The Lost Byzantine Harbour In Cornwall | 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 a few years ago some geophys was done over some crop marks in that field up there and it produced some of the most tantalizing results that we've seen for years not only that but a metal detectorist has found a tiny bit of bronze age gold up there and lots of pottery has come up including this fifth century piece but this is cornwall this is turkish and this tiny little bit believe it or not is african so what on earth is going on here well evidence has been found suggesting ancient mariners plied these waters thousands of years ago bringing in from overseas exotic goods such as wine silk and papyrus and taking away local tin and copper so is there the remotest chance that this is the shadow of an early trading site the like of which we've never seen on time team before as usual we've got just three days to find out [Music] [Music] [Music] the atlantic coast in cornwall is a spectacular and perilous place for a sailor notoriously difficult to navigate and littered with treacherous rocks but in amongst the dangers are sheltered havens like this the mouth of the river camel a huge tidal inlet that joins the ancient fishing port of padstow to the sea and just a couple of hundred meters from the turbulent atlantic is like overlooking a beautiful sandy cove [Music] this is so nice it just reminds me of holidays as a kid up on a headland watching the boats coming in and out and they've probably been coming in and out of an history like this for thousands of years because this is an ideal place to live just above the beach south facing you know settlement in this field here steve spectacular geoffers just amazing geoff is tony and um we first became aware of this site as a result of metal detecting activity and the range of uh bronze age and roman material a few years later i did a flight over the area looking for crop marks and one of the sites that we recorded was this field and we found a lot of circular features ring ditches at the top of the field john do you think these are houses i'm sure some of them must be i mean look at the detail you can actually see what appears to be a central hearth within that particular structure i'm sure we're seeing lots of houses across the field but they didn't get a town planner in did they no but you wouldn't expect that at that date if this is light prehistoric you know they didn't build things on grids and layouts then it's much more random and haphazard how they're doing it we not only need to find out why this is this shape and how old it is but what it was doing here at all what is functional that's right is it something to do with the trading port or something like that in the estuary so with the old geophys as our guide we're going to start our investigation by opening two trenches one in each of the fields that overlooks the beach in the lower field nearest the cove matt and raksha are putting a trench in over a large geophys anomaly which doesn't much look like the traditional round houses in the other field could it be because the archaeology here as mick suspects was linked to ancient trade whereas over in the upper field phil's investigating what could be an iron age roundhouse that wouldn't normally be associated with the types of fines previously discovered on this site fines that include pieces of bronze ajax roman coins and of course the intriguing exotic fifth and sixth century pottery from overseas in fact we could be looking at a thousand years of activity but unfortunately most of this material has been found lying about on the ground and that means the archaeologists can't use it to date anything here so until we uncover our own fines buried safely in our own archaeology we can only make an educated guess at the date of the settlement well i think they could be bronze age houses i mean they're sort of eight to 12 meters diameter that's spot on for bronze age and then i suspect they probably continue into the iron age but don't forget down here we're not in a particularly romanized part of the country we shouldn't assume that in the roman period they go on to rectangular buildings villas that sort of thing there's very little of that in cornwall there's no reason why this can't go on into the roman period or even into the post-roman period and still be using roundhouses it could be a very long period one thing that fascinates me about this geophys is that they seem to have really thick walls around these houses what i think you've got is an outer stone face a core of rubbish midden material and then another inner stone call so it's a composite wall does cavity rubbish insulation make any sense to you francis well sort of sense tony yeah i think the main thing is you've got structure you may have fines actually on the floor in the central halves but what that geophys tells me is that those houses are very understanding well we've dug prehistoric round houses before on time team and circles like this do suggest the remains of a mud or stone house roofed with thatch or turf it might also be surrounded by a ditch to drain away the rainwater while inside there's normally a hearth for the family fire [Music] but although archaeologically they're fairly easy to uncover it's much more difficult to date a prehistoric house what you need are fines [Music] well it's very corroded the edges are all really rough this looks suspiciously like a coin normally the perfect start for a time team dig except there weren't coins like this around in the iron age and within minutes matt's trench produces another surprise slag we did actually find some of this in the top salon it was quite a big hefty piece yeah it's from the top of that silks underneath all this subsoil stuff pieces of slag imply evidence of industrial activity but as yet we have no date i'll have a look at this this is the first find of any significance that's come out of that trench it's pretty manky i don't know if you'll be able to date it from its shape it's obviously um a coin and it's a yeah i was there it's a coin this is a roman coin which is nice to see because several others have been found in the field by the metal detectors why do you say that's roman um from its shape it's it's been hammered by using a hand hammer and also i can probably go even a bit further and say that it's most likely from the emperor hadrian who was around about the second century a.d and it's hadrian because from the shape of the actual head the communist coin which has that sort of shape on it is of hadrian so confident and in front of a television camera that's experience look at that how many of you could tell that that was a coin of the emperor hadrian so our first piece of dating material puts matt's trench firmly into the roman period possibly centuries after our potential prehistoric settlement in the other field that is if we can find it because at the moment all we've got in phil's trench are a series of strange stone features which phil is convinced are natural bridge however is more optimistic and believes they could be remains of a structure john is simply bemused and confused well i mean you've definitely got a good edge swinging around there back in the lower field matt's on a roll um pottery prehistoric it's cornish what we call native courseware i wouldn't like to say whether it was iron age or or roman because it doesn't change a great deal but it's it's that kind of period so and that's just out of this that's just out of the edge here where this naturals cut away into this silk stuff isn't it so stratified among this this material it's uh it's good dating yeah i think here's the second one that's a rim there you go yeah it looks like the base of a straight-sided jar again native courseware and and look at the state of the pot it's obviously been used for cooking yeah really burnt sounds great more intriguing finds but no evidence yet that matt's archaeology has got anything to do with phil's possible settlement and in spite of matt's fines i'm also starting to worry about mick's hunch that this was an ancient trading site even if at first glance it seems to be in the ideal position this water is far too shallow to navigate even at high tide and that's not all stewart believes these cliffs are much the same as 2000 years ago and anyone can see that it would have been very tricky mooring ships alongside so did the exotic overseas pottery really come here by boat stewart's job over the next three days is to find out what links this quiet cove to the civilizations of north africa and the middle east on top of the cliffs the search for the iron age village continues phil's still trying to locate a roundhouse and he's now extended the trench to see if these rock features are indeed part of a structure that makes a lot of sense widening and lengthen that a bit doesn't it to get it clearer yeah at the moment we can't actually see the curving arc of the ditch but although we may be lacking firm evidence of a roundhouse john's convinced he's found the edge of the village yeah i mean it looks as though we've reached the limits in this direction at any rate of the ring ditches right and it's just possible there's a sort of boundary that's coincidental yeah that's what really interests me john that boundary ditch because it then continues further on but if the boundary ditch is contemporary with those houses then i think that gives us a much better chance of dating the houses than stuff you'll find inside them my thought was to put a trench that looks at the interior again a second look goes from that possible half feature across the ring ditch and also over the boundary so along that line so francis is opening a new trench in the upper field to see if we can locate another roundhouse and to see if that structure is built up against the boundary ditch it should also increase our chances of finding some dating evidence in the lower field match trench is starting to look like a house or so he tells me and the fines are tantalizing this is another one of these imported exotics i don't recognize the specific type although i do recognize that we've had identical material from tintagel which is the known type site here in cornwall which is only a few miles up the coast so where do you think it's imported from it's most likely come from turkey in the fifth or sixth centuries right that's post post roman yes yes this is fantastic our first link to the mediterranean and just as importantly it looks as if this structure was used by local people from the early roman period until 200 years after the romans had left britain and that means at the minute there's little to link it to the prehistoric puzzles in the other field where in spite of the gfiz phil's been struggling all day to find anything that looks remotely like an iron age roundhouse any sign of a hearth no not yet not yet but i i mean granted he's found ditches that could have been cut away for drainage but he still hasn't got any fines in fact the most iron age roundhouse-ish type structure on site seems to be in matt's much later roman and beyond trench the geophysics showed this huge ring in this field here and this is the ring here it's this ditch ah so that is actually that yeah it goes all the way around like that so now i'm walking into the house and you can see that the saw is kind of going this dark grey colour especially around here that's because there's so much charcoal in here and we found some burnt animal bone up there as well so i mean there's just their rubbish all over the floor really is this the wall on the other side ah now according to the geophysics the ditch there the wall ditch should go round behind you and should be at the other end of the trench there so this should be about the center of the house so is this the half that's producing all the charcoal and burnt materials yeah it looks like it right you've got fines in the finest tray yep with some great stuff out of here are you down a bit down there yeah there's another bit in situ down there you can see that's a bit of amphora so these are these big wine or royal storage jars and this is coming from the east mediterranean then yep that's post roman as well that's fifth or sixth century so if this isn't my outside wall where is the other outside well according to the geophysics it should be right about the other end of the trench there right here somewhere yep rack shark can you stand up for a sec and the other wall is where raksha is if that's right it's a heck of a big building mate it's a huge building especially if it's producing material like this this post-roman stuff that's really exciting why would it be so significant if it was that sort of date because we don't get structures that are sort of post-roman very often particularly with the fines associated with them and this is the so-called dark ages because we don't know very much about it usually because we can't tell her of that period because we haven't got the fines to go with them so if this is fifth or sixth century then this could actually be illuminating the dark ages which isn't a bad job for tomorrow is it [Music] day two in our investigation of an ancient settlement in cornwall that we think may have been involved with sea trading we've had some striking possibly trade related fines in matt's trench but so far nothing to really prove this place was a port and in spite of phil's best efforts and france is digging a new trench we just can't seem to find the village promised by the cracking geophys in the upper field yesterday evening we got really excited about the trench on the far side of that hedge because we think we may have a very rare fifth or sixth century aed roundhouse over here we're about a thousand years earlier so francis should i be as excited about this strange of course you should tony we've got what looks like it's the remains of an iron age floor in situ and then right in the middle of them here you've got this burnt earth and that i think is the central hearth and then just to one side of it we got that that piece of pottery that's good quality stuff isn't it yeah i think that's probably second century bc something like that later on age but over here we've got the ditch that went round the outside of the house so the wall would have been about here and then over here it gets better we've got another ditch and that's the ditch that went outside the house but then around all the houses in the settlement so this is the enclosure ditch around the outside so when we get the relationship of this stitch to that ditch to the house we've actually potentially got the phasing of the settlement mick what's the significance about the fact that we've got an iron age hut here hundreds of years before the romans arrived and over the other side of the hedge we've got a post-roman hut well in a way this is what we expected to find when we saw all those crop marks and that geophysically i think we all said late prehistoric bronze age or iron age so this you know is really what we expected it to be we didn't expect to get anything like that but of course that might turn out to have iron age stuff underneath it and this might still produce some post-roman stuff so it's probably all part of the same settlement although mick sounds confident the fact is the dating evidence so far suggests there's a gap of at least a couple of hundred years between the archaeology in the two fields so we could be looking at an entirely different settlement here in the lower field but it's a good one matt and raksha have already found evidence of industry trade and most intriguingly what could be a rare post-roman roundhouse but to be sure they need to find an entrance two potential ones are here aren't they or possibly that yeah yeah that looks quite good actually isn't it we go there the star find in matt's trench yesterday was this small piece of turkish pottery that had somehow traveled hundreds even thousands of miles from the mediterranean ports to cornwall in the fifth or sixth century and it's this evidence along with the pieces of african pot that have already been found that lead archaeologists to believe our cove could once have been visited by ships from all over southern europe the problem for me is it seems an odd place to put a harbour talk to local fishermen who've plied these waters all their lives and they'll tell you that this quiet stretch of the cornish coast is deceptively dangerous you've got a big swallow coming in it turns the boats over they get there and they get smashed up is there a way through that local people will know or do you just have to leave it alone only on the high water the local boats will go in any time after about three hours three hours or four hours flood then they can go in and they take our time they come across the bar and go across them it would have been incredibly difficult a couple of thousand years ago wouldn't it if you were coming in from turkey or africa somewhere and you you found this that was where the sailing ships went to ground you see because they would come up channel with like a southwest breeze scale of wind we'll say as soon as they got in here was southwest winded coming out the river adam and that's how they all found it on the shore over there they wouldn't know what it is and a quick look at the modern navigation map would seem to confirm that this is not an ideal place for a port this is the the modern map and our site is just in there and you can see immediately how how sheltered it is around the back of this headland here you've got the full force of the atlantic coming up here but if you come around here it's perfectly sheltered this green area is all sands and which you wouldn't really want to to bring a boat over the main channel of the camel is out in the middle now going off down the estuary down up towards panster but now that stewart's got his hands on the earliest admiralty charts for the cove he's beginning to think that a harbour here wouldn't be total madness thanks to the constantly shifting sands the area in the middle of channel is completely blocked off with these sandbanks up here the modern channel cuts right through that it does sandbank there and this is called oh crunchy it's called the doom bar this is 1634 a little bit more stylized but our site is in this area here and it's showing that the sea coming up into the bay harbour cover the little boats i think that might be the cartographer's way of saying here here be harbour sort of thing so there seems to be a lot of evidence going back to the 17th century that there is the possibility that water comes right up into this bay and it could function as a harbour so i think these charts and the whole story of the navigation around this could help us work out whether this was actually a trading center would have functioned as a major port actually [Music] so with the renewed confidence in our potential port jiffys go back into the lower field to look for any signs of occupation or activity in between our dark age house and the beach while matt is continuing to search for the other side of this massive round building and hopefully a doorway down on the beach stewart's about to test his theory that there was once enough deep water here to allow ships to reach an ancient harbour yeah i just love the high-tech approach of getting a large lump of metal and shoving in the ground oh sam [Music] if they can tell how deep the channel was in ancient times then we should be able to work out how big a boat could have sailed here thousands of years ago got some lovely bits of pottery coming up now carl over in the iron age settlement it looks like phil's made the breakthrough he's been hoping for the confusing strips of rock are beginning to reveal a recognizable shape and there's at last some dateable pottery from the trench well that's fantastic this is the first distinctive iron age shirt i've seen on the site i can tell that because it's very upright in nature whereas the roman ones are much more folded over probably sort of late third early second century bc so there's absolutely no doubt this could not be into the roman period no this is definitely iron age from the upright nature of the rim i mean the thing that strikes me is that that shirt and the others with it are so big and in such good condition they can only have come from this building absolutely it would seem phil's now confident enough to say that there is a building in his trench and it's roughly the same date as francis's roundhouse the trouble for me with a trench like this is all i can see are these great stripes of natural rock with this gritty stuff in between and then down here a great tumble of stuff it's hard to imagine that anyone ever actually lived here it just all looks so bleak until you come up with something like this which phil just found and it's so crisp it could have been made 25 50 years ago but phil this is actually iron age isn't it almost certainly it is i mean we found it with all the iron age pottery it's a spindle whirl it's a natural stone with a perfect hole just drilled right the way through it and they would have used it to to spin their yarn i mean what you have is you have a stick coming through there and you you attach the wall to the top and you literally drop it and at the same time you spin it and this weight allows the momentum of the spindle world to keep going so you can tease out your yarn do you get the same sense of relief as i do that at last we've come up with something that belonged to a tangible human being who was living in the landscape well that's right i mean it would have been a presumably a woman who would have actually been making wool uh or making the taking the wall to make yarn for garments and although we haven't got the piece of stick and although we haven't got the yarn we haven't got the woolen garments we know they existed simply because we got this [Music] but as one archaeological door opens another slams in your face we've gained an extra roundhouse in phil's trench but francis seems to have lost the settlement ditch he told me was right here uh yes well that's what we thought this morning um but i now think that it's the ditch that goes all the way around a house but you said that ran round the whole iron age roundhouse that ditch this one ran around the whole settlement yes um the problem has been that the ditch that went all the way around the house isn't there so you weren't quite 100 right no i was 100 wrong so what is this well look here's your outer ditch for your house yeah okay then the wall would have been about here and then here is the center of the house and right in the center look we have a fantastically good hearth that is gorgeous isn't it lined with stone and then with all this burning here and it's uh cut into a floor and so this is this is certainly the level where people actually walk so that's very important and it's in a sort of oval feature that might just be the filling of a grave with a crouch burial in it because on iron age sites sometimes they placed halves on top of ancestral graves that would be nice wouldn't it it would be lovely we may have lost one of our targets but it looks like we might have cracked what's going on in this top field or at least some of what's going on in this top field nick we've got an iron age roundhouse in that trench there yep got an iron age roundhouse in that trench there are you happy to say that these are all likely to be iron age roundhouses i think that's the reasonable conclusion for that what we don't know though of course is what these linear things are that run around the site what do you think they might be well i think they're probably field boundaries going with early fields i mean they're probably the ditch or the bank that goes with the fuel band but we don't know what date they are they could be earlier in the iron age it could take us back into the bronze age or indeed they could be later than the iron age i think tomorrow we've got to try and find that out henry's now reached two and a half meters below modern levels and deeper than the old charts show the sand has turned to a grey silty mud that could be the surface of our ancient channel this all looks very promising so we're starting to try and work out what sort of ship could have made its way into this cove we're also building up a more detailed profile of when and from where the more exotic finds on this site first arrived here the pottery in fact is extremely helpful for dating what's going on in this trench this pottery is from the fifth and the sixth centuries and what's very interesting is that the pottery is coming from the mediterranean and some of it's coming from the eastern mediterranean anthea harris is a byzantine expert that's the period after the roman empire crumbled to you and i the theory that this little cove had a trading link with the middle east is backed up by the fines made in matt's trench such as the roman coins and turkish pottery but i'm not clear what sort of building matt's digging hang on if this is the outside ditch where's the outside wall of the heart the wall is actually there on top of that slating natural then you've got the tumbled stone but yesterday we thought the outside wall was there so now the house is about two-thirds the size it was yesterday well it's more like half the size actually so unfair yesterday i'm going oh this is one of the most important post-roman houses that has ever been discovered it's so big but it's still important because it's still got the post-roman pottery in the top layer so it probably is a post-roman building anything else wrong with it it's not looking really quite as round as it was it's more rectangular or something it's not looking quite as round as it was that is archaeology speaking perhaps not round at all but more i mean it could be rectangular but we can't be sure of that yet because we're still cleaning the job so it does still make sense even though it's much smaller than we thought the hearth isn't where we thought it was and it's rectangular not round it might be rectangular but apart from that nothing's changed well i'm glad we've got that straight so with just an hour or so to go on day two we've made significant advances in both fields but the picture's still elusive at least some people have been having fun during our trip to the seaside while we've been putting our trenches in up there a couple of the team have been mucking about on the beach while most people would just write i love you or hello in the sand anthea and stuart have created an entire map of europe and here we've been talking about our pottery coming from places like turkey and north africa but where exactly well tony as you can see i'm standing in north africa and this piece of seaweed represents the city of carthage and this is the region from which we get african red slipware but you're right this is not the only place that we're getting pottery from from this site we're actually getting pottery also from the eastern part of the mediterranean we've got pottery coming out of southwest turkey in particular around about the antioch region and we've got pottery which comes from the greek islands as well and we think that what we may be seeing there for is evidence of shipping coming directly from the east and possibly the city of constantinople going through the mediterranean and up the atlantic coast to cornwall but stuart look behind you that's the mouth of the river camel do we really think that 2000 years ago ships would have been able to sail through here and avoid all this sand in order to land by the side of our little site it would the evidence is increasing towards that effect we've got the vessels coming up the atlantic and coming into the mouth of the estuary here and we know those vessels are about 13 15 foot deep in the water when they're laden and the entry to the channel out there is about 20 foot deep so it's increasingly likely this whole bay could have functioned as a deep water port for those vessels okay he's convinced me but we still have a lot of work to do to reveal the full story of this site [Music] to start with we don't know if the archaeology in the two fields we're digging is even part of the same village or how long there was a settlement here while we'd be looking for bronze age farmers in this field over here we'll be continuing our hunt for the dark age traders the house itself is proving pretty difficult to sort out but hopefully we'll finish that tomorrow in the meantime look at this geoff is which is between where the house is and this curve where the harbour would have once been what's going on here is this industry is it commerce is it an early rickstein fish restaurant we'll find out tomorrow beginning of day three here at our cornish coastal site near padstow and in prehistoric times we reckon there was a port all the way around here we've certainly found iron age round houses up on the headland there and a mysterious structure from the time just after the romans left britain but last night john produced this really amazing bit of geo fizz a bit dramatic for the end of day two isn't it that's pretty good i mean the thing is these results are so different to the sort of roundhouse responses yeah these look like small scale industrial activities sort of workshops uh maybe metalworking boat building if our port is down here and our post-roman building is here and this is between and that's a really interesting idea because that could be post roman in date and if it is that that would be exciting if we're right this is the prime location overlooking the ancient harbour the sort of place where foreign traders would have come ashore met the locals and exchanged their wares for cornish goods such as tin and copper we've already uncovered some evidence of this trade in matt's trench as well as a small and not terribly round house we haven't though been able to work out how this building fitted into the port but we've all got high hopes for phil's new trench albeit for different reasons mick believes this is just the right place for a trading post whereas john giafiz has put his money on something like a workshop either way if we're lucky we should get more information about where our ancient traders were from and when they visited [Music] oh oh look at that is that samia well i think it is except that it's so badly decayed all the the really bright red has worn off but look it's got this sort of spirally pattern going around there and around there it's very abraded well it is that is but at least it's good roman but at this stage it's impossible to tell if a good roman was actually here over in the other field we have a whole prehistoric village to deal with and francis is now looking for signs of the first settlers possibly from the bronze age if francis does uncover a prehistoric trackway it could push the date of our site back by another thousand years in the iron age roundhouses we've had mixed results unfortunately tracy can't find any evidence of a burial under the hearth that francis was talking about yesterday so we're going to close this trench down but in phil's old roundhouse trench bridge is still coming up with the goods we've got a small bit of slate that's come up and it's got a deliberate puncture through it and i'm just thinking about whether it's part of roofing uh no at least i hope not because you shouldn't have roof slates for at least a thousand years after the iron age okay i've got two other options for you how about a weight for thatching or it's associated with fishing it's a bit light for a thatch weight but i like the fishing suggestion because it has actually been sort of napped around the edges yes it has been so it's been deliberately reduced in size but that's really nice because obviously people were using the sea there they would have been fishing and this is evidence of it yes okay although we haven't any dating evidence to link these round houses with the port we're digging the archaeologists believe they could have been occupied well into the roman period francis i've put round houses or generic roundhouses on top of where the geophysics showed these ring features but it looks quite strange really i suspect these houses would have had a lot more by way of clutter around them and the pictures emerging of a densely populated settlement overlooking the bay but we still don't know if it had anything to do with the trading port carl this shellman's beginning to come up the trumps i mean down in phil's harbour trench the fines are coming thick and fast unfortunately almost all of them are food waste and that's not what john wants to hear this is domestic rubbish so they're living here but it's not just domestic i mean surely this is sluggy sort of stuff or some sort of no this is actually burnt granite um but even so that's uh certainly subjected the granite to a heat which is far more than the domestic situation to reduce it to this sort of grey ash are you picking up slag or are you picking up burnt granite on your geophysics well to be honest i i can't differentiate between the two i mean they're gonna give such similar responses but the results we've got here suggest that there's more than just burnt granite there's some industrial process going on can you think about what industrial purposes they might have needed granite specifically for they'd have probably originally brought the granite to site for use as queen stones for perhaps grinding or crushing the oil but you know after time coincidence become useless for that function so then they may have used it to build a furnace or something out of because granite being an igneous rock would have been more resistant to heat initially so we want a furnace fill but you've got it on there yeah you find it phil i bet that one i can't oh well that's fantastic this is definitely a native roman where um certainly late second early third century that's fantastic we've definitely got the roman now it's still not a furnace though get on with it dating that's what we want over in matt's trench we still can't figure out what this not very round house is looks like doing could be two pieces actually they do now that's the same fifth and sixth century stuff that we had from this trench before this is really high status stuff i mean it would have had wine or olive oil in it but i mean you just don't find this sort of thing on most british sites and uh i mean to find one really fresh shirt it hasn't been lying around for long so that's got straight into the ground and there's another one underneath it let's get that out as well yeah oh yeah they're from the same pot what's the betting i can get them to join i'll get you a drink if you can sort it out oh there there you go you owe me a pint mat yes beautiful i'm glad we've got an experienced archaeologist on this dig [Music] this may be the least convincing pot reconstruction ever but it's yet more evidence of trade in this case oil or wine coming along this coast in the fifth or sixth century and if they brought a ship laden with cargo all the way from the heart of the byzantine empire it would strongly indicate that the merchants knew their journey would be worth it so we can only suppose they must have been exchanging their goods for the high-value tin and copper that cornwall was famous for but all our dating evidence shows this lucrative trade stop suddenly in the sixth century we've got a thousand years of trade we've got farming we've got some kind of industry we've got boats pulling up at the harbour and then suddenly bosch it all disappears why what went wrong during the course of the sixth century it's fairly clear that the byzantine empire probably overstretched itself financially it was trying to retake the west through a huge military campaign in italy and elsewhere and although that was successful temporarily it overstretched the byzantine empire financially at the same time they were putting a lot of resources into defending their cities into with fighting on their eastern frontier as well as building palaces and churches so just like the romans in rome 200 years previously they overstretched themselves and had to retract and we were left high and dry if you want to know more about trade between ancient britain and the middle east visit our website back in the upper field a jubilant francis has found his target i've no idea how he can tell from this rather manky trench but i know he's going to show me what's going on here well in some respects i think this is part of a key to the site that little depression where ian's working is in fact a ditch and there's another ditch here and those two ditches mark the edge of a drove way you say a drove away what are they driving along it sheep and cattle probably now if you look at where this drove way is going to and from at that end over there it starts just this side of those cottages yeah okay now all the way around this bay you've got open grazing on the edges of the cliffs and the rocks so you probably had thousands of sheep and cattle out there and then they were taken in probably in the autumn along this droveway and then beyond them over there you've got a large animal field or stocking closure now if you look at the edge of the settlement it's going round like that and then like that in two distinct arcs and i think that arc is defining the edge of that stockyard making it a usable shape and similarly this is defining the edge of an arable field and those two arable fields are precisely the same size which is what you need if you're a farmer what about the date uh now that's a tricky one we know that this drove way is in a terrace that was ground down by animals hooves over hundreds of years probably so i wouldn't be at all surprised if this drove way didn't begin in the bronze age then go on into the iron age when it was formalized by the ditches so for all we know there could be a thousand years of settlement on this hillside thank you francis that's why this cluster of houses was such a peculiar shape [Music] we simply haven't been able to find any material evidence that links round houses to the port complex next door but with such a dense collection of sturdy large houses i can't help but think this village must have benefited from the prosperity a successful port brings it's a theory that would appear to fit in with stewart's latest piece of work because he believes our site was managed by a powerful tribe you see that the headland all the way around here uh the village is in here and if you look between these two curves you see that line you're going to kind of ditch running across when you look in the field you can actually see it to the right going across the fields and across the track into the next phase there's a bank and ditch that cuts off that entire headline yeah well that's a classic promontory for to the iron edge where you control the the headland and cut it off and i think that's why the village here it's kind of supporting that center and indeed the the linearity of that settlement and its direction we've puzzled about and when you look at it it's on this line here and it points literally towards where you ought to cross into this tribal or chieftain center upon the hill i think its orientation is because it's geared towards that center up there yeah but i think it would be a mistake to think that the headland and and the political center up there actually had many people living on it i think the people were actually living in our settlement over there and because they're on the best agricultural land whereas up there they'd have been wind blasted and exposed and i think these people were supporting the headland [Applause] throughout the day in phil's harbour trench we've been building up a picture of roman traders we found coins samian wear slag and food waste but we've been missing a crucial piece of evidence until now these tony are african red slitwear shirts which down here in cornwall generally mean fifth and sixth century deposits so that's post-roman indeed yes and where were they found well this is the important thing those shirts were found in there in other words they are well stratified all the other shirts that we've had of that type of pottery have been in the colluvium the hill wash so they're totally unstratified the the stratification of them is good now that's digging speak for undisturbed archaeology and it proves that these byzantine finds in phil's trench a contemporary with mats finds next door although we didn't find any proof to link our two fields we now believe the whole site probably evolved over many hundreds of years from a bronze age farming community into one of the small but bustling late iron age trading centers scattered around the cornish coast meeting the demands for local commodities as the roman empire expanded after the romans disappeared in the 5th century merchants would have continued to call in occasionally with their exotic goods until the byzantine empire faded several hundred years later it's lovely isn't it the perfect cornish seaside picture with fields rolling down to the sea it's hard to imagine just how busy it must have been in the ancient past with a thriving settlement trading with ships sailing in from the continent and beyond and as they came in below that cliff just there they would have brought with them fancy goods like oil and wine and new ideas too perfectly symbolized by this find that's come up in the last hour or so it's a stylus possibly the earliest evidence of writing ever found in cornwall dating from around 200 a.d maybe it was used to record all those imports actually after three days i could murder an emperor of wine myself [Music] you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 65,524

Rating: 4.9016581 out of 5

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, british archaeology documentary, time team, british history, archaeology, archeological dig

Id: 1DY7f_YVoKU

Length: 48min 8sec (2888 seconds)

Published: Tue May 11 2021