The Bronze Age Fortress Buried In Northern Ireland | Time Team | Odyssey

[Music] this has to be one of the most spectacular locations we've ever been to on time team this is not due a magnificent promontory overlooking the coast of county antrim northern ireland i can hardly see my hand in front of my face at the moment and the wind's practically blowing me off the hill but once the fog lifts you'll see spectacular views of the mall of kintara behind me and the coast of scotland way over there better still you'll see this one of the most impressive and mysterious prehistoric monuments in the whole of ireland we're about to embark on a three-day quest into pre-history to discover what happened on top of this hill we're on a remote site here 20 miles north of belfast noctu is a vast headland that towers over the antrim coast and on its summit is this a giant prehistoric earthwork of man-made banks and ditches but it's never been excavated before so no one knows what it was for who built it or when finding out is going to be an enormous challenge for a start it takes us half an hour by tractor just to get up here and once on top you're battered by the fierce winds and rain but undaunted we're going to attack it head-on with a team of archaeologists from queens university belfast provided we don't get lost in the fog up there phil the bad news is you've got two site supervisors this time you've got francis and philip philip what exactly is this um it's a promontory for uh tony a series of earth works uh three banks running for a distance of about 300 meters uh cutting off this promontory from the rest of the upland antrim plateau what do the words promontory thought actually mean it's a term that archaeologists use to describe a wide variety of monuments that effectively are only defined by being located on promontories which are conventionally are interpreted as being defensive i think philip's flailing a bit i don't think it means much at all i think it just means some sort of earthwork stuck on a pointy out bit well actually tony i mean they're a very important class of sight particularly in this part of ireland oh this one isn't unique no no no there are about eight known around here but the thing is they're always in very spectacular places i mean you can't really appreciate it today although i don't know the cloud's lifting well i mean look this place would dominate the sealer so how are we gonna dig it well i think we we simply grab the bull by the halls we put a trench right across these three ramparts dig down and see what's there you see the point is if we can do that then we can actually get down into the bottom of the ditch we should be able to get some dating evidence which will resolve just how old it is but more importantly you'll be able to reconstruct a very impressive bank so that if anybody approaching the site when it was actually been occupied it would have been a very impressive site very impressive is putting it mildly because it takes you a while just to appreciate the scale of this thing the earthwork runs the length of three football pitches by anyone's reckoning it's colossal so it's all the more surprising that this place is an enigma these banks and ditches look like they were built to defend the promontory but some of our archaeologists aren't so sure and anyway what on earth could have been up here to defend it's just as well we've got geophys on hand to tell us where to dig i don't think we can do anything what's up john well we came here we've got lots of plans when we're in the office yeah we're gonna do a series of radar transects across the ditch and rampart system now we actually get here i mean forget the weather that's nothing but just we can't actually do anything why well we've got a wheeled car system we cannot drag it down a slope like that across a ditch and back up the other side it just physically won't go are you a man or a master it's not nothing to do with me it's the cart i mean we might be able to go along the line of the the ditches and the ramparts but then again dragging it through this is not easy often we wind you up at the beginning of a program but you really are brass stuff now aren't you well i'm more frustrated than anything i mean having made all the effort to come up here um yeah it's not good while john throws his geophysical toys out of the pram francis is launching into action yeah i'm not happy going into that here we can take some of this black off but let's leave that we'll do that by hand it's late morning on day one and we're opening our first trench here a 10 meter long slice right across the ditch and bank system of our prehistoric earth work [Music] we're looking for evidence of how it was constructed and finds like bits of pottery basically anything that might hint at what this earthwork was for and why people went to the trouble of building it here in the first place both of which at the moment are a complete mystery but there could be an important clue down in the valley below it's this mine and it's rich in one of the most highly prized materials in prehistory flint god built of it it's brilliant isn't it phil's like a kid in a toy shop here tony have a look at this this is where we should find stuff in this this loose rubbly scree stuff are these man-made flakes yeah i'm just finding them yeah get away just about there don't sound so surprised are they well they are oh good that's why i'm so surprised well in that case then you won't need any tuition about that one no that's where someone has walloped it probably with a hammer stone and that's called the bulb of percussion well done you're almost becoming as addicted to flints as i am you really are no i'm really not how do we know how old this flint working is phil because of these tony when we get these lumps of flint which have actually had a whole series of flakes systematically knocked off of them this has got to be somebody working this stuff either in the stone age or in the early or late bronze age this bit is a core it's a waste of thumb you throw it away so could our defended sight up on not do have been connected with this flint mine and prehistoric tool making we get around this short stuff easily shave with that if we find flint tools up on the promontory then that could be crucial evidence especially if we can date them because the earthwork could have been built at any time between the neolithic or late stone age and the bronze age that's a mere 3000 years of pre-history anything we can do to narrow it down will be vital it's at times like this we all look to geophys to find us some targets except john appears to have had a tiny hiccup the basic problem is we're sat on a big outcrop of basalt that's the stuff that the giant's causeway is made out of it's that sort of thing it's all volcanic and it's very very magnetic when we're doing this sort of survey work normally rubbish pits ditches hearths and so on they'll give responses say five ten units in strength here the basalt that's giving readings of hundreds if not thousands of units so it totally swamps all the magnetic picture so why are you having a look here well francis thinks there might be a building platform and it's just possible we might get walls projecting above the basalt and so we can see them through the turf but it's a long stretch if it wasn't hard enough that we're digging on top of a small mountain it now turns out that this small mountain is also a giant magnet brilliant but isolated as it may appear our site wasn't in the middle of nowhere it seems the entire landscape surrounding it is stuffed with prehistoric monuments well the whole area is really an archaeological site the land here is like a storybook it just tells the whole history of human settlement in ireland and all these fields have high sights and burial counts of different period what other prehistoric sites have you got that are immediately close to here well right down at the sea we have a series of neolithic houses great big wooden houses the size of a modern bungalow wow filled with uh you know round bottom pottery bowls flint arrowheads scrapers all the tools of domestic living and you get do you get large neolithic burial tombs burial chambers and so on yes we find them dotted around the landscape terms where people would have been cremated and buried in fact the last day we were up here and we found a 5 000 year old tomb in a field boundary that we hadn't seen in a landscape we know very fantastic yes but while everything round here seems to be neolithic or late stone age that doesn't necessarily mean our sight is too in fact while john's geophys has been sending him off in all directions francis has zoomed in on evidence for much later activity up on this hill we're standing i think in the middle of a bronze age roundhouse or round house anyhow now all i can see is a load of tussocks that look exactly the same as the tussocks everywhere else ah but look if you come here look there's a slight bank goes all the way around here i'm on the top of the wall now and i come off the wall and it's running beside me here i'm around here and look there's the doorway facing due south then the wall resumes here and comes back so nice little roundhouse you see when it's pointed out to you it's just plain as a nose on your face well i must admit it is fairly clear round there isn't i've only been doing archaeology 16 years there you go how are we going to dig in well what we'll do is is we'll divide it into into four and we'll take our opposing quadrants we'll go straight through the doorway we'll find out what's going on in the middle and we'll get a sample of the walls as well do you know i think that that is the most optimistic statement i've heard so far today get on with it so we're opening our second trench to find traces of a roundhouse typically a wooden framed turf covered building with a hearth in the middle if francis is right then this will be our first evidence of people actually living on this exposed promontory it could also explain why the defensive ditches and banks were here and back in trench one we're starting to see the first intriguing signs of how that earthwork was originally built well it looks as though we're now getting to the base of this man-made bank you see these dark lines running across the bank there yeah they we think those are actually evidence of turfs that have been used to construct the bank and then on the other side it really just drops away vertically into really quite a large ditch francis if this actually was a fort with attackers out there and defenders in there how would it have worked as a defense well i think the key to that is the number of ditches and banks so first of all any attackers got to struggle through that ditch which would be full of water when you come over here tony and look you're rising up again then maybe you've got a palisade here and then look you've got a heck of a deep ditch over there jim the other large earthworks that there are in ireland are they very similar to this they have a certain basic format to them uh that makes them clearly you know defensive uh one of the things they'll normally have is very large ditches but they're going to be v-shaped they're going to be deep v-shaped we call them ankle breakers because they're so difficult to get out of once you've got inside and you haven't got that here no you don't and this is why the site is providing certain problems of interpretation uh you can't simply throw the word hilfor to this even though it's on top of a hill or a promontory so this was defensive it's just that there was something else going on but we don't know what it was that's absolutely right so we all sort of agree it was definitely defensive and it certainly looks it even though according to jim it's somehow not as defensive as the other hill forts in ireland but what could have been here on this huge site to defend well perhaps we're about to find out because out on the promontory ian's radar has just found an intriguing hump there's a distinct dip here single lines in comparison to a hump which you've got actually there so you've got the hump going up and the dip coming down and obviously this is a definite feature and it corresponds with this hump so i mean you've got a mound and then a pit underneath it yeah i mean could that pit be a grave and that might be a barrow or can could be i mean i can't tell what's inside there apart from saying that material there is the same as that material there what do you reckon it is for them um well i think it could certainly potentially be a burial under a can or a barrier as you say i think we certainly have to investigate it if the dip on ian's radar is a grave then maybe the promontory was at least partly a place for the dead a prehistoric cemetery on the other hand phil spent the afternoon trying to prove people were living up here too phil this is where you were looking for some kind of bronze age roundhouse isn't it have you got on we've got it tony i mean i can't be absolutely certain that it's bronze age but we've certainly got the round house look we've got this tumble of stones they spread around in a big r coming round here in this quadrant of the roundhouse i think this is probably where the wall has actually fallen down the slope so we've got our round house and crucially we've got some fines look at that lot that is all were flint oh there's a lot of these there must be at least 10 or 20 pieces there we've actually got one here that's been retouched into a tool look somebody's chipped off that flint there and retouched that into a little scraper and all this work flint is coming from the floor of the hut great our first tool so we think we've got evidence of people living here we think we know what they did with their dead but who were they and when were they around we need dating evidence hopefully we'll get that tomorrow beginning of day two here at knock do in northern ireland as you can see it's been raining all night and the trenches have filled up with water the four by fours can't get up here anymore look at the state of that trench there the tractor got stuck in the mud we've all had to walk up half a mile of this carrying our equipment before we can even start but it's been all worthwhile so the archaeologists tell me because we found this incredible system of prehistoric defensive ditches not only that we've also got a prehistoric roundhouse complete with evidence of the people who lived in it although i keep getting confused francis because i think of this as the whole roundhouse but in fact it's only a quarter of it isn't it yes you see the walls going on the outside there ran back behind us right round there and then that's the doorway what's the significance of this fine for you well what's really exciting about it is this is a proper house this is a permanent dwelling for people and we've got the debris they left behind them on the floor in the form of flints what do we do with it now well we've got to define those walls and then i think we'll extend in this direction to see how it's been set back into the hillside what else are we going to do what are your other targets well do you remember yesterday at the end of the day we discovered this barrow this this can on the other side of the hill now i think that is crucially important so does that mean there might be a burial in it i hope so tony i mean the radar looked very much like there was one and of course that's important because okay we've got the living but we've also got the dead we got their ancestors so that adds to the importance of this place we're really starting to be able to tell the story of this place aren't we oh this place is beginning to harm yeah that after last night's torrential rain it's also turned into a quagmire it's causing us one or two minor technical problems [Music] unless we want to excavate in snorkels and flippers first we're going to have to bail out the trenches but faffing around with pumps is really frustrating this site's huge and if we're going to understand it we're going to need all the time we can get over there just in front of our finds tent is the system of ditches and over that rise there is the prehistoric roundhouse but here like the third point on a triangle looking actually rather like the 18th hole on a golf course is this rise here and when we looked at it in the geophysic it was really tantalizing it seemed as though there was something cut by human hands with a stone slab on top of it jackie you saw that geophysics didn't you did even i understood this one i think what was it you made of it well the thing that immediately sprang to mind to me was a stone line kissed so you've got a stone lined box in here in which you would make a burial and then you built a mound over the top of it would it make sense for one to be here oh absolutely yeah i mean there are quite a lot of these in the area and you're talking early bronze age probably around 2200 bc and it's absolutely classic location because you're on a downward slope looking over a big visitor which is exactly where you'd expect to find something like that what are you going to do with it now well we're going to start by quadranting so we're going to take one quarter out see what we've got there and then we'll work from there on it would be a beautiful place to be buried you can't see it now because of all of this fog but it is exquisite isn't it it's lovely absolutely lovely it's 10 45 on day two and we're opening a third trench here to excavate the mound with a dip underneath it that we picked up on the radar yesterday if this is a stone-lined grave it'll give us a pretty accurate date for this part of the site as i understand it reksha if these are post holes we could be looking at a palisade that's made up of like one large one and then lots of little almost stake like post holes in between back in trench one there's been a breakthrough we found the first evidence that the earth work was fortified this looks pretty convincing this is a huge one here you've got one at the top yeah and then we've got some kind of smaller tentative ones don't we yeah i mean this could be one here um a bit further down this could be one here and then an interesting one down here which at the moment actually can you see that orange yeah that could be some burned clay there's actually charcoal flack in it and from past studies on on these things they're often a good indicator for actual post holes these post holes could have been used for the sharpened wooden stakes of a palisade built on top of the earthwork to defend whatever was up here and there's now more evidence for that in trench three because what we thought was a grave for the dead actually turns out to be a place for the living what it looks like we have is that looks to be a foundation trench associated with a roundhouse ah yeah you can see there is this dark stripe across here and then lovely sort of packing stones really rammed in there to make a good foundation so the whole the roundhouse sort of goes up slope here and i believe there are another two potential roundhouses just a bit further up but the fact is that if you open up this little area and you inadvertently stumble upon a roundhouse you don't know it's here i mean if we don't know that this one's here how many more round houses were there the whole hillside could be smothered in roundhouses we've now confirmed not one but two roundhouses that phil believes could be part of a much bigger settlement and stewart's already started finding signs of it right across the promontory when you start to look at these slopes closely what you can see are very distinctive roundhouse platforms some of them with banks we've got one one over there yeah but around this knoll i've now got it's about six on this slope here there's another two just over the crest and another possible one over there i've been over the entire promontory i'm convinced at the moment we've only got a very small number of them yeah okay but i mean yesterday we didn't know that there were any up here now we're saying oh we only know about 10 i mean i think that's incredibly exciting no that's why i bought you these polls all right because you can't really see them as tussocks of grass so could you take these poles and put them on the tops of the walls right and then get henry with his clever gadgetry to plot them all in okay yeah and i'll come back and see if we've done it properly thank you very much while stuart starts plotting our newly discovered houses back in trench one we're beginning to appreciate what a colossal endeavor constructing the earthwork must have been ian this enormous lump of basalt here i mean it's vast did that come out of a ditch yep came out the bottom down there so i mean the bottom part of a ditch is rock cut is it yeah it's just below the water line here there's a rock face the amount of effort the amount of labour that's gone into cutting a stitch is mind-boggling isn't it yeah well he considered they probably didn't have metal tools they did it all with wooden spades and antler picks this is seriously organized stuff isn't it yeah it must have taken a lot of people i mean you're talking days weeks months to build something that's 300 meters long it's huge it makes you wonder why they put all the effort into constructing these ditches and banks i mean it must have been because they're protecting something over there on the headland i mean that was their community this says how great we are i think it's as much of that as it is to do with defense so we're now convinced this earthwork was built to protect the people living on the promontory behind it and we think they may have been rather special because a fort like this was a clear display of their power and wealth to the outside world and it was a world that knock do was surprisingly close to because the prehistoric people living here didn't confine themselves to the antrim coast they also had links with communities from across the irish sea shown by these intriguing tools from local museums there's plenty of evidence that this high quality antrim flint was actually traveling across the sea to scotland how do we know that oh well there's things like this fantastic horde that was found in 1990 by a schoolboy and it's got five ready-to-use flint axe heads and where were they found they're found at campbelltown here you see just across yeah absolutely where are these ones from well now that's another part of the story so it wasn't just stuff going from ireland to britain you get stuff coming back from britain to ireland so these two are from great langdale in the lake district uh again it's a site where they were knocking out tens of thousands of these things so these ones here these started out in the lake district and they were found here absolutely yeah yeah yeah there's uh what nearly a hundred have been found in ireland now if trading was going on do you think that also have been what you might call cultural exchanges ideas crossing and people crossing absolutely yeah yeah they were intermarrying they were related to each other we know this because they were using the same kind of pottery there were sharing designs and also the the tombs that they were building these big megalithic tombs they were exactly the same on other side either side of the channel it's funny isn't it because when you climb to the top of that hill you imagine that that prehistoric community was really isolated but you're saying that it's actually got connections with places hundreds of miles away absolutely yeah back on site our hamlet has become a village but stewart's got a puzzle he thinks he's now found a staggering 14 round houses but they're not all the same you see they're all separated they're kind of detached so this might have a different function well i still think it's probably a house but it it it may even be a different chronological date to that group over there and this one as well as the big bang around it it's also got a raised interior which makes this one very different to all the others so it'd be worth putting in a trench in here just to see see what this one is and provided they don't get lost in the fog we might find someone to dig it because this is turning into a battle with the elements the road leading up here is now a sea of mud and unfortunately our tractor can't swim there's only one thing for it we'll have to excavate it it's mid-afternoon day two it's getting absolutely ridiculous i left the tent which i think is over there about seven minutes ago looking for phil's trench i can't find it i've passed two groups of people who were also looking for trenches which they hadn't been able to find either i've started shouting for him but the problem is he's actually a bit deaf so everyone else keeps on answering and i go blundering off in the wrong direction uh oh i'll find him sometime i suppose while we stumble around on the promontory down in the incident room henry's got a major find he thinks he's found the entrance onto the whole site cutting through the earthwork at the furthest end you see that engine's coming through and see the outer bank breaking that and coming up into the into the inner bank so playing with the the geophysics on that so that's magnetic data perhaps more impressively you can just see the break in it with a big blue blue line if this was the entrance then digging here could be key to understanding the site but first i need to catch up with phil phil phil this is quite bizarre this is phil's trench and he's not here phil because i think that gets away from any interference from the house so what are you doing over here now i wonder i was confused i thought you were supposed to be working on the uh round house trench well i was but then he told me that i needed to be deployed over here yeah and i'm about to be uh educated as to why i'm digging here what exactly why am i stripping out this piece of turf well look we've got superbly preserved houses here but we always look at houses people obsessed with buildings whereas in actual fact most people spend most of their day outside the house in something like a garden a garden here like croissants and dahlias and stuff no not croissants and dahlias um uh wheat you know i mean crops oats soda thought that sort of thing you look along that string up there you can see it's been cut back the ground has been leveled it comes up here yeah to about here there's a breaker slope and then over to that side there is a higher terrace so there's another garden here right are you happy with that you're looking a little taciturn well no no i mean we'll dig it and find out forgetting the garden for one moment have you finished the circle trench no tony that's why we've got excavators still there look we have actually started to really get our head around what's going on in here we do have the back wall coming around there it is swinging right here we've got a really well preserved roundhouse about nine meters in diameter what do you think that big post home might be for well maybe to support something in the roof but equally it could be something related to a hearty there was the traces of of charcoal in the century which is where you'd expect the hearth to be and of course we do have at the back here what looks like possibly a gully so you can imagine that there's this water cascading down the hill and this ditch is here to deflect the water around the roundhouse well i don't know about francis's theory if i lived here i'd never leave the house with drainage ditches to keep it dry and proper stone foundations for the walls this house was built to last although the very fact that people were living up here at all shows how determined they must have been and having confirmed this roundhouse now francis wants to find the allotment next door so he's extending trench two here john i gather you've got some clever results from the geophys yeah we've done the magnetics here now and we've got three really clear responses look let me come down and show you over at the earthwork john's picked up a mysterious row of features slap bang in the middle of the entrance the first one's there second about here and the third at this point here i mean they could be large pits with timbers in them that have burnt down i mean they might just be boulders that have been placed here you know we've got the problems with the basalt it could just be a geological effect i don't think that's very likely john because they're going so precisely down the center of the entrance way i mean i think these could be some some ceremonial blocking of the entrance way i think it's potentially very exciting and very important and we must dig them now oh francis can be so masterful so we're opening our fourth trench here to investigate the entrance through the earth work it's the end of day two we're still lost in the fog and still baffled by the archaeology but we've also found extraordinary evidence of a prehistoric community living up here even if we still don't know when for me the problem with all this fog today is that i've got no clear picture of the sight i've just been blundering around stumbling across archaeologists in trenches who are either very depressed or very excited but what is this place for how does it work well for me the fog's lifted tony but i could never understand why they put all the effort into these huge defenses when they were seeming to defend nothing over there sure well what now is apparent is that that was a major settlement somewhere very important to somebody to be proud of now the way into settlements is always the most important part so that's why i've taken you here look down there you think that this is actually the entrance into the whole settlement i'm convinced of it tony and i'm very excited because at the bottom there was paving and that's potentially prehistoric bronze age well it could be tony yes if what you've got there is a bronze age street how important is that it's incredibly important and i'm keeping my fingers crossed have we got a bronze age street we'll find out tomorrow beginning of day three and look i really mean look this is not only your first opportunity to see this spectacular view it's virtually our first time as well you can just about make out kintyre over there and along there is the coast of scotland just seeing all that has really lifted the archaeologists yesterday we started to excavate what we thought was a can here somewhere to bury the dead but it soon became clear it was actually the exact opposite of that it's a house for the living with some really good evidence in it but jackie if this is a house what's this great slope of stone do what it's been put here for is to create riveting or stabilization for this house platform that we've got here and if you look that dark feature there with all the stones in it that's a foundation trench for the house which you can see going around the outside i see so the house itself starts there all that's just engineering that's just engineering to stabilize it stop it slipping off down slopes now we extended this trench into the middle which is where we hoped to find a hearth and lo and behold we have this beautiful hard baked past material here which you can see running around this edge here and even better what we've got from there if it's a burnt animal bone and bits of burnt flint so it's obviously been a domestic building they've been cooking in here and we can use that burnt bone to get a radiocarbon date for this house although in truth francis we haven't got all that much burnt stuff have we you don't need much narutoni for a really accurate radio carbon date nowadays it's what two grams something like that although the big story for me is actually not this house it's the fact that not content with this one and fills one over on the other side of the ridge you want us to excavate a third house as well why i want to put a trench in another house in this group um to get more dating material but more importantly that house is very peculiar well it's not flat but in the middle there's a little bump and you know i can't understand what that is could it be a burial it could be it could be a little burial place there when they abandoned the house or it could be a burial from the word go i don't know but it's really intriguing well maybe but the burial that was promised yesterday turned out to be a roundhouse still i suppose we'd better give francis the benefit of the doubt so at 10 30 on our final day we're opening a fifth trench here [Music] back at the earth work careful scraping has paid dividends ian's discovered that layers of soil were piled up on top of each other perhaps over centuries to form one of the banks what you seem to have is literally a dump of material on top of this which is an old ground surface so this isn't a rampart as such this is where they've been cleaning the ditch out and throwing the material outside to make this bank right and then to make the the purpose of a counterscar bank is to make even more of an obstacle of the ditch behind it yeah make the ditch deeper by raising the banks beside it yeah okay so i mean actually this is rather good because it does give us evidence that they were strengthening the defenses or they were maintaining them yeah i mean it's not just a one-off event one day one week one month they're coming back several times year after year to build this bank up clean out the ditch maintain it so it's not just a simple one-off event no no that's smashing we're convinced the earthwork was being strengthened year after year to defend the people living in the village behind it but who were they and what were they defending themselves against big questions for the last day back at the roundhouse in trench three we've had another small breakthrough god that's enormous just ease that out oh wow oh look at that even i would recognize that isn't that gorgeous is that that's that's actually a touch-up edge around there isn't it that's that's handwritten that's gonna be a scraper that is the best piece we've had and that is a real tool yeah that's great but we're still desperate for a date something a solitary scraper can't give us we need results over at the entrance way in trench four yesterday late afternoon francis and i were walking up here in the thick fog towards what we thought was some kind of ancient gateway and we were saying how spectacular it must have looked up here to prehistoric people except of course we couldn't see anything but we can now mind you this isn't the only spectacular thing up here is it francis no it isn't tony i mean i think we've been turning our back on the most important part of the site because we've been obsessed with those houses and things and fair enough but this would have been the sort of ceremonial center of the site this was the only major entrance into it and you came from that direction and then these earthworks focus you around this corner everything is designed to focus people around here and into the entranceway tracy that scatter of stones along there do you reckon that actually is some kind of roadway i don't think there can be any doubt about it now tony it's really nice you've got these large stones here they're running along the edge they seem to form curb line to the edge of this road and in areas where it's undulating they've put these smaller stones in basically they formed a really nice hard flat platform for a road surface to come through couldn't this just be 17th century or whatever no the only thing we've got from the surface of this so far has been flint flakes work flint i think we've got to be looking at an early day and could well be bronze age fantastic finally we're getting close to dating our site with some time in the bronze age roughly 4 000 years ago looking most likely and what an impressive sight this entrance must have been probably with a guard house controlling access to the village beyond now the thing is tony you've walked on this roadway we don't know how far it extends i mean if you're heading towards the houses over here you come into the interior right now if you look up on the left up here on the skyline there are some lumps and bumps now i think they could well turn out to be cams where the ancestors were buried overlooking the houses and overlooking the gateway so you come in through this spectacular entrance with that amazing view behind you you come up here the first thing that you see is the ancestors and beyond it you've got a view out to the sea you've got it the sea perhaps the single biggest clue to what happened on this hill has been staring us in the face all the time we know that people in antrim were exchanging stone tools with communities on the other side we found plenty of work flint in our round houses probably from the mine at the foot of the hill so could trade across the sea explain who these people were and why they were here in the bronze age don't forget that people had already been navigating these waters for thousands of years and they would have had those skills passed on from father to some how would they actually physically know where they were going across these waters this isn't rocket science it's coastal navigation and it's so fortunate in this area where scotland is only 15 miles away from northern ireland most days you can see one headland from another what sort of boats will they actually use for this for this journey they certainly had dug out canoes or log boats and i found one uh about 30 miles south of here this boat was found on the seabed and it was dated to 5 500 years ago in that form it wouldn't really have sailed it would have needed a light rigger oh just to um you know don't think of them as very backward people getting around slowly they go about very nicely thank you the fact is that five and a half thousand years ago these prehistoric people were more confident at finding their way across the sea than across the land crafting dug out canoes from tree trunks to navigate the ocean yesterday afternoon we'd extended trench two here to see if we had a vegetable garden or farmyard next door to phil's roundhouse it isn't either but something far more exciting well we're making progress france's we've got the potting shed or it's another round house no i think it is another roundhouse firstly we had loads and loads of work flint in there secondly we've got this stonework here which is just like that roundhouse over there a bit of a giveaway and then when you start to look you can see that it comes round in a perfect circle and then returns down here and round there hold it hold it i mean you're about to hit that house no no you're not actually going to hit it they are just very close you've got one wall of one house there and one wall of one house there they are separated by that much right so i mean i would imagine that house is probably later than that house wouldn't you those houses cannot be that close and be standing at the same time it's impossible they must be separate buildings at different periods but i mean this is fascinating phil because i mean you know we're getting phases in the big ditch system and we're now getting phases in the settlement it's all sort of coming together exactly by phasing it just shows just how much we can stretch the length of the time that people have been living up here meanwhile the bad news in trench five is that there's no sign of a burial but guess what it's another roundhouse better still every time stewart thinks he's found another one he turns out to be right roundhouses are now popping up all over this promontory there's the four we've now excavated stewart's counted 18 others and there could be more it's a small town but when was it here to prove it was bronze age it's vital we get radio carbon dates for our trenches except that we didn't get any sadly all our samples were too small but who needs science when you've got a couple of flint obsessed anoraks at hand but there's quite a lot of stuff um from the different trenches it's it you know by and large it seems to be fairly similar from trench to trench well that's right i mean it's not only is it rubbish napping it's it's consistently rubbish snapping all the way across the site i know what they've done this one here that's that that is abysmal bang bang another oh that'll do but at the end of the day you could live with this and i mean there they are they are in the bronze age but they are so totally reliant on flinch still absolutely well you know there's plenty of it around that's the thing i mean i suppose really puts you in mind and well what we were having at dinner time there we were using our disposable cutlery plastic disposable cutlery this is the ultimate bronzer disposable cutlery at it lucky for us they chucked them away basically the quality of flint working declined as flint was replaced by metal these specimens from across our site are so shabby we can finally be certain that our roundhouses and the people living in them are bronze age and so is the earthwork which radio carbon dating showed was built during the middle bronze age roughly 4 000 years ago if you come up this way you see you actually start rising on the cliff well your first thing you're seeing are these cliffs themselves are hugely dramatic henry's really on form he's made a further discovery he's found the pathway that prehistoric people would have followed to reach our side as you rise a bit further you come around on the edge of the cliffs following this cliff top path you come to see our site in profile at that point the site is dramatic and then as you keep on going around that's where the entrance to the site is right on that edge that route gives you a very dramatic almost processional route to the site it's five o'clock and our three-day battle against the elements is over at times we've scarcely been able to find our way in all the rain and fog but considering what we've found it's been worth it because what we do know is that a major bronze age community lived up here that until now no one knew it even existed we think that people reached this place by following a processional path that ran from the coast below up and round the cliff top when they arrived they were met by this giant defensive earthwork that protected the settlement behind it but also demonstrated the power of the people living here you went through a grand entrance into a village of at least 150 people who survived up on this exposed hilltop with little more than flint tools but who were they well francis has scoured the depths of his bronze aged imagination and come up with a slightly left field theory now this was a time when people were farmers yes but you've also got to bear in mind that the bronze age is the very beginnings of the irish celtic tradition you know the heroic age and we know from the ulster cycle which is one of the earliest accounts of prehistoric life that people attached great importance to cattle raiding these raids were organized all the young men of the village went out and they went across to the neighboring tribes land and they pinched their cattle and then you got to imagine that they drove them back along the ceremonial way and then they take them in through the main entrance and there are all the old men all the wives all the children all the members of the community up here they welcomed them in to hurrahs and cheers they then slaughtered the animals and there was terrific ceremonial feasting that's what i like about archaeology this fantastic vivid compelling story straight out of the archaeologist's imagination [Music] you

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 125,745

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, brozenage, bronze age documentary, prehistorical documentary, time team, tony robinson, channel 4, archeological dig, northern ireland, irish history, ancient ireland, ancient britain

Id: YMJlr4zRJTI

Length: 47min 56sec (2876 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 05 2021