How Did This Mass Animal Grave Reveal A Buried Iron Age Settlement? | Time Team | Odyssey

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] this is Raf pershore it used to be a second world war Airfield here in Worcestershire over here is a burial pit for cattle culled in the recent foot and mouth Outbreak The epidemic stopped a lot of archeology because access to many rural sites was virtually impossible but over here as a direct result of the epidemic there's been a major new find a previously unknown site that could be as much as 4 000 years old it came to light when the Ministry of Agriculture asked archaeologists where they could dig their burial pits well certainly not here said the geophys boys because they'd come up with this whole Maze of squiggles and circles they could be Bronze Age burials or Iron Age settlements or a Roman Farm or maybe all three so time team have come here to find out how old this site is how big how important and as usual we've got just three days to do it [Music] thank you well the original GFS was done by our own John Gator and this metal interfered with the geoffiz around here so we couldn't find out what was going on under the ground is that a problem not for us we're going to pull down the telegraph Pole that's a nice noise isn't it so fun and games over it's time for business our sights on this huge field next to one of the longest runways in Britain used by Vulcan bombers in the 1950s geoffiz have surveyed only part of the field finding out if the site extends further west will be a marathon job for them watch hundreds of exclusive history documentaries with a subscription to history hit our goal is to bring you award-winning documentaries that cover the events and figures that have shaped our world all in one place delve into the history of the Ancients with history hits exclusive offering of documentaries explore with us the enchanting Temple of Karnak will take a deep dive into the fascinating pre-history of Scotland we also aim to bring you the stories and legends that shaped our world through our award-winning podcast Network sign up now for a free trial and odyssey fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code Odyssey at checkout aerial pits are just across the runway persuading the ministry not to put them on our site fell to the Worcestershire County archeology unit finding extraordinary that in the middle of what was Panic at that time the Ministry of Agriculture were prepared to hold back for a few days in order to allow you to do an archaeological Check Yes I mean in the midst of all the crisis they were concerned to do things properly so they got us onto site then even more amazingly when we came up with the geophysics showing the possible Bronze Age site they immediately agreed to take that area out of their plans for the burial site just so the archeology could be preserved for the future and all these months later you're still here it's turned into the biggest archaeological project to arise out of the foot and mouth crisis using the geophys that's already been done we're planning the first Trench if you went we've got here Nick well it looks like the sort of thing that would be Bronze Age or Iron Age anywhere else that would be my idea so late prehistoric landscape these are interesting things aren't they yeah I mean they look like barrows but I suppose they could be round houses could they as well yeah the right sort of dimensions for both couldn't they be something like World War II Searchlight batteries I hope not but it's only by digging we're gonna find this right so what do we do slap a big trench across them well they The Remains do look as if they're so well preserved so what we're really talking about is almost a sort of surge surgical incision from the edges to get the maximum amount of information but leaving the bulk of the site untouched so where's your at we should put a trench John well what we've got in addition to the circles uh is this big enclosure here and I think if we did something across the enclosure ditch through one of the circles so if we did that first so everyone's agreed a plan and we can start but I know that deep down there are some serious doubts among our archaeologists we'd normally want to get on and fully excavate at least one of the big features in the center of the site but Malcolm's insisting that we move slowly around the edges one small trench at a time all right for the moment but will we get the answers quickly enough one thing we can do is look at the immediate area around the Airfield which is rich in archeology from the bronze and iron ages and may contain Clues to the origins of our site in our incident room in the World War II control tower Worcester archaeologist Robin Jackson is helping Stewart to work out how our site fits into the local landscape and what we need to find out is what other things were happening around about here was the burial where the settlements was there agriculture so we need to know what other sites or what periods are around that small area of geophysics to fit it into context Robin what do we know about the landscape around us well our two dominant landscape features are Breeden Hill over behind us great outline of the Cotswolds which has at least two Iron Age Hill folks on it maybe three and then this side of it a great sweep of the River Haven with its River Terraces along which we know from Crop Marks and fine scatters there's lots and lots of settlements in the past I think these River Terraces are always occupied for a very long time they're settled they're Farm because it's good land and and that's been going on for thousands of years and that's the sort of context behind what we're looking at here what's your first Target to try and find out what the landscape might have been like 2 000 years ago um the Airfield itself is massively altered what the land looks like now we need to find out what the Contours of the land were like see where the edge of the gravel Terraces were see where the edge of the rivers were and see then how eyesight fits into that landscape as long as geophysics can cover this huge site we'll find out how big it is but actually digging the bronze and iron ages can be frustrating there are no structures and few finds when you can't put in many trenches it's even harder to find out how important the site is surely we are going to need more trenches protecting a site by scheduling it is a decision for English Heritage what does their local inspector think this is a fantastic piece of geophysics isn't it it is absolutely yeah it's spectacular isn't it I mean would would you be thinking of scheduling this as an ancient Monument on the basis of what you see there I think on the basis of what we see there it's unlikely that we would schedule just on the basis of the geophysics results there's nothing that that spectacular and unusual that says that it's it's really that special I mean you need a date or something that's right we need to know what date it is how well the deposits survive under the ground and their condition that sort of information is going to be very so you need some evaluation trenches to sort that out that's right to help with that process that's right okay so where are we going to dig well I think we need to look at the relationship of this this end of the site don't we Malcolm that's my my suggestion would be that we looked at that Junction because these are really dark features and we'll see whether one cuts the other or whether one's added on to another although again to take up the point of trying to preserve the the Integrity of the side I think we get pretty much the same results if we put one trench through here and then another the trench along this this currently blank area that's less clear isn't it on that side I think only possibly because we're picking up the disturbance from the the modern Runway yeah if that really is as strong as that then what difference does it make whether we do that one or that one to you because this is going to cause least disturbance to the overall picture there's still a difference of opinion about whether we should investigate the middle of the site at the moment we're sticking to Malcolm's plan to dig around the edges to preserve it so trench 2 at the other end of our site from trench one will be next to the runway evidence of Roman occupation has been found close to it and the squarish geophys suggests there may be Roman fines here too so can we decipher this site without digging in the middle I do understand the need to protect the Integrity of this site we can't just go digging trenches all over the place because it could be very valuable but I've got to admit I am getting a bit worried it seems to me there's the real possibility that we won't be able to get the kind of evidence that you need in order to determine whether or not you're going to schedule it well that's true yeah I mean there are a number of criteria that we would like to to satisfy before what kind of things are they well firstly we need to know the extent of a site so that we can draw a sensible boundary around it and say within that is worthy something worthy of protection we should be able to do that and we should be able to do that that's right John's geophysics result should give us that if we've got Bronze Age burials would you schedule if it's Bronze Age burials in a cremation Cemetery like that then it would be worthy of scheduling that's right and what about if it's only an Iron Age Farm or something I mean there must be thousands of those all over the country there are many many of them are known of course from aerial photographic evidence they're in very highly fertile parts of the country where they're being destroyed by plowing on a regular basis so if vision of survival is very good here then that would make something worth changing so it's detail you need isn't it and details the one thing that we may not get well I would have to see we hope very much that we need we do need that detail let's hope that we get it are we in trouble not yet at least we're opening another trench and at lunch time we're beginning at last to get a sniff of archeology Phil you got something for us well we have Tony we've dug the trench here we're stood in this wonderful ditch I mean you can see it's dipping down steeply down in there right down into the bottom show me how you know a ditch is there well here we've got this very gray sort of brownie gray material and you can see that the natural clay has got all this white in it funnily enough too the feel has actually got stones in it whereas the naturals got no stones in it so as soon as you come on to Stone less clay you know you're into the natural what about Bronze Age and Iron Age well we've got some pot there which Robin's been looking at which comes out of that little Gully over there what do you think Robin well I think if I'm going to be asked to hedge my bets I'll go for Iron Age on this we've got a Sandy looking fabric there and we've got something here with a little white whoops little white speckles in it which looks like Limestone tempered I'd go for Iron Age on both of those although I'd like to see some bigger bits something a little bit more diagnostic Francis you're a Bronze Age man what you're holding I know is not brother I love it I'm also a Fen man and this is what keeps you dry this is the drain that runs under the ground I reckon this was put in his little 20s or 30s something like that but why I think this is fun is that it's running right down the bottom of this ditch it's Iron Age ditch and that suggests to me that this was always a buggy spot even in the 1920s and certainly back in the Iron Age which is why they dug this great deep ditch to drain so you've actually got a continuity of a problem A continuing problem this buggy little bit of field for two thousand years it may be boggy and old but it's also huge our Geoff is flagging under the pressure you've got to keep your strength up mate I hope there's no meat in it no no it's a cheese sandwich brilliant because of the magnetism yeah like the cheese isn't magnetic mid-afternoon on day one the diggers in trench one are now beginning to come up with answers the key question is which period are we dealing with Katie everyone says you've got an Iron Age roundhouse in this trench I can't see an Iron Age roundhouse I can just see a load of dirt yeah there's lots of holes isn't there but basically we've put the trench across the boundary dips there yeah and straight across this circle here yeah so we are actually standing on that line of the circle there can I get a new trench sticking yes so this is the outside wall this is that yeah yeah yeah yeah and then The Arc of the house goes all the way around here yeah and then back to here so it's about nine meters in diameter any fines we've got this Iron Age Pottery that's come out of the Gully over there where Justice digging yeah so look at all this black stuff is this typical of Iron Age finds pretty super cool yeah that's the information we needed about this bit of the size exactly yep see you later there's a debate about whether the site's bronze or Iron Age so far all the finds have been Iron Age but our two experts Jeremy Taylor and Francis Pryor are still arguing the toss What's it gonna be like if it is predominantly early but if it's predominantly Iron Age you'd see from the geophysics that you've got two big ditched enclosures inside each one at least two round houses and probably some small stock pens or animal enclosures that made up part of quite a big Iron Age Farmstead but but I I'm not familiar with a row of Iron Age houses like this I mean it is it's almost as if that was Station Road or something yeah and I wonder I mean could those be Bronze Age barrows and then this little Iron Age house which we got out the back there is lined up on them and in a way saying I am the the result of my ancestors you know and this is probably then going to be quite an important place because it's got this ditch around it and it's lined up with this rower Bronze Age barriers could be quite a big cheese lives in there okay if these things are Bronze Age how do we find out well there's only one way you can't you can't find out by looking at him and find out by digging them we've got to dig them but that's exactly the area that we're inhibited from digging well if you don't understand something how can you preserve it entrenched two karenza's discovering that archeology and airfields don't mix she's already gone through a meter of the stuff they dumped here to level it off and it's still too soon to say what she might find as day one ends all our fines have been Iron Age we're now waiting for news from John Gator on how big the site could be Tony you got the new GFS look at this there's the original Rings yeah that's right and the enclosure now look at these more Rings more enclosure and in this really big possible ring here that's 35 meters in diameter that can't be around house it's extraordinary this site is getting more and more complicated how big is it well we still don't know but it's doubled in size since this morning how old is it we found a lot of Iron Age stuff but Francis thinks that there's Bronze Age here as well how important is it again we don't know but this line of rings seems to have changed to virtually a whole city so what is going on here join us after the break and we'll try and find out beginning of day two yesterday morning when we came here we had a nice orderly sensible plan but this new geofiz has changed everything some big decisions need to be made has practically doubled the size of our site and it's altered its shape is that going to affect our plan well in one sense it has in that we've got a bigger area so we've got new targets to look at now that this looks of its Iron Age this is probably an Iron Age farm and these are probably pens and things inside the yard and that could be the entrance into it but the exciting stuff is this stuff over here because John's actually just processing the rest of this have you got this yet John that's that's a large ring and there's another ring to the South so this one here is a big ring and there's another ring below it I'll try and get a plot for you okay so that's actually bigger and a different shape to anything else we've got so it might be earlier I suppose yeah I mean I think one of the key things to resolve on the site now is how many of these enclosures are contemporary and whether in fact that there's one large boundary ditch enclosing the hole well we won't know that until they've done more differs are over so what should we do over in this new area well I think the first thing is that that somewhere on this oval which we now know goes all the way around we've got to look at that see what date it is so that's that's actually probably number one priority isn't it is something on that and I suppose we need to know whether what this is whether it's another one of these so that's our first Target this is our second Target and then when we've got some spare capacity we carry on looking at this enclosure down here Malcolm this means more trenches and it means altering your plan slightly and you wanted to be very prudent yesterday because you wanted to protect the Integrity of the site are you happy that we extend the excavator station over here yes I am because I think every one of the trenches is targeted to to satisfy a particular need and answer a particular question so that's that's good so we've got to get on wait for the geophysics and then Target those three areas yesterday's plan to stick small trenches around the edges seems to be history now we're going to investigate features in the middle of the site these enclosures and the huge mysterious Circle 35 meters in diameter could it be a hinge a Sacred Circle which would mean Bronze Age or even earlier in his time for Phil's Army to get its marching orders we're going to open my trench in here with Johnny okay right and then I'm gonna be in over there with probably another Cutler three in there oh we've also got this other trench in here uh this other entrance trench which Ian and Katie are going to be doing right so we can get one or two more in there and any spares we can still leave them down in that bottom trench there sounds like you've used my six about three times no no no yeah that dish four meters long the latest long and a bucket with wood so far the dating evidence suggests our site was an Iron Age settlement so what was daily life like here then were they all dressed in skins gnawing raw meat off bones Jackie wood an experimental archaeologist is going to teach us how to make a prehistoric meal it's believed people cooked whatever they could catch or grow locally mix first up to his elbows in dough oats and barley they would have been ground up presumably yeah okay that looks about right now okay and we're gonna put some milk in right okay and you can see the ladle it's actually made from a tree see that's that's the main trunk it's just a brown truck yeah so let nature work for you yeah yeah I can't imagine how I'm going to get that off my hands okay let's see what this is like now yeah that's just about right now you entered a bit about that big yeah it's flat like that so something like that yeah that's right and then we're going to put them on the hot Stones over there somewhere like that that's it blimey that's all careful anywhere on that stone that's it how long do they take to cook well it depends on the heat of the stone right how will we know when they're cooking yeah this should take about 10 minutes really oh right so short as that right quick yeah quicker on The Griddle and it heats up much quicker than the stone because there's some butter in a little slip off if not careful all right come on nice and flat and it's still quite cool or even along there of course I smell good don't they oh look at that horribly burned yeah I reckon I could have run an Iron Age fast food parlor it's not often that we ask you to geoffish something the size of an Aerodrome yeah but I mean it's not really a promise it's nice and flat the big problem is the Mast up there sending all these magnetic waves across the field but do you reckon you'll be able to okay yep do you think you'll be able to give us a picture of the whole extent of the site if I say tomorrow lunchtime well I mean we'll do our best I mean we don't know how big it is obviously um we'll just keep going in the time available back at the other end of the site karenza is finally getting some results from trench two just meters away from the Roman finds across the runway now we've got sort of two ditches coming here because we've got one coming in like that and a huge long one that seems to go off like that right off in that direction according to geophysics we've now put a section through both of them to get some dating evidence for them and it's brilliant see we've got a really nice big piece of Iron Age Pottery down now that sort of mid to late iron Asia sometimes from 500 BC onwards we've got some really nice bits and pieces there's this uh Stone here which um so you can see has been cracked fits back together again and that's either been a hearth or more likely it's a stone that's actually been heated up and then dropped into a container of water to heat the water up for something like make a hot stew or something like that the other really nice item we've got is this little piece here it's a bit of a Iron Age razor the looks of it that's our best guess isn't it Jeremy I'd say so it's about half of a really nice copper Ally razor but this is a really useful piece of evidence from this Stitch because it tells us that we're dealing with a later Iron Age A Time In which people become more and more interested in personal grooming so you start to see razors turning up Ear Scoops and tweezers for plucking hair a lot of people have an image of Iron Age tribes has been quite War like the sort of picture we're getting here is really domestic life people sitting around the fire cooking their food and they're rather feed existence and sort of making sure they look nice so let's have no more talk of prehistoric brutes from the Iron Age these were obviously sophisticated types scooping the wax out of their ears and probably savoring fancy food and here's time teams five-star Chef making his contribution to dinner eel stew I can't wait what's the eel all right yeah and some trout it's about one that's it that's it as well and some hot smoked salmon so this would be a real luxury stew this is a special with the court sermon but you get all this in the local room you could all get this in the rivers yeah in those days and what are they going to be doing sitting there rod and loin and no no they had lots of ways of catching fish but one of them was with a trap like this one behind what they do is they'd lay that in the river right and the fish would go in here and it would be able to turn so it'll be totally trapped that's right they're just superb thing and if they didn't have a trap like this they'd Harpoon it what this thing here with that she's specifically for reals ear would go in this would actually trap it there but hang on I mean this is Stone Age Technology well that's right but if it works why change it it's rather good now hey so anyway once we've caught it and smoked it what we've got to do to cook it well you've got to chop it in nice big chunks and stick it in the pot there and put it fry it in with the bacon the skin and all bones everything everything just I don't know about that I mean that looks like a fairly monstrous bone either one of it's wedged in the throat absolutely likely ingredients would have been whatever was available locally like seasonal berries I thought of actually eating more Thorns before well they're really good they're very good for you I'll try it full of vitamin C what skin and all just get down yeah oh it's quite nice actually when you swallow it quite sweet yeah what what is this uh we've got some Sorrel that grows in the hedgerows and some wild chives okay right now we just have to wait for it to cook Stewart seems to have found Clues to the age of our site a mile away in a cabbage field you've got Breeden Hill to the South yeah big wide river valley then to the left of the trees you see it gradually starts to rise up until you get to a ridge up there well that's the first gravel Terrace above the river right and we know from excavations and so on that there's a whole string of prehistoric settlements and activity right on that gravel there just above the river that's right exactly but if you come up onto the Ridge and follow it along that's where our site is you can see the control tower over there they're the Masters that's that's where we're digging so you're on the sort of next level up in fact it is yeah so there's a move really from the early prehistoric stuff down here up to the Iron Age stuff which is what we're getting on the top I think that's right we're not really getting into the earlier from that are we at the moment yeah cracking cabbages as well aren't they in trench four Phil's now investigating the possible henge the huge 35 meter Circle it's just getting to be a really lovely little trench here Robin look what we had at the top soil afraid it is only the topsoil oh very nice lovely Roman brooch totally complete with the um with a pin there and everything else that's looking uh first century yeah First Century A.D but of course like I say it's a lovely thing in its own right but it's out of the top soil and the top so some careless persons the real the real nitty-gritty of the whole trench is this ditch that we're in that we've got Trace going through the trench this went out through there when we were in the top of it we had quite a lot of bone and also a quite a bit of Iron Age pop but that's right in the top of the ditch then we had a sterile layer sort of in there and then suddenly right down at the bottom I've got this enormous bag of fines oh yes including that rather Splendid decorated shirt excellent now that's more like it that's what I've been looking for not these little crumbs we've we've actually got something diagnostic there that that's looking middle Iron Age that is ah so you know we're going down to about 500 BC now we're looking solidly around there you see this these nice little Visa decorations beautiful little stuff classic and I've actually got another piece which is wow very very similar Yep looks like it might be part of the same one it could be the same pot couldn't it almost nothing but Iron Age from every Trench so has Francis fallen on his Bronze Age sword yet so Francis we've got Iron Age in virtually every trench and your Bronze Age Theory comes crashing down to the ground yeah it belly flops yes there's no Bronze Age here but I can see so a triumphant I am at the moment that's certainly true all the dating evidence we've had so far suggests that this site is occupied from the middle Iron Age right the way through until the conquest period at which point they seem to have moved perhaps only one or two hundred yards further north and started using Roman pottery and calling themselves Romans but what about and this GF is there's this big ring which I know a lot of the archaeologists were getting excited about and thought could be a hinge so I've dug a few hinges and that is not a hinge for a start the ditch is far too shallow it's not perfectly circular the entrance ways are too narrow and there isn't a bank around the outside but apart from that it's spot-on so it's got to be some kind of enclosure probably a farming closure all right we're saying it's all Iron Age but what does that actually mean when did the Bronze Age end and the Iron Age begin yeah well I don't think someone woke up in the morning of 700 BC and said whoopee it's yarn age and I'm an Iron Age personally they were the same people as were in the Bronze Age and then later on we would call them Celts they just used a slightly different technology used um you know Iron instead of bronze if you landed back into Bronze Age you'd be pushed to tell you know a minor Bronze Age I mean very similar the age of the site seems to have been settled but we still don't know how big it is at last The Waiting may be over Jeffers think they've seen the Finishing Line That's the extra bit now Mick now we've got what looks like a western boundary to the site surely one of the things we need to do is look at this because this is where you've got very little Beyond this is that right well I'm hoping that's the case but I think we're happy now that this is is probably an Iron Age hot Circle um and if so would be useful to take out more of it to get a better idea of the internal plan take out a quadrant one quarter of the of the interview why don't you do that Phil and then we can put karenza in there to look at those ditches and see if we can get some relationship between those so carenza's off to the Western Front while Phil's going back to the roundhouse in trench one that means leaving the huge circle in trench four but at least we now know it's Iron Age so it was probably a Stockyard and not a hinge back in the Iron Age hedge karenza is about to have unveiled to her the mysteries of prehistoric cheese making well what we're going to do is heat the cheese by actually using hot stones and putting that into the milk which has got some sour cream in it that's interesting because in the trench we've actually found some of these Stones which have cracked from here oh really wow so it can be fairly confident that was what they were doing that's right it's a seriously effective way of cooking actually but why use heated stones to put into your liquid to heat it up rather than just putting the whole pot onto the fire well because she might want to roast some meat around the fire they might want to sit around if it's cold day and also if it's Smoky fire like this is a bit of a smoky fire you can actually do your cooking away from the fire by just adding stones to it every soaking right so how do we go about it okay we've got uh some tongs there made out of a Hazel Branch okay take one yeah rather good on there you had to take one of the stones drop it into this water just to get the Ash off and then put it straight into just just dip it in the water that's it it's boiled so quickly if you put them in water it will actually boil water in about 60 seconds now we can actually see that the actual curds are separated from the way what we need to do now is to take these stones out so if you can actually Rummage in there and take the stones out and put them back in the fire I don't know that's enough like that right that's the cheese it's made now so we just wait a little while for it to actually strain so that's the curds in the top is there anything underneath yeah there's a way oh yes very watery down there that's right of course no dinner part is complete without intimate lighting first peel some rushes strip the pith out dip it in molten wax it so they froth up nicely oh yes prehistoric Rush lights we're hoping that full excavation in trench one will reveal a complete roundhouse but Phil's hit a problem and here is the Arc of our roundhouse can you see it actually on the ground yes it's this bit here oh yeah and even I can see that okay close to here yeah and so you can see that when it gets to there it stops yeah the reason it stops is pretty sure that there is the here is the entrance of The Roundhouse it's point in southeast where the the entrance is usually are but there is a complication because you can see this brown stuff that is a Furrow of the medieval Ridge and Furrow system and it's cutting through the entrance of The Roundhouse karenza and Robin are opening trench seven to look for the boundary ditch we're hoping for good dating evidence and clues about the status of the settlement day two draws to a close finding out whether there's a sucking great boundary will be a job for day three but with six trenches running I can't help feeling there might be some surprises as well it's extraordinary difficult getting the bone out of the inside of the eels with these spoons of course you are this is the Iron Age I don't have that problem now you have a problem with your beard I think the cheese is particularly good thank you very much that's delicious well this is what life's like inside an Iron Age house tomorrow on our site we're going to excavate one join us after the break do you like a real it's excellent absolutely excellent and I never thought I'd say that beginning of day three and after a slow and frustrating start two days ago we've now got one two three four about seven trenches in our field today this is the important one it's Phil's trench and in it we've found evidence of an Iron Age roundhouse soon it'll be full of archaeologists as we start to excavate it [Music] well that ain't gonna work yesterday geophys thought they'd found the site's western boundary ditch so just when they decided to pack up their magnetometers we've asked them for one more strip to make sure that there's nothing more I don't know what's happened to Phil's Army we've drafted some highly irregular diggers in trench one right Lads I've got some fines trades for you Jeremy come over here very much what are two of the country's most senior archaeologists doing getting their hands dirty you're gonna have blisters when was the last time you did this I don't know Wednesday I think why are you two digging simply because discovered both on the geophysics but pointed out by Francis this morning with these much lighter colored ditches which we suspect May well predate the Iron Age well the thing is you don't give up dude no no a good archaeologist never gives up it was an Iron Age house there right now if this is early as my theory has it then any rubbish from the Iron Age house won't be in it right because it's going to be earlier than the house so we've got to dig it out and make sure that there isn't any and that means we've got to dig it out and we've got to dig it out no okay and I want to dig it I like this all the younger archaeologists are at the far end of the trench doing the proper archeology and due to a beavering away trying to chase this Theory no one else will I like that at the other end of trench one Phil's finding that the damage caused by medieval plowing is frustrating his search for The Roundhouse trench 7 has uncovered a rather puzzling bone thing well it cracked rather severely that's a two-pronged item and it's you know about the right size to sit in the hand Jackie wood thinks it may have been a tool for making Nets when you're making this when you're using hand spun wool as they did then wool twists itself so each time you want to make a nice new Loop it twist itself you know it's a nightmare right so if you had something like this you'd push this into the previous two loops and it holds the shape then you can do your two Loops pull it out push it in do this and you'd actually sort of it would work really well what would the lights have been used for do you think the Nets well they're used for all sorts of things they had um for fishing nets for hair nets perhaps in the Iron Age obviously for hams and bacon which is a popular food that have hung their hands in trench one our two senior archaeologists have been beavering away for over an hour Francis this has been your final throw have we got anything we have we have this is Bronze Age I'm pretty sure it's Bronze Age why why if I look at this yeah this looks to me absolutely identical from everything else in this trench ah in that case you're not looking hard enough right the filling in that ditch if you look at the end there you can see it's much paler this bit here yep that's it it's very much paler and again I suppose it's paler here yeah now if you look over there in in Phil's uh roundhouse where you can see he's got his his box the the soil there is much much darker right so so whatever was going on in that Iron Age house involved a lot of charcoal okay none of that charcoal has found its way into this dish so this ditch couldn't possibly have been open when that house was in use why couldn't it be later the Iron Age well when we started digging it there was some nice pottery in the top good middle Iron Age Pottery but it seems that that Pottery is sealing this ditch after it's filled in so it must have been open earlier than the roundhouse was occupied you happy about that oh yeah it's clever stuff but it's absolutely right so what do you think this thing was I mean no doubt about it it's a field boundary ditch so you'd have had a bank alongside the ditch and on top of the bank you'd have had a hedge probably a lead hedge but that would be stockproof no animals could get through so do you think that there were people here in the Bronze Age and people living here right up to the Iron Age or was it Bronze Age then deserted then Iron Age people came later on I think what you're looking at is a developed landscape in other words cleared of trees in the Bronze Age and open and staying open and people living here and then in the Iron Age in the Iron Age you get a settlement quite a big Farmstead or series of farmsters in this area so an occupied landscape a farmed landscape from about a thousand BC but no obvious signs yet of a settlement until about the middle of the Iron Age about 500. we just won't know whether trench 7 is across the western boundary of our site until we get confirmation from Geoff Fizz that there's nothing Beyond it have you got the rest of the GFS yeah that's that extra 20 meter strip which is where this one here down here so that was that boundary I was talking about um happy so we now know the extent of the archeology yeah I mean this trend this ditch here which we've got this trench across these actually now the westerners are the size isn't it yeah it's all happening over in trench one well Francis ah come and have a look at this we've got some of it yeah what'd you make of that oh God so you have good God I am yeah definitely very nice that is incredible this looks like a fastening or a plate could it be for a Scabbard yeah I reckon so but that's that's what your your belt goes I mean it's a sort of metal version of one of these exactly like that yeah yeah I mean it's just so impresses me that we've actually got iron from the Iron Age I mean it's not a plentiful commodity is it no by no means I mean we've had more bronze more copper alloying oh yeah yeah certainly as well as that we've got some metal workings like that would fit wouldn't it with the uh dark color of the soil yeah and it would account for why the house wall trenches dark the eaves drip is dark everything's dark they were making iron around here yeah Stewart's been able to work out the shape of the landscape before the Airfield flattened it out what we've got here is a three-dimensional map of the landscape yeah our site's sitting here yeah it's on the plateau which overlooks the piddle Brook Valley coming down here towards the flux but if we look at the the landscape now oh what we want to see as well done same view very good yeah there's the the Airfield that's the area where the geophysics and excavation took place now what's happened is the landscape has effectively been changed because of the Airfield here's the piddle Brook coming down here we've got remnants of the landscape prior to the Airfield which are really just hedge lines yeah now although they're not much they're actually quite important in understanding the development of this landscape which if we look at what it was likely to have been like in the prehistoric period looks something like this oh yeah now obviously there's a piddle Brook going down there our site is is there now what we have is a series of divisions across this Plateau into long strips and we know that because the alignment of these Hedges and later maps showing these fields matches the alignment of features which we see on the geophysical survey right so it looks they've got these long strips divided into fields of pasture common access to the piddle Brook down here for watering sheep and so on and a nice agricultural landscape sheep animals and probably dispersed little settlements in each particular plot rather than great big clusters I mean that's nice because it's similar sort of evidence for what we've got with Prehistoric areas inside Dartmoor and Wessex and so on where the landscape is divided up in the same sort of way so it's rather suggests that this is a accurate reconstruction in trench six caters revealed the entrance of a nine age enclosure this spot here is the entranceway so I'm now walking in school hold it hold it if that's an entrance way right they'd be going in and out with carts yeah you're going to get wheel wraps underneath those Pebbles that's crucially important have you have any sign of them at all we only know one example in Britain of the wheelbase of a prehistoric card so we've got to get it even though large sections of the roundhouse in trench one were scooped out by medieval plowing we can still tell how big it was unfortunately trench 7 hasn't delivered our great big boundary ditch so basically in terms of that geophysics feature being the big boundary ditch it doesn't look like it it's too small it's two ditches that that one and this this which I think is just a roundhouse strip girl or something yeah it doesn't look like a big boundary ditch unless we've just been really unlucky and put the trench in at the one point where the ditch is much smaller or shallower maybe it's just a small ditch that had an awful lot of very magnetic rubbish in it and that's what's giving us the signal so I think that's it really because the geophys so clearly showed that there was nothing Beyond this feature the archaeologists still feel that it was a boundary ditch it may in fact have been much bigger than we allowed and we just didn't get deep enough to find out good news from trench six Francis is in a bit of a rut an Iron Age wheel rut to be precise okay they're coming like this this is one Edge coming along there can you see it's about two inches wide uh it's lining up lining up there yeah they are incredibly faint they always are and I think that's what we're looking at here this is probably more likely not to be a farm card as much as the farmer's card so it would be actually the sort of vehicle you carry people in that was it because it was Prestige that's all it's all about you know you you buy a Rolls-Royce before you buy a tractor because you want to impress people yeah and I think that's what we're looking at here this is probably a a light Personnel type car Carriage I would never have seen that if you if you weren't looking for yeah well there was faint was that when I found it in the past and they're incredibly faint but they're there that's amazing three days ago we set ourselves some questions we've answered them all the geophys gave us clear shapes but that Maze of squiggles could have been a line of Bronze Age barrows with perhaps some Roman remains as well instead we've revealed a complete Iron Age settlement a series of round houses and enclosures together with a boundary ditch Francis is going to take us on a grand tour of our Iron Age settlement this is the way into the village okay and these are the cobbles that were put there to stop you sliding around in the mud yeah and here yeah wheel rats before they thought of putting the Cobblestone the real Iron Age what rats absolutely this is the actual entrance there's a ditch here and then there is the main ditch went around the outside full of water still full of water draining it of course I mean as a bank and then it was a hedge more or less where you're standing here yeah then over there it's bustling with people and animals and that's where the main houses are there'd be two or three on each side and then a big space in the middle but we mustn't walk across that I had a feeling they they probably had a shrine or something like that the thing is you mustn't assume that you could go anywhere in the prehistoric settlement you know there'd be houses and people wouldn't like you on their Gardens a bit like a village today yeah just like a village today yeah no this is the ditch around the outside of Phil's house yeah okay big round house a big roundhouse the roof's coming down like that yeah okay and this is the front door there'd be a post coming up here yeah okay the roof coming down like that and a lintel going across can I go in yeah but keep your head down all right all right yeah now right at the center here yeah is the Basin okay I'll drop some hot stones in it yeah okay how's that and then behind us over here yeah we got a fire okay and over there are some of the local inhabitants how do you do greetings do you want some meal stew

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 90,821

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, TIME TEAM, time team official, time team special, time team full episodes, iron age, tony robinson, cannibals, iron age history, iron age city, city, lost civil, lost civilizations, lost civilizations documentary

Id: Y9pasQa9qfo

Length: 49min 1sec (2941 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2023