NEW EPISODE | TIME TEAM – Boden Iron Age Fogou, Cornwall | Day 2, Series 21 (Dig 1)

[Music] here in bowden we're investigating a network of mysterious prehistoric caverns and passages known as a cornish fugu dating back to about 400 bc it's every archaeologist's dream to find a tunnel and it looks like we've got a void or something there now i don't want to make any assumptions but we are next to the fugu aren't we we're also looking for signs of an iron age settlement if we are on the level they do look like possible post holes we're using brand new state-of-the-art technology to get us into places we couldn't previously go and to build a 3d model of a fugu i think it's the first it's been used in the uk yeah something pretty special we've got some intriguing finds how amazing [Music] we've got some glorious weather to greet us at the beginning of day two and where day one was fugus today has already begun to reveal something different possibly something roman and it's not just any old roman story we're hoping to discover the experts believe this square feature might just be an enclosure ditch around a roman temple which could be hugely important a unique discovery in cornwall it's very unusual we're not used to seeing these very square enclosures in cornwall if it's a really big square enclosure you might say oh that's a roman fort or something like that but we don't get those down here really either the ditch is beginning to emerge yeah that looks much nicer through here it does yeah it's much stronger color much more like it yeah yeah it does but it could be the two large pits that actually hold the crucial evidence what might that be come on give me some okay well then ambiguously would just say these these look like pits but pigs can be used for all sorts of reasons you could put rubbish in pits oh wow you could put bodies in pits okay i like that or you could plant some huge great totemic poles i [Laughter] pete's already hard at it in trench too hi pete hey you got to work early this morning where he's looking for an iron age roundhouse and he's found a ditch and what could be a boundary of fence line oh that's fantastic isn't it they're really good solid dark brown splotches we're still hunting for the roundhouse but the finds have produced a piece of pottery dating from the 1st century bc to the 1st century a.d this is such a perfect shirt isn't it you can always draw the whole pot from it karl identifies this as part of a cooking vessel that would have been used in the later iron age the amnoni tribes inhabited devon and cornwall during this period and remained in control throughout the first roman invasion by caesar in 54 bc and claudius's incursion 100 years later when he arrives he invades in 43 with elephants which always makes me really happy in style yeah i mean because you assumed that the people who lived here were like that's the biggest thing we've ever seen up to this point the biggest thing we've ever seen was a goat how's this happen it's probably a horse um but yeah i i mean when the romans get here they spread across you know in all different sort of directions they make they have incredible incursions into wales they make it up obviously to haters wall eventually uh is built the following century but cornwall is a it's a long way to get across um and yet you know they they knew it was worth coming here because cornwall had this reputation for um being a uh source of tin wow it's incredibly valuable of course incredibly useful it's probably fair to say that the reason they can get so many tribal leaders to conspire with them collaborate with them is because your standard of living probably goes up a bit you know you've lived in pre-industrial britain here's what you've eaten forever turnips i mean it's and then the romans appeared with olive oil and you'd be like oh hang on wait i can fry this are you sure it's not in piglet are you confident about cornwall was exposed to other cultures from pre-history because of the international trade in tin and copper [Music] as early as 300 bc the greek explorer pythius sailed around britain starting with cornwall and reported that the natives were very civilized perhaps because of their contact with the wider world so i'm sensing that britain's actually quite multicultural counter to everything that one would expect absolutely so there's evidence from um the later roman empire for around the third fourth century so around the time of uh coins that have been found on this site um that by that time roughly one-fifth of people in britain are long-distance migrants i.e not from europe the helford river was important for both tin and copper going back before the roman and iron age to the bronze age [Music] this dagger which the monique team found in a roundhouse at boden dates to around 1300 bc it's an example of how cornish tin and copper found on the lizard were combined to create bronze a new stronger harder metal alloy john spotted something on the geophys that could be a second roundhouse next to the one where the dagger was found and matt is opening up a new trench to investigate whether it too is bronze age [Music] reckon [Music] by mid-morning on day two we have four trenches on the go looking for features from bronze age to roman and now james and stuart want to open up yet another over a well which chris has found packed with finds from neolithic to roman some nice bits of pottery a pot lug you know nice nice bits of pottery wow and john's brought out his new toy to confirm its location just now we're starting to see some really strong reflections oh yeah um and that i believe is your well ritual shaft or whatever and now we're past it have we got an idea of total depth there well the top is about 0.8 meters yep the bottom i haven't got a clue okay that's for you to find out and i wish you luck getting down to australia if this is a ritual shaft the objects found inside could tell us something about the significance of this site bridge where are you there oh look at you helen's in the mickmobile on a call with the time team's conservator bridget who's in new zealand the first thing that popped into our heads when we when we saw this yesterday was oh god we need bridge she wants advice as to how best to prepare the possible coin for examination with the xrf machine which we hope will help us to identify and to date it yeah so if you've got some deionized water or actually evian is what i used to use in the field it had a pretty good chemical formula on the side of the bottle and if you put a 50 50 mix with acetone oh okay right and then you very carefully swab the the area that you just want to put that xrf onto is the best thing to do with it i probably wouldn't recommend at the moment you know doing the whole lot if you're wanting to use it just for the purpose of the xrf just using a little bit of cotton wool on the toothpick and just doing a little light swab and the reason that you're adding the acetone is it speeds up the evaporation rate of the water i see i wish everything we were looking for was marked by an iron pin and some concrete again let's go we're looking for the x john's radar has meant steward and james have already rediscovered chris as well and are now lifting the lid to see what lies beneath if the well contains offerings to the gods it could tell us more about how people lived here and what was important to them [Music] so far we've been a bit short of fines but matt's beginning to sense his luck change in trench nine where he's found a piece of local pottery with a particular significance to the site so this is it look at that that's a huge thing as well yeah it's chunky isn't it and you can see from the side just this sort of rough texture in the clay that's it it's used to make the pottery and the iron age and the romano british period and it's a type of material so it's this clay with lots of inclusions little kind of gritty bits in it the general feeling is it's iron age so you know it's a bit too late for us but uh i think we're on the right track there's stuff coming up and we're just starting to get what could be the edge there so yeah it's looking good i'm just looking forward to seeing what else you might be able to pull out i mean are there other things that have come out we're getting a few of these pebbles these wouldn't be found uh you know within this field naturally so these have definitely been brought in here by somebody probably as a part of the clay process how amazing so it's all here gas it's all here we just haven't really put it together it's trying to make sense of it come back to afternoon gus i'll have a bronze age roundhouse for you okay i'm gonna hold you to that mat chris has gone some way down the well it's gone down it's hitting another stone at the bottom so three foot i guess sorry meet her and it's beginning to look like it might hold some ritual significance what about this james oh okay i'm interesting well that is more interesting i'm pretty sure that's uh a coin fragment which fits with all those little bits we have there before yeah and this quorums are used for for grinding cereal aren't you grinding wheat so um not i mean it is a smallish fragment of course but it's an interesting granite side yeah very flat size pretty you know you feel like all the crystals rounded off and everything yeah it's lovely breaking a clown or something like that could could be yeah the sort of thing somebody might do in the past mind it yeah we've just gone by my head in my hands i said oh woe is me well it's interesting all the stuff that you told me that come out like the axe it's it's come out the ground we know there's ceremonial granite yeah um they seem like materials that might have that concept well even the pottery you know with that connection of gabroic clay with the you know the local area here you know all of it really so connected to the ground interesting stuff so could it be that grain production was important to the story of boden during the roman period helen's hoping that she too can add to this story if she can prove that this is a roman coin by scanning it with the xrf machine should we have a look if you think that's drying yeah we can give it a go and just pop it into your hand yeah so you don't yeah so the wonderful thing about the portable xrf is it's got an inbuilt camera so we can make sure we're on a nice clean bit and we can line it up with a bit you've just cleaned um and what it will do it'll fire an x-ray stream into the artefact which is why we'll close this lid that's the equivalent of leaving the room at the dentist yeah yeah so we're safe now this is behind a protective shield so it'll fire an x-ray stream at the artifact and it'll energize it at an atomic level which then fires out characteristic rays which allow you to look at the the individual elements within the artifact so if we press start we'll see the data coming in immediately so we've got a little bit of iron but that's probably from the soil in the muck yes i can i can spot something immediately so we've got there we go copper is obviously the biggest element in there which is to be expected with the corrosion a little bit of iron as i've said but the other the secondary element is zinc that is just brilliant i'm really pleased the xrf machine has confirmed that the object is made of the same brass used in roman coins which means that helen can now go to a coin specialist to find out more gosh what a fantastic thing i really really want one the coin came from near trench two where we've now found the ditch around what could be a late iron age roundhouse so the inside of the round house the surface looks a lot different to the outside natural so do you think that could be a floor surface yeah it could be it's nice rounded stone uh perhaps at the beaten earth floor or something on it that'd be really exciting i'm trying to see if i can make out a design on the coin to see if i can try to help to identify it when you lift it up the beauty of as you say helen being able to handle it is that you can see the sights of shadow that is curving around in that direction the monique team have been hard at work in trench four but we've found the square enclosure ditch which we think surrounded the roman temple and we're on the hunt for two large pits which might contain valuable clues [Music] i think this is bronze age oh that i mean it's right at the top of this beach with so that that as a square feature with pits like this in the bronze age that's that's not right yes it might not support the roman temple theory but pottery like this has been found all over the site and dates from around 1300 bc i mean some of these are so beautiful this is an imprinted cord but this salt pottery is and it's quite rare in archaeology that you can almost get close to an individual can you see that you've got fingernail decoration but they've impressed their fingernails of course these are objects of utility but it's also that they were making things that are absolutely beautiful i mean that these marks across the surface that they are obviously about art as well as about it's certainly visual and has been speculated that some of the varied patterns may represent individual families as well amazing because some of these things are huge aren't they something like this this comes from roughly the same sort of size vessel as the one drawn here which which i've reconstructed um conservatively it comes up to my waist so the mouth is there i knew it had been about that wide cabroic clay was used in local pottery from the bronze age throughout the roman period the reason lies in its special properties which meant that it was less likely to crack in firing we've dug some from a local source and we've invited experimental archaeologist and potter angie wickenden to demonstrate some of the techniques that bronze age potters might have used this is what we call short it's got a lot of um short like pastry like short like pastry it's cracking up it's really difficult making pots with gabriel at this stage fresh gabbro clay is difficult to work so angie believes that prehistoric potters would have stored it in the ground for months to increase its plasticity that's much better isn't it yeah much softer and the grit is much tighter yeah so it doesn't have the sort of chunks in it at all is it easier to make it really yeah look if you've done it you've done it completely yeah yeah see how that can press it to a much thinner texture the pots would have been built up from bases by coiling the clay you're going to put the coil on the inside there yep and you're going to smooth it down to attach it with your thumb okay and then you're going to put it up on top and smooth it down on the inside like that then pebbles like the ones from matt's trench were used to smooth the inside i've got pebble now use the round bit and smooth that on the inside it's working angie's experimented with many different tools and thinks that the decoration on pottery here would have been made using twisted wool or perhaps nettles and you just split the metal open take out the pip and there's fibres inside and you make the cordage by just twisting it like this and so you end up with this and you end up with this string yeah and you kind of get get the best part of the string not where it's unraveling and you lay it on the clay and with your fingertips you press it in right like that and push it in to the clay with your fingernails i wonder whether they push it in with the bone tools as well they did lots of chevrons created these patterns in on the pots so that's really good you see you're such confident potter bronze age potter yes i am and i'm getting a t-shirt that says that given how time-consuming the process is andy thinks that the huge bronze age pots found on this site would have been made by more than one person [Music] karens is putting in trench five on the highest point in victor's field over a curvilinear feature that could be an enclosed settlement from the iron age or romano british period known as a cornish round well that's looking like a bit of burnt stone though and that's definitely fired clay of some sort there i'm not sure if that's a bit pottery or whether it's a bit of daub from the wall of a a building or something [Music] just next door stuart and henry have climbed above the tree line to see what the land would have looked like during the iron age when the fugu was in use [Music] this hilltop was clearly a place strategically important for trade routes going out to sea but also spiritually as it's surrounded by bronze age barrows visible on the horizon [Music] so was the fugu here because of the trade routes or because of the ritual significance of the site or both a better picture of the cavern that chris found originally and how it was accessed might help us answer this question but what we want to do is see whether this void which opened up initially and was originally covered with the metal plate whether there's any connection between that void and this ditch coming through here so my radar trace has come across this line we can see the ditch as i said and these weaker responses but still pretty clear suggest that the void does continue through um at a similar depth and it looks as though it may well join with that if john's right the void was accessible from both the outer enclosure ditch and the fugu's stone line passageway and might have been a huge cavern similar to khan uni but the data from lawrence's scans are suggesting something different so we can see the entrance to the tunnel just here these are the timber frames just holding and propping up if we spin it round into side view you can see that tunnel is lower than the ground surface so these white dots along the top here but more interestingly it's coming off parallel with the uh the main hallway channel to the fugu itself so whilst john's picking up features that are potentially running this way the uh the 3d data suggests it might be running this way so there's a bit of contrast and conflict around what it is that we're actually seeing why would it come back back on itself we're hoping more detailed scanning will help us work out whether the cavern becomes bigger or turns into [Applause] things are a little clearer in trench one where we found the enclosure ditch and a passageway to the cavern at the other end of the fugu we're now trying to work out if they connect abby found two stones here not joined um yeah if we okay if we just clean around them lovely right so the booboo is over there yes and i was there yesterday with james and we were hoping that that very deep alarming passage he really clambered down into and i watched him um would curve around and meet us here and it sort of looks like it has yes so ryan's in the first slot we put a slot across what we think is the side passage and it's looking very likely and the trench next to ryan what's happening there that is a slot looking at the relationship between the side passage and the enclosure ditch seeing if they were contemporary if they met up if they blocked the end of the passage with stone so what happens next abby it looks like is it are you just making ryan do all the digging on his own is at the moment looking like a very solo endeavor it's group work is it archaeology it doesn't look like it from ryan's perspective that's what i'm saying later to help us get a sense of what these tunnels might have looked like lawrence has been looking for the stones that might have formed part of the coreboard ceiling maybe you can reconstruct them and put the exact stones in a place where they may have been well i think it'd be lovely to do that wouldn't i think if we can actually lift them from where they've landed and move them to a close pot and reuse them even if it's only virtually i think there's a virtual yeah absolutely using the fugu at khan yooni for reference ray san will try to restore the huge stones to their rightful positions so i'm still trying to get my head around the idea of you've got these big heavy stones and i assume they've got earth above them as well the level of it so is that are we seeing when you're on the ground a pronounced lump above the features or is it actually the ground level is even across above them that capping stone we were looking at is just at the end of the the uh the area here if you can see that with my mouse and then so this is yeah does it the floor surface we've got um the coursing of the uh the stones to to make the passageway um and then this is the the foot or two of earth that i mentioned that's found above it this this is deeper than i am and it is as you say it's a crouched down huddling experience it would have been very dark um it would have been quite claustrophobic with the capping stones on the top thing race hands reconstruction will also have to make sense of the different building techniques used below ground above ground in trench two there's a dispute about whether we're looking at an iron age roundhouse or a bronze aids barrow we've got a ring feature in the magnetics that's as clear as daylight about eight or nine meters wide in diameter that's what we've got in the trench and that makes it a what well i think it's a ring ditch that isn't to do with habitation it's probably uh a barrow a burial james do you agree with that i'm not convinced [Laughter] that kind of diameter i was expecting it to be a roundhouse maybe late iron age romana british roundhouse and i'm still of that opinion i think are you feeling that this is a ditch that has been dug or a ditch that has been uh um worn away or both when we talk about an eave strip is it a deliberately draining it's a deliberately dug drainage or enclosure in fact so perhaps it's acting as both it's not necessarily just taking the water from the roof but also to provide some quarry material which might have created a bit of a low wall inside inside the the ditch for a building but where's the central hearth where's the pottery this is the other side of it here isn't it yeah something like that that's quite a sort of domestic sort of size isn't it yeah bronze age barriers tend to be fairly large but they can be an immense variety of sizes can't be james they can but around here i wouldn't expect them to be this small so i'm beginning to feel that this is getting to be the kind of argument that can only be solved in one way and that is not my pistols at dawn and not by the evidence of this it's by digging the rest of it okay if we can find the center of the ring ditch we just might find a hearth or a burial to tell us whether we've got an iron age roundhouse or a bronze age barrow the sun's going down on day two and i'm hoping matt has lived up to his promises in trench nine we started this trench looking for a bronze age roundhouse and i did promise you gus didn't have i found my round hair we have found this amazing burnt soft silt layer there going round what arc of it going around here going around here going around here and i reckon that's the edge of our round house oh my and best of all we have a post hole that circle there which would be along the edge of the roundhouse so yeah i reckon i've fulfilled my promise to you how threatened you have i mean that is thrilling and so for tomorrow what what's the plan then well what do you think you can see how uh how the the silt is kind of sloping downwards i think the the the fills of the roundhouse have sunk down inwards so we're getting deeper and deeper all this stuff that you're standing on probably about a foot needs to come out so yeah it's going to be a hard hard morning tomorrow looking at these fills here this is almost identical to the roundhouse we had just over there wow these kind of you know these burnt breads with the charcoal and the burnt clay uh really really similar so yeah it's really promising i think on the one over there there was pottery laid down in the middle wow so i reckon that's probably about maybe 30 centimeters below your feet all down there we had we had 600 odd fines from the round house there so who knows what we're gonna find under this who knows indeed just one day left we've got to get to grips with a bronze age landscape the mystery of an iron age fugu and the ring ditch in trench two not to mention the question of whether boden was once the site of a unique roman temple it's a tall order [Music] for exclusive insights 3d models q a's and polls please join time team on patreon [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Official

Views: 297,482

Keywords: Time team, Archaeology, History, Tim Taylor, Channel 4, Archaeological, Archaeological site, Digging, Digs, UK Archaeology, Archeology, archeology site, Phil Harding, Mick Aston, Tony Robinson, TimeTeam, Time Team Official

Id: WEiOj-ZufaQ

Length: 30min 0sec (1800 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 19 2022