Could These Scottish Island Ruins Be Viking Remains? | Extreme Archaeology | Absolute History

[Music] all over britain there are archaeological sites that are too dangerous to access or excavate they could contain unique and valuable evidence of our past which if not investigated will be lost forever exa is a team of highly skilled archaeologists katie hearst in charge of excavation alice roberts doctor and expert in human bones meg waters geophysicist and digital imaging specialist all experts in their chosen fields who are determined to get into these inhospitable places to forensically assess survey and extract the evidence the expedition leader will be me mark davis volcanologist climber caver and diver this is archaeology on the very edge [Music] this week we are all on a steep learning curve as we investigate this shetland sea stack that could have once been home to a group of solitary monks this is the came of icebuster a jagged tongue of rock in the far north of shetland this inhospitable place holds the key to solving a strange archaeological mystery these rectangular features appear to be the remains of houses so the big question is who would choose to live in a remote and barren landscape like this now no archaeologist has had the privilege of setting foot on the game exa is about to be the first 200 miles north of the scottish mainland the came of icebuster is one of the most remote archaeological sites in britain kane meaning rocky point or promontory describes perfectly this wild and precipitous coastline [Music] these strange rectangular features were first observed over 100 years ago and a fascinated archaeologist ever since but because no one has ever got nearer than this speculation as to their history has been rife they could have their origins in shetland's dark pink-dish past they could be part of a monastery no one knows for sure exa has been invited here to finally put speculation to rest 30 miles north of the nearest town two miles east of the nearest house getting close to the site is an expedition in itself and we've arrived in october not exactly the best time for an archaeological excavation as the team wait for the weather to clear they've got time to reflect on the remoteness of the site what you have to really think about is why on earth would anybody go onto that cane it's completely isolated so the only people who i can think of who are going to do that are a monastic community monks yeah certainly you could show some of your contemplation out there exactly but the other thing that they could be are leper colonies as well that would be amazing yeah i mean if we if we find any evidence of of skeletons with leprosy leprosy is quite sort of uh easy to diagnose on the skeletons it's really vital to find out what dates these structures are so we're going to have to look for things like pottery or carbon 14 dating outside things like paths okay we'll get charred grain charred wood with this strong wind it's going to be a bit of a challenge but we'll try to get some some good data out of it but hearths should show up why is it going to be a challenge because it's so windy because the magnetometer itself is going to get buffeted by the wind and when you collect it it needs to be very steady very straight on the same plane the whole time right so we'll give it a good go see see what it's like okay well if you start doing that and we can start opening up some trenches we just have to get over there oh yeah the access onto the site is one of the most extreme we've so far attempted a 50 meter knife edge arrett a 20 meter climb another longer knife edge than an even higher climb made worse by gusting wind and rain the delivery team have spent two days rigging hundreds of meters of rope fixed to the shallow soil by steel anchors the axis is severe even by their standards all right guys well this is as far as we're gonna gonna be able to go without being clipped on so we've set these ropes up the ones along the ground just going to clip into and at various stages you'll have to transfer over so first of all we've got these two ropes that you're going to going to get you to the short climb here now you're about 150 feet or so above the sea and it's very steep on both sides um you're going to have to be transferring over from one line to the other is it safe with all this wind howling across it's really exposed isn't it well it's safe as long as we're actually clipped into something there's always always always make sure you're attached at one point okay these ribbons are strong enough to take our weight are they this is kevlar this can take up to about four tons of weight absolutely no way this is gonna break for safety reasons the team have to negotiate each stage of the axis one at a time katie is the first to face the long walk the sheep track across the aret is badly eroded with great areas of undercutting and slippage on either side the other side of the rope underneath it the route is only one boot wide and extremely slippy guys see what you mean about the rock being crumbly if you take off in the wind i've got you attached i'll reel you back in who aware the conditions and the crumbly state of the rock have made the going very slow this will severely restrict our time on site yeah absolutely do whatever it takes kd's slip at least proves all the safety systems are fully working the delay is given make time to reflect on her upcoming ordeal it looks really daunting to me and and being so slippery and windy like this i just i i am a bit nervous [Music] okay can you clip one of your slings into that black rope please can we come up this bit with katie on the final stretch meg is faced with the biggest slippiest and wettest rock climb she's so far attempted she'll climb it she'll be fine good well done meg nice looking good by the time alice sets off the wind and rain has got much worse well having said i wasn't worried about it i haven't seen two people get ahead of me um and a lot of rocks fall off slightly more worried slippery it's really really loose crumbly rock it's not like anything you've climbed on before as bean tries to duck the gusts our cameraman is not so quick and gets blown off a bone jar in three meter fall the safety lines hold and jamie escapes with a cut finger and dented camera it's hard to imagine who in their right mind would live in a place like this it's got 220 feet cliffs that just drop down to the sea and on the far side there's a 30 degree slope that just edges down to the churning water itself local archaeologist val turner has been puzzled by the structures on the cane for almost 20 years there are two possibilities really either that it's early christian or alternatively that it's a leper colony so a group of outcasts yes people who are shunned by society although society would keep on feeding them or whatever they didn't want close contact with so when you say christians what sort of age are we looking at there well it could be pictish in which case it would be from about 600 to 800 a.d something like that but why would they send christians out onto that rocky promontory i mean it's it's pretty barren isn't it well it could be monastic yeah or alternatively it could be more like a place that they went for retreat okay so contemplation retreat and if it's a leper colony what sort of day are we looking at there that would be later that would be either late medieval or really um quite recent i mean it could extend over any period within that so if you've got a wish list for exa what would that be definitely to find out the date and find out who lived here okay and your hunch well i have a suspicion that it might be fictitious christians but we should say [Music] the only other person in modern times to get onto the game was george gordon coburn a theology student and amateur climber who in 1876 discovered the rectangular features so as alice nears the summit our team are the first archaeologists ever to set foot on the site that's amazing and they're not on the slopes are they they're terrorists down the hill and they're bigger as well than what i thought does it just just drop away beyond there yeah it looks like um it drops really stupidly and then there's another terrace and there's some more structures down there as well really yeah come on down you see the wall here oh yeah and this is this is about a meter high it's really substantial isn't it yeah it is yeah and this is spacious this doesn't look like a little sort of nasty i don't think it's too big to be on this one yeah i mean if you had one big structure maybe a few smaller ones yeah they're all pretty big although although there are um bigger ones and smaller ones yeah yeah these are all monastery back in 1876 coburn reported seeing 23 enclosures katie alice and meg count only 19. so even though the cane still covers an area of over 5000 square meters it's obviously eroding into the sea at an alarming rate but the scale of the site and structures raises more questions than it answers if you think if one person lives in each of these structures how many people would actually live out here so if we could if they're like 19 or 20 that's a lot of people yeah it's not you can it's not just a monk or two in a cell you could fit a whole family in each of these yeah well and that's and that's we have to think about population if you assume that a family consists of four people that's almost 80 individuals how could they have possibly survived at least i think i've worked out how they got onto the stack well you might think this is utter madness if people lived on the came they'd have to go across this knife edge but bear in mind that hundreds of years ago this probably was quite a fair way the problem is with all these cliffs around here is that they all slipping and cascading into the sea and this has probably gone in the last few hundred years or so even if the access across the area was much easier in the past how did this mysterious community bring food and supplies across how and where did they get fresh water where would they have got firewood shetland is barren of trees the came is a perfect place to defend but from whom as well as finding a date for this place it looks like we've got lots more questions to answer it's windy it's treacherous i've slept about three times coming across this really is extreme archaeology [Music] it's taken us the best part of the day to get the first ever team of archaeologists onto the game of icebuster in shetland finally i get to join them hello this is this isn't crazy it's incredible so each one of these depressions is a house is it or a building of some sort building of some sort yeah i still don't know what it is you can see the entrance way into some of those there's a couple of roads here and then there's a big there's a big slave and then there's another one or another so we're going to go about doing this investigation then meg what are you going to do first well i think we're going to start and cover the place really quickly with magnetometry because part of the evidence that we're looking for could be in hearth it could be some charred charred seeds or or some sort of material like it's just dating as well okay so what we're going to do are we going to open up trenches first or yeah i'm tempted to put a trench across one of the structures and maybe take it across to another one so we can get some comparison of two structures the 19 visible features are very closely packed together some appearing to share a join in walls whilst others have alleyways between this is completely unlike any monastic retreat yet excavated where monk cells have been found to be circular beehive structures only big enough for one person the scale of the site does beg the question whether this could actually be the monastery itself with most of the usable hand and foot holes pulled off the rock face during access the delivery team have been busy rigging more safety lines and extra anchor points to give the team a safe exit so there's been no time to bring any excavation tools across the delivery team are getting concerned about the weather hypothermia and the time so you want to start offloading them now mike i reckon it's going to take at least an hour to get everyone off yeah there's a load of storms coming in i think you know yeah there is it's forecasted all so it's freezing the archaeologists are extremely disappointed but have to follow the delivery team's orders it's much harder than you imagine it's going to be it's really quite hairy especially coming back this way because you've just got sheer drops on either side of yours it's pretty nasty i just want to be right back at the other side now i want to i want a hot drink inside me it's not even that far away you could walk there in half a minute that face there is really really crumbly you've got the wind lashing against you but the archaeology is absolutely fantastic i don't know if it's monastic because i just personally i just get a feeling that those buildings are just a little bit too luxurious for a monk they're big and um just it just seems a little bit odd a little bit odd but i can't say at the moment i really want to get digging that's the thing this climbing has been a little more than i expected i had some uh rather scary moments i lost the footing i pulled a rock out and it's only my second time actually climbing like this up a cliff face so it was good this site is fantastic it's really really great there's a lot more to it than meets the eye than we saw in the aerial photographs so it's really exciting i can't wait to get down to work there i think it's fair to say that anyone who actually lived over there must have been completely insane it's freezing cold the wind is hitting across your face the other thing is that we've done no archaeology fine it's been great we've set foot on the game that's a first but as far as the archaeology goes we nowhere near to solving who actually lived there and for me that's disappointing it's our first night under canvas we are staying on site to give ourselves the chance of an early start tomorrow morning and to get a feel for what it must have been like for those early inhabitants trying to survive in such a barren and hostile location we've had to bring in all our food and supplies albeit from the nearest supermarket but it does beg the question as to how our stack dwellers fed themselves they could well be trading with other people [Music] or i mean monastic communities often were supported by the mother church and monks would come over and bring supplies across to the monks because the monks who were contemplating god in their in their isolation were often there not not for the whole of their lives they were there just for a season i've read lots of archaeological science papers looking at pot residue analysis you know scrape inside of the pot and then they work out exactly exactly what was there yeah mostly cabbage soup people in the past gently so i think we're recreating it fairly well reality tv has finally made it to shetland and already the diary tent has a steady queue of dissatisfied customers i'm a bit disappointed with uh what we've got done today um well it's i mean it's been amazing we've had a we've had a good look around and um it is you know it's really it's still a you know a great privilege to be the first people on the island and everything i just you know think that would say little time it would have been good if we could have got some of the kit over and actually started um doing something i'm really behind now to have a whole day without any digging it's um quite shocking really i'm gonna have to work really hard tomorrow but um what i really want to be able to do is contribute to what we're doing with um some good maps but it's gonna it's gonna take a little bit of time um so i've been a little worried about that i'm gonna go to bed tonight in a tent on a bog in the middle of the shetland islands it's october it's wet it's windy they're expecting gale force winds tomorrow life is not fair [Music] well my worst nightmares have come true the severe weather conditions have actually come in it's about one degree with the wind chill and air pressure's still dropping so the worst is yet to come i mean we got on there yesterday and they all look spectacular but unless we start excavating today we'll never know who actually lived on the cane it's not normal rain it's it rain normal rain that goes down would be so much a problem it's the fact that it's horizontal makes things more difficult because of extra safety duties yesterday the delivery team have even more work to do today all the excavation and geophysics equipment has to be lifted tied and dragged to the site by zip wire we were hoping to get an early start but bad weather has made us later than ever ten o'clock in the morning we've got eight hours left this and everyone is already soaked probably getting pretty damn cold we've yet to get them over to the windiest park and then all the work starts it's gonna be a really interesting day the team have found a relatively dry place to plot a trench strategy well i guess it'd be great to have one that went across the wall and into on either side that's exactly what i think yeah yeah then we can get two floors for the price of one exactly yes and the structure in between of the wall and that's right yeah i think it's really important to get the structure of the wall i think that's gonna be um potentially it's quite diagnostic and also of course the fines but not taking down the wall just no no no no i think i think what you want to do is go down onto the archaeology and see what's there rather than start digging into it within half an hour the storm has passed as we enter a period of relative calm it's time to get the team on site we're all just raring to go really because we've got the kit over there now so we can actually do some archaeology after yesterday's difficulties the delivery team have rigged an easier method of access instead of climbing katie meg and alice are using mechanical ascenders to pull themselves up the rope it's still not easy given the slippery conditions [Music] once on site it's straight down to work meg is going to carry out a geophysical survey on the slope and terrace below the rectangular features katie has opened a trench across one of the walls between two of the structures the came is a scheduled ancient monument historic scotland has given us permission to open a few small trenches so it's essential we position these accurately in the calm before the next storm the delivery team are facing a new challenge so we've got all three members of the delivery team trying to get val up now she's never done any climbing in her life before so you can imagine if we were quite scared with all the wind on the air yesterday she's going to be absolutely catering itself but i can understand why she's doing it the sense of anticipation must be phenomenal because she's wanted to get onto that stack for nearly 17 years and only know she has the opportunity to do it nearly there val he seems to be doing all right though how did you find it wow i'm here that's the important thing [Music] fully recovered from her ordeal val gets a tour of the site first stop katie's trench across the wall between two buildings can you can you see this here yeah that line yeah the big boulders on that side but all these little ones it's not infilling a an the adjoining wall is really substantial and this carefully blocked up doorway proves that the two buildings were once interconnected not your average monastic cell come over here you can see the other structure to the other side and it's literally they look as though they're sharing the same wall once i took away the turf i've got a bit of a an empty patch i'm just wondering whether it's a turf wall guess i expect you're right actually yeah you can see this yes yes which might mean that it's um been packed with turf vikings certainly built like that vikings had stone on either side and a turf in the core that's really exciting it is but is this can you say that this is definitely the only time that they use this kind of construction technique in the viking period um i'm not sure that i'd go absolutely quite that far but it's certainly indicative we've certainly got that on the west of um on the west coast of norway which is the nearest part of norway to here and houses at ullenharg for example and also at yards off when yards off was dug that's what they found val may be hedging her bets but the fact remains that the first people in shetland to build rectangular houses were the vikings so if this complex of buildings is the remains of a viking settlement why did they build their houses in such an inhospitable place and does this mean that our monastic retreat theory needs to be revised i still think uh sort of religious community is your most likely explanation yeah but i possibly a viking one possibly yeah viking or north yeah yeah it's just so good to be here it's fantastic isn't it yes there is no reliable date for when the vikings first arrived in shetland but they did begin raiding mainland britain in 790 a.d as pagans the vikings attacked and destroyed christian communities but by 900 they themselves have been converted to christianity so is our site pagan viking or from the time after the conversion finding the date for the buildings is now more crucial than ever after the most exciting site visit of her career val negotiates the route back with new enthusiasm it's amazing i think it's viking it's a viking type of construction viking to north type of construction with stone on either side of a turf core and that's typical west norwegian construction for that sort of period viking north period so why not yeah looks good with the 19 rectangular features clearly visible on the ground mega has been surveying the slope leading down to the lower terrace here aim is to see via magnetometry if there are any subsurface features not visible to the naked eye it's a huge area to cover but we urgently need to find out the extent of our site we also need a date the likely place to find date and evidence is on the floor of one of the structures katie's working flat out it's finally time for me to get down to work well it's all hands to the pump meg's down there doing a geophysical survey katie's still working there and she's tasked me with opening up another trench in this rectangular feature right in the corner and the reason for that is at the moment we still don't know whether anyone actually lived on the cane as far as we're concerned it still could be for animals we haven't found artifacts that says yep someone lived here still a mystery could this corner conceal the date and evidence we are looking for we are here at the came of icebuster in the far north of shetland we are investigating these strange rectangular features on this precipitous promontory it's one of the most extreme sights we've ever attempted we've had driving rain gale force winds and treacherous slippery rock faces to contend with but we've succeeded in getting the first ever team of archaeologists onto the cane we've already turned up a major surprise instead of an early christian monastic retreat we appear to have found a series of viking buildings but with absolutely no fines we are still no nearer to discovering the date of these structures the team are becoming despondent what we've really got to do now is get a piece of evidence we need to find we need to find something that yeah the stuff that i've been digging out has got absolutely nothing in there you've got no charcoal for dating nothing like that meg have you found anything in your survey um well we've we've covered the whole of the bottom part of the of this little island here um but i actually can't really see anything in the data until i look at it at my computer katie just going back to what we finished talking about yesterday and we talked about sort of pixis versus north but is there still any sort of idea this might be a monastic or a could it still be a leopard name really still have absolutely no idea but the just the shape of these houses look very much like a nordic christian side right so i think we can say i think that's that's the plus point today right i mean i know we haven't found any artifacts but you know that's the thing yeah we've come across walls that are not built in shetland or even in scotland like that the nearest is norway and that that is a good that's a good thing to be able to remember as well that so few of these stacks have ever been excavated in the shetlands yeah and really very few people know what what's going on here um in terms of the logistics are you a lot happier than yesterday did it work today yeah why is getting older yeah we got the kitty no actually i'm not no because we i got half of the work done today that i thought i would okay we we waited around in the morning this the kit didn't get over here at eight o'clock straight away like we said it was going to and the whole point of our sleeping out here last night was actually to get out here and get to work at sunup and it didn't happen from a point of view of uh project management this is the bit that uh i dread more than anything else and the reason for that is everyone's coming across cold but they're also complacent and mistakes can be made and i've been on so many expeditions where it's actually finishing and on the way back is when all the accidents occur so fingers crossed everyone will concentrate right until the very end everyone made it off safely but no one's relishing the thought of another knight on the canvas it looks like the diary tent is in for a busy evening i'm an osteologist with no bones it's uh i feel i just want some bones really i don't think i'm gonna get any on this one um i don't know it's probably i'm probably just getting a bit down because i'm tired as well i'm very tired very tired very cold [Music] good fun it's the beginning of our final day on site and i'm on a mission there's too many questions about this place that still need an answer firstly how did the people who built the structures get on and off the cane i'm pretty sure that our route would have been much wider 1500 years ago it could easily have been 10 meters across by my reckoning in the next few decades all of this will fall away leaving the cane an isolated sea stack even if large chunks of rock have fallen away it doesn't explain how they negotiated this first climb it also doesn't explain how they transported the building stone to the site there must have been another way onto the promontory one of the things that puzzles me on this site is the amount of stone that's gone into building these walls now the only place you find that amount is at the bottom of these sea cliffs in the talis slope so somehow whoever lived here had to transport all the blocks in so they would have climbed it up the sea cliff all the way around the top the headlands across the arete and onto the cane or the other way is in by sea now i know which way i'd rather do it and that's by sea itself so trevor and i are going to look for any man-made features such as a natural wharf it's an extremely long shot after such a passage of time and constant battering by the sea i think that see this feature here right i think this has been that's collapsed and i think that you know it wasn't you know this used to be a joint to that if that was the case this jets out a lot further that's quite a nice uh nice place to be in here yeah you can imagine bringing your boat in here yeah if you if if you could again with it with a low tide to scramble out onto these ledges it's been estimated that the sea levels have risen four to five meters over the past 1500 years so it's entirely possible that this rocky promontory could have provided some sort of landing stage let's not forget that the vikings were master mariners and probably used to negotiate in trickier landings than this [Music] as trevor and i try and find a way back up the cliff the solution to another major question presents itself how did they collect fresh water again the answer appears to be geological rainwater still percolates down through the peat and collects here at the rock face given the climate of shetland having enough drinking water appears not to be a problem meg's geophysical survey of the lower slope and terrace is complete she's covered over 1500 square meters and the results are promising we're looking at the magnetometry data from yesterday there are a few hot spots as we call them of high magnetic value or low but but areas of interest one of those is adjacent to the place where alice is actually excavating right now it's closer i think it's it's south of what looks like the exterior wall of the structure they show no more rectangular features on the lower levels but do indicate areas of very high and very low magnetism these could be areas of burning perhaps domestic hearths or even small kilns on rare occasions they've even been found to be cremation sites the shape and alignment of the features is completely unlike anything on the top terrace so alice has opened a trench on this distinctly boat shaped area we don't know whether these lower features are contemporary with the rectangular buildings up top but and it's a big but if this feature is also viking then this could be all that remains of a pagan boat burial well casey and i came down had a look this morning and we decided to open trench here because as you can see we're in the middle of a of a feature we're in the middle of something which is a bit it's a bit of an odd shape because it's not rectangular um like the other features up top of the hill it's got a sort of curved into it almost a sort of boat shape up there but anyway what we've done is put a trench in across the rim around the edge which presumably is a wall and i'm coming down on the stones which suggests it might be a wall viking boat burials are extremely rare in shetland only a handful have ever been found and excavated they were constructed by laying the deceased inside an actual longboat or sometimes a boat-shaped can of small rocks as things are slowly beginning to make sense on the lower slopes katie is working up top in the corner trench i started yesterday and is finally coming down onto the conclusive evidence we've been searching for [Music] it's our last afternoon on site and we still searching for that elusive piece of date and evidence katie's now moved over to the trench i started yesterday in the corner of one of the structures well i think i've actually struck what it looks like to be a floor surface can you see where all this black stuff is here yeah what is that it's all charcoal you can even make out individual bits of stick right through here so um this looks so it's it's either part of a horse or it's um been trampled across on the floor but the floor is it's just so important to find the floor because you often find all sorts of bits trampled in like cuttery and bone and things like that so the importance of the charcoal and this is the dating of it yeah because we haven't actually got an absolute date yet for these buildings all we can say so far is that the way they've been built with the stone and the turf in between is probably viking but we have this charcoal is so so important because we can actually get a really spot on date from that the charcoal doesn't prove categorically that people lived here but it does prove someone at the same time the floor of the building was in use litter fire but it would be nice to leave the site knowing the date of the structures one single piece of domestic pottery would decide the matter once and for all meg is doing some additional survey work to try and give herself a digging target alice is still working on this boat shape feature our possible viking burial but she's not finding any trace of wood metal or bone i'm a bit intrigued by that stone over there which is large and doesn't seem to be part of the wall sort of collapsing in so i just wonder whether it's part of whatever building was here and whether it was you know placed in the middle of it but it would be lovely to have some some artifactual evidence as well with the light failing and the weather closing in it's clear that alice is not going to have enough time to excavate it completely we've only got a couple hours to go before i pull the plug on this excavation the winds are persistent there's 70 mile an hour through the night and they've continued all the way through the day katie's opening her final trench in the doorway of another building a small one meter square test pit it doesn't take long to get to the bottom of what looks like another empty trench the frustration is obvious i really wish we could find just we only just need one find and that would tell us who lived here we're running out of time now yeah we're getting really pushed for time yeah i think megan's gonna once she's finished her job fizz we're going to get her to open up another small trench like this just get as many trenches as possible just to try and find something so cute there may be a very simple religious reason why the site is devoid of fines if you think about a monastic community they might have been very frugal they might have had very very few possessions um and things like pottery they could even have done without they could have had skins for storing water and milk and stuff um they could have used the local stone for sitting on you know you're not gonna not necessarily gonna find anything here and all their rubbish could have been chucked into the sea meigs decided to open her final trench on the lower terrace at the pointy end of alice's boat shape feature with this test pit we've now dug a full allocation of trenches i think it may be too little too late i know it it took a couple of days to do your geophysical survey and you've only got a one by one but at the end of the day this is our last chance because all the other trenches have found nothing they phone yeah collapse walls but um no artifacts that tells us who actually lived here yeah this is our last shot really well hopefully we'll uh come out let's go the problem with this site for me is is that we've come here we've done a lot of work hard graft yeah not come up with hard and fast answers but opened up a whole can of worms that's given loads more questions well i think the problem is as well that there haven't been that many comparable sites excavated so we can't even say oh yes and there's another one like this somewhere else in scetland because we're in uh you know quite a precious site we're only allowed to open up small trenches one by one trenches it's so frustrating because i bet if we went to just one of these rectangular features strip the whole thing back yeah we'd probably find what we're looking for yeah but but that's what we're all about you know it's tough archaeology i know that but we need to sample we really need to sample the site because we are you know coming in and looking at all different things but what actually what you just said i said to katie last night as we were going to sleep i said why can't we just strip open up a whole structure we know it's there we know you know we may find everything we're looking for right in one but it's it's a it's a different approach yeah it is i mean it's micro archaeology that that's the thing almost immediately meg comes down on the same spread of small stones that alice found this uniform layer of rocks doesn't look like a collapsed building but with no fines it's not looking like a boat burial either it could be just a boat-shaped can of stones but meg's working on her own theory i'm digging here because there's something that showed up as a high signature actually a dipole over here a high and a low so have you got any theory about what this might be i'm hoping it's something that was burned uh or it could be just a different occupation different soils different use something like that so you just got to keep on digging but we've run out of dig in time all that remains to be done is to record the trenches and evacuate the site before we lose the light our survey and archaeological reports may be of use to some brave soul in the future who's willing to take the risks and get in here the team are disappointed but as the wind picks up they realize that getting off now is the only option this is gonna be the windiest it's been [Music] tired i'm very tired and i'm a bit disappointed to be leaving behind a mystery wouldn't it be boring if you solved everything well absolutely that's not what science is the best is it yeah exactly sort of struggling even new questions yeah exactly i got to excavate today if you couldn't tell i got very dirty yes it was a good day excavating good geophysics i'm ready to go i'm really tired fully everything yeah but it was really good it's really good katie's charcoal sandals begin their long journey back to the lab where they will be carbon 14 dated the results will take weeks one thing i'm slowly learning is that if you're into instant gratification don't consider archaeology as a career by the end of the day i was feeling really really tired and so i've opened up a lot of trenches to shifted a lot of soil as well and uh there's a lot of stones up there so there's always really hard work to move but it's also been quite disappointing but we did get loads and loads of charcoal so we can at least get carbon 14 days in fact there was less than four percent charcoal in the soil sample in order to obtain a reliable date we had to resort to accelerated mass spectrometry 865 a.d wow well this is a really important date because we know that vikings are coming across to shetland at this time but this is exactly the point where they're converting to christianity as well so we don't know whether our site is pagan or christian so do we know who lived there well we know they're viking and i think we can rule out the fact that it was a monastic retreat because those structures were way too big weren't they knowing the construction methods used we can now speculate on how these buildings may have looked complete with turf walls and roofs this could have been much more than an isolated domestic settlement but what we might actually be looking at is the monastery itself and you thought that all of those buildings were contemporary with each other as well didn't you yeah and that they're viking because they're north construction is that right the walls are north construction exactly yeah well we also got out there with all of our equipment and got to map the building so it's the first time they've ever been mapped and we've also got the geophysics of the whole slope in the bottom with all that information i'm just i'm just amazed you know we didn't get any artifacts at all and just from that tiny little bit of charcoal you actually got a date and and not only that it was absolutely clinical we only opened eight square meters of trenches yeah and don't forget we got on the came in the first place as well so as far as i'm concerned it was a job well done

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 106,928

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history, extreme archaeology, Dr Alice Roberts, Katie Hirst, Dr Meg Watters, time team, bbc documentary, Shetland Islands, Kame of Isbister

Id: Y07ISxmAVrg

Length: 48min 26sec (2906 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020