The Buried Bronze Age Ruins Of Bodmin Moor | Time Team | Odyssey

[Music] welcome to one of the most hostile environments in britain today yet in pre-history it was one of the country's most sought-after neighborhoods this stone house at the heart of bomberman moore in cornwall has been here for 5 000 years and believe it or not it was once an ideal place to have a home but what was it that drew generations of prehistoric people here what sustained them and why is this spot now so inhospitable we've got three days to chuck a lot of science on this one because the digging and there will be some digging on those houses and this can may not give us all the answers [Music] [Music] [Music] cornwall behind one of the wildest and most romantic coastlines in britain lies bodmin moore barren windswept and dominated by huge craggy tours weird granite outcrops that have been sculpted by millions of years of harsh cornish weather this is a landscape that's been witnessed to thousands of years of human history a recent archaeological survey recorded hundreds of prehistoric settlements here but no one can say for sure how old they are or even if they're all the same age what are we looking at francis well this is one of the best preserved landscapes in britain because it's all on the surface there's everything here we're going along a trackway which is probably 4000 years old and it's leading up to this bronze age building here do we have any idea how many people would have lived here during the bronze age year when we carried out the survey we recorded at least 200 settlements and 1500 individual houses within those settlements now it's impossible to say whether people lived in them all the time whether they were contemporary and whether or not they were seasonally occupied or permanently occupied but what we can say is certain is there are at least a couple of hundred people up here at any one point maybe even a couple of thousand is this the doorway it is yeah it is eerie the idea of going into somewhere that's maybe 5 000 years old what exactly are we gonna do here francis we're gonna do an excavation dig a hole and find evidence that will suggest yes this was a house or no it was used for livestock and we'll also date the thing this settlement lies just under road tour the second highest point in cornwall but it's so exposed that you wonder why people would have wanted to live up here at all the archaeology though suggests that unlike now this wind and rain swept more was once a hive of activity and if it was a bronze age settlement then we're looking at anything between a thousand and three thousand years before the romans but it's still only a theory it's important that we date these structures properly and we're just the latest in a long line of archaeologists to come here helen we've got a really crisp edge along here and another one here isn't this a trench hasn't this place been dug already yes you're right a distinguished local archaeologist called dorothy dudley brought a team here in the late 1940s and she dug a few small trenches through some of these features and nothing more had been known until just last week we came upon a box with some more material in it so it's a case at the moment of trying to put the various jigsaw puzzle pieces together and find out what she discovered john all i can see here is more and big stones is there anything that giffis can add to the mix yeah of course there is i mean we don't actually know that all of these around houses i mean some of them could be stock pens they could be clearance cans if we can identify areas of burning that may indicate hearths and so help with the interpretation then we've got the whole landscape beyond well yes and the landscape shows up incredibly well on this wet air photograph we're standing in that roundhouse and dorothy dudley also excavated in that one and we got permission to dig there now they're on either side of this great big enclosure and wouldn't it be fantastic if we could prove that that roundhouse and that roundhouse were in use at the same time in which case this whole thing would be a village [Music] we're beginning our dig in the doorway and the first challenge for us is working out which of these stones are part of the original walls which stones are rubble and which stones are just stones if these were bronze age buildings they would have looked like this low stone walls with timber beams forming a conical roof which would have been covered in turf or even hides if it was a house there would have been a hearth in the middle for the family fire i say if because 10 years ago the bodmin moore survey assumed all the house circles here were bronze age but no one's been able to accurately date the whole settlement some structures on the moor could be thousands of years older still because 500 meters away to the north east is another huge man-made feature [Music] we suspect it's neolithic and if it is we're talking at least 2 000 years before the bronze age this is my sort of world up here tony it really is i absolutely love these great open spaces it's just so atmospheric and then right in the middle of it look francis believes this mysterious bank that looks like a ruined dry stone wall could be a colossal prehistoric burial mound but we might be pushed to find any evidence the soil here is very likely to be acidic so in other words bone won't be preserved so what are we going to do here well what we're going to do we're going to put a couple of trenches where people have dug holes in the past so here during the second world war this is a training exercise so tanks used to come thundering through here so this time time team's going to thunder in and we're going to knock a hole in here on the side of the trench and then we'll put another one up here where there was also another track we can be able to record the construction of this cairn and also uh find some traces of a buried soil what's buried soil all soil was buried no no look let's suppose for example that this cairn was was four thousand years old maybe six thousand years ago the soil that he's sitting on is going to be buried and that will preserve so much information about the environment of the landscape at the time i mean the thing is as phil said it's acid this soil so that means we won't get bones which is a disappointment but we will get pollen and that will tell us an enormous amount about the environment the trees and grasses growing in this area this structure's over 500 meters long and despite the foul weather phil can't wait to get his teeth into the archaeology meanwhile geophys are working through our potential bronze age settlement [Music] they're looking for signs of burning which would have been left behind if they'd been a half in any of these buildings we're also about to open a second trench over this house circle and yet again there's evidence that it's been dug before this time it could be our enthusiastic amateurs or perhaps squaddies on one of their world war ii exercises i'm inclined to go for the military option uh hopefully no bombs in it but this string that i've put here takes out a quadrant about a quarter of the whole thing and makes use of that trench and if you see if you come right here we're virtually opposite the doorway so if there is a half with any burning it will be right down there so i think that's the next thing to dig i think isn't it well that would be great because i mean if we find that no one has been in here before you really good chance that if this is a house circle we'll have good occupation deposit and that'll be the best chance for getting dating evidence and fines and then we'll be able to relate it up to that hell circle up there where matt and helen are [Music] up on phil's trench it's difficult to see how he'll ever make any sense of this huge pile of stones but at least he's happy yeah what's the weather look like it's looking good better than this morning at least you'll give the old clover a chance to try over there [Music] considering the selection of weather that's been chucked at us this morning it seems odd to me why anyone would want to live here or indeed go to the trouble of building a 500 meter long cairn but our local experts think that the first settlers here were drawn towards roe or rao tour they'd have been in awe of these rocky outcrops and there's evidence that they were worshiping here the tools were the sort of primary landscape features that were clearly venerated by the people that lived here here at rautel we've got the hilltop enclosure which we know was probably neolithic in date with there's other examples elsewhere on boardman and these are almost certainly some kind of tribal gatherings centers for ritual ceremonies a meeting place for people to come together and sort of celebrate their lives within the landscape steward also believes rotor provides a connection between the mysterious stone bank and the much later settlement he suspects both are focused on the tour but proving it can't be achieved by digging alone well he would say that wouldn't he i think it's one of those sites where what's below ground actually might not be as informative as actually what's above ground there's the stone sizes there's the shape and size of these banks or cairns whatever they are we can look at how they're constructed what they line up within the landscape so this is a classic case we've got to start looking at the obvious and try to understand what it's telling us in phil's trench he's beginning to suspect this bank is far from being a random pile of stones and you've got one there and another very very flat one in there in fact you've got one here on edge and what i'm noticing too this is bang on line with the edge of the cairn there's a load of upstanding stone they just stick up over the ground oh yeah and they go right away through here i reckon this is going to prove to be the edge of the cairn the build up and the makeup of it is going to be over that side and on that side is a collapse where it's fell out and i've got exactly the same thing on my side so mid-afternoon on day one and it feels as if we're close to some sort of discovery and we're beginning to make progress in other areas as well this morning phil and francis were banging on about buried soils and we've now taken our first samples from the site this should help us get a snapshot of what was going on in the prehistoric landscape what can you do with this mud once we've dug it up uh we can learn all sorts of things from a sieve of mud like this believe it or not we can look at the pollen grains they tell us about the vegetation which is growing around the site we've looked at the plant macro fossils the seeds and they can tell us about insects and they're a very good indicator of the environment and also climatic change as well anything else oh there's also a test we can do it's called soil phosphate analysis what does that do well what we do is we take samples of soil from the trenches and we apply a series of chemicals and that will tell us how much phosphate there is in that soil sample so it's not just fettling around with mud and spiders legs it certainly isn't what can you learn what can you tell us well it's i've always argued that we cannot understand sites like this without this sort of environmental information that may not be as exciting as your big walls up there or your big field boundaries um or your flint tools but it's just as important in our first stone circle we're still trying to find a half to help us identify this as a bronze age house rather than a cattle pen and then there's our other target phil's getting more and more confident that this is a purpose-built structure and one of the most extraordinary he's ever dug and this tiny piece of flint might be the first evidence we have that this can is much earlier than anything else on the site i'll just get so excited about that that is absolutely magnificent what sort of night we're looking at for it up here much of it is very early mesolithic you know six seven thousand bc i always just wonder whether or not it's a tiny tiny chip whether they've got say a scraper or something like that and it gets dulled yeah and they're actually re-sharpening it well a lot of the scatters that we get are like that where you get a lot of flakes and retouching material and not much in the way of tools and of course if you if you've got to bring flint what from the coast that's where we think most of it comes on bob midwall it comes from the beach pebbles that you get on the coast about 10 miles from here i suppose so in other words this stuff is is very valuable material so if you've got a a blunt flint tool it pays you to resharpen it yeah one of the things that i was particularly interested in is where it's coming from because what do you say it was right down in that bottom there tracy yes just this dark soil down the dark layer down here it's quite compacted and dry see i wonder whether we're not beginning to get into either the surface that was here when this thing was put up yeah or whether we could be in the top of a of a buried soil yes that's what we're hoping for exactly the buried soil beneath this structure whatever it is the light here on road tour would have been as dramatic to the ancients as it is to us today they worshipped the sun and ran their lives by it and thinking about it so do we despite the impetuous weather it's been a good first day in our two house circles the diggers have finally got into their stride over at the can they're now looking at stones that haven't been seen for thousands of years and look at this we're now deeper than the antiquarians got down to and this surface too is maybe 5 000 years old and tomorrow we're going to dig into it to see whether this was a place where people lived or maybe where they buried their dead [Music] day two on bodmin moore we've come here to unravel the mystery of this deserted landscape that once attracted generations of britain's earliest settlers yesterday john's gift his results were what were euphemistically called inconclusive but today you're much happier aren't you yeah they are they're quite exciting because we're getting the bigger picture now i mean these areas of enhancement at this end of the survey when you actually overlay them on the round houses they coincide exactly whereas at this end we're not seeing any enhancement with the round houses so what do you think that enhancement might be well the enhancement i think is burning and so that could be halves so it suggests that these might well be lived in and that's right here yes but there is a problem dorothy dudley actually excavated far more of these roundhouses than we thought it's just possible that we're seeing excavation disturbance by coincidence tony i actually have her plan here now that one there with a very high enhancement happens to be this one and she doesn't appear to put a trench in it at all so are you happy for us to dig this house because so far we've only been allowed to dig houses that have already been disturbed and that's because we didn't want to damage sites unnecessarily and also to save you time because the trenches are there but we do want to get the story out of this site and we do need dates and halves give you dates the potential for dates through radio carbon data this large stone behind francis here may be the site of the heart it would certainly be great from our point of view if we were able to dig as it were a virgin circle wouldn't it would be fantastic a fantastic opportunity here now we can get on to some undisturbed archaeology in our new trench three and with helen's team still digging trench one and bridges team busy in trench two we've got a fair chance of finding the occupation evidence that we're desperate for what seems to be the floor layer in the house we've also got our environmental laboratory in a nearby farmhouse where ben and emma are examining the buried soils from the site to try to build up a picture of how the landscape looked and how it changed over the last ten thousand years it looked looked a lot more organic actually in the trench another archaeological tool at our disposal is radiocarbon dating on organic remains such as wood bone and plant material [Music] back on site in trench one helen and matt are beginning to make sense of dorothy dudley's 1950s dig i think you can vaguely see across here where it used to be and there's fewer stones but um we've gone out beyond that and you can see here these collapse stones here which just go over the wall of the house there it's massive obviously it's huge i think there might be too many for a wall here yeah and we have had a few a couple of finds as well there you go love little thumb scraper wow look at that and it's been burnt yeah it's burnt flint and it was found outside the walls just over there oh that's interesting because the two scrapers that were found by dorothy dudley's team were also outside look there are these dots there just outside the entrance and have you seen anything it might be a target for carbon dating possibly you see these the lay that you've come down onto there yeah it's all quite black nice dark black and in the very centre of it there is in fact quite a strong concentration of charcoal i think we if we put a slot across the back or something and got a section down there and got a good sample of it yeah we probably could get something at last we're getting to grips with these stone circles we've got trenches open in two separate buildings and it would be fantastic if they were both part of the same potential bronze age village but without doubt the biggest mystery on the site is phil's neolithic cairn built 6 000 years ago by the earliest farmers who only had stone tools [Music] this monumental structure is over 500 meters long and francis believes it's no coincidence that it points east and towards the tour he's also convinced that it's unique in britain with only one or two other neolithic monuments even remotely like it when we were up here yesterday in the pouring rain it looked to me like a rather random jumble of stones that you might put up to stop sheep wandering about but looking at it now it looks like a really big structure well the thing is tony about these really big structures they're very carefully put together or the whole thing collapses so i'm hoping that phil has got good evidence for how everything was actually built i mean you can actually see it on the surface tony i mean if you look up the monument you can see that there are actually two parallel rows of stones running right the way up its length and we've actually got some evidence of it in the trench here look there's that big boulder which is sticking up through the surface of the grass and we've got these big boulders coming down here and actually the infill is much smaller boulders and if you really want to see the other side much more clearly look at that whacking great stone in there yeah so what you've got are these these two parallel they're like walls and the infill is just rubble they're just heaving stones in now outside of that we've got more stones and yesterday i thought this was tumble stuff that had slipped off the top and slipped down either side but when you look at these stones here look there's that one all of those they're all flat they're all interleaving and if if stones tip off the top of a monument like this what they don't do is lie flat they just kind of tip and jumble all together so now i think that these stones are actually part of the monument and probably laid in against the sides really to strengthen both of these walls so do you think the original shape would have been like a gentle slope and then a flat top yes i think it is i think it definitely got a real definite shape to it what about the buried soil well we're just beginning to get a point where i think we've got it at the top is this sort of browny gray stuff but the important bit is this very black stuff now that black stuff is the buried soil but the important thing is that he's underneath this stone here okay we've got something that looks like a wall but how do we know it's prehistoric why couldn't it be from any period well it's the formality of that facing which is very very striking it's been deliberately placed there and i think place there to be seen from either side and this is exactly what you get around the huge neolithic burial mounds the chambered tombs of orkney and ireland and all over the place and that is very much a neolithic feature or even an earlier bronze age feature i'm actually quite excited about it because i think that's as diagnostic as anything else today absolutely it would have been a heck of a lot of work oh yeah well the whole point of these huge monuments is to bring families and people together from a from a large area of countryside so the big monument represents a whole series of of gatherings of the tribes it's job creation is keeping the unemployment to think that people were designing and building structures like this up to six thousand years ago is mind-boggling the next big question of course is what was the neolithic thinking behind such a huge monument meanwhile down the hill working our house circle trenches is painfully slow we're almost halfway through our three-day dig and we're still waiting for dating evidence francis has no doubt these house circles are bronze age but bridges just discovered something that could upset all our expectations i was looking in the top over the other side of the trench and i've come across this this bit of green glass and this piece of um vessel ribbon oh right it looks a bit suspicious to me for the prehistoric or post-medieval periods um well this is going to throw a cat in among the pigeons because this is roman glass it's the rim and then shoulder with a little piece of wild white trail slip along the bottom oh i see it is a little bit lighter just there that's where it's very rare for cornwall and i'd say it's about second or third century a.d which is a great surprise i got to admit i hadn't expected to find roman glass out here in the middle of bobman moore the first really juicy find from these house circles and it's definitely not bronze age but it does suggest that roman tourists or pilgrims might have come up here to visit these ancient ruins anything from a thousand to three thousand years after the buildings went out of use you'll have to see turf by hand raksha's now opening our third trench in the house circles go for it this is the first structure we've dug that hasn't been excavated before and we've got great hopes for the finds here up on the bank cairn phil's ready to give up his buried soil for environmental examination get your fingers crossed there we go that's a good one is it that's not bad yes we've got the uh transition from this this lower the orange natural material into the slightly more organic and this is the material we're hoping there'll be some preservation of pollen in here it's so incredible that all that potential information is just in that little block that's archaeology now archaeology is big walls and fines and layers ben's been taking samples like this from all over bodmin moore for several years by analyzing the pollen grains in the soil he's been able to paint a vivid picture of what this landscape looked like right through prehistory even from before the time the cairn was built this is a grain of oat pollen from what has previously been carried out at this site from a peak deposit just just next to the archaeology and what's happened is the peat layers build up over thousands of years this sample's about 4000 bc peat layers build up and we can extract samples from that peat deposit and we basically will count the pollen grains in those in that sediment and that will basically give us a picture of the way the environment has changed through time and what we find for the prehistoric layers is as you can see the grain of oak pollen there if i just scan across the slide you can see there's quite a few there's another one there there's this other grain such as hazel in there as well so basically we're getting lots of grains of oat pollen hazel pollen that's suggesting that we actually have quite a dense oak hazel woodland but just because you've got pollen in the sediments here that doesn't necessarily mean that there were oak trees here does it the pollen could have flown in from somewhere else and what we find is that we actually tally up number of grains on the slide and obviously the higher percentages of tree pollen you know the more confidence we can have in describing a forest environment to this habitat basically and from the work that you've done how would you describe what the habitat was like here for that sample of around about 4000 bc uh we started to reconstruct each of the periods and this is this the 4000 bc one um what you're seeing is really quite dense woodland running right up to effectively the tops of the tours um only really restricted by the stone where there's no soil for the trees to grow effectively so you just have a very dense oak hazel woodland possibly a bit of older in the river valleys as well but it's completely different how it is now and certainly more sheltered [Music] from this work on bodmin moore ben and henry have been able to track how man has changed this landscape ten thousand years ago in mesolithic times hunter-gatherers would have roamed through forests here searching for food and shelter three thousand years later at the dawn of the neolithic period they began to choose places to settle and cleared this landscape to graze their animals a few thousand years later still in the bronze age they began to farm on a big scale clearing even more of the woodland so when did people start chopping the trees down about 4000 bc at the beginning of the neolithic how did they do it stone access it must have taken forever well yes that's how we used to think but we do now know that throughout the mesolithic people were managing the edges of woodland using fire i mean every so often the fire would get out of control and burn down a great swathe of land so they did both i think why did they start clearing the land well the original purpose was probably to clear land for farming but there are only a few hundred or almost a few thousand people around here then surely they wouldn't needed to use all this for fields well i think there was more to it than that tony and the dreaded word is ritual hey look come this way i'll show you what i mean now look out there tony it's a different world you can see the skyline you can see the the bank can pointing at the skyline i mean if you were a neolithic person that would have been the realm of the ancestors that would have been a special and probably rather terrifying place up there francis and stuart are suggesting that the early farmers cleared avenues through the trees so they could have a constant view of the tour although i'm puzzled why they didn't just clear the whole lot you need to encourage the animals you need to hunt the animals to feed and they need they need things like this to feed on you'd have to leave stands of trees for the animals you'd also want to encourage this spirituality thing as well by leaving gaps in the trees to enhance how you view these monuments and so on so you've got to view it as being a mixture so whatever this ritual was it was a balance between woodland and moorland absolutely left towards me another squall's coming our way and we're having to protect the work we've done so far in some ways it's been a very frustrating day we found nothing archaeological to tell us when people were living in these house circles or if they ever did live in them but it's a different story in phil's trench we're beginning to establish that this was a carefully designed and built piece of architecture and i can't help but think that all that effort and construction has got something to do with the powerful presence of roe tour [Music] we're losing the light now and the mists coming in you can hardly see rotor anymore and all day we've been beavering away at this stone circle although frankly to very little avail until in the last few minutes ian discovered this it's a hearth in other words people were living here this isn't just an animal pen or a cairn it's part of a settlement but when were people here and what were they doing hopefully we'll find out tomorrow it's the beginning of day three on bodmin moor in cornwall and it's been tipping down all night but at least this morning's looking good well maybe not in the trenches [Music] somewhere under here we're fishing for some clues to help us understand a potential group of bronze age houses we're also trying to work out what the purpose of this massive stone bank is a structure that supposedly predates the houses by at least 2 000 years the real key to unraveling this whole site is to get dates is there any chance that we'll be able to find out before the end of the day well i hope so tony was under that murky dark water that ian's sponging off there there is a half and that half has got charcoal in it and that charcoal will give us a radiocarbon date that will fix the period when this house was in use but science can be fallible and none of our radiocarbon samples subsequently proved to be conclusive so actually the best method for dating these houses will be good old-fashioned archaeology piece of pottery would be nice over at phil's trench the neolithic bank can is proving to be a far more complex structure than we could ever have expected so rather than going for a second trench phils decided to concentrate all his efforts on deciphering this cross section of the monument in world war ii the army drove tanks straight through this bank and although this desecration hacks fell off there's a big plus yeah it's a veritable arsenal look they've been used that one's got a completely dented end yeah but then of course we found this this morning not this barbed wire lashing amongst the stones and that's a consistent thing it's all in amongst it these world war ii finds confirmed that some of the loose stones on the sides weren't part of the original neolithic structure and must have been redeposited when the tanks breached the can that one's a really interesting one actually in the lab we're adding to our picture of the landscape as it looked when it was first farmed they're dung beetles where'd you get them we got them from the section where we're doing the processing in the stream and what do they tell us um they actually tell us about the environment they're telling us that there were animals grazing in the area when the deposit was formed how can you work that out because there was lots of dung and that's what they were interested in okay this tells us there was animal dung here but can you work out which animals the dung came from you can sometimes yes um they tend to be associated with the large herbivores such as cows um sheep goat and pigs and horses and things like that so yeah they can be quite useful is it true you sometimes dream about beetles it is tony yes what kind of dreams um i had a nightmare about one last one last night this is a big one it was a very big one emma's dung beetles confirmed that livestock such as cows and sheep have been grazing these uplands for at least 5 000 years and we may also be getting closer to knowing when early farmers occupied these houses we're still digging all three stone circles last night we discovered a hearth in trench one and ian's digging through that very carefully and is coming up with material that the people who lived here might have thrown in the fire there you go it's a broken piece of flint very nice in trench two bridge is struggling with her first find of the day but it's not delicate archaeology she's dealing with oh cool the frogs fight in trench three rapture's nearly ready to lift some of the stones this is the one house circle that hasn't been dug before and underneath we should have intact bronze age archaeology we've also found a scatter of stones in all three of our house circles and francis is sure it's not a coincidence this is a house i mean little doubt about that because there's a half there but you look in front of you here there's a large heap of rocks and that heap of rocks looks for all the world like a can and cairns are normally burial mans it's a bit strange turning your house into a burial isn't it and it is possible of course that there is a burial here a dead person beneath that cairn but it's also possible that it's a cairn to the house to the life in the house what do you mean by that well it's very difficult to leave a home isn't it especially if you've enjoyed living in that home if you've enjoyed being on right or you're leaving it forever you turn the house into a can turn it into a monument it is a lovely idea that isn't there is there any way we can test it if we carefully unpick this can we can see whether it it comes after the house or late phase of the house it could be that they make the house a monument but they may also be burying artifacts of life the artifacts they use like pot and other things in the house could be found underneath the can decommissioned in the same way that would be good it's just after lunch on our final day and at last something's come up in trench three that could focus this whole dig it's a small shirt of pottery and this could be the first piece of evidence that puts our house circle firmly into the bronze age carl i'm so so excited about this because this is the first piece of pottery we've had in this trench well i think you're very right to be excited this is bronze age pottery it's what we call travisco wear here in cornwall it's dates from the middle bronze age so yes this is a very exciting piece and i've just noticed on the interior if you look carefully you can see the black area that's actually internal residue and that's the last meal that was cooked in this pot so we're we're thinking it's about 15. it's around about 1500 bc it's odd that something that looks so insignificant can tell us so much this piece of cornish travisco ware confirms this was a bronze age home and what's more we know they were cooking here three and a half thousand years ago back in the farmhouse ben and emma are beginning to run tests on some floor surfaces from the house in trench one and material from phil's can organic matter such as discarded food or animal dung rots down and leaves phosphates animal dung was commonly used as fuel in bronze age houses and by running these tests it could give us an indication of the level of human activity oh look you can see it going already over here which is always good you can just see here you see this blue halo we've got developing there now the faster the sample goes blue is also meant to be a sign of high levels of phosphate so if we keep an eye on which samples are going quickly it's quite interesting that's because of the half ah now there you go because well obviously sat around the fire just waste rubbish being dropped onto the ground and that's that's persist in the soil over the millennia basically emma what are your initial impressions um basically we've got the half sample that's gone very blue very quickly lots of phosphate lots of activity all the way through the center of the house we've got you know again evidence of phosphate and even outside of the door and that's really gone quite blue and that went quite fast yeah ben again we've got evidence of phosphate on the lower line there are three that have hardly any phosphate at all and one with just a tinge where were they from phil's trench from the bank cam um as you can see we're not really getting much evidence for phosphate high phosphate levels in those at all so a clear distinction between the different trenches in terms of the concentration of phosphates in the soils this is the sort of science i can really identify with these organic remains have been locked in the soil for thousands of years the phosphates also tell us there was little human or animal activity near the cairn it was possibly a place kept sacred to the memory of the ancestors [Music] back on the moor real archaeology is catching up with the science bronze age pottery seems to be coming up everywhere in trench one matt's found some more near the hearth for two and a half thousand year old pot this is really special it's called decoration on it hasn't it yeah whether the cord's been pressed into it yes it's travisca wear it's exactly like what carl was showing me earlier on sometime in the bronze age isn't it francis yes it is it's in the middle bronze age to be precise um between roughly 1500 bc and a thousand bc right and this is another piece also of travis aware but i think slightly classier that one with the chord impressed uh chevrons zigzags absolutely and that came from raksha's trench along with another little bit in here now the importance of that of course is that all of this pottery is identical and that means that the three houses that we've dug out of all of these houses are all contemporary and that means i would guess a penny to acquit but all of the houses are part of a village so we have ourselves a middle bronze age village that is absolutely fantastic this is the first time that anyone's been able to confirm that this is a bronze age village which is a great achievement and our environmental team can add to the story there's no evidence in the pollen analysis that our bronze age farmers grew any crops up here it seems they carried on clearing the trees for fuel and over the centuries the soil became too acidic to support anything else it would seem that unwittingly generation after generation of bronze age people were responsible for changing the face of bodmin moore forever braxton's team were the first to find that much needed dating evidence and with just an hour to go they've uncovered something else that could take the history of this settlement back much further if i just put those two pieces together there i think the brilliant thing about this is that is an old break you can see the dirt in there so they've used it it's broken and they've just thrown it back in there and you're actually at the bottom now aren't you i am yeah that that's fantastic that's like the best dating evidence that we could have our fines people are very excited by this manky bitter flint technically it's a bit of rubbish a by-product from making a prehistoric blade or scraper they believe it could be early neolithic about 6000 years old and this tells us that this settlement actually goes back to the time the earliest settlers were building the cairn it's one of the most enigmatic structures we've ever investigated on time team and phil's the first archaeologist to have been allowed to excavate it fully i don't think television can give you a sense of the magic of this monument it's so big in the landscape there's so much work involved in it and it points so dramatically at the tour so what do we do guys we dig a sucking great hole in the middle of it why did we do that francis well i think it's essential tony that we actually get down to the buried land surface the old topsoil under the monument right at the center why what's so important about that well you know throughout this whole project we've been thinking and talking about the buried soils what that does is represents the the environment that was there when they began the monument it's the first part of the story and the first part of the story of this part of the site is that they took the turf off and that's crucially important because we know from other sites in britain that the the actual alignment of of the bank or or the barrow was actually cleared of soil first it's a sort of religious ritual purification of the ground before you put bodies in it once they actually prepared the ground what they would have done was to make these two parallel walls and what they did was they got these shocking great stones and and put them in end ways on and as they did that they filled up the gap in the middle with all this rubble and gradually built the whole thing up i rather suspect that it was probably just about as high as you see it now and then on the outside of it they stood these they lent these big slabs of granite against the walls which would have given these from a from a distance it would have given this a great impression of gleaming white boulders of granite that would have stood out for miles and then on either side they paved off the areas as well and might they've used those turfs that they'd taken off and put them on top absolutely and that would make it even more spectacular because you'd have the white granite and then you'd have the green turf and that would provide a smooth walkway along the top of this thing it's a sort of processional way it would have been unbelievably spectacular i must say phil often you show me prehistoric finds and your eyes are full of crazed excitement and i'm thinking it's actually a bit boring but this has got to be one of the best pieces of archaeology that we've ever done on time team isn't it it's certainly one of the best i've done in our donkey's years this feature shows us just how sophisticated the ancient people were in their relationship with the landscape they'd have thought of the tour as we now think of a cathedral on mosque and on solstices and other significant feast days they'd have left their homes to process towards the rising sun to commune with their ancestors and the spirit of rotor is as potent now as it was then continuing to draw pilgrims here for thousands of years from the roman times up to the present day we're finishing this dig as we started it in the blustery rain looking at this huge magnificent monument a boulder can a boundary can there isn't even a proper name for it but what is certain is that it meant a great deal to the people who constructed it and it was part of a much wider landscape which hopefully will mean as much to the people who look after it in the future as it did to those who built it 6 000 years ago [Music] you

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 95,847

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, time team, tony robinson, bronze age, ancient britain, bronze age britain, time team dig, archaeological dig, bronze age documentary, british history, prehistory, prehistoric documentary

Id: RH-OD_eKslo

Length: 47min 24sec (2844 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021