Is There A Neolithic Settlement Buried Under Sussex? | Time Team | Odyssey

[Music] one hot day in 1922 a young man called john paul strolled across this sussex down he was the victim of a first world war gas attack and he came here looking for fresh air and a bit of peace but what he found may be one of the very few stone age settlements ever discovered in england but he wasn't an archaeologist he was a 23 year old gramophone salesman which made him highly unpopular with the archaeological elite his work was sneered at his fines were lost this site was bulldozed and in a tragic twist of fate john paul was murdered now 80 years after he first set foot on this hill time team have come here to reassess his work is this really the site of a prehistoric village and what about the mysterious second site which he recorded but is now lost time team have got just three days to find out [Music] black patch hill is in west sussex on the south downs thousands of years of intense prehistoric activity have left their mark on these hills there are traces of neolithic flint mines bronze age farms and iron age enclosures on virtually every slope which makes it all the harder to understand why we've come to one of the few places with absolutely nothing to see i don't get it miles there's lumps and bumps all over the place as far as the eye can see except here yeah this whole area was landscaped in the 1950s they bulldozed it and it's been plowed ever since so what do you think might be here what i think is here is one of the most important prehistoric sites in the country that just tripped off the tongue didn't indeed it did indeed evidence um well effectively in the 1920s the local archaeologist john paul uh investigated at least a hundred flint mine shafts in this field over to our right these are shafts cut right down into the chalk to extract the flint this is his map this is his map here yeah so it's this way around yeah yeah and what he found on the other side is a whole range of of mounds containing human burial deposits and beyond that what he calls a range of dwelling pits do you think they are driving piss well there's scoops in the ground that contain um domestic rubbish animal bones flint scrapers a whole range of materials so they could be francis do you think we've got houses here well i don't know tony um if we have it's fantastic but they could be all sorts of other things they could be barrows they could be where trees are gone over or they could just be spoil heaps from the mines over there i mean if they are dwellings then they're as rare as hen's teeth so it sounds like there's a real archaeological prize to be won it's just it's a heck of a big size yeah well that's the problem with what we've got here i mean this is the the only evidence we've got of it on this map and of course it's it's not particularly the scale if you said to me where are we now we're sort of somewhere in there yeah that's exactly it so if john paul was right and if the whole site hasn't been trashed by thousands of years of human activity or by the bulldozer then we could find some fantastic archaeology but that's an awful lot of ifs isn't it and the first big if is that map and that group of flink vines is that group their own pulse player stuart and henry have been trying to make sense of it for the last two hours the road bends off around there whereas in the real world the road goes off we know the neolithic houses are somewhere in this field on long furlong farm i mean the problem i've got though this is a six hectare field i mean pinpointing their positions proving tricky and i think that ring ditch might be this ring ditch that's shown on paul's plan at last though they think they've cracked it which means the gfiz can get to work they're looking for a series of barrows and houses that could be up to six thousand years old what have you got there that's all the interest all of a sudden and the results look promising at least one clear ring and maybe a second ring to the north crikey just wonder if that could be b9 so in the top one is going to be b6 but the thing is b6 didn't have a ring ditch around it so you might want to have a completely new feature undetected by pull we've also got these areas of disturbance to this side and that could actually go with the dwellings we need to get some trenches in across this bigger ring ditch to see if it is b9 and across that other possible ring ditch [Music] number one francis number one number one lucky old me so our first target is what appears to be a ring barrow [Music] perhaps the same one excavated by john paul in the 1920s [Music] phil's opening a second trench over a feature that looks like it could be another ring barrow [Music] and bridge is investigating an area of disturbance that we hope marks the spot of the neolithic houses [Music] can't concentrate there you go there's your ditch if this is the ditch that john paul excavated then it could be the first step towards understanding and building on his work yes that bit at the end there that needs to be the extraordinary discoveries he made across the sussex downs were thanks to his passion for prehistoric archaeology a passion that took over his life and his family do you remember him going on these digs he was digging most of my life really i mean we all went digging sometimes or we went to have the social life at the top and do the picnics and collect the blackberries and while he and his party of friends were down the mines i always like the clothes though because you so often see pictures of him down the line very smartly dressed in his suit i have an idea that's me i like your hair yes so were there a lot of fines stored in your house oh yes my cousin used to come and stay and clawed was underneath the bed that was one of the skeletons how did he possibly earn his living and do all that archaeology it's only since he's died with this we really think how did he because really virtually running two jobs he worked at the post office but he also went to meetings he lectured all right hard question was he a good archaeologist yes i think he was i think he was an excellent argument and if he was a good archaeologist how come the archaeological powers that be slagged him off because he was a working class archaeologist because he was self-educated because archaeology in sussex was controlled to a very large extent by two doctors the doctors kerwin who as far as i can tell were a pair of self-righteous snobs who turned up on sight in a rolls-royce i was told recently not surprisingly they didn't want a self-educated post office worker stealing their thunder a poisonous campaign followed his work was hijacked his techniques criticized he was even accused of looting he must have found it incredibly hurtful yes i think he did i think it went very deep but he pulled himself together and went off still digging and exploring it was still a lot to be found what did he do in his final years he was still working as a bank guard and that's how me and cain so what happened uh he was shot and killed there was somebody trying to really been at it three months he put his hand up apparently and this fellow turned on him and shot him it just hit you just can't imagine anything like that you know especially in a place like worthing we just didn't deal in crime in those days do you think work still needs to be done to reinstate him and his archaeology yes however good an archaeologist he was that was 1922 and techniques have come a heck of a long way are we just having geophysics on the side i'm sure he would if he's like any of the archaeologists that i know his spirit will be hovering over us going no put that trench there no don't dig in that field dig in that field that's what my daughter she said i do hope he's looking down and seeing all that's being done now [Music] right now we're looking for the neolithic houses he said he found somewhere on long furlong farm he thought these were small circular huts cut into the chalk and that they were home to the flint miners a kind of prehistoric pit village if this is one of the houses he discovered we should see loose soil from where he backfilled his trenches you got anything bridge absolutely nothing john all we seem to have here is natural chalk you know the way that's been laid down that is not backfill that is just a cage hawk look a discoidal scraper it's just come out of the top soil and the grass so we have got something here yep that's lovely isn't it like you can see there it's the working edge isn't it and just held it and used it like that you're gonna have to have another look come on it's in the top soil oh i think that's a battery but let's face it it's hardly evidence of a prehistoric pit village is more likely to have come from the massive mining complex just across the track that was discovered and dug by john paul our scraper undoubtedly came from one of these shafts sunk in search of the precious seams of flint that run through the chalk what would it have looked like if we'd been walking over this landscape six thousand years ago well it would have looked radically different we'd be walking through a really pock marked almost moonscape series of craters and with those creatures have been very deep uh yes indeed some of them would have been extremely deep going down six or seven meters victor you've had a crack at recreating what do you think it would have been like how does that look to you that looks fantastic actually victor looks spot on and you got it from this photo i beasted on that roughly there there's the man himself how would they have dug chambers like that well it would have been a very difficult process given the technology of the time much of the sort of the initial digging would have been done with bone and and wooden tools and really the the state of the art tool type of the time was this is this something that john paul actually excavated himself yes this is a deer antler and the the pointy end would have been hardened in the fire and this would have been used to pick away at the chalk or to leave a blocks of flint up so this would all be sticking would have been done with something as simple but effective as this would have been incredibly hard here well it would have been working away with one of this would it would have taken months there is not a cut to be seen in there back in bridges trench we're still no closer to finding where the miners might have lived did you say ian in the 50s there was plowing all the way bulldozing through here the whole site was bulldozed down levelled so all we're seeing is disturbance yeah it seems the black marks on the geophysics weren't prehistoric houses at all but modern disturbance courtesy of the bulldozer or the plow which could mean that the archaeology that was here in the 1920s has been destroyed nothing in that trench and phil's trench looks equally unpromising you think that there's an obvious difference between that brown stuff and that white but you've got to remember what the character of this chalk is it's a soft rock yeah and when it gets wet if it it'll rot yes and when it rots and look at the way it's it's it's trending that way it's trending down the slope in other words the way water would run off down the slope i think that's just a geological feature that's going to cause our response yes i can't tell from looking at the plot whether that's geological or archaeological and there's nothing archaeological in it well look if john's got no evidence and we want to test paul's conclusions about these dwellings we just dig a hole down the slope and see whether we can find them my only concern is you're going to dig a trench and keep digging a trench there's no guarantee we are going to hit anything we don't know whether these dwellings are that close to barrow have you got a better idea not at the moment so we've abandoned two of our trenches and our 21st century technology in favour of phil's archaeological instincts it's much the same way that john paul would have worked over 80 years ago the plan now is to open a long trench right across the area where we think the dwellings might be but a disturbing idea is taking shape either the settlement's been destroyed or john paul archaeological pioneer and unsung hero made a mistake but if we can't find houses here there's still a chance we could find them elsewhere on black patch hill because john paul said he found a second prehistoric settlement somewhere on the neighbouring farm but tragically his untimely death cut short his work leaving stewart with just one cryptic clue to its location somewhere about 600 yards north of myrtle grove farm well i've i've been going through his original text yes and he actually gives us a very good tour of this region right down to where this site is the north side of the valley has a deep divide about halfway along its base which passes northwards between black patch and harrow hill and you see where the contours got this is that deep valley coming up between them on the western side of the chalk ridge on what is actually a projecting spur of black patch so we're actually he's talking about that area in there 600 yards from the farm puts it in that area there which is north of the farm as it describes which is there's the farm it's actually in this field here as stewart pinpoints the possible settlement on myrtle grove farm back on long furlong farm it looks as though we've finally found signs of pools excavation have you got anything uh yes yes i'm very excited this is the ditch do you reckon this is a ditch that paul found yeah without any diapers look at the stuff in the section here it's very very very very loose there's no way that's been there since the neolithic that proves absolutely but this was a pull ditch and this is this thing on the jiffy it's about 15 meters diameter what do you think it is well i'm sure it's the outer ditch of a barrow so what's 15 meters uh well run round and we'll see all right yeah away a bit too so this is a ditch around a burial mound yeah well except there wasn't a mound what do you mean well it was a flat barrow they do occur it's not unusual barrows are mounds or ditches built over or around a burial they're often in prominent positions which suggests they acted as a kind of marker or focal point and francis now thinks that john paul didn't excavate all of the ditch which means there could be untouched prehistoric material waiting to be discovered which is just as well because our long trench looks a lot less promising in fact the longer it gets the emptier it looks our only hope of finding the dwellings now is to go back to john paul's sketch map and compare it with aerial photographs taken before the site was bulldozed but but we've used that one to calculate that one yeah but that's because it's from this is it sounds simple very good 20 meters apart but it isn't wow those were 200 meters apart if we can get our sums right then there's still a good chance we could find the houses tomorrow it's been a frustrating first day but our number one flint fan has loved every minute what do you think of that then that is really good and that is our one fine i know you're going to tell me that that's a scraper or something but how can i tell that that's anything more than another old pebble look you see that that swelling that's what we call the bulb of percussion and that is really the the indicator that this has actually been struck off and it is not just a stone out of the ground it's an early neolithic scraper well fair dues it's a great little find but it's the only find we've got yes but but you know this is one of the most fundamental periods in our island story is that that point where people stopped roaming around on the landscape and they actually started to settle down they started making vast communal monuments enormous burial mounts and they started making settlements they were making settlements that we can't find for tomorrow tony tomorrow beginning of day two here at black patch near worthing where we're looking for that holy grail of british archaeology a stone age settlement we've already rediscovered the site dug by archaeologist john paul 80 years ago and we're beginning to piece together what could be one of the most important neolithic sites in britain but that's about half a mile in that direction which begs the question what am i doing here in a field which is completely empty except for a couple of other puzzle-looking archaeologists why are we here well when john paul was up in this area in the 1920s he investigated that really this whole landscape and we know that there's one site in particular which he describes called myrtle grove where he looks at a whole series of shallow depressions which he thinks is another stone age settlement he did some limited excavation there but really the problem is because there's no photographs or drawings or major description in the worthy museum archive archaeologists have been unable to retrace where he was at the time do you think we're in the right place i do i read his description very carefully and he's a good describer of the landscape the way he writes and you can actually i think can pinpoint it exactly into this field you rather like john paul don't you i do i think he's a landscape archaeologist in the 20s and 30s that was a fairly rare beast actually his writing style is so good i'd be pleased to write some of the things he's written would be nice if we could find something for john paul it would [Music] and for gia fizz that means yet another huge field back on long furlong farm we're extending the trench over our ring ditch in the hope that there might be more to it than just evidence of john paul's original dig frances what's it's a big area strip you've got here well i write this out phil i mean we found out last night that the ditch hadn't been fully dug out by paul this solid stuff on the edge is in fact the original neolithic ditch filling and it's going to have artifacts that will be able to date the future ah so it seems to me what we want to do is strip half the barrow yeah see what he missed on the interior if he didn't miss anything well i'm gonna go on down there getting some data in from henry yeah and he reckons he can actually pop me in on on one of paul's actual excavation so i'll i'll leave you to your area okay good hunting if francis is right there should be lots more to learn from the ring barrow and from the neolithic houses but finding them is proving tricky geofizz couldn't do it but if henry's got his sums right he should be able to plot their coordinates onto the ground so henry you reckon you've finally calculated the position of paul's excavations yeah this is going to be d2 d3 is going to be over that way but come on come on how have you arrived at these precise positions from this the only feature we we know is b9 that's the one that francis is digging that's right so everything's measured from there but this isn't to scale there's another map which has some of these features on which has a scale on it it's long shot why don't you give me that despite phil's skepticism we're opening two trenches over what we hope are neolithic houses it's our last throw of the dice if we can't find them this way we never will luckily there's good news from myrtle grove farm giofiz think they've spotted something that could be evidence of a prehistoric house so we're putting in yet another trench that's coming onto it there it is seems quite a distinct change that looks nicer we just can't go back so you watching other people working well i'm entitled every now and again to rest my weary bones besides this is experimental archaeology in what way well i'm just having a nice cup of jackie's neolithic tea so how'd you make it jackie well what we've done is we've put some elder flowers in the water and we put some honey in they had a hot stone i just sizzled it slightly in some water that's it you gonna try something oh yeah yeah see nice the little flowers get they're nutritious so what else are you going to be doing well we're going to be doing some experiments to see actually how people might have lived in this landscape and we thought we might make fill a new hat save yourself i don't want a new hat there's plenty of life left in this one yeah that is the most disgusting stained piece of headwear in the whole of british archaeologists well phil tries to hang onto his hat open in that corner yeah we're busy expanding our trenches on both farms so it is it's curving through yeah we now know that john paul didn't have the time or the technology to completely excavate this site so we're picking up the story where he left off it's a bit of a circle you got in the chalk there well on long furlong farm we found what he thought was a neolithic dwelling but phil's got another theory i don't know i don't think it's a dwelling what do you think about this sally well i'm not convinced that it is a dwelling but it did have a certain amount of domestic refuse in here paul found worked flint cracked flint cracked flints that have been in heat bits of sandstone rubbers from grinding corn animal bones and pottery here what's your problem with it being a hut if there is all this domestic stuff my my problem is that chalk can play funny tricks on you because chalk's a very soft rock and because it's it's soft it will actually decompose when you get water on it particularly if you've got root system with a tree and what you're left with is the brown clay that is actually in the chalk so what you can be looking at with a feature about this size is where a tree has been standing in the chalk and it tips over and so the tree if you like would be standing here yeah it tips over hold on a minute what about all the domestic rubbish it is still possible that that that you can get material that is building up in these tree throws it's still possible that people can actually be taking shelter in the tree i just do not believe that this is this is a dwelling and it's the same story in bridges trench just the outline of another uprooted tree these are natural features not neolithic houses john paul misinterpreted them but why when he came here the landscape was was littered with humps and hollows mine shafts and spoil heaps and so on and at that time any hollow in the ground was being interpreted as pit dwellings there there's hundreds of them in the archaeological record right i mean all the work that's been done on tree throws has been done really very recently and the fact is a tree throw doesn't mean it isn't important this could be the sort of evidence that shows us that the land is being cleared by the neolithic people for the first time it's a real imprint on the landscape so it is actually quite an important excavation even though it is just a treehole move on over yeah our search for the pit village is over so instead we focus all our energy on the ring barrow just down in that corner in the desperate hope that we can make sense of what john paul might have missed wait and we've got our first find but it's not exactly prehistoric we've got evidence of paul being here look fry franco well that's some good stuff look you need two bottles of it though let's get on and clear the rest of the hole early afternoon on day two and we're still scraping away at that ring ditch so that's bulk that's whole get the pool stuff out first don't take the neo stuff out because we're all absolutely happy that we've got any modern contamination off francis yeah hi jones why have we exposed all of this when we knew it was here you got me running all the way around this about 24 hours ago well the thing is john paul didn't dig the whole thing out and so what we're doing now we're removing that very very loose stuff which had been tipped back by john paul to get down to the undisturbed ancient stuff what could the stuff that he didn't dig out tell us the stuff that he didn't see that's gonna be the stuff that went in first so that's gonna date the ditch precisely so any fines in there are red hot so why didn't he dig out more of the ditch well it's one of those things people in those days they weren't as thorough as us it wasn't part of the way they thought they wanted to get an impression of it they didn't want to dig it scientifically as we do but i tell you what he did that yeah and he was so busy looking at the ditch yeah but he didn't see behind him over here oh fantastic could that be a burial i think it is yes i do well we have one piece of bone out of it from so far oh yeah that's bone alright though yep francis yeah oh i wasn't gonna tell you about that tony is this another one here yeah oh now this is the money isn't it it is thank god relief [Laughter] and pretty soon we've got our first find from inside the ditch this is the first bit of pot we got actually so it's quite important i mean we want it it could well be a bronze age it's the right sort of thickness this is really sharp edge so it suggests that it is in situ and it hasn't been batted around on the surface before it's gone in but it's one of just a handful of fines we know prehistoric people were here so we'd expect to see a lot more finds than this so where are they phil and maisie think they might have the answer why have you brought us here phil we must be 200 meters from the rest of the day yeah but you know we haven't got many fives in the plow soil up there yeah well we wonder where they're all down here you see when i was a student um 30 years ago and training digs down here they were just beginning to realize that the reason was nothing on top of the hills was it all washed down into the valleys why would it come so far well gravity partly but um i mean there's nothing else to stop it and you're talking about thousands of years well that's about the bottom isn't it i'm not actually sure what we're looking for well we're looking for anything that may have derived from up there would be the obvious thing pot and it will have been undisturbed down there but at the same time you've got to remember that prehistoric pottery was very very lowly fired in other words it's just basically like well as you know dog biscuit and so once it gets in the moisture if it gets a lot of dampness in it it will just fold a bit so it's actually quite rare if we if we found neolithic pottery in here that would be seriously rare but flint so there's no good reason why we shouldn't find friends oh that's got a bit of an edge on it there we go yes i'll get i'll give you that one brook flint that is very sharp it really is isn't it it's it's in beautiful condition yes prehistoric pot oh we were just about to finish the scene the director had just said all right everybody let's go back up the hill and here it is fantastic gosh is it's tempting to carry on digging down here but the truth is these fines are out of context so we can't date them and they won't tell us anything about our site it explains why we're not finding everyday items the kind of things that were dropped or discarded on the surface but we are at last beginning to find things that seem to have been deliberately buried in the chalk i mean that that bit looks like it's a collar going around the rim doesn't it yeah i reckon that's what it it is and it's wobbling it's wobbling that's a good size right what is it a nice big piece oh and it is decorated yeah and it is a collared urn well that's fantastic so it would have been upright like that so what sort of date do you recognize well it's early bronze age about 1800 1900 bc i should say that is fantastic this could be a cremation and then on top of it of course we had this and this is when i was watching the digger this was sticking up above the chalk it's obviously a marker for this little it must be and these don't normally occur on their own so i wouldn't be at all surprised if there weren't more underneath there but gosh i think that's fantastic is this a cremation or something else we're extending the trench in the hope of finding other pits and making sense of this intriguing barrow and almost immediately we uncover another flint marker back on myrtle grove farm it looks as though we could be on to something you know your dad was supposed to have found this mysterious second settlement but there's no records around of it at all we put this trench in here to see if we could find any evidence of it miles have you come up with anything yet that looks like a cut to me certainly yeah you can see the uh the solid natural chalk uh coming up here and it just takes a dive and then when ian is digging it comes up again what we've got is a is a cut into the side of the almost like a terrace and that's what exactly what you'd expect on a slope like this if you're building a house you tear us into the side of the hill so theoretically this should be an area of prehistoric housing what's so frustrating is that so many of the fines and so many of the notes associated with this area have gone missing essentially the flint mine site all the fines in the archive and everything is in the museum but all the sites around the periphery where other people were involved a lot of the material is still missing i think it was scattered amongst a whole range of different sources you didn't chuck it away because it was cluttering up the house not guilty wouldn't it be great if we could confirm that your dad's work was right oh that would be really wonderful be through to bits and the only way to confirm it is to keep on digging [Music] at last we're beginning to get evidence of prehistoric people living over that side of the site but this part of the site seems completely different doesn't it francis well it does actually in the last hour we've revealed what looked like five cremations but i really want to get back in the ring ditch i think yes it's the ring ditch tony it really shows us everything that we need to know john paul he started the book if you like today we've discovered a huge amount we've written a couple of chapters now what i want to do tomorrow i want to extend right over there finish the book and i think if we do that we'll be doing proper homage to john paul so is that the prehistoric land of the living could this be the land of the dead let's hope we can sort it all out tomorrow it's the beginning of day three here at black patch on the south downs and we've only got one day left to uncover the rest of this barrow and see what it can tell us about this fantastic prehistoric site when black patch was first dug in the 1920s by john pull limited time and primitive technology meant he was only able to tell part of the story now 80 years on we're beginning to unravel the rest of what's proving to be a complicated tale [Music] and on myrtle grove farm it looks like we can add a new chapter john paul thought he'd found prehistoric pit dwellings here but miles has another explanation is this one of john paul's pit dwellings it's certainly one of the the potential dwelling sites that he recognized but it doesn't look like it's a pit uh what i think we've got given the actual slope of the hill coming down here is a circular cut a sort of a flat terrace driven into the side of the hill onto which a house would have been built right so does that mean they've taken us with a slope and cut a section out to make a flat flap yes how does that all work with the rest of the building well effectively what we're doing if you look it down in it in plan what you should see is a semi-circular cut into the side of the hill and it's upon that you get your upright hut structure what we should get is a circle of timber posts which would have supported the roof and then probably an outer wall just nicely embedded up against the terrace cut it does look as if it's a your classic later bronze age house which is what one and a half two thousand years after the flint mines go out of use so here john paul was spot on three thousand years ago this hill was home to prehistoric people but these were bronze age farmers not neolithic miners so where did they live could they really have made this hill their home five thousand years ago well it's fairly gorgeous up here now but it's quite blowy isn't it and we've got portable toilets we've got catering up here it would have been very bleak for people in the neolithic wouldn't it well not necessarily it's a very different landscape it would have been there there'd be a lot more forests and there would have been actually clearings appearing in the forest in the neolithic they've started to have to cultivate crops and work the land so they didn't have so much time to sit around the fire and do some cooking so it would be the beginning of convenience foods what do you mean by that well they'd make a simple bread dough with flour and water i put it onto a hot stone in the fire and when they came back at lunchtime they'd have a little cup like this which they could put some food in what would they put in it well here we've made a mixture of sea bass and wild herbs and some nuts and some butter because butter is a very big neolithic food that's really really nice well why should food be bad because it's nearly thick it's funny isn't it i'm just such a prejudice i i thought that in the stone age people would eat food that i would find disgusting but if you serve that up in a restaurant today you'd eat it quite happily wouldn't you you also threatened phil with a new hat have you managed to do anything about that actually i have here we have it oh fantastic what's that made out of this is just grass and it's been made into a long plait and then sewn together with a bone needle it'd be very interesting to see whether he adores it or whether he runs a mile can i give it to him i want to get cracking on with this ditch meanwhile back at our ring barrow phil's investigating a series of small pits outside the ditch inside them we found pieces of hot stone and worked flint each pit was topped with a large lump of flint evidence that could suggest these are cremations but phil's not so sure one thing i don't think it is is no cremated bones so these are sure or not not straight cremation not well i don't think they're cremational we've been discussing what they are it's funny in a way what they've got in them see virtually you get no fines at all but in this one you've got this strange stone now i just wonder is this sarson looks it doesn't it you know the local sandstone but i've not seen any saracen on this site at all have you no but when we've got it on this site it's in the top of a feature yeah and then when you go to this one we've got again virtually no fines but one tool one little scraper nice little scraper lovely little scraper in that one again hardly any fines but in that case you've got a big piece of pot yeah i don't know there just does seem to be somewhat that is well i reckon that these kits filled with special things commemorate somebody's life and that's one of the reasons why they don't cut one another they're all carefully spaced out just like graves in a church yard these big lumps of flint here that's marking the spot and i think the fact that they're just outside the the barrow i think that's very interesting that they're put there to be close to something that was important a little bit earlier one thing i think we can rule out is that they are not settlement they are not somebody living here no absolutely not this is about death and the ancestors people went to great lengths to associate themselves and their ancestors with this hill but why well it's probably no coincidence the black patch was home to the most fundamental and precious commodity of prehistoric life flint shot until about 6 000 years ago during the mesolithic flint was chipped or napped to make axes and other tools but then neolithic people came up with a radical new technique that involved hours of careful polishing 20 hours work that's a lot of effort so was the new model more efficient or just better looking the strange thing is nobody knows we've decided to find out i bought two eyeballs like the two champs we're about to conduct our own serious scientific research are you two taking this seriously of course we are oh right are you ready match fit match fit shaked up so on my left we have the mesolithic axe coming in at 7000 bc and on my right the neolithic axe coming in at a mere 3000 bc 4000 at least you reckon okay yeah i'll give you that the mesolithic axe was a masterpiece of practical design i'm worried about the angle you're doing it at francis yeah stop being a backseat driver quick to make and easy to repair it was in every prehistoric toolkit phil oh round one over oh oh it's all right [Music] so why about 6 000 years ago did neolithic people introduce a new model one that took days of careful grinding to make or repair under fire here with the shrapnel that is working a lot better yeah tell me what what's that this axe seems to leave a much cleaner cut than the mesolithic actually look at that surface there yeah you got proper axe facets it's a proper blade cutting the the other side this is bruising more shredded cherry just looks as if he's been chewing it was oh thanks that's right right let's compare the edges i mean this this is really the old mesolithic one is really bad isn't it it's really and then it's got the wood it's got instructions and i mean that is presumably points of weakness so over times neolithic acts um that's going to carry on as it is but this mesolithic axe where the wood has got into these little crevices it's going to get worse and worse in use would you would you reckon it's sort of 10 times more durable than this that's the sort of feeling i get i mean yeah it's that sort of order of magnitude isn't it yeah i mean that's amazing that is amazing it's almost like that's a bronze axe well done that man victory to the neo yes while our axe wielding archaeologists exchange blows in the woods over at our ring barrow things are getting stranger and stranger miles we whipped all this off for you this morning so you could work out what was going on with your barrow what is it doing it's not a barrow for a start you're kidding no no i mean by definition a barrow should have a burial in it or some kind of burial element and this is the one thing this site has not got so this little hole in the middle isn't a burial no no this looks like it's actually a tree hole some kind of natural feature we might just have an enclosure ditch some defining this kind of sacred space that doesn't look like it's for a tree no indeed we've got a series of rather stranger features coming out here and you can see where max is digging all this flint where about has this come from then rapture it's just been in all of this fill really i've never dug anything like it before in my life and if you just look in the section it's just packed with lots and lots of flint but that can't be natural can it you wouldn't get loads of flint like that just under the sun i've never seen anything quite like this before actually it's been extracted from the flint mine and then they've actually chosen to place all this fluid back in this hole what about in your hole matt well it's not strictly my hole because i started off with a thought was a feature here but actually i'm coming around and i'm joining up with rakshas feature there as well so we're actually both in the same feature which is quite large and goes around like that what do you think it might be well it could be a shaft a shut a shaft like a flint like mine but one enclosed by this banking ditch how deep might a shaft be well if you go by the shafts on the other side the flint mining area we could be going down six meters ah and just to remind you it's ten to four on day three which means we've got to get cracking if we're going to make sense of this weird stash of flint but it's not our first unexpected find we've been here for the best part of three days now and all that time you've been sitting here in front of the trench good as gold it's just taken you back to your youth isn't it and i'll show you what we've found in that trench there yes look a couple of pop bottles which your dad must have buried when he backfilled the trenches oh fraico you know the company yes i do it's quite a well-known sussex name so could these have been yours it might have been the picnics we had up here with the neighbors the picnic in the photo yes you're going to stay here till the bitter end tonight aren't you oh yes because we must see the finale as we race to make sense of the barrow or mine or whatever it might be the bigger picture is beginning to take shape sometime about six thousand years ago people came to black patch they sunk mines in search of flint and used that flint to clear the trees after mining drew to a close this became a sacred place about 4 000 years ago our ring barrow was built and ritual pits placed around it a thousand years later black patch became what it is today a place of settlement and farming when i was up here two and a half days ago i thought that i was going to be looking for a neolithic residential site with a few flint mines attached but it seems to have gotten more and more complex as the digs gone on these are very they're very difficult sites to sort out fluke lines people i think are coming here to mine flint but it's not just purely an industrial activity it's a big communal activity and when they're here they're not just they're not living here for like generation after generation and for hundreds of years so when john paul said that what we've got here was a neolithic settlement he was wrong wasn't he no he hadn't he came and he saw pics which he interpreted as being dwellings he was absolutely right at milton's grove that's what we've got we've got dwellings of the bronze age period he didn't notice the bronze age period in fact at that time the distinction between the bronze age the iron age and the roman period was all conflated anyway and with all the science and what 50 or 60 years worth of advancement of knowledge in archaeology we're still struggling to answer the questions he asked we're certainly struggling to make sense of the ring ditch the bottom isn't very deep we've hit solid chalk beneath our stash of flint which means it's not a six metre deep mine but if it's not a mine what is it i mean that's weird isn't it it is it is it's curious to think what this might be i mean it's really this whole central space within the ditch and the only other feature within the interior is this face of irregular tree throw hole but no burials no burials i mean over there in the flint mines they're digging holes and they're getting flinned out and here they're digging holes and they're putting flint back it's it's almost as if it was some form of a of a of a burial of a ritual or a you know of offerings and then you get the ditch goes around the outside and it sort of bounds this sacred area and then you get those those commemorative pits indeed i think it's fantastic can you think of another one no it is unique so this barrow wasn't built to honor the dead but to honor the two things that dominated prehistoric life here on black patch hill flint and trees it was flint that brought people to black patch and flint that helped them to clear the trees and shape the world around them but if he hadn't done all that stuff we wouldn't be here in just three days we've begun to unravel 3 000 years of history a process begun by one man john paul ladies and gentlemen thanks ever so much for all the work that you've done over the last three days but before we go there's one small presentation that we have to make to film can you take your hat off please you'd forgotten hadn't he totally neolithic man [Laughter] everything that we've done over the past three days has been inspired by john paul's work and it's nice to think that we've added yet another chapter to his history of black patch hill but it's strange isn't it that a story that began 80 years ago with the discovery of a flint mine should have ended with evidence of almost the opposite process people taking the mind flint and putting it back into the ground [Music] you

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 93,191

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, ancient world, sussex, time team, neolithic history, prehistoric buildings, prehistory, cavemen, stone age, tony robinson, history of britain

Id: EdeYgsHmr0s

Length: 48min 32sec (2912 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 20 2021