Seven Buckets and a Buckle, Breamore, Hampshire | S09E13 | Time Team

most of what archaeologists know about the saxons has been discovered by excavating their cemeteries last summer we dug one here in braymore in hampshire because we wanted to find out more about this it's a brass byzantine bucket which was found in a grave here over our three-day live dig we not only learned an awful lot about how people lived here but also how people died here nearly 1500 years ago during the frantic course of our three live programs we delved into archaeology as diverse as prehistoric flint knapping and bronze age waterside rituals but while all this was going on our documentary crew were following the archaeology in detail to bring you the in-depth story of saxon burial rites and extraordinary grave goods this mysterious 6th century tinned brass byzantine bucket only the third ever found in britain and one of only 11 in the world is almost 2 000 miles away from where it was made in antioch now in modern day syria so why was it buried in this idyllic part of hampshire could it be a prized possession of a long-forgotten saxon chieftain buried on a mound in this field this has got to be the flattest most unpre-possessing field we've ever dug on what about this big mound in front of us i see no mount i see this vague nice there's a great big round mound in front of us well on this big round mound is this where we found the bucket yeah they found the bucket metal detectors found in the bucket but there's also been lots of other findings from here and they're the sort of fines you'd expect to get with the cemetery so you know that's what we think might be buried here this looks to me more like what i'd think of as a bronze age barrow well it's not uncommon for anglo-saxon barrels to be popped into pre-existing bronze age barrows so it could be that when the bucket was found did they excavate the barrow no they did a few well when the bucket was found the metal detectors just dug out the bucket of course but then when it was recognised how important the bucket was the archaeologists came in and did about seven meter square test pits just a few tiny pits what we want to do is excavate a bit more and find out more about where the bucket came from what was it in a bit more we've got three days does that mean that we can open up the whole barrow oh no no i mean i think we'll be you know we're sampling the burials if they're there and we'll probably have a look at a section across the barrier just to make sure there is a barrow but we won't be able to do any more than that with the archaeology only a few centimeters below the surface the mechanical diggers can only be used to carefully scrape away the top soil which is proving to be rock hard [Music] our plan is to open three trenches on the mound the first is to examine the context around where the bucket was found the second trench will investigate the test pits where spearheads and shield bosses have been discovered the third will attempt to find out if there's any bronze age structure to the mound as the trenches are opened geofiz begin a magnetometer survey on the rest of the field looking for anything that may indicate the layout and scale of the saxon cemetery we've got a problem with burials because you dig the grave you put the body in then you put the same material back so there's no contrasts but we will see the iron objects and so we're going to grid out the whole area and we can map those and then get the metal detector guys in they can do the non-ferrous material and we can compare the two and who are who knows what else we're going to get our team of metal detectorists have only got a few hours to conduct a scan of the entire site marking any non-ferrous hits with pegs this information will be combined onto a 3d topographic map with john's mag survey showing any clustering of metal artifacts indicating possible burials in the past night hawking or the illicit metal detecting and removal of artifacts from this site has been a major problem but it was a responsible detectorist who originally found the byzantine bucket when did you find it um a wet and windy morning in october 1999 typical detecting weather yes it's a miserable day uh i know you you'd already found something saxon hadn't that's right yes um the second thing i found was the um the byzantine bucket or scituate they call it um i dug down about two feet initially there was something green it looked like a handle or possibly a bronze age talk or something like that i rushed back to the car got my trowels i started to excavate down the right hand side of the um what was now obviously apparently was a bucket could you all right could you see any of the embossing around the bucket nothing at all nothing at all it was it was covered in muds and it was pouring down you know steve took the mud encrusted object to salisbury museum who called in local portable antiquities officer sally warrell i'm basically working with finders mostly metal detectors to try and encourage them to record all their fines with us i mean the thousands of objects found every year and basically we're trying to build up as a bigger picture as possible so actually what steve did was exactly the right thing it was fantastic that he didn't clean it that was very important and so it was really only at the point where when the object was x-rayed that we we began to sort of realize its importance and it's rarity absolutely yeah i mean what we're trying to do is encourage cooperation between finders and archaeologists and museums and steve reported the finds immediately and this has led to further work and our understanding of this apparently really important site at the other end of the field phil's opening a trench to try and find out the extent of the saxon cemetery [Music] to give him the best chance of finding the edge he has a plan to excavate a 30 meter long trench is that non-ferrous back on the mound steve bolger is busy helping carrenza scan her trench and there seems to be no shortage of metal detector hits blue for ferrous possibly spearheads or knives and green for non-ferrous maybe brooches or buckles the size of that is quite good for a shield boss can i just go over and yeah see yeah i mean that's my spans eight inches so that's not bad for a for a shield boss with some maybe studs and things yeah um and then so you might be looking here at a grave with something non-terrorist there jenny's trench is at last starting to yield the first signs of archaeology very degraded human bones as well as finding out more about the people who were buried here we've set stuart the task of trying to find out where the saxons lived to a lot of people that's just a mound in a field to me it's a mound in a landscape that's been evolving for thousands of years i'm keen to find out why it was there and more importantly the people are buried there where did they live and i'm using old maps geological maps air photographs to try and understand that and have you come up with anything so well already very interesting things are emerging we've got some old maps which show a very very peculiar but interesting settlement pattern and i think that's going to tell us something about where the settlement was that's associated with this cemetery over in katy's trench there seems to be little sign of any bronze age structure to the mound we have been thinking francis that originally this mound might have been a bronze age barrow what do you reckon well at first glance it looks like one a very big one but there are things that hmm aren't quite right like what well i'm not happy about this being a bronze age barrow ditch you know the ditch that produced the stuff for the mound it's not right i'd expect layers of gravel in it and slipping off the mound and there aren't any but we've got bronze age fines haven't we yeah there's lots of bronze age find um these flints i mean they're all about sort of 2 2 500 bc but they're not the sort of things i'd expect to find in a barrow i'd expect to find sort of juicy things like great big arrowheads and things in a barrier but this looks like the sort of stuff you picked up off the kitchen floor so are you saying that you think that this mound might be a natural feature that people have used over thousands of years maybe and the saxons then decided to bury their people in it yes that's the way it's looking i won't swear to it but that's how it looks right now i think yeah the human bones found earlier in jenny's trench have now revealed themselves to be two individual skeletons a rare example of a saxon double burial but you think andrew that these two bodies went into one grave at the same time yeah i do indeed i mean you very rarely find early anglo-saxon graves so close together as separate events so um looking at the aspect of these i mean almost certainly you've got two people put into graves right and is that just opportunism is it we've two people having to die on the same day we'll dig one big hole rather than two or is it that you know father and son and mother and daughter you've been forgotten that they died on the same day so we're talking about some sort of episode where yeah the one thing we've got to bear in mind at this period is sort of a plagues effectively right um and it's quite likely that you'll get close members of a family dying at a similar time i i sort of find that quite hard to actually accept because normally you get plagues in the sense that we understand the word to be associated with people living in close proximity to one another and where you've got problems of contaminated water supply and things like that and with more rural dispersed settlement it's actually quite unusual for infectious disease to be a major problem so i you know i think i would take issue with that a bit sure i think the other thing that we automatically assume because of what we do today that you wouldn't have a grave left open because we don't today and that doesn't mean that in the past they would have automatically closed the grave up just because there was one body in it and it could be that burial practice then was less particular than it is today because there are terms with fly puparia found in association with the corpses and that suggests that they're on display for some some period of time karenza this is the trench where the bucket was originally found isn't that that's right we now know exactly where it did come from see that square in the middle of the trench there we just drew that didn't you well yes but we've drawn it round a metre square test pit that was dug around the anglo-saxon bucket any other phones well the other stuff we found is all much earlier which is quite interesting see we've had masses of this flint see all this lovely really black shiny stuff it's bronze age flint and the fascinating thing is that it seems to all have come from one or two original bits of flint somebody has sat here making flint tools on this very spot in the bronze age so even though the mound itself may not be bronze age it looks like almost 4 000 years ago people were sitting here making flint tools to try and find the extent of the cemetery phil seems to have gone a bit mad with the jcb philly i have dug the biggest trench in the world here not much in it i'm afraid this is the the main terrace gravel where we've got the cemetery the the important thing is we've not actually got any burials ourselves so we must be outside yeah but have you found anything we've got a a small ditch there which has got some pot in it all right but this is not uh it's not ancient that's from burlwood which is the local postman right in flint of course and a bit of animal bone yeah well so i think we should shut this trench down no no no no no we haven't finished it yet we must extend the trench through to the floodplain itself to get a transect right the way through and we must know how this how old this this ditch is okay and do you think we might still find something oh yeah the position of phil's trench on the edge of the floodplain is apparent when you see it superimposed on a topographic map of the site add to this the results of john's mag survey and the metal detector sweep and we can see that all of the metal anomalies are concentrated in clusters on the mount we're at the trench which i think is the trench where all that ferrous information was coming out we've surveyed the whole area and targeted this one and have we done karena well you know i said earlier we had some metal finds possibly coming up that might help yeah it's now turned up and it's fantastic it's exactly what we wanted it's the first anglo-saxon find through here and look at it what is it what is it it's a spearhead see it from the point there all the way down to the ferrule at the end where the wooden shaft would have gone into it and the fascinating thing as well is it comes just about a foot from where that bucket turned up so it looks as if it might be part of the same burial that's all for this evening at the same time for more trenches more beautiful finds and the news from time team live so we ended the first day's live program with the solitary spearhead but that wasn't quite the full story everyone's packed up and gone home now how's the day been for you well i'm still worried about this trench we had loads and loads of metal detector signals for copper alloy objects and they haven't been coming out actually i'm wrong not everyone's gone home there's katie still plowing a lonely furrow what have things been like for you it's been really frustrating all day i've found very little just a few iron nails and a few flint flakes but in the last 10 minutes i have just found this wonderful spearhead another sphere no later than seventh century so what does this tell us well it's even more of a conundrum because that's iron and all these signals are copper alloy or bronze puzzling day we've had we've had grave cuts we've started to come up with these fantastic grave goods and there's still a long way to go join us after the break cross your fingers tomorrow we'll get even more good finds we have our excavation into our saxon graveyard and we've got one or two tricky questions to answer these two skeletons appear to be buried in the same grave so why would that be were they possibly related to each other were they just buried on the same day what do you reckon margaret well it's it's very very difficult to be sure there are various possibilities and one of the ones that we've seen on other anglo-saxon cemeteries is that graves appear to have been left open and then a second burial put in at some later stage so what are we going to do with these chaps now well firstly this isn't a chap this one we don't know but this is definitely a woman how do you know that because a part of the pelvis survived which is clearly female and were there any grave goods associated with this when it was originally dug up yeah this one had a shield and there was a spearhead lying here why would a shield and a spear be associated with a woman when she was buried well why not maybe she was a warrior they had warriors in who were women in saxon times well we don't we don't know but we do know that at the end of the iron age there were warriors in britain there was boudicca there was queen cartier mandua and she was a warrior queen so if this tradition survived before the romans maybe at the end of roman influence you get the reemergence of powerful warrior women yesterday's metal finds are now in the conservation lab the spearhead from katy's trench is first cleaned of all surface soil showing the concave profile of the blade a sure sign of 6th century workmanship an x-ray of the same blade shows us the internal structure of the shaft socket definite proof that it's saxon back in trench two even more metal works being uncovered this time a shield boss placed on top of a skull once x-rayed traces of rivets around the edge become apparent now ian i know that this is the shield boss this is what they've been finding out there what's it made of it's made of iron and of course this is the only piece that survives and with of course the rivets around there the rest of the shield's made of wood covered with leather and of course the other bit that survives is the iron hand grip that goes behind held on with leather this is this is a big thing guys some of the weapons and some of the weapons are big look at the spear i mean it's absolutely huge stands really tall and of course if you're a guy of high status you'd be buried with a fabulous sword as well so are these common things uh to be finding engraved yes they are fairly common spears particularly and then uh spears and shields are the next thing and then finally if you're really important you have a spear a shield and a sword and what do they want them for why are they in the graves it's how you arrive in the afterlife maybe or it's a question of just pure status and as grave goods go there could be no status higher than our byzantine bucket we've said craftsman ray walton the challenge of trying to make a replica bucket using a single sheet of brass and where possible authentic tools and techniques the first stage is to mark out the bucket base on the brass disc then begins the first of many hammering processes to try and raise the bucket sides the skill in the hammering is to ensure that all of the blows of the same strength to prevent bumps and bulges but all this hammering makes the metal brittle so every few minutes the brass has to be gently heated then quenched in water and pickled in vinegar it's going to be a real race against time for ray to finish before we can lift the double burial skeletons for further analysis they have to be recorded to show their relative positions best done in three dimensions using some new technology how does it work your gadget well basically it's a double triangulation um this emits a magnetic field in a sphere and these two points allow you to track the position of the wand within the magnetic field so it knows where it is and similarly these two cameras see the laser stripe when it comes out the middle and that gives you the other triangulation and it's a combination of those things that give you all the points on the surface just as you move the wand over it so it's similar to what you might do with surveying on the ground but in smaller scale with a lot more points that's brilliant you can even see its teeth and everything it's going to be a few hours before all the data is processed to create the full 3d image with the three trenches on the mound firmly placed inside the saxon cemetery it's phil's trench four the epic lonely furrow at the bottom of the field that doesn't seem to be producing any archaeology phil all day yesterday you were here trying to see whether this trench had any relationship with the cemetery has it well no we we've stripped out a large area of the gravel there and we've found no burials at all we now know that the cemetery does not extend this far we've also managed to pick up the edge of the floodplain so we know that the area where the cemetery is has always been on a mound it's always been on a spur of dry land so was there any point in digging this tradition yes there was the only way you can actually prove whether there's a in this case the cemetery was there is to dig it we've done it there is no symmetry here that shows us the extent of the cemetery so we're going to close up this trench we're going to finish recording these ditches here close the trench down and then get everybody else at the top with the double burial in trench two now recorded it's time for the delicate excavation of the bones so once all these bones have been taken out what's going to happen to them well we're going to take them down to the bone lab and very very gently try and clean off the soil and then have a good look at them to see if there's any pathology or heal trauma or anything like that so that we can see if there are any diseases or sort of fractures or anything that can tell us anything about lifestyle really what's the quality of these bones like awful really hitting a nutshell why is that it's the ph of the soil which is the acidity is probably quite an acid soil it's also this sort of um alluvial sediments of river valley floodplain sediments they set like concrete in the summer and then in the winter they're wet so the bones continually drying and wetting and that doesn't do any good either but where did all these saxons who are buried here live the landscape surrounding our site shows a continuity of use from the stone age through the medieval and elizabethan periods to the present day [Music] but stuart and mick seemed to have found clues to the saxon settlement in the heart of the present-day village looks to me stuart like absolutely classic dispersed settlement you know you've got cottagers all over the place bits of green lots of bits of woodland and it's what you'd expect from a saxon settlement pattern that's never got turned into a village you should say that there's been a big field walking exercise over here yeah and in this field over here which is which is beyond that big tree over yonder there's been oodles of saxon occupation debris poultry all that sort of stuff from in there but from nowhere else so that is strongly suggestive that that's the settlement and that's where the people were likely to be buried but what attracted the saxons to this particular valley in the first place i've had a look at the geological maps and the air photography and so on one thing is actually quite dramatic when you look at it no it's crikey that's the river the blue line yeah and this this lighter blue area is the floodplain the area where historically the river would flood and the banks would overflow so this is all wet down here and what's quite significant about this site is a big gravel peninsula which sticks out into this valley fog plane this sticks almost right across the valley doesn't it's like a barrier isn't it yeah and our site sat right on it so if you care from the south you'd see it if you came from the north you see it so any barrow or cemetery in that position would have been a highly visible and significant monument so now we know why the saxons settled here but there's a huge amount of debate amongst historians as to who the saxons really were war-like european invaders or indigenous britons under new management from the beginning of day one we've been talking about saxons and anglo-saxons when according to the venerable bead this entire area of hampshire plus the isle of wight was occupied by a people called the jutes who originated from jutland now part of modern denmark and in fact sandy is in fact a jute from jutland so how long they're here well we think they arrived in the late 6th century and occupied the isle of wight and all this area probably from the river raven over virtually to hailing island and that continued to be the case when our cemetery was in action right the way up to 686 and in that year they swept down from the north from the the thames valley a tribe of saxons under their king cadwella and he conquered this area committed genocide and even ethnic cleansing on the isle of wight do you buy this well robin's getting all this from bead bead was writing in the early 8th century and he's talking about the political realities of his own day now this could have been in the 8th century this could have been a kingdom with memories of a judicial king but we're talking here about the ordinary people the ordinary anglo-saxons the ordinary whoever they called themselves in answer to helen why the heck did they call the new forest the forest of the jutes why was the itch in the area of the jutes i think i'll leave them to it the dukes are going to be fighting the saxons for some time to come down at our cameo site ray's making good progress with his replica byzantine bucket even though at the moment it looks more like a fruit bowl so is is this the way we think it was made originally oh i'm sure it probably was yes i mean you can see exactly the same techniques um in modern times you know in china or in turkey there are guys doing just this so i mean i'm sure this is exactly how they did it it's going to take 40 or 50 complete rotations of very accurate hammering and 40 or 50 heatings and quenchings to get the sides upright that's before the thousands of punch hole engravings and the tinning process back on the mount trench ones beginning to look more like a maze the various holes and levels inside the trench are an attempt to decipher the very complicated archaeology coroenza things got really good here last night didn't they yeah we had a beautiful anglo-saxon spearhead and now we've had the other thing we really really wanted which is a grave cut the actual edge of the grave that the body was placed into it's turned up in the bottom of this test pit which has gone down further than it had before and you can see we've got the end of one long bone showing out a section here and then the edge of the grave cut is actually this contrast here between the darker fill and the lighter fill in trench three katie's got traces of human foot bones at one end but no sign of a skull at the other she's having real trouble finding the outline of the grave cut in the tightly compacted earth katie have you got any more of those skeletons yet oh no but i'm so excited i'm just finding what's this thing some bone we've we've taken the trench back so yeah we can see the whole of the grave yeah that these feet belong to yeah and having done so exposed this post hole i've been going down inside it and i think i've found a knife or a spearhead this big piece of metal across the middle here and really exciting i've just found some more bone as well are all these bits of bone then well just this bit and this bit are bone and this is the metal object here well hopefully the skull is right underneath here yeah okay well i'll pop back later that's very exciting with trench four at the bottom of the field closed down phil takes over trench five on the mound where there are a number of geophys and metal detecting anomalies [Music] a very well preserved iron spearhead a meter below the surface was obviously responsible below that two skeletons another double burial we got one of the throwy bones there oh hang on that does not look like a thigh bone to me it looks exactly like a skull that's right over the other one's leg isn't it i know i know yeah look at it oh that's a skull yes oh god i well i suppose not much we can do about it now i should have to clear off all this and let's get down on to it get the rest of the legs of that and just see whether it's an isolated bit or whether it's a complete body yeah i mean it might just be a bit it might knit but it but it's a bit strange if it is a skull because it's sort of lying between the legs or the other two after an hour of careful excavation the layout of the burial becomes apparent there are two superbly preserved skeletons it's so different from anything else we've had absolutely true conditions this is obviously a big hulky hulky male you know look at that skull great big brow ridges really rugged robust face and the pelvis is an absolute classic male pelvis very narrow very high android sort of shape yeah no question at all about that one this one's less clear the skull is still is quite sort of gracile it's nowhere near as robust as this if we just look at the pelvis yeah the pelvis is very much a male and that's the sort of thing you see very often a slightly gracile face and a male pulse in people who die in their early twenties males who die in their early twenties still tend to have a fairly soft gentle facial features so we've got one in the primary life say 40s to 50s just like us yeah absolute crime of life and the other one in the 20s and and the baby it's not a newborn baby by any means the sort of toddler i mean we need to i think there may be more bone under these shield boxes we'll have to take the shield boxes don't you think it's incredibly moving you've got the entire baby skeleton would have been covered and protected by two shields yeah there's no question of it being two graves they went in together even if one of them was put in days or weeks or months before the other one there's all due respect it's the burial practice here is really really odd i don't understand it so phil's double burial appears to have the skeleton of a child or baby placed between the legs of two adult males unique in any british saxon cemetery well i think the katy looks like the cat has got the cream and i don't know what it is do you know what it is all right what is it katie look what we have found it may be the rim of the bucket but is it i mean is that a cop is it copper it's a copper alloy and the thing is it could be either handle it could be part of a vessel if it's not like the other one yeah it might be made of wood with bronze fittings around it but we're going to have to wait until tomorrow to find out if mick's right over in the bone lab the analysis of the skulls from this morning's double burial in trench two has also raised a few questions a supposed warrior woman turns out to be an elderly lady buried with an eight to ten year old juvenile surely too old and young to be warriors so why were they buried with weapons but the biggest mystery is why are we finding so many double burials based on evidence from previously excavated saxon cemeteries you'd expect to find one double burial in every 300 graves we've got two in only five trenches you know how we're always saying that the best finds always come up just when the cameras have stopped rolling well would you believe it's happened again it's 25 past seven virtually everybody's gone home and look at what karens has just found what is it korenza i think it's the one thing we've all been desperately hoping we'll find it's a skull there are the teeth spearhead from the spirit it was buried with but the really really exciting thing is that it's so close to where that bucket came from probably just a foot away this may have been the person who was buried with the bucket we found them at last so we've got just one day left to see if we can find out more about the person who owned the bucket join us after the break it's only nine o'clock in the morning of day three in our excavation of this fantastic saxon cemetery and already we're running out of time the graves are so packed with grave goods and multiple skeletons we may not have time to excavate them all last night katie unearthed the rim of what appeared to be another bucket though different in style to our tinned byzantine bucket this is a major discovery phil's been brought in to help record this extremely rare find what's that wood you got there this is just unbelievable i've got decorations coming down in in copper alloy with the bubbles underneath them and then behind that are what looks like wooden slats narrow wooden slats coming down this is absolutely extraordinary you wouldn't imagine that the preservation was so good would you the excavation of the person who was buried with the bucket has thrown up another mystery yet another double burial our third in five trenches definitely male and you can see his big brown ridges here um you can see that he's got a jutting edge of a jaw caliber jaw yeah really sort of brad pitt i should imagine so that's an angled jewel there chunky bones robust bones that's a sign of um heavy sort of muscle coverage and and generally that's male really from the length of the of the long bones as well pretty tall at least six foot the other thing we can tell about him is that uh he's certainly quite old very worn teeth even the incisors here are worn right down and you've got the dentine which is inside the tooth exposed is that painful to him when he's eating not at all no as the dentine gets exposed it hardens up and it's quite a normal thing with aging in archaeological skeletons so if that's a male one what do you think about this one they're looking quite cozy this one's lying on its side sort of wrapped around the arms of this one there's a little bit less of this one isn't there we seem to have lost a lot of the skull yeah that's so well preserved um let's look at these teeth um again we're probably seeing quite a lot of wear on those molars there can have a better look at those when we get it out so again we're probably looking at an adult um and these limb bones are quite slender so it may be a female but we really need to get hold of the pelvis um to find out whether it really is that's the best indicator of sex so it may be a female last night over in trench one carrenza thought she'd found the skull of the person buried with the byzantine bucket this morning we may need to have a rethink as to who was buried with what phil yeah you know this is the grave that we have possibly had the bucky tattoo but certainly had two spearheads and a skull we've got a bucket another one look at that starts there the turquoise green of the copper alloy comes right around like that there's a wooden bucket with a with a with a bronze skin or a copper skin on the top of it that's what it looks like amazing yeah this is bizarre because i mean we just got a site that's riddled with buckets because we got one over there hang on a minute both of you i think i've got another one over here another one good ad that's exact that's exactly like the one in our trench oh right that's the rim yeah it's exactly the same perhaps these sheathed wooden buckets have been made using local skills and materials as saxon copies of the byzantine bucket it began in byzantium and it ended up in southern england how the heck did it get all that way i think probably very slowly because we think it didn't just start in byzantium it started in antioch which i can hardly reach it's in syria two thousand miles away so somehow it made its way over to england and we don't quite know how um it's probably through byzantium either across land around the sea and then from byzantium it could have got here it could have been swapped for something by somebody who lived here and swapped again by somebody who lived here and swapped again etc etc all the way up to england but would there have been people in southern england who had the money to be able to buy something like that well indeed i mean the status of the object itself tells us that you're looking at people who want to own these kinds of materials um and it indicates that there were almost certainly contacts either side of the channel with families of a similar social stand so it could have been the brothers or cousins of people who were ruling this little area who could have been indeed yeah as we've already established the river was a key factor in the formation and development of the saxon settlement it would therefore seem logical that the river was also a major artery in transporting people and things from the coast to inland settlements look at this splendid array of stuff and you know you've got the the traditional costume on there but it isn't it isn't just functional is it no it's very highly decorated this sort of broach used to pin at the shoulders this style or you might use an annular like this or a saucer or a disc brooch like these beautiful things but i mean can these all be local i have to say i've never never seen one of these no they're not local no i mean that's a curry shell that's probably come all the way from the red sea so we're talking long distance movement of objects here and what about all i mean there's lots of beautiful jewels yeah we've got we've got um amber from the baltic we've got um an amethyst and we've got the little tiny ones are in fact garnets and pearls so incredibly long distances yes trade yes but i mean this looks like for our purposes we see it all beautifully laid out but it looks like a shop so is that what we would have had on the riverbank people setting up a shop hoping to make a few queen i don't know well not a few quid no because of course we're in a pre-monetary system here we're we're talking sort of barter or exchange so you don't need the money so why do you need the things what's what's it about it's partly human sort of acquisitiveness of human nature you you see something you want it's you know you know what it's like we all do this um and the anglo-saxons you know were probably exactly the same as us but also these things are functional some are necessities uh brooches you have to have to hold your clothes oh some foreigner comes along and goes oh you don't want to hold up your dress like that i've got a much better way absolutely that's the beginning of fashion after the highly prized and decorated byzantine bucket arrived at our settlement a new fashion for buckets was obviously born here we're trying to revive that by making our own bucket though it still looks like a fruit bowl even after countless hammerings [Music] back on the mound it's starting to look like our latest double burial contains more than just a bucket it looks like there's enamel that is really incredible so how does that work as a buckle uh if i take this one off yeah that's probably the easiest thing to do so that's the best way to explain it i think my the little pin of my buckle is the same as this great big thing it's got this huge plate on the on the base of it where it's got the loop that goes around around the bar which will be underneath this so the next thing we're looking for is is the frame but then i'm guessing because this i've not ever seen anything like this before enamel is really unusual wow fully conserved the buckle would look something like this so now we can see the two burials complete with all their grave goods a tall middle-aged man with knife spear and shield alongside possibly a younger female once again the female is equipped for war but balanced on the lower shield a copper-sheathed wooden bucket it's extremely unusual for so many weapons to be found as grave goods careful analysis may give us some clues to these strange saxon burial practices [Music] this is the spearhead from trench one oh yeah uh from near the bucket was found and i'm looking at details things in the corrosion that might tell us a bit more about the burial my goodness is that what i think it is i think it's a fly pupae i think it is isn't it it's sort of part of this sort of exoskeleton there and then you've almost got a cast of the rest of it yep wow that's incredible isn't it i know it's it's wonderful but i think what this means then is that there were maggots on this body the body associated with the spear when it was in the grave and that they pupated and what you're seeing is the cast and the remnant of the pupae and now the spearhead wasn't found directly on the body it was quite it was a bit of a distance away in forensic cases what you tend to see is if you discover a body um when you first reveal it the the maggots will actually go away from the body because they're looking for somewhere that's more suitable to pupate and they don't seem to like to do that on the body if they don't have to um so they probably moved away within the confines of the burial environment and found somewhere to pupate and and what we're looking at really is what's left of that wow it's time to catch up on the latest news from bucket city it's absolutely amazing as you can see copper alloy bands around it decorative bands down four sides beautiful beautiful object was there wood associated with that or was it just metal it's wood yes look i'll show you on the trench cam look can you see in there the dark black is wood and then the turquoise green is the copper alloy banding around it but then we found another one look at this here you see that it's got a rim around the top and then down the side so that's got bands of bronze around it as well you have had a good day haven't you what about the size of them these two look pretty similar in size well even more interesting there's not just two we then found a third over here all the same size more or less somebody there they are more or less but what's really interesting that is 12 centimeters in diameter that's 13 that's 14 so they could all have nested in each other and the silver one from antioch from the middle is just over 15. they all are fitted one inside the other we can only speculate as to how these buckets were used in saxon life and death rituals perhaps they were filled with food or drink for feasting at the funeral or for the deceased person's journey to the afterlife future analysis of the material inside our excavated buckets may provide the answer what kind of status do you think the people were who were buried here well this is a stunning find i mean as a burial deposit it can only really represent people who were regarded as tribal leaders oh karena how do you think all this work then well i think how we know that it's such an impressive barrel is we think it's all part of one barrel it's incredibly symmetrical that's what really screams at you and those post holes look like they're part of a structure that might have gone over the top yeah a canopy or a chamber that perhaps people could have come and visited the graves as they were laid out there with all their glorious perfect items shields spears they've all got shields and spears both skeletons one thing we do know for certain is that our saxons from this part of hampshire wouldn't have been able to read the inscription on our byzantine bucket written in ancient greek it offers advice for the owner use this lady for many happy years ray's almost finished adding the inscription and hunting scenes to our now raised replica thousands of punch marks make up the intricate pattern with only minutes to spare before the end of our live program it's dipped in molten tin to give the appearance of silver it's this silver shine that gives us one last clue as to why they were important as grave goods i think these showy flashy items if i was digging them up on a bronze age site they'd be to impress the other people in in my village in my community [Laughter] it's about the living as much as the dead so it's not it's not going to the afterlife no it's display it's it's what they want to communicate to the people who are coming to the funeral so what does that say about the kind of funerals that they would have conducted well they they would have been visible laid out in the grave if they wouldn't have been in a coffin lowered in they would have been there with their bucket here and their spear here ready for everybody to come and see and the people who came to see them would know what the bucket meant [Music] you are pretty sure that they were laid open this isn't just supposition what about all the rest of the things that you said how can you possibly know well we we don't know a lot of it that we don't know how much feasting there was whether fires were lit how far the relatives came from we don't know masses of things but we're we're putting together fragments of evidence to make a jigsaw puzzle like what well fragments like a lot of buckets in one place but perhaps a lot of blue beads in another cemetery can you tell from the way the objects are found in the ground now by the archaeologist about that sort of thing yeah some people have spears with the head up here some people have spears with the spearhead down at the feet there's a lot of this this patterning which you can only see the results of when you look at thousands of graves over hundreds of cemeteries there's just so much to find out it's very very strange these people they're they've all got weapons i've never heard of that before this is something entirely different that was the end of our third day and we'd run out of time so with five wooden buckets and ten skeletons still to excavate welcome to day four the skeletons are finally giving us some tantalising clues about the relationship between the bodies in adjoining graves one of the really interesting things about this one though katie is this is this line here can you see it this sort of zig-zaggy line this is what we call a retained metopic suture when babies are born their skulls are in lots of different pieces which overlap during the birth process to allow birth usually this suture which you very you don't see very often on adult skulls it closes by about the age of two to four right generally when this doesn't fuse and completely disappear it's what we call a developmental failure but not one that has any sort of health implications or anything right people who have this generally tend to be related to one another and by sheer coincidence or not as a case may be in jenny's trench we've got this adult female who's also got a retained metopic suture so they may actually be they may well be related to one another it's absolutely fabulous and and i guess it's what you would expect in a sort of dispersed settlement which is what the anglo-saxon period is noted for that people would be related to one another small groups aren't there yeah yeah that's right another thing that's is interesting here katie is this fracture line along here do you see it oh yeah it's really faint yeah but it's all the thing that's slightly disconcerting with it is it's really smooth yeah and when bone breaks that's been in the ground for a while it breaks in these raggedy lines yeah because it's got no sort of plasticity left because all the collagen is degraded when bone is broken either by trauma or a blade or whatever and it's got lots of collagen left it breaks in very smooth predictable lines and this this line here is the sort of line that you'd expect when bone is broken when it's fresh so would this have been enough to actually have killed him well it depends what it's associated with and until we get it out and have a proper look at it we can't really be sure about that post-excavation examination of the skull does point to some sort of head trauma though this could be explained by something as simple as dropping the body during the funeral and with the incidence of fused metopic sutures occurring in less than four percent of the population it's almost certain that the two saxons buried in adjoining graves were related by dating the grave goods we can conclude that our cemetery was in operation around 500 a.d by examining the bones and the density of burials that it was an extended family group centered on the mound and that the people who are buried here though maybe not warriors held weapons in high regard but why they're buried in pairs with buckets will for the time being have to remain an enigma [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 278,736

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, Time Team Digs, Archaeology digging, Saxons History, Breamore, Dark Ages, Anglo-Saxon, time team, time team classics, time team hamphsire, time team full episode, time team season 9 episode 13, time team breamore, breamore, hampshire

Id: w1NLaVHgVRQ

Length: 47min 55sec (2875 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 27 2021