Digging for Britain 6 2 East

for rich with history now alice roberts is back with some truly remarkable discoveries we may be a small island but we have a rich and complex history that's still full of mysteries so every year hundreds of archaeologists go out hunting the lost pieces from our missing past a tiny tiny coin every element is there this is just unbelievable in 2017 their investigations continue to fill in the gaps wow bringing us closer to our ancestors than ever before in this program digging for britain showcases the best digs from the east of the uk oh wow that's rather lovely short each of the excavations has been filmed as it happened by the archaeologists themselves their dig diaries mean that we can be there for each exciting moment of discovery how does that feel rupert yeah pretty good and now the archaeologists are bringing their finds from pottery to metalwork to human remains into our lab so that we can take a closer look at them and find out what they tell us about our british ancestors welcome to digging for britain in this program i'm joining archaeologists in the east to share in their biggest discoveries we're diving deep in the english channel rescuing the precious cargo of a lost east india ship we find lots of coins and we travel to suffolk to unearth traces of britain's earliest occupants we found this incredible pandax fantastic point it's also a big year in the east for roman archaeology and this episode includes hunting down evidence of britain's first clash with the might of rome this could be a very important clue to confirming that this is a base of julius caesar and to find out how these discoveries fit into the story of britain i've come to colchester to explore the castle museum and find out how the objects inside helped tell the story of the east but our first dig takes us out of colchester and into the buzzing financial centre of london and one of the biggest excavations in our capital's history during the blitz the german luftwaffe destroyed a third of the city of london but amongst the devastation glimpses of its ancient roman past began to emerge from the rubble including a remarkable roman temple of mithras found just off cannon street for archaeologists of the time this was amongst the first evidence that parts of rome and london were still well preserved under the modern city waiting to be rediscovered in the post-war years the site of the temple was built over but it's long been believed that there was much more to be found in the layers beneath the myth graham in 2012 archaeologists finally got the chance to revisit the site when the global information company bloomberg started to redevelop the area now in the year that the new building has been opened the team are sharing their dig diary with us this was an incredible opportunity for archaeologists to delve down into the deepest layers of london's history right back to its origin the excavation gave them a chance to find out more about the original appearance of the town about who lived there and about the lives of those first londoners the bloomberg site was once at the heart of roman london straddling the wall brook a lost tributary of the river thames because the site remains waterlogged many organic remains have survived this exceptional preservation gave archaeologists the unique opportunity to explore the realities of life in the very first london sadie watson is heading up the dig to be honest we have been itching to get our hands back on this site since 1954 really when grimes found the temple of mithras we knew that there was a breadth of archaeology here that was unsurpassed in the general area if you went 50 meters either side of this exact spot you wouldn't get the same depth of the material the romans built london from scratch in the mid 1st century a.d but until now the original appearance of the town has been a bit of a mystery however because the preservation is so good here the team can effectively reconstruct the layout of an entire roman neighborhood what we've got here is a waffle structure and perhaps delineating some private land with some animals on the inside or it could be part of a building but it's absolutely amazing i mean obviously we're the first people to see this for nearly 2 000 years so it feels a bit special and it just makes you wonder what's underneath this what's the next thing we're going to find when the team began the dig they were unsure of how much of the roman town had been crushed by millennia of rebuilding over it but what they're discovering is not just the traces of the original layout of this part of early london but the very fabric of the streets many of the wooden buildings are preserved up to shoulder height unheard of in raymond britain so as well as the street we have the houses alongside the street and the alleyways behind the houses and the open areas where they were dumping their their rubbish and things like that so we have the whole streetscape laid out in front of us [Music] this incredible dig is revealing that beneath the modern streets of london lies a roman timber town with wooden buildings lining the streets and a layout that wouldn't have been out of place in the wild west this astonishing discovery reminds us that london has always been evolving adapting to the needs of its time from its humble wooden beginnings into the modern city that we know today halfway through the dig the teams start to excavate down into the wooden buildings hoping to discover new details about the lives of the first londoners [Music] and they're not disappointed so this is a penn annual approach made of copper alloy and the pin has gone but it would have been pinned into your tunic and a really heavy um steel yard weight and we've had lots of weights and measures from this site so the assumption is that they're doing industrial weighing and measuring here as the dig continues the team on earth a wealth of personal fines from 2000 years ago the fines look so fresh the waterlogged conditions have seemingly frozen them in time but it's one particular group of leather finds that allows the team the most intimate insight into london's fledgling population got coming up for about 500 shoes you can see very clearly that these are child sized shoes and at the other end of the spectrum you've got large men's boots so we have evidence for families living here it's not just all about economic life it's quite a tangible connection to the individual people who lived here [Music] these items belong to the earliest occupants of our capital city they allow us to populate the ancient roman streets with men women soldiers traders and children the first people to call london home this excavation is producing more roman discoveries than any other site in london but then towards the end of the dig the team finds something truly remarkable small rectangular pieces of wood more valuable to the archaeologists than silver or gold these are ancient writing tablets there are two pieces of writing tablet here so you've got a little indentation for the wax to go there they're essentially just letters really nice gets you close to the people incredibly this writing tablet was not alone in the end the team would find more than 400 of them the largest collection of their kind ever found but the big question was would they discover any writing on them these would have been wax tablets the wax itself is long gone but are there any traces of the writing on the wood itself the team is in luck they can see the impressions of letters but in order to read them they need to bring in a specialist professor roger tomlin is one of the world leaders in translating latin shorthand working from photographs and hand drawings he has the daunting task of deciphering the writing now i'm inviting roger and sadie into the lab with these amazing tablets so that i can finally hear the voices of the first londoners what an amazing sight and how fantastic to have writing preserved say roger what do these letters actually say what do they tell us well they tell us all sorts of tantalizing extracts of what roman businessmen were writing to each other about this is a particularly well preserved tablet and when i saw this in the conservation lab when it was still wet i was very excited because i could read the first word at the top left hand corner which was nerone which was clearly a reference to nero the emperor nero and then the date the 8th of january 57 and then the beginning of the text is written by a man called tibalus and he acknowledges he owes the sum of 105 denarii in respect of goods um sold and delivered so an incredibly early financial document yes it seems to be the earliest dated financial document only about 10 years after the romans got to london and and here they are setting up business enterprises importing and exporting not much has changed not much has changed and what about the names do they give us an insight into who these people were where they'd come from well ideally they they tell us who the person is and this is a nice example here um it's an address of a letter which reads dabase you will give this letter understood to junius the kuparius the cooper the baron maker a brewery somewhere in the area and presumably juniors is making barrels for it it's just astonishing you know this is the kind of detail that we expect from you know the second world war and to be able to reconstruct that level of detail going back 2 000 years ago that's amazing what about the other objects sadie what about what about these beautiful broaches do they give us clues as well as to where people were coming from certainly they do and broaches tell you a lot because people tend to bring them with them from wherever they is they've come from to london so we have lots and lots of examples from the western roman empire gaul and the rhineland particularly but this superbly decorate a wonderful example is actually from what we now call norfolk so it's from the icini tribe well buddhic has tried odika's tribe exactly and who would have moved in um to london and worked and lived amongst the londoners as well so not only do we have people coming from outside um britain to come to london and found this town in in open fields we also have people coming from elsewhere across the country to live and work here as well it seems that just like today the first london drew its inhabitants from across britain and europe so we are really looking at the very beginning of london what would it have been like well we have evidence of course that there's commercial activity going on with the writing tablets from the very beginning we also have a huge assemblage of militaria so we know that the army were here in great number there would have been industries such as metal working um slightly more noxious ones leather working all the things that you would expect really but but living cheap by gel with everything else as well we also have one of the tablets has an alphabet on it this one here yeah this one here possible evidence of education somebody learning or practicing their alphabet it's a b c d and so on oh that's just extraordinary that's wonderful it's a roman child learning to read and write so it's a real mix of activity so the very very earliest beginnings of something but a lot of things which remain very familiar to us today banking beer and this melting pot of cultures absolutely the bloomberg dig has revealed the forgotten voices of the people that first built london and as the molar team finishes the analysis of the fines over the coming year they'll be able to give us a uniquely detailed picture of an entire neighborhood in a roman british town by the middle of the second century a.d london had become one of the most important trading centres in northern europe as well as the capital of roman britain but it could have turned out very differently london wasn't the first capital of rome and britain colchester was that is up until the middle of the first century when it met a grizzly fate and i'm told the best place to understand this story is underneath the castle in ad60 within 20 years of london being founded the british warrior queen boudica revolted against roman rule and eventually led an army of enraged natives right into colchester at the heart of the town was the temple of claudius and it was situated right here amazingly its foundations still survive and curator glenn davis is taking me down into the basement to see them this incredible glen yes this is a very special space we're actually standing in a full space we're standing in a chamber that would have originally been filled with sand and this construct made up a huge platform or podium upon which the temple of claudius the largest of its kind in roman britain at the time would have been built so what happened to the temple then because obviously colchester was attacked during the budaken rebellion it was now you have to remember the temple of claudius uh was also where the imperial cult was worshipped in a way it was a symbol of rome and to the roman brits a symbol of their oppression and this would have been a target and after burning a lot of the town boudicca and the tribes who united with her would have bee lined to this temple where the townsfolk had basically sought refuge and we know from tacitus our ancient roman writer that they besieged the temple for two days it must have been absolutely terrifying for the people of colchester who'd sealed themselves up in this temple when budika arrived with her army it must have been i mean you're talking about hundreds of men women children hearing the the shouting and the rampage outside and of course they start to set far to the temple so it starts to heat up maybe even elements of it start to fall after two days and it's after those two days tasters tells us that they eventually broke down those front doors and then a bloodbath above our heads 2 000 years ago would have been absolute carnage and what about after the rebellion because that rebellion eventually failed it eventually failed with a huge loss of life on both sides and colchester was rebuilt indeed the temple was rebuilt but colchester never retains that capital that moves on to london londinium and it never quite reaches the heights that londonium does after that so it never quite recovers from that the only slaughter bedica that devastation no they left a mark archaeological discoveries from both london and colchester have added flesh to the bare bones of history revealing the lives of the people that lived through the bloody beginnings of roman britain our next story takes us into the english channel to one of the richest shipwrecks off our shores the goodwin fans are notorious as swallowers of ships today the remains of over 2 000 wrecks litter the area one of them is the rosevic a dutch east india company ship that sank in 1740 on its way out to indonesia in the 17th and 18th century britain and the netherlands were two of europe's leading powers both were great seafaring nations locked in a battle for control of the lucrative trade with asia for the winner the prize was enormous wealth the race for the east was a dangerous business and it wasn't just about the wealth of individuals and corporations but of entire nations as archaeologists get to work on the largest underwater excavation since the mary rose they're hoping to gain insights into just how high the stakes and the risks really were the east india ships were stuffed with incredible riches to trade with the far east what makes the race fix so special is that it sank with all of its cargo and nothing was ever salvaged [Music] now a team from historic england and the dutch government is investigating they hope to understand more about these trade routes and the level of financial risk taken by the traders on each voyage [Music] underwater archaeologist martin manders is leading the team we're now on board with the shelling which is our research ship and we're just right above the shipwreck within three months we have to excavate a very large ship well luckily we only do the stern part of the ship i think people will be amazed at what what we bring up the team have decided to excavate the back half of the ship because it is the best preserved section part of the cargo hold is located here so they're confident they'll be able to find evidence of what the rosvik was taking to the east indies but excavating a shipwreck on the perilous goodwin sands is a complex operation the unpredictable weather and strong currents mean that time and tides are always against them in late august after months of preparation they finally begin the diving operation just to confirm the plum weights a couple of meters off the seabed slowly the ghostly timbers of the rose vic become visible amongst the gloom the team gets to work using giant suction tubes known as air lifts to help them clear away centuries of sand from the wreck then their hard work pays off they get their first glimpse of the race fixed lost cargo over here we've got a few of the artifacts that we excavated so far these very nice chunks actually we found quite a few down there close together so this could be that it was cargo meant for trading these tankers provide the first insights into the kinds of goods that were being traded in the far east but the team need more evidence to find out about the true scale of wealth that was stowed on board they need to explore further into the rack however what they begin to retrieve is copper sheeting there wasn't much that the people needed in the dutch indies but what they did need was a building material so a lot of raw material copper also a lot of just normal bricks they were weight so they were ballast but in a way there were also goods to be sold these discoveries are important evidence of how the british and the dutch built their settlements in the east but they weren't just out to build colonies the real reason for taking such risks with an eight-month voyage across pirate and stormridge and waters was trade the key mission of these ships was to take out wealth from the netherlands and britain and bring back riches from the orient exotic goods like spices and textiles items that were worth a fortune back in europe historical records suggest that this ship should have been laden with silver currency but the team hopes to discover the true scale of the investment involved in a single voyage after weeks spent living on the research ship and diving day and night they finally hit the jackpot we find loads loads of coins we have silver from mexico but we also have from the patosi mines in piece of eight bolivia it's worth eight reals most of the ones that we've got so far have been from mexico the dutch east india company also known as the voc traded using spanish silver as the archaeologists continue diving they retrieve hundreds more coins but towards the end of the project they make an unusual discovery not all of the coins appear to be official spanish currency we've only just started uncovering these ones a lot of the money that's been recovered has been the spanish money so far i believe these are riders these are dutch coins this leads martin to a surprising conclusion he believes that the dutch money belonged to the crew themselves [Music] well i think we're getting to the personal stuff because of the coins that are so different from the cargo um of the vlc so we get into personal belongings really interesting so why were the men on board the rose vic transporting such large quantities of personal wealth to indonesia i've asked martin to come into the lab with this extraordinary hall of silver coins i'm just amazed at what a huge amount of wealth went down with this ship i mean this is like a floating bank yes well in in the way it was we know that it had 36 000 coins from mexico the pillar dollars on board of the ship the voc would take a lot of coins with them from the same kind of dates very shortly before the voc would go out so we think that looking at the date 1737 just before the ship went out we think this is the money they took along with them so that's kind of official business that's official vac money exactly yeah and it is adriala so a piece of eight as they say these coins we find here have a much older date and these are du catons from the southern netherlands and these are from 1619 so 120 years before the ship sank so where are these early coins from then exactly well they were smuggling they were smuggled on board and why would they smuggle money and who would smuggle money well it's actually everybody from the captain until the most simple seamen they would bring silver from the netherlands to the dutch indies because silva was worth more in the indies than in the netherlands it's just extraordinary so there's the official business of the vac and then everyone on board from the captain down to the humble sailor also stood to make personal gain from this village but martin also believes that smuggling played a significant part in the final demise of the east india companies the funny thing about the smuggling money is that although it was illegal people would even borrow from official banks money to bring to the east indies as well and when they lost the money they had to go to court or the widows had to go to court yeah and there was so much corruption that in 1795 the voc was so much up to his debt that it went bankrupt and all the assets of the voc came to the dutch government so that was what 50 odd years after the shipwreck the company went bust exactly and i think what the shipwreck shows us is both on the one hand what there was to gain from this international trade but also the immense risks that were taken well that's exactly the truth yeah the east india companies were the world's first multinational corporations they accumulated vast fortunes but were prone to corruption and mismanagement it was the dutch that folded first the british soon followed but not before they'd expanded their influence in asia when the government took over the business the foundations had already been laid for britain's empire in the east archaeology provides us with another way of looking at history adding to and sometimes challenging the written records but when it comes to pre-history we rely solely on evidence unearthed from the ground and that's exactly the case with our next dig as we head to barnum in east anglia where archaeologists are searching for the answer to an old stone age mystery four hundred 000 years ago britain was a very different place indeed there was savannah here where elephants rhino and lions roamed alongside some of our early ancestors and any evidence that we can get of these people and the way that they behaved is incredibly precious that's exactly what our next excavation is revealing [Music] around 400 000 years ago there's evidence of an expanding human population right across northern europe including britain but who were these people and why were they here part of the answer may lie in a disused clay pit near the village of barnum an incredibly well preserved stone age site first discovered by the victorians nick ashton from the british museum is one of the leaders of the team we're just here for three weeks so day two we've got another 20 to go so a lot of work to be done the team starts the dig by trying to discover what the environment was like for some of britain's earliest occupants investigating an area that was once on the edge of an ancient lake [Music] it's not long before the team's animal bone expert simon parfet is called in to identify the first find it's a pond therapy so this is one of the really important elements in in the animal assemblage that tells us about the climate so today these animals are living in more continental europe in parts of france where the summers are much warmer so this provides a really good indication of what the climate was like 400 000 years ago britain was a very different place much warmer than today with animals that seem exotic to us now we found the edge of a piece of bone if we take it out you can see that it's a spongy bone in the middle a very thick cortical bone it's actually the rib of an elephant so this is a obviously a tiny fragment of a very large rib and living right next to the elephants were humans in this area we found artifacts through this part of the sequence and these are hard hammer flakes part of the clactonian industry so yeah we this is part of the contemporary vertebrate life that was living with humans at that time claytonian is the name given to a particular stone toolkit including simple flakes of flint used for butchery these tools may look unremarkable but to the archaeologist's eye they have the telltale signs of being worked by a human hand their evidence that people were living and hunting here in early britain but then towards the end of week one the team finds a more advanced stone age technology we're at the end of birthday six and fantastic find found in area three just as we're packing up uh this incredible pandas and um it's only the third we found from the site in i think about 10 years of digging as you can see it's incredibly fresh conditions this black flint very fresh edges this exquisite handx is much more advanced compared with the basic flint tools that the team has been finding so far so the question is did the people living here make a sudden technological leap forward or is this handx evidence of a different group coming into the area it's not clear yet so the team continue their hunt for more clues and in week two they find something surprising and exciting is that somebody yes there are multiple pieces here this evidence is found in the same band of soil as the more advanced tools and from the burning pattern nick believes that this could be intentional use of fire by humans the interesting thing is the quantity of burnt wood is coming up so it's associated with the group of people who are making hand axes um a really interesting conclusion is the use of fire and the manufacture of hand axes are they two parts of the technological package that they bring into the area at this time um i must confess i still keep an open mind but i'm inclining more and more towards the conclusion that people are actually using fire in this area it's not just a natural fire this potential evidence for humans using fire could be amongst the earliest ever found in britain combined with the more advanced stone tools it suggests that a new group of people was arriving here but who were they and where did they come from nick has brought some of the artifacts into the lab to help us answer some of these questions well nick this is a really exciting site and thank you for bringing in the fines but you've got these two different types of stain technology on the same site yeah so over here on the right you have very simple flakes and cores they'll do the job but they're very simple and here we have a clear change in the technology and you have this beautiful handx that's beautiful great individual thing so who do you think was making the clactanium and who do you think was making that if i was to hazard a guess which is only a guess um maybe you've got homophile heidelbergensis making these uh more primitive looking tools and perhaps the handx makers are very early neanderthals so this could be evidence of the first neonatals in britain uh yeah some of the first evidence oh that's really exciting homo heidelbergensis and neanderthals are thought to be the two main species of humans living in northern europe around this time an ancient land bridge with the continent would have allowed them easy access into what is now britain here's a tricky question why are they coming over is it is this just a population's expanding and people are just milling about and starting to spill further north west one of the ideas we're looking at is that there's more or less around this time there's a big deforestation event not just in britain not just east anglia but right across europe and so the questions we're asking is does it relate to some big natural disaster you know is it volcanic activity for example creating a big nuclear winter or is it something even more exciting like a big meteor strike and that in itself would have a big impact on what humans were doing suddenly there's a loss of their local habitat loss of vegetation that's going to affect the wildlife and this will trigger population movement so maybe this is linked to a different group of people coming in just over 400 000 years ago this new evidence from barnum is helping us to understand more about the early inhabitants of britain and the environment they lived in at an important moment in prehistory when the very first neanderthals arrived in britain but our next dig deals with newcomers of a very different kind we're heading to the tip of kent and possible evidence of the first roman invasion of britain i came here back in 2010 for digging for britain to see the excavations in advance of the construction of the kent access road i witnessed the unearthing of bronze age burial mounds iron age treasure here we've got a tiny gold coin and multiple roman graves but this was just the tip of the archaeological iceberg because after i left the team made their most amazing discovery the ditches of a vast fort that was potentially roman we know that this area of kent was where the romans invaded in ad43 but incredibly the team dated this fort to almost a century earlier at this time only one roman general was known to have visited our shores the mighty julius caesar say was this fort the first tangible evidence of his time in britain now no archaeological evidence of caesar's actual arrival in britain has ever been found so the discovery of an early roman fort is providing archaeologists with a precious opportunity to get closer to the truth [Music] in the 50s bc julius caesar is recorded as making two fleeting visits to our island dr andrew fitzpatrick believes that this fort could have been built during one of those trips now he just needs to prove it what he hopes to find is roman military equipment that he can date to the time of caesar we know that caesar in the second invasion brought at least 24 25 000 soldiers and 800 ships that must have left a lot of evidence if andrew succeeds he'll not only have found julius caesar's fault but put us on the path to understanding why he made this early exploration of britain andrew's first task is to get to grips with the full layout of the fort his team uses geophysics to map the line of the ditches that once ringed the encampment as the results come in they reveal a tantalising clue our geophysical survey showed that the fort runs in a rather unusual irregular pattern here so i think this is a specific style of defense to encircle large areas and the reason it's a large area is because what this is defending isn't so much the soldiers as the fleet and so the key to the story really is the sea andrew believes that the fort's huge ditches formed a circuit of defenses that protected nearby pegwell bay this large open area is not only the perfect place to land a sizeable navy but also matches the description of caesar's second visit to britain in 54 bc it looks like andrew is on the right track but he now needs to find dateable roman artifacts left behind by caesar's army he believes the ditches are the best place to find them as his team starts digging they discover something intriguing well we believe it to be a roman arrowhead and where was it founded it was around about 30 centimeters off the bottom of that so it's really near the bottom of the ditch yeah that could be a really important find for us in trying to establish these ditches were dug by the armies of julius caesar although rusty and broken this piece of iron could represent a major breakthrough in andrew's search for caesar because to a specialist's eye roman weaponry is just as diagnostic as a world war one rifle for a modern historian to make a positive identification it still needs a good clean so andrew takes the fine to conservator graham morgan for initial analysis after a couple of hours of work the weapon turns eight not to be an arrowhead but the tip of a spear all right there we are there's the object so far it's very corroded but that might be like the illustration you showed me before this one here you can see there's a center rib on that as well very similar i know that this weapon here was found in the roman camp at the siege works of elysia and that's the site that julius caesar attacked in 52 bc so the question is is this from absolute similar enough to the one from elysia to suggest that we really do have firm evidence for roman soldiers at eb suite in the 50s bc and it looks quite close yeah this possible roman spearhead is an exciting clue but to be sure that the fort belonged to julius caesar andrew needs more evidence in september 2017 he returns to the site for the final time hoping this time to unearth conclusive proof [Music] the team begins by trying to find one of the entrance ways to the fort where they believe they're likely to find more artifacts but their first discovery is totally unexpected so there are is it two two skulls there or are there more there are more there's these two there's one over there there's one you may just about see being uncovered there gosh that's remarkable the team believes that these skulls may have once lined the approach to the fort as a chilling deterrent to the locals if they're right then perhaps they're close to one of the fort's entrances they expand their trench and make a breakthrough and then we have a road here which you can see in the cobbling visible behind me and it runs into the entrance of the defended enclosure andrew believes the fort would have been similar to caesar's other camps in france with earthen banks defensive ditches and a rough cobbled road leading into the entrance but more important is what the team find on the road strewn across the site is more human bone heavily created weapons and one tiny find that could be the key in linking this fort to julius caesar well this small bit of iron could be the first hobnail that we found on this site and you can see there's a shank here and then it comes down to a slightly pointed domed head now if that turns out to be a hog nail the surface in which it's been found dates to the first century bc the only people who came to britain wearing boots with hobnails in them were the soldiers of julius caesar's army there can be no doubt about the significance of hot nails and it would be in many ways the smallest of details that give us the clinching fact the biggest of stories of the first chapter of britain's history so could this humble piece of rusty iron solve one of the biggest questions in roman archaeology in britain to hear the latest news from the site i've asked andrew to come into our lab with some of the most important finds oh how exciting andrew what is all the evidence that you're using to come to your conclusion that this probably is caesar's fault we have a very large defended enclosure that dates to the first century bc the shape of the defenses is very similar to known roman sites in france of 52 bc of caesar it's the right place geography fits we have weaponry that could well fit and it's in terms of where would you land your army i think it's here it all points to that conclusion if that is a hobnail is that going to clinch it it would be very strongly suggestive and there are other pieces we have possible roman weapons these things here yep so the possibility is that this in your hand is the tip of the pelum which is a roman type of weapon and this is the diagram over here this is the one and it's the same size it's the same shape and we know this particular one was found in a roman fort of 52 bc and there are other examples found in italy and the interesting thing about that is that's where julius caesar raised is legions in north italy starting to stack up isn't it with the fort looking likely to have belonged to julius caesar andrew has started to think about the reasons that motivated his visits why do you think julius caesar came my personal view is he comes for the glory because he's going beyond the known world for the romans the world stops at france britain is almost a mythical land they're still not sure that people really live there and he brings it under the control of their own world so he achieves great glory because of that there must have been some political benefit as well well one one of the key things is is what happens afterwards and this isn't an army of occupation it's not going to be there with boots on the ground the way the romans work for many centuries is they work through the local rulers and they get the local elite to work with them when julius caesar leaves in 54 he does two things he agrees the amount of tribute that will be paid to rome but he also takes hostages and those hostages are very often the family and the youngsters of the rulers and it means that britain is tied into the roman world and the kings of britain become client kings of rome and effectively they are part of the roman empire caesar's campaign diary provides us with some of the earliest written descriptions of britain as well as our first recorded dates andrew's made a compelling case for this having been caesar's fault and rather than a simple story of conquest rome appears to have spent a full century softening up british rulers before finally taking over i'm dying to meet one of these client kings so i'm going behind the scenes at the castle museum to examine a contender in the form of the lexton burial a selection of objects interred with a very important man in colchester crucially it dates between caesar's visits to britain and the final roman invasion in ad-43 what grave kids i mean they're just gorgeous look at this little ball he is lovely the detail is just wonderful isn't it it's fantastic isn't it really really beautiful you wouldn't believe in some ways that that's 2 000 years old or just over he's fantastic there's a real roman flavour to this because the ball were incredibly important to iron age people in britain they hunted them they ate them they even revered them but this little figurine has a real roman classical look to him and it could well have been made in ghoul and imported over here to britain what about this little foot that's very sweet tiny little foot you can just about make out the toes he's wearing a little sandal i was wearing berkeys very definitely there's a lot of detail there so what do you think this was was it part of a statue no it's unlike our figurines i think this is part of a piece of furniture um yeah which may seem odd but it's footing for something like a folding chair or stool so who had chairs like that it would have been some of the most powerful men in rome um all the way up to the emperor and indeed it may even have been gifted if this person was of high enough rank maybe maybe even a client king here in britain so somebody was sponsored by the roman empire effectively exactly that yeah a connection with the roman empire gave this individual great wealth and power but the last object suggests that this was more than just political expediency a relationship with rome seems to have been personally meaningful to this british ruler this is a medallion it's based on a coin of the emperor augustus oh is it and what's amazing about this is this gives us a brilliant date uh for this burial so this this burial can't be earlier than about 15 bc which is when the coin would have been cast and it's tempting to think that this is a very personal object and maybe there's some individual relationship here maybe not with the emperor but certainly with the elite in rome so when claudius arrives in 43 a.d do you imagine that some powerful people in britain are effectively welcoming him in yes i think there will be people siding with the romans yeah indeed especially in the southern part of britain the belongings of this possible client king in essex provide a rare glimpse of the forgotten relationships that facilitated the final roman invasion and as andrew's post-excavation research on caesar's fort continues it will undoubtedly enrich our understanding of the very beginnings of roman britain rather than rewriting big history our final story is revealing the forgotten lives of ordinary britons throughout the 18th century maritime trade was the main state of the british economy but 1706 saw one of the most catastrophic disasters in all of british seafaring history when a fleet of 182 ships sailed straight into a winter storm they were returning from virginia in america as part of the so-called trade triangle european goods were sent to west africa to buy slaves the slaves were sold to plantations in the americas and in return tobacco rum cotton and sugar flowed back into europe it was a wretched but lucrative trade the hazardous prize was one of the fleet's escort vessels it sank on the 19th of november 1706 when bad weather forced it to run aground of brackish and bay during the early 1700s thousands of ships were crisscrossing the globe the lives of the men on board are a vital but forgotten part of our history without them britain would never become a maritime power or built its empire [Music] in 2016 a team of local divers and archaeologists launched into a new two-year excavation of the wreck funded by historic england their mission was to recover new details about the crew and the realities of 18th century life at sea they start by constructing a metal grid positioned over the ship's hold so that they can record and locate any new discoveries site licensee ian grant and archaeologist dan pascoe are leading the investigation so we've put down the frames and these are going to be the grid that we're going to be working on doing the excavation and we've gone from one side going over what looks like a barrel store yeah there must be at least five half barrels and at least one complete one for the look of it these barrels were used to store provisions for the hazardous 280 strong crew the fact that they're still intact is a promising find and suggest that the wreck may contain many more artifacts [Music] a few weeks into the project the team make an important discovery related to the men's most crucial job on board a really exciting find from today's diving what it looks like is a powder chamber the hollow areas where the charge would have been there would have been a lid on top and this would have been transported from the powder room up to the gums on the gun deck keeping the many guns of the hazardous at the ready was a key task for the crew [Music] the warship was responsible for protecting the fleet from the pirates and privateers that terrorized the waves these weapons are a powerful reminder that the men of the hazardous must have been constantly wary of attack [Music] halfway through the project the divers begin to discover something else the personal belongings of the crew i think the best two fines are these buttons oh that one has got a pattern on it that is our horse's head yeah it could be your horse's hands yeah yeah yeah well well done people never cease to be amazed along with the buttons the team begins to discover many more personal items on the seabed a shoe buckle a pair of brass dividers used for navigation and a pewter plate as ian and dan sought through the fines they begin to build up a vivid picture of the different kinds of lives on board so do you think the pewter where was probably officers yes rather than crew yeah i think the crew probably had off of wooden platters wooden bowls at best but what's the old story about the the square meal three square meals a day yeah and they would have been wooden platters i don't think ordinary crew would have had repeats away no so even at sea britain was a society divided by class but in the end class meant little when the men's lives were put under threat on the 19th of november 1706 after a 3600 mile journey the hazardous prize was within touching distance of home when bad weather closed in you get the feeling that the is pretty rough just here i mean it's a beautiful day today but really really rough so they've come in they've missed their safe anchorage they've bumped around all through the night they finished up very close to here and the shore although it looks no distance to us on a nice day on a stormy day i think it probably looks a long way and all they want to do is get on dry land so they're not interested in personal effects they're all left on the side the hazardous was wrecked in brackish and bay the ferocious waves ripping apart its mighty timbers condemning the ship to a watery grave but fortunately the majority of its men made it to land it must have been devastating though for them to leave all of their precious belongings on board including one very unusual object that's now providing a valuable insight into the mindset of some of the crew so this is the elephant tusk that's come up from the hazardous prize now this is a ship that's sailing back from virginia and forgive me if i'm wrong here but i didn't think they had elephants in virginia no and and it seems most likely that it's come from africa to america may have come on a slave ship and somebody's uh bought it and gonna take it home and this is something that was probably picked up by the officers on board they might have been bringing it back to make a profit back home and this tusk really reminds us of that triangular trade doesn't it the fact that the hazardous price itself might not have traveled to africa but there are ships going from africa to the new world and then other ships coming from the new world back to britain and an opportunity to make a few shillings here and there yeah however they could but the crew of the hazardous prize never got a chance to cash in their exotic acquisitions and in fact this wreck was just the last of a string of casualties that year so tell me more about the the hazardous price because this shipwreck is part of a much bigger tragedy isn't it exactly it was escorting a merchant fleet that was um over in virginia in the americas and its job was to bring that fleet back safely to england unfortunately it was kind of doomed from the beginning very much so they're a catalogue of holdups early on in the year which meant that they didn't actually get to america until july and the last escort ship i think didn't arrive until august and it meant that they were crossing the atlantic in really poor conditions september is the worst time to leave as we know from the hurricanes that have just been when they got back to england there was 35 of the original 200-ish merchant ships left that's a huge loss so massive massive loss yeah not only did they lose their one of their warships they also lost a large amount of tax revenue then on top of that there was all the personal losses for all the traders so yeah it was a major major tragedy i think it's really interesting contrasting this shipwreck of the hazardous prize with the rose vic which went down a few decades later and i think both show you just how risky this was exactly the excavation of the hazardous prize is bringing us closer to the forgotten seaman who once plied the atlantic trading rates providing new details about their daily lives on board 18th century ships it's just one discovery and a year that's been jam-packed with new archaeological revelations from sunken treasure that lays bare the extensive corruption of the east india companies and writing tablets with the words of the first londoners to new evidence of julius caesar in britain archaeology is helping us rewrite the story of our island next week we're joining archaeologists in the north of britain unearthing evidence of a forgotten british rebellion on hadrian's wall oh my god how does that feel yeah pretty good finding a 3 000 year old cache of weapons man wow linking us back to the warrior chiefs of bronze age britain and we discover that the scottish island of iona was home to a forgotten jerusalem of the north it's quite an extraordinary thing to do it's like early medieval virtual reality yeah maybe [Music] and that's all the same time nine o'clock next wednesday stay with us here on bbc four it's the detectorists up with the lark and the magpies next you

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Length: 59min 7sec (3547 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021