The Incredible Neolithic Finds Of Ancient Britain | Digging For Britain | Unearthed History

foreign [Music] but we've got a big history everywhere you stand there are worlds beneath your feet and so every year hundreds of archaeologists across Britain go looking for more clues who lived here when and how you can even see the architecture of the bone inside the jewel there yes archeology is a complex jigsaw puzzle drawing together everything from skeletons to swords temples to treasure and it's still Sharp from orkney to Devon we're joining this year's Quest on sea land and air we'll share all of the questions and find some of the answers As We join the teams in the field digging for Britain [Music] the further back in time we go the more rare those glimpses of our ancestors become tonight we're going into deep pre-history and this is where archeology really comes into its own with no written records those pieces of evidence that we pull out of the ground are the only Clues we have to the Mysterious World of prehistoric Britain [Music] history that will take me from orkney to the South Coast I'll be discovering art made by Ice Age britons yeah that's right the legs here and seeing how farming first developed here yeah I'll be finding out how the sea holds Clues to the birth of trade and as we travel through time we'll see how a culture emerged that still resonates today so when was she found [Music] Our Journey Begins before Britain was even an island when a Broad River flowed through East Anglia and this is where archaeologists are trying to find out when the first people arrived in Britain for over 200 years archaeologists have searched these lands for signs that early human species may once have lived here but the first humans to have emerged from Africa were tropical they just weren't adapted to cold climates and they could not have survived in northern Europe now on this beach in Norfolk archaeologists are finding remarkable evidence that May challenge this belief I've been following this project for years and the archaeologists are about three weeks into this year's dig so I've been really excited about coming here to find out how they've been getting on team are part of an internationally renowned project searching for clues that will help them date this site saying that you're a few weeks in Nick Ashton of the British museum is leading the excavation and what sort of evidence are you finding in these in these ancient river sediments who are getting pollen from these fine grain sediments we're getting wood we're getting other plant remains Little Seeds uh horse getting beetles and they're very good for reconstructing climate and on top of that we're getting animal remains animal bones um and teeth and they really help with the dating of the site mistakingly examined so it's all happening down here ah what have you got for a Sofie [Laughter] some pebbles at the moment so each sub load is checked and sorted yeah and there doesn't appear to be anything in that over a five-year period they've sifted through 70 tons of sediment but sometimes it's the most unlikely finds that provide vital Clues all right quite a weathered but surviving pine cone yeah you could look at the structure of that and confirm the exact species when you're looking this far back in time even a single find like this pine cone core is crucial find by find the archaeologists can reconstruct this mysterious Lost World a Pine Forest that was inhabited by creatures no longer seen in Britain Simon parfitt from the Natural History Museum is an expert on prehistoric mammals and what's that in that book though okay this this thing is it looks like a stone um believe it or not it's a high in a dropping this is fossilized hyena poo so we know there were hyena here is there a hyenas so you've got large carnivores we've got this fantastic rodent jaw with some of the teeth and this is an extinct beaver-like rodent and it was semi-aquatic living along the banks of the river it's such beautifully preserved fossil I mean you see the the yes yeah it's a wonderful thing [Music] no when each of these species became extinct that these fossils are helping us to date the site this is the tooth of a mammoth and this is in fact one of the earliest forms of Mammoth that we find in this part of the world this helps us with the date because this is quite primitive so we have a fantastic that's right yeah it has very distinctive teeth you can see this is the chewing surface and you have a series of plates and they're very widely spaced and this is a feature of primitive mammoths later mammoths the the plates tend to get closer together the enamel gets thinner so that's one of the features we can use to identify it the teeth belong to a type of Mammoth that died out over 700 000 years ago so its position in these sediments gives another vital clue to the archaeologists the various types of dating we're able to say that the site dates somewhere between eight hundred thousand and a million years old so that's that's the date of those sediments that we're looking at in the in the trench between 800 000 and a million years old yeah yeah fantastic [Music] this project really is unique so many important discoveries are made by pure chance especially in pre-history where something might be found in a quarry or when a road is being built but here the archaeologists have set out to find something new to make an important Discovery and they've done it because what's being found here are not just animal and plant vines it's not just evidence of a vanished landscape from perhaps a million years ago there are fine suggesting humans could have lived here then too today we recovered one of the rare artifacts that we're also getting from the side and this is really exciting because it shows that humans were living here at that time this is Discovery today this is a small flake it's slightly broken and but you can see all the telltale signs of human manufacture this tiny object is a waste flake left over from making Flint tools so this is evidence of humans in Britain going back possibly a million years yeah and so it makes it by a long way the older site in northern Europe the oldest human site so I'm holding in my hands a piece of evidence of the earliest humans to inhabit this island going back nearly a million years they've found over 70 pieces of Flint which show signs of human working and amongst them are even some intact stone tools [Music] this we actually nicknamed the just the butter knife is it so pretty but you can see all the evidence of human working there that bulb would percussion the wings coming out from the characteristic Rippling and actually on this piece they've modified that edge it would certainly be ideal as some sort of you know for cutting meat yeah so this is the original sort of knife and fork of the Old Stone Age and it's still sharp and after 800 000 million years no human remains have yet been found to confirm who made these tools but it was a truly ancient species some 750 000 years older than even the Neanderthals so hayesboro has pushed back the earliest human occupation of Britain by at least 200 000 years but what's really remarkable is that the humans living here back then were surviving in extremely harsh conditions at this time Britain was a preaching an ice age how did these early species manage to survive here were they more advanced than we've previously thought these are the questions now facing experts like Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum what were these capabilities that these people have for control they must have had ways of keeping War well that's right yes I mean the environment was comparable to say Southern Scandinavia in the present day and yes I I think you know stick Us in in the winters in the Scandinavia today and we would we would have problems coping so we'd have to imagine probably that there was at least Basic clothing and probably the use of fire but the evidence has yet to be found it does make us look again at these earlier human species and perhaps they were more sophisticated than we've given them credit for yes that's right yeah their capabilities were far greater and that's really exciting so we have to make them in in some way certainly more like us than we would have believed [Music] we know there were people here in Britain nearly a million years ago they were surviving an incredibly cold conditions it gives us newfound respect I think for those earlier human species and at the end of the day it's those insignificant finds that archaeological revolutions are made of we don't know how long those people survived here but they were eventually wiped out by the vicious climate [Music] of size of those years British climate changes in world history which repeatedly forced people out so these were not our ancestors to find them we have to go for hundreds of thousands of years to the end of the last ice age and to a site in modern day Nottinghamshire where they once lived it wasn't until around thirteen thousand years ago that Britain became recolonized by modern humans Homo sapiens people like us and this time they were here to stay and they were living in caves like these at Creswell Crags at the end of the last ice age foreign we know that these people were physically identical to us but archaeologists are Relentless in their search to find out just how similar they were to us in other ways searching for those elusive things which let us feel truly connected to them cave art can speak to us like nothing else a distant Echo from an ancient world with no written language and since the discovery of the famous Lasko rock art in France in the 1940s the hunt has been on to find similar rock art in Britain archaeologists scoured the walls of caves like these but found nothing and they put that down to Britain bring such a challenging environment back then that people were just surviving clinging onto existence with their fingernails they didn't have time for frivolities like rock art that belief was turned on its head by discoveries made in this cave where I met Ian wall [Music] he's an archaeologist and director of Creswell Crags thank you foreign but we think our prehistoric ancestors were 12 13 000 years ago so it's the best place to actually view The Rocker that they were creating so I can see a few scratches on the walls yes would like to come and stand here and I'll uh I'll show you this is one of the first figures that was discovered in that there's in 2003 but you can just pick out some fainter engraved lines here at first I struggled to see what Ian was seeing gradually an image emerged this is the the top of a neck of an animal yep all right you're convincing me and the ear I'm coming down here that's right a mouse that's right yes yes and that's chin running underneath yes and who is it coming down yeah that's right the legs here and then the uh on the belly of the animal that's remarkable there it was appearing right before my eyes the image of a deer we can imagine perhaps how important this creature would have been to our ancestors it was almost certainly one of the things that kept them alive so how do you know that that is Ice Age crucially you get these deposits of flowstone it's redeposited cow site and that forms a thin skin of deposit and sometimes that Lies Over the Top of these engraved limes that's this that's this white area that's right yes and that can be dated fairly precisely with a technique called uranium series dating right so so it's roughly around thirteen thousand years old so we really are looking at I say you don't yes it's the Clincher this is the oldest rock art to be found anywhere on these islands so much of archeology is about how people live their lives in quite a mundane way the tools they made the diet they were eating that sort of thing but here we've got art which is something a little bit different and and it does give you a real connection back to these people it's incredibly evocative you can imagine them in that cave making those images on the wall and I rather like the mystery that we will never do what it really means [Music] [Music] I'm on my way to a dig in orkney where archaeologists are finding out more about early farmers and their mysterious beliefs my destination is the tiny island of West Ray home to a site called The Links of noltland where one of this year's most exciting digs is happening looks great can't wait to get down there many Neolithic sites are Monumental and ceremonial they're really impressive but it's like going to a cathedral to find out how Everyday People live today this site is different I've come here because archaeologists are an earthing vital evidence of early farms and these are the extraordinary and rare remains of a 5 000 year old village where the farmers once lived archaeologists here are uncovering a remote to survive then as now these islands must have felt like the edge of the world I was given a tour around the site by Richard Strachan it's almost always Wendy monotony the weather can be on your side sometimes a little bit of rain on the sites very good as well archa logically it keeps us all nice and moist so it is challenging yeah it is like you have four seasons in one day I can't believe it was raining this morning and now we've got sunshine it's very normal here so we go even have a look at it it's a finding the buildings are covered with a layer of ancient rubbish or midden and it's from this that many of the signs of everyday prehistoric life are appearing the whole site is basically sealed by this mid material this is containing the shell the ball and all that sort of that sort of stuff and you can see that we're getting poetry too within this we're getting Flint is that is that a piece of plushie down there yeah this is a fantastic piece of pottery that Sean's just uncovered yeah you can see the wonderful decoration on it he's looking in places it's very very shallow under the sand is the evidence the archaeologists have been hoping for proof that people here were growing barley which was one of the earliest plants to be domesticated [Music] more is directing excavations here I want to go and talk to Hazel about something rather interesting over this side of the site doing and carbonized cereal grain coming from these midden deposits they had field systems which run from the settlement down the slope and they were middening and enriching the soils there so presumably that was for growing their the crops all around the settlement from the field system evidence of composting is emerging each layer of soil tells a story of a struggle to make farming work here when we actually look at the profiles the soil profiles that you know from the earliest times what we have are cultivated soils swamped again and again by blowing sand so do you think this would have been a challenging environment to be farming in yes yeah I mean it's challenging nowadays and it wouldn't have been any different than it's like Sandy soils are ideal for cultivation in that they can be worked easily and turned easily but they're also very prone to erosion and it's a very windy place [Music] the conditions here would have made it difficult to survive just growing crops but new finds are showing that domesticated animals were extremely important to these early farmers glimpses of a vanished world [Music] emerging from the soils is something which has stunned the archaeologists the skulls of 40 cattle built into the foundations of a wall can we get a bit closer to it yeah this is really peculiar I can see a whole line of them here this is the outer face of the wall along here the stones yeah that's the interface there so they're placed into the core of the wall into the thickness of the wall however Keely because that means that they wouldn't have been visible when the building was standing no they would have been placed there when the wall was being built they would the foundation level of the building and you can see I mean how they sort of relate to each other they've been put in sequentially these ones and the horns are actually overlapping on those ones and then they've put some stones in and then some more cattle skulls all along it's making them part of a building it's it's almost monumentalizing them isn't it somehow enshrining them and viewing the building with their Spirit or whatever yeah building them into the very foundations this strange Discovery reinforces what the researchers have learned about the importance of livestock to those early farmers foreign it's easy to see why cattle was so important in this fragile and remote landscape and it's yet another glimpse into a mysterious ancient mindset this is just utterly bizarre these Castle skulls built into the fabric of a building will never know exactly what they mean but they obviously represent some complex beliefs together archaeologists now know that this land was farmed for around 50 Generations but eventually the struggle proved too great overcome by the wind and sand they gave up and abandoned their Village it appears that the buildings were deliberately filled in with rubble within which archaeologists found what could be a defining symbol of the farmer's defeat now of course this is something we found last year which really is quite unique and we hadn't seen anything like this from the whole of Scotland brought her to show me how lovely oh there she is another Glory I think you can check her very smooth yeah this tiny figurine is known as the West Ray wifey and despite her Homespun appearance she may be the earliest known expression of religious identity ever found in Scotland she's really sweet she's got a very cartoon-like face isn't she how she has we can just pick out that she has eyes and a very a very sort of curvy eyebrow yeah um and she's got this a sort of a very rough mouth but she also got arms down by her sides yeah she's on the top of her head as well yeah [Applause] [Music] where the figurine was found makes her even more intriguing she seems to have been carefully positioned in the abandoned ruins it seems like she was probably put there deliberately as a closing deposit she was placed there yeah and then there's no way often so anybody ever came and did anything here again so that was probably their way of marking the clothes of that settlement Hazel believes the wife he's placing may have been a ritual end to the farmer's long struggle we're actually seeing how people thought that you know that they decided that this is this was a good way to close this building off at the end of the period so it gives you much more of an insight into how people's minds worked at the time if the researchers are right then the West Ray wifey is unique a 5 000 year old household goddess perhaps figurines of this type are usually thought to be goddesses or you know some religious deity kind of thing given that she's the only one that we have and we don't have widespread representations it's hard to argue that she is definitely a goddess it seemed that she must be representational of some concept religious concept sure they're wonderful to hold this tiny little figurine it's rather hard to know what she meant for the people that made her but nonetheless she's a fantastic little message from the past and utterly unique but just days after I left the dig a second figurine was Unearthed bolstering Hazel's belief that these may have been household goddesses this is just the third season of digging here every day more of the mysterious settlement is revealed thousands of years people had buried their dead in communal Graves then around 4 500 years ago something changed in that time-honored ritual and people began to be buried in individual grave something which seems much more familiar to us today this is cultural man he was discovered in 1975 and he had been buried in the new way this is very well preserved because considering this is a 4 000 year old skeleton his skeleton is curated by Alison Sheridan in his grave archaeologists found a beaker a distinctive Clay Pot that was the symbol of this new burial style we know that Beaker burials started on the continent but once they arrived here they spread rapidly throughout the country and the question that has perplexed archaeologists for 150 years is how that Beaker culture spread so far so quickly now a team of archaeologists is using cutting-edge science to work that out they want to know if it was just the ideas that traveled or if the people did too Janet Montgomery and Jane Evans are analyzing the isotopic signatures of Beaker skeletons like cultural man to find out where they lived and whether they moved during their lifetimes [Music] to do that they must painstakingly extract some tooth enamel from each Bronze Age individual we only need a very small amount less than a match head size of tissue but you have to make sure when you take it that it's not contaminated it has to be cleaned it has to be carefully removed so you don't mix up the tissues and that it's free from any contamination from the burial what we want to do is take something that tells you about the person when they were alive not what's happened during the time that their body's been buried in the ground chemicals in each sample tell us where that person grew up we know where they were then buried so we can tell if someone moved during their lifetime or if they stayed in their childhood home Janice and Jane have analyzed over 250 Beaker skeletons in this way the project has been five years in the making it's the biggest ever survey of our prehistoric ancestors and colderthal man is the latest to join it his teeth were in such poor condition that Jane had to use a different technique to extract the sample these teeth have got almost no enamel remaining on them so what I did instead of slicing the tooth up I had to pick off very carefully with forceps small fragments of the enamel Jane managed to obtain a sample but once she got the results she was convinced there had been a mistake it was only after I'd got the enamel results in triplicate that I was convinced and happy enough with the results to to tell everybody else what we've got the analysis has been carried out here at the British Geological Survey and after five years the researchers are just beginning to bring all the results together and draw some conclusions I wonder how our man from Kill duffel has done the eyes are took composition that his teeth gave suggested that he came from an area of this type of rock this area of antrum and it's the Antrim battles do you think he's Irish that is the most likely place for him to come from how interesting and so he managed to make it from his childhood side here to his burial size up and around here so around 4 000 years ago colderthal man moved 300 miles across the seas from his Irish home to his Scottish grave where he lay buried in a signature Beaker burial of the 250 skeletons from around the country which could explain how the beaker culture spread what about the isotope project as a whole what's it telling you about this period in the Bronze Age and about populations moving around a lot of the evidence that I've got from um that this this this project and and other data that they seem to be very mobile at this time survey reveals some intriguing results showing our ancestors traveling long distances across the country results from Beaker burials in the Yorkshire walls area for example showed that over 50 percent of the individuals sampled had moved there from somewhere else some from as far afield as Scotland it's interesting because I think you tend to think that people in these prehistoric societies were perhaps a lot more settled so at the back you go the more settled they were yeah I don't it doesn't work that way no this project is really interesting because of the scale of it they've looked at 250 individuals and that means we can start to answer some of these big questions about the population of Britain during the Bronze Age [Music] thank you I'm on my way to meet a group of amateur archaeologists who are uncovering a remarkable story about Bronze Age Britain four thousand years ago these Waters would have been buzzing with ships Bronze Age britons were traveling and trading the length of this Coast I'm heading towards a site that has yielded a treasure Trove of beautiful objects and Vivid proof of the early importance of trade and the risks that Traders ran we're about half a mile off the coast near Salcombe in South Devon we're creating really carefully because there are divers down there at the moment hello hi good morning hello hello [Music] these aren't professional archaeologists they're divers who found a love for history and for me that makes what they're finding here all the more special it's real dedication here these guys are down at Salcombe every few weeks diving in the same spot constantly looking for new objects that are coming up from the seabed team dive using underwater metal detectors to scan the seabed in the last few months their dedication has paid off with a massive Hall of objects which have been sent to the British museum where they're being analyzed by curator Ben Roberts in total we've got over 300 objects we're still working through them at the moment and they're still being found that's the Fantastic thing what's amazing about this particular collection of objects it encapsulates where we were culturally about 3 000 or so years ago you have swords and this was for your Bronze Age Warrior what you would have used in Conflict against your neighbors and we have plenty of evidence for Warfare at this time also you have large-scale trade this is proper large-scale trade in commodities [Music] so the next couple of diamonds going down the divers can spend up to an hour at a time underwater at a depth of 10 meters I was talking to Germany said that the seabed the sediments the gravels move around quite a bit down there so every time they dive there might be something new exposed the group dive around once a month because the seabed is constantly moving it's impossible to predict whether they'll find anything it's the most eye-catching of the fines so far examined at the British museum is the exquisite jewelry usually when we find Bronze Age gold from this time some about just over 3 000 years ago we find relatively simple gold objects so for instance here you have a fragment of what would have been a twisted gold neck ring where you take your gold bar and you twist it similarly you have gold bracelets these are solid bar bracelets they've just taken a bar of gold and they've just Twisted it around the wrist what this means is is that these bracelets here are just far in excess of anything that had come before here you have eight strands of gold wire that have been Twisted on their own and then bound together to create this stunning little bracelet which when it came off the sea bed was just perfectly coiled these represent the absolute Pinnacle of Bronze Age gold working so what we've got here is this small group of divers who are spending all their free time combing the seabed down here in South Devon and they're making really significant discoveries that are helping us to understand the Bronze Age that little bit better both the divers and Ben have reached the same conclusion about why these objects are here although we're still finding objects and the stories are still being written I think this is probably a shipwreck and I say that because we're finding things that we don't normally find on land and we don't normally find when they've been deliberately placed in rivers and deliberately placed in bogs as we have all over Britain the have discovered one of the oldest in Britain no remains of the ship itself have been found but most of the objects were probably its cargo but there's a mystery here too the majority of the objects date to around 2 300 BC but some date to a few centuries later Ben has been trying to work out why this could be I think there's only two ways that you can really explain why these objects ended up off the south coast of Devon in the same place and one is a shipwreck um or maybe two shipwrecks and the other one is to say well they were deliberately placed there so we have this tradition in the Bronze Age of placing bronze and gold objects in special points in the landscape such as hillsides or in bogs and springs so it's possible that it was a combination of the two with one taking place slightly earlier as a shipwreck and one potentially later as a dedication it's really hard to say so the objects with the later dates may have been an offering thrown into the sea in remembrance of that original shipwreck it's a touching thought although the gold objects found by the divers are the most beautiful and striking they are not the most important of the vines instead it's some much more mundane lumps of tin these ingots that we have absolutely the first 10 ingots we've ever been found in the Bronze Age in northern Europe very exciting for me I understand not necessarily aesthetically beautiful for everyone else but nonetheless very exciting the 10 ingots represents this Missing Link in our Bronze Age World between the Finnish bronze objects that we have here the bronze ingots so it's these that represent our first evidence of the tin trade in this part of the world so it's these for an archaeologists that are actually more exciting than even than the gold archaeologists have long suspected that the South West with its natural would have played a central role in supplying this raw material across Europe this is the crucial evidence they've been waiting for found by our amateur team these bubbles coming out there I mean there's a couple of divers just about to break the surface which is very exciting I wonder what they found hello Mick welcome back did you find anything but I'll pull it that's right no it's not Bronze Age is it Mick it's very disappointing [Music] well they didn't find anything today but undatedly there's more of this Bronze Age shipwreck to come to light here and of course what we're looking at is a 3 000 year old tragedy imagine this boat Laden with tin and copper ingots making its way along the coast here and perhaps they were just in sight of A Safe Harbor when disaster struck we'll never know whether the crew managed to survive but their Precious Cargo of copper and Tin was claimed by the sea we started our million year Journey with fines of rudimentary Flint tools made by ancient hominins as we travel forward through time to discover this complex trading Society everything has become more familiar what strikes me is that in our pre-history are quite clearly the roots of what we think of today as our culture our way of life and what really brought that home was some discoveries made in the grave of a chieftain in fortiviat in Scotland last year when Howard Carter opened to tankerman's tomb he reportedly said I see things wonderful things this is what really happens when archaeologists make these amazing discoveries oh my god oh oh my God this is the dramatic moment last year when archaeologists filmed themselves as they lifted the Capstone of a 4 000 year old tomb [Applause] it would change our understanding of how Bronze Age people buried their loved ones [Music] after discovering the tomb with geophysics archaeologist Kenny Brophy and his team had to wait a year to be able to open it oh my God this is cool we might have to bleep that egg yes this is an incredibly exciting moment in archeology isn't it because a lot of a lot of archaeological excavation is about painstaking painstakingly removing thin layers of soil very gradually uncovering things this is this is a rather momentous yes um uncovering of a of a grave it must be quite exciting to be standing there it was I mean it was it was it was really a set piece moment there was a real sense that we just didn't know what we were going to find which is which is one of the great excitements of archeology of course but this really was a mystery the stone-lined grave known as a kissed held many treasures and it would prove to be the grave of a Bronze Age Chieftain but there was one big surprise no sign of his body remained peculiar isn't it you've taken this Stone off the top of the case burial and you're confronted with objects which are you know fantastic you know you've got organic remains but there's no skeleton well that was a thing that immediately struck us because I imagined in my mind's eye that when the kiss was opened we would see a skeleton lying there maybe with a nice piece of pottery next to it and nothing I saw conform to anything that I expected but the team did recover this mysterious white material one thing we did notice when we were digging though that there was a kind of white powder stuck to the side of the the kissed it was this powder that would solve the mystery of the missing skeleton we found her there was some kind of calcite substance which had suggest it came from bone and that bone was perhaps broken down by body fluids that were leaking from the body and then the bones all dissolved all right so that's it so and this is all this yeah this is all that's left so essentially that bag of material there is probably the only remnants are left of the person who's buried in This Kiss which is I suppose a side end really to this person from almost the first moment the team suspected they had a high status burial and one key find confirmed that This Magnificent dagger this is very elaborate isn't it it's a fantastic piece of bronze technology involving in a large blade of bronze which is a copper and Tin alloy rivets holding it together a bone handle a Band of Gold which is holding all together those wooden pens involved here as well so this is an object that's not just about the metal of the dagger it's about so much more than that this is a really beautiful elaborate object the sheer Rarity of these in the archaeological record suggests that what we're dealing with here is someone who was was very important and someone who this dagger perhaps was a symbol of their power and symbol of their importance so it was entirely appropriate that when they died that ended up in the grave with them after the initial Discovery it's back here at the lab that most of the work has been done to identify the objects found in the grave we found a group of objects that were perhaps in a leather bag and these include these strange looking objects here a lump of a metallic substance which is an iron ore called lemonade a yellow iron ore and then it's lying on top of this Stone tool which is made of Flint these objects served a very particular purpose in the Bronze Age and the combination of these two suggest that this is probably some kind of fire making kit the a striker light that maybe was something portable that could be carried about and Kenny do you think of fire making kit like this would have been something that everybody would have been carrying around or just particular special people the balance of probability is that these were objects associated with powerful people perhaps making fire was something that powerful people were associated with but we can't rule out the fact that these may be everyday objects that everyone had because everyone needed fire we knew exactly what it was used for but we're not sure whether that use was it was a special magical use or perhaps whether it's something's ordinary as a as a box of matches all we know is that the people bearing this person thought he should have it with him in the grave yes yeah [Music] but for me the most exciting finds from this grave are also the smallest ones and there they are [Music] these objects in the grave archaeologists also found these tiny things their flower heads now archaeologists often find pollen in Graves but pollen could get there because it's blown in or perhaps arrives in the grave in food and drink that have been placed in there with the body but here what we have is actual flower heads of Meadow Suite so we know for the first time that Bronze Age people placed flowers in the graves of their dead that flowers were part of the Bronze Age funeral ritual just as they are today this is a piece of Meadow Suite just waiting to flower in the summer so we know that whoever it was that was interred in that grave at fortitude he was buried there during the summer months I find it amazing that something so effemable and whilst the physical Remains the bones of that person have long since disappeared what we have got is the evidence of this incredibly tender Act of placing flowers in somebody's grave it's something that gives us a real sense of connection back to those Bronze Age people in our million year Journey we found out that our history goes back much further than we ever thought possible and we've seen that over time a complex society emerged in which the foundation stones of our own can be found we've discovered a rich culture that has developed since those Ice Age artists first left their Mark in the caves and what this journey shows us is that our pre-history is still a part of who we are today and it's a part of our story that's only revealed with the health of archeology and so the digging continues [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Unearthed History - Archaeology Documentaries

Views: 283,413

Keywords: Unearthed History, History, Ancient History, ancient, Archeology, Documentary, Archaeology, Digging for Britain

Id: CsPVVRkKzKg

Length: 50min 38sec (3038 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 17 2023