THE LONG BARROWS: 1,000 Years Before Stonehenge | A Prehistory Guys Film

[Music] [Music] [Music] the first sight I had of this Barrow was at a time when Colonel Lee of Kum ha had ordered Roman pavement to be uncovered at well in the year 1807 for the satisfaction of his friends and the Curious in Antiquities it was then pointed out to me at some distance from the spot on which we were engaged with the Romans and Colonel Lee in the most obliging manner offered to have it opened whenever I could attend Sir Richard Colt was a busy man in the years before he wrote those words to The Society of antiquaries occupied with other antiquarian Pursuits it was a full nine years before he could attend and his work at ston Littleton longbarrow at wellow in sumerset was a turning point for the whole discipline of [Music] archaeology his careful and analytical approach to excavation was in sharp contrast to the more common practice of intellectual treasure hunting Colt hore wanted to understand the prehistoric remains rather than simply expand his personal Cabinet of Curiosities along with his friend Mr Skinner the director of the neighboring parish and an unspecified number of helpers they made an opening in the roof and cleared the passage Skinner was happy that beyond the slow collapse of time the interior had suffered very little so with great care they continued to excavate the entire Barrow color's work would fall short of today's archaeological expertise but his descriptions were thorough he recorded the internal arrangement of Chambers he recorded measurements for everything evidence for cremation as well as burial every bone and as many bone fragments as he could discern from each of the separate burials and the Engravings he commissioned are fabulous in their detail he spoke to neighboring farmers and established that half a century before the Barrow had been robbed for building materials apparently it had also been home to a fox it was 20 years after color's death that the somerset archaeological and Natural History Society carried out some Restorations and 150 years more for modern reconstructions to be done the the point is that colt took investigation to a much higher level which paved a new way for archaeology it's a great shame that the full depth of Earth was never cleared away during color's lifetime he never saw this ammonite I'd love to have heard his ideas on what the builders might have thought about it just under 6,000 years ago Britain was EXP experiencing a major period of change we know very little about the lives of the people back then but the culture seems to have been adopting new ways of being maybe new beliefs and a new hierarchical system all seeming to emanate from Continental Europe and how do we know this well some of the best lines of evidence come from these long [Music] barrows these iconic prehistoric burials were present threw out much of the North European land mass from around 6,500 years ago and whatever it was that brought about the Northwood surge of the culture they appeared quite suddenly in Britain many centuries later about 5,700 years ago often they were built by extending existing tombs sometimes built right over the top and these huge monuments were constructed in large numbers the remains of over 40,000 are still known in Europe today so when we consider that most of the traces of prehistoric life have long since been lost beneath towns and cities it's difficult to imagine quite how many of these tombs may have [Music] existed there are slight architectural variations but basically long barrows follow two main structural forms externally they are long trapezoidal structure wider at the for court narrowing towards the back seeming to Echo the shape of the long houses that were so common across Northeastern Europe 6,000 years ago the two main types are those with a for court which usually but not always faces Eastward opening to a passage or galleried burial chamber like Stony Littleton we saw earlier and those where the for court is a false portal and the burials are accessed along the sides of of the barrows like here at Bellis snap and windmill tump near the village of Rod [Music] Martin before the likes of Colt began nudging antiquarianism towards the more rigorous field of archaeology prehistoric sites were places of Legend and folklore and in many instances their names still echo the myth of the past whilst more modern research is bringing knowledge very firmly into play giving us this jumbled mix of fact and fiction this is Arthur's Stone so named because Legend has it that King Arthur killed a giant here whose elbows left their marks in the stone as he fell of course they did more recently this very Capstone is the inspiration for the TBL Stone in CS Lewis is The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe in our imaginations asan died here but take a step back to reality and what we really have here is the robbed out remains of another long Barrow the Capstone would have been covered by the huge mound of Earth stretching a long way in that direction and the main for court is up here with a false portal and this blocking Stone the entrance to the burial Chambers is around the side and this is a rare example where the side passage doesn't lead to side burials it actually leads right the way round to the back of the main burial chamber so apart from giving us the stripped back view of the insides of a Long Bar what this site does is give us some insights into a wider social context it's a human thing we build replaceable houses and permanent tombs so it's no surprise that nine times out of 10 you see a barrow in the landscape and no trace of the settlement that it's supported no signs of the living to explain the presence of the dead but dwon Hill not far up there has revealed a good many secrets and provided us with some of that context back in the 1960s thousands of flints Arro heads and stone axes were found here ultimately leading to excavations half a century later that revealed an enormous multiphase settlement there were signs of Palisades slots where Timber posts had been erected some probably supporting a roof there was an alignment of three long houses plus a fourth within a palisaded enclosure the point is in order to have built and maintained a settlement of this size there must have been significant number numbers of people and all of this happening before the construction of the long Barrow perhaps this is an indication that the newcomers needed a few generations to settle down in these new lands before they were in a position to reintroduce the style of Tomb building their four Bears had left behind intriguingly though some of the excavated remains have been interpreted to suggest something different it seems possible that the earlier Timber buildings were deliberately burnt to the ground and the Mounds raised directly over the top as the lead archaeologist described it houses of the living becoming houses of the dead now there is a lot of discussion and theorizing about the ritual burning of buildings in the Neolithic I'm not suggesting that it didn't happen but we should also not forget that we're looking at a time when people built Timber houses and illuminated them with pig fat and naked flames what could possibly go wrong some burial sites were used for Fairly brief periods of time whilst others were developed and used over centuries whan Smithy in Oxfordshire is a particularly late example which has a deep and complex history hinting at an emotionally charged past in its first stage around 5 and a half thousand years ago wh and Smithy was a Timber Mory house which contained the remains of 14 people 11 men two women and a child at least three of them had met a violent end arrowheads were still lodged in their bones and the dating puts them all in a very narrow period of time around 10 to 15 years and it's even a possibility that they all died and were buried around the same time two or three generations later the site was completely covered by an oval Mound created from soil extracted from ditches along each side this act has been interpreted as a symbolic closure of the Tomb and it remained in this phase for another short time the Monumental structure we see today was built on top of the mound around 3,450 BC and used for less than a century it contained the remains of just one child and seven adults long barrows vary enormously in length typically between 20 and 70 M but some of them are enormous with the biggest examples extending over 100 m now the longer barrows tend to follow the simple trapezoidal shape but some of the shter barrers have a much more defined form and one of the most beautiful although heavily stored examples is Bellis NAB near the village of wincham in [Music] gler some believe this shape is a reference to Stone axes which we know held a significance Way Beyond their practical uses polished axes have often been found completely unused in burials so it seems perfectly reasonable that the tombs could Echo this another school of thought however is that these shapes represent a truncated female form and that the burials are taking the departed back to the womb of the earth whatever the concept behind this design the false portal has always been slightly mysterious there are two main schools of thought maybe it was to hide the true locations of the tombs to prevent looting or perhaps this was a portal between the living and the dead where the spirits could pass freely but the living were Bound by their physicality the side Chambers collectively contain contained the remains of over 30 individuals probably dating to at least 5,000 years ago but excavations in the 1800s uncovered six skeletons under the Force Portal five of which were children and these are thought to be later Bronze Age [Music] burials the sweeping area around Stone Henge is one of the world's best known prehistoric regions where the wealth and power of those Neolithic people are made unquestionable by some of the world's biggest displays of megalithic Madness it's Brash ostentatious udacious even and the same can be said of course of the area around averbury to the north not surprising then that one of the largest known long barrows ever built is here at West kennet overlooking silbury Hill and the vast sprawling Landscapes that were home to so many people this has to be the best place to put all the long Barrow building and usage into perspective we're used to seeing all these monuments together in the landscape and we can't help imagining them all being there at the same time but these tombs are old so very very old this Colossus was built a thousand years before the stones of a BRI and Stonehenge were erected a thousand years before silbury Hill was constructed built around 3,650 BC the tomb was in use for about a thousand years the Stonehenge we see today was built around 2500 BC West kenet longbarrow had already ceased to be used when Stonehenge was erected the chambers here contained the remains of 46 males and females old and young with a variety of grave Goods clearly this was an epically important Place although already fallen into disuse the barrel wasn't closed for centuries it was sometime after 2500 BC that the decision was made to seal up the tomb it was filled with Earth and then huge blocking Stones were raised in the front perhaps were terrified of what they thought might get out remember Sir Richard Colt who I was talking about earlier well he traveled widely to indulge his Fascination for prehistoric remains and he recorded and saw a lot of them he also wrote the Barrow in my opinion was a grave of Honor raised over the ashes of the chieftain not of the vassel whose remains were deposited in the parent Earth without the distinguishing Mark of an elevated Mound I'm inclined to form this conjecture from the frequent discoveries made on our bare Downs of skeletons s tumulo and many of our large barrows have been found to contain the bones or ashes of one single corpse S tumulo without tumulus no Barrow just buried in bare Earth one of the biggest question questions in Archaeology is what did they do with the Ordinary People if these are the tombs of the elites what did they do with everybody else where are they and here is Colt telling us just how frequently they find skeletons on bear Downs I think a lot of people missed that memo forget the 2,000 years since the Romans started formalizing farming in the two centuries since Colt Hall wrote those words we've had over A Century of industrialized farming on a colossal scale completely destroying any evidence of those countless simpler [Music] Graves have you ever wondered what an archaeological excavation looks like out of season underneath those black tar polands at a semi secret location lies the most intact and previously unexcavated long Barrow ever discovered work's been going on here for a few years now and there's a lot of excitement about what might be found and that anticipation has been compounded by some amazing discoveries that were made not far away this was the most thorough excavation of its type ever undertaken little by little exposing all the remains through all of its building phases right back to the site's earliest Mesolithic activity in almost every aspect this was a classic long Barrow construction except that in this instance the wider for court end of the Barrow faced to the West instead of the East Hazelton in glare was home to two long barrows situated just 80 M apart and very sensibly named Hazelton North and Hazelton South not surprisingly the barrows had been known about for a long time but it was only in the 1970s that the decision was made to excavate Hazelton North these excavations uncovered some of the most exciting developments in our understanding of the people who lived and died with these monuments this was the most thorough excavation of its type ever undertaken little by little exposing all the remains through all of its building phases right back to the site's earliest Mesolithic activity Archaeology is by its very nature a destructive process so the completeness of the excavation meant that no Trace was left in the landscape but every Last Detail was recorded cataloged and preserved to the extent that a section of the northern chamber could be reconstructed Stoned by Stone at the corinium Museum in Siren cester so visitors really can get a sense of how these tombs may have appeared when they were in use the Barrow contained two L-shaped burial Chambers about halfway down each side the earliest burials being those deeper into the heart of the Barrow with later burials being laid progressively towards the outside and from these two Chambers the archaeologists collected over 9,000 bones and Bone fragments from 35 individuals and this is where the magic starts at the resource center and storage facility of the kinian museum in San sester in the 40 years since those meticulous excavations were carried out archaeology has reached a level of scientific potential completely unimagined those few decades ago refinements in dating capabilities completely new techniques in isotope and biochemical analysis increasingly showing us where people lived where they grew up what they ate even how far they traveled and perhaps one of the most profound developments of all the science of ancient DNA or adna for short in 2021 a multinational team of experts took on the challenge of analyzing the DNA from the individuals buried in Hazelton North unraveling the world's earliest known family tree buried in Hazelton North were four generations of one extended family who lived roughly 5,700 years ago one man was buried here with four women and their children and their grandchildren and their great grandchildren now we can't say for sure whether these partners are telling us that this was a polygamous household it's just as possible that the man found himself a new wife when one died but these bones do talk we know that here at least this was a patrilineal society because brothers were buried with fathers and each subsequent burial was arranged depending on their relationship to the first generation mothers and there were two daughters buried here who died in childhood but there were no adult daughters telling us with a fair degree of certainty that wives would be buried in the family tombs of their husbands and we also know that families were as complicated then as they are today there were stepsons in the Tomb males whose mothers are present but they biological fathers aren't and still others who have no genetic connection with anybody else in the Tomb at all maybe people who married into the family but never had children of their own being able to put some metaphorical flesh back on these ancient bones takes archaeology and by exension us a step closer to stripping away the anonymity of these Neolithic people we can relate to them understand them a little better with each and every detail remember the out of season excavation I showed you well that work is ongoing and being carried out with unprecedented rigor scientific knoow and laboratory techniques we have a little while to wait a few more seasons maybe and who knows what secrets and what Revelations lie in store for us what stories lie within these silent ancient [Music] soils [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Prehistory Guys

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Keywords: the prehistory guys, the prehistory guys youtube, michael bott, rupert soskin, ancient history, prehistoric archaeology, prehistory videos, archaeologist interviews, ancient mysteries, prehistoric man, severn cotswold long barrows, neolithic long barrows, neolithic britain, Britains ancient tombs, waylands smithy, west Kennett long barrow, belas knap, hetty pegglars tump, Arthurs stone

Id: VLGYNtYXKLU

Length: 24min 58sec (1498 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2023