The Hidden Secrets Of Green Island | Time Team | Timeline

hi everybody welcome to this timeline documentary my name is dan snow and here i am in a lancaster bomber cockpit one of the few remaining lancasters from the second world war to tell you about my new history channel it's called history hit it's like netflix for history hundreds of history documentaries on there and interviews with many of the world's best historians follow the information below this film or just search online for history hit and make sure you use the code timeline to get a special introductory offer now enjoy this show this is pool harbour in dorset one of the largest natural harbours in the world today it's a haven for waterborne pleasure seekers but archaeologists believe that 2 000 years ago this was a very different place an international port that traded as far as the mediterranean and at its hub this apparently insignificant islands tucked away in a corner why because green island where i am now has produced some remarkable archaeological finds coins masses of pottery including high status foreign wear and evidence of iron smelting and shale working so far so good but this island has never been thoroughly excavated and if we're going to prove it was the dover of its day we're going to have to come up with something much more substantial and as usual we've got just three days to do it [Music] if there were a port in pool harbor 2000 years ago why on an island and why a small blob so far from the main channel the questions were raised three years ago when 40 test pits were dug all over the island revealing imported pottery and hinting at foreign trade but the test pits were too small to find structures now time teams come here to investigate the theory that green island is archaeologically rather special how many times on time team have i said this could be a real significant archaeological site and we've ended up with a couple of post holes or a bit of roman road are we really likely to be able to prove that this place was nine age port i think we've got a lot better chance with this one because of the fines that have already come from the place i have to say at first glance these finds don't look particularly spectacular do they so why are you showing us these four poultry shirts because of the mix of material we've got imports and native wares covering the first century bc into the first century a.d things like this same in coming from southern france we've also got northern french wares now all that's coming in and being found in association with what we can date as iron age wares are being made locally now these look like proper fines what on earth are they one of the big manufacturing industries on the island was shale working that is the blank that is the waste product of making a shale omelette it's lathe worked and it's pre-roman so it's very unusual finding using a lace for this type of work before the romans arrived here but we're going to have to find more than a few bits of pot in the blank off an armlet aren't we we're going to prove that this place was a major port i mean we need more material to start with so we can see what sort of range of material we need more evidence of the industrial activity that was going on why industrial i thought we were looking for a port not an industry because this sort of stuff is is probably in a high status of valuable objects they're making it here it's presumably going out exactly it's not being left here we don't find the finished article here at all it's ending up elsewhere any other clues that we can look for the big thing that i'm hoping to get out of this week is structural evidence whether they're warehouses manufacturing areas hearths kilns that type of thing so where do we dig well we're going to do some geophysics in the open areas on the island anyway but as a result of the test bits that ireland has done we've already got a couple of areas that we can start putting a trench in already was a tough one an iron age port might have had wharves and docks but if there were any on the shores of green island they've long since gone eroded by the sea so instead we're searching the interior for evidence of trades such as foreign pottery and industry producing more than was needed locally we've targeted two areas trench one near test pits which revealed domestic debris can fill fine settlement and a second area here where eileen found worked shale and iron slag could this be where exports were manufactured time team doesn't often dig on islands and as you can imagine getting us and the gear over here created quite a few larks but once we're here it's incredibly quiet and also very beautiful there's loads of honeysuckle and mountain ash and chestnuts and these huge rhododendrons which i think are going to create quite a few problems once we start digging and there are a lot of ticks as well because of its ecology the islands are triple s i a site of special scientific interest and that's going to create some practical difficulties mechanical diggers are out so we've got to dig by hand and we've got to keep the topsoil separate so that it can be restored when we backfill to preserve the ecology a lot of the archaeology eileen found was a meter down so phil and his army will have to shift a lot of spoil and geophys are also having to adapt to the terrain in their hunt for the industrial area john i have to tell you there's been a certain amount of grumbling from your team about the fact that you're making them use such cumbersome equipment it's actually because the archaeology is so deep here we won't reach it with the normal instrument um it's meant to be about a meter down so this is ideal for sorting out that problem what is that machine well it's a magnetometer the same as this and what does it read it reads magnetics and so it'll pick up ditches and metal working areas and pits and so on all the sort of archaeology we expect here it's just not very good where you've got low branches i think we should stop talking and just watch claire for a few minutes henry our surveyor is also getting tangled up in the island's vegetation his gps equipment doesn't work without a clear line of sight to a satellite and stuart our landscape archaeologist looking for telltale lumps and bumps which might say something about the island's past well he's just looking lost but the good news is that already the archaeology is promising we've barely scraped the surface in trench one and late iron age fines are jumping out that's a meaty room and a that's a serious piece of partner among eileen's finds was a lot of worked shale it's an easily fashioned oily rock which is found locally until recently no one knew what to make of these rounds with square holes in them for centuries antiquarians looked at these and thought it was money and they were given the name coal money they thought it was the trading tokens that the phoenicians brought over lasers of coal made out of coal exactly the oil shale and it wasn't until the 19th century that they looked at it again and looked at the working marks and realized that no something else is happening how did they get these squares out of the middle they'd use tools similar to these and hollow out the center core what's this extraordinary looking it looks like a huge nut off a massive 19th century industrial machine that's a rough out for a bracelet if this had continued to be worked it would have been narrowed down and it would have ended up as a gorgeous black bracelet whenever we look at fines there's always one on the table which is so fantastic that i know it can't possibly have come from our site you are completely right it's first century a.d it's a romano british dog bowl we call them this is from eggedon hill in west dorset but we have a tiny shared one from this site again excavated earlier this season so we know that things like that were in existence here and complete at one point eileen's belief that green island was a port or part of a port isn't just based on fines but on a massive feature first identified three years ago two huge jetties in the channel between the island and the mainland they're now under mud and only just visible at the very lowest tides when they were originally found it was thought that it was a continuous causeway really connecting green island really to the mainland and they found this as victor shown here there's a 70 meter gap just at the deepest point so shipping could generally pass through the middle there but there's not one continuous feature what are they made of these are a series of oak posts about 25 centimeter diameter with the sharpened ends which are being driven down into the bottom of the harbour and then we've got a whole series of perbex stone limestone material that's been dumped down and rammed into that to make it really solid almost like sort of a harbor wall john do you know of anything else like this at all i certainly can't think of anything along the atlantic coast to find anything comparable you'd really have to go to the mediterranean world to the greeks and the romans what surprises me is the amount of investment that's gone into constructing something like this the jetties have been dated to 250 bc although they could have been part of a port as shown by victor they could equally have been defensive either way the question remains what role did green island at one end of the jetties play back in trench one phil's already deep into the iron age and at the rate he's going he'll be in the neolithic by nightfall phil i've never seen you adopt a three-spade strategy in the trench before well it's the best compromise to actually dig this trench tony the fact is we've got about a meter of sand to go down through but i thought archaeology was about layers i thought that's why you used a trowel that's if you can actually distinguish the layers in this case it is just sand the layers if they're there are totally indistinguishable so what we're doing is taking it down in a series of 10 centimeter spits the best compromise we can come up to is to shovel them off the sand breaks up and we recover the pottery and what we don't recover we get out of the civilian and you can see the the the results of our strategy two nearly four trays of pottery from what one and a half spits that we've dug off that amount of pottery is from large large-scale settlement on this island so we've got loads of fines but we also want buildings can gear fizz help trying to work out what i think is going on we've only been able to do a sort of narrow strip because all the trees and the vegetation so it's only 20 meters by 50. but i think you can see these really clear anomalies coming through and that's my interpretation it looks like a series of enclosures that's good isn't that excellent i'd like to have a look at that junction there with a small trench that's it that sounds a good idea doesn't it get the relationship between the two but if i remember right your test pit that had a bit of furnace material was approximately there it was yeah well if we did a trench to take in that old test pit that would be great the linear we've got and see what's going on yep why did you go when he said enclosures what do you think we might find well we were saying that we were interested in structures weren't we straight away starts to look as if it's not just fines but there's boundaries and buildings indeed eileen's hunch that this area was promising seems to have been confirmed by geophys and we're putting in two trenches trench two is going into the area where eileen found a bit of furnace and gia fizz got a big spike could this be the furnace and in trench three we're targeting an enclosure ditch which might show where settlement or workshops were archaeologists believe that a late iron age trading network extended all the way from britain as far as india dorset was the territory of the dura trees about whom little is known they did build maiden castle and in their territory was the biggest known port in southern britain at hengistbury head 25 miles from our site but focus is now shifting to poole harbour because of the work eileen has done here on ferzi island and the owa peninsula there's extensive evidence of iron age settlement and industry how could green island have fitted into a major port complex it is a funny old place to have a port though isn't it mick i mean you come from overseas you drop the stuff off here but then you've got to ship it over to the mainland because on an island whatever you bring here or take from me has got to cross the water already i mean there may be an aspect of defense that we're looking at here when we look at some of the early trading sites in the mediterranean occupied by the greeks and and the phoenicians places like cadiz for instance they're on islands and so obviously you've got a certain amount of defense the island seems to be stuffed with fines we're finding them in the trenches and now we're finding them on the beaches taking a break from his trench kerry spotted something intriguing falling out of the cliff on the northwest of the island pottery flint and something even more auspicious our first sign of industrial activity this looks more like iron slag or iron ore that you've got here we've had iron slag from here before and the big question really on green island is whether it's sort of what stage in the iron making process does it relate to and basically is it iron smithing is his iron coming into greenland someone was working it or are people actually taking the iron ore itself putting it into a furnace and actually producing metal here uh in the first stages of production that's what we'd really like to try and find out and what's exciting about this really is that this slag here is not just flag and it's also furnace lining so we've actually got part of the furnace there you can see the sort of clay which has been fired and it's associated with flint's and iron age potter is a bit of black burnish wear there which is from the iron age bits of furnace are probably falling out of the cliffs because 170 metres of the island have been eroded over the last 2 000 years but if we can just trip over furnace lining then this is fantastically promising for our search for industry on the island we're also getting a sniff of industry from our trenches in what's now becoming known as mosquito alley where in trench three matt is looking for a feature which giofizz thought might be an enclosure ditch there's no sign of the ditch yet but we have got our first shale core it looks like a pit or something coming around here um but best of all down there we've got shale core hey just just turning up there in actually inside this pit that's awfully small is that the interior diameter of the of the bracelet it could have been a ring or another piece of ornamental jewellery oh they were making a whole range of items including cups and different types of jewelry as well hello i found something just a few meters away miles in trench two is looking for evidence of metal working and he may already have hit pay dirt oh he got mild well it looks suspiciously to me like some kind of furnace bottom uh-huh yes yeah that's that's a smithing half bottom so that's that's what you get at the bottom of the furnace we were talking earlier about smelting and smithing well that is this comes from the smithing stage once you've got your metal yeah you've started to work it and actually turn it into useful artifacts all right does that mean that that smithing is taking place in this tranquilizers come from it's taking place somewhere in the vicinity it doesn't tell you exactly where it is we can't be certain that it was taking place in the exact spine spot too what would tell you the exact spot if i find it sitting in the ground right well the thing we really want to try and look at is hammer scale now when you're working iron the outside surface tends to form this crust and when that sort of falls off as you forge it it sort of creates oh it's all sort of sparked just flying absolutely that's that's called hammer scale and the hammer scale tends to stay where it was made so if we can identify areas with high concentrations of this then we can basically say that's where smithing was taking place this is tantalising evidence that somewhere near this trench there was a blacksmith's workshop which would be a major find the search is now on for the structure itself and of course any hammer scale would be good to find phil's getting very excited by what's coming out of trench one phil is that just a scatter of stones or is it something more significant this is definitely something more significant tony this is is a pile of stones but the important thing about it is it's actually got some shape to it look there's a deliberate straight line along there there's another one going out there this is not just a pile of stones that have come down at random within the within the hill wash this is a deliberate pile of stones and i honestly believe that we are looking at an iron age or romano british surface just like you're sitting on a surface now maybe 2000 years old could this be a structure rather than just a path or a floor i don't think it's it's a structure but i'll bet you there's a structure very very close any more fines that i think is our best piece of dating evidence that is the core of a lathe turned shale bracelet and the association of that with the with the stones and all the pottery around it i think confirms that this pile of stones is iron age or a man of british mick has anything like this been found on the island before no nothing like this has turned up and it's exactly the sort of thing structural thing that we've been looking for we said we wanted a profusion of fines looks like we've got a profusion of fines we said we needed structures we may well have structures but does it mean we've got a port join us after the break beginning of day two and once again we're about to disturb the peace and tranquility of green island here in paul harbour as we try to find out whether it was once a thriving iron age port in our effort to get to grips with what was happening on the island 2000 years ago we've got three trenches open each targeting a different key feature in trench one phil's trying to find out whether his pile of stones is the first structure ever found on green island on the way he's finding more shale cores we know that metal was being worked on the island and some of that evidence has come from trench too what miles wants to find is the furnace itself but so far this morning all we've had out of the trench a shale cause well that's it we've got another one wow it's lovely that's complete if this was a port the island would have been crisscrossed by enclosure ditches and that's what matt's hoping to find in trench three but guess what is that more rough for a shell bracelet the manufacturer of highly prized shale armlets and jewellery was obviously happening all over the island probably for trade jake keane is going to attempt to make a replica iron age armlet though shale's easy enough to work and polish with modern power tools it's all together a different matter with the tools available 2 000 years ago so what are you going to do to get your bracelet out of it select your lump split it and then see how you go from there show me how to do that then okay let's have a go god it does smell a bit done it really yes that's the oil in it oh look at that let's scribe this looks about your size all right you reckon have you ever seen this done before sean i haven't no it's i mean you dig these things up and you think well i know what this is but you don't really because until you actually seen it being made it just brings the whole thing to life really the other key industry that we're trying to bring back to life is iron working and in trench two they think they may be closing in on the iron age furnace redshift i think we're digging big holes in the middle of the trench what's this well it's quite exciting really because um we section this feature off to see whether it would be going down yeah and uh i found this really nice vertical edge here so hopefully it's part of the furnace how can you tell the difference between here and and and here because it looks exactly the same color to me it's more by feel really because this is very loose can we speculate what this might be to do with the furnace yet not yet it's early days yet if this does turn out to be part of an iron age furnace it'll be the first one ever discovered in situ brilliant though that would be it won't tell us why they were smitting iron on an island but how much of an island was it 2000 years ago green island is quite a small island now but was it like that in the iron age no it wasn't it would have been larger if you drain the water down to about two meters below its present level which is probably where it was the sea level was how do you know it was two meters lower in the iron age there was a roman site just on the north side of brownsie which indicates the water level must have been about that sort of level our site was part of a much bigger island that took in brown sea and fersi islands present-day green island was the bit that was closest to the navigable channel but frustratingly we can't look for wars or keys or other direct evidence of a port because they're not there anymore about 170 metres of key seafront near the jetty are now underwater because of erosion and rising sea levels we're finding industry because we're digging in areas that were well inland how's phil's structure coming on in trench one there is good news and bad news really yeah you remember last night we had a big spread of stones all the way over here that's right well they are the stones that's on the spoil tip behind you now oh yeah firstly there are quite a number of flint nodules i think that these nodules are the raw material to make the tools to work the shale we've also got plenty of examples of work shale we've actually got a shell working site the other stones are this this very coarse iron stone now they break this up to include in the pottery to actually temper the pottery we've also got pottery making as well and i think that what we were looking at was a dump of raw material so when i was trying to push you about whether this was a structure or not i was got a mosquito on you and you refused to be pushed actually you were right there wasn't a structure here i didn't think there was but we do now have a structure look at this superb series of pitch stones running right the way across also look how different the soil is on this side see it's got all these bits of stone to on this side we've actually got a much darker material with quite a lot of bits of charcoal so what does that imply that this is that implies that this is a deliberate edge possibly a terrace some form of revetment perhaps it perhaps this is uh the the edge of a building i that i don't know so though we've lost one possible structure we've gained another more definite one we're ahead we've got four trenches open producing a flood of fines and now the archaeologists want to open another geophys have been sent into this area in the middle of the island but they're going to have to hang on a tick i imagine that the most useful implement on the island would be this but it's not it's this it's a tick tool and i don't know if you can see this little black dot there that's a tick and what you have to do is you press the tool into the flesh along here run it all the way up there like that and then turn this thing round anti-clockwise 180 degrees like that there is a door now but if you think i've got ticks it's nothing compared with gfiz how many ticks do you reckon you've had between you in the last day or so i think about 36 but i'm not showing you where so why have you got this poor masochist into this part of the island it's because we now have an opportunity to investigate this meadow area that hasn't been looked at by anybody before but we know from the test pits that we've dug just down the slope there it all seems to be centered on this area here this could be the hub of all the activity and the main thing about this area from our point of view is we're confident there's been no bonfires no burning of the rhododendrons no rubbish pit so hopefully a clear area for us and hardly any trees yeah and no ticks i hope john gators not only having to contend with what's lying underground but what's on the ground they're acting as if they own the island well actually they do i can see you're enjoying your lunch but i'm afraid i'm gonna ask if you could move if you don't mind would we mind moving joe davis has owned the island for over 20 years she's keen to safeguard the beauty and tranquility of the place you want to do the gfs for me that will be fun i'll probably get better results the family has never allowed anyone to explore this close to their house before in trench two the archaeologists were very excited about the feature they thought might be a furnace [Applause] miles hello um your furnace feature looks remarkably square it is isn't it it's almost exactly uh one meter square why is that well it is a funny thing tony um it's very rare in british archaeology when you dig a feature are you able to say who dug it uh when they dug it and for what reason and we can say all three things here which is um it was doug about four months ago um we know the names of the people who dug it and uh we know it's an archaeological test pit it's the one of ireland it is it is we were fooled essentially at the beginning the fact there's one or two iron age pieces of pottery contained within the field but presumably you've still got a bit of something there is we've still got this this patch of clay and you can see it in section here so it is this is actually something archaeological so we can still investigate this the good news is that there still might be a furnace in this trench and we've still got time to dig it 20 meters away matt in trench 3 is looking for an enclosure ditch and has come down onto natural geology that unusually for time team can be easily seen i've got down to the natural in this trench this is the yellowy sand because yeah it's yellow it gets a bit mottled but it's all the same stuff right but we eventually did find a feature this ditch across the side here yeah full of this dark material it's plunging right there absolutely yeah you can see the yellow sand gets the edge and then straight down like that but clearly you haven't got room to move there have you really no i haven't even reached the bottom of it yet it's still going down yeah so i think probably we ought to come at what a meter this way yeah i thought we might say that away from trench one phil's learning how to make an iron age shale armlet he's chiseling out the basic shape from a lump of shale jake this is getting awfully fragile i mean i think i'm pretty much through there and i you're very nearly there yes you could tap it off but i wouldn't i'd chip it through because what we don't want is bits of this broken [Music] the shale's now ready for turning on the ingenious foot driven wood lathe to be shaped by flint tools napped by phil himself one area we seem to have ignored is the open hillside following geophys results which indicated burning we put trenches four and five in here but they only revealed burnt rhododendrons and stones neither of which advance our story much but geophys have persisted and now have more results from this area as well as for the meadow and the lawn both previously off limits to archaeologists are there targets there and will we be able to dig for them right here's the last key area i hope now where have you done i'll show some here we've got the one area here oh that's where we're sitting now on the lawn and then the one area in the long grass which we had cut right yeah and look ignore these modern responses but we've got a massive anomalies these could all be to do with metal working and then in the sort of scrub area to the right um other anomalies i mean lots of targets you could go for uh and look there was trench five we're well clear of all the modern disturbance now we've got a massive responses i'd like to look at i think we should certainly do more work based on that yeah at the bottom of the slide just keep looking there as well have you done any test pits here in this area no i mean this area has always been sort of out of bounds to us as far as digging goes so if we were able to persuade joe that it maybe shouldn't be out of bounds for the rest of today tomorrow it's a good job for you it's a very easy fish and maybe some time right he's done it before he's good at it joe has anyone shown you this no look that is very very interesting really ideally what we'd like to do is put in a little test pit to to see what it is there's a slight problem it's on the lawn what here yeah yeah i'll show you where it is it's just just about here it would be one meter square in all honesty there would be a line there for a couple of months but it would grow over and you wouldn't notice it would be just the same as the rest of the law whatever happens even if we find something we limit ourselves to that one meter meg meg yeah can you guarantee that it'll only be one meter square yeah just one meter test be to be really useful would that be okay really useful i suppose so okay god i love you there are going to be three new trenches each looking for possible industry indicated by gfiz trench six is on the lawn and trench seven in the meadow area nearby we've opened trench eight our final stab at investigating the open hillside more in hope than expectation in trench one phil's line of stones is looking ever more like a building we've got this cracking uh front of pitch stones and they are trending round in an arc and then at what you can see about three quarters of a meter back beyond that we've literally got a parallel set of stones going around i mean it looks to me like the sort of thing you get the back of a house if we could show this was actually some sort of settlement you know domestic building and so on with the mystic debris that would be a major step forward i mean we've we've got oyster shells we've got bone so you've got the stuff on a house rather than a workshop i was going to say yeah well we've we've got a lot of workshop debris workshop debris but we do have domestic refuse well you know if we can get the post holes and things to go with it that's going to be fantastic isn't it very good trench 2 has had its ups and downs in the search for a furnace we found one of eileen's test pits but we're still hoping that miles can deliver something 2 000 years older and a lot less square mars has changed again what's this extraordinary round thing uh it's something that's not a test pit we've got this big sort of oval spread here of bait clay and all the way around it we've got these pieces of dorb and you can see the wattle marks in there which is all part of this sort of structural material so what do these two things mean well it's the whole thing really i mean that's come up where we found the slag finds yesterday where we found the smithing half bottom yeah we've gone in with the magnets again today and we've got hammer scale coming up here now in higher proportions so the association of the smithing half bottom the slag this wide burnt area and this structural dorb seems to suggest what we could actually have there is a smithing hearth so we've definitely got smithing here the one thing that i'm really interested in was this thing you had your foot on yes yeah well that's uh can't be too certain at the moment but it seems that it might well be the base for the anvil how often do you come up with these kind of things these aren't sites aren't too a penny uh if you look across from the mainland um most i know sites have been badly damaged by ploughing and i really can't think of any example which is certainly as well preserved as this we might be able to get some detail out tomorrow to say not just that it is a furnace but actually what sort of first is how it worked how the actual act of smithing was practiced so we're looking at something that's pretty unique outside is unique yes totally but is it industrial and can we find any more of it and when we get down deep inside it what else will we find join us after the break beginning of day three in our search for an iron age port here at green island in paul harbour and our trenches are really starting to come up with the goods in matt's trench we've got what appears to be an iron age ditch probably second century bc this is my favorite trench we've got a furnace here we've got bits of a wattle and door wall we've got what appears to be part of an anvil and you want to extend now don't you mars god yes yeah we've only got uh two thirds of the feature really in the in our trench we really need to get all this out and get the whole thing in plan big square here definitely but that's not all of 30 meters away in phil's trench over there he's got a big line of stones which he thinks might be part of an iron age roundhouse so he wants to extend that trench too and we're putting in a new test bit over there because of some of john's geo fizz we've already put in a test pit here slap bang in the middle of the lawn because another one of john spikes and through the trees we dug a trench yesterday which we're still finishing and we've got a brand new trench there as well which is a heck of a lot of new trench for day three so the pressure is on our key targets are the iron age industry that went with the port metal smithing and shale working as well as evidence of settlement next to phil's roundhouse he's now found cracking evidence of human occupation bone the only bone we've had has come from a waterlogged deposit we've had nothing from the dry soil like this is that's because the sand is so acidic exactly it's actually destroying the bone yep it's heathland soils and it degrades everything that's in there so these pieces of bone are potentially really important do you know what sort of um species it is i'm not absolutely certain but it looks mostly cattle to me that's great because that matches exactly the type of bone pieces we were getting from the waterlogged deposit which was cattle sheep also but a duck was all animal that was very good eating so that is really good new information about the people that were living here in trench two they've drafted in john gator to check whether they found an anvil and whether there was more than one furnace here that's definitely the only holy fired stone there's nothing else around that at all that's that's giving a high reading average readings it is an anvil but just the one furnace chief apprentice phil is tied up in his trench so the apprentice's apprentice has come to lend a hand at our shale works they're trying to carve the inner core out of the armlet it does tend to wander yes what i'm trying to do at the moment is get that groove in the right place how long is it going to take to carry on like i reckon you've got two or three hours oh my god so that's the rest of mick's day sorted then back in trench one dee seems to be breaking all the rules of good trench keeping in pursuit of a huge lump of shale in the section oh my god it is going on it yeah it's um i think it's going a bit far really just to continue doing this we've got to get it out i don't care i i don't care how big a hole you are i wanted to just go for it we we can't afford to lose that big piece good work dan you want to put your body straight in there yes please this huge piece of shale would have been the raw material for making an armlet the archaeologists have never before been allowed to dig near the house in the middle of the island we're hoping that trench six in the lawn and seven in the meadow will give up more of the island's secrets dan have you found whatever it was that caused the geophysics spike here no not yet but um nowhere near the bottom i don't think but look at this cool that's samia presumably that's samia yep uh late first early second century that's your import i think whatever you're doing stop doing it and come down to 21 now please okay coming come have a look let's go you know we were talking about just how well preserved the bone was who would have thought amongst that well-preserved bone two fragments a human skull look definitely there are the sutures where the plates are all joined together we're 99 certain that is human skull fragments do you think it was just discarded here or do you think it could actually be part of a burial no i mean it's not unusual to get fragments of of human remains in iron age features but was it on the surface or in a cut or anything well funnily enough if you look down in the bottom of the hole here the bones came from right down in the bottom in that black stuff but you notice there is this very very white colored sand the natural sand but it looks like we've got a possible ditch or a shallow feature running through the middle of the test bit it's early days yet but we could well have a ditch with the human bones in it pre-dating this this stone-built structure but phil if there's a ditch in front of the wall does that reduce the chance that we've actually got an iron age hard not at all it may even actually increase it this could be the foundation slot the actual foundation trench in which the building stood that fell down and then at a later stage it got filled up with domestic rubbish and bits of bone the bees are busy the diggers are busy all over the island there's the steady scrape of spade on sand at our own industrial site after endless grinding of the shale armlet a critical moment approaches apprentice phil has had to drag himself away from his trench for this crucial operation breaking the armlet away from the core oh yes hey stop look i can see dale look there it is i don't see i can see him if the armlet's broken hours and hours of scraping and polishing will all go to waste yes just a little further down the hillside trench eight was opened to look for the source of a geophys hotspot it's produced some flint more shale cores and uniquely some charred grain which suggests people were living near here in trench three matt has now revealed his iron age ditch yeah really steep sides going right straight down like that and did you get any fines or anything from it yeah a few bits they've turned out to be mainly late iron age i think yep i think so three time age forms and fabric splendid lovely this ditch might have been enclosing a shale works or even some of the huts where the workers lived but our best evidence of settlement has been trench one which has constantly surprised us just when we thought we could confirm that it contained an iron age roundhouse it's delivered yet another twist and this time it's not altogether welcome so has it turned into a round house then phil no it's more of a rectangular straight one mix oh is it that's not what we wanted at all no well it's supposed to come around at least curving around like that yeah and i think it's it's more or less coming through there what i'm wondering is whether or not this one here look is it is a terminus look see that one yes yeah whether or not there's some sort of a yeah well yeah a wall that stops there yeah it don't seem we haven't got any big stones here none of the pitch ones are on this side right but it ain't round and we won't tend to think of sort of roman if it's straight and you know that's the sort of that's the sort of golden rule and it curved iron age and roman straight ones this poor old victor i feel sorry for what is that woody true it was a rain so victor's gone back to the drawing board but the archaeologists can't agree on what we've found although it's still possible that it's part of a building and that it's iron age one thing we do know this could have been the area where workers lived and kept their raw materials in trench two they desperately want to reveal the iron age furnace that was part of the smithy before the end of the day these strange circular things weren't here last night but are they nice well it's some sort of structure related to the hearth so it could be a set of bellows or something how would that work well what we think's going on here is in these two pits here we have some sort of ceramic vessel and perhaps on top of that tied around it sort of leather bladder or something which they'd have pumped up and down to force the air into the furnace oh i thought he meant that they were like post holes and there'd be a big bellows like my mum used to have straps roger this bit here has always intrigued me what we can see there is a dump of fresh clay which is being used to repair the furnace as it literally melts and it leaves behind stuff like we found in there absolutely so it's like a little emergency pass in case things start going first aid kit for failing furnaces so what does this trench tell us about the industry that was going on here well i mean the key thing is we've actually found the structures relating to this activity before we just had the artifacts we've had the sort of bits of slag we've had all kinds of bits of shell in the in the surface now we've actually got a firm evidence of a structure that's showing us that they're they're smitting this on and actually creating objects and this is one of the key structures definitely smithing it is and you think that the fact that they were doing it on an island is in itself special i i i think what you've got here is a very special process remember this is the iron age iron's pretty new it's a novel material and it's used for really some prestigious objects so i think there's special people doing special things and they would have been seen as being special by other people you're a bit skeptical about this idea of special aren't you i just wonder whether we aren't reading too much into it i could see that originally the process would look magical you know of getting metal out of stone but we're well on into the iron age here it must have been much better known than it had i agree to an extent i think we have to remember is basically most people weren't iron smiths okay so you know this is a pretty rare thing to be doing compared to the rest of the people and what you do basically makes who you are who you are is down to what you do was this a place to be treated with or and wonder or just a workshop what's beyond dispute is that green island has produced the first structure of an iron age furnace ever found in britain the iron would have been placed directly on charcoal fanned by the leather bellows [Music] nearby there would have been an anvil for working the metal an iron age smithy might have made tools such as chisels and hammers or weapons such as swords and knives or just iron bars for trading after three days hard digging we've found no structural evidence of a port what we do have are literally thousands of fines and they tell a story of industrial activity and occupation on this island for 500 years what we have got are about 30 bags like this of pottery shale slag far more than we normally get presumably most of this stuff's dateable yes i mean we start up at this end with the earliest stuff which is about 250 bc we go through to about 100 here we're getting up to about the time of the roman conquest but then we've got occupation which goes on into the roman period so second century same in third century roman coin and quite a lot of other finds to go with that as well for some inexplicable reason the piece you're most excited about is this why it's contemporary with when the jetties were constructed so it populates the island right back about 250 bc the people here with those pots when they're building the jetties and you didn't have evidence of that before we came not confirmed evidence such as you're holding in your hand we've had a huge amount of the shale haven't we and loads of slag but have we had very much of this imported work we haven't really tony no we've had about one percent of the total collection which is significantly less than you were finding in your test pits much so so doesn't this rather undermine the idea that we've got a big port here with lots of exports coming in no it doesn't worry me because we're only seeing one part of the the total picture green island is part of a much bigger complex and over on our for instance there's a very much higher percentage of very exotic material which you just don't get anywhere else mick what does this whole assemblage tell you i think what it's telling us is that we've got to start thinking of pool harbour as some sort of you know big not only iron age industrial center but but probably another port that's of international importance we hadn't allowed for so when i came here looking for a port it wasn't that there isn't a port here it's just that it was part of something much bigger that's right i think it's the whole of pool harbour itself you did give me quite a hard time in those negotiations didn't you before you let us dig this test bit not hard enough really oh come on it is beautiful and we didn't extend it it's a lovely piece of work isn't it yep and it was worth it because of the fines which are quite spectacular there's this uh whiskey bottle right that's probably mine what about the glucose fizzy drink bottles but thanks for letting us stick it and also thank you for letting us share your lovely island for three days and by way of thanks we would like to give you this it's just like the bracelets that they made here 2000 years ago that's really beautiful thank you i should treasure it it's amazing to think what was happening on green island 2000 years ago there may well have been wharves here which have been lost to erosion and rising sea levels but the island was undoubtedly an industrial site a leading producer of shale ornaments and iron artifacts looking at it today tranquil and cut off it seems extraordinary to think that there would have been a hubbub of industry everywhere it would have been a different world but there would still have been ticks

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

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Id: 2BItXFBV1jY

Length: 48min 49sec (2929 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021