Cornwall's Biggest Iron Age Site | FULL EPISODE | Time Team

this is gear in Cornwall right by the lizard peninsula and this massive field is part of all of the County's most impressive hill forts you can see its shape from this aerial photo it's a huge 18 acre field surrounded by a bank and ditch in fact it's so big that an antiquarian visiting here in the early 20th century thought that it was the remains of an Iron Age city and look at this we Pitt have another hill fort and this one seems to have two enclosures and as you can see it's right next door over there this is Cove alak and when the same antiquarian Charles Henderson visited here he wondered whether this fortress as he called it might be the place where the Iron Age people ran to when they were under attack the problem is that even though these are two of Cornwall's best preserved prehistoric sites no one knows anything about them we don't even know if they're from the same period and that's why time teams here we've been given the rare opportunity to find out whether these two sites are both Iron Age and if so what was going on here 2,000 years ago it's a tall order how much can we find out about these two hill sites in just three days [Music] day 1 of probably the most ambitious time team yet too scheduled ancient monuments to investigate at the bigger site gear 4 acres of the 18 acre field have been plowed ready for a new crop so we're seizing the opportunity to search this area for find by field walking although I'm not going to admit it to Mick I can't help but be impressed that so much works already underway as usual GF is are busy trying to detect what's under the ground while Henry is doing a GPS survey which will allow us to make a 3d model of this hill fort Mickey's 9:45 day one what's going on what's all the frenzy well we've got a great opportunity here Tony these two sheduled ancient monuments there's never been any work done on them there probably won't be any done in the near future so we've got to get as much done as we can look this one alone is a teenager I know there's only a certain amount we're going to be able to do in the time that that's for sure but I think there's certain things we can do which will help to sort out whether Iron Age where they're contemporary we've actually started to trenches already we got this one with Jenny and up here at gear and we've got this one down here that Corinne's is running it over at keV Alec if we can get to the bottom of the ditches of those we can find it was any dating material hello Jen can you hear me hi Tony yeah we definitely have woody Gary and Charlie raped up on harnesses and hanging off the tree well it may but we've just cleaned up we've got rid of all the vegetation and we're getting rid of the modern buildup on top of the rampart so we can see what's there and once we've got that underway we really need to get into the ditch and start digging that because if it's big it's obviously gonna be a bit of a race against time to get to the bottom of it and we've got another one to carrenza here are over Kavala kia Carranza can you hear me yeah Tony hi yeah we've been at it for a while now well looking at it it obviously is very old there's a clue from the place name in a way I suppose kevala care means fort or castle and Vala well the earliest spelling of that is mahalik in 10:17 it means important person so the meaning seems to be fort of the important person which sounds great because that's a thousand years later than the Iron Age so at the moment we're only on on guesses and hopes really hill fort is an old term often given to prehistoric sites like these meaning that they were built with defense in mind the modern view however is that they probably had many different functions and were often more about status than defense but so little is known about enclosures like these in Cornwall commonly called rounds that anything we can find out about them is going to be an important step forward the only clues to what's been happening at gear in the past come from the fines collected by farmer rex Hosken this is what you've picked up over the years yeah roughly between 1980 and 1990 about ten year period yeah the family is to laugh at me if you think bringing all these bits of stone and spend an hour washing in the sink so after a while there's a lot of fin tear film I mean that is what makes it such a nice collection as far as I'm concerned yeah the fact that there is so much Flint yeah the one piece that I can be absolutely certain about yeah is that oh well that little spike on the end that is a chisel Arrowhead cutting edge across the top probably half did like that and that is definitely gonna be late Neolithic maybe two and a half thousand BC IQ snap looks as if that would give you a sort of blunt edge on the end of you watch me make I mean if this is coming at you a fair old lick you got this razor-sharp edge along there right that ain't blunt I expect that our internal point on me you know say this will cut I mean what all this boils down to is it just demonstrates to me just how long people have been living on this yeah never mind the elf fort for the time being people have been living here for thousands of years before that fort was bit but it's this selection of Iron Age pottery lumps of iron slag and also items like this Grice and stone Bowl a copy of a Roman ceramic bowl that have prompted the idea that gear field was busiest in the Iron Age in romano-british period something like 2,000 to 1800 years ago the first jiffy's results are ready for gear field and appear to be showing the location of what might be an Iron Age round house with a hearth in the middle the results are so good that we've asked geophys to press on and extend the survey in the meantime fill an English heritage inspector Ian Morrison a keen to get a trench started to test the results yeah so what we're proposing to do is actually to put trench through that you saw if we if there is an entrance we got a better chance of getting it yeah you were happy with that very yep well I've just dug this hole and we can see how deep the class soil is now so yeah get on with it Shane machine not off yeah it's two months to move by hand I'm glad you the plow soil here on top of the hills only nine inches deep so it doesn't take long to carefully expose the first layer of archaeology a decisions made to widen the trench and straightaway Phil's got more to shout about - they're an enormous bit of pot broken down through there such that since it you oh look here it goes again there it goes it's burnished look at that look we got this big big piece here look no crow I'm going the way around there yeah yeah and in there look and then there's this bit here that's right yeah I don't know I don't know I don't know that bit we've dislodged this is yes it's definitely not Bronze Age it's looking promising could we have a complete Iron Age pot sitting inside a round house okay and you're working well Phil's job now is to carefully widen the trench even more just that little veneer of topsoil there where whip that back and we'll clean it back as we go with two sides to deal with the geophys team started early and did their survey at Kerr VALIC yesterday as you can see it clearly shows lots going on in the outer enclosure but initially a trench is being opened up here to investigate the strongest signals in this area you can see here we don't really have to have very many structural type anomalies in this area at all and they say we've got a nice group of pic type things here hooked up against the bank I mean we're very tempted by all of this over here well there's obviously a lot going on but we did feel having opened one trench over the rampart ditch on this enclosure we really need to finish investigating this really before we start looking at another enclosure so we're having for some dating evidence from here but that's what we really want from this enclosure is some dating evidence from one or other of the trenches to give us any idea of how old is these monuments are scheduled monuments scheduled attention once we the the long-term a in is preservation of these the future generally yeah yeah yeah and yet you seem very keen to learn more about them and to do that we've got to dig holes in them yeah I'm just destroying them isn't it well it is I mean it is but it is a common misconception that scheduled monuments should be fossilized should be preserved yeah not touch yeah it's extremely important that to realize that scheduling is more about protecting it from these sites from development from erosion from the gradual loss of ARCA logical information without any record I mean of course we've got to preserve large amounts of these sites for future generations because you know how our political science has developed over the last few years you said a large proportion of the leaving the idea that you could you should always sacrifice a little bit to learn some well you know what is it for it's it we need to understand about them more about our past as if you don't know what's there how do you decide how best to keep here the plowed area and gear has been divided into five meter squares and we're hoping that the systematic search will show up any concentration of fines Bronze Age Flint from their scraper nothing ready to spend probably about twenty or pieces of Iron Age pottery now what's this just found it that is certainly Iron Age pottery yep is probably the best piece we've had so far it's looks like a little beaker whereabouts was it in something down there as well that's it see I mean if we get all these spots put on the plan and then once we've done that we can we can get somebody in there to dig them at least if we know they're there quite right Phil no time for monkeying around but spirits are high because even I can see we've got what looks like a complete Iron Age pot sitting in the ground next to an area of burning probably a half and the curving wall of what must be a round house showing up around it but the best news of all is that the latest installment of GF is is showing that the higher ground in this field is crammed with archaeology and this is fantastic there's a spectacular results yeah yeah are all these circular things early human habitation well I think I think it must be most it with these circles and lines it all looks yeah this is a very great maxing here you've got this clear earlier boundary don't either sits on top off always earlier than yeah I mean that's clearly one of the targets you should go for isn't it the relationship of that to this big thing I think we should look at that we look at this double ditch thing in case it's a barrow we stay like an early burial burial mound something like that or rather than a house and then this ditch thing here which I think he you know looks as if it might be a sort of earlier ditch or in a ditch presumably your track round there and perhaps you'll have a look at that but in none of the big Cornish prehistoric sites have ever had this amount of GF is done on them so this is all new and exciting information the challenge is where to place each of our new trenches in the hope we can identify Iron Age occupation from Bronze Age or possibly even earlier activity in this field we're approaching the end of day one are we doing as well at Kerr VALIC we've been really worried all day that this site might turn out to be really late because we found nothing but we have now got quite a lot o IH pottery excellent Wow we've got a couple of rib sheds and it's all quite freshly broken what do you mean freshly broken well you can see here these edges aren't at all worn they're really very much just as they went into the soil so it shows they hadn't been moved around a lot so basically they've come from here yes so it proves that this site is Iron Age which is fantastic we never knew that before we've unearthed several different types of Iron Age pottery coming from a feature that might turn out to be a rubbish pit meanwhile how's Barney getting on digging the ditch and rampart that goes around care Vallot I'm getting on fine brilliant we've got ton basically a huge rock-cut ditch now is that an Iron Age cut that vertical section or is that what the dig is just then no no this is I don't know whether it's Iron Age but it's certainly old it's of antiquity this is the original ditch cut to going straight through bedrock it's at least four metres wide this ditch and it's at least a metre deep so right the way around the ring work that's got to be thousands of tons of stone that's been moved the most amazing the impressive monument then with that vertical face through a rock very difficult to get into yeah absolutely tomorrow Barney all hoped to find some dating evidence in the bottom of the ditch but it's been a great day one at both sites and to cap it all I've just been handed yet more GF his results from gear field it's five to seven fills up to his neck in archaeology what have you got fill with the most important thing Tony is we've got our middle Iron Age pot look at that it's a beautiful rim middle Iron Age probably about 300 BC and it comes from our Iron Age round house what part of the Iron Age house is that that is the foundation trench and here is the doorway so tomorrow we'll take out some more of the foundation trench we'll lift the pot over there and we'll start digging in the hearth as well gentlemen before we knock off for the evening have a look at this Jeff is there's gonna be some real hard chatting about where we do on that and though it is fantastic isn't it do you want to say it properly join us after the break beginning of day two yesterday evening I rather unfairly failed to show you our GF is results look at that isn't that pretty virtually all of this is human activity and most of it appears to be prehistoric this little thing here is what we're excavating over here and it looks like it's an Iron Age heart over here we're having a meeting because with all this stuff going on how the heck do we choose what to dig and what we just leave alone after all we only got two days left Mick so much lovely stuff and so little time we're discussing what we're digging here of course this is the big trench and we've got one in there that's not producing the great deal that you've not gone deep enough now okay so we need to do more there we'd already decided we were going to do something across this noble ditch thing here so you know those three targets are on yeah I mean I think the problem is isn't it it's that we're not looking at one phase of occupation here looking at several phases and it's very difficult to understand exactly what we've got and what we really need to do is to try and extend the area to do affairs before we actually start to make concrete decisions on where to put the next track that we're gonna do even more John down here in this funny little bit sounds like it one reason for waiting for more GF is is that they might get even clearer results on the lower slopes of the hill where a buildup of soil may have protected the archaeology from plow damage but surely the rest of the field can't be as good as this can it meanwhile Jenny and her team are making great progress excavating the ditch and rampart to find out how and when it was constructed while what seems like miles away in the plowed area of the hill thought the archeology in our round house is much easier to see without the full glare of the Sun you see there's a distinct red line yeah which comes along there right it's very heavily burnt there with the black it comes along there around there yeah it's like a flow and then it comes back down this end here what we've got then is a ton of enormous heat and we've got big lumps of charcoal there and they're actually in the flue right there's another piece there look yeah is it similar the things you've seen elsewhere it's all things you've done you said I'll tell you what it reminds me of this could be the tunnel to a pottery kiln right possibly right but is that the sort of thing you're gonna have in a building not inside a building but anyway you're looking at so many phases aren't with pizza suggesting that it could be the remains of a kiln perhaps something like this and not a straightforward half where the cooking would normally be done one thing's for sure we definitely have a complete Iron Age pot sunk into the floor of the house that's the man looks like it is surface decorated well southwest decorated is exactly what my response was gonna be we're definitely talking about our age between saw 200 and 100 BC USA Wow what's amazing is that the archaeology is so close to the surface something Rex is well aware of when we asked Rex how deep the archaeology was he said 9 inches yeah and how do you say well it's about nine inches everywhere we've looked yes right and then what what's happened is Rex hasn't plowed very deeply at all and he can tell that from the finder that we're picking up in the field so you've done no more damage than fatter than hundreds of years of plowing over the site I think in the past we've got a picture of an old steam plow here oh yeah I think this is the the Beast that did most of the damage about 100 hundred and fifty years ago when they'd have a steam engine either side of the field would just plow from one side of the other and they use that to actually bust up ground the problem is is that the modern tractors these days that they use most in most of the country where there are intensive farming they tend to go deep they tend to break into the subsoil and pull it pull it up and destroy the archaeology whereas Rex doesn't use this you know the bigger machines and has been very careful to stay above the archeology and care Valek we've discovered iron age pits in the small enclosure and an impressive rock-cut ditch surrounding the site but so far we found no sign of any round houses charondas now turning her attention to the outer enclosure where we've got lots of intriguing geophys signals but it seems to be within a complex of other anomalies site totally absolutely and I turn on Sam I really don't know what's happening here this is the only way we're gonna find out if the outer enclosure was occupied in the Iron Age meanwhile a gear the delicate task of lifting the two thousand one hundred year old sunken pot is about to begin round the difficulty is of course I'll have to get in behind all the and then hopefully as we lift them we can lay them in the tray in their relative in their relative position so instead of just having a load of pop just bundled in it will give us some idea that when you're removing pot like this if ever you break a bit do you beat yourself up or can you feel relatively philosophical about it generally I think I'd probably want to beat myself up I mean there's a certain element of that that says you you know you are philosophical but I think if you care about what you're doing then you certainly don't want to mess it up thanks to Phil's careful work it was possible to restore this pot which intriguingly had its base cut off and even our experts couldn't think of a reason why that might have been done [Music] you're very privileged Rex to do this normally we don't have a helicopter big enough to carry any passengers right so we wouldn't want everybody to give the impression that you can get a helicopter ride this would be defended he'll fault with it well the term hill forts confusing because people tend to think of hill forces as like beef defended military places whereas in fact what we ought to think of these great big enclosures is they they serve the purpose as a community center places where people come to where they trade where the exchange sleep and this site sits the head of a big estuary on the hey vlog and I think that's important it's location is important from that point of view of trading and where people actually come to and I think we've got to view eaters as serving this big headland community because although there are lots of places like cave Alacoque on this headland there's only one enclosure the size of substance of gear stewards been looking at the distribution of prehistoric sites in Cornwall and interestingly well there are literally hundreds of smaller round similar to care VALIC gear is one of only 20 or so large enclosures and the only one in this area on the lizard peninsula but was this huge enclosure at gear created in the Iron Age to find out we've been digging across this ditch which goes on around the 18 acre site as luck would have it how 2 meter wide trench hasn't turned up any dating evidence but Peter Reynolds reckons it's all been worthwhile to see the construction of the rampart you've got a big ditch here you've got a bank and where Jenny is it doesn't have to be a massive palisade fence they're just ordinary fence another five feet on top of that that's really a statement we are here you say it's a statement so you're saying it's not primarily for defense more to say how powerfully well I don't think any of these enclosures could be defended there aren't enough people living inside to take on a sustained attack from outside they are always vulnerable I think the other thing that impresses me is it's how clever they were and using the the contour of the land that was already here to build it they've used a sort of a slight natural slate that's here already to sort of ease the amount of work they've had to do it yeah because the natural stuff is here isn't it Jen yeah just there they're very orange stuff is what was there already runs across to there yeah so is that lump of sticks out then they reckon the old ground surface on which the rampart was built yes everything from me to basically soapy would they have used the this little platform here to build up the higher material and then as a platform to wall right well not so much to walk around its initial purpose is to stop the bank eroding into the DES falling into the ditch and as soon as you've got grass or vegetation going on there is all stabilized yeah that's the real purpose of a berm it doesn't explode B erm you've got a really nice berm Jenny thank you very much close to the rampart Rex found a small cache of rounded stones and these are typical of what's been found at other Iron Age side stones you couldn't possibly have stones all this size just happen accidentally these have been deliberately collected to be used as slingshots and I'll betcha by the look of the surface conditions they've come off the beach Iron Age reenactor David Freeman's here to demonstrate how effective a weapon the slingshot was if you had a pact was it for the Romans if they'd have been on the receiving end of problems get one in the face it'll just simply take all the bones out without any bother told it'll kill you almost instantly the gap at the top of the armor if it hits him through there you'll go embed itself in your chest in the Roman medical manuals there is actually instructions on how to get a sling stone out of a soldier's body it's using a pair of tongs that are pushed in to grab the stone too but they have to hold them down on the table coasters no anesthetics naturally Phil wanted to go better yes in our little experiment we managed a distance of about 80 meters and in terms of speed enough fun and games time at last to let John have a break while we look at his latest GF is to extend the survey look at these anomalies really clear there's a really nice enclosure there looks as though it's got sort of pits fired material in that area there in this stonking windage with us up annex insight and you've got these are presumably still the later the MOT more modern field walls like the sort of thing you see we've bushes on the top and everything yeah if you see this irregularity around here and there's another linear feature here and if you see there's almost another one there which seems to respect both joining up which suggests to me a possible field pattern but the the uniformity of a circle there's almost certainly structural so presumably we're looking at a round house there and this is some sort of farm yard or enclosure it doesn't have to be a big village yeah no that's right so I think we're talking about a trench we ought to be going in there and it annoying that if you follow my finger here we've got some kind of internal division which comes down around the slope and almost respects that right out there and the curious thing is is that all of the round features are within it there's none yet as yet that come out side by side there so why might that make this one a particular interest well because we can get the relationship between the two it's almost like killing two birds with one stone I could buy that if we were trying to you know hit two targets there see what happens with that in relation to that one but I still think that's probably where we should start and we've got a couple of hours left to today we can get quite a lot to home innit couple of hours there's only five o'clock hell's teeth when do we ever stop the fuel assembly it's like - half past eight isn't it nice how the stagers good news we're gonna hold off digging this until we get more GF is about this area which might be part of a settlement that's earlier than our age this trench in the meantime should establish if we've got Bronze Age activity in this part of the field and it isn't long before we've got our first clue what are you thinking I know I know yeah yeah and the fact it's much thicker in the way that is that is a lot cruder than what I was finding at the top there yeah go on put a datum oh yeah that's a terrible thing you're asking me to do but as a hunch I'd say it's promising yeah I mean it's been another terrific day a gear and there's just time to check on how currents has got on at keV Alec okay so we're in this figure of 8 yeah we buy that change then and what do we got well it's very difficult to see anything with stretch in terms of what the geophysics produce but we've got this spread of stones in the trench here yeah which we think might be the very top of a large pit the really interesting stuff we have had coming out of here has been the fines haven't had a huge number that almost every single one of them has told us something really interesting but the brilliant thing the really really interesting thing that we found is that that I knew I'd have trouble convincing you listen you have a look at it see how shiny it is touch if you're not smooth it is oh isn't it yeah and there's the same surface there and what this is you can see the lines of those two things it is the tip of a blade of a polished Flint axe and in the Neolithic 4,000 years ago these were your 150,000 pounds ports cut these are the big status items those polished stones are they Neolithic - we don't know we're thinking they're Iron Age but that's before for humvee the axe but the really important thing is there's no Flint locally this has come from a long way where it may have come as a really important gift and some rest for as Kent priests what are you doing peeping up and down our tree well I'm just trying to find out how magnetic the soil is on the surface here Tony to see if there's definitely a pit here and the good news is that in amongst all these stones I think that the readers are very high for you and there must be a big pit hopefully there'll be a lot more to come given what we've already had at that beautiful axe of what else might come out of here so we've only just skimmed the surface here and it looks as though maybe the whole reason why this site was so important in the Iron Age was because part of it and in particular this part may have been high status for 2,000 years prior to that one day left join us after the break to see the puzzle of the burnt wood Nick to visit an Iron Age roundhouse will read peg and to judge my performance as a geophysicist beginning of day 3 welcome back here are our two hill sites there's the little one there and I'm in the big one most of the activities taking place here but I'm now at the far end here I've been brought down here by Stuart who's desperately excited about some things he always is on day three what is it this time - well I think we've got the entrance into enclosure Tony mentalistic well just there the reason I wanted to come here was that we've walked all around the circuit of the earthworks and although it was originally hidden by trees there was a definite gap through the earthworks there plus we had this earth photograph which shows a crop mark of a track way coming across this field here no that truck way came across this field here but you can't see now photographs are taken at a different time when the conditions aren't right for showing the crop mark but in the wood you can actually trace it as a physical feature a hollow way down the slope leading to the estuary at the bottom so I'm an Iron Age man and I'm just coming out of the gate well could I see ahead of me well amazingly you'd see the next significant enclosure which is Castle Penn care and that would be visible as you approach the entrance but as you go through it it disappears so it does seem to be significantly placed in relation to the next big slide like this there Ben gates Oh there have been quite quite large gates here probably wouldn't wooden structures they may have been stone because there's a rock-cut ditch here but that's what we're hoping to find that out what have we got in the trench Charlie can you explain to tell me what we've got well it looks as though we've got the rock cut causeway across the ditch here which is left in where the ditch was expected and it looks as though it's possible here we've got the end of the ditch coming around right with the entrance then coming through here finds often turn up in the ends of the ditch where the ditch meets the causeway so we're still hopeful that we might get some dating evidence for the construction of this huge enclosure our ever-expanding geophys plot continues to show signs of settlement over thousands of years and our job of trying to find out which squiggly line belongs to which period isn't getting any easier yesterday we put in a trench over this enclosure and it's produced pottery that looks to be Bronze Age or earlier because this enclosure appears to be linked to another one we're going to assume that this one's early to in and mik have decided to place our last trench here to see if this is an even better preserved round house sitting inside a big Iron Age boundary ditch Geoff is only three you tell me exhausted yeah we've still got lots to do we've got this triangle in here to finish off Jonah has what you yes okay what you've got to do is walk in a straight line between that double peg and that double peg 20 metres away yeah that actually controls the speed at which you walk yeah so at the start it's all switched on set up you flick that switch and then you should hear the sound you have to walk at that pace constant pace so that by the time you get to that other double peg it's come to the end of the line yeah it stops beeping why do I have to walk at a constant pace because it's taking readings automatically and it's on a timer basis so as you walk along it's actually measuring the magnetism in the soil yeah and so if you went at different paces we wouldn't know where you were right and keep it a bit closer to the ground right if we go yep faster aim for that with double red peg it's not bad let's start in the middle of the plowed area we're still investigating the Iron Age round house we uncovered on day one here to help us make sense of it he's Iron Age expert Henriette quenelle the pottery all right well very interesting indeed here we've got a very long narrow furnace or kiln or something like this we through hit fill was looking at it earlier all we found is a red patch here but it's now turned into this very long structure we're getting bits of pottery out of it like this oh yes well that's a nice rim sure definitely later iron age possibly really quite late in the iron age very good quality you can yell from the thinness of the web you would see that as right at the end right up against the sort of Roman conquest I'm with you it's certainly for quality which was occurring at that time yes yeah it doesn't really tell us what this is though that's what we're trying to find out well it is not inside this era stone it's inside the house and what's interesting is that it's aligned straight towards the entranceway so it looks as though there might have been a through draft shower coming engine sees the entranceway is here this is one end of the wall and this is the other so it's about three meters wide it comes through here as a reminder of what Iron Age buildings looks like Phil and Peter Reynolds have gone to visit a reconstructed round house at hua drifty about 20 miles away I mean you get something like this and an hour soit suddenly springs to life you imagine dozens of these all over the hill for the big difference with this house is that it's built in an area where Granite's available whereas the walls of round houses at gear more likely were built of Earth and faced with small stones similar to a Cornish hedge at the Cornish hedges you know where you've got two sets of stones either side and an earth infill what would that leave archaeologically if you were to plow it out to hell and back oh yeah it would disappear wouldn't it all that skillet would smash down into the tiny we find in the soil yeah like the soil would be distributed fairly evenly through time and all you'd have is the foundations range which is what we've got let's have a look inside the size of this round house is similar to the one kate is currently excavating as you can see the roof doesn't have a hole in it the smoke from the hearth would have gradually seeped out through the thatch now we've got a beaten earth floor and functional floor a really good floor and in in the middle the hearth but the thing that really saddens me on a site is that we've got this beautiful building we've got no evidence for that at all none and yet from an excavation point of view it gets worse because we wouldn't even get the floor it's all been plowed away and the only thing we're going to get is that is the magnetic anomaly from where the fire was very base of the deepest features that's all there is and a gear we're still thinking that the deepest feature might be the remains of a furnace or kiln fantastic while we've been chatting away Jos just uncovered this looks like a whole plank going in to look into this is grain on it yeah so almost the last charred piece of wood yes but if that's continuous grain it's a very substantial piece of wood isn't here mm-hmm I don't want to throw a spanner in the words it does make you wonder whether in fact we've been interpreting this the wrong way and whether we've actually got a timber line feature which just happened to catch it yes all that drop there's so much happening at gear that it's easy to forget were actually investigating two sites and Kev Alec Carranza's found more pottery in the outer enclosure and wants to know if it's 4,000 years old and goes with the fragment of Neolithic axe she found yesterday well it's very nice it's got a superb decoration of curved in size lines I don't know if you can see it in this light but you've got a double line there and a double line there outlining a kind of leaf shape a kind of curvilinear pattern and this is entirely distinctive of southwestern decorated where the pottery which is common down here from about 300 BC onwards but it's very nice iron aged pottery this southwestern decorated ware comes in a variety of forms this is very good quality some of the decoration is entirely geometric so what on earth is a Neolithic axe doing in an Iron Age trench well the axe is definitely a Neolithic that doesn't change that and I guess what must have happened there's some high status activity there's somebody important up here in the Neolithic because that piece of axe fragment hasn't walked up here by itself someone's owned it so I still think this site is 4,000 years old we've had high status activity going on here sporadically in the Neolithic from what henriette says the Iron Age pottery is very nice and the great thing is we've now got a definite date for the feature we found that pit that we were looking for the geophysics last night it's full of this pottery so we've now got a really accurate date for it and that's brilliant I just like what's coming up in the bottom here they say we've got masses of this it's possibly just lying here huge lumps of it there's a much more of it back in Section as well just lying on the bottom of this pit and it could just be the the rubbish that's been thrown down on the bottom of the pit or who knows maybe it's all one vessel and it's the vessel it's been sort of offered to the gods in a pit but rubbish your gods its Iron Age it's Iron Age [Music] so what we've been able to discover at keV Alec is that it appears to be dotted with iron age pits full of high status pottery the puzzle is that we've found no trace of any round houses here although who knows what a trench across some of these other geophysical walls might have revealed we've run out of time on this site but we have achieved our main objective we've proved that both enclosures that care VALIC date back to at least the Iron Age and although Barney wasn't lucky enough to find any dating evidence in this trench he did establish that it had an incredibly impressive ditch cut through sheer rock suggesting that this must have been a place of some importance in the iron age and gear not only are we building up an incredible map of archaeology but we've got the field walking results which can be cross-referenced with it and of course the pottery is interesting because in areas that we haven't been able to dig we've got great concentrations where there must be other houses and other occupations to clear down that area Katie meanwhile has forgotten all about kilns and is excavating what's clearly a plank of iron aged wood in the center of our original roundhouse a plank of wood going along the bottom here which might have been pierced by holes that held up Watling you can see that this dinner this dinner sticks here and here yeah and there's some over the other side there which might have been used as a partition wall in the middle of the Round House does that make sense to you it doesn't make nonsense that's for sure the experts have to admit they've never seen anything like this before inside an Iron Age house normally wood doesn't survive it's only that it got burnt 2,000 years ago that's preserved it for us to puzzle over today it might be a an actual physical structure of some kind which needed to be held upright so you've got a beam at the bottom things stuck into it that sounds like something like a loom or something to me the only problem with that make is if it's a loom normally you turn them sign onto the doorway well yes to get the light from over there that's right yeah can I not see some rods of sort of charcoal in the end of the section there an analysis of these remains in the lab might provide an answer but in the meantime Katie's remembered some other evidence that might help to solve the mystery there are actually some polished stones over there behind Peter which might be associated with alou well with sort of cloth smooth and or sinking now it's but it could be you know when you think about it if those stones are used not just for cost but for skins and then you would need a rigid frame a really powerful framework to hold a skin in place while you're actually breaking down the fibers of the damn thing yeah so those rubbing stones might be part of it too you're right well that's certainly a thousand times more shiny than all the stones around it but isn't that just natural no way that this kind of high-gloss only comes from regular use on working something like cloth or leather so it could have been a plank of wood seated in the ground holding perhaps a frame like this in order to carry out an activity that must have been commonplace around here in 300 BC that's one interpretation Victor yes well it could have been why it burned nobody know I hear you've got some good news chaps oh we've got some brilliant news that's a big well what we've got here is the the end of the ditch which defines the entrance right to the enclosure here you're standing right on the entrance to the big historic enclosure so we now know that this is the original entrance rather than anywhere else that's absolute and we've got some pottery here we've got this large chunk of Quebec pottery which came from well down towards the bottom of the ditch where they're working now and the whole thing has got very soft and soggy no it's very very fragile but even so it's sufficiently of the type that I think one could be fairly certain that it's Iron Age they came across the bottom now you know the implications for that oh yeah that's right clear at the beginning of the site yep one piece of pottery but such an important find because it tells us that the ditch and rampart around this huge site were created by people in the Iron Age but why did they need such a big Center at year stewart's convinced this huge enclosure was a meeting and trading place designed to be seen for miles around the Garen closure tilts down it's actually on the slope facing this direction quite deliberately so it can be seen for once the experts almost agree with each other what we're actually seeing is a center which might have served the community for a wide distance around as a center perhaps in the summer for exchange ritual and general gets to get together so you think into this almost like a sort of equivalent of a small town perhaps a small market town something like that yes I I think I agree with Henrietta that it's a settlement it's not a hill fort but I do think what we're looking at here is the service industry which is servicing all the agriculture all over the place we're almost out of time but we've now unearthed the second round house and established that the iron age occupation stretches across this enclosure this round house is better preserved and full of some of the highest status pottery we've seen it gear most importantly we found evidence to establish that both gear and care valack were in use at the same time do our experts have an opinion of what care VALIC was used for could could we play a game and say that this is for the people cove alak could well be that small round could well be the impressive Center for the big man of the area the mr. big well you could play that game or you could say that the Cabal ik was more for an elite of whatever kind within society you want to know something about these two sites well something would be nice we've know so much more than we did well three days ago yeah it seems like a lifetime ago three days ago but we've only excavated less than 1/10 of 1% of the archaeology we're standing slap-bang in the middle of an Iron Age round house and even though we've almost finished still beautiful fines are coming up like this lovely piece of an fora high status pottery for pouring wine it's been a great three days but the final piece of the jigsaw is the Geo phase of the whole place John have you finished it yet he's still healthy 30 seconds ago a whole great picture Ian have a lot I mean that's absolutely amazing we've never had anything like this before in call and I mean the complexity of it is it's just absolutely fantastic there's enough here to keep the experts talking for years ignore the relatively modern field boundaries we've proved that these are Iron Age houses and it's likely that all these are - we believe that these ditches are earlier and probably part of a Bronze Age site occupying this area of the field which was expanded into a much bigger enclosure in the Iron Age there are other intriguing anomalies like this one near the entrance and perhaps even a Neolithic field system hidden away in this fantastic archaeological map showing occupation here over four thousand years and made possible by the wonders of geophysics Fiona Christina John do you know how far you've walked over the last three days far too far we've calculated it at 62 and a half miles Phillip Rex we know we spend most of the time slagging you nevertheless here you are this is for you from the work you've done [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 201,373

Rating: 4.9149184 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, Iron Age, British Iron Age, Phoenician Legacy, Cornwall, Wealas, 900 to 500 BCE, Celts, Britons, Common Brittonic, Cornish, Diodorus Siculus, Pytheas, Belerion, Gaul, Rhône

Id: fmFxCVppfT4

Length: 49min 24sec (2964 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020