Prehistoric Fougou | FULL EPISODE | Time Team

this tunnel in Cornwall is 2,000 years old and up above me someone's back garden we don't know what this place was originally used for and we don't yet know if it was part of something bigger but somewhere in the garden out there the tope time team can come up with some answers [Music] this little Cornish garden higgledy-piggledy Gardens launched adjourn impressive feature isn't this turning no this is Joe whose garden it is whose whose fogger it is no no fugu I know it's spelt fo geo you but it's pronounced fugu it's all to do with the person of the lips they tell me is this a map this is a plan that was drawn up by a local artist an antiquarian son of a pencil schoolmaster chap called blight in 1864 marking the the fugu here with its side creep message this is the fugu that's right and what are all these little boldly things well this possibly is the remains of a stone wall which was part of an the Iron Age feature that surrounded this site and was still largely visible in 1864 but may conceivably have been obliterated when the garden was developed in the house built in 1910 it's presumably this high ground up here sort of in a curve around here we can see the sort of Bank here do we know where I should know I always thought that was a stream but it's the stream is much further further down so I don't know what that is hmm but do you think that there is actually more to the fugu zand we can actually see now yes there are lots of reasons for that one is that this little passage here at the end of it there's a small doorway and it's got quite heavy lentils in the shape of the door and it's plugged with a boulder so it looks as though this might have carried on further in the direction of your lawn over there yes over there and then really the most interesting one is that if you dance about on the lawn and thump it resonates like a drum sounds Hollow and indeed it does here and where we're standing and if you yes yeah and it looks as though there might be a passage going off in this direction past the house at least three times the length of the fugu right the way to the Lord yeah so we have two questions to tackle this weekend firstly is there an extension to the fugu under joe's garden well the geophysics team of just about finished surveying the lawn so we shouldn't have long to wait for their first results and secondly can we find any evidence of the Iron Age settlement which would normally be associated with the fugu carrenza and Stuart we'll begin by passing out the length of the fugu in the hope that they can use blights map to find the location of the possible Iron Age war the wall itself may have gone but the bank it would have been built on may still survive coming around this is what you've just fallen you can see the celina which carries on following the contour round isn't carrenza and Stuart are walking along the ridge of high ground which is all that's left of the evidence that blight recorded here with these two sketchy lines if blights correct then the enclosure wall would have continued like this encircling the fugu and the Iron Age houses inside so if we're looking for evidence of the settlement and how it related to the fugu then this is effectively our target area but we do have one restriction this weekend we can't excavate within this area as the fugu is a scheduled ancient monument protected by law but you shouldn't matter because if Joe's right then there could be more of the fugu waiting to be discovered under his lawn so where did you do your jumping up and down apparently we're not the only people Joe's invited to stamp on his lawn recently he asked a local dowser to investigate now I thought dowsing was just used for finding water but in this case the dowser was able to tell Joe that the fugu does extend under the law Micke how do you feel about dowsing Oh skeptical I think the honest answer to that one well I'd like to know what it is they actually reckon they're picking up I mean I know they hear and they've said to this there's remnants of a passage or whatever I think I'd rather look at the geophysics first I think we've got some results every now Yeah right so we can see physicists orientate us where we are yeah we're actually stood at a point a house this is the resistance data and this is the hold of the lawn area right so we've got the low resistance anomaly curving through a straight section at the top and it curves around in this direction suggestive of maybe a ditch or waterlogged chamber that's now collapsed but anyway wet of some sort wet certainly and that's indication yes it's quite stunning and then it corresponds with that so with Joe's permission our plan of action is to dig a trench at each end of this curve if what we can see on the geophysics plot actually is an extension to the foogoo then the theory is that it would run back in this direction to join onto the creep passage which is approximately where you can just see Robyn having a crafty smoke but what was a structure like this for well even though several have been excavated in the past the original purpose of a fugu still remains a bit of a mystery we do know that this isn't the original entrance and these steps are thought to have been added fairly recently maybe by smugglers or even by visiting antiquarians well as you might imagine with archaeological sites there's a lot of theories but the way we're coming down into it you can guess that term refuge is one of the obvious ones you know she sort of coming away from where the settlement might have been you know and he's hidden away underground the possibility of course with some of them is that they actually go under the ramparts and out through the ditch so there are sort of escape routes it's a hell of a thing to build for that I mean other the other possibility that a number of people have raised is that they're actually for storage you know that you some sort of underground larder sort of thing I mean it might send a lot of food rotten but I know in oil and they say well you know but what about daily produce something like that what about a cult that's well that's my really yeah that's the other thing that's been I think that's been raised more recently really and there are a number of things here that suggest that the roof certainly just hey look it's got a stone sticking down which if you're not aware of it you can crack your skull on it as you come through and you know that might be only people who are you know sort of in the know should know about that the other feature is that this has got a sort of side passage in it called a creep this one's actually got a radon meter but we can go into this what's a radar meter well a lot of granite areas have this this gas core raid on that comes out yeah there's been a lot of sort of scares about it recently and they're obviously monitoring it a.m. if we get past that you see this actually comes up into a side passage well to where there's a stone across the end now and obviously looks as if a lot of this is in filled and then it's beyond there that you know the idea is that the passage went on how old are we well again it's difficult to say with a lot of them because the excavations but this one the only ones we know in this area are about sort of 400 BC down to first century AD there was one x grade at corn you knew that sort of date the one or two attached the core child houses around here which are contemporary the Roman period that's that's not 480 so sort of like prehistoric contemporary the Roman period 2,000 years old in my own figures Jesus yeah exactly yeah it's a fantastic structure there's no mortar or cement it's just the weight of the stones keeping it out who who apparently is Cornish for cave and only ten figures have been discovered in England and all of these are in cool at the moment we're number three that's our fugu and you see how many there are in the immediate area the black ones are the ones that are preserved the the hollow circles if you like are those that have disappeared if you open up to a larger picture of Cornwall even then they're all concentrated to the of the river fowl and it's this Brittany that Brittany not far away obviously these are the suta rains the underground passages and chambers and creeps of Brittany and you can see that it they're even more numerous in Brittany than they are in Cornwall are there any in other parts of the Celtic fringe well Ireland is the prime example they've recorded over a over a thousand there indeed I think something like 600 in County Antrim alone there there are positive hazard to plowing but it just showed that this is a cultural experience that is limited to as you said the Celtic fringe but the question at the moment is are we going to find any more of this foogoo under the lawn would this give you a signal give you a strong signal this will give you give you the signal you had on your geophysics but would it run in a straight line ran in the straight line I'm a bit surprised the sort of curve that we got on me that's trench for the pipe well we haven't clearly top yet because you don't understand it are you the same depth as us cuz you obviously haven't got a water pipe ever you should have said well there we are got it and it's been did like the Geo fish shows do you know anything about this Joe is a sewage pipe water pot with soft sewage is too small but never come across it unguent I think it connects into an old system that no longer works what are the thing we've got when we put the probes in there the current will flow into the ground and it will just shoot along the pipe and we'll have a very broad effect so we put the probes in there we will see when we were over the top will have a much stronger effect but you'll still have the effect of one side and so you'll get that broad anomaly that looks like a ditch yeah it's because all the electric currents are just being concentrated along the pipe so that's why we thought we've got a trench that wide so are we feeling pretty stupid no I mean you know that's that's what the geophysics for in it you know it comes in gets a signal I mean it's a sort of thing you'd expect to get from an iron pipe we should have looked through it and said god that could be an iron pipe you know no I've got the map that Joe promised me from the dowser findings now it's all fairly higgledy-piggledy but this is the house again all right there's the lawn yeah there's the fugu he thinks that there is some kind of tunnel going there but we I mean this is not where our water pipe is which is over here that's right so did they not pick up the water pipe I think he was kind of programmed to be looking for tunnels not for water we'll ask him when should come in you're you're you're absolutely cynical yeah that's right but there's loads of things that you don't know what the process is you don't have the process in your own car and yet you believe it'll take you down the m4 so why it's just so silly I just don't understand the what the forces are that they reckon they're picking up I mean if somebody could explain that to me that very useful when she come in to know I've got to bring me money when he when he comes when he comes get him get him to go over the ground again yeah and I mean if the system works like he says it does then he ought to be doing the same as John does and he should be out of locate where he thinks it is I think it's only fair if the geophysics failed to find the extensions of the fogers we must at least give the dowsers a chance they think that the extension runs under the lawn like this but the real priority for the archaeologists at the moment is to get carrenza trench started here across the line of the bank because if we can find the Iron Age wall then we have a chance of getting our hands on some pottery which will tell us about the settlement and the people who were living around the fugu 2,000 years ago is this yours big come here watch this can you just just show make what happens when you when you hit me but it's so fun it just sort of Ferelden like that I can't possibly turn yeah if I go forward here you start going all around the court they have a complete life of the land it's an extension of something inside but six cents if you like I told you that's interesting that I think Mick's going to need a little bit more convincing but he is prepared to allow us to take some labour from his scientific trenches to dig our first new-age trench as far as the other two trenches on the lawn are concerned trench one is more or less finished we've reached the natural bedrock the Rabb as its called but as County archaeologist Nick Johnson is pointing out trench two will need to be extended because these stones may be the remains of a wall connected with the Iron Age enclosure meanwhile I'm keen to try my hand at dowsing [Laughter] scary stuff with no time to waste our new-age trench gets underway and even though I'm gonna lend a hand on this one maybe our Luck's changing perhaps we will find an extension to the fugu and who knows maybe carrenza is just about to find the iron age wall that would have surrounded the fugu and the settlement here but what would that settlement have looked like this is Chan Castle it's a big sort of fortified settlement it's one example of what that could have been here I mean personally I just don't think there's enough space for anything I tend to agree with you but I mean like this I've got a quote that refers to three ditches actually Chappell Tonkin in 1702 mentions the site here as on top of a hill within a large triple entrenchment surmounting a hole which leads to a vault which of course has to be the view but it's the wrong structure it's wrong to is average it's not the right it's not a defensible sort of situation no I mean personally I think my money's probably on this this is a sort of simpler enclosed settlement just one bank and ditch around it they can be quite varying sizes it's a farmstead that's been made defensible and where you find Phu goos associated with these sorts of settlements then you find that the fugu tends to go underneath the rampart and exits into the ditch if it is an enclosed settlement we're looking at then this is more likely to be what it's going to be is that the other sort of settlement we get is these courtyard houses these are much later aren't there in it these are Romana British so they're 1st century AD but you do find Phu goos with courtyard houses although the foo goos were associated with earlier settlements and and simply have existed right the way through the basing site has been adapted in a later moment there isn't really space again on the site for several days which are 2530 meters across within an enclosure so this is a pick and the type of settlement we're hoping to find evidence of in carrenza trench but what about the extension to the fugu what chance do we have of finding that well the dowsers trench isn't looking too promising we're not going to give up with it but at the moment it's looking remarkably like the other two trenches on this lawn in other words devoid of any kind of fines at all in fact all the graphics team have had to work on this afternoon is this which is based on a bit of 1950s flower pot found by carrenza who's prepared to say it might have housed geraniums Thank You carrenza so end of day one and really it's only carrenza strenght across the bank which is showing any kind of promise beneath that power cable we've discovered stones here that could be fallen rubble from the Iron Age wall but we have to extend this trench tomorrow to find out make you're advocating that we should dig some more excavation trenches yeah I mean what do you call it exploratory don't evaluate valuation that's the word is this just blind panic no it isn't a member told me to Nick about this I mean you you if this enclosure that shown on the early maps was around you know an Iron Age settlement site or whatever then it's extraordinary that when they built the house they planed everything off which is what our three trenches seemed to indicate and presumably then bought on the soil in which is clean you know where's the soil and the top of the hill gone did he go over the edge it may be that the the only archaeology actually sir right survives round the rim info but I think the strategy I mean Tony's querying saying with panic in I don't feel this point in had some reinforcement I mean it seemed to me that you know this is how you set about a thing like this you put your evaluation trenches in you know to try and work it out okay so this is the end of day one Mick's not panicking carrenza is but she says she always does at this time the geophys people have gone to another fugu down the road so maybe they'll come see you after the break day two and having dug up half of Joe's lawn we're now moving our investigation on to the area around carrenza trench which is in this wooded area highlighted here a garden like this makes it very difficult to see exactly what we're dealing with but the news from our survey team this morning is that they're beginning to sort it out what we've done here is taken the early depiction on the Ordnance Survey map 1905 when the enclosure was was mapped and see that that ring there this this thing here that's right what we think we've located it in carrenza strange and then we've got just so it it's disappeared now you can see that it was flattened when the house was built yeah but little bits of it survived as earthworks which we were looking at yesterday that's where cleansers put a trench at the top there right what we've done we transpose that and blights original survey there we've digitized that into the electronic Ordnance Survey map yeah with our survey that we did yesterday and look at this you see here there's a fog ooh and this is the enclosure that was mapped by the Ordnance Survey and that of the redline is blight survey what it's showing is that this enclosure is actually quite small it never went through the garden here at all in fact it goes underneath the house and out it never went through the garden no there was no we going outside it looks it might be an enclosed courtyard house something like that which means that we never had a chance of finding the extension of the foogoo under the lawn because the lawn is outside the boundary of the enclosure and one of the few things we know about Fuu goose is that they're always situated within the boundary of the settlement so how does Hamish explain what happened yesterday so why do you think that those rods moved well there there must be some sort of reason we does--is don't have the prerogative to be 100% right that's what and I think there must have been some a part of it I think was my concentration probably went my rational mind took over something I didn't allow my mind to work properly I'm not making excuses Mia culpa I mean this is something that just hasn't worked for us this time do you feel the fry triumphantly vindicated me no not at all actually no I mean I I was very skeptical and cynical I know anyway well I don't understand what happened all we found in this trench was natural rock but I can honestly say that the dowsing rods did move when I walked over here yesterday but the most important task now is to widen our search around carrenza strenght so in addition to extending this excavation we've also started another one closer to the fugu which is already revealing interesting large stones and could be a sign that this part of the garden wasn't disturbed by the building of the house in 1910 with Joe's permission we'd also like to dig one more trench to confirm that the boundary of the enclosure follows the line suggested by our survey team who are now busy adding the fugu accurately to our map why would you have a big tunnel that's really there's been an awful lot of work put into it hasn't ya [Music] so they wouldn't been used but they did this at corn uni didn't they I mean a very elaborate focu there as a courthouse on the top of it yeah but I mean it's much more as I understanding like the Irish examples you know we've basically got a tunnel under a house for storage or whatever it would have been 400 year for five hundred years later could have been easily so from our point of view essentially yesterday we were digging in the wrong place it wasn't the current thinking is that the smaller enclosure might contain a courtyard house now if you remember Victor's drawing from yesterday a courtyard house looks like this and dates around about the first century BC Tony yeah we're there I think the genuine thing the genuine one how do you know that that is Iron Age ten years experience in the area no it's handmade pottery it's gotten my Cassius son fabric to it which suggests it's actually from the lizard it's not the local granite it's got mica actually put into the clay in fact it's presumably burnished on the outside or is because it's very dark in black isn't it yes there is see the other thing which is really interesting is that we've gone down onto a subsoil you see the the story always now getting a lot lighter and a lot more compacted we never got that in any of the other trenches so it looks as though this area hasn't been truncated the way the lawn has last we're getting somewhere our first bit of pottery and our first evidence to show Joe the striations on it yeah I think it must be that way off that's probably the the chaps you know marks when he's holding it the thing is you can actually get quite a lot of out of a bit like that because if you look at the Aang the the the curve on that yes that means that you're talking about something through that sort of size in diameter you'd fitted onto one of these circular diagrams and if it's that sort of diameter then presume is that sort of height so you know you're looking at really something quite large I mean used for storage you know something like that I mean it could be almost anything but because of the diameter you can at least get something edge of each you know yeah the pots the right date so what we're hoping now is that we'll start to uncover the remains of a settlement which will be contemporary with the fugu if we can learn more about the settlement then we might just learn a bit more about the fugu and we'll certainly begin to build up a picture of the people that lived here victor is now able to reconstruct the pot for Joe so that he can get a clearer idea of what it looks like Victor has also been busy working on something that will give Joe and his daughter Hannah an idea of how they would have looked if they'd lived here during the Iron Age sort of quite an age Punk apparently it's quite extraordinary that they used lime wash which then solidified so that the hair literally stood up like that we've seen some Roman coins you know it's got this spiky hair sticking out Joe's family had lived here 2,000 years ago they'd probably have farmed the fields around here during the summer and streamed for tin during the winter when the water levels would be higher Phil is going to spend much of today involved in an experiment to see if we can find some tin ore in the stream in Joe's garden and extract the metal from the rock using the same technique as would have been used by people here in the Iron Age you want me to hold the pan underneath the rocks here you can shovel it's true yeah that's a good idea shut the big ones up I'm not gonna get any big ones all right fifty stuff they're really after all right to be really really small pieces and well that yeah I would be surprised if we got anything bigger than San tin was a valuable commodity because it was needed for making bronze which continued to be in demand long after the bronze age sink to the bottom exactly that's right as you suspend it the heavy particles sink rapidly right and the lighter particles take a bit longer and the stones just drop out yeah I'm sort of doing two actions really one is continually stratifying and the other is sort of Bentley washing over the light material over the front end you're not losing any or out of it at the time - you could be you never get 100% separation I transfer that little break and you saw the lights colored rocks shells lighting weight as well right going over the front end of the city or is a black rock is it dark in general in their felt but is this stuff right here - we've actually got some reasonably sized pieces in there as well what that yeah but that is that is 10 or yes brilliant smell table next to the lawn work has started on our final trench which is being dug here in the only workable space along the line of the enclosure now because the gardens so overgrown the geophysics team have been prevented from surveying anymore here and instead have been asked by Nick Johnson to find a lost fugu which is supposed to be sited in this field at Trevor neig approximately twelve miles away this is another fugu visited and recorded by blight in the 1860s but it hasn't been seen by anyone this century obviously if we can find it it will be an important discovery increasing the number of fugu in Cornwall by 10% meanwhile back at our industrial site Simon Timberlake is called in to help with the next part of the experiment the tin ores ground into powder and then rolled into mud balls to keep it together it's really ritual and that's the key to the success and then a much sordid yeah remember that tin smells about a thousand degrees centigrade I'm sure about this this this separation of the of the tin from the or whether you're is tin oxide yeah if you turn the oxygen oh yeah we're burnt we're burning the charcoal at the bottom of the furnace it's very through oxygen right and there's it's common oxide there and so that's reducing the tin oxide so take the oxygen out actually yeah and you're left with the tin just turn here this primitive furnace is basically just a hole in the ground lined with clay and the bellows are made from pig skin and was specially made for this experiment like any primitive technology the key ingredients are time and hard work for about half an hour now yep just to make sure after about 50 minutes and put another charge it right but how are we getting on at our main excavation carrenza Stren ch well in addition to discovering two more electricity cables we're starting to uncover what we think are iron age structures inside the rampart wall the question is do all of these bits of stone relate to a courtyard house yeah I mean this well obviously the sort of possibilities that have to present themselves is that this is about the same width as the foogoo and of course it's a bit too early to tell but if we have found more of the fugu in this trench Joe is going to be delighted I think we found the biggest bit of pottery yet on time to make the rim on the top absolutely standard late Iron Age yeah couple of centuries BC this is all good dating material on what we have now are several different varieties of Iron Age pot this for instance is an Iron Age cooking pot what we found so far is the evidence of structures the exact character of which we we're not quite sure so we need to work out whether there is any genuine phases to any of these structures both on this side and so far all that we have found is evidence of occupation we haven't found any occupation layers right at the moment we think that the most likely candidate is on that side there and I think we ought to investigate that and we got some with a bit of luck we've got some really good stuff to look more do tomorrow else were in the garden our smelters have reached their moment of truth will they have any tin to show for a hard day's work so what are we looking for well it won't where the penalty will be beneath the place the furnace yeah so we should have a flag really put the picture five bottom to the turn so a beam literally on the bottom yeah beyond probably be underneath down the crack yes it its tinning that's vitally yeah we can try to cool it down by putting some water on we need to get it a little bit cooler first ah no I see the team yeah now that's that's mixed up with slag Eve it's really it's it's but what I'm hoping is that we might actually have some let's run through the bottom of the the furnace yeah there put that on try to get this over here on this the Tama stone and ah yeah oh look at that oh we got lovely brilliant you do that with your pen like a nice bit of tin in there no you Christmas remember what I said that he would actually killed go through the crime doesn't in there some more bits there look yeah well go through the cracks and and it'll cool underneath the face of the furnace is that right wait cool you guys so lovely bit isn't it nice brilliant so end of day two and it seems that everything we've attempted today has gone incredibly well we have a tin we seem to be unearthing the settlement we may even have found more of the fugu for Joe tonight with the wine flowing it seems like there's no question we can't tackle well maybe one I mean have you developed a personal opinion as to what you think it was originally built for try to influence it I think therefore some ritual purpose of which I don't I I don't know is I have no I have no problem with them being used as refuges and stores at the same time I don't think that a refuge and a store required that sort of structure in the first place we've been talking for a long enough I think everybody on time team would like to say a big thank you to our good hosts for an excellent meal yeah you ought to charge your glasses [Music] day three and once the important job of recording the archeology has been done today's business can get underway and that is to make more progress with this trench can we work out what the structures are are these loose stones concealing the extension to the creek passage that Joe is still hoping to find well there's only one way to find out taking them sequential II more than anything else yes like come that we have straws in a pioneer meanwhile out a Trevor neig the geophysics team are on the hunt for the lost fugu archeologists reckon it could be in one of two fields and having drawn a blank in the field next door yesterday the team are hopeful that they'll find more than just cabbages here in Tony I'll bet you think that's a small piece of tin for a day's work don't ya would it have taken the Iron Age people that long to make this little blob oh you bet yeah there's a lot of work going into that why are we concentrating so much on tin as far as I understand it you've got the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age and this settlement is part of the Iron Age so where does tin fitting ah but that just is a matter that they were actually starting to work iron that doesn't mean to say they stopped working bronze making bronze that is a constituent part of bronze so you mix that with copper to make your bronze so as you went through into the Iron Age they were still making bronze you're just carried on so in the same way that in the 20th century we got plastic but that didn't mean that suddenly metal became redundant so do you think that our settlement might be here because there were tin deposits nearby I think tin was was probably exploited by the people here but I think it's a it's a well this particular site is probably more than just a farming site but you're never very far from tin you don't have in west Penrith you don't have to site your settlement specifically for tin because it's all around you we may not be finding bronze in our trenches but both excavations are turning up fantastic finds this trench for example has produced this lovely piece of hand decorated Iron Age pot which Victor has just finished reconstructing [Music] in carrenza trench progress is being made slowly removing the loose stones but the possibility of finding the extension is now beginning to look less likely yeah I mean we out what you know what you really got to get some other edges to it now just don't know about this other side so no extension to the fugu for Joe here but we are now beginning to get a better understanding of the various Iron Age structures in this trench here's Carranza's original trench with the bits of stone found on day one this rubble fell down hill from where the wall actually stood which is where carrenza is now working and at the far side of the trench we think we're now beginning to find the remains of an Iron Age house that's like that big stuff we had yesterday isn't it the Greek cities I said yeah I just come out of the rubble storage jars yes that's the first bit we've had out of there that's quick sweetie there's some more there yeah see when it's dirty like that's neat in the Solar Tori that imagine knowing that when you find a piece of dirty looking piece of stone that it's something well Joe's neighbors are clearly impressed but what's important from our point of view is to all the pottery we're finding is too early to be associated with a courtyard house like this which means we're back to our first theory that our settlement looked more like this and if we're right we'll have made the rare discovery of an Iron Age settlement that's contemporary with a fugu hopefully getting us a step nearer to finding out why the people who lived here built Phu goos in the first place what do you think it was used for then I did it we now have the geophysics results from Trevor neg has John finally got something to smile about pretty good Tony do you think Tony will believe it no no you only think he's a pipe wrench yeah I mean that's brilliant just what we expected enclosure ditch really clear magnetic anomaly and then the fogger coming off at a slight angle which marries up exactly with blight plan of 1867 boundary ditch and fugu coming off like that even the middle break you know with the narrow doorway that he recorded there that's fantastic and it I mean this has been lost how long Nick since the 1860 767 is dated black paper so it's been lost for years no one else found it after that so a real success with geophysics and the fugu art revenue officially back on the map and it's possible we may have some good news for Joe - for although we couldn't excavate the fugu in his garden it hasn't stopped Stuart taking a closer look at the structure itself what I've done is mapped out worthy side passages on the ground yes and related it back to the surface using the the entrance down there as a kind of key key mesh to it and what I've done is laid out the natural angle that's the block painting just down there yeah but just set in from it there looks like it's a knob joint underground and I didn't really get chance to examine it very carefully but when you come up to the surface this abyss boulders sticking through this is what caught my interest earlier on yeah which is exactly where we were on the first day when you said to me go like that yeah it sounds hollow yeah so you really think from your surveyors perspective that there's the possibility that there is some more tunnel going in that direction it's the possitive that a line that looks quite interested what do you mean by a joint underground well it's the stones but together very awkward list of the stones being pushed in push it blocking something these stones could of course be garden stones but equally they could be the tips of large stones which go deep into the ground and it's hard to ignore the fact that they seem to line up with what could be a blocked entrance to the creep of course it's frustrating that we can't dig inside the scheduled area this weekend but we can't complain we already have enough to deal with from our excavations in the rest of the garden this trench for example which is so far failed to find the enclosure wall is now starting to produce last-minute important evidence Oh crikey yes it's smooth on one side yeah just come out of the the slight ditch that there is what we found here is half a saddle quern which would have been used for grinding things mainly flour for making bread and because it was found with Iron Age pottery it's actually a very good indication that people were living here and preparing food during the Iron Age we've now got a securely dated context they're not very easy today to pop the other bit in there somewhere yeah unless it was broken the oil another place as far as they could one you know I mean it's just stuff never is there is it next to next to what you want this trench is also beginning to reveal evidence of burning so this could be a half which is showing up as a charcoal stain against the lighter natural soil it's hard to believe we didn't find anything on day one because we now have a total of 60 sheds of pottery amongst which are five or six different types of Iron Age Pot and what's amazing is that these storage and cooking pots along with the flour making equipment represent the complete domestic toolkit for an Iron Age house but what's most important is that all the pottery is contemporary with the fugu which tells us that the remains in our cheese existed during the time the fugu was in use it's amazing it's like a jigsaw puzzle isn't that what can we say about it well you must remember Tony that this is a sort of keyhole in a big sight you know you've just taken one little slot across it so that rather like if you dug a trench across your house and it went across the living room into the hall it will be difficult to reconstruct the rest of the building from it yeah but if you went to a lot of the prehistoric sites in this area it would there be masses and masses of these interconnected walls like that and that's clearly NIC what we're looking at apart I would think isn't it yeah and I think that we can start by saying that we've got the back or the inner side of an enclosure wall train your trench this is the inner face inside face of a rampart settlement and inside the settlement there are buildings and structures built against the inside wall so what do we think this big curve well we think it's part of a part of a wall and we think that over there is part of another wall which is going off off at a different angle and this is slightly confused by the fact that a water pipe line comes through here is this an earlier stage of settlement to this or is this part of that well we think probably that that may well be a drain God suddenly exiting where that water pipe now goes through there and over here there's another wall yeah that's we think part of a hut circle and is the post hole and insider a post hole this is the poster obviously holding a post perhaps to help hold up the roof then here are the perhaps remains of 400 years of rebuilding living and rebuilding behind a rampart associated with the fugu and the important thing is that the VAR majority of fines are entirely Iron Age in days and the Fuger course occupies an enormous area of this enclosure it dominates that end of the enclosure and the pummel entrance comes up right in the middle of it so rather than it being a little tiny feature going out under the wall which we rather thought to begin with Stuart's plan now shows it to be you know the major dominating thing at that end of the enclosure can we now complement our picture of Joe with a reconstruction of how the settlement looked between 400 to 100 BC we know that the foogoo dominated one end of the enclosure leaving only limited space for domestic buildings at the other end the archaeologists have speculated that there might have been an outer enclosure the evidence for which might be the collection of stones found under Joe's lawn on day one but what's important about the discovery of the settlement this weekend is that we can now put the fugu into some sort of context not only can we visualize for Joe how the wall ran across the bank in his garden with the Iron Age house inside but we can see the fugu just a mound above the surface in relation to the size of the enclosure and the other buildings so what was a fugu for I personally don't believe it was just a fridge or a hiding place it's far too well built for that I think it's more to do with the third option it's a place connected with people's spiritual beliefs [Music]

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 328,929

Keywords: 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, prehistoric, fougou, fogou, cornwall, cornish, cornish history, underground, Time Team

Id: s9wM1B0HLag

Length: 50min 21sec (3021 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 16 2019