The Ancient Graves Found On A Welsh Cliff | Extreme Archaeology | Absolute History

[Music] all over britain there are archaeological sites that are too dangerous to access or excavate they could contain unique and valuable evidence of our past which if not investigated will be lost forever exa is a team of highly skilled archaeologists katie hirst in charge of excavation alice roberts doctor and expert in human bones meg waters geophysicist and digital imaging specialist all experts in their chosen fields who are determined to get into these inhospitable places to forensically assess survey and extract the evidence the expedition leader will be me mark davis volcanologist climber caver and diver this is archaeology on the very edge [Music] this week we are all hanging around in pembrokeshire trying to excavate three ancient burials before they fall out of the cliff and are lost forever [Music] this is the beautiful pembrature coastal path that stretches for 200 miles around southwest wales but parts of the pathway are in imminent danger of being destroyed due to coastal erosion and subsequent landslides take this section over the last few years alone it's lost several meters to the advancing sea but in the process of falling away three small stone line coffins have emerged from the cliff face so exa has been called in to rescue the archaeology and investigate this site before it's lost to us all forever this site was discovered by a pembrokeshire national park ranger who was monitoring the coastal erosion through binoculars when he spotted the stone coffins because the coastal path is walked by thousands every year it's hugely important to maintain and preserve this fragile natural resource to that end the seaward edge of the path has been designated an area of special scientific interest a triple s [Music] we've come here at the beginning of winter to minimize our impact on the environment working in close collaboration with the park rangers do we know anything at all about this site well the only things we really are sure about are that there's two iron age hill forts on either side of us one over there and one over there so what we might be looking at is an iron age cemetery but it just seems a bit odd that there are all these stones sticking out of the cliff face as well because they didn't tend to bury their dead in stone-lined coffins so who used to bury the dead in stone like coffins i guess that's the first question well they used to do it in the bronze age romans did it as well as well around here we've got just three coffins there meg have you thought about the geophysics absolutely i think i'm going to use radar first and i'm going to drag it right along the top of this cliff edge here right over what we think are the targets so that i can see what if radar is going to work and to get a good depth estimate what it's going to look like or what they should look like and then i'm going to continue surveying back from the cliff edge to try to see if we have other features that look the same that we can maybe target later i'll give us an idea of whether it's a cemetery or not as well i think we need to clean up this whole section along here and actually assess how many graves there are where they are and what they're looking like as well yeah i'm really excited about this i don't think we're going to get an awful lot of evidence sort of looking at the cliff here because we can't sort of excavate into it because this is a triple s eye so we can't undercut this this this edge but if meg finds some more burials further back then there's a possibility of excavating a whole burial and that's where we'll get some really good information the fragments of stone eroding under the cliff face are the remnants of stone-lined coffins constructed of sandstone slabs they were assembled to form a lidded coffin a stone box with no bottom before we can examine the cliff face meg is going to conduct a geophysical survey on the path itself directly above the eroding coffins i'm going to start with ground penetrating radar because i've had really good success in the past finding graves and burials with radar i'm really excited because i'm going to do time slicing and put it in a cube of data and then start slicing down because what we'll be able to see is if they're more than just a few burials we'll see the distribution across the area we'll be able to come out and literally peg it out on the ground where these burials are and i can also see depth wise where they are so we can actually in the cube have a three-dimensional image of where the features are and then go investigate them so yeah it's gonna be good very excited three coffins eroding out of the cliff face doesn't necessarily mean we've got a cemetery it could be an isolated single family plot part of meg's task is to find evidence of more burials but first she's got to find out what these stone line boxes look like on her radar the radar signature is essential to identify key features of the site the position of our burials in this tiny bay flanked by two as yet unexcavated iron age forts is an archaeologist's blank canvas as far as dates are concerned we can eliminate most of pre-history from our inquiries in bronze age whales they tended to bury their dead in barrows in the iron age they were cremated the romans didn't even get to within 30 miles of here so that ruled them out and by the medieval period the dead were buried in the parish churchyard of saint ishmael's two miles inland so that leaves what we used to call the dark ages or now more properly the early medieval period that's a good how's it looking um yeah i think we have a target that's just underneath the beginning corner of our grid so you think it might be a stain yeah i do because it's very flat and it's a very strong reflector flat meaning it's just very straight in the in the data it doesn't doesn't have any dipping angles or anything only accessible at low tide the beach below our site is where i caught up with a very reverend wynne evans dean of st david's cathedral and archaeologist who is convinced that what we've got here is indeed a cemetery the last rest in place of a group of early christians it would be fascinating to see who was buried in the cemetery if they're all males fairly fairly young and perhaps with a rather skimpy diet you might think that they were ascetic monks or on the other hand of course it might be the cemetery of a community and that in itself is fascinating because these people may have been christians they may have have not they may have been a church of sorts attached to that particular cemetery or they may not because in the beginning what you get appear to be open cemeteries based on family groups which either attract a chapel to them or in about the eighth of the ninth century or likely later they're abandoned and people start burying in churches if win is correct this could take the burials to as early as the sixth century the so-called age of saints when most of the population was being converted to christianity it's time for alice and katie to have a closer look at the eroding burials the initial assessment is crucial firstly to see exactly what state the archaeology is in and secondly to work out an excavation strategy can you see anything with all the bits flying around alice um i've got this big slab here sticking out i can't see anything that looks like any bone though sticking out uh hang on a minute i think i've got a bit of bane here okay that is definitely bone it looks like skull it's incredible here at the moment the whole of the cliff is all sandstone so what's happening is the sand is just blasting us off and we can't even look over the edge so conditions working there are pretty impossible at the moment with the team being sandblasted and buffered against the cliff face it's clear that we're going to have to think of another way of doing this it's easy to see how the archaeology is being so quickly destroyed but it's not all bad news but it's looking really promising you actually see voids actually within within the carpenter yeah that's fantastic as well so there are bones there definitely safely extracting the bones is going to be critical if we're going to find out who was buried here [Music] after a day of being buffeted and sandblasted the delivery team has come up with a new plan to get us to work on the cliff face a platform is to be suspended over the edge big enough for katy and alice to work on and stable enough not to be blown about in the gales but alice is concerned that when it's lowered it will crash into the archaeology bean you know where the stones are don't you really that's the other option is to have someone on the beach the rope tied onto it holding on to it what's going to happen is that trev's going to tie a rope to the platform um he's going to go down on the beach and he's going to pull it so the platform will be away from the cliff and then let to rest against the cliff when it's gone down low enough with the platform safely secured katie and alice this time wearing safety goggles begin the dusty process of clearing the cliff face of loose vegetation there could be more stone coffins hiding in the undergrowth back up top meg's extended her survey area 10 meters inland on the edge of a conifer plantation and there appears to be archaeology everywhere this looks really nice that is fantastic jim something really good right there really good can you pull a little bit more see that's exactly what we're looking for perfect really nice okay good thanks jim so what radar actually picks up is the contrast between dielectric properties so if you've got something say stone a certain property and soil around it now there's going to be more air mixed in with the soil but what we're going to get is that interface between the soil and the stone and that's what we actually get this response from this is part of the radar wave as it goes in the ground part of it reflects off of that surface and comes back up and part of it continues down into the ground that's why we can go vertically what is a big challenge here is all these trees that are planted right so they've been digging holes yes and putting trees in and what we see now are there a bunch of little baby trees but if other trees have been planted and dug up and taken out and trees put back in you know so if we have all these holes being excavated it's it's not easy to detect the difference between a tree hole and say a burial it's finally time for me to get up close and personal with the archaeology that's assuming the platform can take my weight i'm doing all right so what we got then tell tell me what we got it's looking really good right the furthest one away that's you see that one right in front of you this one here yeah that's looking good what's that that's a bit of blue that's that's that is a bit of bone yes so there's a there's a bit down there and there's a bit across there really do you know i would never in a million years would i would i see that as as being bone it looks like a a fleck of uh some sort of flint or whatever isn't it i mean that's incredible so what about this this is that's a fantastic one isn't it that is brilliant this one you can see you've got another vertical stone here yeah horizontal slabs going across and then another vertical yeah so it's beginning to look like all these coffins going off in that kind of direction yeah not not straight on but just slightly slipping off but that that kind of says no it does it says east-west doesn't it so so that's that's kind of right isn't it the east-west alignments of the burials is further evidence that this is a christian site a relic of earlier pagan times when burials were aligned to the rising and set in sun early christians were buried east west to be ready for judgment day and the resurrection okay katie i've i've should go off that that fragment now which it looks like it's going to fall off so i'm going to take it off and okay i think i think the other bit i'll leave there because that's fairly embedded it's time to get the fragment back to the dome for analysis alice have you found out what those fragments of bone are yet yes it's definitely a skull it's definitely human which is obviously what we're interested in the texture of it really sort of gives it away um can you see that it's it's got a sort of honeycomb middle to it yeah which is called the diploid and that's where the marrow is inside the skull yeah and then there's a slightly sort of um thicker table of bone on either side of that and that's the classic construction of the vault veins of the skull so it's not just it's not just a skull bone it's actually we can say quite specifically where in the skull it's from it's part of this area yeah and what's really nice actually is that on this piece here we've actually got some of the grease you can see it here we've got it underneath the microscope can you see these areas yeah yeah yeah it's actually little artistic arteries yeah and they make they actually make grooves where they lie up against the vein and that is a meningeal artery groove on the inside of the skull i mean i'm i'm absolutely amazed that you're able to tell from from that all that information it's fantastic having said that right that's information which is general do you know what i mean that's any human skull we still don't have any idea of how old this person is what sex they were all of this sort of thing so um you know there's a lot you can say from these tiny pieces but you can't really tell much about the person so for you we need to find a complete burial that's what you would like well that would be lovely yeah back on site there are fragments of bone eroding out everywhere they all need to be recorded then removed or they'd be lost forever alice is this part of the skull that you found yesterday yes it is um this is part of the the side of a skull i showed you the smaller fragments yesterday and this is a much bigger fragment and this is the inside again with those channels for the blood vessels right oh you can see it as well yeah you can see the curve yeah it's quite incredibly fragile isn't it really way for things yeah it's very crumbly so we're gonna have to get that out very carefully yeah yeah it looks as though most of the rest of the skull has already been lost to erosion yeah have you found anything else in the because this is clearly one grave here and that's quite a big one there have you found anything else there um this one over here yeah there's a bit of a bit of skull here a curve that you can just see in cross section can you see that there yeah just slice through it um and then that's a vertebra this is really nice though because this gives us a definite orientation on the graves yeah it shows us that the head is up at this end and if that's a vertebra then the spine's obviously heading down that way so we are getting this sort of orientation east west orientation yeah in the dome meg's processed all a radar survey from yesterday but has it given us any new excavation targets so what i see here is if i in this cube if i turn it so it's actually looks like a planned view it's easier to see things see that great you can absolutely see straight lines and corners and it's this feature right here do you think that that's possibly a coffin i that's quite wide i don't know if it's a coffin or if it's a stone perimeter you know edges of something it doesn't appear to be to me like a slab covering something because i would expect that to be just a complete bright reflector at this level yeah so i'm really not sure i would excavate right there okay so that's the target target number one meg's feature on the radar survey is four meters by two too big to be one burial and too big for one trench it's positioned right in the middle of the coastal path we don't want to destabilize the cliff edge more than necessary so we're open one by two to try and prove that meg's radar signatures are indeed burials i've been enlisted to help out top side though i suspect more from my brawn than my brain um well i've cleared that whole sort of area that we're looking at with all the underground there's nothing there no more no more coffins no there's a side to the coffin that you found yesterday with the skull section in it um but apart from that name what's that looking like inside it is it just the skull or i haven't cleaned it anymore um because i think we need to we need to plan it all don't we first yeah it looks as though doesn't it that the all we've got are the skulls and the feet that they've gone off in that direction yeah have dropped out yeah so this is the very you know the last bit of evidence there to get so i think it probably would be a good idea to take those out part of our job here is to find the extent of the burials and if this is an early christian site any traces of a church the aerial photographs may hold some clues i think what's really interesting that's come up from using the gis is looking at the aero photograph there's a number of features which we can kind of see yeah yeah there's definitely something in there isn't it sort of rectilinear that's great because you can't see that on the ground at all no i mean there's nothing there at all this is a big feature i mean if we actually just measure up from there this is sort of 23 meters across there and then extends sort of 49 meters down behind the trend yeah and then within that you've got this smaller circular feature and that's that's about 12 meters in diameter what we need to do is try and find out whether that is associated with our grave so i guess the thing to do is um get meg to survey over that area the corner of the rectangular feature is inland of the coastal path in the field alongside our dome it could be a banked or fenced enclosure around the cemetery but our burials are outside of it i need to get a second and third opinion about what this thing could be what we can see clearly here is this this return here that's that's the clearest most defined um feature that we've got on this aerial photograph normally as you look at that kind of circular feature and think iron age and think house if you see something rectilinear like that you either think it's it's modern or you might think it's roman there are loads of possibilities here and what we've got to be careful not to do is pre-judge it context is all in archaeology you know and you've got to work out whether this circular feature is in some sort of context with this possible enclosure yeah and is that in some sort of context with the burials okay and you've got to work out the extent of it is is this enclosure the extent of the the archaeology here meg's got every toy out of the gfs toy box to try and give us a target to dig on this feature but after four hours of radar resistivity and magnetometry she's less than impressed with the results [Applause] we're really targeting that particular corner because you can see it the best in the suit photo that looks like a linear feature to me it does it does it does it does indeed look like a linear feature but then so does this and we've got a little bit of a pattern here and you've got to wonder if it isn't geological in nature instead of a corner or corner being like this in the data we've got something that's oriented like this which is completely off you know just completely opposite well it's a real danger isn't it looking at this and seeing these features and thinking we've got archaeology absolutely and it really isn't archaeology um it's too big a risk to tie up time and resources on something so archaeologically indistinct that it could be geology with no chance of extending a survey into the conifer plantation meg's going to concentrate their efforts into giving us one final digging target near the cliff edge katie's trench is well advanced she seems to be coming down on stonework which may be the first signs of a stone-like grave well this is starting to look really good we've got a vertical looking stone here yeah and another flat one here so this this looks that's probably the top of the grave this looks just the side of it yeah and look at this big void going down onto that oh yeah well some of the ones in the cliff side have actually got voids underneath the top slabs quite a few of them yeah looks like we've just come we've just clipped it in right in the corner of course of course and of course it looks like there's another one over here you see that's very high up though isn't it it is high but look look at the color of the sword it's very dark yeah so that to me looks so it's possibly the end of a the end of the grave and it's possibly going off in that direction yeah oh it's just so annoying though it always happens isn't it i'm just beginning to wonder whether meg's je fizz survey was actually showing not a rectangle in the middle but actually graves on either side i thought this last night when i looked stick when she was saying there was this rectangular shape that was four meters by two meters i was saying well could it not be two graves in a row making that four meters yeah and then a gap and then another one probably what's happened yeah but this is great and if this is the top then hopefully it's going to be really well preserved as well underneath i think we're going to have to extend the trench which means moving back all that sport under the spoil heat before we can find out if this is an intact burial we're going to have to shift four tons of soil the grave could provide all of the answers we've been searching for the age and sex of the long dead occupant what started with a park ranger viewing a grave through a pair of binoculars and a cliff face has turned into an incredibly complex site the grave is part of a cemetery we don't know what age is yet the geophysical survey is turning up hot spots all over the place so it's easy for us to get carried away with a gem of a place like this and we mustn't forget our original specific objective and that's rescue archaeology so alice is going to go back over the cliff and continue to document it further northward see if she can see more graves katie's going to extend her trench a little bit see if she can come down on top of a complete burial and meg's going to reaffirm some of her geophysical interpretation so it's our last morning i wish we had a month of them alice what's left to do on the um cliff face um well jim and i have planned half of it from the platform yesterday and we've just got the other two graves to plan there are four graves down there yeah if you see them really nicely now um and we have um rescued all the bits of bone that were falling out of the cliff they're pretty fragmentary though um tiny little bits of cranium they can't really give you much of a clue as to who that person was that was buried right um so i've got good hopes for for these trenches up here and hopefully we'll get some we'll get some better um bone specimens wait but they're good enough for a c14 date at the moment absolutely that's all right meg spent most of yesterday trying to locate a mysterious rectangle in the adjacent field today she swapped her radar for a matter the primary goal of our work here is is to establish what's going on with these burials that are rotated yeah but what i was interested in is this spot right here that looks the same but actually is back a bit almost 10 meters from the cliff edge to see if the cemetery would actually go back at all and not all be eroded out okay i know if you come down on top of something then i guess you could infer other areas within your gpr yeah it's all trying to classify things so that we don't have to excavate the whole area if we have a number of spots that we can say all right we excavated over two three of these spots they are in fact burials let's assume then that this signature in the radar data is is probably not definitely but probably burial it's important to find out if these signatures are burials but with only six hours of daylight left it's going to be a tall order to compound our time problem katie's uncovered another stone line grave in a trench so this this is probably a later grave it's a really nicely built structure they've got these horizontal slabs and vertical slabs i think they've taken a lot of care if they're dead sure yeah so what's the plan of action though well i'm extending this all the way back here to reveal this grey and we're gonna uncover the stones reveal the skeleton alice can have a look at it or record it all properly lift it and then go down onto the skeleton so that means shifting all that stuff yeah it's a hell of a lot of work to do one day with all of the evidence pointing to an early christian cemetery wind suggested that he and i went to church saint ishmael's was once the center of a thriving medieval community the church itself dating from the 11th century though much modernized through the ages it contains relics from a time before the church and its cemetery came into existence a fine collection of early christian crosses um this clearly is broken because the top of the head of the of the cost is gone you can just about see where it's going to um to move up now what are they doing what are they for they're either gravestones or they can be used as boundary markers otherwise when you came into the church's land yeah the this cross would mark the the division as it were and that was important if you were a fugitive seeking sanctuary um in the case of some of these major world churches the sanctuary area can be as much as 3 000 acres because you can come in there with your retina with your army with your family with your flocks and hurts and yeah if you had some space and you had to know where the boundary was yeah absolutely yes okay if you just go behind the fountain bring that that one yeah it was quite heavy one this could be a grave marker right rather than um um across in other words the sort of sites we are looking at on the cliffs which are at is the opposite end of this this is a major um clerically stuffed uh mother church episcopal church perhaps once perhaps of the 9th 10th and um 11th centuries the site on the cliff is the precursor to this okay um and an early christian community within i say an open cemetery who hadn't thought at that point of of creating a church and moving into um into a church head for churchill burial yeah their graves might have been marked by things like this yes do you think we find something like this on our side i think this is slightly later but this is the kind of thing we will be looking for not maybe even as big as this and not with a craftsman a much simpler ring cross yeah and maybe a smaller inscription it's obvious that there are no upstanding grave markers on our site though they may have fallen over and been buried by the passage of hundreds of years that's exactly the kind of stuff that you should be looking for certainly because that's what i've got in nature when they cut the grave they would have taken out the fill okay and then just put it straight back in so the difference in the soil color is is going to be really hard to see yeah but i think no i think you're you're on something there good excellent with katie's trench enlarged the full extent of the new tiny grave is revealed grooves a lot smaller than what we first thought yeah can you guess what's going to be in this kind of size grave yeah it's going to be a little baby yeah yeah it's always really sad i think digging up digging up babies but it kind of brings to home as well but there must have been a much higher in infant mortality rates you know in the past than there is today so are we going to go about excavating this thing well it'll be the same process that i use all the time we take the last thing off first so i'm going to have to just start peeling back all these stones and then i'll probably come on to the soil that they put over the skeleton and remove the soil and then probably come down onto the skeleton okay all right all right so the other thing that we have to look out for when we're lifting these stones is for any engravings on the other side because that quite often happens sure okay just keep an eye out for that it's it's strange i i honestly thought that i'd be really excited but um it's really somber you know yeah and uh it's kind of um even sadder the way they've taken so much care with the burial as well haven't they really obviously really how do you actually um how do you cope personally with that well i have to say that you just cut yourself off from it and um you know you have to just think that what you're doing is for our knowledge now you know what what we find out about this baby is all going to add to the our knowledge of the past so um the only thing that i'm shoving to to the forefront of my head at the moment is the fact that in 20 years time this is not going to be here anyway i think we are rescuing it exactly if we weren't here digging this then all this information would be completely lost anyway yeah alice is taking one last trip over the edge this time further along the cliff and without the safety platform in search of more burials well this looks disturbingly like another grave but this is just the sort of construction that we were looking at um with those other ones so these are these flat slabs on top there's horizontal slabs there forming the top and this looks like a big flat slab here this stuff looks like natural also presumably there's filler growth inside there it's got to be planned it's going to be it's got to be photographed and planned because again it's obviously eroding just out of the cliff section and it could be gone fairly quickly katie's almost finished excavating the child's grave i think it's going to be completely empty that's not really bizarre if you think this is going to be a very very small child and the bones are so delicate yeah that they're very unlikely to have survived yeah yeah can you see that the soil has changed now it's um a lot more heavily yeah so i think and we've got also got down to the base of these stones here yeah so i think basically we've got to the bottom of this grave in a way it's uh actually quite strange uh we haven't found anything in the grave in the baby grave and um all sorts of moral dilemmas that are going around in my head are put off until such a time as when we do find a complete scale at them at 10 centimetres then the bottom of that is there's a real sense of urgency now we're running out of time and alice needs to record her latest burial the fifth found on the cliff face only then can she remove any of the bone fragments for the first time on the cliff face the eroding bones are not pieces of skull and vertebrae now that is trabecular bone you can see the way it's made out of lots of little struts and that's what most of the veins in your foot are like or measure the veins in your ankle [Music] anyway katie i found a tailless an ankle bone that's fantastic is this from the cliff face yes it's from the that fifth grave on the cliff face here that i've just been looking at well that's that's really interesting because that if you've got the foot then that probably means that the rest of the skeleton it certainly looks like it happens i think i've got the the feet um and then some of the the outer side of the coffin which we haven't had on any of the other ones have we yes i've got the slabs on the outside of it so you've got five over there i've got four in here four meg's just found another one there's four in here yeah so we've got a little child's grave here yeah an even tinier one i've just picked up to the side of it yeah one running along underneath it which i presume is an adult one yeah and then one in the corner yeah so it's called it's quite a substantial cemetery though it's a really dense cemetery yeah yeah and also what we can tell now is because we've got um a child burial we're not we're not looking at a monastic settlement it's going to be a lay population yeah i think it's i think it's lovely how they have taken the same care and trouble to construct the graves for the children it suggests to me what you've got is a family group or generations of a family but rather than an ascetic monastic community and that raises the question of the relationship of this site to what's happening down on the site of the parish church at its initials which of course as we realize is a major class mother church uh bishop house site uh certainly in the late queen home here the 10th 10th century and what the relationship is and perhaps once they stopped bearing here the next generations were bearing down there megas come down onto the lid of another burial to pinpoint a single burial by radar then open a one by two meter trench and reveal a complete grave is an absolutely amazing piece of survey work it's all fallen into place it's starting to look like our cemetery was the precursor to saint ishmael's which we know is 11th century we now have enough bone fragments for carbon 14 dayton but as yet we don't know anything about the individuals who are buried here time's running out and we lose in the light but we committed to seeing this excavation through to the end well it's all hands to the pump at the moment we've got the two trenches open and we're trying to come down on top of two very prominent graves and the delivery team and myself are all helping out under the watchful eye of both the archaeologists yeah i'm really excited i'm really excited you know it's the end of the day and this really is meant to be the end of the excavation um as i said we are going to have to continue tomorrow but i'm just really excited to have a look in men's grave so i'm going to get an overlook that's right the capping stones over meg's grave are ready to be lifted in the reverse order and so that they were laid down when that when the grave was created each stone needs to be carefully checked for inscriptions we should probably look for inscriptions on the outside so you can flip them being in check okay it's nice oh there's you can see these side stones in here coming straight back the mood is definitely one of somber anticipation most of the times when i'm excavating a grave it's because um because if i didn't then somebody's going to destroy it anyway so i think it's it's really important that we do excavate this because then we can show what is here because the coast is eroding but at the same time the foresters are putting all this these trees up right next to the archaeology to stabilize the the coast which is also doing damage to to the archaeology so you know if we if we can dig this we can say how deep the archaeology is and in the future people can just be very careful where they put paths where they put trees you know so it's it is it's good it's good to do this as the final stones are lifted it's clear that the grave is full of soil with no trace of a skeleton got it all right okay it's not too heavy oh my god what let's see the skull the skull yeah oh my gosh look at that glasses you can see yeah you just see the top of the skull and dove of it there yeah and that's just fantastic it just looks really well preserved it's not broken it's just just a bit strange for you i mean i i know you've revealed skeletons quite a bit before i mean this is the first time i've i've ever seen a skeleton at you as well really yeah you're looking a bit sheepish you're not um well i the problem is i've been getting so excited about this and then suddenly you know this this whole skull is revealed in order to lift the skull it's essential that we remove the final stone but it's firmly embedded in the wall of the trench okay so you've got where you wanted to be lifting the stones what's the plan for now we certainly can't you know go any further with excavating the skeleton because the next thing that needs to happen is that that stone needs to be removed and in order to do that you've got to extend the trench it means that you can then see the whole grave you can see the grave cut all of that sort of thing phil do you think that do you think that sounds like a reasonable plan i don't really think we should go any further with this tonight i think we should i think we should leave it i think you're right i mean it's going in under the section so yeah you need to widen up the trench and uh and best will in the world this sort of light is no it's it's streams how important is it to to lift the skeleton when we cut into the ground here we made a commitment to seeing it all the way through the whole process and we can't just dig down to something see oh it is burial yes confirm what we think it is and then close it up because the evidence will be lost we'll have done something almost for nothing and honestly if we have issues like that we shouldn't have opened it up period [Music] after 14 hours of excavation yesterday the team are back on site early to finish what we've started the first big surprise of the day is when we examine the newly cleaned capping stones from the grave one of them has an inscribed cross a very crude and possibly very early christian symbol i don't know about you katie but this was an absolutely incredible find yeah and there's there's a wealth of geological information in this tablet and the first thing that struck me was this line across here and on the top half of it there's a lot of lichen growth and it's incredibly well weathered it's been exposed to the elements for a substantial amount of time whereas down below there no lichen and very little weathering yeah you're quite right you can see there's quite a big difference between this area and this area it's carved a bit narrower isn't it and this bit is wider so it looks to me as though this was actually once standing at the head of a grave with this bit inserted into the ground and this bit standing upright so it actually pre-dates our skeletons absolutely it's been reused inside our grave i tell you something announced that i picked up on as well is that see the corners of the cross yeah they're actually drilled in place and then they've probably chiseled it right the way across so it's quite a crude method of inscribing the cross and the other thing that we can tell from this cross just from the design of it is that it's probably around sixth century with the two baby graves empty katie has removed the capping stones on the adult grave and is starting to find fragments of badly decomposed bone the acid soil has almost completely destroyed the skeleton over in meg's trench the side wall has been cut back to reveal the full extent of the grave we're just about to lift this stone over the head of the of the burial are you ready meg if it's too heavy give me a shake all right nice thick one there we go [Music] the vault of the skull seems to be almost completely intact there may be enough for alice to determine the sex and the age of the individual you can actually feel the mastoid process okay i just took my fingertip there so that's intact which is good because that's that your teeth it's just just behind your ear yeah you've got a strap like muscle that actually turns your head from side to side that runs down your neck that's where it detaches now that's much larger in males than in females and then all your neck muscles attach onto a lump on the back of your head called the external occipital protuberance and uh and that is a great jutting out thing in males the next time you see a blade with a shaved head have a look at the back of his head because you can see a sort of lump sticking out and women don't have that they have a they have a nice smooth back to their head katie's skull is in much worse condition but the teeth are giving some clues to the age of the individual you see these teeth some of them have fallen out how warm they are oh yeah look at that this one right down yeah yeah there's only so much osteoanalysis that can be done on site the skulls and all the bone fragments are carefully packed in acid-free containers to be shipped back to alice's bone lab after all of the attached soil has been removed it's immediately apparent that more than 80 percent of the skeletons have been destroyed in the acid soil fragments have been carbon 14 dated and have given us a very early medieval date of 734 a.d we also know a lot more about both individuals so what can you tell me about the two skeletons alice well this skeleton here is the one from the grave that meg and i were excavating um and as i thought at the time this does look like a female skull it's got a fairly rounded frontal not much in the way of brow ridges above the eyes and also the back of the skull is nice and rounded with no particular bits sticking out as well that's that's female looking to me okay let's see how good you are an age i can't give you an accurate age on this at all um all i've got is the top of the skull now one of the things which does change with age are that the sutures start to close can you see these zigzag lines here which are fairly indistinct on this one so they have closed as the person's got older it's very variable when they close so i'm not going to say anything more than it was an older person it's not a teenager okay an adult female then yeah yeah okay what about this one this one over here um i can't give a sex to i've said it's indeterminate sex because some of the features in it are male and some of the features seem to be female it's always easier if you've got a pelvis but we haven't on this one but i can give you an age okay and i think one of the things that you were picking up on when we were excavating was that um some of the teeth look quite worn yeah this one here um the cusps have been completely worn off you can see that dentine is exposed but that's the first molar that comes through around the age of six so that is going to be the most worn of all the molars so if we look at the third molars the wisdom teeth so these are the ones that come through again around the age of 18 it varies quite a lot and you can see that there's no dentine exposed on that there's a bit of polishing and the cusps have been worn down a little bit but there's no dentine exposed so in fact although that tooth is incredibly worn um compared with teeth nowadays this isn't a particularly old individual it's probably somebody in their twenties and why would it be so worn though because of the different diet that they're eating they're eating a much more abrasive diet there's a lot more grit in the diet from corn stones used to grind up cooling things with all of the radar data processed into a 3d cube the extent of the cemetery has become apparent the ground penetrating radar survey gives us the evidence that we need to say this is in fact a cemetery we had targets we excavated them they are burials so now we can say the rest of the targets in the area and they're probably 20 and possibly even more are actually burials this is fantastic isn't it just from such a small beginning a few bones sticking out of the cliff face we've really pulled together so much data we've shown that this is a christian burial site with east-west aligned graves it probably started around the 6th century and continued in use until about the 8th century we didn't find the church but let's hope that somebody in the future might find that and then the population probably moved towards some ishmaels in the 10th 11th century and now that i've done my assessment on the bones and we've got the radiocarbon dates as well the bones themselves are going to go back to some ishmaels and get reburied with all of the archaeology removed from the path and cliff edge the site was restored by park rangers if in the near future more erosion takes place then the coastal path can be moved inland safe in the knowledge that no more graves will be disturbed

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 75,150

Rating: 4.8891568 out of 5

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history

Id: WlcL3dCc6zA

Length: 48min 15sec (2895 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020