Saxons on the Edge (Stonton Wyville, Leicestershire) | S15E08 | Time Team

take a look at this i bet you're thinking that's just another piddling piece of time team pot but it could be the key to something that's really hard to come by hundreds more bits of part from the anglo-saxon period thus the centuries after the romans left have been found up here at nave hill in leicestershire could they be cremation urns is this an early cemetery or could this even be evidence of one of the rarest and trickiest of archaeological prizes an anglo-saxon settlement as usual we've got just three days to find out so [Music] we all know the story roman britain was a driving bustling place but when the romans left a bunch of germans came over destroyed romano british civilization and introduced saxon culture trouble is there's so little archaeology that we don't know much about this time that's why people call it the dark ages but in leicestershire archaeologists have begun to find some clues and one of their most promising sites lies here on nave hill in a rural part of the midlands 11 miles southeast of leicester local archaeologists here have found hundreds of pieces of pop just lying on the surface and crucially one piece is decorated pointing to the early anglo-saxon period from the 5th to 7th centuries the good news is the sun looks like it's going to come out and we've got 300 manky pieces of pottery is that good news as well i think that's very good news we've either got an anglo-saxon cemetery or an anglo-saxon settlement and i think my money would be on settlement this isn't their picture yes it's not terribly informative this this dark area might be settlement what are we going to do with it well we've got existing uh results of field walking and these dark blue areas coincide with the areas where they found most of the pottery and what we're hoping is that these actual concentrations are sitting over the top of saxon buildings now this one here we're actually looking at it again and then we'll put in a whacking great trench how big it's going to be 60 meters long by at least five meters wide why so big yeah it sounds big doesn't it but it's really the minimum size i mean this is i kettlebee which is a very similar site that was excavated about 10 years ago very close to here you realize well on this plan 60 meters about that long and plonk it there or there or there you'd miss everything anglo-saxon but the good thing about i kettlebeer is that this area of buildings and this one they're on top of concentrations of pottery so if we can find out exactly where our concentrations are drop a trench down on them we think we have a really good chance of of being able to to to find our buildings so we're going to stick a trench in and we're going to come straight down on an anglo-saxon building only being a tiny bit mary poppins if you think of the number of anglo-saxon sites we've dug on time team over the years and what do we get stains in the ground if we're lucky isn't this going to be another three days of hell well what's the alternative so i mean this is a pivotal point in our country's past and we have a duty to investigate sites like this and this site needs investigation the alternative is just to give up i've found buildings like that and every time i see one laid out in the ground i get a tingle at my spine geophys get going with the huge task of investigating the hill the aim is to locate the best place for a huge 60 meter trench we're hoping that together the geophysics and pottery scatter will lead us to identify some post holes holes in the ground that once held timber posts these would have supported distinctive saxon buildings either halls or buildings called grub huts built over a pit but before we even start digging some amazing geophysics results oh wow look at that that's very good that is really exciting but it doesn't say anglo-saxon to me i thought the anglo-saxons liked circular structures but we don't get ditches like that around either settlements or cemeteries do we i mean look at this really large pit response it's just possible that that could be saxon could could that be one of these sunken featured buildings well that's what i was meaning right isn't this area here around where phil wanted to put in his long trench yeah and i i my thoughts are maybe shorten it yeah you could do 35 meters take in the enclosing ditch and look at some of the features inside see what the date is i mean after all part of our job is to characterize what's on the site so if it's anglia saxon and it's iron age as well we need to know that so this could be saxon but it could also be much earlier from the iron age the centuries before the romans arrived phil opens a trench that will cross this ditch and critically the area of high concentration of saxon pottery fines that looks like a poster well is that uh i want to clean this up but i think it's a bit of decorated sucks and pottery yeah yeah the oil to a non-pottery expert when i do that that feels like stonewall you might be right actually yeah that's stone phil's understandably cautious about anything he finds because we don't have a great track record of locating anglo-saxon [Music] settlements in lancourse we were looking for evidence of an anglo-saxon community uh there's nothing really so no bank no ditch no structures at all we're dealing with a hedge there's a hedge line okay right well we will obviously stop great in hartley paul we opened up seven trenches in search of an anglo-saxon nunnery but found no signs of any structures so you've had a good time but we haven't found anything we've had an amazingly challenging time we've had a lot of fun but no we haven't found anything but in east tree after 14 trenches looking for a saxon palace we thought we'd finally got something tell me if this is evidence of a sex and community is this it there's some comfort that other archaeologists haven't done much better there are only eight fully excavated anglo-saxon settlements in the whole of britain mick why is anglo-saxon archaeology so hard to find well i think it's because at that time there's not as much pottery around some parts of the country is not at all and the the whole material culture doesn't have as much metalwork you know it's not much bronze and stuff like that so it's very difficult for archaeologists to find and of course the buildings are built to timber so when they rot away and disappear it's not like roman buildings the stuff's not there to be found so it's much more difficult to find the stuff and you're very optimistic about this place why we are very lucky here in leicester and north hampshire that the pottery survives on the surface so you know from from the field up there this morning i've i've picked up that amount of material which is probably more than you've seen yeah in your whole career in some sense i'm absolutely green with envious because we don't get as much of stuff like that down our part of the world here you've got whole sequence of things yes we've been at it for 30 years around here and um it is like fairies you've got to believe before you find it because this stuff is is the sort of stuff you can walk over so easily uh yeah but once you actually believe it's there people find it you probably know more about the anglo-saxons around here than anybody and yet you're very excited about this site aren't you it is a particularly big one you know this could be some sort of estate center but really it could be but we please please please guys don't use the p word if we start looking for a palace we'll be here till christmas and we won't find one for a moment let's just bask in the glory of all that fairy dust but there is the possibility the fines didn't come from buildings here saxon pottery can also come from cremation urns so there may be a cemetery on the hill the anglo-saxons buried people fully dressed in the ground but also they burnt and put them into pots and then bury them in the ground and if you can imagine a funeral pyre up here you would see it literally for miles around it would be a really spectacular spectacular thing so it looks like we found a good place for a saxon cemetery so this will be our you think our first target up on top of the hill if we're looking for evidence for a cemetery i quite like that idea personally yes saxon cemeteries are often discovered by finding metal goods in the burials so metal detectorists get going on top of the hill yeah meanwhile back in phil's trench fantastic oh wow oh big look at the big bird [Laughter] [Music] oh it's a rim as well look at that oh yeah oh that's beautiful look at that how old well it's it's early mid saxon so 450 850. wait till tony hears this eddie was so skeptical as hell this morning he's gonna eat he's to eat some humble poetic incredibly on day one we've hit saxon post holes dated by pottery in them if they are from a building it suggests there's a saxon settlement here and we now think the pottery must have come from a settlement not a cemetery as metal detectorists haven't unearthed any metal grave goods it's not long before phil uncovers even more post holes in the ground phil you've got lots of little white flags have you found something it's a row of posters tony we've got one two three four five six possibly a seventh all in a line and one two three of them have got enormous shirds of saxon pottery in them when you say post holes if they're all in a line like that why couldn't that be a fence the thing is that the spacings between individual posts is so close that i don't think it is a fence the only time i've ever seen anything like this before it was in a saxon building and of course having got these bits of pottery in them does suggest to me that we could be in a settlement not out in the middle of a field in 15 years of time team can you ever remember us having a robust anglo-saxon house no but i can think of many many times when we've looked for one i think this is a building i think it's a very good chance that that's exactly what we're looking at it's a real stroke of luck to find an alignment of post hills like this with as phil says well dated pottery right in the surface was this all the geophys uh no it's not but remember this trench was placed here because of the dense concentration of saxon pottery i mean it really is luck he just scraped away it was not lucky it was a dense concentration of saxon pottery it was you who was dubious about it if we've got what you think we've got what's the significance of it well the significance first of all is that we have very few buildings of this sort from this part of england we don't have that many well-preserved plans of anglo-saxon buildings of this sort at all so really quite exciting to find one to find one again with dateable pottery really very unusual so no hype this is genuinely a really exciting archaeological find absolutely absolutely these are not uh you know easy to find and there are very very few from this part of england well done phil your luck paid off it was not lucky this trench was put in on the concentration of pottery i told you that's what i said lucky unbelievable it seems like we've got a saxon building but we need to excavate more to find out what the building is and to find other buildings within the settlement [Music] we extend our trench from 30 meters to 60 meters long to try and find more saxon post holes as day one comes to a close there's a huge effort in the search for more dark stains in the hope of identifying a whole saxon structure but then something else appears in the ground this morning i was incredibly pessimistic about this site because whenever we've looked for an anglo-saxon settlement before we've never found anything that i've found very interesting at all but already today we've got these six or so post holes that indicate a major building and now look at this it may look just like a stain to you and me but the archaeologists are saying that this is a grub hut one of those big buildings with a big pit underneath it so already this has turned out to be the best anglo-saxon settlement site we've ever had tomorrow can only get better beginning of day two here in leicestershire and yesterday we gave ourselves the seemingly impossible task of trying to find an anglo-saxon settlement here in this rather dreary and apparently never-ending field and yet within a couple of minutes of starting the excavation look what we found over here bish bosh bosch bosch about six post holes all in a line which seems to indicate some kind of building and then late in the afternoon over here where that yellow string is something which mick calls a grub hat mick what exactly is a grub hat it's a type of anglo-saxon building which either has a sunken floor under it or it has a cellar under a suspended floor is it called a grub hat because it's a sort of kitchen no it's from the german gruben house and those archaeologists are really bad at foreign language so we have to call it a grub hut i like your idea of a kitchen now we've got it what do we do with it well you can see we've laid the string out because we're going to put a section across it to make sure that's what it is and more importantly see what fines there are in because that'll help us a lot to say what it is so we've got our rectangular house here and apparently some sort of grub heart here what does that tell us well this is the normal arrangement anglo-saxon settlements people are living in the in the halls in in those sort of post-hole houses they're working in in the grubhub our grub hut could give us important clues to the people living here although the construction of grab huts is hotly debated we know they were built over a pit in the ground where today there might be important finds preserved the mind my pole stall who's posted we've found it the post holes we found yesterday suggest a different type of saxon building one built without a pit and with hosts i'll tell you what now the sun's got up clears and shows up ever so well now you can see the features a lot better but we still don't know what this building is exactly so ian's delicately digging to try and find more post holes while geofiz are finding even more features even though we're well into day two we've still only put in one trench it's that long one behind us that phil put in yesterday lunchtime although i suspect all that's about to change because john has wandered off over here and he's looking pensively at the ground what's happening well look you remember this curving ditch we had yesterday it's now square i i mean they're fantastic results what do you think it is me well it looks ironic some of this but you know there could be anglo-saxon on the top of it you often get that you know an iron h7 with anglo-saxon material over the top of it so ten past eleven day two trench two tracy opens a second trench where we might find more signs of saxon settlement [Music] we can't tell from a building whether it was incoming saxons from germany living here or native british who adopted germanic architecture but the hill itself might give us a clue what a fantastic site this would have been for an anglo-saxon settler i think it's a bit drafty to be honest i think i'd rather be down in the valley bottom all right it wasn't a fantastic place for them to live so why did they live up here in the iron age there were people living up on the tops of the hills down in the valleys as well early roman period we find that progressively the sights on the tops of the hills disappear and the settlement is concentrated down in the valley bottoms and then there's a whole new set of sites that come back up onto the uplands again so do you think they're different people on the top of the hills then i think perhaps up here we might actually be seeing the incoming saxons on these hilltops on these defensive sides slightly edgy places where perhaps newcomers into a countryside where they don't know what their welcome is might well finish it up eventually the saxons interbred with the native british and today it's possible using dna to investigate whether someone's ancestors were incoming saxons we've commissioned a test on our own phil harding we've got a saxony surname after all phil gave a dna sample a few scrape briskly against the inside of the cheek for 20 strokes you are collecting cheek cells not saliva so be sure to press firmly against the cheek and rotate it while you're going ho okay brilliant that one goes in there too is that it uh not yet no no seal the packet with tape and write your name in the box we'll find out about phil's ancestry tomorrow we've been hoping we'd find even more of the saxon settlement on the slope of the hill but there's no sign of sacks and structures but with geophys continuing to cover the field it's not long before another target appears look we've got and these look quite interesting whether they're small enclosures pits it's got to be worth trying to date these so have you got a likely place that you'd like us to look at there well i think if we went into that sort of corner there where we've got a ditch turning okay well let's mark that out and let's let's get a hole in and see what it is keep our fingers crossed it's saxon so tracy and ian move to open trench three near the top of the hill [Music] stewart and historian sam newton are out investigating our hills position in the landscape there are saxon lane villages around outside called the langtongs church langton east land to west langton thorpe plankton turlington what does some islander the long enclosure like long town long tail right the langtongs are separated from nave hill by a river with a ford linking them this river was once the boundary of the hundred a saxon administrative area i love these old roofs where they almost got forgotten now you almost can imagine yourself walking the same route exactly all those generations or in our case a land rover yep richard this is a good place to see the site from isn't it sound you can see the people walking along the horizon look up there where i've brought you we sort of drove along through the langtongs up there there's a site there to thorplankton and we're at that crossing here of the river although this stream looks fairly insignificant now you can see on the map it's a major topographic boundary it's also a hundred boundary everything seems to be coming together converging at this point we've got a major river crossing we've got major saxon territorial administrative boundaries we've got roots all coming together and on the skyline up there is a settlement that we're digging so the river was a boundary in saxon times route ways led to the forward crossing from which the hill occupied a prominent position suggesting an important sight and on the hill phil's revealing more evidence of a saxon structure quacking post oldest one jackie what's your shaping up well it's not the same shape as yours for a startle which might be a good thing yeah it's not as deep as that i think i'm getting close to the bottom here but it's really horrible stuff down the bottom i'm not entirely convinced and quite there yet it's very very mixed material the other thing too about them is the size of them they're much much bigger look at that look at that third one there yeah they're quite substantial aren't they they're they've got to be structural i thought it's a damn big fence not very likely not only that not only that if it was a fence you'd expect to see it running on in both directions this is this is a discrete set of post holes i'm sure it must be one side of a building yeah so not a fence but a wall we still need more evidence to be sure there was a saxon settlement here and at the far end of trench one matt's just beginning to unearth something [Music] paul we've got a couple of minutes i'm just half sectioning oh yeah that's coming out oh fantastic and yeah there you go let's get that that's the biggest i've seen on the site so far well that's not saxon that's i've seen that one cleaned up but that's iron age i think right absolutely typical just like so many times before on time team we look for a saxon settlement and come up with something else but then more pottery surfaces on top of the hill um don't try this at home kids yeah that's iron age so even more iron age on our side evidence of people living here over 500 years before the saxons even arrived in england and it's not long before paul's dashing back to trench one well can i come down yeah come down here i'll start handing you the goods oh fantastic it's all the same part isn't it yeah ah but look at this bit oh you got the oh fabulous look at that that's quite late iron age i think isn't it that's really unusual i haven't seen one quite like that before that's presumably the room the rim's up here isn't it yeah at the top yeah it might still be in there actually that break looks fairly fresh well there we go he does it gently does oh look at that oh yeah that's really nice it keeps coming cool loads of it and some more oh yeah it's all the same part this is it's all the same vessel definitely yeah we can see if we can recon some of these are really big i mean somebody scored where jars were talking about things like maybe this hard oh yeah oh yeah oh oh gosh fabulous now that wasn't quite the room i was expecting ambience there you go there it is yeah that's what do you make of action well again it doesn't look wheel thrown does it it's beautifully made yeah so great finds we'd be proud of on any dig and the geophysics results keep leading us to fascinating iron age features but these results and fines aren't helping us find the saxon site and in our quest for a saxon settlement there's another surprise the best part of eight hours ago you said that they were going to start to excavate this grub hut yeah well they don't look like they've done very much no they finished it you're kidding yeah but it's not there there isn't a grandma isn't it you're joking no i mean we saw this rectangular stain and the guy that's dug a lot of them locally said yeah he thought it probably was that but when we emptied it you see it's only about six inches deep and it's actually over the top of a late roman ditch so it's not grubhut at all we've lost that i can hardly hear what you're saying my head is ringing with guilt after i bigged up this idea that we got the greatest anglo-saxon sight we'd ever found well we may still have because you remember the posts over here i do well this is the row here look we've been they've come on there yeah what about this one here this is huge that's produced anglo-saxon pottery as well and that may be the doorway through the the side wall of this building could be the doorway of the fence no because if you come here yeah which might be the corner post you can see the other post holes going off at right angles to this rope one there one there yeah and we're working on the bases that these buildings are often sort of four metres wide and 10 meters long and then you see phil's working at the top end there on what might be the corner post 10 meters away that way phil does that look to you like a corner post i've definitely got a post over here tony but whether it's the corner that i can't be sure you could remember it could even be longer this building but the problem is you see we've got a big area that we haven't dug there yeah which is where the side wall will be if it goes up that way but it ought to be one two three four five six seven eight nine ten so we ought to find the other post somewhere around here that's right so that would be the side wall that would be the end wall and if we find another post here then we could have our very first anglo-saxon hall absolutely yeah yes bring it on as day two comes to an end an entire saxon building seems tantalisingly close but one saxon building doesn't make a settlement and we don't have the second structure we thought we had i don't think i've ever known a trench with more highs and lows in it than the one behind me first of all we were incredibly skeptical then we found the post holes then we found a grub hut then we lost the grub hut then we thought that the post holes might be a building and is that building an anglo-saxon hall well we'll know that if there are more post holes underneath where the machine is currently working and the archaeologists start work there tomorrow beginning of day three here in leicestershire where we're looking for an anglo-saxon settlement we may have a rare anglo-saxon hall here but we won't know till the archaeologists have discovered whether or not there are any post holes in this bit but apart from that it's been a dig of real highs and lows we thought we might have a grub hut here but then that kind of disappeared on us we thought that we might have the anglo-saxon settlement come on we should have you come but when we looked closely at this geophys and started to excavate it all we found was iron age stuff so mick come here where is this settlement that hall wouldn't have been stuck up there on its own no perched at the top of a hill extremely unlikely it's on its own it would have been with others so where's the settlement well i think it probably is under the scat of anglo-saxon pottery remember we we started by picking this area because it was the one of the densest areas of anglo-saxon pottery the other dense area is in the field next door so there's probably you know a row of buildings all down the ring yeah but hold on we've got a big scatter here we've got a big scatter in the next field yeah the gap between it is frankly huge that's right that's right so we can only strip part of that area in the time that we've got so what are we going to do well i think we take a piece we take a strip along the top of the hill where there's i mean there is posture all across the top of the hill and also along the top of the ridge is a very good sight for these buildings and we strip it here along there and hopefully find the posters underneath but with one day left that's going to be an enormous amount of work it is but we've got a lot of people here who are free from all the trenches have been done we've got some new people coming in from the haliton group anyway so we'll have enough people to do that our chances aren't great at finding anything no no i mean if it's there we find it if it's not well you know but if there's a haystack and a needle time team always knows how to extricate it i can never say that word not content with finding one rare saxon building with just one day left we're determined to find more of the settlement there should be more buildings somewhere other saxon settlements have had dozens so raksha opens trench four where there was a high concentration of pottery fines with such a challenge we've asked for help from the local hamilton group who found the original pottery mix giving a briefing first of all thank you all for coming along we really need your help today your machine at the moment is taking off the top soil get you down to the level where you might see the post holes but in this sort of conditions it will dry out so quickly you'd be like scraping sort of lumps of concrete off in no time at all so you know there's nothing we can do about that but it is going to be hard work for you i'm afraid the faster you work the more lunch and tea we have yesterday phil uncovered more post holes of what we think is a rectangular saxon building today he's trying to uncover the whole layout to confirm it's a time team first an anglo-saxon hall but spotting post holes in the sun isn't that easy very good here now we still can't see anything it's the way [Music] yeah you can just about shape actually you get a better view up here than you do down there when i stand up here and watch i'll sit up on the roof move over i know we're there because i can actually in here somewhere i could see the edge of the ditch looking for post holes is a is a you're under what you did for nothing yeah loads of post holes post holes yeah i think that's another one the new trench and yet again we're overturning 15 years of failing to find saxon structures we've got a post hole here and this hopefully there should be a corresponding one just over there but look at these you can see them really clearly there's another set just here very good raksha's post holes are evidence of another building if it turns out to be saxon we hope that it might hold preserved clues to the people here on nave hill and stuart and sam have found more reasons why people would have settled here so chaps why is our settlement on this null in this field and not somewhere else i think there are three good reasons why they're here one is that there's quite a a tradition of roman settlement in this area anyway quite close to the roman roads so there's a continuity of agriculture potential already here the second is this this river valley that goes round the edge you've got obviously you've got a source of water there you've got really rich alluvium right so it's good for arable there's good farmland that's good farmland basically and the third very good reason is that you're on a high dry ridge here given the context of flooding yeah it's easy it won't flood so it's very very simple reason why they're here but if that's the case why isn't there a village on there now because you know all around i can see villages on the you know but on this knoll here there isn't a church we've got langton here we've got church langton's uh tower there you can see aspire which is turlang yeah these have all become modern villages well they're all that side of the river that's a different hundred in the saxon period this is the administrative area that's right we're in another hundred now and on this side we've got one settlement in this parachute which is over that hill over there called staunton wyvel yeah and what seems to have happened is that this pattern of dispersed little farm stains have effectively been wiped out and the communities brought together into one so eventually a settlement here would have disappeared when its people moved into villages leaving the land for farming that that one's looking like it's got quite squared edges yeah yeah definitely but we're hopeful of finding more saxon evidence that survived that time then in our first trench matt and helen begin to uncover something mysterious you can almost see a kind of irregularity yeah we don't have much we need to think of something that's got a ring of post of tiny little posts and some in the middle i have seen kilns which have these kind of gaps underneath the floor and then you can just um pass the heat underneath them but i don't really think the heat would have come from the superstructure this is yeah and this is kind of underneath underneath but it's still way off there while in our new trench the determined work is paying off these bottoms don't belong to the time team they belong to the haliton group who are the people who found the anglo-saxon pottery here when they were field walking and we've put this trench in to see if we can at last find our anglo-saxon settlement first signs are good they think they're starting to find some post holes but are they anglo-saxon mate i think they probably are because from over the top of them in the topsail we've got a lot of bone okay that could be of any date but we're getting anglo-saxon pottery shirts as well we've just got this anglo-saxon knife come out a knife that's a good find isn't it yeah i mean it's the sort of thing every anglo-saxon would have carried with them you know as a domestic item so i think he's looking really encouraging at the moment things are looking good again at last we're finding the everyday things that the anglo-saxons would have used and crucially the fines show the post holes must be from a saxon building [Music] we think there have been even more buildings here in saxon times spread over the hill and on top of the hill tracy's been investigating geophys anomalies to see if there's saxon or iron age having found an iron age ditch now she's got pottery have you got one then we've got late iron age pottery but we've got early roman as well oh right things like that oh that's rather nice that's nice wheel thrown so roman and iron age on top of the hill but no saxon sight at all there's also been lots of iron age pot in our first trench as well as a strange feature matt and helen uncovered wow this is pretty spectacular paul what is it it's a bread oven as well as we can tell tony well why are there all these holes in it well you've got the solid clay base and there would have been a dome over it to keep the heat in so the holes are where they would have stuck wooden poles in the ground when they were building it to support the clay dome of course once the clay's dry you fire it it fires the dome and goes hard and all the wood burns out anglo-saxon iron age what about all this lovely pottery is that iron h2 it is yeah it's actually from the oven uh it's from a feature nearby but the oven is the same date as well what do you think it is it's a big storage jar absolute beauty how big would that have been probably about that sort of height it's very typical of the the latest rna pottery we get around it it's beautifully decorated isn't it with all this comb oh yeah very nicely made yeah but don't you find it frustrating mig that we came here looking for anglo-saxon and we keep bumping into iron age stuff well not really because you often get two on the same site you know we often find anglo-saxon sites because we've we're looking for an iron age site because we can see an iron age site on the geophysics because of the ditches and on the aerial photographs where features show up why do you get them in the same place it's mainly because it's the same sort of economy it's a subsistence economy these are farmers who've got to produce all that they need from their own patch of ground and the s that's true of the angler sex and pure is true of the iron age the contrast is with the medieval the roman period where you can always nip off to the marketplace and get what you can't produce these chaps have got to produce the same all their own materials from from the land around so they tend to go for the same type of ground the same areas and in our search for traces of the anglo-saxons our last trench keeps on giving we've only got a few hours left and people are working frantically hard in this trench raksha anything else come on well we've had a great flurry of activity and we have evidence of occupation here go on see this red patch around here yeah that's evidence of burning and the question is is it a half we don't know we need to investigate that i know we don't have very much two hours two hours so not just another building in our saxon settlement but very rare evidence of saxon occupation but just how many people gathered around fires on nave hill one thing that seems blindingly obvious about this landscape is that there are hardly any people in it would it have been the same in anglo-saxon times no there are a lot more people in the anglo-saxon times maybe there were up to about 100 people on this site alone and then we've got all sorts of other sites up the valley i still find it hard to believe what it would have been like with 100 anglo-saxons living just down there do we know from the documents what they might have been doing well uh we know for one thing from the language and the poetry that they they really knew how to have a good time and we know that as a primary agricultural economy their agricultural year would have been punctuated with the festivals with great parties so anglo-saxon life wouldn't have been as bleak and horrible as the phrase dark ages leads us to believe absolutely the dark age is really a complete misnomer they were they were prospering in a very rich agricultural environment now the word celebration was certainly one they knew a lot about these party-loving anglo-saxons have left their mark on the modern population and several weeks ago we submitted a dna sample from phil harding to investigate whether he's descended from saxon immigrants or the native british and on our catering van we've had a sweepstake as to phil's ancestry phil come here you've got the results your dna is covered you look a bit nervous well there's a sort of certain element of trepidation really on your mother's side we looked at the mitochondrial dna and we found that you're descendant of a woman who lived twenty thousand years ago in the dordogne yes i like it i like it why do you like it so much hey why the fists in the air because there were good flint nappers in the door twenty thousand years ago yes i knew there was see that's where i get it from her descendants moved up following the herds of big big game and eventually crossed into britain so i think from this result it looks as though your maternal ancestor was one of the first people to come to britain after the last ice age stuff they're not romans yeah i'm not roaming there but it's getting better it's getting better you've got it from your father who got it from his father and back then tell me it's roman no no and there's a very clear signal in some cases of roman now no you're not having not in yours which makes you a celt you're positively prehistoric it seems phil couldn't be more british if he tried but is he representative of the modern population the genetic bedrock if you like of the whole of britain and ireland is celtic the saxons and the vikings really only contribute up to 10 20 so they were they they were they're the sort of basic sort of invaders then that settled in amongst the celtic people that were already living they didn't displace them they didn't push them off into wales and scotland as a common myth says uh they didn't kill them all either they just come on the celts weren't here from the year dot you were an invader too but we were amongst the first people to colonize it you've heard what he's just said certainly on your mother's side that that's that's almost certainly true yeah so the land belongs to you hey does it yes there's a few flies in your jam get off my land if you want to know more about dna and your heritage visit the time team website [Music] phil's ancestors were here when the saxons arrived with their distinctive germanic building designs and after finding even more post holes we can finally begin the job of recreating the building we found now here on this side you'll notice that there are these two post holes so phil's showing the layout off to our designer race and and we think this might have been more likely where the doorway comes in okay so that you could actually come in and your wall line might even be somewhere slightly inside of that and that's on an east-west axis is it the actual main building in east west yeah 15 years and at last we've got this time team's first anglo-saxon hall phil are you now absolutely confident that we've got our anglo-saxon hall absolutely confident tony in fact i'm so confident that i decided to stand in the middle of it does it make you feel tough that after 15 years we've finally got one it's been worth the wait though aren't i not and just when we think our site couldn't possibly deliver any more it's so well fixed in but look can you see it that's definitely been polished look you know is that bone or it could be bone it's very dark i think it's a needle there's there's one very like that for my kettlebee oh oh wow oh look it's got little perforations it's one of those big needles so what would they have used that for there well something cool something something like nets or something like that like fishing there yeah yeah because that would that would go that quite well wouldn't it sort of winding through this yes as day three comes to an end we found a preserved piece of early anglo-saxon life archaeologists in britain have found very few buildings and settlements from the so-called dark ages but at nave hill time team have found two extremely rare saxon structures they'd have been nestled within a substantial community where people lived and worked leaving us a few precious glimpses of their lives raksha has this trench come up to expectations this trench has been nothing short of fantastic we know that saxon people lived and worked here in the 7th century we have pottery dating to that and also out of one of the post holes we found this fantastic bow needle what a lovely way to end the dig the anglo-saxon period is one of the most important times in english history but the archaeology from it is frustratingly hard to find hopefully though here at nave hill we've managed to get a little bit closer to the people who decided to make their home here 1400 years ago you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 382,149

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, leicestershire, saxons on the edge, time team s15e08, time team

Id: rtqjGU4k4uE

Length: 47min 31sec (2851 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021