- The painted plaster speaks of high
status.
This was a well-appointed villa
complex with no expense spared,
and among the thousands of finds are
personal objects
which connect us to the people who
lived here.
- So we've got a nice intaglio ring
with a blue gem in the middle.
- Oh, that's lovely.
It is carved.
- A little bird.
- Isn't that beautiful?
See, this is when it starts to get
really personal.
Something that was actually on
someone's finger.
What's that piece? That looks lovely.
- We've got a lovely little buckle.
- Oh. That's gorgeous.
It's got animal heads on it.
What is it?
- A double-headed horse buckle.
- That's quite fine, isn't it?
They've got little eyes as well.
- Yeah.
- Is that a known style?
- It's very late Roman.
In fact, it almost goes into sort of
early Anglo-Saxon.
- So one of the later finds on the
site, then.
- Yeah.
- That's really lovely.
What a beautiful find.
This buckle dates right to the end of
the Roman period in Britain,
to the early fifth century,
and perhaps even later.
But the team are also uncovering
evidence of much earlier buildings
on the site.
There were clearly people living here
before the Romans
arrived in Britain.
- So, here we've got our roundhouses.
- Oh, yeah, they're really clear,
aren't they?
- Yeah.
- These curving ditches coming
through.
- Yeah, they kind of really pop out.
- Hello, Mo.
- Hi.
- So you're standing in a roundhouse?
- Yeah, we have two ring ditches for
Iron Age,
which hopefully gives us a formation
for an Iron Age settlement.
- Yeah, yeah.
So the big question, then,
is whether the people that were living
here in the Iron Age,
whether they're the ancestors
of the people who end up living in
that villa.
The team have recovered thousands of
sherds of pottery from the site,
which help to tell the story of the
people living here,
as well as providing useful dating
evidence.
Oh, that's a nice bit. What's that?
- This bit is a nice cheese strainer.
- Isn't that lovely?
I mean, it's like a colander, isn't
it?
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
Oh, it's got a centaur on it.
- It does.
- That's really lovely.
Have you got an idea of the kinds of
centuries that we're talking about?
- It's going from late Iron Age
all the way through to very early to
very late Roman.
- So you think there's continuous
occupation here?
- Yeah, all the way through.
- I mean, given that we've got this
continuity on site,
do you think, rather than looking at a
country retreat
of a rich town person,
do you think we're more likely to be
looking at a wealthy family
that's probably been here a while
through the generations?
- It could be a local that's started
to adopt Roman ways,
or it's somebody who's come over from
the continent
and built that villa, stamping sort of
authority.
- Mm.
- But it certainly seems that they
were becoming more affluent
as the time went on,
that they could actually put up a
fairly expansive building
and then put up a bigger one.
- The villa itself and that huge
aisled building
would have been very prominent in the
landscape
..and alongside the pottery and
building materials,
the archaeologists have discovered
some intriguing finds.
Now, what is this?
- We've got some tiny little axe heads
called votive axe heads.
These are normally found
- Oh, my goodness, they're really
tiny.
It's a doll's house axe.
- It is tiny.
We tend to find these on temple sites,
sort of votive offerings to the gods.
- So you don't think it's a child's
toy?
You think it's something to do with
religion, effectively?
- It does seem to be on sites that are
very typical temple sites.
- These are really curious.
I've never seen one like that.
- Enigmatic.
- Slightly mysterious.
They are enigmatic. That's just the
word.
- So these next objects, again, you
quite often find on temple sites.
- The reason I'm wearing the glove is
cos it's made of lead.
- It is.
You can see that's tightly wound and
coiled lead.
They're normally inscribed with little
curse.
- So these are Roman curse tablets.
- Defixiones.
- So this is unusual for a villa site?
- It is.
It does potentially point to something
like, you know,
a small family shrine or a small local
shrine being used
by the wider population.
- I've drawn these two buildings, the
villa and the aisle building,
side by side, but in fact, the
archaeologists think that
the villa is earlier and that this
could have been an upgrade.
It's certainly a lot bigger.
It's an enormous building.
You get a sense of that looking at the
footprint of it
on the ground here.
These buildings were used for all
sorts of things.
This one would have been magnificent.
We get a glimpse, of course, of the
people who were here
from those small finds.
What we don't know is whether we're
talking about wealthy Romans
who've arrived in Britain,
or a local farming family
who were doing very, very well in
Roman Britain.
And their roots may go right back into
the Iron Age,
and perhaps their ancestors lived in
the roundhouses over the far end
of the site there, so there's
fantastic time depth here.
Think about all the changes that
happened through the generations
as we move from the Iron Age into the
Roman period and beyond.
MUSIC: Lost and Found by Johnny Flynn
# Just a lonely radio
# Just a makeshift show and tell
# Playing out the lives of the lost
and found #
The Roman Emperor Claudius invaded
Britain with his army in 43 CE.
In some places, the Romans seemed to
have been welcomed in
with open arms,
but Wales was a stronghold of
resistance,
and it took the Romans almost two
decades to reach northwest Wales
and the Menai Strait.
Our next story sees archaeologists
returning to a site
where an incredible hoard of ancient
metalwork was discovered
in the 1940s, but it turns out
there are still new discoveries to be
made.
The site is at RAF Valley on the
island of Anglesey.
The airfield here was built during
World War II
and became operational in 1941.
The following year, the runways were
being lengthened to allow
much larger planes, including American
heavy bombers,
to land and take off.
But before the airfield could be
extended,
the sandy terrain had to be
stabilised,
and that was done using peat from the
edges
of the nearby lake, Llyn Cerrig Bach.
While digging the peat, the workers
made an incredible discovery -
a hoard of ancient metal objects.
Archaeologists were called in and
ended up recovering
more than 180 iron and copper alloy
artefacts
before the peat was spread across the
airfield.
The Llyn Cerrig Bach hoard
is one of the most important
discoveries in Wales,
dating to the Iron Age.
This year, more than 80 years after
this amazing hoard
was discovered, the MoD needed to
carry out maintenance work
on the airfield.
Before the new tarmac is laid,
they've called in a team of
archaeologists
to check the underlying peat in case
any artefacts were missed.
Richard Osgood is leading the dig and
filming the investigation.
- We've got to find a methodology that
will work for recovery
of anything that's on the runway.
And the only thing I can think of,
really, is to use a great team
of metal detectorists.
- The team of ten metal detectorists
meticulously scan the airfield
BEEPING
- That's identifying a ferrous metal.
- ..but their devices can't tell the
difference between ancient
artefacts and modern metal.
- A definite piece of iron chain.
It looks quite modern and
agricultural, doesn't it?
- So it's a frustrating process,
and just as they were about to call it
a day,
one of the detectorists, Graham,
makes a potentially exciting
discovery.
- Graham, what have you got? This
better be good.
- Well, I was just walking back and
had a thought,
"Right, yeah, let's dig it."
- Oh, my goodness, Graham, that is
stunning.
- Richard suspects that this is Iron
Age metalwork.
And as Graham carefully excavates
around it, the excitement grows.
- There's more there, isn't there?
- Yeah.
- Wow.
Unbelievably brilliant.
- The fact that these things are still
articulated
- Oh!
- Look at me, I'm shaking.
Well chuffed!
- Brilliant. Brilliant.
- Thanks.
- Well done, mate.
- Back in the tent,
Richard has brought along this new
discovery to show me,
along with another intriguing find
from the airfield.
Adam Gwilt and Adelle Bricking from
National Museums Wales
are joining us.
What are we looking at, then?
Adam, this is your speciality.
What are these objects?
- So, amazingly, these objects
have survived in the peat on the
airfield.
And this is a complete bridle bit,
which would have gone into the mouth
of a pony.
And this is called a terret.
It's a guide for the reins on the
chariot.
- Now, how datable are they?
- We know that they're probably middle
to late first century AD.
- Can I pick that up?
- Yes, please do.
- Oh, isn't that amazing?
- It's heavy as well, isn't it?
- It is heavy, yeah.
It's just so beautifully made.
I love the design of it.
Was it immediately obvious what it
was?
- Oh, yeah. I mean, that is
You could use that today.
I have a horse and it's actually quite
similar to the one that I use.
- Is it quite small cos presumably
those fold back
along the cheeks of the horse?
- So that would be like a like a pony.
- Yeah.
- Pony size.
- It's just such a beautiful, ornate
object, isn't it?
It doesn't need to be that beautifully
made.
- Yeah, definitely, they're showing
off a little bit.
It's meant to be appreciated, not just
used.
- That terret, is there a colour on
it?
Is this red here?
- Amazingly, there's red glass
decoration that's been inset
around the ring.
It was a very particular kind of Iron
Age technology.
If you imagine the contrast between
the red
and the golden bronze colour,
it would have made quite a statement
at the time.
- Yeah.
It's fantastic to have this
reconstruction
of an Iron Age chariot here.
Where does that terret sit on this
chariot?
- So, on each British chariot,
you have a set of terrets along the
yoke here,
and the reins would be drawn through
them
and held by the charioteer.
- Yeah, yeah.
Why are these things ending up in a
bog?
- The combined dating evidence
suggests that this was the place
that people were returning to
and choosing to gift these valued
objects.
- If it's been happening over hundreds
of years, we're actually looking
at a place which is, for want of a
better word, sacred.
- The evidence does suggest that this
was a religious site
of some importance, and it does
suggest that this lake
on this isolated island was a special
place
where this kind of religious practice
took place.
- There is religious significance into
these put into the water,
and that's the thing you make a
sacrifice.
- We're talking about the Iron Age
overlapping with the Romans.
- Yeah.
- There is a clash going on between,
you know, the British people
and these incoming armies.
- Yes.
And there's an amazing account of the
Romans crossing
the Menai Strait around about AD 60-61
and being terrified by furies of
druids,
meeting them in opposition.
- Are you going back?
- Absolutely. I think there will be
more.
We'll be getting back in touch with
you, hopefully, again
when we find more.
- So it's quite important, actually,
to go back and find more.
It is building our picture of what
those hoards were over time.
- We've just touched the surface.
- There's more to find.
- We'll definitely use all that we can
get
to build up that wider picture.
- Yeah.
- Hopefully there'll be more to talk
about next year.
- Next year! Brilliant!
I'll have you all back.
Thank you.
# Turn the soil, weave the dream
# Thread the river, rake the sand
# And dig for those whose stories lie
# With buried paths and futures won
#
It took the Romans some 25 years to
subjugate Wales,
although it was only ever a partial
conquest.
They would leave their mark on the
landscape, the language,
and on wider culture.
During the fourth century,
the Romans would adopt a new state
religion,
one which would outlast the empire
itself.
Next, we travel 15 miles west of
Cardiff to the Vale of Glamorgan
and the town of Llantwit Major.
This Welsh town is named after St
Illtud,
one of the most venerated Celtic
saints.
Illtud was an abbot and a famous
teacher
who lived from the late fifth into the
early sixth century
during the Early Medieval period.
This is the rather lovely St Illtud's
Church,
and like many churches, it's a
palimpsest.
It's accumulated different bits over
time.
The earliest bits of it go back to the
time of the Normans,
but inside there are even more ancient
monuments.
These are early medieval monuments.
They were found in the vicinity
of the church here at Llantwit Major.
The patterns on them are absolutely
gorgeous,
but what's really drawn me here is the
fact that they've got
inscriptions on as well.
So if we look around the back of this
one,
up here we can see a name.
There's a cross
and then the letters I-L-T-I
It would have been Illtyd.
So, it's the saint after whom this
church,
and, in fact, the whole town is named.
This is 10th century.
This takes us back another century.
And we've got a name here.
You see this?
Houelt.
That's King Hywel, the ninth-century
Welsh king.
And then this stone is the earliest of
all of them.
And here I can make out a name
again
So, Utha
..H-E
..L-O
Uthahelo.
And we know that this is an
eighth-century Welsh king.
We know that from the annals.
So we've got an incredible association
between Welsh royalty
and Llantwit Major.
This was clearly a very important
place.
Those medieval monuments are evidence
that this place
was a religious centre with royal
connections
centuries before this Norman church
was built.
The monastery that was named after
Illtud continued to exist
in some form up until the Reformation
in the 16th century,
but the original buildings from the
time of Illtud
seem to have been lost without a
trace.
Now, a team from the University of
Cardiff are searching
for evidence of the early monastery
here.
They've opened a trench 70 metres from
the church
after receiving an unusual tip-off.
Tim Young is leading the dig.
- The only excavation prior to us
coming in here within this area
that's produced early monastery period
finds
was the work of badgers in the woods
just behind you on the other side of
the stream.
- They do make pretty good
archaeologists, actually.
- They do.
They're digging up burials.
So we have now a minimum of four
individuals from the badger sett.
- OK.
- We've dated two of those,
and they're seventh to eighth century.
- Following the badgers' discovery of
human remains dating
to the Early Medieval period,
Cardiff University commissioned a
geophysical survey,
hoping that this might help them find
the lost monastery.
- This is the geophysics.
The yellow colour is the internal
subdivisions
within a broader enclosure,
which appears to enclose much of the
valley.
It's about half a kilometre or so in
length.
- That's really big.
So you think this was all the
monastery?
- We're suspicious that it is.
So we were drawn to this site and this
field because of this wall.
The wall has proved to be Norman on
the basis of the pottery
that occurs around it.
- OK.
- But all the exciting stuff is
underneath it.
So the base of the walls provides us
with a sort of nice Norman horizon of
around about 1100,
and everything underneath is
potentially part of the monastery.
- Although Christianity was the
official religion
of the late Roman Empire, it is
unclear how widely this belief
was adopted across Britain.
But the religion does seem to have
been very well established
in Wales by the fifth century, the
time of Illtud,
and his monastery is considered to be
the oldest centre
of Christian teaching in Britain.
I mean, what would it have been like,
this monastery?
It's not just monks?
- No, it would have been a broad
community.
The monasteries are the focal points
within the kingdoms,
often, of industry and commerce.
This is wonderful to have some of
these features that take us back
into that really key period of
history.
- Can we get a closer look? Can we go
down into the trench?
- Yeah, let's go down.
- Near the Norman wall,
Tim's students have made another
discovery.
What have we got here, then, Tim?
- We've got two very small graves.
- Oh, OK.
- The one on this side contained
a skeleton of a child of about two,
probably.
And this one's even smaller.
- Right.
- And given the smaller size and the
lack of bone preservation,
we suspect this was probably a very
young infant.
- Yeah.
While Tim and I are talking,
osteoarchaeologist Beth Pryce
has started excavating another burial.
- Another infant just coming up on the
other side.
- Yeah.
There's his skull just starting to
emerge.
- There's the skull just coming out.
- Bigger bits of bone, Tim.
Can you have a look, please?
- You've got some more bone coming
through?
- Yeah.
Come and have a look cos it looks like
another skull.
- It looks like another skull.
- It does look like another skull,
yeah.
This gets more and more interesting.
- This is all we have so far,
so it's trying to find the cut so we
can kind of get underneath it
to get that out, then to have a closer
look.
- Yeah.
Beth, we'll come back later, see what
you find.
We've got two skulls so far.
- Presumably, there's a high status
churchyard up there where we've got
kings and abbots being buried.
And we're, I assume, out on the
fringes of that
burial activity here.
- So, The ordinary people of old
Llantwit Major.
- The ordinary people, yeah.
- And in this particular corner, it
looks like it was an area
that was reserved for the burials of
young children.
- It's looking that way.
- But it's not just burials that are
being discovered here.
Tim's found evidence of other
activity.
- Much of what we're finding is slag
like this,
which is the regular product of a
blacksmith doing everyday tasks.
- So, in the kind of late seventh into
the eighth century,
we've got metalworking here,
industrial activity
- Yep.
- ..and burials happening.
- Only just over there, yes.
- Yeah.
But there's one curious find that
could provide a link
between this industrial activity and
monastic life.
- We have these pieces of fired clay.
So, this material is characteristic of
the clay coats
that are put onto iron objects when
they're brazed,
and back in 650-770,
one of the characteristic objects that
is being made this way
are the iron handbells that were used
in the early Christian church.
Here, we're only getting these tiny
fragments,
but it's possible that that's what
they're from.
- These replicas, made using the same
brazing technique,
show what these handbells looked like.
- It's a fascinating thought that it
could be.
- That's fantastic. So, it's only a
suggestion at the moment?
- It's only a suggestion at the
moment.
- It's quite tantalising.
- It's very tantalising.
Yes, indeed.
- Are you just about to try lifting
them?
After hours of painstaking work,
Beth and Tim are ready to remove the
three skulls they've uncovered
for further examination.
So the plan now is to block lift them
and then back in the lab,
they'll be really carefully excavated
in a very controlled way.
- That's the plan.
They're clearly very, very fragile.
- Yeah.
- Right, support it.
- Yeah.
- Further analysis of these remains
may reveal more
about the inhabitants of Llantwit
Major 1,500 years ago.
- And if I pass you the shovel, do the
reverse.
- Got it.
- OK.
- One.
- One down.
- Good.
- I absolutely love the story here.
I mean, the fact that this site was
essentially discovered by badgers
is intriguing in itself.
And then we've got these inscribed
stones, and they are gorgeous.
And they take us back from the 10th to
the ninth to the eighth century.
And now what Tim and his team are
finding here is pushing back
into the mysterious seventh century.
And we're getting tantalisingly close
to St Illtud himself.
# I dreamed I flew with the saints
last night
# I know them all by wing size #
But now we're going to drag ourselves
from the seventh
to the 17th century,
when Britain had established itself as
a naval power.
International trade was growing
and the foundations of the empire were
being laid.
The ports of London, Liverpool,
Portsmouth and Plymouth
were becoming some of the world's
busiest,
but maritime trade was also
flourishing
in smaller towns and villages along
the west coast of Britain.
Our next dig takes place at a small
seaside town
where archaeologists were excavating
ahead of a new housing estate
being built, turning up some
surprising revelations
about international trade.
We're travelling to North Devon, to
the town of Ilfracombe,
on the edge of the Bristol Channel.
Today, Ilfracombe's rugged coastline
and picturesque harbour
make it a popular summer holiday spot.
But back in the 17th century,
Ilfracombe harbour was a thriving port
during the Early Modern period.
This dig takes us a mile inland,
to where archaeologists have
discovered the foundations
of a 17th-century farmhouse.
- We are actually seeing the
construction method
of this building which, for
archaeologists,
this is actually quite exceptional.
- And some astonishing finds from the
site are raising questions
about who might have lived here.
- During our excavations,
we have recovered some very unusual
artefacts.
- Sean O'Regan from AC Archaeology is
leading the dig.
- This is our east-facing range of the
structure.
As you can see, very thick, very
substantial.
They've been using this locally
sourced material,
quartzite boulders, absolutely rock
hard,
and with lime plaster over the top
that will last for decades.
You haven't experienced it today,
but I can guarantee you that if you're
facing an easterly wind,
you need some good solid walls in
front of you or around you.
- And the harsh conditions
that sometimes batter this coastal
hilltop haven't changed.
- Here we have our hearth.
Absolutely lovely piece of
architecture.
The hearth is the central focus of
your building.
This is our chimney stack, chimney
breast.
It suggests that a second storey was
here.
Possibly the second floor added at a
later date.
- Whoever the owners of this farmhouse
were, they were clearly doing well
and investing in their property.
- This was a substantial structure,
so not just a run-of-the-mill farm
building.
You know, there's a lot of money and
time and effort
that went into building this.
- But the architecture of the building
doesn't reveal where this new-found
wealth came from.
It's the small finds from the site
that offer clues about the people who
lived here.
Naomi Payne is the finds manager.
- Fissured, I was really surprised to
see.
The pottery type is Werra slipware,
because it's from the Werra Valley
in central Germany.
It's made its way to the UK
in small quantities
in the very late 16th and early 17th
centuries.
So this is not what I would expect
to find on a site in the middle of
North Devon.
This certainly indicates status.
- And it's not just pottery that the
team are finding.
- We've got a coin.
It's a 17th-century coin
which was minted in Spain.
- The coin features Philip IV of
Spain,
who reigned from 1621 to 1665.
It would have been legal tender across
the expanding Spanish Empire.
- There would have been a lot of
opportunities locally for people
to travel on, you know, crewing ships
and that kind of thing,
and they might have acquired this coin
on a ship.
- And there are other clues that those
who lived at the farmstead
may have been amassing a fortune from
ventures overseas.
- So, this is another unexpected find
from the site.
They usually only turn up in the UK
on a fairly large coastal port site,
so this is a glass bead,
or part of a glass bead.
They're known as chevron beads or star
beads,
and they're typically made in Venice
and Murano.
They were seen as high status and
exotic objects,
and they are, in effect, currency at
this date in the 17th century.
So again, this is not something I
would have expected to see
on this rural Devon farmstead.
You just wonder about the connections,
who's lived here and gone off to seek
their fortune, crewing ships,
sailing out of Bideford and Barnstaple
or even Ilfracombe.
We can only speculate about the long
journeys that some of these objects
have had to get to North Devon.
- To discover more about these global
connections,
historian Yasmin Khan is visiting the
Devon Heritage Centre in Exeter.
- In the 17th century, the British
Empire really started to take shape
as British people settled in the
American colonies
and started to take control of some of
the Caribbean islands.
And Devon, positioned on the southern
tip of England,
was perfectly placed to send ships far
and wide.
I'm meeting an expert in early
Atlantic trade,
historian Lila Chambers.
Lila, these are some of the things
that have been found at the farmstead.
So, we've got a coin here
and this beautiful broken bead.
- Yeah, so these are both very
interesting in the sense
that they span pretty wide
geographies.
So, the Spanish coin would have been
circulating
throughout the Atlantic.
And so in trades like the Atlantic
slave trade,
or really any sort of merchant venture
in the Atlantic world,
the most desirable trading item would
have been a Spanish real.
These types of beads were extremely
popular in West Africa
as both a trading currency, to an
extent,
and as a sort of item of prestige.
- So they've been used not just for
jewellery,
they're actually a trading currency?
- And definitely from Atlantic trade,
and more than likely from the Atlantic
slave trade.
Because they're such a specific item
for the West African market
and that's where they held the most
value,
you can pretty confidently assume that
this would have been involved
in some way in the Atlantic slave
trade.
- Wow.
The accounts book of one Devonshire
family, the Burwells,
details how merchants transported
these beads to West Africa
and traded them for enslaved people.
- Here we see the kind of broad
accounts of the trade,
and you really start to see the human
horror of what's happening
in transatlantic slavery.
So we have a column for the beads
and all the detailed information about
the date they were sold on
and for what amount.
But we also have a list of men, women,
boys and girls, so children as well,
being purchased.
- It's just so stark seeing the words
"slaves bought" like that
and the numbers in these kind of
columns. It's so dehumanising.
These enslaved African people would
have been transported
across the Atlantic and sold to slave
owners in the Americas.
This would have made a lot of
investors, like the Burwells,
very wealthy, but at a horrifying
human cost.
- Many of these voyages would have a
20% to 30% mortality rate,
so pretty large numbers of people are
dying,
and often they are people that are
already vulnerable
to disease and malnutrition as well,
so children and older people.
- It's just the sheer profit
motivation which jumps
off the page at every turn.
- Yes.
- We hear about Bristol and London and
Liverpool,
but Devon isn't necessarily somewhere
that is
immediately associated with slave
trades from England.
- Mm-hm.
You know, Devon had a real economic
boom in this period
before it was superseded by places
like Bristol or Liverpool.
And so this find at the farmhouse is
really kind of a key moment
of wealth generation in Devon related
to Atlantic trade.
- It's really striking to think of
these smaller places in Devon
booming as part of a connection to
this global trade,
but with such a sort of ugly
underbelly to it.
- This trading bead represents the
dark side of our history
and connections to the slave trade in
unexpected places.
We're now leaving behind the maritime
connections
of the British Empire
..to investigate the overland routes
of a much more ancient superpower.
The Romans loved their roads,
and they built an extensive network of
them right across the empire,
including, of course, Britannia.
From settlement to settlement,
you'd be able to travel for hundreds
of miles,
but you'd want somewhere to stop off
along the way.
Our next dig is on the edge of the
Cotswolds,
five miles south of Cheltenham.
Here, a new bypass is being built
and archaeologists have stripped back
a huge 60 hectares of land.
- We've been working here for over 12
months now,
and this is our last area,
and we've probably saved our best area
until last.
- The site lies alongside the A4107,
which links Gloucester to
Cirencester
..along the route of an even older
thoroughfare, Ermin Way,
dating back..
..to the Roman period.
Roman roads allowed the rapid movement
of troops
and military supplies,
but were also used for general trade
and transport.
Ermin Way was a vital link between
Gloucester and Silchester
..and plenty of Roman finds are
emerging from this big dig.
- What have you just found, Cameron?
Is it Roman?
- We found this blue glass bead.
- Ah! Not only is it a coin, it's a
silver coin.
Now there's a find.
These are quite rare.
- Alex Thomson from Cotswold
Archaeology is the project manager.
- We're very close to a Roman road, so
we knew there was potential
to find features alongside that Roman
road.
And then the evaluation trenching,
that identified a Roman building.
- It's a simple, compact building with
two rooms and an outdoor yard.
It seems to have stood on its own next
to the road.
Its solitary location is puzzling the
archaeologists.
- We're quite early in the stages of
our excavation,
so kind of tying down exactly what
they were using the building for
is a bit difficult at this stage.
- But archaeologist Dan Sausins is
starting to find some clues.
- So what we're finding within this
building is evidence
of lots of little different
activities.
From on top of this surface we've
gathered quite a lot of finds -
horse harnesses, bridles, cart
furniture,
and lots and lots of spent nails.
So we're walking past the driveway now
towards the main building.
And what we can see here, now,
this first room is probably likely the
workshop area.
We've recovered lots of tools,
iron tools in here.
We're walking through the threshold
now, and straight away
we can see lots of evidence of
domestic occupation.
So here we see the quern stone,
which is used for producing flour.
We also have our hearth and large
chunks of mortarium pottery
and Samian ware all coming out of the
surface,
which would likely have been used for
cooking their dinner.
So whoever owned this building, or ran
this building,
certainly had fingers in most pies.
- I want to know more about this
mysterious roadside building.
Alex and Dan have brought their best
finds to the tent.
So tell me what these finds tell us
about this building.
- Some of the finds that we've had
date from no later than 60s AD.
The Romans arrived in 43 AD, and very
quickly,
within a couple of decades, they were
in the southwest
and into the Cotswolds and building
Ermin Street,
stamping their authority on the
landscape.
- What we have here in front of us,
these are hipposandals.
These are really early horse shoes.
The hoof would have gone into this
socket at the front here.
This would have gone over like a
sandal, hence the name.
- Isn't that a brilliant term for
them, as well?
I mean, hippo is horse, isn't it?
- Yes.
- Hipposandals.
- Yeah.
We also have this artefact here that
we believe is either
a decoration off a horse harness
or some horse-related paraphernalia.
We also had quite a lot of quern
stones,
which were indicative of flour
manufacturing.
It could be bread production as well.
- So people are grinding cereal,
they've got horses.
- Yep.
- What's that?
- That is a Roman key.
So it's either for the front door or
for a travelling chest.
We had other keys as well from the
site,
such as this little bronze key ring
here as well.
- Oh, I love that.
That's fantastic. I mean, that's how
not to lose a key, isn't it?
- That's it.
- I should get some of these made.
I mean, it's a motley collection of
lots of different finds.
What's it suggesting to you?
- Most likely you've got a family or a
group living in the building
and offering their services to
travellers.
Some sort of stopping point for horses
to be looked after, treated,
horseshoes changed, removed, added.
- So you're going to see it in the
distance and think,
"Oh, I could stop there.
"My horse is a bit tired. I need
something to eat."
So, basically, I know it's not a
motorway,
but it's a bit like a motorway
services.
- That's certainly one way of looking
at it, yes.
- The 19th century was a time of
immense change in Britain.
There was mass migration from the
countryside
into booming towns and cities,
as growing industrialisation prompted
many to leave behind farms
and fishing ports for factory work and
urban life.
As our cities were expanding in the
18th and 19th centuries,
they swallowed up the surrounding
countryside, but archaeologists
digging in cities can recover that
rural history.
And that's exactly what they're doing
at our next dig
in Bedminster, in my hometown of
Bristol.
Home to over half a million people
today,
Bristol is the eighth biggest city in
Britain.
This dig takes us back to a time of
unprecedented and rapid change
..during the Industrial Revolution.
The River Avon flows from east to west
through the middle
of Bristol, but there's a lesser-known
network of waterways
that flow through and beneath the
city.
This dig is taking place next to a
tributary of the Avon -
the River Malago.
Here, a team of archaeologists are
excavating the site
of a proposed shopping centre.
- So we've been slowly peeling away
the layers
to kind of work out what's going on.
- Beneath the dense urban archaeology
is evidence
of a more rural landscape.
Chris Hambleton from Wessex
Archaeology
has been filming the dig.
- And what we actually have been
looking for
for the last couple of weeks
is a mill that was built here in the
1820s.
- Watermills were ubiquitous in
pre-industrial Britain,
using the power of water to grind
wheat into flour.
This mill would have served the local
community around Bedminster.
- Oh, so this is actually one of the
millstones
that would have actually been grinding
the corn,
which is absolutely gorgeous,
as you can see.
What's happened is, it's broken,
and then it's been repurposed
and used as a floor.
So this is actually where the mill
wheel was.
This is really lovely here.
What we've actually got,
you can see the way it's sort of
grooved in here.
So, actually, the wheel has worn the
stone down which is really lovely.
Look at this lovely curve to it.
- By the mid 19th century,
there were 30,000 working watermills
in Britain.
Most of them have vanished from our
landscape,
or they've been repurposed or even
moved
..so this dig represents a rare
opportunity to examine the remains
of a watermill in situ.
- This is where people were actually
living in the 19th century.
So, we've got the remains of walls and
cobbled surfaces.
What we've got just down in here is a
Victorian-built culvert
with a gorgeous dome to it,
the brickwork beautifully made in the
19th century.
- Culverts are used to contain rivers
and streams in underground channels.
As the archaeologists dig into the
ground surrounding the wheelpit,
they can see that the mill was adapted
over time.
- We've removed the facing away,
and actually what we've got was the
blocking here.
So we now know that the level of the
water that was coming
towards the wheel has changed over
time.
So, this is super cool.
We have actually worked out some
phasing here of the Georgian mill.
- I'd love to know more about this
forgotten watermill
so I've invited project officer Vix
Hughes
to the Digging for Britain tent.
- It's an amazing site when you get
there.
You would have no idea there's a river
there because,
obviously, it's all culverted
underneath.
Everybody's built over it.
- I'm a Bristolian and I've never
heard of the River Malago.
- It's just not there any more.
It's there, but culverted and very
small
and that's part of the story of the
watermill.
- So what did you know about this mill
before you started digging?
- Well, we had some sort of
documentary evidence to suggest it.
And amongst the documents,
we were lucky enough to have some
maps.
So this is one of our early maps.
This is 1828.
The big River Avon is there.
And then our little Malago River is
just down here
that flows up into it.
So, our mill is just there.
You can see all the surrounding area
is all ploughed fields,
which is an open area. It's
agricultural.
That really sets the mill in its
landscape.
People bring in their grain, get it
ground up on the millstones,
and then it exits as flour.
- Not much detail about the
architecture of the mill there,
though, is there?
- No, and that's one of the key
problems.
All I've got is a little rectangle,
and that doesn't show you
anything of the detail of the walls
that we found.
- Did you manage to get good dating
evidence?
You've brought some of the finds in
here, and this must help you
date the life of the mill.
- Yeah. So when was the mill built was
a little bit tricky,
but we were very lucky.
We found this lovely surviving
hand-blown glass bottle,
and it dates from about 1710.
- Brilliant. Can I pick it up?
- Yep.
- Completely mortared into the wall.
- Yeah.
Things are built by builders,
so it could just be that that was
their lunchtime drink
and that's just the way they got rid
of the evidence.
Just pop it in the wall as they're
building it up.
People do it these days, don't they?
They pop things under floors and
behind wallpaper.
So, yes, we know the mill is in place
by 1710,
and that's our evidence just there.
- That's brilliant, isn't it?
Nobody's going to argue with that.
That's pretty forensic, isn't it?
OK, so it's in place there in the
early 18th century.
What about these objects here? So
lovely.
- Yes.
These are all aerated water bottles.
- Fizzy water.
- Exactly!
- So that one actually says "Bristol"
on it there.
- Yes.
- This one.
They're really lovely, aren't they,
Vix?
- They are.
This one is our exotic one.
This is the one from Cardiff.
And these come from towards the end,
so these are about 1890-ish.
- What happens to the mill in the end?
- Well, what happens to Bedminster is
that they find coal
and lots of industries move in.
So, in the space of maybe about 50
years, it goes from a population
of about 3,000 people to 78,000
people.
- Really?
- So, 75,000 people move into the area
of Bedminster.
- It's a new era.
New energy sources.
- Yes.
We can see the mill on the maps.
Shall I show you what they might look
like?
- OK.
- There we go.
So, this one is about 1874-ish, I
think.
So, again, we've only moved forward 50
years,
but it just looks so much different
now, doesn't it?
You can see the intensification of the
housing.
You can see everything is built up.
- And there's the mill. It's still
there.
- Yeah.
- It's completely hemmed in.
- Yes.
- I mean, it's surrounded by houses.
- They need to control and cover over
a lot of the watercourses
because they need the land,
so that's why the mill is running out
of power.
Which is why when you go to Bedminster
now,
you just cannot find the Malago. It's
really difficult.
You can't find any of these
watercourses.
- I've never even heard of it.
- Yeah.
- I want to go and find it now.
I want to go to Bedminster and go and
find the Malago.
- Yes.
- Next time on Digging for Britain, I
venture into the New Forest
Rehabilitation Centre?
- Yeah, Gypsy Rehabilitation Centre.
- ..to uncover Britain's lost Romani
heritage.
- It was all a very forced thing to
end that sort of nomadic life.
- Historian Yasmin Khan delves into
Devon's harrowing
civil war experience.
- Gosh, it really comes off the page,
that sense of anguish.
- And in London, the city's earliest
inhabitants
give up their incredible burial
secrets.
- Objects we've only ever seen in
pictures or paintings.
- # 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. #