Lord Of The Isles | FULL EPISODE | Time Team

[Music] it's hard to believe but these buildings were once at the very center of a kingdom that dominated the whole of Western Scotland for over 500 years these people are from the National Museums of Scotland and they've got one final chance to unlock the secret of that kingdom the Lords of the Isles what can the time team do to help [Music] [Music] [Music] over there somewhere it's Donegal on the coast of Ireland and if you climb to the top of that little hill on a clear day I reckon you can probably see it although not today looks nice now but it's been tipping down I'm absolutely drenched anyway about a thousand years or so ago settle as a ride from Ireland here on the Isle of Islay and it was their descendants who became known as the Lords of the Isles and for the past five years archaeologists from the National Museums of Scotland have been digging on that little island in the middle of the Loch you can see why they concentrated on the island can't you there's the remains of old habitations on it it's close to the shore it's very dramatic looking but what they hadn't had the time or the resources to do is look any further afield and that's what the time team is gonna do over the next 2 or 3 days we're going to dig round the little lumps and bumps around the Loch because the National Museums have only got the resources to deep for this summer after that no more money so if they don't find anything this summer they never will I'm gonna find out exactly what time team we're going to do I'm gonna dry off first Micke hi Tony what's the plan well all sorts of work started all over the place already we've we've got the geophysics going up on the mound there and you can see the surveyors up there as well and then we're going to be looking at the lakeside round here with the divers they're gonna be looking in the salt over here we're also gonna be over there where we think we've got these guard houses we're filling the others are on the on the other side on sign unlock and you haven't actually had a look at the mound that we're gonna look at no we haven't i remit has been to look at the the two islands here and we're coming to the end of that phase I don't quite understand because the mound seems to me as a layman just such an obvious feature why haven't you looked it before well because we re bit really has been to stick to the two islands but it it's only really by being here that the importance of the mound has has dawned on us and that's again one of the reasons why it's useful to get in other people who can help you see things that perhaps you fail to notice because you saw so much into the the job in hand that you can't take a wider look David's keen for us to investigate the mound because he believes it could have been used as a ceremonial site by the Lords of the Isles possibly the place where they inaugurated their leaders our plan of action is to carry on at the guardhouse site until we've got some geophysics information about the mound what we're hoping is that the geophysics survey will tell us if there are any signs of buried stones or structures under the ground the National Museums of Scotland are currently working on two trenches on the main island this one which is trying to find more evidence of medieval buildings or signs of earlier occupation and this trench which is positioned at the water's edge in an attempt to learn how the causeway linked with the island they feel something yeah we just found a little glass bead down there well not a be too small might have been making something just while you were boiling yeah if we'd been traveling we might have missed it because I could have gotten coated with mud and stuff where's it oh it's beautiful as man doesn't only been here about five minutes yes obviously four years of excavations here in Finland have produced hundreds of finds brooches like this one and harp pins like this pieces of pottery all helping to provide a picture of how the Lords of the Isles enjoyed life here in the 13th century this is Victor's reconstruction of how this bit of pot would have looked when complete its ass and tong jug which David believes would have been brought in with the claret from France but all of these finds have come from the main island and the smaller Council Island but what can we find from the mainland Phil is working at the guard houses the geophysics are working at the mound at the far end of the site and the divers are working in the silt at the edge of the causeway which would have linked the island to the mainland but at the moment they don't seem to be having much luck coming down the stream and the Pete's making a very dark as well so it's if we work here we're gonna have to be very very tight in the trouble for me poor ignorant southerner is the Lord of the Isles is one of those Scottish phrases like speed bonny boat or you take the high road that sounds incredibly evocative and I've absolutely no idea what it means well it all started in 1156 with this chap called summer LED who was a petty king in in in Argyll sure and he cast lustful eyes on an Ilah of the coast of Scotland one a famous sea battle and drove the Norse out of Isla and he made his headquarters here had descendants who settled and established a mini kind of palace at Finn Lagoon they didn't start calling themselves lords of the Isles until the 14th century and even then they assumed the title out of the blue so were there lots of lords of at one time or was there just one Lord who ruled over all of the islands well from the 12th century onwards basically one Lord in fact after summer led you know died in battle against one of the kings of Scotland in 1164 it the whole thing was split up amongst his sons but one of his grandsons was called Donald and from him all the MacDonalds conceivably in the world including the fast food bloke are descended from that one grandson of Summerland meanwhile as the rain continues to fall water levels continue to rise making the archaeological going tough however Phil's pressing on at the far side of the LOC we're digging here because there are 17th century documents which tell us there were guard houses here housing up to several hundred men protecting the ferry crossing onto the island it's easy to forget especially in bad weather like this that these islands were a special place for the Lords of the Isles so important in fact that some of them chose to be buried here quite an impressive collection isn't it these are found late last century in the ruins of the chapel up there this is brilliant Denis Idol of it yeah do you think the Lord of the Isles would actually have looked like this all undoubtedly a lot of the top people in west highland society wore armor like this because it's very light they were able to to stride across hills through the bogs and heather they weren't encumbered with plate metal and you see there's that the garment the main garment is wearing in a curtain a quilted garment probably made of linen or cotton and stuffed with other material like wool or grass I can see David how that sort of padded clothing would be very effective against a sort of sideswipe with a sword you know perhaps absorb the impact yes but I can't see how it would actually stop anything going through it you know Sally Ann is here because you're gonna make a Sarepta ker one of these it might be something that will become clear if we do that we actually see what it what it mean what it looks like I think you'll find also if we make it up out of linen that linen does actually stop a sharp blow better than you'd think it would particularly if it's stuffed with towel which is the untreated on unworked linen fibers it's surprisingly good now this gentleman may have been wearing mail underneath this is all right yeah which would also stop the blow so yes have you got a volunteer we can volunteer somewhere yes who is it right right so we have just two and a half days to try and produce an a curtain for rat all I can say is I hope it's waterproof the mists of time when I was young and print fertilizer three hits in addition to the geophysics survey of the mound carrenza and Stewart are preparing an earthworks plan recording any lumps and bumps in the ground which may represent the outlines of old buildings and give us a clue to how the mounds been used in the past Mick has decided it's time to check up on how Phil's getting on at the guard house with him is Donald Macfadyen local farmer and a member of the fin lagin trust who were responsible for bringing archaeologists to Finn like a lock in the first place we would like a reconstruction of what the island had looked like really what the things 15th century of when those are there in fact we're already well on the way to granting Donald Victor started work on a reconstruction based on the information provided by the excavations here over the last four years we know there would have been a prestigious building on the council Island here and a posh guest hall and a chapel at this end of the main island and access for important people would have been by ferry which was protected by the guard houses on the far side of the law are you getting on the moon film well apart from this being the wet side of the lake not too bad this is a Dom Macfadyen from the trout very pleased to be in excavations that we're doing well not too bad I mean you might be surprised to know that when we arrived here this morning this local swimming pool well actually what this through here was full of water I mean that must have chopped it down last night so the first thing we had to do was to bail the sight out but what are you getting we've got quite a nice preserved building here there's obviously more walls under here that's right isn't it we got a nice turf Bank there knows turf wall there and then through the middle we got the central part of the building and on the other side the other side of the building they're using two cutting two blocks like building man yes putting a timber roof on the top of it you know Tim burns thatch on the top right not so traditional building it could be a guard house being severe the roughest age well we got nothing to prove it at the minute you know we just don't know unless we can get until we can get some date of the fines and it doesn't look like what we're gonna get and then and got nothing at all nothing at all well you can see what the state of play is making I mean it's getting pretty impossible and you know I mean it's a doing it's not gonna get any better disease for the legs it doesn't look like it I reckon we should break for life that's the best thing use my permission to do anyone else feeling is the spirit of desire any good news well actually yes we've done some work up on top of that mound that you can occasionally see through the rain both the earthworks survey and geophysics I think do suggest that are some possible buildings there's something up that be worth having a look at the earthworks survey actually does show some sort of lines that might be remains of walls suggest there might have been a building there this is the top of the mound here and what's showing up a slight bumps in the ground is this feature here and you can see this there's a very regular turn to it here that looks like it might be the remains of a wall of the building or something like that it's a bit difficult to tell exactly what it is because there's rocks sticking up through the grass which is natural this is obviously interfering to some extent we're at the moment trying to think where to put a trench but yes I mean the geology is difficult we are getting correlation with the topographic survey and this is the area where correlates well with the earthworks so how do we make a decision precisely where to put our trench well we've got lease accurately plotted out and given that the earthworks in the geophysics car life on this anomaly I mean I would have thought that was a good target to go for I think immensely relieved about that and yes I change true that we'd be paying interest you know and I certainly agree with you wholeheartedly that it doesn't sound as if it's something that's nineteen to zero so we're gonna take where they correlate on the anomaly here that's right so trench to get started on top of the mound with everyone lending a hand at the moment we're going to stop work at the guard house site but the fact that we didn't come across any fines at all not even the usual bits of eighteenth-century clay pipe suggests that it is an ancient site and could well be one of the guard houses mentioned in the documents work on the a curtain is now well underway and every effort is being made to make it as authentic as possible this for instance is incredibly smelly sheep's wool which has been collected from the surrounding fields and already our excavations on top of the mound are beginning to produce five that's a bit more like it and I Hey yeah I mean that's absolutely no question about that oh is this the only pastry got some more will actually enjoy pretend a pottery no no no no I'm quite happy to have a prehistoric affair Wow I fell off something a bit later where's this from then well you know we stopped it over there on the causeway in the reeds yeah visibility was too bad so we move down to the council aisle looking for the causeway there yeah and I think we found the edge of the causeway and also at the edge of it the remains have what looks to be a midden which is where all this stuff's coming from there's still a long down there there's wooden artefacts still lying in the in the bottom waiting but that's for tomorrow but some of this stuff's really nice this mines that's born burn so these are food remains of animals they've chopped up here yeah this looks like chop marks and it's nicely something that we've sadly missed on the excavation so far is that we haven't actually had any medieval middens so this is really exciting this is gonna give you the diet once we can get some sort of date as NATO minutes yeah yeah that's fantastic and there's so much of it there this is all from an area about half the size of this pallet very small yeah and there's loads more yeah that's great that's all coming down to tomorrow isn't it yep great smashing thanks very much Oh romantic up here knows some good stuff got a bit of Flint Phil oh yeah you know we have some Flint's yesterday yeah and we're and David was pretty cautious just to get Flint all the time blow away well that's what we call a micronus I mean it's a very small piece of Flint but it's been deliberately shaped and the important thing is that it is a very diagnostic piece of Flint or something well it means that they can be tied down to hunters who were probably the first people who were living in Scotland maybe what six 8,000 years ago well how do you know that this is man-made because it looks to me just like something I'd dig up about the garden well can you see that along this edge here some very very my new microscopic almost chips along the edge yeah can you see that you hadn't removed from there and in fact we got the same thing on this side as well little tiny chips along that edge now that is not the sort of thing that would happen accidentally what would they use that for then Phil well these things are used basically collectively use quite a lot of them in this in in a tool called a composite tools and they've always been accepted as being Arrowhead tips and things like that barbs but now in people are increasingly becoming aware that they're used for drills engraving tools scraping tools I mean you name it they've virtually virtually use them for anything so what sort of people were these we're basically hunters and let's be honest what a better place to observe your game than up here I mean you've got a full view of everything look you can look have a look at the lake and animals coming down one having superb catchment area so are we really starting to say that this is a prehistoric site or is it too early I personally think we're probably bit tired leave that Flint doesn't make a summer you know but at the same time that Flint's that are up here they haven't they haven't migrated here they the Flint is likely to have started up here it doesn't move we were right up on top of the hill no I think we've got a we could have a amazing lithic so you up here right so it's beginning of day two last night I thought we were going to discover the remains of celtic lords and ladies and we've ended up finding some new Stone Age people the story can we get out of the wind and have a council of war so the decisions taken to extend our trenches on top of the mound in the hope that we can now answer two questions is this a Mesolithic site and was it used by the Lords of the Isles thousands of years later to speed up our survey of the rest of the site we've brought in a satellite mapping system that will quickly enable us to produce a large-scale map of the area the global positioning system as it's called has already mapped the mound which you can see here and this may enable us to work out where the water levels have changed and if the mound was ever an island does it work you've got a series of satellites up in space that are telling us where they are and we're measuring our distance from those satellites and from that information we can get our coordinates of the ground point here with respect to those satellites and with respect to another station so what we're looking at is getting coordinates to an accuracy of 10 or so millimeters in plan around the countryside and within 10 15 millimeters in height wherever I walked with the palm so these satellites are sending down information about where they are in space and if you've got them the information from four or five of them then you know where the bottom of the pole is exactly like so electronic tape measure yeah so now wherever I go I'm just measuring coordinates of the ground the GPS system uses American military satellites shows that Star Wars was a total waste of time currently all's working well and it's beginning to produce a picture of the complete landscape of Finland all the fines are dealt with in here finds such as this medieval belt buckle which was found in one of the National Museums trenches yesterday but of course our newest source of fines this weekend is in the midden discovered by the divers between the two islands now my understanding of the plan for today was that Mick was going to help with the underwater archaeology but apparently there's been a change of plan they're gonna crawl and scramble for words guess I'll turn these yep just follow me down [Music] despite the fact that the peat gives the water a brownie appearance the visibility is actually very good underwater archeology like this involves using a suction pipe which is called a lift and is effectively a large vacuum cleaner which sucks up the unwanted silt and helps to keep the water clear [Music] again on them Tony fantastic it's so much easier digging on the surface this finds all over the place yeah bits of wood little bits of bone I've got a stump you quick bit of bone mass I thought that think I didn't want to lose we can have a look later on can you see in the stratification that we were on the boat yeah this that's certainly three strata yeah there's the silt first hole which is very gray and you have to be very careful you turned the otherwise you just finished up the lose ability all around yeah and then below that there's like rusty pebbles and then below that there's the actual bridge of the spoil heap that we'd be working I can't believe I'm getting excited about a medieval rubbish tip but there's not just the midden down here you can see the big stones that were once part of the causeway which linked the council Island with the main island the material coming from the midden and the evidence being found in the trenches on the island all add to our understanding of how life was lived here in the medieval period among the fines from the island have been several heart pills and a Mary McIntyre a member of the fin laggin Trust is pretty keen to hear the kind of typical instrument that would have been played in front of the Lords of the Isles six hundred years ago [Music] it's amazing how a bit of sunshine can transform everything the whole valley looks glorious now but what was it about these islands that made them such an attractive place to live apart from the exciting weather of course what are we looking for well at the moment we're heading out down the sound which which here is the obvious way is because it's a long sheltered Inlet but anybody coming from Ireland or from the southwest or you know down towards the Isle of Man or anywhere like that would have come up that way but use this long Inlet to come in and see in front of us now look this sort of jetty coming out it's really an actual boulders coming out in a line look under the sea sit down there look from the air this is where they've beats the galleys and so we see the this long sheltered Beach going up very clearly the water running from that beachy place coming right through is this road that you know they would have used to get to the meeting exact afternoon lag on itself so we need to give a aware the eye adds as we go along so we can't pick up traces of that you can see the logic of it so clearly can't you there's this really quite welcoming Bay out there but then this very fertile land at the brittle with hills and mountains on either side and let's not forget it's a well used landscape it's got prehistoric stuff in it it's got door stuff in it and so if this place was already revered as an important center then you legitimize your own activities by establishing yourself there as well it's underneath us now love you okay see that that must be running away through their look and then going over the shoulder the hill down there and he's heading down for the cobble houses that we began to look at to get the ferry across so they coming across this slope but their first view would have been this island you know it is the end of the lake this is the piece that Tony excavated yeah is there anything else in Whistler born or and yep they're very small pieces it's not so much big pottery in this but these two pieces have decoration on lungs don't they come from the same part now these strike me as being very interesting actually I've seen pottery rather similar to this coming from Ayrshire more particularly from Dan Donald castle and which belong to King Robb at the second is where he actually died in or 1390 and these I think belonged to quite fine jugs they've obviously been covered with a green glaze and decorated with wavy lying patterns which I think was Bhutan with a comb as rather rather interesting to think that if I'm right that same pottery is getting to Dan Donald Castle we're late 14th century and also here as well it's kind of nice to add to the idea of the council aisle with quite important people coming and meeting here and maybe drinking wine then indeed yeah it's a change in the weather certainly cheered everyone up for the first time this weekend I can actually see the paps of Jura that I've heard so much about our Akutan is really beginning to take shape and with the help of local volunteers they tell me it'll be finished early tomorrow so just that for the arm cemeteries are okay that's fine that should be alright not too solid run the way okay so that it can be bolted in because that's huge want to hit that he'll be carrying his sword on but the big question for today is are we making any sort of progress on top of the mound and we finding anything that would justify our spending so much time there Phil and carrenza believe they've got some news for us what are you writing this then good lord well heroin Bush on up here so we thought would you strip a bit more turf it's either a little stone row or a suitor on its significance well a set of stone lined underground chamber for what normally for storage most occur in the East of Scotland have a choice I'm not following can you remember Tony we just had these two builders here that we thought might have been a wall this was the first trench we open this what Phil and I would think it seemed to be the only sort of structure we can possible structure we'd had up here and so we thought well you know bother it will follow this this is something interesting up here we were following gut instincts plus the geophysics in the Earth's gonna say this what should we saw on the geophysics very I mean this this is fantastic whatever date it turns out to be it's going to be something looking for the Isles and last night we had middle Stone Age we've certainly added this morning and now we've got this burial chamber from when or any date prehistory who knows we got a lot of work up here yet Tony it's quarter past eight please [Laughter] [Laughter] [Music] beginning of day three and there's a howling gale coming from totally the opposite direction wasn't happening girl yesterday Phil I don't understand for the life of me why people would have built up here every bit of weather just batters us why didn't they build in the Lee of this hill we got to remember Tony that that in the in the Stone Age in the really in the early times this area would have probably looked totally different to what it is now very very dense woodland so it'll be loads and loads of shower and when you say the Stone Age you're talking about Mesolithic and old Stone Age what were they well basically you've got three periods of the Stone Age you've got the very oldest Stone Age we call it the Paleolithic and that goes right back to the first people who were living in this country but half a million years ago now and they were living here until basically the last ice age went away that we're talking their baby 12,000 years ago 10,000 BC and the next group of people we call them the Mesolithic peoples the Middle Stone Age they're still hunters and they're moving around capturing animals gathering fruits and what have you and then it may be about 4000 BC you start getting the first farmers and they're the people who are responsible for clearing a lot of the woodland and you think that this is new Stone Age if it's any of them this is what it would it ought to be yeah so you really could have been a big stone corridor with maybe earth over unlikely yeah I mean you just can't tell in a lot of cases a lot of this could be eroded away the dirt the mound so what you can do well what we should do Tony is take a sex and we call it a section which is just a trench running through the middle across it and that will give us some idea of how deep that the layers are and we'll be able to see what this upright stone is doing how well it's bedded into the ground and it will also give us show us what these ones that are lying on this side are and we're probably taking about a meter across summat like that and how deep until we get to the bottom [Laughter] now that we've got a prehistoric site on top of the mound currents has gone to have a closer look at a standing stone which is positioned here and it seems to be aligned with the mound and the paps of juror you see right onto the perhaps of juror unsubmitted where we were stood on the mound last night I did notice how the stone was directly in the cleavage of the path of juror in fact but I've been going through the the documentary sources and I come across the accounts of the travels of a chap called deliciously Martin Martin in about 1695 and he recorded that the that time at any rate there were two standing stones six feet high on the east side of Locsin laggin now the only snag with that is of course that this is at the north end as opposed to the east side it's quite difficult to get your bearings hereabouts and I I would guess that this is likely to be one of the stones that Martin was referring to except I would refer to this as the end of the Loch rather than the side of the law well I'm not too worried I think that walking over here just now there's some interesting sort of patterns in the grass there's one area the grass hasn't grown which which there could be a stone under there stopping it gray and there's actually quite an interesting sort of circle of paler grass that could even be a future running round and I wonder if we could get the David's interested in this thinks there might be another one here we got the geophysics in to have a look so the Buried stone was influenced the type of the way in which the vegetation was grown oh yes because there's a stone under the grass there's less moisture in that the grass doesn't grow as well doesn't seem to be a problem here was it dry earlier in the year dude it's very dry in in there yes I would like John to do this I think it'd be well worthwhile encouraging them our a curtains now finished and rats not only looks warm and dry but makes a pretty convincing Lord of the Isles that is brilliant it looks much more practical than I thought it would be I thought he just looked like rap dressing up as a pretend soldier see if you can draw your sword the chainmail suit under there so even if anything penetrates that's right and you've got those sort of swords that we're talking about here are not designed to to thrust the design to slash and break but I raised the question when we discussed this earlier as to you know whether sort of clarity name across like that mm-hmm whether you know it would get through but clearly that's really quite quite patty isn't it leaders I think was to hard I think what is important is this is a brand new one I'm probably after his first first escapade out in the hills and his first combat this would be quite badly damaged yeah but he would take it back home honey it over to somebody and the next time it went out it would have lots of repairs and patches I'd just be serviceable what about these fittings at the back I mean it's it's um I mean obviously got to get into it so you can presumably under all this young show you very briefly this he couldn't do this himself so it was basically at the mercy of somebody else was double thickness on the back where it wraps over I strapped into this very very tiny won't put right in here is quite upset that we're pulling him so tight quite simply if you held the body tight and compressed it if it was hit the internal organs don't move around so the chance of serious bruising and internal bleeding was restricted for the fighting period so he had a reasonable chance of getting off the battlefield in some state of survival and do we know that he would have had to tone trousers off times there are a lot there is a lot of evidence to suggest that they were slightly fancy in the colour use and different legs if I can just show you it right if you're not too embarrassed about this the legs are actually separate it's possible to one of these bodies like just from another pair as it were who had been damage to their hose rather than trousers that's right yeah so you've got one vulnerable place wrap despite the bad conditions under foot the geophysics team are working as quickly as they can to produce a survey of the area around the standing stone on the mound Phil's hoping to find some dateable evidence as he digs deeper around the stones are you fancy some carvings on the rocks that'll be alright springs eternal Tony I've just been looking through to see what other sites there are that might be the same sort of data around here to see how how new this might be and it's really exciting because I think you can see from this distribution map that this is all sites of the same date and these are all stone age and these are all around the coast that's all around the coast growing and we're here right inland and there's nothing there at all it's been recorded before it's a sort of it's a lovely sheltered Valley as this part of the world goes it has this sort of it's secluded from the sea but very accessible to it and it is the only area on the island but in fact on any of these islands are on Isla Audigier or on say that has any of this inland settling at this earlier date as far as we know this seems to be quite fairly altering our concept of of the settlement on the island if you look on the a few thousand years later in the Bronze Age you've got a lot of evidence that people were living up here yes but we've pushed it back perhaps well with the Mesolithic evidence we've pushed back settlement up here more than three and a half thousand years Nick just before you go have you got on them of the weekend good stuff important stuff absolutely it's great it's a very very exciting site I didn't for a minute think it was gonna be so rich especially in three days yeah but it's really tremendous stuff and it's given a real insight into certainly to me anyway into the council Isla and the sort of things that might have been going on there when you look at the island it looks very barren and very bare but now that we found this material you can I can anyway actually imagine the the house with the door open yeah playing the white coming out near imagine ourselves smashing jugs and people coming out in the morning with all the old bones and everything else and that's exactly where we finding it just lies here because it's under water it's it's not disturbed there's no bacteria to break down things so tremendous preservation and they were very exciting to see what comes out of the site in the future we now have the first geophysics results from the area around the standing stone pits rather than stones well I think pits and possibly a couple of meters across that's absolutely one I don't understand what might it be well it could be a stone row it could be a major religious landscape we're gonna do some more I mean the point is they they seem to be pointing towards the paps that's the real point of interest I don't think we're gonna be able to finish this one today this is dishes big I better clean this loose up and then see if we can get them up here oh there's more stones big old stones and yeah that looks like hey that does look like though that doesn't look very much like well you better go down to get to get David up here and get him up here pretty quick I mean I don't know whether is human well there it is hang on a minute you see I've got nice this is the long bone in here there's no question about that yeah but then we got the joint there know that that's a hinge joint so that's how they've got to be I'm sure that's an ankle joint because well I think it's a it's a it's not I don't think it's a hand I mean look at this awesome almost in good condition well a lot of the bond down the island there's this very soft very mushy but of course with all the limestone around here so is it human I don't like a piece of sort of an ox bone the full leg of an ox on me I don't think it is human but I mean it gives you some hint of what the hell was down here hold on it yeah why might there be animal bones down because there is the honest answer have you any ideas well I mean we haven't really got enough here to say have we but but it seems to me that the only reason I'm the obvious reasons are you eat either debris from from feasting and so on what you've seen down at the island or it's some sort of or is some sort of deliberately buried deposit for two reasons its raises the question of what are we gonna do now well I think it does I mean my mind clean I just think we can't get much further away there's no way we're there's no way we're gonna go on digging you know we've if you like we've done the evaluation work this is an incredibly important thread amazing a good job in such a short time and I I feel that there's no way we can just leave it like this it needs a more delicate longer time to work on it isn't it always the way just when you find something really exciting you run out of time and apparently there's more to come so this is the second printer yes and anymore well one two three pits yeah do you want a few more yeah well you tell me what you think of that oh my goodness yes it is it is the rest of you know it's not an asana Lawrence is a geological strike talk to Claire and we're a bit confused it looks geological but the alignment isn't right so we've got all this activity with stones and pits and God knows what up there we've got the can or whatever it is on the mound and they're a distance apart you've got this huge sort of a landscape of massive ritual monuments all ahead of the lake it's it's a seriously big religious site if it's a religious size it's a seriously big anomaly of course a lot more work will need to be done before we can fully understand the prehistoric evidence on this side but the geophysics survey of the field does suggest that the standing stone may have been just part of a larger configuration of stones possibly a stone circle like this or more likely a stone Avenue which was aligned with the pacts of Dura to the Northeast but also designed to provide an impressive approach to the mound itself we started our investigation on the mound with a view that it may have been used by the Lords of the Isles but what we've discovered this weekend is a ceremonial or ritualistic site belonging to a period thousands of years earlier the time team view is that this was a stone lined burial or storage chamber which would have looks like this the bone is almost certainly cow or oxen and was probably placed here for ritualistic reasons in addition on the main island the national museums of scotland have found this piece of prehistoric pottery it comes from a pot that would have looked like this and it was found alongside possible evidence of prehistoric round houses so the big picture of this sites during the new Stone Age might look like this with people living on the island but using the mound in the area to the northeast for religious activity [Music] our work this weekend has established that the area around Finland lock has been important to people from as early as 6000 BC right through to the occupation of the islands but the lords of the Isles in the 13th century so with all this new important information David should have a strong argument for raising more funding and continuing the work here in fact it's so important that who knows the time team may even be back you

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Views: 120,528

Rating: 4.909524 out of 5

Keywords: Team Team, Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode, scotland, scottish history, scottish hebrides, mystery, 13th century, ancient history, monachy, King

Id: X5_Bs7Mfj7Y

Length: 47min 6sec (2826 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 05 2019