The Case Of The Underwater Stonehenge | 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 dartmoor one of the richest and best-mapped prehistoric landscapes in britain but not all of it has been investigated and there's a very good reason for that because for the last 150 years this has been at the bottom of the reservoirs that supply the people of torquay with their drinking water fast forward to the present day and the reservoirs looking pretty empty because the local water company have decided to pull the plug and give us a unique opportunity to explore a lost world this could be some of the best prehistoric archaeology in britain the only problem is now we've got rid of the water how we gonna cope with the mud it really is very difficult [Music] tutterford reservoir is in an out of the way valley on the eastern edge of dartmoor [Music] it's an isolated spot so just getting into the site is a huge logistical feat needing all our manpower the reservoir has been here since 1861 when an incredible 30 million gallons of water were flooded into the lower part of the valley but a couple of years ago when the water levels were low a local out for a walk spotted some mysterious stones sticking out of the mud he called jane marchand from the dartmoor national park authority who became the first to investigate this hidden site why hasn't anyone ever discovered them before well because they've laid under totterford reservoir water since 1861 when the reservoir was created and before that period i don't think people were coming out looking at local archaeology it's a bit early for sort of the explorations on dartmoor which began in about 1880. what would you like us to find oh basically to give some idea of the chronology of these monuments because you we quite often get them together we get circles rows and burial cans so some dates and whether they're all contemporary or whether one was earlier and then decided that decided the later ones so it's what where why in three days in the mud that's it yeah you can do it thank you so much there could be a complete prehistoric site waiting to be discovered beneath all this mud but the prehistoric is a fantastically long period of time and covers everything before the roman conquest of britain nearly 2 000 years ago your perfect site oh it's it's a dream tony you can actually walk across it and stub your toe on the pre-history you know i'm used to having to dig down to get it but here it's at the surface why do you though well dartmoor has been an interest in mine for about 40 years now and it's because of that it's because you know unlike almost anywhere else you can walk through a bronze age landscape but it's mainly because i've got to look after him of course you know i've got to keep an eye on him make sure he does things properly we talk blithely about prehistory but what exactly do we mean on this side late neolithics that's the end of the stone age and bronze age some very roughly from about 3000 to about 1500 bc do you think the sites might all have been from the same period yes i do i think um essentially the same period although there's one enigmatic mound in the middle which has got me scratching my head as well as the mysterious mound in the middle what we've been told we've got from the initial survey is a stone circle two rows of stones in a line which could be some kind of walkway a single row of stones and some other prehistoric stuff dotted throughout the site piles of rocks that might be cairns where people buried their dead if we can prove all of this it'll be an archaeologist's dream well john is this the first time you've done a survey in the bottom of a reservoir yeah although for john it's the stuff of nightmares i mean is it going to be plain sailing we have got problems and that's mainly the granite i don't know how magnetic it's going to be so the fact that the granite has originated from a volcano that volcanic activity may actually affect the magnetics which affect your machine yes and we can confuse that with what might be burning or settlement you know activity um so we'll give it a try but i mean how about the silt itself is that going to be a problem i think what we'll try there is actually radar yes you're actually going to drag that wheeled trolley out across the mud yeah because that would hopefully give us the profile of that old land surface get profiles um of the sort of valley and then build up a 3d picture well i hope you succeed as long as we don't lose jimmy and the silts [Music] so it could all turn into one big mud bath whose idea is this i don't know like jimmy's stuck in the incident room in the drive [Music] but thankfully other parts of the site are better for the magnetometry and radar to see if there's anything else lurking beneath the surface although the first results are far from conclusive the good news is the granite is not as magnetic as we thought it might have been all right i mean having said that we can't see the cairns all the stone alignment can you not see where the stone alignment goes under the bank at the side the reservoir well i mean there's hints of things but i wouldn't really recognize them so really if we're going to do anything here we've got to go with what we can actually see rather than anything you might be able to tell us maybe as we do a bigger landscape yeah you know we can get a better picture because presumably you're not going to let us stop at this stage no [Music] we can't wait for gfs to sort themselves out we've got to get on with the dig so we're starting at the end of the single aligned row of stones phil's put in the first trench over this pile of stones which we're calling the terminal cairn cairns are rock covered burial mounds so we're looking for any evidence of burial to try and get an idea of what the site was used for while matt is opening up trench two on the two cairns immediately south of the big mound you can see the large one right there oh yeah and there's a little one just in front of us here yeah yeah and for the moment we're just cleaning up all this silt just so we can get the full extent of them all and then it's going to be a case of half sectioning them we're going to run a string across from there to there and we're going to uh after we've planned and photographed it we're going to start carefully taking out this side of each cane underneath there could be a burial there could be ritual offerings i mean that's another thing we're really looking forward to yeah well i'll come back when you've got a bit further sherry getting on you know this just doesn't look much like dartmoor does it i mean i imagine dartmoor as this treeless rocky place a kind of blank landscape i think it's quite well represented by this ordnance survey map helen and stuart have begun their investigation into why our site looks so different to the rest of dartmoor and give us a snapshot of what prehistoric life was like here on this side of the map over here where we are this is an intensity of settlement and fields which shows it's being cultivated for a long period of time very different to the dark more landscape that we have up here which is bleak you've got to remember in pre-history you're dealing with a totally different landscape there was more trees there was more activity prehistoric farmers were cultivating land and over a long period of time you get into a kind of cycle of soil deterioration eventually the the settlements and so on aren't valid anymore so it changed over time and so is it that we we see all the pre-history today because there's nothing else that's come later to take them away that's exactly right the conditions weren't attractive for the medieval farmers and intensity of agriculture and settlements so they've effectively been left behind all those stone circles and settlements we can still see them making this very unusual well it is because what we've got here is a stone circle in the bottom of a valley and that makes our prehistoric site unique in dartmoor archaeology we want to make the most of this incredible opportunity so francis isn't wasting any time in opening up the double stone row nearest to the mound 12 o'clock day one you've already put in the third trench bit of a digging frenzy isn't it well not really tony this is an incredibly busy landscape but how do we know that's prehistoric couldn't that come from any period if it was just the individual stone yes perhaps it could be but in this case we've got an arrangement of stones two parallel lines and that is probably speaking only ever finding lit neolithic early bronze age monuments how do you know i can't see anything at all well you can't unfortunately because only one or two have survived above ground what do you think this is all about well you know that big mound yeah well i think it's got a sort of tail coming down in this direction and then heading off over there and i think that would have formed a big dry ridge maybe you know they had ceremonial processions and then as part of marking out this processional way they put a big setting of double stones so it could just be a nice little path but it could be ritual i think it's ritual tennie ritual i've heard that one before but i'll go along with francis's theory for the time being some important clues could be on the mound flint was found here during the initial survey and today it's attracted our flint obsessed anoraks like moths to a flame the only trouble is it could completely rewrite the history of this bronze age site as phil's found something that dates much earlier it's this gorgeous little end scroll but you can see the way it's been retouched so lovingly all the way around there now that is the work of a skilled craftsman somebody really loved his work can you put a date on it they are difficult to today in isolation we really could do with some more of this flint work but my initial instinct is to think this is early and when i say early i think it's earlier than these stone monuments that's really exciting isn't it because that means you've got this early mound here with some sort of activity going on and then later people have built this path up to it absolutely i think that this mound is the focus this is what drew people in originally and then that these stone monuments were drawn in around them look at you clutching yourself i know it's lovely though isn't it yeah you kidding me i know i know but you see i've made so many of these things this takes me back to the real people who who made these things it's turning into quite a good dig isn't it it's the afternoon of day one and we're working on the bottom of what's thankfully an empty reservoir in devon we've already put in three trenches on what are hopefully three different prehistoric monuments that we suspect date from the bronze age trench one is over what we think is a terminal burial can at the end of a single row of stones we've put in trench two on two piles of rocks that might be more burial cairns and trench three is over a double row of stones that we suspect was a processional way leading up to a mound which francis thinks is the central part of the whole site it's possible that the mound was here for thousands of years before these monuments were even built as we've got dating evidence from flint found on top if we're right and it is this vast prehistoric ceremonial what does it mean what's it for well what it was for was the different things in people's lives that they want made formal and ceremonial so these cans would be when someone passes on to the next world um this double stone row could be a procession um that marked when a new chief came to to power something like that this stone circle was where people celebrated the changing of the seasons so it's like a combination of a church and a registry office and a town hall yes it's all there um and the thing is it all seems to fit together tony it's almost too good to be true isn't it it is of course all these theories rely on the dates of these monuments tying together mind well i mean i think it looks like these stones here from this can are later than these ones here over in trench one we've got major doubts about the terminal cairn being prehistoric especially when you compare it with the single stone row is the cairn earlier or later than the stone row and we should get it in that section absolutely all right fair enough and it's not looking any better in trench two either as we're uncovering evidence that the cairns aren't prehistoric at all we've removed the silt here you can see this really fine almost clay on top there and that was the silk from the bottom of the reservoir and it's sitting on top of this dark layer which is the ground surface in 1860 when the reservoir was filled and here's our can and you can see that the stones of the cairn are sitting happily right on top of the 1860 ground surface and that means raksha well it means that it's not prehistoric and we know that because it's literally just sat on top of that black surface it's not cut into that so there isn't a specific cut made for it does this mean that all the piles of stones around the reservoir are likely to be from the 1860s well that one's 1860. this one here as well in front of you that's also clearly sitting on top of that old ground surface the kens that we have are coming in line along the edge of the reservoir they're all in a nice line my bet is none of them are prehistoric i seem to remember not long ago saying that this all seemed too good to be true scarily i was right since we've proved that the cairns aren't prehistoric what on earth does that mean for the rest of the site could the double stone row be the next together um that whole what was a stone in there once yeah i mean that's a really nice rubber it's been pulled out presumably when the um reservoir has been done yeah it looks about that level so then over here we've got another stone the one that matched that oh yes i mean i think we've got the the hull haven't we for the for the stones it looks like it i mean you can see that small rock standing down there that's the classic wedging for a stone in a stone row and the other thing of course we got this stoney stuff at the top here do you think that could be the remains of a sort of walkway it's degraded down and it's covering the surface so this must have been the point of which this was open to walk up and down i would have thought i think that's brilliant okay i'm convinced especially with that little packings down there that this is a prehistoric double stone bro yeah i mean little doubt about it so francis is very happy with his double stone row but other parts of the site have got us scratching our heads could have easily been set up okay which could have fallen over we've got another massive monument to investigate and helen and stuart are getting their heads around it the stone circle they're looking much more into the center aren't they that's right yeah now this is the one that's vastly off the line they're not sure the stones are even in a circle it's too late in the day to put in another trench so the plan is to start digging tomorrow to try to prove the stones are prehistoric and form a circle have you got something going on over there back in trench one phil and faye may just have found some conclusive evidence that dates the single stone row there is you know there's a cut the good news is that it's prehistoric that is the hole that has got our long row of stones in there's a cut in there you can trace it right from where your trowel is that's it yeah there now if you go on up with your trowel up there keep going that's right it got right the way through that light grey yep so what the sequence is they've cut a hole that's the line you've just scored yeah then they put the stones in then the whole lot is filled in with that dark gray stuff that's it there and then the whole thing is sealed off by that very very dark topsoil that old ground surface this stuff we had earlier on this stuff all the way along here that's right and then the cairn goes on the top of that that is our sequence so basically we're right absolutely the can is later than these ah but it's really nice to see the archaeology prove it though although the can isn't prehistoric it's helped us to prove that the single stone row almost certainly is we haven't got a lot of flink coming up or anything have we we still don't know why this row of single stones is here so could francis idea of a ritual landscape be falling apart up until about an hour ago we thought we had the perfect prehistoric site with monuments coming up all over the place but now it seems that that cairn isn't prehistoric at all it's probably about 150 years old and may well have been a base used for machinery so have we got a prehistoric site or is it a building site there's certainly a prehistoric site here but rather more of it i think relates that reservoir building i think some of the other mounds do some of these lines out here i suspect to probably feel boundaries from that period as well so what are we gonna do tomorrow well if you look on the geophysics you'll see that the mound we're on is this noisy oval area here that's where phil found the flints this morning and so we're going to do some sampling on that so if we can get more evidence aren't we yeah so test pits which will sieve here and then i want to go down there to the sort of focus of the whole site this stone circle that has to be honest i'm having serious doubts about it so will all our dreams turn to dust tomorrow or do we have anything prehistoric here at all fingers crossed yeah yeah we do have stuff pretty historic here you say you do on the basis of what thousands of holes we've got beginning of day two here at tutterford in devon where we're looking at a prehistoric site on the bottom of a reservoir although it got a bit worrying yesterday because a lot of doubt was cast on the date of some of the features in the reservoir although francis is pretty confident that this mound here is prehistoric and you do look as though you've been here all night feels like it i've been here in my brain tony and what's your brain been telling the rest of your body well if the double stones are some sort of processional way what are they leading to well the only thing they could possibly lead to is this great mind so this great mind becomes incredibly important i mean if you remember phil and his merry men found a load of flints yesterday and so what i want to do now is to put some test pits some small holes which will sieve very very carefully to try to find flints and it really luck we might actually work out what was happening up here we believe we've got a late neolithic or bronze age double stone row that may have acted as a processional way leading to a central mound which we think is thousands of years earlier this is turning out to be a more complex site than we thought that's the first one there okay raksha if you're going pit one whatever we're calling it i don't know what the numbers are but let's call it one for the time being to try and understand what's going on the plan is to dig four small pits in 10 meter sections along the mound to see how much flint there is and to help us date the site do you think we get gets a glass of cheap white wine when we get back home all right mouse flinch get going if francis is right about the site being ceremonial there must have been something very special about this place that drew people here one thing that's really clear when you're in the bottom is that you feel enclosed you feel like you're in a natural bowl or an amphitheater stewart believes that the landscape is the key to the puzzling so if you have a natural amphitheatre it would make it quite an important place to be but yes is it natural or is it having a reservoir i couldn't quite work out whether that was a natural barrier till i found this map which is early 19th century 1801 first edition a one-inch map and it shows on here quite clearly the brook coming down the valley yeah and turns the right angle and goes down there so that barrier at the south is natural and would effectively seal that in we have got an enclosed space in there so i think a key part of the archaeology down here has to be to get henry to do some sampling of the sediments across the valley there to try and understand what that environment would have been like standing water flowing water all those sort of questions can be quite crucial in understanding that if it is a ceremonial complex back at the mound the test pits have produced our first tantalizing discovery nice little blade yeah it's the same sort of fence the same color and texture of the flint of all the other stuff this is razor sharp there's no question they were operating on the top of the mound here these flints are more evidence that people were here thousands of years before the stone monuments were built and for them working flint was a way of life to get an idea of the tremendous skill that our prehistoric ancestors had as flint knappers and to see just how difficult it is to master phil's taken time out of the trenches to train matt up as his apprentice okay matt the first thing we've got to do is actually get you used to taking flakes off watch what i do keep my fingers underneath and strike down right so hitting it quite a bleak angle straight down absolutely think about the shape of the flake looks got that ridge across the ridge that's following it down there okay you're going to take a flake off around there okay like that just get used to taking the flake off that's the first thing oh there we go that's a big isn't it different shape yeah why is the different shape well i guess it's if you've got the ridge coming across that's the ridge is totally the different shape that the ridge has made yeah not as easy as it looks is it francis is having troubles of his own as he's having major doubts about the authenticity of the stone circle so he's putting in a fourth trench over one of the stones hello already is that is that the hole do you think the pit it's looking like it does look quite like it's a different film francis it looks pretty circular to me i can't really see what all the fuss is about we've established we've got this double stone row going up to the mind you know our main axis for the site but why isn't this stone circle on that axis that's where you'd expect it it's off to one side as if they were i don't know drunk when they laid it out have you got anything so far tracy well no we thought we might have had the stone socket the stone hole in here but it looks like it's just where the ground's literally sunk in around the stone but that's actually really good why well that suggests that whatever this stone was put in it's actually lower down in the sequence than we're at at the moment we suggest that it is earlier yeah and the fact that it's slumped that indicates that the softer deposits in the hole have shrunk so yeah it's very good news so it could still be a stone circle just because that turns out to be an ancient stone doesn't mean it's part of a circle yeah so what i'd like to see now would be the results of a geophysics and see if we get a better pattern so a lot riding on gfiz to prove that the stones are in a circle thousands of years ago the landscape looked very different to what it does today this 3d model shows the landscape setting really well doesn't it if we're going to understand what was going on here we need to establish what the place looked like in prehistoric times so henry's been making a 3d model look at the relationship of the stream as it comes around here it's so close to the stone circle but if the stream had moved as they do um through time it would have taken out part of the stone circle so what i wonder sticking my neck out is whether here we've got another island like this one but more subtle because the actual the sedimentation of the of the lake has actually masked it so after doing this bit i want to start crawling around this area and seeing where there are other channels and other areas of possible wet deposits which might have made this into another island just get on with it so henry starts his core sampling to test his theory that the site was built on islands surrounded by water it's inorganic sediment if i mean but it's got enough remains to make it brown and over in trench one faze found some evidence that supports this theory of water being an important feature in this prehistoric landscape so i've got down here the cut for this linear stone whatever it may be yeah and on that side over there we've actually got what piers in section is the bank of what i think because of this sediment down here a river so we're right on the edge of the valley in fact yeah when you say a river you mean one of the streams is coming through here at some stage yeah exactly and really interestingly then we've got all these stones which seem to lie in it yeah so they they're contemporary this river and the key question of course what date it's a very difficult question no we haven't got dating evidence but with the amount of stratigraphy and the amount of all these layers these sediments i think we're talking about the prehistoric period right right with the single stone road deemed prehistoric another piece of the bronze age ceremonial landscape falls into place [Music] if only the same could be said of matt's napping skills you've been bashing away this you're also not removing any flint yep look at that angle there that you're trying to remove what sort of an angle is that well across the top corner there about 100 degrees or so exactly you cannot remove flint where the edge of the core is greater than that i expect to see some improvement tomorrow [Music] while matt toils away francis has got his eye further down the double stone row leading up to the mound this is a key part of the bronze age ceremonial landscape but i'm still not entirely convinced of the idea of a processional way i need francis to demonstrate it to me why have you put in this little muddy square well you see that there's tony yeah that's a stone right we wanted to see if there was another one matching it so we scooped off the mud with this and you see that's hard and that is very soft and that's going down so that there is where they pulled the stone that was originally matching that one out when they built the reservoir do you buy that rat shark couldn't it just be a hole for once i actually believe francis for the first time because you can actually see the stones corresponding all the way up there yeah and it's absolutely slap bang in line with that stone and the next one and the following one so are we going to say that that's proved oh without a shadow of doubt tony i am actually quite excited but what does it mean i mean we've got no pots with paintings of people processing in a serious way up to a hill in the stone age they weren't doing that kind of thing okay well there are records of of tribal societies where you have this sort of thing taking place often with posts rather than stones and i want to convince you yeah and the way to convince you i think what you're a profound skeptic is to walk along it and we're going to think neolithic thoughts we're going to try to put ourselves back okay so suddenly now we're actually on the sand ridge yeah okay and it's getting firmer yeah we've done it i'm not sure what that's proved about the stone age but it has proved we've got really good wellington boots in spite of myself i'm beginning to believe francis's view that it was a ceremonial landscape but there's still one big part that hasn't been confirmed the stone circle if it is prehistoric it'll be a first for time team a good enough reason to celebrate and another thing i haven't told you is that it's our 200th dig so what better way to end the day than with some bubbles [Music] [Laughter] [Music] well this is turning into a really exciting dig we've got our neolithic walkway along here we've got our metallic mound there but over there have we or have we not got a stone circle because if we have it could prove to be the key to the whole site we'll find out tomorrow cheers beginning of day three here at totteford reservoir in devon and everyone's a bit muted today after last night's celebrations which is a bit of a problem because we've got an enormous amount of work to do trying to establish whether or not what we've got here is a giant prehistoric stone circle francis yesterday afternoon we put this trench in to try and establish whether this stone had been buried a long time ago or whether it was much more recent have we proved anything yet yes tony and i am certainly not muted on this this really is exciting we've got the hole that the stone was placed in right but more than that we've got the stones that were put in there deliberately to wedge it to get it at precisely the right angle so you wouldn't do that if you were just making a field boundary ward or something so this has to be a bronze age stone now whether it's part of a row or a circle i don't know i've seen some flints from around this stone those flints are definitely prehistoric i am also convinced that that stone is prehistoric but of course just because we've got one prehistoric stone doesn't mean we've got a prehistoric stone circle does it just means we've got one prehistoric stone exactly tony but look over there you see that stone there standing on its own yeah well geofizz discovered a stone hole next door to it so if we put a trench between those two and they're both real and they're both prehistoric then i think we've got ourselves a stone circle if francis is right then this is a very special site because we haven't dug a prehistoric circle on time team before which way you're going that way that's if ian can point the digger in the right direction i have heard they're having a lot of trouble recruiting staff these days and the deck of drivers is particularly susceptible to replacement as well as trench five we're opening up a further two more trenches on the stone circle phase digging in trench six while matt is working in trench seven on a very large fallen stone and that's the biggest stone so far isn't it it is yeah this will certainly be the most that's already four foot long isn't oh it we go then yeah that's the end henry is continuing to core around the mound with help from bob they're hoping to prove that the site was made up of sandy islands surrounded by water which is all part of france's idea of a ritual landscape i've already started calling the other side we're seeing the the same materials on the island i see i'm calling it an island now because it's starting to look more and more like i'm gonna get an idea of what's happening then yeah now the interesting thing is going to be looking that way over to the stone circle over there to see if that's something of an island same as this one yeah and we're not only looking on the outside of the stone circle but also in the middle to see what went on here it's quite weird though isn't it because you literally come out of this stone circle area it's very boggy yeah and then as you come on to this area it's actually quite dry yeah it's it's just like the double stone row you've got the same thing there it's quite dry between the stones isn't it yeah that and i think that that obviously was important you know dry underfoot well just like it is to us raksha's opened up trench eight and is starting to find more evidence that the stones were built on an island back in trench five the digging frenzy comes to a standstill as phil is beginning to unearth something yeah you can see there's definitely summit coming round there and it does have these big stones in it that don't necessarily look natural so we're yeah we will have a look at that it's mid-morning and this is one of those moments where everything on time team seems to kick off at once matt what have you got coming out of this little trench well i've been clearing up this zone here and it's much bigger than we expected it looks like it's a good five foot long standing stone that's just fallen over so you think that it's prehistoric oh yeah without question and it's not only that over here we've got phil ian could you kill the digger for a minute phil is that something there that is another stone hole tony another prehistoric stone another part of the stone circle absolutely equidistant between that stone there and where matt is come over with me because we've had some news from raksha's trench as well we're doing sieving here as you can see what's that for phil well that's to try and get all the flint's raxa's had quite a lot of flint out of her trench and we want to make sure that we get every piece of flint and what you've got now raksha we've got a whole heap of flinty goodness in this trench and i think i don't know whether that's a blade or an arrowhead no it's not an arrowhead i'm afraid it's a rather nice broken flake but it's the same material the mesolithic material that we're getting off the mound what do you think all this tells us francis well it tells us that we've actually got two phases on this side you've got this earlier neolithic mesolithic which you've got on the mound and we've now got down here completely unexpectedly and then there is a later bronze age phase which goes with the rougher looking yellow flint and that is contemporary with the stone circle and the stone road it's extraordinary how once again we're finding so much stuff so late in the dig and i would remind you that we only have just over half a day left [Music] geophys has had to tackle extraordinary amounts of mud to get the radar results from the stone circle they've been working around the clock but they think they finally cracked it this is where phil's been working and he was talking about finding the stones in that quadrant um look at these results that jimmy's now presented one two three and the fourth the perfect arc and when you drop that arc into the bigger picture it forms that complete stone circle that is the final quadrant and i don't think it can be clearer than that i'm convinced john i'm absolutely convinced so we're now certain that we have a prehistoric stone circle which is a first for time team but we still don't know how it relates to the rest of the site and what exactly it was used for francis yesterday afternoon you said that if those stones turned out to be a prehistoric stone circle then that could be key to our understanding of the site and yet even though we're digging over there you keep being drawn back to here well i do tony because i think that's why the stone circle is where it is this mound was always the center of this landscape that double stone row leads directly to it it's linked to it yeah but the stone circle you see is joined in a different way it's joined as if there was some some gravity it's attracted to this mound and that's why i'm so fascinated by the east-west boundary at the far end of the site there because if that is contemporary with all of this then that's the edge of this landscape bob it's hard for us to understand isn't it that there was a time when we got this processional way we've got the mound a stone circle a boundary why it's intriguing isn't it one of the things that fascinates me is this contrast or difference between the wetter areas and the drier areas which we have on the on the mind here and it's perhaps important that the stone row and the alignment leads from wetter ground onto dry ground and perhaps the ritual itself involved some kind of movement from wet to dry and that was a significant element within the ritual itself it's so tantalising it's something that we'll never really be able to describe in in any meaningful way no it's all a great theory but do the dates hold together with francis's idea of a ritual landscape phil may just have found firm evidence in trench five which states the stone circle to the bronze age phil you look rather like an australian sheep shearer holding sheep droppings wow i'm over the moon tony that is our prehistoric pot you're joking no i'm not those tiny little pellets absolutely absolutely how do you know that well i've had a word with with carl our local pottery expert and he's happy that that is bronze age pot where was it filled it came from about 18 inches away from that stone this trench is lovely and clean now what are we going to do with it well we want to make it longer actually because we're actually beginning to build up a picture of the of the arrangement stone arrangement on this side of the circle and so far we've got an additional stone hole there we've got a stone there and we want to get the third one in the arc and it's probably going to be underneath that digger fantastic we're finally getting close to linking our prehistoric monuments together both the double stone row and the stone circle are from the bronze age while the mound dates much earlier from the mesolithic when people were working flint's matt's coming to the end of his napping but would his work be good enough to fit in with our ancient ancestors who lived here is it going not bad actually i think i'm getting the hang of it think about one that you might want to use for a knife um probably go for something that's you know knife shaped as it were so something like like that i suppose so why do you pick that one well it's good and straight and it's got these razor sharp edges so you've got your knives let's think about somewhere else think about scrapers right maybe something like that the thing that you've got to select for a scraper is one that's got a dipping end to it and that one is perfect for that it's got this dipping end yeah you could actually butcher your game you can actually process your hoods and those two tools are they're the basic two for all the flint technologies for thousands of years cutting and scraping and with those skills you could integrate with our mesolithic people living on the mound over there you could survive with these skills the results are in from the coring samples and henry reckons he's figured out what the landscape looked like during the prehistoric so henry this is the sum total of the work that you've been doing over the last few days yeah this is the survey and the borehole work and everything else we've got the coring transects have been putting across here just trying to understand the landscape in its environment what we have are two streams from france's bronze age ceremonial landscape running through the valley either side of the central mound and an island on which the stone circle was built as yet we don't know how the stone circle links to the mound but raksha may just have found the answer in her trench max what's this little depression here that you've been excavating this depression here believe it or not is a post hole we found just after lunch a post hole yeah for something wood yes it's for a wooden post how do you know that was for a wooden post and not for a stone well if you look in tracy's trench she has a standing stone in it and there's actually a cut around it so it would have gone much deeper and to pour the packing around which you don't need for a post hole any idea of dave well funny should say that i actually have a bag of flint and i'd love francis to have a look at them because i would love to know what a date they are we're in the middle of a bronze age stone circle yeah we've got a post hole and these flints are all mesolithic so how long before the bronze age circle was here would that post have been here about 4 000 years wow and that's the same sort of date as the mound up there yeah that's extraordinary so 4 000 years after that post was put in all these stones were erected so you were right yesterday afternoon when you said if we could crack this circle then we would understand more about the logic of this site you've got something that's mesolithic here and that's mesolithic isn't it on that mound and then later you've got the walkway coming up to it and then you've got the bronze age circle yes so this site began when people were still hunter-gatherers and they became farmers and then it was an age of metal phew at last this is an incredible find we've uncovered some sort of mesolithic timber structure as old as the flint work on the mound so we're now able to link all the features together in our ceremonial site now we can see that we've got a complete prehistoric landscape but every piece of archaeology we've exposed asked the same question who were these people and why did they erect it is there anything that we can really say about that well i think the answer to that is they were just like us i mean this is a very special place we're in a sort of natural amphitheater and all their religious monuments their constructions are all intimately related to a very small-scale landscape it's a natural amphitheater isn't it and then within it you've got these small rises and fall in the landscape and they relate directly to the actual monuments that were constructed on them you know the ceremonial monuments and the ceremonies that were going on here happened over an incredibly long time three four thousand years so it's all about people's religion developing out of the landscape and i i feel a strong sense that um this is a sacred place mick you never get that excited about prehistoric sites do you no no i'm a pretty cold-blooded character about the spirituality and religion and all that but what convinced me was seeing it from the air because not only is this site special in this valley but this valley is in the top of a great massive sort of mountain piece of landscape of dartmoor hidden away he wouldn't be able to see it from below in fact he wouldn't be able to see it until he got really near to it so it looks to me like a really sort of special place so i think i'll probably buy into it on this occasion so yesterday he was richard dawkins today is the archbishop of canterbury the entire ceremonial site was made up of a central mound with a timber structure next to it dating from the mesolithic period 8 000 years ago later about 4 000 years ago during the bronze age a double stone row was built acting as a processional way leading up to the mound around the same time the stone circle was built a single stone row could have acted as an east-west field boundary to the entire site it's been a pretty eventful three days hasn't it it certainly has what is it that you've enjoyed most i think it's seeing the prehistory of this valley coming to life again and of course people don't excavate stone circles on dartmoor very often they certainly do i think the last one was about 130 years ago so how important do you think this dig is well i think i mean it's been tremendously important for dartmoor but i think it's been important nationally too you're glad we came delighted thank you very much i think we're going to have to rewrite some of dartmoor's archaeology books because of you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 142,063

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, case of the underwater stonehenge, time team, archaeology documentary

Id: BRlhRWShfJY

Length: 47min 40sec (2860 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020