The Buried Secrets Under A Pig Field | Time Team | Timeline

one of the great privileges of working at history here and making films together with our team at timeline is the access we get to extraordinary historical locations like this one stonehenge i'm right in the middle of the stone circle now it is an absolutely extraordinary place to visit if you want to watch the documentary like the one we're producing here go to history hit tv it's like netflix for history and if you use the code timeline when you check out you'll get a special introductory offer see you there welcome to dorset and the windswept landscape of cranborne chase an area that archaeologists have been drooling over for years because it's jam-packed full of archaeology take this field for instance recently two different sets of burials have been discovered here and the local farmer wants to know whether they could have anything to do with something that he's discovered just close to his house strictly speaking it was some pigs who made the discovery they were rooting around in this area over here when they unearthed a mosaic floor and lots of bits of wall and roman tile like this apparently they're part of a large roman building but it's the wrong shape for a villa so what on earth could it be and are the burials up there the people who lived here the farmer is desperate to find out and i've promised him personally that over the next three days time team won't let him down [Music] with two sides to investigate we've started geoff is here near the farmhouse where we hope they'll be able to reveal the extent of the roman building while they press on with that the rest of us are going to focus on the burials discovered in this field on top of the ridge it's a heck of a way from those roman finds up to the graves isn't it yeah i mean they're almost on the other side of the hill aren't they i've promised the farmer we'd try and find some link do you think there is one well i think there could be yeah because i mean the villa would have had its own estate its own land and those burials could be on the land so they could it could easily be connected the burials were discovered during the last few days of a dig by bournemouth university only they didn't have time to find out much about them crucially our first task here is to find bournemouth's survey points so that we can relocate the burials in this field i mean what sort of marker is it it's a long aluminium spike probably about that deep so it's a proper survey pod yeah big head on it yellow marker on top of it found the one in that corner so we know what they look like and it should be in this area right i'm a bit concerned it might have been plowed out though that's the plow edge of course i never doubted that we'd find them for a second and now that we have we should be able to use the gps system to position our trench just next to theirs it also means that we can relocate bournemouth geoff's plot accurately in the field too the actual burials don't show on this survey but as you can see this plot is showing lots of other archaeology that could be relevant we're at the top end of this field he'll look looking looking down and you see it's covered in features typical of cranbourne chase you know it seems to have archaeology of all sorts of different periods in it what do you think that is i think this this is a ring ditch which probably means it's a plowed out bronze age barrow sometimes there are bronze age burials in but often later burials around the edge as well presumably these are field boundaries yeah i think we've got some sort of linear sort of land divisions running across here but as you say these smaller areas look as if they're iron age or a minor british fields where's our burials well we've got two areas one area up in a ditch here and then a bigger group down in the middle here that's where our trench is going in because although we've got burials here we don't know what date they are is this our lads here down in the middle there yeah so one of the first things we've got to do is try and find out what date those burials are so as trench one gets underway over the burials near the farmhouse our historian guy de la finding out more about the roman building it's the pigs that discovered this pigs yeah the pigs when the pigs were right in the hole of this field traveling away trailing away no they used to come back with their little mosaic cubes in their mouths and drop them into the water throws and i thought it's time to investigate a bit further so you have had an excavation we've had a little excavation just over the far side there where we discovered the mosaic floors but what other evidence of building material have you had there's lots of flint's roman roof tiles just scattered on the surface and when you actually cultivate over the ground you can actually fill the track going over other buildings so so how far do you think the building spreads you can definitely see a platform yep i can see the right so if you've got scattered traces of its stretching yes so so it's much bigger than that i think so up on the ridge with the full team at work it hasn't taken long to whip off the turf but somehow we seem to have opened up our trench on top of where bournemouth were digging is this your fault henry everybody's everybody's pointing the finger at me basically i've mapped out the position their original trench bombers original trench and i've only just found out they had an extension but they didn't tell you about nobody told me about it no i'm innocent so all of this area here is already done no no only small parts of it come and have a look at it some of this stuff is absolutely pristine archaeology you see there's a there's a ditch running through there you can see there's the natural chalk there the white stuff there and then this is the actual edge of the ditch running along there yeah and then it comes along and it turns and it comes down this way here there's a bone here that's right there's an animal bone actually in the top of the ditch yeah we've had loads of pottery there already now here we think we might actually have a grave a green is this a new grave this is a brand spanking new grave never been dug only this bit of our trench overlaps with bournemouth's excavation they dug this grave but didn't get any dating evidence the skeleton would have been taken away for analysis and we've quickly re-excavated it to confirm it's empty that looks like a good solid chalk bottom down there ian yeah this is the bottom of the grave and no bones in it so it definitely been excavated before oh yeah so we've got two more graves here that have never been once yeah why aren't they clear absolutely in the chalk you know you can see the edges clearly even i can see that there are grays the contrast of the white chalk and the brown fill this is a heck of a lot of graves isn't it isn't that going to be a problem well we're not going to dig them all we just need to know where they are phil reckons we might have a good chance of dating these burials because we've uncovered this grave which has been put in over a ditch where it's related to a ditch we we want to know whether it's earlier than the ditch or later than the ditch that's a crucial piece of evidence and then when we take the ditch we'll know much more about the date of the grave that's exactly it to find out how big this burial area is we're opening a trench on either side of trench one tony to john go ahead tony come from here it looks like you're raising something are you no we're hard at it tony how long [Music] the trouble with sites like this when you're at one end you've no idea what's happening at the other thanks john no problem geophys has been tried here before but conditions at the time resulted in these fairly fuzzy results a few trenches have also been dug by the local archaeology group and they've got mosaic floors here you can see all that laid out there there's those walls have turned up all up the edge here yeah and then sort of on those walls there's obviously been painted wall plaster when they were stabbed it seems an enormous leap to me but they've come up with this interpretation of the building and they reckon it's too big for a roman villa i don't get along with that at all they're really talking about this whole area here but the building they've outlined at this point is not really any bigger than the existing modern farmhouse on the site there are lots of roman villas that are far bigger than that so it could be a villa but guy also has another idea but this house does sit on the edge of a large area involving cranborne chase and salisbury plain which has traditionally been associated with having no roman villas in it and so some people have said perhaps this is an imperial estate farm for the empress benefit owned by him so i mean one possibility i guess is that this place could be the administrative center a building that has a very large set of facilities for the procurator the government official who would have helped around the area but that's total guesswork well the guy you know as well as i do that actually in this area north of here the reveal is popping up all the time to the west there are far far fewer than over to the west well it's got our experts thinking and arguing but does the roman building have anything to do with the burials up on the ridge do they even date to the same period thankfully we've got an expert on burials with us today who might be able to tell us i haven't seen this yet cool it's a roman flanged dish flanged meaning just that that that's just a sticky outfit exactly well we think these are just like salad bowls table worth that kind of thing do you get grave goods in the roman grove you do often not very many but i mean we could find nothing at all so just to find this is quite something um do you want to come and have a look in here you're joking no i'm gonna think a little dimpled oh yeah yeah a little neat very good result well and it's complete as well but it's sweet explain what it is a funny little dinky mike it's a late roman beaker i've seen this kind of thing before they're from third or fourth century and they're little miniature drinking cups now presumably we wouldn't say that this accidentally fell in there no this is not residual this is going to have been made not long before the moment of burial most likely so here we have a grave with something that dates it what a result technically speaking this dinky dimpled thing is a new forest where beaker and it means this burials roman dating to the late third to fourth century a.d oh that's good in it that's just what we want isn't it we know they're in a box because we've got all these nails there's a coffin this is gonna be something fairly special they've gone to a bit of trouble yeah and maybe that beaker's put on top of the coffin and fallen off it maybe it's put by the side of it you like things like that don't you you like little finds like that you bet you've been pleased about that i don't think it's just me i think there's a lot of other people who love that little fans like that it's quite possible i'm dreaming all this because we seem to be discovering exactly what we're looking for we've got another discovery over here in trench two there are no graves showing but what we've revealed is further evidence of the ditch found in trench one that runs underneath this burial [Music] it appears to be full of what looks like iron age pottery that will help to establish the date for the ditch yeah now let's have a look at the other side yeah there's one look in fact there's two there are their parents they're painting little pairs so it's deliberate isn't it yes two fingers pinched and thumb and finger pinched like that we'll have to wait for the final word on this when our expert on iron age pottery arrives tomorrow it's a very noble pot that isn't it yeah glorious meanwhile i'm feeling a bit nervous because i'm being allowed to excavate what is at the moment one of the most complete finds ever discovered on time team you ever found one of these before no never am i being too tentative no no you're fine yeah that stone's embedded in there so you can go further underneath this area here and are you sure yeah it's fun it's the stones that are unnerving isn't it because you don't yank them up in case they're actually underneath that's right david i believe you've got a roman coin for me yes it's not a terrifically good coin but genuine roman right uh it's late third century see the little radio crown around the top there yeah that's right this late third century coin fits with the date of the roman beaker i'm excavating and it seems the material coming from the other graves is all roman too it's very hard to say with with large nails but those could be out of the coffins for example the graves are in yes these little ones are really interesting those are the hob nails romans are often buried with their shoes on because they have to wear boots to make their journey across into the underworld and they're very common grave good fine so that's really good oh good i've excavated quite a lot over the years under supervision but uh a whole beautiful little ceramic pot has been out of my league but i suppose something this shape is likely to be quite robust isn't it that's it if you carry on like that it moved it moved that's okay if you carry on like that you'll probably find that if you define the other end yeah you might find it just you feel it now just literally hold it and just very gently [Laughter] if it's giving you any pressure then don't no it's not it's not come on darling there we go oh isn't that fantastic yeah oh thank you for that we're doing that that's all right you've made my day all day we've been concentrating on digging the graves on the far side of that ridge and no wonder because they're really exciting but the job is to see if we can link them to the roman building down here and it's 20 past four day one and we haven't even started yet any chance john well we're getting there but slowly it's not good conditions for resistance it's been too dry the spread of building rubble's making the results slightly blurry although they do seem to match the suggested outline of the building to start with john reckons we should put a trench in here well certainly that looks like the darkest area of your resistance isn't it so perhaps there's more rubble and stuff there so yeah let's start with that with the archaeology close enough to the surface for pigs to unearth our trenches here to begin with will be hand dug straight away there are a few bits of tesserai or roman mosaic floor coming up i know that more than anything else the farmer simon is keen to find out more about his roman building and hear what our experts make of it pretty good day one yeah i think we've begun to sort this out this bit here in what way well we don't seem to have any burials in that trench over on the far side there we've only got one possible one in the end here it doesn't seem to go much up the slope so if anything it's only coming this way so we've almost defined the extent of it on the side of the hill here and what about our mysterious roman building yeah i still wonder about that i mean the favorite option seems to be a villa but i'll keep thinking of other things i shouldn't mention it but i have wondered about a temple you've just mentioned it oh yes what about this fine yeah this is lovely isn't it this little um new forest beaker but it's got something in it near that rattling yeah i can hear it so i don't think we just unpicked the soil and wash this i think we we get somebody you can serve it to have a look at it just in case there's something in there that's of interest so end of day one we've got lots of graves here we've got that fantastic enigmatic building over the ridge and we've got this and if we find something like this on the first day who knows what we might get on the other two days join us after the break welcome back to cranborne chase down there we've got at least three roman skeletons way over there we've got what seems to be a large roman building but do the things link up what we do know is that we've come up with some really beautiful finds already so beginning of day two and i'm really looking forward to what today could bring yesterday to my amazement we quickly managed to establish that these burials are roman and date to around the late 3rd to 4th centuries a.d and we'll find out more about them over the next two days but the archaeologists also want to know how the burials relate to some of the other archaeology showing in this geo fizz plot to start with phil wants an expert's opinion on the decorated pottery discovered yesterday can you give a state for that polaroid yeah oh that's nice isn't it well that's what we thought yeah it's first century bc it is it's very late iron age it's classic for this part of the world was part of wessex cranbourne chase well that's excellent yeah because that does confirm what we were thinking that this is this ditch is so much earlier than our than our burials yeah it means that we now know this ditch is late iron age and that the roman burial we've discovered here must have been put in after the ditch had long gone out of use spurred on by our early success phil's now widening trench too to investigate yet more archaeology now what have you done should we got a feature in here yeah the thing is it only sticks that much yeah into the trenches so i want to know where the other side is but you see look it's actually quite substantial i know this is good film that's right all this brown material is the actual feature and then you've got this distinctive chalk line yeah that comes along there i also wonder whether it might not it might not be a building platform that's another possibility isn't it yeah over near the farmhouse we know we're excavating a roman building we're just not sure what it is exactly or if it existed at the time of our fourth century burials although it's early days in terms of digging guy has been looking for clues to the date of the building by examining the farmers collection of fines simon i've been looking at all these fines that you've got now did they all come from around the villa or a bit further afield they come from all through the bottom of the field right so all over yeah all over there's an interesting story that's emerged from it because um the romans arrived in this area around the year 43 now i think we're quite close to an invasion period for hodd hill aren't we that's not far away far away right now these broaches belong to around that period around the middle of the first century but then although the broaches indicate some roman activity here just after the invasion there's not enough to suggest people were living here in fact the coin collection only starts some 200 years later then the coinage picks up in the late 200s getting on for the end of the third century and there's a very respectable run right the way through into the fourth century up to this coin which didn't circulate after around the year 353 so you reckon our roman building was in use perhaps for 75 years and went out of use pretty prominently around about the year 350 a.d well that's about it and i can say that because this coin is actually of a rebel emperor and all his money was demonetized after he was put down so this coinage didn't really circulate after that date normally the villas trail off during the second half of the fourth century and i would still have expected some coins in the 370s maybe just up into the 380s but there's none of that at all so the fines suggest that this building if it was a villa was abandoned unusually early around 350 a.d but significantly it also means that the building was standing at the time of our burials and they could be connected there were lots of villas springing up in the more prosperous third and fourth centuries and it would make perfect sense to find one just here on cranborne chase our building is at the head of two streams giving it a good water supply and it's close to main roman roads for easy transport this is really good arable land an attractive place to live and farm for thousands of years and as if to prove the point there's news from trench three as well as showing there are no more roman graves here it's turned up evidence of much earlier activity in this field pottery and some flesh i like that oh wow that's a big old scraper flint tools were still in use during the bronze age and phil reckons this could date to the same time as the bit of pot found with it this is somewhere around 700 bc end of the bronze age beginning of the iron age but it came out of this post hole here and we've got two of them there's the other one we may possibly have a building much much older than everything else because this presumably could be an entrance to a bit it could be it's getting complicated but this means we now have a bronze age building dating to 700 bc and we've got an iron age ditch part of a field system around 100 bc and of course our roman burials dug sometime around 300 a.d good stuff but i was hoping that as we made progress with our burials we'd be able to send some of the team to help with the roman building unfortunately the archaeologists clearly have got other ideas there's also this ring ditch up here that we've been looking at which is clearly a very important component in the way this landscape is developed but it's thousands of years different well i mean you know it's probably a bronze age monument but these monuments can continue to act as a kind of focus for activity long after their original construction date i mean in wessex you even find deposits of roman metal work and stuff like that in these ring ditches no the one thing that you're not saying is that this geophys has been produced copyright bournemouth university and i know and you know that bournemouth university would like us to have a look at that no i mean when we come and look at a chunk of landscape like that with the geophysics done you know our job is to evaluate it to find out what this stuff is what date it is what condition it's in and you know you've got to drop trenches in to test that out precisely and and let's bear in mind that bournemouth university and us we're all working for the same end trying to understand the landscape and it's a key component of this prehistoric landscape it's understanding that they had history too well the romans had history history and of course this sort of thing would have been really important to them yeah well is it me or do you sense they're ganging up on me apparently our roman burials may have been sighted on this ridge because there was already a bronze age burial mound here we're now opening up a trench across the ring ditch to check its date and see if it was reused for later burials mick meanwhile hasn't completely forgotten about our roman building how are you getting on them bridgette and despite a tiny trench we are making progress although bridget still has a jumble of walls to make sense of she's got a theory about them if we are actually below the a tessa red floor um this could be a heating channel it's just speculation at the moment then that would actually come up around here and then go off this way and go off along this way here what makes you think this might be all underneath the tessellated floor well it's crazy look at the amount of tessera we've got oh right it's everywhere and we've got loads of wool plaster as well some of it decorated all of it red and white and all of that has been found in this tiny little area here right so you know if you have removed a floor gone through it then it's all just gone fallen into whatever feature this is potentially the heating channel have you got a dog's dinner this end as well no no no we have the cordon bleu piece de resistance here i think it looks like carrenza's found the remains of a roman plunge pool corner of wall in this end of the trench which hasn't shown up at all on the geophysics that started to go down here so we extended the trench back and you can see what we've got here is a feature that's going right into the ground there's the plaster the pink painted plaster still in situ on the edge of the wall there you can see it's curving around there just turning to come around there here it's curving up here and i think that might be the bench they sit on well there's obviously quite a lot of work to do there isn't it to sort that out it means the building we're digging is a bath house one of the necessary luxuries of a posh roman villa what we need here is more diggers but there's no chance of that at the moment because up on the ridge phil's extending trench one to find the sudden extent of the burials [Music] so we haven't got the end of the cemetery yet so it's what 30 meters given that we're also putting a trench across the bronze age ring ditch which means we may reveal burials from other periods mike our expert on death in dorset has arranged to show me how much burial practices have changed over the centuries so this is going to be a timeline of burials is it that's what we're going to do we'll start you off 4 000 years ago 2000 bc southern dorset here we are and bill here hi belle is dead don't try this at home what you're about to see is a bronze age beaker burial and uh he's going to be in a crouched position at the bottom of this pit men go on their right side women on their left side and his body is going to be really tightly crouched they're beaker burials because they have a particular type of pot a beaker yeah pretty little thing decorated sometimes they have a bronze or even copper dagger in with them there may be a few other bits and pieces do we know why they would have adopted that kind of position as you can see it looks like he's asleep yeah that's one possibility it's that sense of sleeping into death it could also be that they're seeing these almost like little babies again that they're going back into into a kind of greater womb we're not really sure this kind of bronze age burial was covered by a huge mound of soil and had a ditch dug around it it's likely that the ring ditch in our field is the remains of a burial mound like this and that the pile of earth has been plowed away over four thousand years well we won't kill bill now we'll leave him uncovered that's the early bronze age right that's it if you come over here we'll look at the middle bronze age which is what sort of period 1500 bc 500 years after that and people have been cremated and the ashes are placed into a large pot and there are no grave goods at all now you might think this was real cheap funeral stuff yeah but they're using about a ton of wood to actually burn the body on a pyre they're burying them not very far from where they live sometimes they're reusing the barrows these earlier ones went into sometimes it's just like a little family plot behind the settlement apparently ditches around burial mounds like this one we're digging were reused for burials in many different periods and i can see now the only way we'll ever really understand why is to investigate them now he's lying there facing east he's crouched again this is based on an iron age burial around 500 bc burials face east most houses face east or south east even the entrances to their enclosures face east so it's the key kind of direction he might have a pot put in let's say behind his feet a sword not at his belt but actually behind his back and i've got two disgustingly greasy pieces of pig we've got a bit of jaw and a front leg and these go on his stomach is it there to keep him stocked up on his way to the afterlife is it that he's the missing person from the party so he has his final and last meal i don't know but when the archaeologist finds him you don't see any of that no the pot the sword the pig bones the brooch and the skeleton and the skeleton yes but people were also cremated in the iron age their ashes were buried with a collection of pots a chunk of classic feasting meat like pig and sometimes perhaps a personal object like a broach however the fact is that relatively few iron age burials of either type have been found and it's one of the biggest mysteries in archaeology could they just have been hung up for the birds to take very likely a number of them were because we actually have settlements with these small bones scattered about it never ceases to amaze me how much can be learnt by excavating skeletons but it takes time tomorrow we should learn a lot more about the three roman people buried here it was from this burial yesterday that i skillfully excavated this complete new forest where beaker and now the moments come when we can find out what was inside it is there anything inside it or was that rattle just earth moving it's just all fallen away right now and i'm about to tip this up yeah and let's have a look oh a lot of earth i think we might be completely look at that it's empty absolutely stony empty yeah that's a shame so far everyone's been carried away by the wealth of archaeology up on this ridge but as we approach the end of day two i'm determined that we should do our best to find out more about the building we now all agree is likely to be a roman villa mick there is marginally more activity going on here than there was yesterday but basically it is one and a half trenches and five diggers cheeky devil there's a lot of activity going on down here is there enough for us to be able to have sorted out by this time tomorrow what's going on no no we've got a lot to do we've got a lot more work to do but you know we've got we've got more people going to be released because we've pretty well finished up on the hill we can bring a lot of people down here and we've got a lot of geophysics to guide us he was shaking his head just now yeah because i don't think we're beginning to understand the building yet certainly not the extents it's all a bit fuzzy it's not as clear as we would hope and i think we've got to ignore this plan information and just look at the geophysics it was only speculation that plan anyway wasn't it yes so we've got bournemouth's earlier survey in the chicken field we've got ours shown in red and yellow here and there's several areas we could put in trenches yeah for my money we know that's now a plunge bath we've got to finish that record it and finish that trench but not do anything else in that area we know that's the bath the question is is it attached to the rest of a villa building so where is that but i mean normally we we'd get john to do the geophysics and then we'd we'd target various areas of that and work it out from that i don't see why we shouldn't do that in the remaining day that we've got so we've got just one day left i'm pretty sure that we can sort out what's going on up there and we're going to bring all our resources down that hill to the villa join us after the break beginning of day three and two days ago i rather rationally promised the local farmer that would help him work out whether there was a link between the bodies that were buried over the far side of the hill and the roman building here and the big challenge today is to sort out this building although frankly john it's not actually a hive of activity here is it well i've marked two of the trenches why haven't we started well god well i was frustrated about this as everyone i was here till it got dark yesterday we've got a problem we want to go big to find the extent of the villa but we need to keep it small because there's so much coming out of the trenches so yeah we just need to get a move on and we've still got no diggers i know i know can i borrow you for a moment yeah sure over here we were planning to put a trench in weren't we where the chickens are i don't have to move my chickens do i turn it well i don't know what's the answer to that do you i hope not and can we put a trench in while they're still there will they fall in do they like archaeology well i hope so we'll soon find out so a big push here today with most of the team moving to this end of the site now that we've got a bath house we're almost certain we're dealing with a roman villa but it's a question of how big it is today we're ignoring previous speculation about the layout of the building and going back to basics by targeting strong geophys features across the area we're putting in three more trenches including trench five that phil and the chickens will be digging up on the ridge we've left literally a skeleton crew here to finish off the farmer had been wondering if these burials were connected with his roman building and so far we've established that broadly speaking they're of the same date late third to fourth century a.d today after two days careful excavation we're learning details of the individual burials it's actually an elderly female that we've been able to age and sex her now yeah and this elderly woman wasn't buried alone these are the remains of a small terrier puppy that was put in the coffin beside her i mean there are all sorts of interesting implications to that i don't know whether you know they killed the dog and put it in the burial or you know whether the dog died the same time as all sorts of things could be going on i suspect what's happened it was actually killed to go in with her right now all that might sound quite horrible to us yeah if you have a firm belief in an afterlife take that it's not that bad you know you know you want you just got a new puppy take it with you you want your puppy to come with you we've established that these burials don't extend beyond this area we're only investigating three of them but we estimate that there may have been as many as 20 graves here however the big news for me today is that apparently our experts don't think these are the people who lived in the villa this this cemetery probably goes with the settlement that you can see on the geophysics and that settlement may be like a village for the the workers tied into the estate on that big building which is presumably a villa so they think the burials could be the people who lived and worked here on the villa estate apparently some of them have thought this for a while i know they've been busy but someone could have told me phil you seem to have created a big spoil heap over there have you found any archaeology absolutely but my trench is full of chickens well we've dug two big holes over here and there's very little coming out of these as well so uh much the same story really no but we're going to extend the trench in the opposite direction just to make absolutely certain there's nothing here other than chickens okay keep me posted it's it's like the birds in it oh look oh they're really they're all one's got a worm they're all they're all that is oh they're really after that one it appears that our geophys survey was picking up a change of geology and not more of our roman building it's starting to look simon as if possibly the the range of buildings is actually quite confined into just the area we've been digging and it doesn't look as if it's going over towards your pond and at the moment unless something's a lot deeper underneath this stuff it doesn't look as if it's here either but in trench one what we've got is evidence of a bath house with a plunge pool almost still intact not writing though corinda if you look john's come up with the other corner of the bath that's good isn't it so we now know how wide the plunge pool was and it is just about six feet wide that's right and it's not going to be a lot longer it'd either be a six foot square or perhaps a slightly longer rectangle not very big but quite impressive what's lovely is all the plaster around the edge but what i think is really interesting is the tiles they've obviously all been deliberately lifted and removed i know it's like someone's come along and lifted up the decent tiles presumably to reuse them somewhere else and they haven't gone for the broken ones and they haven't gone for the ones at the edge they've got the rolled plaster on top of them they've just taken the decent ones up on the ridge the latest news is that the building platform that phil found in trench two has turned out to be the remains of a roman period building dating something like a hundred years before the burials it appears that our cemetery was put in alongside an old derelict building a scenario found before in this area and which also had burials dug into an old ditch but why did these people get buried next to a ruined farmstead because they buried them in the ditch if you want to bury a body it's a great deal easier to bury your body in a silted in ditch which is a hell of a lot less work than trying to hack a hole out of a stony field time now to find out about the roman burial in our ditch what can you tell us about this one well apart from the fact that poor things had his head squashed um we've got a young teenager about 13 to 15 years old at the moment whether we'll be able to sex it ultimately or not i don't know it depends about how much we can see but generally at this age it's difficult to sex so we're not really sure matt what's happening around the feed well we've got more and more of these uh hob nails turning up this morning we have a row going across here and now we've got ones coming across here as well so definitely wearing a pair of shoes so mike where are we now on our timeline of dorset death we finally got to the roman period now we've got to remember that he's being dead in the 4th century a.d yeah and up until 200 a.d most people were getting cremated and what we find after that is throughout the empire not just britain but and even beyond the empire to the north into scandinavia inhumation becomes the rule now he's wearing a shroud and he's in a coffin so this is very like the kind of burial that the people over there would have had almost identical now we're not sure about the shroud we have one or two cases where we have the impressions of the linen actually into plaster that's been put over the body in certain cases and the interesting thing is we've just found a shroud pin in the cemetery up until now i don't think anyone's ever detected one of these in these graves it's the first time so fantastic yeah this is the iron shroud pin it was discovered with the third burial i don't think any of the diggers realized its significance although they knew the body had been shrouded because the bones are tight together it's difficult to say much about it as the middle has rotted away and here's a little flask like the one we found that's it now we've put oil in this one it could have had wine it could have had nothing at all and again this goes in by the side of the body we found lots of hob nails in our graves all that gets left yeah are these the hub nails this can be because they were buried wearing their shoes but apparently sometimes the footwear was just placed by their feet it's been suggested that maybe they're seen to walk to the afterlife we know that they're not always their own boots because we have children's burials with adult shoes in and that suggests to me that this is more than just an ordinary item of footwear it has a symbolic significance far greater than the objects themselves we stripped along here and we found absolutely nothing yeah and then when we got over in the chicken trench it looks like we found another roman wall the trouble is it seems to be on its own what's uh what's new kerry in terms of resolving what this means apart from the chicken invasion we've gone back to see if we can find another wall of that height and we can't find anything and we've gone back what another 10 meters or so we think it's part of the villa but could be a boundary wall the puzzle is the find suggests that there's a building very close by oh yeah well that's all right in the bathhouse trench we've got a bit of detective work going on but when you've got the different the blue the white and the red and you've got quite a complex decoration that's a completely different piece of work than this oh look at that we're going into a window in brazil apparently none of them has ever seen anything quite like this before take a look at this mark karen spotted last night it's an eye isn't it it is isn't it yeah absolutely you definitely think that it is that is not accidental is it it's a very classical type of iron it's the same technique used on a statue where you impress to make the the pupil but with time marching on and two of our trenches finding no archaeology at all i want to know what we're going to do next i think what we should do is actually link these two areas beyond the cold plunge into the far trench where you've got the evidence of the hyper cost because that way you can establish the rough dimensions of this bath suite and also have a look at its sort of phasing and construction isn't that the policy of despair but yesterday afternoon we said you said that we already knew that this was a plunge bath so there was no point digging that anymore we ought to go and dig somewhere else plead guilty mallard but we've looked over there there's only a bit of wall as karena says there's no archaeology over here that brings us right back to this we know the phasing here is far more complicated than we thought perhaps this bath house has been built into what was actually a much smaller building than we originally thought so she's right we should be looking over here and understand this building given the time we've got left we've got lots of spare labour to concentrate here given that we haven't found anything in our other trenches the plan is only to strip off the top soil and clean up the surface layer to reveal further walls and features that might help us understand the individual rooms and maybe the status of the villa up on the ridge we're now busy recording the evidence we've found [Music] as it turned out our trench put in over the ring ditch didn't reveal any new burials or dating material so you should be about in the middle of the barrow there but using more advanced gear fizz equipment than bournemouth used for their survey we picked up something they hadn't detected but look oh you've got the healthcare it's been a hectic three days but essentially what we've found is new detail to add to the story of continual occupation of this ridge over thousands of years in just these three trenches we discovered evidence of a bronze age roundhouse an iron age field ditch and an early roman farm building all of which had long gone out of use when this area was used as a cemetery in late roman times by people living close by and probably farming lands that belong to the villa down the hill and down at the villa we're still working hard to keep my promise to find out as much as we can about it it seems we've collected enough clues to picture what the plunge pool might have looked like and guy has a theory about why this villa was abandoned so this is based on the bits of war plaster that we found here we've got fragments of all those colours found in the plunge bath over there and this is what building it no this is taking it apart why would they do that in the roman period well we've never got any specific explanation to help us understand why any one building should be taken apart but funnily enough there is a historical episode that does fit the date you know we think this villa was given up in the late fourth century or just after the middle of the fourth century yeah and that's the time of the emperor magnentius 350-353 he's actually a rebel emperor who rules the western empire much to the annoyance of the emperor constantius ii who's the real one right now magnentius gets defeated and constantius sends over his agent into britain specifically to beat up all the people who'd supported the rebel regime now this chap this imperial agent gets completely out of control so much so that the governor of britain tries to kill him but fails and commits suicide himself on the spot because he's so appalled at how these people having their estates seized all sorts of innocent people so you can imagine how this agent could have taken away this estate from this chap who'd owned this place perhaps a supporter of the rebel empire the house is knocked down and the land is given to somebody who supported the legitimate regime maybe in the next villa up the valley it's a cracking story isn't it even if it doesn't necessarily apply the place but you know it could help us understand it yeah and now after a final bit of cleaning up how much more do we know about this building bridge this is the part of the trench we called the dog's dinner is it still a dog's dinner absolutely not this is the most fantastic archaeology coming up what we've got here is actually the beginning of our roman story this is the early plunge pool it's got painted plastered walls and we've got a city where people would have said if it's a plunge pool why's it got all this brick stuff in it because the family's up and coming they've decided to invest some money and improve their house they've filled in the plunge pool and they've laid over it a centrally heated floor you've got one of the heated channels there just here that's right and over this was the mosaic floor that we found all the parts from you can even see the bedding here this family was upwardly mobile and that's not all they do at this point at the same time as they lay the mosaic and fill in that plunge bath they built a whole new bath range where's the bath range well we were right to extend the trench this way because we've got another two rooms exposed this rubble here is clearly in field so these are quite deep chambers these are heated rooms we've probably got the hot room and the warm room that will go with the cold plunge bath so you've got the sort of triple arrangement of a standard roman bath house so you walked on heated floors into the tepidarium with its warm bath next into the calidarium the hot room full of steam and then finally into the frigidaire the cold room to take a dip here in our cold plunge pool as for the rest of the villa well the fact that these trenches turned up nothing makes us think that the roman building remains are fairly concentrated in this area stewart has spotted that there are earthworks in the field opposite and it's possible that the major part of the villa is across the road as ever victor's been quick to interpret this idea and his sketch shows the bath house on the end of a typical 4th century villa as it often was because of the fire risk as for the people who lived here where were they buried well i'm told somewhere up on the higher ground possibly in a mausoleum but that's for another day i suppose i'd hoped that at the end of the three days we'd be able to turn around to simon and say the people who were buried up on that hill were the people who lived in that villa i think that was probably always going to be a long shot unless you find a grave slab up there saying here lies marcus and down here you find his plate and his spoon saying these belong to marcus to have that sort of link it's not quite like that i think he's telling us we were a bit naive but they could have been workers on the estate absolutely i mean i think it's all interconnected and you know we've shown that sort of bigger picture i think so are you pleased yeah very pleased you've answered lots of questions i think there's lots more questions to be answered there's decades of work just in this field exactly but then that's what crown born chase is like it's full of good archaeology [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 234,999

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, british archaeology, pig field, time team, tony robinsons, british history, romam history, ancient history

Id: ZhUbyMrwLxM

Length: 49min 0sec (2940 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021