The Lost Iron Age Fortress In Wittenham | 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 an iron age hill fort it's a kind of prehistoric castle carved as its name suggests into the top of an impressive natural hill there are literally thousands of monuments like this littered across the british landscape but this one at wittenaum in oxfordshire is very unusual because right next to it is another even more impressive hill with nothing visible on it except for a clump of trees this second hill round hill as it's known has been baffling archaeologists for centuries they're sure it's got something to do with the tribe that built the iron age fort but what previous archaeology has been small scale but has produced some tantalizing clues in the 18th century two skeletons were found at the top of the hill and in the 1940s archaeologists put in a small trench somewhere down there and found evidence of a building and masses of iron age pottery so clearly something was going on around here but what and how does it tie in to the hill fort we've got just three days to find out oh and we've got a bit of a problem with some newts [Music] a local archaeology unit has been excavating the iron age hill fort for the past three weeks it's never been dug before and they're hoping to discover when and how it was built and what it originally looked like they'd also love to find out what its iron age inhabitants used the neighbouring hill for round hill is only 200 meters away and is actually higher than the fort but they haven't got the time or money to investigate it which is where we come in so what can we do to help you with what you're doing well we've concentrated on the no it's never been dug but it's presumed to be an early on a sort of 600 bc hill fort the other hills more enigmatic and i think there's a lot to be done up there because we just don't have the background what are we going to do then well in the 18th century they found burials on the other hill here and so we've actually started putting a trench in the wood up there to see whether we can sort of sort that out we've already started to work we haven't even done the geo fissure no but it's difficult to do the geophysics in woodland like that so we've had to go for where there are gaps in the trees and then about 60 years ago a local chap called rhodes dug a hole down here and found the remains of what might be a roman villa but he also found masses of iron age material so there may be some sort of settlement across this area that goes with the hill fort so the relationship that'll be interesting so we're off at a cracking pace phil and francis are delving into the top of our hill they've no idea what they're going to find they could be buildings up here or more bodies but they're convinced there must be something and we're not restricting ourselves to the summit of the hill it was somewhere on this hillside that local archaeologist pp rhodes discovered his iron age building we want to find out whether it was an isolated structure or part of a much larger settlement but first we've got to find his trench we've got measurements he tells us the center of his square trench was 510 feet from the little whitton and wallingford road at the point where the footpath meets the road here so 510 along there and then 103 between the central trench and back onto the road when it's all in feet of course yeah not meters we can work out using a bit of mass how far we have to go along the road and it's just a basic offset from that point if they can find rhodes old trench we'll be able to expose more of the iron age building he found do you think you can get that before the geophysics dude the question then will be whether the people who lived in rhodes iron age building had anything to do with the fort towering over them where tim and his team have already opened a vast trench across the ramparts they're searching for pottery and features to help date the hill fort and find out how and why it was built we know we're near the bottom of this t-shirt but the scale of these ramparts is really really quite something i mean you've done a huge sort of slice through them haven't you to presumably give you the profile of the of the ditches right the way from the interior to the bottom the aim is really to find to get back to the chalk and to get the full sequence if there is more than one cut of the ditch you know after all these sites were sometimes in use for hundreds of years of course when it was originally dug that chalk that they dug out of the bottom all the way up the side on the top of the rampart and on the outside it must have been an incredible sight yeah gleaming white sort of absolutely and and from here of course on the berkshire downs opposite there were other hill forts yeah that on a clear day you can see and could see us right up here on castle hill presumably there were fences along these banks well yes we we in fact just over here we've just started to uncover the outdoors yeah come on have a look we've only had just had this cleaned up by a machine but yeah we've already uncovered these dark circles one here one here yes they're quite stood on the front of the ramparts so this should have held the fighting platform up on the top in fact that's right from the size of the post holes tim estimates that the palisade would have provided a substantial and impressive added line of defense on top of the ramparts the summit of round hill is proving a trickier proposition try that try that phil's only been able to put two small trenches in among the trees so far there's no sign of buildings or bodies what's a natural it's uh standing gravel capping on the top with galt clean chalk that's what we got here there's the patch of gravel coming so that's a big fat nothing in trench one and the story from trench two is equally depressing it's utterly sterile very small no archaeology nothing in here no there isn't just nice geology there may well be juicy archaeology on top of this hill but because of the density of the tree cover we simply can't get at it and mick gives the order to abandon the summit what a disaster but all is perhaps not lost we've still got a huge area of ground below the summit to explore and the prospect of unearthing in it an iron age settlement if our luck turns if geophys can provide us with the target so what have we got then john well oh crikey that's good wow that's fantastic we're stood here then yeah and that's 80 meters up to that point you can see this fantastic ditched enclosure with an entrance at that point there what sort of date would you think that would be then oh just on morphology iron age maybe romano british right right well that would fit with excavation that was done somewhere in this area before which produced iron age and romano british pottery presumably we can't see roads trenching in that i think 10 feet is just that right we've got a 30 meter block here yeah yeah well the survey are trying to locate that as we speak with a mixture of sort of schoolboy maths and satellite surveys so we're waiting for them are we how do you feel about that well look i can give you some targets in the meantime i mean i'd personally like to dig that and dig one of those if not more right so per pits i think i think we should go for those two the terminal should be in here right that's a bit more like it nice crisp targets lots of wide open space so in go our next two trenches trench three at the entrance of the enclosure which could have protected a small settlement and trench four where we're hoping to find another section of the ditch and one of the pits at least the trenches will go in when we've dealt with our next little problem the whitnam clumps are home to a rare species of animal the great crested newt they're protected by law and we've only been given permission to dig here on condition that we stick to this previously negotiated zone and before we can start digging we've got to mow the area where we want to put our trenches and conduct a finger tip search any newts we find must be evacuated to a place of safety will i know one if i see one have you seen any of the pictures you certainly will this is what they're looking for the great crested news and this is uh a girl great crested nude so it's hands and knees job that's absolutely yeah in a row this wasn't in the truck searching the this area that's been known if i was a self-respecting knew i would have legged it out of here if somebody come along with a mower well if you've got your legs left well you can see we've moaned it high um so that there's very little chance of a new actually being known while we did it out come out wherever you are it's a time-consuming process but no newt's is good newts and an hour after we've decided where to put the two new trenches they're finally underway and almost straight away in trench three phil hits our first archaeology test right on it and it certainly does we've got mortar on that side and that side mortar on at least three four sides it's not a high quality floor is it i mean it but it's it's a it's a workmanlike floor absolutely yes yeah we get to pick a shovel into this just have a monkey in a boat with a trowel all the fines have been roman so far but phil's got a long way to go before he hits the bottom of the ancient ditch so it could still turn out to be iron age and henry's track down roads his old trench so we should find something iron age soon so here yeah but basically my measurements from rhodes is his description of where his trench is at the center of it just here well look phil's trench is going over the end of the ditch at the entrance yeah the point you're telling me is about here that's well away from this noise that i have with the building because he's going to be on the southeast corner of that building but his measurements put it just here we've got things here but the main building looks to be quite a bit over there we'll see we'll find out so once the area has been denuted trench five goes in here to locate rhodes iron age building phil you had a ropey old trench up the top of the hill this morning is this one any better i'll tell you what it is tony things have so totally changed we're literally getting fines by the bucket full are these all from that trench absolutely do you want to have a look at it yeah it's an amazing assemblage it's a right old mixture we've got quite a bit of roman material including building material and a range of pottery but in particular we've got a lot of iron age pottery mostly early iron age i think but the beauty of it is it's such in such big crisp pieces i mean look at that look they even fit together so i mean this stuff has not been moved very far and they seem to have quite sharpish edges don't they they haven't been rolled around a lot and and of course we've also got tessary as well so we are dealing with a roman building with a floral yep and again that that ties in with what rhodes found in 1948. now that phil's found both iron age and roman pottery in the enclosure ditch it looks as if people were living here from at least 600 bc to about 400 a.d that's a thousand years of continuous occupation inside the enclosure there's no sign yet of anything roman in trench five but matt has uncovered a layer of iron age pottery better still it's lying on a cobbled surface just as rhodes described south is that way so if we get that oriented so he's he's got that side of it in his trench our trench has obviously got the other side of it effectively coming around perhaps like that it looks rectilinear yeah it does i mean these red cobbles goes pretty much north south straight along there and there's nothing nothing across there at all so we've just clipped the corner but we've clipped the corner that he hasn't disturbed absolutely yeah i mean this is undisturbed here have you got any pottery yeah there's been some really nice bits actually i'll come over show you them huge lumps huge bits yeah i mean look at that the decorated piece wow look at that with a sort of thumb impressed decoration around there early iron age i think that was fantastic because one thing rhodes says the reason he's so convinced that this is a square building that's of iron age date is that the lair above it has almost exclusively iron age pottery in it yep matt and carrenza are convinced this is the square iron age building described by rhodes the question now is was it an isolated building or part of a settlement and did the people who lived in it have any part to play in the life of the nearby fort like perhaps building it in the first place quite clever engineering this i mean it looks like a very large ditch and a very large rampart that's because he's stupid the iron age engineers are very clever what they do basically is take the slope of the hill and cut a terrace into it and then just dig down on the terrace so that creates what looks like a massive ditch here put on most of the material down there so from below that looks like a massive rampart with a massive ditch behind it and another massive rampart it's just clever engineering minimal effort maximum effect yeah and what's quite interesting if you look at what you're you're going for rather more of a display than the seriousness indeed and i've looked at it yeah i don't buy that oh i've looked at it and what's interesting i've seen on lots of hill forts where you get really massive structures like this on one side yeah but go around the back end yeah and there's virtually nothing in terms of defensive capability and if you walk around this one what's interesting when you get round the side where the face is round hill yeah look at the size of the rampart and ditch there and it's nothing of this proportion you mentioned you know very impressive here that's facing towards the ridgeway and it strikes me you know that's where the opposition was over there so you made it look really grand over there towards round hill okay it's not as incredibly spectacular so they were probably friendly over there but i also wouldn't fancy going across those ramparts i mean seriously if you have blokes up the top there with slings and bows and arrows you see i think that's the lads on the ramparts is it defence back down in the valley beneath our hill ian's been trying to get to grips with the enclosure and although he's hit archaeology he's somewhat baffled well yeah he's supposed to be a pit i mean here we are on the geophysics it's this row here isn't it yeah and it's supposed to be that blob there yeah but we've got a load of flint so maybe it's the fill of a pit right we ought to be seeing the ditch of the enclosure up there aren't we well i think we might have the edge of this ditch coming through now right you see this line of white pepper all right sort of dipping down yep that's either the edge or it's a fill dipping into a ditch into all this big black morass oh so that could be all ditched then couldn't it i don't think we've got a back edge yet right okay end of day one and after a full start on the summit of round hill we're now wrestling with some intriguing archaeology we've got a huge enclosure ditch an iron age building inside it a pit filled with flints and a load of roman and iron age fines what does it all mean that's what we've got to find out tomorrow a new day a new set of geophys results and a big surprise this is the building we were looking at last night this is the thing that korenza thought might be a roman villa or something and look at our resistance results now good god that is the same area what is it resistance that's resistance and the black is showing high resistance it looks like a building it's aligned east west and there's a hint of an apps at that end which is that is that the east end that is the east end hang on so if it's aligned east west and it's got an apps does that mean we're looking at a church or something like that wow i mean it's the sort of thing that a church does and it eh i mean this looks too good to be true i i can't believe it myself to be honest where is it on the ground well basically we're just here but it's quite a big building it's 10 15 meters long we don't need a big trench to sort that out oh no we we need to put something across and establish exactly what it is that's right and how deep we've got to go down and then how well preserved it is and then what sort of building it is phil let me get this clear if it is a roman church that is very rare that is very very rare very very important indeed we've got to sort this one out it's the beginning of day two and the archaeologists are very funny normally they're so laid back but you really get this sense of suppressed excitement this morning it may all crash and burn by tomorrow but at the moment it feels like we may have something really important but we won't know until we dig so once the area has been denuted trench six will go in here on the south wall of the possible roman church meanwhile in trench three phil's still trying to date the ditch that encloses the site and he's found a tantalising clue i'll test your knowledge on roman artifacts nowadays got a very strange one here good lord see it's an iron thing and it's got a a socket there yeah see that and then it it it splays out at this end it's got these two sort of notches in it it's almost like it's a kind of three-pronged fork yep yeah except not too many roman forks i don't think there we go is it is it from a roman context do we think it's got all the roman pottery card it's got a testery with it it's got to be roman i have an idea actually i wonder if it isn't actually uh a perforated spearhead they're not very common they're associated in the literature with a particular rank in the roman army beneficiaries and it would be a ceremonial object as it happens we have an inscription from dorchester just over the hill recording a beneficiaries consolaris the discovery of a roman ceremonial spear placed at the entrance means that the ditch is more likely to be roman than iron age after all so to make absolutely sure stewart's checking out the other section of ditch in trench four oh well going on down i think i'm getting near the bottom now if you've got anything to to date it i think it's firmly roman because we're getting big chunks of this tile i'm afraid don't be afraid it's fine it looks as if our chances of finding an iron age settlement are quite slim we now know that the enclosure ditch is definitely roman and the gfiz results are pointing to a building that's probably roman as well the only iron age building we've found so far is rhodes in trench five what started as an iron age story is beginning to take a rather roman turn but there's no doubt that this hill fought iron age and at the bottom of a pit within the ramparts tim's team have made a disturbing discovery this is the body of a small child how do you know it's a child from the size of the bones uh some of them have come loose as as we've been cleaning this one in particular which is the humerus this bone here measured that and the measurement suggests that the baby was about a month old when when it died can you tell which way it's lying we're a bit confused about that at the moment uh you got the skull here that's the front so it looks like the head was pushed down right forward possibly the body's coming round like this maybe in a slightly crouched position we can't really be certain at the moment why would they have put a baby in a pit well if this was a rubbish pit as people used to believe then that was chucking away a baby with the rubbish now i don't think people in the iron age were like that people have never been like that so i think that was a deliberate placing and it's probably quite a you know a special reverential very sad deposit do you buy that tim i'm not convinced entirely i think that there are a lot of burials as as francis says in these pits but with infants in particular you know you get roman infants in ditches all over the place and i suspect that they had a different view of how important these infants were so they may have just put them into the ground where there were convenient hulls this is the the prosaic and the poet isn't it absolutely without a glimpse of any newts phil's hot on the trail of our mystery building in trench six and already he's hit a layer of demolition rubble just layers and lines and layers it's too early to tell whether this is the rare roman church we hope it is look at that but the roof tiles and tesserai from the rubble confirmed that it is at least roman a couple of hours later the first traces of the foundations themselves begin to appear phil's confidence is growing this is where they reckon the wall was going to be and here we've actually got big lumps of mortar which may actually represent where they've demolished a wall and actually got bits of mortar and then beyond that is where the geophysics says that the anomalies die out and we just go into a a soil but if we're going to prove that this is a church here then the trench is going to be where the apps is but you decided not to put it where they are that's right i mean at the moment we haven't defined the apps well enough what we wanted to know is is what the state of this building is the best way to do that is to is to put a trench exactly where you've got a clearly defined edge if you've got a clearly defined edge that is the best way to start looking for the building and then if we can resolve that then we can either extend the trench or put in another one to actually look at the apps in other words i'm gonna have to be a bit patient but there's plenty to get on with we've still got a whole iron age settlement to find and it looks as if francis is about to open a new front what is it was it francis are you newt fertiling i am tony yes i am it makes a great change from archaeology does it imply that you're going to dig yes but less than an hour ago mick said to me whatever we do we mustn't put in any more trenches what we've got to do is concentrate on what we've got yeah well i got at him over lunch why well i'm reasonably sure i think we all are but that enclosure is is a roman feature of some sort yeah and i'm interested in that early pottery that came out of it and just outside the enclosure here there's a group of pits and i got a pretty good idea that they're going to turn out to be early iron age so i'm really keen to get my my fingers on that stuff so because you're the prehistoric expert you can pull rank with mick who isn't basically well i won't say that's what happened but there was a an exchange of views why are you excited about pits well the thing is these pits they were deliberately filled in the pottery is very fresh it's in superb condition and we'll get environmental samples out of them actually tell us how people were living on these clumps and around these clamps so actually the key to explaining what life was like here lies in those pits the geophys results are showing a rash of pits all over the site which suggests a sizeable spread of iron age settlement here if francis is right and these are pits and they are iron age hence trench seven into the thickest clump of them but in trench six phil's initial enthusiasm and confidence are fast evaporating the more he digs the less of our mystery roman building he finds it appears to have been so thoroughly demolished not even the foundations remain i still argue that in fact you can see the cut of the rubber trench going right up to there well i think it's been robbed totally away i mean we've got no floors we've got virtually no walls so that when they dismantled it i mean they just map dismounted it big time they just took everything away and that the only thing that was left was probably quite a discrete pile of rubble so sort of anything that was usable in terms of stone or whatever they've carted away pretty much [Music] phil will struggle to pick out the outline of the building let alone work out its function his only hope is that other parts of it have survived better so more in hope than expectation phil's opening a new trench to see if he can find another wall in better nick if there's one there at all luckily the news is better in france's new trench he's found his pit and it's full of bits of iron age debris which is going to get environmentally sampled looks to me rather like floor sweepings everything we've got so far has been very small and that's rather good that's what we want and the things that we find here could indicate things like diet and oh yeah and diet and what the how they were farming i mean you know have we got sheep bones or or are they growing corn you know what was going on here so see look there you go it's a typical the bone pieces are tiny they're all and that that's got this sort of fracture that comes from when you actually break up a bone when the animal shortly after it's been killed so it's still full of fat and and you get this characteristic it's called spiral breaking like that and there's lots of it the bone preservation here is superb we've already started to sieve the contents of the other pits and we've found a massive information to help tell us what life was like here in the iron age we found the bones and teeth from sheep pigs and cattle and we've also found traces of wheat and barley all of which show us that this must have been a very rich and productive area for farming but the very presence of a fort a few hundred meters away reminds us of a darker side to iron age life and although the baby in the pit was probably not a military casualty the archaeologists were now lifting it bone by bone are nevertheless disturbed by what they're finding i mean the one thing that is significant is that this baby's body is disposed of differently to most iron age dead because on whole we don't find them in the ground what is this still disturbs me is that the head is really upside down in relation to the torso that is the top of the head that is the lower part of the head and it's really quite upside down it could have been a sacrifice it's quite a nasty thought but it could have been and once the skeleton was removed another theory presented itself now that's interesting you see that white stone in there come across that before in sort of iron age context yesterday these appeared they were higher up but in this old position here so it's almost like resting out on them it does look as if there's been some sort of careful ritual putting the baby into the ground doesn't it with a sort of burnt water and orb structure underneath it and then the stones placed around its head quite a lot of care really but sadly we'll never know if it was buried by its parents or left as an honoured sacrifice to the gods the baby has actually been the least of karenza's worries all day she and matt have been scraping away in trench five trying to reveal more of our only iron age structure yesterday they found a massive iron age pottery dating to the 6th and 7th centuries bc and under it a cobbled floor surface and some post holes today they're extending the trench delving deeper into the archaeology and they found not only more of the iron age building but evidence of a second roman building this is the roman building the mortar floor which has got mixed in bits of wall plug painted wall plaster from an earlier building in it so we know that's an earlier building and then down here we've got this iron age surface but this is the critical thing there's about eight inches buildup of plough soil here with no occupation in it at all so that's telling us that between the middle iron age at the absolute latest and the second century a.d this part of the site at least was completely abandoned there's no continuity of occupation from the early early iron age through to the romans which means not only do we have both roman and iron age stories to worry about on this site but an uncomfortable 300-year gap between the two when the site was apparently abandoned what's going on this morning we all seem so incredibly focused on our mysterious absolute building and then we seem to lose that because the walls were robbed out you've just got excited about your pits over here and john's just given me a brand new lot of geophys with a whole load of other targets it seems to me we've entered the land of intellectual anarchy does it all fit together what we're getting is a focus towards if you like domestic life you know what we're seeing here is how people lived at the bottom of those hills and so i think we're helping to ask a lot of the questions that tim's trying to answer next door now we've got the pits francis thinking it's particularly interesting from my point of view because now we've seen these pits and we can recognize them on the geophysics we can see how far this iron age settlement seems to be extending and it's already gone way beyond where we'd expected we were focusing on one enclosure but we don't know whether it's part of a much bigger settlement so if we have time it would be nice to look at that i think that's really what it demands to doesn't it buy about tomorrow lunchtime we've got to look and see whether perhaps pop in a machine trench across that well we're not going to walk away from our roman building well phil says it's been pretty well trashed it's been recycled we might be lucky just to get the ghost of a building there even if we only get the robbed out walls we can still find out something about its scale and even its character so i think there's some mileage in it yet so a limited amount of work just to solve that would be really useful yeah yeah yeah let's go for that as well it's it's so tomorrow more geophys results to explore one last stab at the possible roman church and hopefully an iron age settlement to go with the fort join us after the break beginning of day three here at the whitnam clumps in oxfordshire and two days ago we started excavating at the top of that hill and found absolutely nothing so we began to look inside this area here because of this beautiful geophys and that's round about here and we found evidence of two roman buildings and some iron age stuff and a big roman ditch over there but now the whole excavation's spreading out all over the place it now looks as if the settlement was far bigger than we could have imagined and we want to know more about the people who lived here who were they how long were they here and what were they doing we've only got one day left but we can't ignore our search for what we're hoping could be a very rare roman church yesterday we were very depressed when we thought it had been robbed out but this morning phil's looking much happier i've literally gone down that much and look what i've come down onto this superb level incredibly compacted mortar floor whenever as i scrape it you can hear just how solid it is it's been protected by all this demolition rubble it must mean we're inside a building we've got to be with the floor of this quality we thought the whole building was going to be absolutely trashed it may not be as badly uh damaged as we thought it would be okay so that's coming along nicely what else we need to find that that third trench across the building we were looking for this is my apps it is it's your house so uh where's the trench for that here oh back where i was sorry about that yeah that should get the end of the building and maybe get the apps presumably uh why did you say uh we'll get the western end of the building you don't think it's an absolute i i'm not quite as confident but whatever the thing is is the end of the building certainly the end of the building geophysical extending their search towards the hill fort to see how far the iron age settlement stretches in that direction and at last phil gets a trench open to look for the apps so we might get a result on the possible church while he's busy in the trenches stu and i have taken to the air to get the bigger picture and we're rewarded with the most exciting discovery yet they cropped mark stewart yeah look at this there's a whole complex of them on this side of the road it's fantastic they're oh and it looks like there's a series of trackways there's enclosures what are the little real ones that look like spots well i think they must be picked that must be part of the complex that we've got the geophysical results from the other side of the road this is fantastic isn't it we couldn't have wished for better conditions for finding crop marks with one of the hottest summers on record followed by a sharp burst of rain the features stand out clearly in the fields and it's even more obvious when the aerials are printed up it seems that the crop marks could be one of the most valuable clues to help us understand our settlement what really impressed me about what we saw from the helicopter was that that whole field seemed to be pock-marked with a little pits little depression it's quite clear in in the iron age they stored grain in silos underground silos cutting either the chalk or the gravel and you think well it will go rotten you know but we've tried it and it doesn't what what happens is you seal the top of the pit with clay with the grain in the grain then uses the oxygen up and then it goes dormant in in the carbon dioxide in the pit and it'll stay like that for several years and you've got the complete stored crop and just this edge of rubbish that you've got to set fire to or took away so that's what you're seeing from all those those dark patches or the storage pits when they go out of use they're filling with rubbish because that produces the nice dark crop mark but the whole of thames valley is full of them phil's new trench has finally nailed the mystery roman building but not quite how we'd hoped he's now convinced that far from being a very rare roman church it is in fact a rather ordinary villa the confusion arose because of the way the structure was demolished it looks as if the west wall was the first to go and when it did all the roof tiles slid off forming a neat pile and that's what looked like an apps on the gfiz but if that's a little disappointing the overall story of the site is taking shape very nicely we've got a huge hall of pottery that stretches from the early iron age to the late roman a staggering 1 000 years but having sorted the fines into a timeline we've confirmed what carrenza's found in rhodes trench this is this is mid line age and i've had to to work quite hard to find any middle iron age material in in our assemblages so far there's much less of it the late iron age ceramically speaking is totally absent on this site it's just not there must be what four or five hundred years it might not be as long as that but it could certainly be it could certainly be 300 years paul's discovery has backed up carrenza's evidence from rhodes trench that showed the site was abandoned for three centuries but it still doesn't explain why it happened john's turned up something rather intriguing too the latest year fizz results and they're showing a couple of very strange anomalies you're gonna like this a lot right yeah there's a price to pay for it that's the extension of the survey are you sure you don't normally get them this far south i know well i've dug some in northamptonshire um i know mostly they're in yorkshire but wow if they were i mean yeah well you occasionally get small iron age enclosures square ones in in you know in the iron age but less than 20 meters square wow yeah and they have dots in the middle oh yes we're going to have to have a look that's the point if if we're going to look at those we've already worked out what we can do in the time we've got left if you want to change the agenda then something has to go you can't look at this anymore well this is the obvious thing isn't it we perhaps lose that and move people over to them to do we're done here but there's another problem the the yeah bigger problem that's the limit of our license we can do anything that size so we can't dig this side in fact we're outside it's just a whisker in there i mean i mean if we're not working over there could we shift it that way um i'm not sure it's that easy i think that's what we'd have to try and do if you were adamant that you wanted to do this we'd have to try and negotiate our t-shaped area too we can't expand the survey area there's a possibility we might be able to move this but it's your decision i think that makes sense because the hill fort just off just off the planet so we're moving towards the hill for we're trying to get the link between them yes so in a way i suppose it does make sense to concentrate our efforts you can always come back to that later on you know yeah another year yeah so you want to go for that oh gotcha i think we have to i'll go and see if i can have a chat with tony with us who can do something about the area okay okay while we wait to get the go-ahead for our new trench stewart thinks he's solved the mystery of the missing 300 years and he's called francis over to the hill fort to get his opinion on his new theory we saw some crop marks in that wheat field over there just beyond the road where the excavations are taking place and what i've done is had a look at the images and transcribed them onto here what what's in that field of wheat over there just underside the road look at that there's the road there's the farm in the distance yeah this is the enclosure that john found on his geophysics where the excavations are so there's a whole complex of things just in the next field to where we're actually working that sort of resembles a a class of sites known as banjo enclosures doesn't it [Music] yeah um which are usually middle iron age indeed and of course that's rather exciting because that's what we're missing there indeed earlier we got roman but not middles and of course those middle-aged settlements actually go with the hill fort as well because there's plenty of middle iron age stuff here right that was probably where the people lived who occupied this place as hill fort in times of trouble and i don't think we've known that before i think that's really exciting we've had the okay to shift the t zone but with time running out fast we're desperate to get started anything that looks or feels like a newts if you find one tell me there's no way of bypassing the newt management scheme these things can't be hurried and after a rigorous fingertip search that is denuded so with only four hours left it's up to the two old pros to see if they can find a square barrow with an intact iron age burial oh ah oh that's better than it raptures hit the bottom in france's pit and as we'd hoped the potter is confirming that the pit is early iron age and it's contemporary with the hill fort too the two old troopers are putting us to shame with their perseverance francis yeah i think i'm down they've been hard at it for three hours and already they've nearly finished yeah i'll tell you what though phil if that pottery and everything turns out to be exactly the same as my pit over there then you're talking about a hell of a big satellite oh wow yeah yeah you're blowing as much as i am your old boy i've been taking a dish and on the other side of the site underneath the flint's ian's uncovered another large pit and a vast piece of pot that's extremely impressive i think it's about ready to come out okay fantastic magnificent there you go brilliant cheers yeah there could be a lot more in this pit it's so big it's a very slack profile it's not very pronounced and i think it's very early iron age so we're talking about 7th century yeah why not yeah that sort of thing climate yeah that's i think that's really good i mean that's such an impressive piece of pot and it's a hell of a big pot too this massive pot was made locally and was used more than two and a half thousand years ago by the farmers to store their produce right you've got a nice selection of um mostly our early arnis shirts that's what i yeah hang on what's that oh good lure looks like a loom weight then it does look there's the perforations through it is good look yes look at that let's hold it oh i like these late bronze age you reckon yep technically it's an actually perforated cylindrical clay i don't want to know what it is technically i don't know what it is yeah it's late bronzer it's a cracker it's a sort of sausage of clay which you stick a stick through to make the hole and then you hang it from the bottom of the loom and you get a row of them and it tensions up the fabric well these cylindrical ones you don't get them into the rnas do you no i don't know so that pushes the story back here by a couple of hundred years yeah wow i mean we've got enough pottery here as well i think to suggest people are living here because it looks like we've actually got structural evidence here but we've got a post hole in there and we've got one in there as well so we we're beginning to get actual buildings i think actually in this in this uh enclosure come on look at my i was gonna say not a lot in it um but the main thing about this ditch is that it's very v-shaped um i can't see any barrow materials slipped on the inside and the fines have been well sparse yeah on the sparse's side yes that came from high up the shape is nice yeah i mean for a possible barrier but there's no evidence for a barrow mound having slipped in um i i think we can say it's possible but not disproved yeah but but but let's be honest we've got plenty of evidence of people living here we've got biscuits with with domestic references i think that tends to believe that we haven't got a burial here we've simply got a nice little domestic enclosure yeah i think it's all a case of we could have both yeah after all the pits are earlier their late bronze age early iron age and this is middle iron age or later so they could turn over and do something else yeah i'll go along with that yeah all right overall missing both right you want that as a jpeg back in the incident room neil is combining the mammoth geophys survey with stewart's crop marks and adding them together to make one grand plan well there we are then tony we promised just the complete picture with all the evidence and there it is it's very pretty isn't it a little bit more than pretty i think it's spectacular i'll explain what we've got here tony remember all the the crop marks we saw from the helicopter there's the the detail of them here what we've done is transcribed them onto this shot and you can see these are the lines here we seem to have two curvilinear enclosures here with with trackways and roadways and so on and what i've done is highlighted in red where i think you've got two two settlements effectively here this purple line i've highlighted is it's a very straight roadway it's very distinctly different from this group it's heading straight towards that roman enclosure though called these settlements they look like aliens they're very funny settlements they're known as banjos and you've got these trackways around the outside probably to get livestock in and out of the settlements and then you'd actually had houses in the middle there it's very unusual in this part of england to find two together that's very unusual tim when you were excavating up on the clump did you imagine that down here it would be as full of activity as this not at all no it's changed the picture really because with everything you put together here i mean we've got the early iron age the late bronze age middle iron age over here in these new enclosures the missing bit from this side of the road and the romans fantastic really it's put the hill fort into its landscape context over what 1500 years and it's not cost me a penny don't you believe it the story of the area around the clumps stretches back to the bronze age nearly 3 000 years ago we now know that the hill fort was first built in around 600 bc in its shadow was a thriving community of early iron age farms which stretched from the very earliest structures immediately below the ramparts to carrenza's farmstead and into the distance then 300 years later they moved to a new banjo settlement and used the hill for farming eventually the hill fort was abandoned and a roman villa was built here on the southern slopes of round hill three days ago we came here to try and work out the relationship between this landscape and that hill fort like most of us i thought the answer would come from the most obvious feature around here the top of round hill but if i've learned one thing over the last three days it's to look beyond the obvious the answer actually came from the air photos those amazing crop marks the thousands of pieces of pottery and building material and last but not least the most extensive geophysical survey time team's ever undertaken all of which helped us to tell the story of the largest archaeological landscape we've ever discovered oh and we didn't find a single newt you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 169,407

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, time team, tony robinson, iron age, british history, archaeology, archaeological documentary, british dig, bbc teach, mick aston

Id: 6R6YjNmPGc8

Length: 49min 5sec (2945 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021