Hidden Dark Age Burial Ground Uncovered by Archaeologists

foreign Britain came to an end with nearly four centuries the Imperial control Drew to a close was it the time of violence chaos always change or gradual thank you foreign two years ago an extraordinary excavation took place on this quiet Hillside in buckinghamshire it's thrown remarkable new light on a little understood period of our history that's all too often written off as the Dark Ages now for the first time we can reveal in detail what was discovered here and what it tells us about what was going on 1500 years ago yeah we're going to dig deep into this mysterious period of History trying to sift the archaeological facts from the myth when I get the chance to go up close with everything from ancient swords Shields and Jewelry evidence of violence an iron object if you look at it it's actually embedded in the spine but also some of the finest objects ever found from this forgotten time [Music] The hs2 Rail Project is cutting a line through England from London to Birmingham it's a line through time revealing historic discoveries along the Route as the engineers prepare to build the high-speed Railway teams of archaeologists have been scouring the route in advance seeking out and preserving every scrap of historical evidence they can find from circular Bronze Age hinges to Roman roads and hidden medieval churches [Music] but one of the most important and surprising discoveries has been here in rural buckinghamshire where the Chilton Hills meet the veil of Aylesbury the hs2 rail line is going to go right through this Valley past the town of Wendover just over that Ridge from London to Birmingham but when the archaeologists first arrived on this site and started to conduct their survey there was no suggestion of what they'd eventually find the first survey used geophysical techniques to scan beneath the surface for disturbances in the soil Clues to possible human-made features but the early assessment only showed a few ancient trackways but then a few trial pits were dug to check out the site gradually an extraordinary story started to appear tantalizing glimpses of burials they rarely show up on geophysical surveys but the early dig showed bones hints of metal teams of archaeologists move in using metal detectors as a tool to help locate likely burial sites for excavation got a large fairer support here okay which if I pinpoint it tend to put over the locations to protect them from the weather almost immediately things get interesting the detectors identify locations of metal objects before the digging begins at Earth foreign Matt painstakingly reveals an iron object a Spearhead we haven't actually found any skeleton any bones yet but what we have found is a gorgeous spearhead right there so that one will be the tip basically you see that is one edge of it and that's where the wood would have socketed into it what's really odd is that it's a spearhead without a body at the moment we haven't reached the bottom of the Grave yet so what we're going to do is I'm going to clean it all up and then hopefully we find ahead Excavating over the next day reveals the skeleton of the person who was buried with the spearhead placed by their left shoulder well we've got a body which is nice it's a bit of a relief actually so going along with the spearhead we've got this Shield bus which would be if you picture a shield it'd be the middle bits the iron bit and it's kind of a bit of a bashing basically it's a bit unusual because it's got a little bit of a pokey out there which is more effective for bashing I guess as well as that we've got these two metal objects here which we think might be nice currently with Saxons it's a it's good to have two knives on the Go at once uh one for kind of fighting one for whatever else you need to do eating whatever across the site more burials are emerging all in early Anglo-Saxon Style foreign and many of them are revealing Weaponry including the remains of several more lavishly decorated Shields and more spearheads [Music] as each grave is excavated a picture is emerging of what seems to be a group of wealthy people with valuable Anglo-Saxon artifacts from the 5th and 6th centuries A.D the era immediately after Roman rule traditionally the Romans are portrayed literally packing up and leaving Britain in 410 A.D historians now think it was far more complicated with a mix of interacting cultures particularly in this early phase a time that is short on historic evidence the written record for this period is incredibly thin we have a few contemporary references and then a little bit more written over a century later we get the legendary names like Arthur and vortegone but the picture that emerges is one of Shifting times uncertainty in the post-roman period and the arrival of Europeans in Britain people who were going to change the course of British history the lack of written records means that the physical objects in this time are incredibly useful to help interpret this little understood period after being recorded on site the fines are being moved to archaeological headquarters for further assessment I've come to this secret location in Cardiff where the objects are undergoing their initial evaluation let's go inside and check them out foreign [Music] is Johan McCarthy all right yeah and what we got here okay so here we have a selection of weapons from the site obviously here on this side we have a couple of spearheads delicious looking spearheads yes indeed I'd want a state of preservation I mean you can see that that sort of they leave nothing to the imagination can I pick this evil looking one yeah indeed yeah that's a pretty robust and what does the what does the width mean on that is that is that is that a just to make it look nice or is that a more effective injury yeah it definitely creates more effective injuries as the blade widens obviously that's going to open a larger wound which is going to be more bleeding it's going to be a very very nasty injury indeed wow as well as Spears many burials male and female adult and even some children include an Anglo-Saxon style knife known as a sayax so here we have a sayax and a sayax is essentially a really big knife now it could have been used as a weapon there are theories that it may have had more of a practical use of sort of a hunting knife as well but um in combat you can see how effective it would be if you're in the Press of uh of close combat yeah yeah then it's going to be a lot more effective to use a shorter weapon to get into somebody's ribs so they're growing some nasty area like that cause somebody some horrible damage because you can't wave your sword around because you're all you're all yeah exactly you're in a shield pool you think everything's going fine you look down someone just stuck one of those into your thigh one remarkable discovery on site brings home the potential for violence in the early Anglo-Saxon world well this is an exciting Barrel the 30th so far much like the other Barrel obviously it's the lines to a specific set of cardinal points this one is northwest southeast and like all our other burials its head is either in a southern part or the western part however unusually the burial is flexed now most of our barrels are supine extended on their back with their legs sticking out down to the bottom of the burial these legs are bent slightly flexed you'll notice that there is a lovely copper alloy disc brooch down there and if you see the staining on the bone just towards me that also was the location of another copper Isle object which is degraded completely and left the staining on the bone so much like the other burials we've got these two disc broaches probably forming class for a cloak but what makes this burial very very interesting you'll notice towards the base of the spine an iron object if you look at it it's actually embedded in the spine a notch in the spine so when we remove it you'll see the notch in it whether it's cause of death is another we don't know for certain yet although the chances are it is this is the most curious of the burials so far not the richest in grave Goods but this particular event this is a singular event that we've actually got in the archaeological record foreign it's very rare to find a burial like this a body laid in the ground with some care but with the sharp spearhead still sticking into it back at headquarters in Cardiff the burns this unfortunate victim have had an initial assessment by The osteologist Rose kallis so we can estimate age at death we use a suite of methodologies the most commonly used is the is to swear and tooth eruption and also we can look at the auricular surface which is a morphology of this area of the pelvis and the morphology the bone degrades through time so you can get an age from that so this particular individual we've managed to age to 17 to 25 years of age young man a young man yes yeah Rose's examination has found out more about the gruesome wound this sharp iron spear or sayax caused in the young man that was embedded into the body of the spine and that projection we can estimate that this particular person was stabbed from the left side from the front rather than the back and it was very deep because it actually penetrated and embedded into the spine and then he was it was left in and he was buried that is terrible he was stabbed in the stomach when in so hard it is spine it's always so exciting archeology where you get a glimpse into a particular second even though it happened 1500 years ago and that well that's it absolutely um and this is the only evidence of a sharp force trauma within the whole Cemetery that she seems really important because our perception of this period is that every night life was nasty brutish and short everyone's stabbing each other the whole time well this is the only individual within this Cemetery that has evidence for sharp force trauma and so there's nothing to suggest that this group of people were in constant conflict with each other [Music] foreign as well as Spears Manila Graves excavated including the metal fittings from wooden Shields particularly the central iron shield boss so this is a think of mail almost certainly in this case a warrior burial because it's a very large spear up to the top right and also the ubiquitous knife that we all find on pretty much all the barrels we've had with the handle just there under the forearm the two hands are below the thigh the shield on top of the thigh and you can see that this itself was a weapons and this would do some serious damage but they're vicious because they're not just defensive on a shield that those could you could use those to smack into someone yes yeah yeah so they have offensive qualities obviously this one has a very nasty looking Spike on it which could obviously do simply some damage but they're also very versatile as well so they obviously protect your hand um but this one to Shield bosses like these have a flat disc on uh this protrusion here and that could be used to hook down an enemy Shield or sword if you can catch their blade or the rim of their shield on it uh it can actually be used that way as well and the decoration on that is beautiful yes yeah this one has some lovely silvered fittings on it and there is evidence to suggest that the Anglo-Saxons really did like decorating their Shields and they believe that perhaps by decorating them it's added to the protective qualities of The Shield across the site 15 burials were found with Spears and seven with shields but only a single burial had one of these so this is really really exciting find on site this is actually the first sword we have on the site despite the number of burials so what we have here is a Spath of sword and during the Anglo-Saxon period this was used as kind of the Slash and Bash sword of the infantrymen and the preservation is it's really really fantastic so you can see here the blade is kept its shape really nicely and we even have bits here at the Scabbard left behind and then you can see here up at the hill and this may have been covered in either leather or bone and we actually see an Amber bead was found just about this position actually with the hilt um it could be that this was a form of decoration and would have dangled using some kind of cording along it and add a bit of personalization to this weapon lifting This Magnificent sword from the soil has been the highlight of Victoria's archaeological career it's great and it's terrifying because until you find it you can kind of go about your day of blissfully unaware but as soon as you do uncover something of such National importance like this you have this in custodianship for this Heritage that it's your responsibility not only to get it out okay but to ensure that it's going to actually be preserved and conserved for future Generations [Music] foreign [Music] there's a remarkable tool that lets me see just how the sword looked before it was lifted from the burial hey Louie hi Dan how you doing good so what are we looking at here right right we are going to show you some photogrammetry models of some of the burials that we've found so this is super accurate yep it's built up from photographic imagery and then basically we drop it into a 3D model and so you can zoom in out and see all aspects the one individual skeleton 83 you see under his left side look at that so long profile of the sword as we found it and that's one of the few swords you found on site uh it's the only only one long sword or proper sword at the other one's a slightly shorter sort of sayax style who are fascinated to know exactly why it is broken a sword when the others aren't that's amazing what a great tool to be able to um so you can revisit the grave site years after it's actually been Disturbed and the bone is collected the technology is incredibly useful to understand the site but I really want to take an up-close look at this remarkable weapon for myself well look at this you have this wow now that is a beauty isn't it yes it is indeed oh my goodness it is beautiful Anglo-Saxon sword obviously there's a little bit of Merc on it here but it's it's still in a fairly good state of preservation and then you've got the grip would have been wood but that's that's rotted away yes the grip would have probably been in some perishable material maybe wood maybe bones something like that so unfortunately it hasn't survived in this case many swords especially for the early Anglo-Saxons may have been given as gifts we know from Anglo-Saxon Literature Like Beowulf how important gift giving was to the relationship between a Lord and his retainer so it does show that they are that they are indeed a status weapon a status symbol can I try and see what the way yes yeah if we're gentle with it we can just pick it up a little bit there we go oh amazing it's got a lot of a lot of Weights though isn't that mate so your mic is obviously a cutting weapon but it can break you know it could break a limb if you hit someone yes yeah it's quite easily only one found at this site I mean that's tempting to think therefore that the people that were burying these bodies they were they were keeping the sauce back maybe for themselves yeah the kids might be like well I'm keeping dad's sword so but he can have his old spear exactly the sword was almost certainly made of pattern welded iron a finely crafted object of lethal practical Beauty but as the excavation continues and more and more burials are uncovered a different picture starts to emerge on site not just weapons but the beautiful and useful possessions of people who've lived relatively stable wealthy lives it would be wrong to think this excavation is all about violence and weaponry that this era is one of Warlords invading Saxons our theory in Britain's trying to hold them back violence Darkness of the restraining guiding hand of the Roman empire being taken away and being replaced by Anarchy okay interpretation suited an earlier generation of historians one who saw the British Empire's role in the world as positive talked about the civilizing influence of the Imperial power but now we've come to think about Empire very differently and we think about this period differently as well it's no longer the Dark Ages but the early medieval or early middle ages the early medieval period certainly saw people on the move across Europe as the Western Roman Empire disintegrated the Slender written record talk of angles Saxons and juts crossing the Seas from northern Europe they describe Invasion and the arrival of mercenaries in the 5th Century but there's much debate about how large and violent and incoming this really was however the archeology shows how they brought a new style of objects to Britain [Music] on-site more and more objects have exceptional Beauty discovered bodies buried festooned in bead necklaces gorgeous brooches toiletry sets and beautiful spiral silver rings you can really start to get an idea of how these people looked when they were alive and dressed in their finery the Thames of Mercia are a living history group who specialize in this early Anglo-Saxon era including the clothes of wealthy women as worn by Julia I'm dressed as a Sith with a 6th Century noblewoman this is a florid Cruise form long brooch that pins my clothes together um and then underneath these are also one of my more recent pieces these are baltic amber again the original finds had much chunkier pieces of Amber on them they've got Roman recycled Blue Glass some polychrome glass beads and some melon beads as well which I really like they're like my favorite pieces this is my new ring originally found in bidford on Avon a grave at Silver spiral I have my little um toiletry set some nail clippers an ear spoon and a sharp thing to get the dirt from under your nails and I've got my Square small long brooches they they're really important actually the coat of my dress my dress isn't tailored at all so um it's held together by my belt and my brooches but it's really awkward to put together it takes a few pairs of hands essentially they hold the whole thing together um not the comfiest things they do dig in a little bit but you know fashion sixth century fashion nearly everyone buried at the Wendover Cemetery was fully clothed in their best items wasn't only things that were made to be worn that were found in the excavations if the archaeologists have also turned up some beautifully crafted objects including small wooden containers shaped like small decorated buckets yeah well what we what were you think you've got is that there's a wooden vessel that's been reinforced with these bronze buns around it and you can see there's one there and that's got the rim on it we've had other ones in some of the other burials with fewer sort of rings around them so I think this is this is on the the fancier end of ones that we've we've had here just here this is the school just kind of starting to come up here and they've all been outside I've for the time being the ceremonial purpose of these wooden containers is a mystery some objects have clearer uses including one of the most exceptional finds at the site we have an amazing object the second of its type found in Britain as a whole vessel the other being in the British museum it's a beautiful cone-shaped Beaker and it's an extraordinary uh fortunate for it to survive because this side has been you see the grave is very shallow and it's been plowed quite heavily so we have a lot of plow scars and this fortunately has survived the ravages of time so again it's a site that keeps on giving and that every single grave could be it's very different this is the first of this type of Beaker that we've got here we may find more so it's a it's a very high status drinking vessel so and it's made of glass made locally now transporting glass um across land across whatever distances is a fragile business at best so the unless you have these large trade networks glass tends to have very short trade runs we know that glass is manufactured at this time in certain parts of Britain Dennis powers and South Wales being a famous example where they found glass workings so this would have been made not necessarily local local but certainly in Britain [Music] foreign ERS had the chance to take a closer look at this amazing cone beaker here we have a Kempston style glass Beaker and now this is an Anglo-Saxon find and it's it is very delicate indeed um but it's very beautiful and it's an example of a a kind of high status object that would be used for feasting drinking some nice imported wine or perhaps Mead a lot of the glass objects that were made by the Anglo-Saxons were also made with recycled glass often imported from the continent there would be centers where old glass vessels will be smashed down into tiny little cubes we called cullet and then they would be sold on and many of them would arrive in Anglo-Saxon England where they would be melted down by Artisans and made into new objects like this it's giving me a very different flavor for interior designs in the early medieval period I mean it would be the obviously these are high status these are wealthy people but their houses would have been filled with the kind of beautiful objects that we would think of as having in our houses these spectacular objects tell a story of new Styles coming to Britain after Roman rule and a relatively wealthy group of people who made their homes here on the edge of a hill in what is now buckinghamshire it's been an exceptional opportunity for the lead archaeologist of the hs2 digs on this section of the line Dr Rachel Wood Rachel how would you sort of summarize who was buried at this site and over how many decades so from the objects we can see it covered basically the fifth and sixth centuries A.D so we don't know precisely but it's around a couple of hundred years of burial here it's not that many people so 141 people over a couple hundred years is not that many so it's not the whole population and we can also see from the objects that it's it's the wealthier or highest Status End of the population that's been buried there this is 200 years of the kind of elite of society buried in one place and you just you guys stumbled across it that must be the dream of any archaeologist absolutely it's it's so interesting and we would have been so excited to find one grave with one decorated pot in it and yet we had 141 individuals with almost all of them having at least one amazing knife or you know most people had large collections of beads with them and pottery vessels or a bucket or one of the glass vessels or something you yeah we really really were utterly astounded with it the amount of information that we will be able to get from the further work and the further study that can be done on the objects and the people themselves is um immense I would say this is probably uh one of the most important Anglo-Saxon discoveries since Sutton who will the Staffordshire hoard one particular grave on the site gives an idea of the range of objects these people knew from Roman times deep into the Anglo-Saxon period we have a super an extended burial much like all the others we've had so far and with it there's a variety of very interesting Goods um the most obvious you can see is the glass bowl there which is survived fully intact except of course the weight of soil on top of it has cracked it glass objects themselves are unusual in barrels so in late Roman burials they occur more frequently than than not however if it was early Saxon that would be very unusual so it's it glass itself was a high status object was imported from a long long way away in the late Roman period this person was buried with plenty of fine clothing and jewelry it all makes for an array of objects from across several centuries carefully placed with a single burial back in Cardiff the glass bowl has been reassembled in the lab this bowl this is actually late Roman in Orange yes it is we believe this bowl originates around Circa 400 A.D just about the time the Romans were leaving Britain and uh this is so interesting because it was found in an Anglo-Saxon grave and not just any Anglo-Saxon grave as well we also found something else in that grave what we have here we have some silver objects and there's two possibilities with these objects we call them scooter form disks it means they're shaped like Shields as you can see this is much like the shield bosses that we're missing from the sites and if I take these tweezers here and and turn it over you can see it has a handle exactly yes now there's two possibilities one is that they were all part of a necklace now we have these necklace with scooter form discs and they are generally a lot later than the kind of stuff we've been finding here more towards late sixth early 7th Century uh kind of periods and uh if that's the case then having a late Roman glass bowl and quite a late early Anglo-Saxon object in the same grave implies that this bowl may have been curated for a very long time either that or it was traded from abroad at a slightly later date so it's about it's a Survivor yes very much so very much so survives a lot longer it would in my house so the glass bowl and silver discs were probably made up to 200 years apart and yet they were carefully buried with the same person there's much work still to do carbon dating chemical analysis to find out where these people came from perhaps DNA to see if they're family groups but we do already know a huge amount about this special site there are 141 burials in 138 grave Cuts buried in the fifth sixth and possibly seventh centuries A.D over three quarters of them were buried with objects many exquisites from fine swords to rare glassware and Jewelry apart from a few objects preserved carefully from Roman times the artifacts show a clear Anglo-Saxon style made both in Britain and on the continent [Music] to complete the picture I'm visiting Oxford to meet professor of anglo-saxon archeology Helena hamaro the terrible reputation is based on a very small number of written sources that describe those centuries as absolutely apocalyptic the end of everything the end of the Roman world and you know disaster afterwards but what we're seeing from the archeology which is really quite abundant now and growing all the time is that you know there's a much more gradual transformation that's taking place and then some parts of the country Roman ways of doing things actually continued up to a point you know right through the fifth century so we shouldn't think of it in terms of this catastrophic collapse of everything in the first half of the fifth century so we're starting to realize that it really wasn't like that and you know things did change ways of doing did change in the fifths and especially the sixth centuries so migration clearly played a role but it cannot explain everything and it's I think we can be quite confident that the majority of the people living in let's call it lowland Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries were descendants of the people who'd always lived here but amongst awesome was a substantial a substantial minority of people whose forebears did come from the other side of the North Sea so I'm obviously a product of of centuries of writing about states that has made me think that a good state is one with a kind of powerful Central Authority and armed forces and borders and do you think this evidence these people were living in a different kind of world where those where the lack of those things didn't just mean constant Hobson nightmarish Anarchy yeah produce these huge surpluses to to pay uh to pay to the Empire you know you're essentially talking about broadly being self-sufficient communities who are doing it for themselves uh you know there aren't really even Kings obviously we're biased towards burials because that's often what we find I guess but but the big question is what does the archeology tell us how does it fill in those gaps well in in the fifth and sixth centuries um you know the majority of people were buried um closed so they're buried with any um durable kind of dress fittings that they might have been wearing at the time and then in addition to any dress fittings you've got grave Goods so maybe a pot might be some Weaponry might be a glass drinking vessel all sorts of things associated with the kinds of activities that people were got are just really important you know being equipped for Warfare if you were an adult male you know feasting drinking all those sorts of things if you were you know at the top of the tree or that kind of thing having access to rare imported goods you know gold glass you know garnets those sorts of things that came from far away and showed that your family was well connected those kinds of objects were incredibly important in communicating the position of a particular family or kin group within the wider community so the decision to bury somebody with a sword or a glass drinking vessel was probably not a religious statement it was probably a statement about that person's identity within a wider family group and we tend to think now that you know the head of the family male female heads of a family would be buried really ostentatiously with lots of stuff and then kind of the second cousin twice removed would not have so much it sure is quite interesting this site seems to be quite High status people do you think it could be a sort of cross-sectional Community or do you think it is an elite place well it does have a lot of stuff um and I wonder whether it's something to do with where it's located and it's located quite a nodal quite a strategic position so they have been in a very good location to access Goods traveling through save from the southeast from Kent to London up towards the upper Thames Valley all the good stuff really is coming from across the channel the gold the garnets the coins the glass vessels they're coming from the Frankish world and Beyond so you want to get your hands on that sort of stuff it's prestigious it it symbolizes your success the position of your family and that cemetery is located in a very good position to be able to access that sort of stuff it seems to have been quite a prosperous Community right through the whole period with you know more or less ready access to pretty good stuff I mean there are cemeteries where you you wouldn't get a fraction of that so this looks very much like an ancestral Cemetery established in the fifth century maybe even the first half of the fifth century some of the fines are very early and it carried on a use potentially right through into the seventh so it is an ancestral cemetery and and that's quite that's relatively common in England in this period so you have these quite large ancestral cemeteries which then in the conversion period in many cases not always but in many cases are then replaced they're abandoned and replaced Often by somewhat smaller cemeteries elsewhere so this looks as though it probably went out of use round about the early 7th century well over a thousand years ago this site was forgotten seems so surprising given the importance of tax rate while the people who are buried here and all their finery people who knew a much wider world than this little Valley they knew Germany the North Sea Britain and they chose to be buried here with all the wealth and objects that accumulated at points along that journey through life then the ever-changing nature of British history meant that New Elites new rulers moved in and obviously for them this place had none of that magic and it was lost until archaeologists so recently rediscovered as the post-excavation work continues in the lab this remarkable unexpected Discovery will continue to take us closer to one of the most misunderstood and fascinating periods in history thanks for watching this video on the history Hit YouTube channel you can subscribe right here to make sure you don't miss any of our great films that are coming out or if you are a true history fan check out our special dedicated History Channel historyhit.tv you're gonna love it

Channel: History Hit

Views: 113,498

Keywords: history hit, history hit youtube, dark ages documentary, dark ages archaeology, hs2 dig, dan snow dark ages, dark ages skeletons, medieval archaeology, medieval archeology, medieval skeletons, medieval documentary, dan snow medieval, medieval discoveries, medieval discoveries uk, medieval skeleton discovery, medieval discoveries documentary, middle ages documentary, middle ages history, middle ages archaeology, best archaeology finds, best archaeology finds 2022

Id: 2xSmITnazFE

Length: 37min 42sec (2262 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 10 2023