Archaeologists Explain Life In Early Dark Age Britain | Digging For Britain

[Music] we might be a small island 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 JW there Archaeology is a complex jigsaw puzzle drawing together everything from skeletons to swords temples to treasure she's got a very cartoon-like face isn't she from orne 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 [Music] Britain the Anglo-Saxons invaded and divided our Island and ushered in the Dark Ages this year Archaeology is offering fresh clues about the people who gave us England the land of the angles their Warrior culture of swords and ornate burials the physical evidence of violence in a time of blood feuds and this is sliced down the entire left side of his body and the Mystery of the Magnificent ring once worn by a wealthy Anglo-Saxon and never seen publicly until now for almost 400 years Britannia was a part of the Roman Empire controlled by Rome's Legions and strategically positioned forts but by 410 AD the troops had withdrawn and Raiders began to plunder the wealthy and defenseless land in the Dying Years of the Roman Empire the emperor honorius received pleas from the British people but with barbarians to deal with on the home front and the Empire on the brink of collapse he couldn't afford desend reinforcements the people of Britain would have to look to their own defense the islands ceased to be part of a coherent Empire and the legacies of Rome were left to crumble crucially written records all but disappeared ushering in the so-called Dark Ages Britain was left wide open to bands of Invaders from the continent they included powerful tribes from France Germany and Scandinavia who we've come to know collectively as the Anglo-Saxons and it wasn't long before they started to feel comfortable in their new [Music] home the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the first Germanic settlers is a shady period recorded by just a sparse collection of texts and even the archaeology that connects us to the people who live through this period is scarce Dorchester on TS has thrown up some of the most important [Music] finds and a new dig is hoping to add to the best evidence we have for this transition a handful of artifacts that emerged from the fields around Dorchester over a 100 years ago they're stored here at the ashmolean Museum in Oxford the objects I'm about to see were found in the 19th century but the fact that they are perhaps the best archaeological evidence we have of the earliest Anglo Saxons in Britain gives us an idea of just how rare those physical traces of the early post Roman period are the these artifacts came out of the graves of three people buried in the fifth century one is a burial which seems to be Roman until you look more closely he was buried wearing a late Roman belt known as a singul it's it's really a badge of rank of status and this would have been made in Gaul in an imperial Workshop but the chap wearing it of course we know lived and died in Britain now you might just think well why couldn't he just have been a Roman soldier this is certainly a a badge of of high rank in in in the Roman military but it would be very unusual for a Roman soldier to be buried with his singul with his belt that that's quite a dramaic style of burying your dead so he's got Roman objects but he's buried in an un Roman way with grave Goods absolutely next to him a woman's grave contained further evidence of this mixing of Roman and Saxon identities a Roman belt buckle alongside two early Saxon brooches this is a so-called little cruciform brooch and the other um is the back plate of what's called an apply brooch and that proves that she was not only wearing dress items from Germanic parts of the world but that she was wearing a costume which is really Germanic so she's got a mixture of both Roman and Germanic style about her absolutely the fact that she was buried next next to or near to this Chap and that he was buried in a rather Germanic way albe it with Roman items suggests very strongly that these two were Germanic speakers from the other side of the North Sea another grave added confirmation that these people were Keen to signify themselves as both Roman and Saxon the question of what was happening to identities and how these were being reinvented and reformulated to meet these rapidly changing you know rather traumatic circumstances is extremely interesting and it's incredibly difficult and rare to find objects that can be firmly and definitively dated to the first half of the fifth century I mean whether Roman or Saxon they're both rare and these burials are some of the best evidence for for how people were negotiating this very tricky period connecting with the Dark Ages even through Archaeology is a real challenge the artifacts from those Graves scattered around Dorchester are fascinating they date to this time of incredibly dramatic change in Britain but they are just a handful of objects from a very small number of Graves we're not looking at a whole Cemetery let Lan in a settlement so we are just glimpsing a very tiny part of the whole story at this year's dig amongst the garden allotments of Dorchester [Music] [Music] of people living through that [Music] transition you've probably heard of the venerable bead he was an e8th Century northumbrian Monk and the most famous chronicler of his age his ecclesiastical history of the English people is still our best source for the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons but we do have to treat what he writes with a little Caution he wasn't out to write an unbiased account and it's strongly motivated by his Christian faith be tells us that North Umbria was conquered and settled by the angles the commanding site of bambra became the power base of this emerging tribal Kingdom the castle we see today was largely rebuilt in the 20th century but we know from archaeology that the site has been occupied for 5,000 years going right back into the ne lithic the castle sits on this massive Rock which is the strongest natural fortress on the coast of Northeast England and with commanding views over land and sea bambra would become the seat of the northumbrian Kings but even at a royal site like bambra we have to work hard to decipher the clu left behind by the Anglo-Saxon people who lived here so what have we got over here then gram well I mean that's the one fortunate thing that it's now exposed again so we can have a look at it director of archaeology Graham young outlined where a Saxon Timber Hall would once have stood the people who lived here constructed their buildings out of wood which has long since disappeared leaving just an impression of the early Fortress so this really is negative archaeology isn't it you've just got the holes left where the Timbers of this wooden building have have just rotted yes we've got enough evidence that we can reconstruct broadly what's above ground and we're standing right inside it and right on the edge of the rock here so so what would this building have been uh well we think it's it's to do with the gate because the Anglo-Saxon entrance to to bambo is just behind us it's this Clift here uh there's a marvelous little text from ad 774 and it describes this these steps coming up through a Clift in a marvelous fashion as the author says and that must be it there's nothing else at bambo that that fits the bill so we're standing in the middle Anglo-Saxon Gat house to bamra castle Yeah I think that's pretty much it we know that generations of Anglo-Saxons lived and worked at bambra over a prolonged period stretching hundreds of years and yet even here the footprints of the people are faint and hard to trace much of what we do know comes from sources like bead but what they tend to focus on is the high status individuals the kings and queens but there are people who made much less of an impression on bead people whose archaeological signature is much more difficult to trace there's not much evidence of their buildings and certainly no buried treasure or magnificent Graves these are the Ordinary People the farmers and workers who populated the rural land landscape and they are even harder to find this is rural North umberland and we're right in the heart of bead's Home territory today we exploit this landscape for its natural resources of sand and [Music] gravel but the same industrial Machinery used to remove this material has uncovered rare and vital evidence of life in the so-called Dark Ages Dr Clive wadington is leading the excavations at lanton quarry last year his team Unearthed rare traces of an ordinary early Anglo-Saxon Village in front of me here we've got a range of the fines that we got from the excavations at lanon so you can see for example this large Stone here which is a local Sandstone to the untrained eye it might not look like a lot but when you turn it over you can see this lovely smooth smooth flat face and that's got this perforation here in the center and this is a base of what we call a qun stone which is a rubbing Stone um which would have had a rotary qun on on the top another Stone um that would have been used for Milling grain to create flour fragments of evidence reveal that the daily lives of these long forgotten Villages would have involved Milling weaving and metal working but there are also more decorative items we found some glass beads and you can see that these are really beautifully decorated and we call them polychrome beads they're multicolored these have been analyzed and have been shown to contain traces of metal as well where which they'd used to color the glass it's not treasure but these everyday objects are shedding light on the workers farmers and craftsmen who settled these Rural Plains 300 mil down the coast I'm about to meet the founding fathers of the invasion according to bead the Anglo-Saxon takeover began here on the coast of Kent with the arrival of two Warrior brothers hangist and horsa they had been called in to help the British king vortigan fight against his enemies the picks and they were followed by wave upon wave of Germanic Warriors who settled in Kent but before long those incomers would turn against their host and start to expand the boundaries of their new [Music] territory we don't know whether these two men actually existed but it is clear that Germanic tribes were settling in Kent by the fifth century we're in what may have been the territory of the first Anglo-Saxon Warlords to settle here within a 100 Years of their arrival their Kingdom became the richest and most powerful in Britain and this year the skeletons of the people who lived here at this time have been emerging from the ground a huge new highway is being built in thanet cutting straight through an area that's particularly rich in archaeology a team from Oxford Wessex archaeology has been called in to systematically excavate the area before the road can be laid he's a male individual can see by the very prominent eyebrow ridges the very very robust clavicles or collar bones as well as sax and graay caves archaeologists have found pits full of discarded shells evidence of the food eaten by local [Music] settlers they record their findings using satellite technology eventually linking together all the graves and fines across the site when the work is finished all the information they've discovered here will form a detailed computerized map this excavation is absolutely massive but it's just one of over 20 similar sites up and down the road scheme here we've got the two largest archaeological units in the UK coming together there are over a 100 professional archaeologist on site at any one time making it the largest excavation in Britain this year and when they finished it will all disappear once more beneath a Tarmac and cars that will eventually pass this way but the archaeologist work will continue analysis will be carried out on the skeletons eventually we should know their age their sex and even the diseases they suffered from it may take years but archaeology isn't just about the digging in 2008 another Anglo-Saxon Cemetery was discovered 30 m away and it's only now after nearly 2 years of research that it's yielding remarkable insights into their world you might wonder what I'm doing in a car park outside a shopping center in sitting born but I promise you if you come with me through these doors there's evidence of anglo-saxon Kent at the height of its powers archaeologists have recovered 2,500 objects from around 230 Graves at a site called the mes it's an enormous collection of Clues dating back nearly 1500 years and processing this volume of material Demands a unique [Music] approach right I think this must be [Music] it Dana Goodburn Brown is an archaeological conservator a year ago she pioneered a radical new scheme in ening local volunteers to get involved with conserving the grave Goods of people who may have been their ancestors so have you got people coming in who who've never done anything like this before oh yeah no most no one's done anything exactly like this no they go through a training session and we have some practice pieces and then they start working on the real thing so what are the artifacts that you're working on here Dana well this is a side view of this block which seems to have this enormous um roach that's gilded you can just see a little bit of G gild and gold coming out so there's quite an intricate design going on there but they could see that there was a series of rings now if they lifted the mount individually you'd kind of just have a series of rings and you wouldn't really know what it was but if you X-ray it as a block you can see the relationship between one and the other so that's the these this was something that went around the waist and probably keys or things might have hang hung off of it Dana's Innovative project is opening up archaeology to everyone and is already proving popular we've had almost 10,000 people and um so you get people just dropping by some people come back and again and again and um we've been open several months and people are still just discovering us new don't you think it's great because loads of people can see it normally conservation work goes on behind closed doors in a museum and and and I love what I do and it's really nice to share it with other people I do have to start myself sometimes and think ah this is400 years old and and and some Craftsman you know made this and then someone wore it it's quite special yeah this is such a great example of community engagement anybody in this shopping M or they might be coming here to get their weekly shop or for a cup of tea can pop in here and find out more about conservation archaeology and local history and if they're really interested they can also volunteer but right now I want to find out more about the artifacts from those Graves once they've been cleaned you get a sense of the incredible craftsmanship that's gone into making these stunning objects but what can they tell us about Anglo-Saxon life Dr Andrew Richardson of the Canterbury archaeological trust has been interpreting these finds for over 2 years Andy these are wonderful objects just here they break is yes I mean if you if you look at this one this is what we call a plated disc roach it's basically a silver back plate with a gold front plate and gold cell work and then inlaid with with garnets and very very fine gold filigree wire it's also very delicately made it is it's it's very highly skilled uh craft working and you know when you show this sort of thing to Modern Jewelers uh they say that they would they would have to charge you enormous amount of money to make a a copy of this the woman who owned this and wore this would probably have been at the top of the social scale in in this in this community incredibly High status possibly even Royal connections definitely I think yeah yeah many of the people buried here by their grieving loved ones were adorned with magnificent pieces of jewelry but the whole Community is here some buried with ordinary everyday items like this this iron knife if you think about you know the full range of objects we've got from this site it's a huge investment in wealth in the ground and it isn't recovered by them it's only when we excavate it that that it emerges uh into the light again the people interred here were part of a wave of settlers who'd come to make their Mark and nearly 1500 years on this cemetery is allowing us to Glimpse how their society functioned a member of a powerful family dies they the family have to sort of reaffirm that that family still has power and status because this certainly isn't costume jewelry is it I mean this is the real thing these are these are incredibly prized items this this is the real thing I mean for their time these are the topof the range um jewelry that Anglo-Saxon England can produce we can suppose that these settlers were seen by the people already living here as Invaders and Power in these times was wielded at the end of a sword the cemetery Bears witness to the importance of these weapons these are iron weapons you've got spearheads uh some of these spearheads inlaid with with gold you've got um some decorated pyramid mounts from a sword belt they are amazing can I pick that up on its base yes these Exquisite items are over a thousand years old shaped in silver inlaid with gold and topped with garnet an extraordinary amount of effort has gone into crafting them I think they're real um functional weapons but they have a symbolic role um young children uh people who are severely disabled have been found buried with weapons people who could never have used them in battle but they still see themselves some Warriors they do they do and I think you know Anglo-Saxon culture if you look at their poetry uh their artwork work is very very um centered on warfare it's about communicating a message about how they see themselves how their families see the deceased in the funeral right this amazing Cemetery has led me back into a long vanished world of anglo-saxon Warlords and their much-loved wives and daughters but the finds reveal that this was a world not just of warfare but of feasting too what about these vessels here in the they're rather intriguing well these are replicas of two cut glass cone beakers that were excavated in one of the graves at this site they actually were found intact they're quite curious you obviously couldn't stand that up table no and I think I think these are again about communal feasting I think these to be passed around the Mead table um and these were found together in a in in a grave of of somebody with a sword so perhaps a warrior but certainly a man um and making a statement about perhaps his love of feasting is love of Meade uh and it's it's ironic that you know the site is called the mes and um they built a pub on it there is so little documentary evidence of early Anglo-Saxon Society so cemeteries like this and those amazing grave Goods offer a really precious insight into that culture and we start to be able to really focus on those people in the Forgotten Cemetery who themselves have long since faded from memory the idea of a Christian God was slowly gaining ground but the pagan gods and goddesses were so deeply rooted in Anglo-Saxon culture that they wouldn't disappear [Music] overnight Christianity had returned and like the invader's own arrival it would wash through the land slowly but surely one important aspect of this change is that by the 8th Century hundreds of minsters and nunneries had taken route all over Anglo-Saxon Britain the presence of these monastic communities molded the entire future of the country not least because they reintroduced widespread literacy but apart from inside the very greatest of these religious houses we have very little idea of what life was like in them and that's what makes our next story so exciting it's a rare opportunity to excavate and understand an Anglo-Saxon [Music] nunnery this is Bart Castle in modern day gloustershire some of the castle dates to the 12th century but its roots go back to the Christian conversion of the Anglo-Saxons 17th century manuscripts speak of an Anglo-Saxon nunnery based Within These grounds and my friends from Bristol University are hoping to find its walls looking good guys looking good I've Dr Stuart prior is co-directing the excavations he's been able to put a date on some of the early structures that are emerging just from this area here we got this absolutely fantastic Anglo-Saxon strap end um would have been on the end of a belt and essentially it's a it's in the shape of a little BEAST's head a little dragon's head and it's 9th century and this was buried underneath the section of collapse wall so what that shows is that this building just here behind me has to be 8th or early 9th century goes out of use part of the wall collapses and seals this particular object and essentially what this does is it gives us really good datting evidence to say this is Saxon and it's probably the nunery go off to the 20 M long there also directing the Dig is Professor Mark Horton he's finding some intriguing evidence of Life inside the Anglo-Saxon nunnery thing about Anglo-Saxon Archaeology is that finds are incredibly rare but we've been really lucky in in finding an extraordinary quantity of material from this excavation metal work like buckles and so forth but maybe the most interesting of these three this is a wetstone or hone Stone it probably would have hung around somebody's neck what it was used for was sharpening the knife that you would then sharpen the quill which you would use for Illuminating manuscripts parchment manuscripts so it's evidence of learning of scholarship um literacy in the middle Saxon period this find might be tiny but it's a rare piece of physical evidence from a world influx a direct link to the Revival of the written word throughout Anglo-Saxon [Music] Britain this is an extraordinary piece it's 8th Century experts are really divided on what it really is but I think it's what's called an Asal it would have had a bone pointer attached to one end would been used to help reading manuscripts we know that these religious houses were not just places of worship and as the digging continues artifacts are gradually emerging from the ground that reveal that they were also focal points for commercial activity this was only found yesterday just up there on that surface up there and it is the earliest type of coinage used in Anglo Saxon England dates from around 690 to around 740 as there as a SK now these things are very very rare in Western Britain they're found in some quantities in plac like London and ipswitch and Southampton but here in the west they're virtually unheard of and why it's so exciting it tells us two things one is that this place was a really important for trade and commerce and the second reason is that this find puts the site back much earlier the first documentary evidence we've got is in the middle part of the 8th Century this coin suggests that people here in the late 7th or early 8th Century right at the beginning of the conversion of this part of the world to [Music] Christianity the jewel in the crown of this Ang sax and ler is a quite incredible object no one seems to know exactly where it is found or how and as far as I know it's never been seen by the public before so it's incredibly exciting that we're getting a chance to examine it that is fantastic isn't it absolutely fantastic it's actually bigger though than I imagined yeah it's it's an extraordinary thing you you know you've seen photographs or drawings but when you see the thing itself it is wonderful wonderful piece Leslie Webster former curator of anglo-saxon archaeology at the British museum is astonished by the level of its Artistry the craftsmanship which is magnificent um and the sort of she quantity of gold that's gone into that so the question I've got to ask you Leslie how old is it well looking at the style of the piece my feeling is that it belongs to the first third of the 9th century that's amazing although we can't say for sure that the ring is Christian it seems to be in the shape of a cross Leslie suspects that it was worn by someone of very high status but whether a bishop or a king we just don't know the other question I really need to ask obviously is how how do you think it was made well if I can seize it from you and give a closer look it is absolutely superb I mean what we've got are four little animal creatures with pointy ears long STS they've got little staring eyes so it does look quite wolf-like I think or Hound likee now the filigre is also wonderful it's so fine and this lovely plattered work round the outside here very very delicate uh again that's quite an earlyish feature the craftsmanship is just magnificent I can't believe that it survived in such amazing Condition it's a very imposing Monumental ring and and in in its whole character and style it is unique [Music] perhaps what's most interesting about this process of the re christianization of Britain is that it's not one neat linear story various missionaries arrived at different times from overseas preaching the religions of the Celtic and Roman Church is and attempting the conversion of the Pagan Anglo-Saxon Kings according to be the North umbrian King Oswald brought Christianity to his people he called for a missionary to come from the Irish Monastery on the island of Iona to convert his people and when the monk Aiden arrived Oswell granted him land to build a monastery on lindes SP over there and the island became a cradle of Christianity this was the Golden Age of North Umbria the Royal capital of bambra would have been a magnet for people from across the kingdom perhaps from across the world who came here seeking fame glory and gainful employment 12 years ago archaeologists located an extens Ive burial ground right next to the castle buried beneath the sand dunes were the remains of the residence of the Anglo-Saxon Fortress of bambra 100 skeletons were removed just a portion of the total number believed to be buried there and taken to Durham University for extensive analysis and research I'm an osteologist someone who studies human bones so I know how much these physical remains can reveal about the lives of past people archaeologists can tell a certain amount about ancient Lifestyles by looking at objects that people have left behind but long after we die our bones hold an enormous amount of information about us Dr Sarah Groves was involved in the excavations at bambra as a student and has been analyzing the skeletons ever since her findings due to be published next year reveal some fascinating observations about the community living there the vast majority of the population did have quite bad teeth um almost every individual adults and children alike had calculus on some of their teeth at least and a really high proportion of them had carries as well so that's a tooth decay like this individual over here that hole's massive it's uh taken away almost the entire top of the root there just hanging onto the cran and the tooth next to it completely gone all we've got left is the roots remaining there yeah we all know the pain of toothache and these people didn't have modern drugs or dentists to ease their [Music] pain so why do you think there were such high rates of tooth decay and gum disease in this population well it's got to be something to do with the diet that they're eating because it's affecting the whole population so they must be eating something in their diet which is making them more prone to having these these Dental diseases and what could that be well I think that they must be eating quite a lot of meat and we're seeing that from the archaeological material and also eating a lot of flour which is quite starchy and leads to sugars building up in the mouth and also things like beer and wine and Mead all of which are quite sugary and if you're drinking a lot of drinks like that then that can also lead to tooth decay so rather bizarrely these atrocious teeth are telling us that these people had quite a luxurious lifestyle potentially yeah and very rarely the stories told by individual skeletons contain clues about the way these people interacted with each other so is this a is this a young person a juvenile it's a young person but I don't think it's really a juvenile if you look at the state of fusion it could be an individual who's between 10 and 16 years so looking here the end of the radius in the forearm that's that's still completely separate and the ends of these finger bones as well are still separate but if you come up here and look at the teeth you can see that actually they've got quite an adult denst do these teeth really belong with this skeleton they do and if I hadn't been there during the excavation I would have asked some questions about whether the skull did belong with the body but it really does so we're looking at somebody who from their teeth looks as though they're in their late early 20s yeah but from the rest of their bones looks as though they're a child still yeah a picture was emerging of a seriously disabled young man whose skeleton was ravaged by debilitating condition and if you go right down there to the knee you can see this right knee is really abnormal that's very odd if I pick up the left knee as well for comparison just looks odd doesn't it it's very flared the knee joint is so malformed that it probably would have caused them problems with walking so this person had a congenital problem they they're very short um they probably look slightly deformed as well but they're being buried in this High state of cemetery yeah and you can imagine that this is somebody who's potentially had to be cared for throughout their life and yet they've still managed to reach early adulthood so it's suggests that as the population their family their friends are looking out for them they're looking after them and affording them all the dignity and burial that everybody else in the cemetery was given so it really shows you that this is a community so much like us now you know caring for our sick for our young people for our elderly and for people with disabilities what's emerging is a different picture than we might expect of these so-called barbarians we're starting to see them as people like us members of families with friends and loved ones and this isn't just the perspective that we're getting at bambra 300 miles away to the Southwest Mark Horton has been researching a wonderful story of anglo-saxon royalty and a Wessex Princess in Love [Music] inside Momsy Abbey in Wilshire is a tomb dedicated to the first king of all England Athlon Athlon remarkably for his period was not just somebody who wanted to expand the the frontiers of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom but also wanted to create alliances with Europe and he systematically married off his sisters to all sorts of European rulers and princes and Dukes the most successful Alliance was between his sister Edith and Otto of Germany Not only was this a politically astute move but it also proved to be a great love affair Edith captured the imagination not only of Otto but also his course and the people around her because she was clearly stunningly beautiful um we know that that that Otto was very much devoted to her he gave magur as a diary this is this this this town on the frontier where she ended up being buried and where otter himself ended up being buried later on during recent excavations in magur Cathedral in Germany archaeologists set about exploring a 16th century sarcophagus dedicated to Edith was thought to be a senat it thought to be an empty tomb but actually inside was found a lead casket um and in that was an inscription that said these are the remains of Queen Edith that were placed here in the year 1510 but in the Middle Ages people constantly move bones around relics was big business so we really had to be certain that the bones were those of Edith and not some random person that have been scooped up in order to give this this tomb some credibility if these were her remains it would be an extremely significant find providing a direct link to the first king of England Athlon and only science can help us determine whose body this [Music] is two of the teeth found within the coffin were sent off to be analyzed at Bristol University Dr Alistair Pike planned a measure strontium Isotopes in the teeth to find out where this individual grew up strontium is found in soil and absorbed by plants and animals it finds its way into the bones and teeth of the people who eat them because teeth formed during childhood the strontium found in Dental enamel reflects where a person was born and raised and in Edith's case this would have been in wessix the Royal Kingdom at the heart of an emerging England as far as Alistair is concerned the results from the magur tomb are conclusive I think that we can be 99% certain that we have the remains of Princess Edith partly because the archaeological evidence suggests she's of the correct age but using the strontium Isotopes we can show that the the results are consistent with someone who's been brought up uh on the kind of geology that surrounds the Winchester area which is what the historical account just princess Edith did although Edith died over a thousand years ago she remains proof of our Timeless fascination with princesses she came back to England in the way that in her lifetime she would never have expected to do and she was an exceptional lady and somebody who really is at the Fountain Head of sort of modern Europe whose blood probably runs in the veins of most royal families in Europe today if Edith's bones tell a royal Love Story the skeleton of one young man from bambra encapsulates the violence of the Anglo-Saxon years and bears witness to his untimely death this is his left arm as part of his left shoulder you can see that this has been sliced away across the top of the shoulder and this is something which has happened in life rather than something which has happened to the bones in the ground definitely you can see if I put the rest of the shoulder together there that we've got another piece of bone which has been sliced away so this has happened while these two bones are actually stilled together as a joint something has sliced through them yeah absolutely so that's that's been a cut across his shoulder there and you can see here on the pelvis A Great Big Slice of bone has been completely cut away oh my goodness yeah yeah cleaved right across it has so that's sliced away the front of the pelvis quite cleanly M and all the way down to his left knee really down here again sliced off right on the left hand side a really clean slice so it's again taken off the side of his knee and this is slic down the entire left side of his body yeah it's really exciting because it gives us the possibility of even reconstructing how he was standing when the blow was struck so because of the way that his shoulder is cut we can tell that his arm must have been slightly forwards and across his body yeah so he's probably standing in a defensive pose yeah so he's actually involved in in the fight which happened which which led to the end and his left side which makes sense if you've got a right-handed aggressor yeah absolutely yeah and potentially somebody who's coming from a little bit above him as well do you think that he might have been a warrior it is possible even though he's quite small we know that um men in the Anglo-Saxon period started their careers quite early so we have evidence for boys as young as seven being sent to monasteries to train as monks and uh we know that uh the elite started training with weapons from quite a young age as well so from maybe around seven or eight he might have started learning how to use weapons so this is a young man who had a very tough physically demanding but very short life by looking at skeletons like these we can tell so much more about past societies and new technologies are allowing us to get at evidence that's locked away inside their bones and teeth about diet or even where they grew up but when you look at the bones laid out like that the skeleton of that young man for instance who died that horrific injury you realize there are also much more personal stories to be told the warrior Kings of North Umbria ruled bambra at sword point for hundreds of years and they left us one final reminder of their turbulent times almost unrecognizable now these swords are the ultimate symbols of anglo-saxon power these are quite magnificent items aren't they they're both I mean obviously they're corroded now but when we acerate them we can see the Deep structure and they're pattern welded uh which means that they're they're made out of a series of of rods um welded together with a blade added to the outside this one is particularly fine you can see that it actually survives there's a lot of metal in it it's very strong very coherent this has six bullets in the core of the blade so this would have been a high state of Sword definitely I mean six stranded swords are very very rare there are very few in Western Europe so the likelihood is that we're looking at something that may even more than just a an aristocratic Warrior this may have been genuinely an heirloom of the Royal House it may have been carried by Kings and looking at this this sword I can't help but remember back to the skeleton from the cemetery here who was obviously a young man who died at the hands of somebody wielding a weapon just like this the Royal swords and indeed the entire site of bambra are fitting symbols for the whole of anglo-saxon Britain [Music] there are still so many unanswered questions and the Mysteries will remain a challenge for archaeologists and historians to unlock for many years to come but it does offer us tangible connections too so what have I learned well in many ways these people were just like us they had holes in their teeth some were healthy others marked by disease and cared for by the communities but this was a time of great unrest and violence weapons became symbols of status and people died by the sword the struggle for power played out across all levels of society and even the dead were co-opted buried with Treasures of gold and precious ston whose real value seem to be as Badges of identity these people may not have left us detailed records of their lives but Archaeology is bringing them within our reach and the digging goes [Music] on [Music]

Channel: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries

Views: 280,100

Keywords: Ancient civilizations, Ancient relics, Anglo-Saxon life, British culture, British heritage, British history, Charlemagne era, Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries, Dark Ages Britain, Documentary series, Empire downfall aftermath, Hastings battle, Historical events, Jewelry artifacts, Kingdoms history, Medieval kingdoms, Medieval lifestyle, Pagan beliefs, Renaissance beginnings, Renaissance era origins, Societal aspects

Id: _wz_E1zAhlg

Length: 49min 46sec (2986 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2024