A Neolithic Cathedral? (Northborough, Peterborough) | S12E05 | Time Team

this is finland falls near peterborough and a few years ago an aerial photographer saw some interesting crop marks here and took some photos this is one of them and these are the marks they're huge about 200 meters across from here to here archaeologists had a look at the photos and got very excited they think that they're evidence of a six thousand year old structure which they call a neolithic causeway enclosure but agreeing on a name and agreeing they're very important is the easy part agreeing what they're for is very different is this evidence of a massive farm or some kind of settlement or a ritual site very few of these things have ever been dug so anything we find could help solve the puzzle and we've got just three days to do it [Music] you really wouldn't know a major monument was here in this field if it wasn't for the crop marks in the aerial photograph at ground level there's nothing to indicate its existence so we're relying on geophysics to locate the huge rings of ditches hidden under the soil nearly cause wading closures a bit of a mouthful isn't it well it is but i mean three words um neolithic refers to the period so in this case it's around 6000 years ago causeway well that refers to the fact that this is a rather strange site because it's got two ditches going around the outside and another two going around the inside and if you look closely at those ditches look over here for example you can see they're dug in segments like sort of string of sausages and the gaps between the ditches there are the causeways presumably this is the enclosure this outsider yeah that's it i mean enclosure bit is the fact that it's enclosing a space but it's a lot more exciting than that because this is the first time in british history people are actually partitioning up areas of landscape for special purposes why are they doing it that is a brilliant question and that's hopefully what we'll be able to find out what do you think francis well i like a bit of ritual i like a bit of religion so i think they were religious and ceremonial centers to which people came from miles around i know you're going to be polite to such a major figure in british archaeology but basically you think that's twaddle don't you no i wouldn't i wouldn't say that at all no no but there's an alternative view here and that is that this area is rich in natural resources and in the neolithic people were starting to capture those resources and manage them in a way that they hadn't done before and i think it was the folks here so it's either a cathedral or ambridge what about feinsville well this is 64 000 question tony i mean if we locate the trench right and if we strike strike it rich we could have loads of fines and those could include organic remains bits of work wood and that sort of thing if on the other hand we don't strike it right with the trench we could get virtually nothing at all whatever we get is going to be very very important this is a totally virgin site it's never been looked at before it will have great implications both on this site and the other causeway enclosures in the area the plan is to put trench one on the inner ring of the ditches on the east side and a second trench on the west side where the ring of ditches disappears under an area of thick mud left by an ancient river channel the dark band running down the middle is mud left by a roman canal the geophysics team have finished surveying the areas targeted for the two trenches and the results aren't what was expected you've got a problem i'm afraid this is where the inner ditch should run we've done the geophysics and i can't see it at all there is something here isn't it i just think that's probably geological well it shows up superbly well on the photograph i know it does but look at the other end where you can't see it that's just that black aluminum stuff look at the geophysics that's so clear isn't it i don't understand why we're not seeing it at this end when it's so clear here does that alter our plan um yeah not drastically i think we want to go for where we can see it nice and clearly so we'll send uncle phil off to that trench and what will you you'll stop here willian because you're going to need a lot of your experience on this sort of ground yeah to sort that out yeah it's going to be tricky no i'll stay over here and maybe with a bit of help from henry if he can pin the air photo he should be able to mark that the other side of the field yeah it's happy with me see you later as the ring of ditches on the east side didn't show up in the geophysics it's down to our surveyor henry to calculate where to put trench one he does this by matching the ditch outlines seen on the aerial photograph to gps readings you stood on it now as far as we understand i've set out these these two pairs of canes should mark either side of the causeway which gives the ditch that side and a ditch that side [Applause] on the west side the ditches show up clearly on the geophysics so john can tell phil exactly where they're located so you should get the ditch coming through here terminating here a break and then another big pit or deep settlement a bit this way finding the rings of ditches is going to be key to figuring out why neolithic people built these monuments what we do know is that after two million years wandering the landscape our hunter-gatherer ancestors began a more settled existence this change from a completely nomadic lifestyle marked the beginning of the neolithic age which in britain lasted from 4 000 until 2500 bc when metals first came into use causewade enclosures were built from the very start of the neolithic period and must have played an important role in the new way of life right i think we're down at the right level here kerry you can see it's good and clear yeah so you see the change from the orange here to the clay it's very clear from up here is it yeah i think that's your buried neolithic soil right francis's trench on the east side and fills on the west side are both placed where we think the inner ring of the ditches is if we look at these trenches in the context of the entire field we can get our first real sense of how big the monument is but it's not the only one discovered in this area so this is our causewayed enclosure here and there's another one here and one here and one here and yet another one here yet these are very rare neolithic phenomenon and we've got five together why is that well i think it was deliberate i think these are marking the edge the boundary of a really important cultural territory cultural stuff well it could be culture it could be practical as well because if you if you look at this grouping and they are very close together they seem to relate to the valley of the welland and if you look at this geological map over here all these pretty colours are upland all this blank yellow out here is finland it's bog it's unpleasant but all these enclosures occur where the well and meets the bog effectively they're on this zone in between so i think we've got to look at reasons why they're all clustered together so are you going to try and tie them all up for us well i'd like to it's a it's a big task i'm going to go and look at these locations for the causeway enclosures we know about and see how they relate to the geography how they relate to each other see if we can somehow get back to the landscape of the neolithic knowing when you've found a ditch can be a bit tricky as they are after all simply holes dug in the ground six thousand years ago it's quite ephemeral though the archaeology isn't it phil what do you mean pretty vague yeah basically i mean yeah it is it is it is it's very very difficult to see i suppose identifying it is just a result of of observation and experience really subtle changes in the color of the soil might be the only thing to indicate that you've come across one and after a little more digging that's exactly what phil thinks he's got in trench too along with some of the river welland what do you got here phil we got the ditch look in that section because it's actually sloping up but on this side damn it you can see it it's actually coming down there and then it dips down here it's very difficult to see it there but once you get along here you can actually see the edge very clearly against this white gravel and then it rises up the other side and it's actually filled up with this this sticky sandy clay material and then up in here you've obviously got a a lot of burning a lot of charcoal and a lot of the the clay is very very red so i think they must have had an incredible fire burning there it's great field but we're no longer working blind anymore we're not working fine it's so difficult to see the edges i reckon we are working flying but we know where we stand we know we got a ditch it's the right shape it's got the right filling it's got evidence in it for having been backfilled no we're on the money there phil i think to make a ditch at northbrook neolithic people dug down through dark clay soil into the lighter gravelly soil underneath we know from excavations at other causeway enclosures that they placed important objects into the ditches then soil from the banks was put back over them this is what we call the backfill when the ditch was no longer needed the remainder of the bank would be placed back on top of it ditches might not sound very exciting to us but they obviously were for neolithic people since they put so much time and energy into making them and if we're to solve the great enigma of what they did here it's in the ditches we'll find our best clues in france's trench we relied on henry's calculations to locate the ditches and it looks like he's spot on miles has taken over the digging and he's got straight onto one hey miles is that the end of the ditch there yeah just coming in you can see we've got all the whiter gravel there which is the natural and then you've got all the darker soil coming back here which is the fill of the ditch and rumor has it that in this whole gigantic trench you've had one fine one single find from the upper levels of the ditch which is this very small piece of pottery is there any way that we could date this tiny piece of pottery yeah i mean that's a very classic piece of beaker pottery beaker is in the beaker people has it yeah it's the big early bronze age so it's around about 2500 bc and would this actually have been a beaker yeah it's a base of finely made very finely decorated drinking vessels sometimes get them associated with burials but they are quite a common feature uh finding them as individual fragments in the top neolithic ditches only another thousand years to go and we're in the thousand years straight down the beaker style of pottery was brought here by migrants from mainland europe although we can't be sure why they turn up on the top of neolithic ditches it could be because the monument was regarded as a special place even in the bronze age what is it about the neolithic that gets you going i think it's a period when everything happened what do you mean well it's when we stopped being ancient and actually start being modern um in the neolithic human beings start taking control of their own world you know they control their their supply of food you know their animals the milk meat cereals flour so where do the causeway enclosures fit into that well i think the causeway enclosures are about settling down in the landscape i suppose to build monuments like this in the landscape and transform the landscape does imply some kind of feeling of power yes but it's very particular power these sites are often about death and death and the ancestors the world of the ancestors obviously doesn't exist but in their minds it did and the ancestors were in league with something bigger and something more powerful so by linking yourself to heroic figures in the past you were linking yourself into god a great deals claimed for neolithic causewade enclosures according to francis they're monuments built in reverence to gods and ancestors according to ben they're more likely to be the first farms or villages but which is it or is it neither we've found the inner ring of ditches in both our trenches but what we haven't found is anything to help us answer these fundamental questions neolithic ditches are the treasure chests of their age tomorrow we'll carry on digging them and perhaps will strike it lucky beginning of day two in our quest to find out what neolithic people were doing here 6 000 years ago yesterday we were looking for the all-important ring ditches and we found a slice of one just here so now we're looking for evidence of people on the ground how are we doing on that score francis well that's fantastic tony we've actually got the original surface on which people would have walked around in the neolithic this is this dark stuff this is the dark stuff here but you've got look you've got burnt bone here you've got a large piece of bone here you've got pieces of pottery there it's intact it's absolutely extraordinary people were walking here 6 000 years ago is this in the ditch ah no this is on a causeway now look let me explain how it works the ditch comes through to that drawing board so the dish is going this way it's going like that yeah which is going like that it comes to the drawing board where it stops okay then you have an undug bit which is the causeway the cause we're going in it's going in that direction yeah yeah and then the ditch picks up again over there so now we have the basic structure of the monument a ditch then a causeway and then another ditch the word causeway is perhaps a little confusing since it suggests a structure but in fact all they are is the gaps between the ditches the other segment of this is over here have we found anything here uh yes same thing again everything's preserved there's been a lot of bonfires or something on the surface you can see all this all this charcoal here yeah and and sort of red fire cracked silt how can you say for sure though that's neolithic and not bronze age or even later ah that could be bronze age it wouldn't surprise me at all if they didn't use it in the bronzer but we do know though in neolithic people here because clever old matt has found let's have a look about 10 minutes ago that you know what that is is that an arrowhead yeah it is it's a very distinctive leaf shaped arrowhead it's snapped across the middle that's why it's got a flat end and they're most commonly found in caused weighting closures it's a beautiful find it's absolutely cracking it's so thin and beautifully made that lovely ripple flaking on it it's a lovely thing so at the very start of day two we've got our first neolithic find leaf-shaped arrowheads were made from the very early neolithic period at around 4000 bc this one was either broken while being made or during hunting it was found outside a ditch in trench two and was most likely just thrown away the all-important placed objects will be inside the ditches and now that we've found them francis helps matt mark out an area to dig we're digging the inside that's right yeah so anything from the interior will be in this side of the ditch i think it's going to be the best bit to do if these monuments were part of a transition to a more settled lifestyle we'd expect to find evidence of a neolithic village here the most natural place to position one would be in the centre of the monument so the geophysics team has been busy surveying this area is that it what's your meaning look we've got some fantastic results this may be the first evidence for activity inside the enclosure where's the evidence well i mean these blobs i i mean they suggest to me burnt features maybe pits does that look like human activity to you this could well be the traces of settlement inside the enclosure crisis yes i mean i hope ben's right because if it is it's going to be incredibly well preserved because we know there's much more eluvian there than we expected but it could be later than the neolithic it could be bronze age it could even be roman there's only one way to find out isn't it [Music] the landscape around northborough is no longer lush fen land it's nearly all been drained for farming but not far away at wood walton there's a remaining patch of wetland fan phil's come here with maisie taylor maisie is an ancient wood specialist who worked on other causewayed enclosures including one near here at etton incredibly she found the remains of a neolithic wooden bowl there maisie wants phil to help her figure out how they were made they were making wooden bowls from a particular part of an older coppice now luckily for us this all the coppers has got precisely what we want there's some wood on this which is exactly what will make a bowl and you can see it i think quite easily because this is all sort of bubbled up here where it's been repeatedly cut and can you see it actually is quite bowl shaped already so that's the outside of the bowl yeah and we'll have to hollow out yeah the inside it didn't grow naturally like this did it oh it is natural but with a bit of help from man this would be cut down regularly every say 10 years or so to start the regrowth and you'd have a crop of rods come up around the outside the modern forestry they plant a lot of trees they harvest them bang everything's gone but in the past they used the woods as a resource they kept um cutting down a tree here coppicing a tree there and it maintained itself in a fantastic balance you had a never-ending source of material so what we're doing is going back to the original techniques literally that started in the neolithic but you're going to have the advantage of a chainsaw won't you [Laughter] well [Music] i mean that is a bowl isn't it while mazie and phil gather up their wood john is marking out the trench in the central area of the monument at least he will do when he's figured out where he is you're completely lost in this flat field [Music] i think you're a little disorientated perhaps [Music] are you sure that's the ones that we were standing for standing by just before no we were stood here and we moved that way [Music] can i trust you that it is supposed to be here [Music] thanks for your help now that sorted out bridget can get on with looking for evidence of a neolithic village if they lived here there'd be a lot of human and animal waste and this waste would raise the level of phosphate in the soil paul middleton and his team are drilling down into the ground to reach the neolithic layer of the soil the samples are then taken to a lab in the incident room for analysis paul you're our perimeter effectively aren't you well perhaps that's what we're looking at certainly we're measuring how much there is in the soil in relation to human and animal activity which can certainly include excreta you were collecting your soil samples boiling them up with hydrochloric acid to produce that solution and then adding a reagent to turn the solution blue if there was phosphate present presumably looking at these samples this one's a quick wii in a one-off picnic visit as it were and the dark blue one is from the village cesspit and that one's a real hot spot in the context of the site the plan is to take samples of neolithic soil on a grid which covers the whole site any hot spots will tell us there was a large number of animals or humans here in phil's trench matt has been digging down through the layers of a ditch there's not a lot of finds so far but one of them takes us back to the very beginnings of pottery wells it's not exactly the crown jewels is it ah well no i think it is for for the neolithic um it's quite nice we've got a fragments of uh pottery come out we've got this little sort of rim with these decoration on it uh and is that definitely neolithic yes it is yes it is that looks looks like a piece of uh mildenhall wear this is the first sort of pottery vessel that we see in the british isles it's quite coarse and to our eyes it's very basic but this is state of the art domestic product for the neolithic and all these bibs um we've got nice bits of firecrack flint all that sort of crazy lines on it suggests it's been in the middle of a half in the middle of a very intense fire where did all this come from well we think we've got the end of the ditch here so we concentrated on that it's all coming from the top layer over there where all the charcoal and burnt door was um if we get down in deeper hopefully we might find some more meaty stuff this is the terminus of the ditch isn't it every time any of the archaeologists say ditch terminus they go all dewy eyed what's so significant about it well if we get the the terminal sort of the butt end of the ditch it tends to be where there's a focus of deposits and so if we're looking for the evidence of pottery bone other kind of possibly ritual deposition it's going to be in that end piece of the ditch well to be honest i don't think this quite constitutes ritual deposits they almost look domestic and 30 days early days yeah still got a day and a half left mildenhall wear was made from about 3600 bc they were round bottomed parts decorated with simple lines and dots on the rim and sides this find gives us the first firm evidence the causewayed enclosure at northbourne was in use from the very beginnings of the neolithic age you couldn't wait then oh nothing was going to stop me about this one in fact i was so excited about doing this that i actually made some tools before we came here i don't know what sort of tools you're after but this is the one that i'm really excited about i mean look what i've done there is made a little chisel and i've ground the edge off and put that in a handle as well that's fantastic so i've never made one of those before so i don't know how it's going to work well this is one of the great opportunities because we've got the drawings of the ones we found here and you can see in this one you the the swirly grain of the the coppice stool but on the rim which is around here so that would be on there you've got these funny little marks they show that these were made by charring and then scraping ah so are you using fire to actually soften the wood because you see i mean i've been looking at that wood and i'm thinking well if we gotta gauge all that out with something like that that's a lot of work and a lot of time the thing is in the neolithic if you're sitting around in the evening instead of watching telly you're watching your your bowl charring well i think before we can watch the equivalent of neolithic tv you better want to get your fire started not carry on making tools right [Music] it's mid-afternoon and fines are still very sparse so francis is relieved when ian finds something which might support his side of the argument i think we've got uh what looks like the remains of a pot with some sort of um burnt material in it oh yeah it's like sort of wet digested biscuit it's gone back to mud it can't go back to being mud unless it's very very poorly fired very poorly fired but it is it actually on the bottom of the ditch that's the bottom there it's really hard yeah it's nearly there oh yes it's pretty well on the bottom yeah that's interesting you've got a pot on the bottom of the ditch near the center it's got charred grain in it it doesn't look much now but i reckon we're looking there at a deliberately placed offering all right and that's very good news makes me very happy the offering pot turned mushy because it was only partly fired perhaps in a bonfire this fits the theory of the pot being used as part of a ritual the pot maker saw no point in fully firing it as they had no intention of using it as a functional pot [Music] stewart is out and about on his tour of the other neolithic causewade enclosures in the area i'm now to site at upton which is about 11 kilometers south west of the site we're excavating and here a causeway enclosure was recorded in the plowed field and the slope that the enclosure is built upon is actually on the slope which tilts down towards the south out to that valley area down there which is a valley of the river knee this enclosure clearly is designed to be seen from the valley of the river kneeing down here and to look over in that direction i'm at the causeway enclosure and atom that was excavated before this gravel quarry totally destroyed it and what he found he was a cause-wade enclosure actually set in the in the bend of a river which was out beyond it got to remember in the neolithic period this was flood plain gravels water flowing lots of different stream and river channels very difficult territory to actually negotiate ian is definitely having a good day in trench one he's now uncovered some large bones in the same ditch he found the offering part our bones expert peter rowley conway is delighted to have something to look at so ian where are these from um they're all from the top layer this black showing in the section right well these are very interesting these are cattle bones this is from the rear leg the rear foot of a large animal large cow this could well be nearly thick in size because they get smaller after the bronze age so this is a big animal and what's this this is a forearm bone it goes right there and this looking at it has been split while the animal has just been newly killed to hit it with a rock or something right at that point and split this sidewall of the bone off right to expose all the marrow inside and they used to eat long arrow in those days so you find a lot of bones like this has it been cooked i would think not before it's had the side knocked off to get the marrow out because that would cause the marrow to dissolve so i think this has been done just after the animal has been skinned and butchered francis's trench is providing our first clues about what neolithic people did here the offering pot at the bottom of a ditch is evidence for francis's ritual activity but the cattle bones suggest there was domesticated cattle kept here which supports ben's view that this was a farm as yet there's not enough evidence to prove either theory and what about the neolithic village bridget was looking for in the central area of the monument how have we done bridget well we've definitely got a prehistoric topsail that covers the entire site and this is here this is all of this brown material here yeah within it we do have small areas that have charcoal rich little bit of burning going on but nothing definite and now one glimmer of hope is over here where marcus is he's cleaned off onto natural and within the beirut soil here he's got this bit of burning going on and the geophysics spike suggests there should be something around here wow not that great does that wow mean what i think that well means yeah yeah i'm afraid it doesn't but aren't we in a bit of a crisis apart from that spike there's nothing in the middle of this geophysics that you'd want to shake a stick at no i mean that doesn't surprise me you see you're being a western modern man you see a circle you see a target you go for the bullseye they weren't like that in neolithic times they were obsessed with boundaries so this site is actually surrounded by not just one but two great ditches around the outside so it's double bounded so i think the key to understanding this site lies in those double ditches around the outside so what do we do tomorrow oh we dig them so all day today we've been moving closer and closer to the center now we're going to turn this whole dig upside down go back to the outside put all our resources there and hopefully get more evidence about the people who built this place on the side of our neolithic cause wade enclosure we're working furiously away trying to find out what the neolithic people were actually doing there the francis has brought me here to wood walt and fenn to show me what the fence were like 6 000 years ago pretty bleak place for people to live well actually not tony okay come here in the winter and you get a bit bit damp but you actually lived on the edge of the fen i mean they weren't stupid they didn't like to live in water you put your house on the dry land okay and then you had fields around you on the dry land which are growing wheat and barley but in the winter when protein's getting a bit scarce if you're living on the edge of the fen it's great because you can come out here you've got this stuff you can feed us hay it's just reed but you know sheep love it you can put this stuff on your roof as well to keep you nice and dry it's much better thatch than from wheat or barley straw i mean we're standing on nice squidgy peat okay but you dry this stuff up and it makes fantastic fuel so this is a wonderful natural resource was there anything to hunt a huge amount that bit of water behind us would have been covered in ducks there'd been hundreds of duck on there you also had geese and then also lurking in the depths in there you'd have had sturgeon so they're probably at caviar in neolithic i think living here in the neolithic would have been terrific on days one and two we put trenches over the inner ring of ditches and one in the center to look for a village today we're going to shift our attention to the outer ring of ditches and put a fourth trench here where the ditches can be seen clearly in the aerial photograph henry's calculated where these outer ditches should be and tells phil where to put the trench we know that the inner rings of ditches were built at the very beginning of the neolithic period now we want to see if the outer rings were in use at the same time or added later [Music] paul's finished measuring the amount of phosphate in the neolithic soil and the results are very interesting on the graph we can see three spikes of high concentrations of phosphate their location is along a line which runs from outside the monument into its central area paul what you reckon is it actually might be animals being driven in to this central area that's right i mean i think the levels are high enough they're way above anything we expect for general background even sort of fairly intensive human activity uh and the location of them suggests it may well be some kind of that's a drove way or something where the animals are coming and animals that's fantastic ben you seem particularly excited about the idea of being sheep and cattle on this side yeah definitely because this is evidence for for these herds that we were talking about people actually sort of capturing these wild animals domesticating them and actually pulling them into the enclosure so this is definitely one up for the farming side of the argument much to ben's delight in phil's trench they've successfully located the ditches of the outer ring but so far there's no interesting finds from them which is frustrating bridget a little we've sectioned like five small ditches so far and found what three fragments of bone and a whole lot and that is it don't be negative bridge don't be negative i'm not being negative i just think it's a little strange you want loads and loads of fire i don't want loads of fines you're complaining about the absence amen well of course it is always nice to have something to keep you going in here bridget's frustration with the lack of fines is understandable but what we have to remember is that this monument is 6000 years old which means it was built two thousand years before stonehenge so anything that's found here offers precious insights into a time when our ancestors first made their mark on the british landscape phil takes a break from digging to see how maisie and james are getting on they actually got quite a nice surface there for you to get a work on phil's flint tools are as precious to him as a jar of ale and now's his chance to try them out he's an excellent tool the scraper does a good job on the child wood but he's also made a stone aged chisel which he's been dying to put to the test so this really is groundbreaking stuff because i've never used one of these before this works like a dream it's done it you can actually get in amongst it i mean i think if you were really using a wood with a nice grain on it it would it would split out so easily it would it would i mean you're getting such a nice finish bit there though it's fantastic oh yeah honver chisels chisel go i wish i could spend longer but i can't i gotta get back okay but just carry on the experiment yeah okay there james so hard that to follow in phil's trench the line of the outer ring of ditches is now strikingly clear in the soil what are these four branches i think this is a miniature version of the larger ditch the ring ditch that we've got in the middle of this enclosure now and reason i think that is that over here we've got a causeway so we've got one bit of ditch ending here another bit of ditch ending there you say a causeway but presumably not for people to come across they just fall in well exactly you know it's obviously ridiculous as a practical thing yeah but what i think these causeways are doing and there are lots of them i mean there's more over there is they're dividing this ditch deliberately into short lengths why would you do that i think it's something to do with families look victor's drawn a picture let me let me show you now this is the sort of thing that was happening see this chap here maybe he was the head of the family yeah and he's placing a pot just like that pot do you remember we found yesterday yeah but sort of half fired thing now it's a hopeless pot absolute disaster but it was full of charred grain it was obviously an offering it's not a practical pot just as that ditch isn't a practical ditch it's representing something and i think that charred pot just like that skull behind is representing a story in a family history so a bit like a cemetery where you not only bury people but somehow you use them as an act of remembrance yes exactly like that absolutely francis is convinced neolithic people used the ditches to commemorate their ancestors but do our finds support this view we've had more bones than any other finds but do they tell us anything else other than the neolithic people ate meat they tell us a very great deal what we've got here is about two dozen cow bones they had pigs they had sheep these guys know exactly what they're doing they're not in a kind of long transitional period they are full farmers they're eating hazelnuts to be sure but most of their food is coming from domestic crops and domestic animals why do you say that sure there's a number of assertions it's an assertion which i can back up here's a cow bone that has been through it you might say this is a hip bone what's happened here they've been cutting the little ligaments that joined them so you can break this into separate blocks of meat but this is not and i stress not a ritualized bone this has not been buried with reverence in some important vote of deposit it's been thrown away how do you know that because a dog has come along and chewed this away and this end here and after the dog has left it the mouth has come along and had to go there just to wear its teeth down a little bit uh and only after that has this bone become buried this is classic domestic refuge it's a rough old bone isn't it lucky to be here yeah these are perhaps the most interesting cow burns we've got this came out in three bits and they go together like this this is a male normally these bones are broken and you'd say right that's bull but because we've got the whole bone you can measure the length as well and that is very very interesting because it's too long to be a bull so what is it what causes bone to grow in length like that is castration this bone comes from a bullock they were maintaining bullocks at least some to increase the meat yield and get more beef off the hoof so these aren't casual farmers who've just strode in after these people know exactly what they're doing and they are getting 80 90 of their food from cattle and i think northbrook joins a number of other sites to tell us that we've got sophisticated farmers in our hands these are not half and half people a hearty neolithic steak was no doubt complemented with fruits of the forest some live yogurt and served up in handsome alderwood bowls ready for tea that is just so amazing i mean they are they are works of art and i mean the texture of that wood down there is magnificent yeah that i mean that that that effect is exactly the same as we saw in those original drawings of the the neolithic ones you must feel very very chuffed with yeah i'm really pleased it's brilliant if you had to really list the sort of things that you've learned from it what would they be well we are we understand much better now why they use these coppiced lumps and i think if we had to go back to the wood and get more we'd choose slightly differently we know more about them now and you've even prepared a feast as it's all genuine neolithic we've got evidence for all this the nuts the berries the sort of yogurty cheesy things lovely near the thick herbs honey i'll dip that in there yeah oh i could get attached to those no bevy i suppose uh well we do actually have some cider or some fermented apple juice so why isn't it out uh james hasn't made the wooden beekeeper stuart has now combined his knowledge of the neolithic enclosures he visited with what we know about the one at northbrook this is the best understanding we have of the monument in its landscape at the time so it really is quite a lonely situation surrounded by water channels with only a few dry land approaches to it most times very much so yeah i mean one of the objectives to set out from here was to try and look at this monument against the background of all these other causeway enclosures there were five in this grouping which seemed quite unusual if you look at these other enclosures can you see up at barham its visibility is restricted in that direction can't see anything in that direction at all but you can actually see in a cone down to the river at huffington it's exactly the same how it collects the river as it were in that direction but there's no visibility that way so really they're all looking down onto sort of waterways and aetna and northbrook are also in very watery situations as we've just seen from henry's research exactly but do you think they're all contemporary my guess is that they are i mean one thing that makes me think that is the commonality of shape they've all got this very strong oval shape and what makes it particularly interesting that northbrook has actually got more rings than the others and that's the furthest east along the welland and it just makes me wonder if that's kind of as far as they were reaching out and this one had specific monumentality that they wanted to implant on the landscape [Music] phil's perseverance has been rewarded with an important last-minute find well what do you got wow what have i got gordon bennett where did this come from all right that's down in the bottom of the ditch there this is the best burn we've had yet do you know what this is well no i wouldn't ask you if i did this is an aurochs wild cattle it's the only one we've seen so far this is incredible this is a distal fit it goes right there in me it's about four times as big this has never been domesticated this is a wild animal through and through how frequently do they turn up on causeway enclosures not very often let's put it that way it's a nice thing to find it's very special well you see the it's you know you're kind of saying how important it is the place where we found it is special because it's right at the bottom of the ditch it's right in the middle between the two ends this did not happen by accident this has been put here quite deliberately it just seemed just too much it's too much of a ghostiness that is too much of a coincidence i'd better go and find some more i made my day [Laughter] aurochs were hunted in the neolithic period but must have been quite a challenge to kill they were formidable beasts built like a spanish fighting bull but twice the size at the start of our dig of the causewade enclosure at northborough we had two opposing views about what neolithic people did here francis argued it was a place for rituals revering the ancestors and gods while ben thought it was where britain's first farmers gathered in their resources so after all this archaeology are you still convinced that essentially this is a big farm well look we've got enhanced magnetism in the ditches here this is burning this is uh debris and and charcoal from settlement being dumped into the top of ditches on the interior of the enclosure again the anomaly is raised by the burning here so it comes out as yellow the phosphates too show that we've got animals being driven into the enclosure pulled outside and then driven in so you know i think it's pretty compelling compelling um superficially yes but the burning on the interior would fit beautifully with people using this seasonally clearing off the the vegetation and then getting on with their religious you know activities it does stretch credibility somewhat doesn't it to think that this huge earth monument with these massive dishes around it was built simply to be a farm well not a farm but a place where resources are pulled into they dominated a wide area of this landscape they are farming it and they're bringing the resources back here i just don't think you let your cows into church do you you don't let them poo in church when they're there there's a point isn't it aren't you simply importing a theory which works well in other sites where they have found ritual deposits and sticking it here where they haven't found any well i'd contest that the fact they haven't found any we've got that half fired pot which doesn't make any sense full of charred grain right in the bottom of the ditch and that auroch's bone which is placed absolutely on the bottom of the ditch right in the middle and that thing is a deliberate placement so are you prepared to concede that there might be a ritual element here well look i think in everyday life there's an element of ritual that creeps in and i think we can pick that up through archaeology so i'm prepared to concede that they were doing things that were not wholly practical all of the time and are you prepared to concede that there was probably some farming going on here of course i think what really worries me tony i think if we continue this discussion for another two or three minutes we might end up agreeing so i think we should stop let's stop now the cause wade enclosure at northbrook was the grandest of the group in the area it was situated on an island surrounded by lush fen land and river channels and seems to have been built in two phases the inner ring of ditches was built first at the very start of the neolithic age while the smaller ditches of the outer rings were added later the light gravelly soils of the banks would have stood out against the landscape and could have been seen from a great distance the effect of the whole monument would have been very dramatic no other great monuments came before it no other man-made structures competed with it over the past three days we've managed to tease out a picture of this part of east anglia six thousand years ago if i'd approached the site then i'd have seen massive ditches ahead of me and i'd have crossed them along a series of causeways until i came to this huge central area and ahead of me i'd probably have seen a group of our neolithic ancestors hacking away at a carcass i'd have seen others commemorating the dead by placing bones and pottery into a shallow grave while they waited for other local settlers with whom they could exchange grain or livestock the fence is still farmland today and the field boundaries stretch off into the horizon but it was right here our ancestors put down roots and created the first farming communities [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 225,969

Rating: 4.918798 out of 5

Keywords: Team Team, Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode, Neolithic Cathedral, Peterborough, Northborough, Neolithic Britain, Neolithic Period

Id: 1NvMGhtq30E

Length: 47min 56sec (2876 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021