The Mysterious Sunken Hut In A Scottish Lake | Time Team | Timeline

one of the great privileges of working at history here and making films together with our team at timeline is the access we get to extraordinary historical locations like this one stonehenge i'm right in the middle of the stone circle now it is an absolutely extraordinary place to visit if you want to watch the documentary like the one we're producing here go to history hit tv it's like netflix for history and if you use the code timeline when you check out you'll get a special introductory offer see you there this site is an archaeologist's dream being given the chance to excavate a possible ancient man-made island is rare enough but if the circular earthwork really is a henge and we can prove that the two sites are archaeologically connected then this would be one of the most remarkable prehistoric sites in scotland so is your gut instinct that this is prehistoric yes 100 miles um yes i think at gut instinct it's pretty straight but caution the caution yeah word of course at the moment the the actual basic shape of the monument fits also a shape of other type monument types like windmills uh hut circles various types of burial monument but i think we can safely say at the moment that i think it is going to be prehistoric if it's prehistoric what could it be i think we're looking at a thing like a henge like stonehenge only a tiny pocket-sized example tiny little thing but it's got an entrance way here which is looking out over the lake and if you like the world of the ancestors the next world so it's a religious site have people always known that this was here well it's been an obvious feature obviously for thousands of years but certainly archaeologists have known it's here at least since 1970 when they cut out a quarter of this monument then unfortunately their results were quite inconclusive so what we're doing is re-excavating the area and hopefully trying to make sense of what it was they found the first job is to remove all of the peat to define the area of the previous excavation geophysical in there as well conducting a survey to see if there are any below ground features at the center of the circle henges tend to come in all shapes and sizes this one if it is one is tiny only 12 meters in diameter they were usually places of worship or burial dating from the late stone age often divided and bordered by standing stones or wooden posts henges were the focal point of prehistoric ritual only 200 meters away to the east is the intriguing little island in the loch roughly circular in shape it doesn't look like a naturally occurring geological feature it looks like a man-made island called a cranog cranogs were places of habitation and refuge fortified raised enclosures constructed of layers of rocks shored up by stakes driven into the loch bed connected to the land by a some causeway large enough to house whole communities this one if it is a crannog was probably only big enough for one roundhouse one family and a few animals this is the chronog its mound of stones that could be a crannog and we've looked a lot amount of stones like this sometimes you can see they're definitely glacial dumps and therefore definitely not a cranner with this one we can't say it's definitely not and the the hints are that when you look at it underwater the sloping sides are not a natural slope so it looks as if it's been built from that point of view it's quite circular that suggests a cranog how are we gonna dig it well i'm told it is just made of a big pile of stone so obviously provided we're careful and we can record the structure of the mound as we go down by the sounds it's just a matter of moving stones we will shift stones until we find something that says this is artificial then we'll be very very careful we'll do everything in the most archaeologically exact manner as we do on other sites like this but at the moment it's not an archaeological site as such this area of the highlands is jam-packed with ancient archaeology lochmigdale is surrounded by neolithic and bronze age sites mostly field systems and hut circles but it was also the place where in 1900 the world famous mgdale horde was found a unique collection of bronze axes jet jewelry and finely worked metal rob and cara who owned the land appear to be living in an archaeological gold mine did you know anything about the history in the archaeology when you bought the estate we knew that there were had circles throughout the area not just on our island but i mean there's an area called airdens which is further back up on the moor which again is heavily um circled as it were so we were aware of of the artifacts that were in the area although not being sort of studied and then there's the mgdale horde and then there's a big deal horde did that actually come from your land it did come from our land yes the migdale hall is really interesting because that's the one bit of archaeology from this area it's actually been dated the crownog on the henge we don't know what date though we've had no finds from them at all the migdale horde is the only fines but do you know exactly where it came from it was found in a quarry that's over there a granite quarry that was being blasted about 1900 and when they were blasting apparently this horde appeared but is it hard to imagine exactly how it was found if they were actually blasting the quarry you know a rock came off and there it was setting yeah well possibly i think we need to try and find a bit more about that because that might hold the key to telling us what was so important about this area that it has a crannock and a henge if that's what they turn out to be the migdale horde was a key factor in helping archaeologists understand the scottish bronze age but the exact place of discovery and blasting has been lost we're going to try and find it [Music] it's taken nick phil and the crannog team nearly all morning to stockpile the excavation gear compressors and suction dredges on the island but at last it's time to start diving they've decided to put in two trenches one in almost two meters of water the second in only a few centimeters before he's allowed to dive phil's got to learn the strange techniques of cranog digging the biggest problems seem to be how to dig lying face down in the water and how on earth do you know where your trench begins and ends is this there purely to to aid the the recording of the site or is it just to mark the edge of the trench it really is just to show us a general area to excavate initially so whereas on land would use string and nails underwater use a metal frame absolutely okay let's move it okay what we want to do is go backwards right you come out to about here right well that turn i should be able to just drop my end why are we putting this trench over here in particular because this section of the site looks most artificial right it's almost vertical stone face the stones look almost like they've been made and the bottom is not too silty nick's going to be working in the deep trench his first job starts shifting the large rocks from inside his metal frame it's back-breaking and slimy work [Music] back on dry land john's got the results of his survey what they're telling me is that we're not dealing with a settlement site and you can tell that from the lack of noise basically i've marked the approximate position of the ring you can see there's just two spikes inside and that one there is clearly that ignore stone we're not getting any areas of burning um the reason i don't see the bank and ditch is because it would fit with it being a henge type monument right um there's no sort of rubbish deposits there's no burning no burning or anything no half um people haven't lived here that's what the results are telling me well that's encouraging so we can cross off domestic settlement from our list of potentials yeah brilliant so i think that's official then from now on we can all call it a henge everyone apart from stuart that is if we've got a ritual site down at that henge and we've got a ritual site at that krenig you're looking for whether people lived well i am but i just i hate that word haynes you've just used why well the hinge conjures up images of stonehenge huge great great sight and what we've got here is quite clearly a small site so if stonehenge is a big cathedral that's more like the parish church that's it i think we're looking at a small community on on the lakeside here with their own special place where they might worship or bury people yeah so what should we call this thing i'd call it an enclosure for the time being i think until we really know what's going on have you found anything up here uh no not really yet but what we have got is the science and monuments records you can see on here all these references to prehistoric sites around here and i'm trying to see if any of these features around here might actually help us tie your henge my enclosure to the crannog on what might be going on around here in the prehistoric period you can see there's all sorts of things on the surface around here there's a very nicely shaped hillock just there isn't it uh yeah it's just a nice nice natural hill yeah well spotted what about these two little piles of stones here yeah they're piles of stones as well these are our clearance cans they're you see to the fields up here they're nice and clean they've been improved for pasture yeah well one of the farming activities to get rid of the stones and they dump them in piles and that's what these are they're they're stones that have been taken off these fields but what's interesting about these is it's very much the same sort of activity as the prehistoric farmers who built the enclosure or henge would have been performing to clear the ground prior to starting to cultivate it i've always suspected there was more to landscape archaeology than met the eye back at the incident room carrenza's hot on the trail of the migdale hoard where did it actually come from do we know well we know that it was found in may 1900 when they blasted the top of a granite knoll and there's a rather romantic watercolour which doesn't necessarily give you an accurate rendition of the landscape and it says it was found in a weathered joint of granite knoll and it may well be that they from the condition of the objects that they found it as they were putting the explosives down in a cleft in the rock so what actually was in the horde well there were a lot of items there was a flat axe head and it's been tinned the surface of it has been enriched with tin it would have given the axe had a silvery effect on the surface there's also six armlets which are graded in size and if you were to wear them together they look like a spiral omelet there are two other things which have been called bangles they may will have been anklets and then you have these tubular sheet bronze beads which had willow to strengthen them inside and the fascinating thing about these is that they give us um direct contact with central europe really from that far away absolutely whereabouts in central uh bavaria in particular so they were having extensive contacts with well europe and rest of england yes that's right and also with ireland as well we're at the northeast end of the great glen here and we know that they were importing copper from southwest ireland for making their objects here i mean one crucial question is what date is this hoard we were able to get a radio carbon date from the willow inside one of the beads and that's given us a date of between 2200 2100 bc which is exactly the time when you get the beginning of tin bronze metallurgy in scotland so effectively what the horde is telling us is that here at migdale we've got a very expensive offering of items from sort of all over the known world virtually at that time being made to the gods so it suggests something very important going on here it may be that that henge site there is a very prestigious burial site it's particularly given its location at the end of the lock actually in the lock phil as a novice crannog digger begins his excavation by troweling in the shallow end he's carefully loosening the silt on the bed of the lock looking for anything that looks unnatural the spoil is being drawn away by a suction dredge which aids the diver's visibility by depositing the mud over 30 meters away [Music] as nick works down the rocks are getting smaller and smaller a sequence of sorting that doesn't usually occur naturally it's looking more and more man-made but geological evidence isn't archaeological evidence with most of the rocks removed he's beginning to come down onto a new layer of sediment a layer that appears to contain organic material possibly the first evidence of archaeology anywhere on the entire site it's the end of day one and we're now almost certain this is what we hoped it would be a bronze age henge there's still quite a lot of work to do on it we're going to clear out the whole of this section of the ditch but the exciting place is here the ditch terminus that marks the exit out of the hedge and it seems to have been a particularly significant area for bronze age people there could well be fines here if we're going to work out who the people were who built this place and how long ago they built it then the evidence lies here join us after the break beginning of day two at our bronze age site here at loch mcdale in the highlands of scotland and you may think that trying to establish whether this little pile of stones is man-made would be a doddle but in fact technically it's been one of the most difficult things we've ever had to do it took our dive team virtually all day yesterday just to set up and prepare and they were really inhibited by the fact that we can't move through the middle of this little island because we'll stir up the debris and affect the visibility so we have to pick our way around these stones all the time which takes forever but nevertheless by four o'clock yesterday afternoon they put two trenches in one over there and one over there and already it looks like they're coming up with the goods what is it that's been making you so excited for well well tony in the first trench the one on the actual top of the mound over there behind you we've actually got fragments of charcoal what's so significant about that charcoal means burning and burning is a sign a very good sign of where people were actually living but the really good news is in that trench in there in the water yeah unfortunately i haven't been able to see it because it's so deep and the visibility is so poor all i've been able to see is this wonderful plan with these timbers we've actually got timbers under the water more importantly we've got a stake which must have been driven in and i'm dying to see it so should we have a look at them oh look at this look at that look now then i reckon that that timber is that this is this one here i reckon yeah that that rounded bit i reckon that rounded bit is that bit there yeah now look that that there's there's a stake you see that that round thing it looks like a looks like a sort of tucking piece down there can you tighten up on that stake a bit yeah look at that oh wow look at that that is not that is not accidental that is somebody who's actually driven that steak into the ground and then just to the side of that oh yeah there it is look so so we're looking and according to this it's 64 centimeters long and 12 centimeters wide so it's quite a big timber and it's incredible the degree of preservation these little tiny these little toys the little tiny bits of timber that's this little group there yeah look at it oh they look like they're driven into don't they the other interesting thing is there's a lot of organic remains down there as well so we should actually be able to tell what the world was like or the landscape was like at the time these timbers were down there [Music] what is that murky stuff that you were showing us down there uh the organic material that i was disturbing is broken down vegetation but the fibrous bits are brackened and brackens what they laid on the floor to make the place comfortable a nice place to live in are you happy that just from the evidence that you've seen that what you've seen below the surface is man-made and is old uh yesterday i was not too sure i thought we had a big mind of stones now we absolutely have an archaeological site and a really nice one with a forest of timber on the loch bed we're going to be spoiled for choice as to which one or two pieces to sample for carbon dating all of this murky organic stuff needs to be carefully bagged sampled and cleared but with it floating around everywhere obscuring the visibility it could be hours before we can see what else is down there [Music] today the whole focus of the dig has shifted onto the krannog and even though it's freezing cold down there everyone's getting really excited but there's still a few brave people digging away here at the henge yesterday right at the end of the day i said that they were going to excavate in here which was the exits to the henge because we might get some fines here and also that they would be clearing away this ditch and you haven't done either of those things typically why not um because it turned out to be a lot more complicated than we thought when i started trolling out what i found there was a stone packing and there were dark patches and pale patches i think we've got a post at the end here now this is a cheap you just marked this with the end of your trowel i have i mean if you if you actually look at it that material is distinctly darker from the pale stuff over here so this is probably peak that formed in the top of the void left by the post when it rotted you've done quite a lot of cleaning over here haven't you yes yes well what we've got here is the bank which goes around the outside of the ditch and you see there's a lot of stones over there those stones i think are stopping the bank from flowing out and the material at the core of the bank there is the stuff that's come out of a ditch i've got basically the same thing as what francis has got you know he's got the post hole here yeah well i've also got one here which is you know respecting the sides of this entranceway we've got the stones up against it and inside at the base we've got a lot of decayed quartz chips can i borrow you for a minute just just stand there francis this is supposed to be this ritual exit of the hedge how come it's so narrow that well you're standing on the exit but i'm in the ditch well it's deliberately narrow i mean the whole point of an entrance into something like this is that it's special you're leaving the ordinary world and you're going through a narrow entrance into a confined space it's all part of cutting it off from the normal world just outside the henge miles is uncovering a jumble of broken stones which seem to be lying in a small pit right in the front of the entranceway you had absolutely no fines out of this site at all no fines no apart from from quartz chips quartz chips were always banned carrenza's tracked down tony woodham the archaeologist who first dug the hinge back in 1970 to find out more about his excavation we only dug uh the center of the of the circle uh from the inside of the ditch to the center it's about a foot a foot deep right so we've got a bit further to go to here and then you've got this black earth with charcoal that's correct yes and that was the sort of deposit cut into the sand was it it was lying on top of the sand right lying on top of the sand and we we uh we removed that and and it was just clean sand underneath it was in my mind that possibly possibly the site had been used during the bronze age for for a cremation cemetery now we've confirmed it's definitely a henge we're still struggling to find out what it was used for stuart's now taken up the challenge to find the site of the migdale horde and local resident marion fraser has brought him some crucial information i was certainly taken there to see the site you were yeah some years ago how many many years ago all right i'll ask how many you're a lady [Laughter] and i certainly saw the granite can you tell me where it is well it's on top of karnathia which is translated into english as talahil right and in the vicinity of kunara so you're saying it was found upon tullock hill and that's the hill just up there above us isn't it this path is just beside the cattle grid up to the ridge we were told it was sort of way over there which it doesn't appear to be so i i you know to to get this information is really valuable even though she was only a child when she was taken to the horde site marion has given stuart a detailed description on how to get there following directions that marion gave me she said you go over the cattle grid and this is the cattle grid here and she said you should walk up towards the mast which there's the mast on top of the hill just up on the right he's staggering here walking so right in the middle of all this prehistoric activity on the surface you don't have to dig to find this in these mounds here they're everywhere it's around about every 50 yards where the prehistoric the bronze age farmers the people who built our hinge this is what they leave behind them these are their fields this is where they were living and where they were farming we're all on a mission today to try and find out if the horde henge and krannog were in any way archaeologically connected henry we're looking for evidence of human beings from thousands of years ago is gpsing the lake really going to tell us anything we don't know already i think it will um what i'm going to do is try and create a three-dimensional model of the base of the lake so really just to look at the landscape context of the crannog but won't the landscape have changed since the days when people were living on that crown up well i'm hoping that maybe we might see some sort of changing topography at the base maybe something which might suggest a a causeway between here a path out from here to the cranner yes so the little variations that you can read might give us evidence of a pathway i mean we can hope henry i'm going to stop this interview right now because the water has just started to leak over the top of my wellingtons [Music] up on the hillside and with only an artist's impression of the horde site to go on stuart's now checking out every boulder now this is exactly the sort of thing that is shown on the diagram where the artist at the time showed a rock with lines across it which sort of matches up with this type of weathering we've got on here this is exactly the type of rock that at the time they were digging out to cut for creating lintels and uh frames for doors gate posts that kind of thing so again all the ingredients that we're looking for are up on this hillside henry hi corenter this is sandy who farms all the land around here hi sandy hello henry and he reckons that as a child he used to be able to when the water in the lock was really low actually walk out to the crownog along a zigzag causeway that's precisely what i'm trying to find i say where was it just about every green tree there just just literally just here yes and how deep was it when the water was low to be about two feet below the waters oh that's fantastic news excellent thanks sandy according to sandy that should place the causeway about here but to find the exact route henry is still going to have to survey the locked bed with three orbiting satellites to give a global accuracy of a few centimeters he'll be able to chart every tiny change in depth and produce a 3d model of the underwater terrain well now i'm standing pretty close to where the artist drew this drawing from i'm sure of that where the mig dale horse was found it's a big dale rock over there i've got a null high knoll to my left i've got the curve of the lake to my right down there this perspective is now matching very closely it reinforces to me this connection between where people are living up here we've got the evidence for it on the surface quite clear evidence and where they were being buried and where the kind of the religious side of our life as it were at the end of the lock there's a connection a visual connection between the two here this is important information because we've finally confirmed the position of the horde almost a mile from where everyone previously thought it was discovered before i go there's one thing i've got to do though i must get a correct grid reference to this to ensure it goes in the record and in a few seconds it'll give me a grid reference which you can then put on the sights and monuments record so other people can come back to this place phil spent most of today lying face down in the freezing water and at last he's found something how's it going on your side going really well i'm still working my way through the clay layer and i still have got some charcoal and a bit of gravel to the side you still get the charcoal eddie a little bit yes because i mean i'm getting my first few bits on this side but i don't get anywhere near as much as you so it just shows it must be a very discreet little concentration not earth-shattering but more definite proof of habitation nick's doing slightly better with what looks like an animal tooth and bits of burnt bone let's hope the organic materials that are being bagged up will give us even more information about the lifestyle of our as yet mysterious chrono dwellers back at the henge the excavation's progressing well but with no more obvious structure emerging and no fines there's a sense of frustration brewing we have to find some dateable artifacts so we've opened a new trench 30 meters from the henge that could be a prehistoric burial can end of day two and it's been a day of real mixed fortunes over there on the land side we haven't come up with any new evidence in any of our trenches but the kranov has surpassed all expectations we've found more wood than we could possibly have hoped for so tomorrow we're going to try and lift some of it in the hope that we can begin to solve the mystery of who built that island and when and what it was used for join us after the break [Music] beginning of day three in our quest to find out what was going on here at loch migdale hundreds or even thousands of years ago and so far we've only been partially successful we know we've got a man-made island and we know we've got a henge but because we haven't come up with any dateable material we don't know whether we're in the neolithic or the bronze age or even the medieval so it's time for a council of war how do we know what period we're in if we've got nothing to date it with the thing about henges is they seem to be used as a kind of prehistoric observation platform and whatever people were doing in them in the neolithic and bronze age they weren't leaving any objects francis that's a bit of a dodgy old argument isn't it we know it's old because we haven't got any evidence now unusually for archaeology it's based on common sense actually i mean you wouldn't find a load of kitchen rubbish in a church or a chapel so i mean this does indicate that this was a special place and the other thing about it is that its shape is very very characteristic of the sort of small hinge-like things you get in the northeast of scotland so i'm perfectly happy with it being neolithical bronze age in fact it can't be anything else the one place where we have got fines is on the man-made island are we going to be able to date them absolutely no problem at all initially we know we can get dates from them because we've got at least 50 pieces of timber because it's organic we can get radiocarbon dates yeah you say that we can get dates for them but it's not dates we want it's one solid date isn't it nick when we were chatting in the bar the other day you were saying it was a crano you'd have bucketfuls of fines masses are fines well i think all the timbers and the bracken that we found the sheep sorry the animals teeth that we found um tooth and a bed tooth and a bit um and the burnt bone inside i call these fines you know i know that you want pretty things but underwater some things aren't very pretty as a referee can i play the sexism card do you really want to find something pretty i'd call tim as part of the structure um we don't know that until we execute them because they may some of them may be actual artifacts maybe wooden objects just because you know that we can see the top of them doesn't mean that they are necessarily part of the structure okay do you think we're going to get anything in the way of retrievable objects that are not part of the built structure yes yesterday henry assisted by the local farmer found evidence of a causeway on the edge of the loch today he's in deep water i have to have this and having trouble enlisting help i don't do surveying i'm digging it's all right if just think of it as like a very long thin shovel it'd be fine what happens when the water gets up to here [Music] yeah about there phil deeper here henry so you want me to go that way yeah take one about there all right phil another go on three meters or so just carry on you'll be fine i think it's deeper here henry no keep going phil you'll be fine is that deep enough for you andrey well tonight let's just see what happens you just take the next one you'll be fine all right for you ready i'm not going in there i'm not going in there back back despite phil's problems the survey appears to show a definite raised area on the lock bed [Music] with the entire trench cleared of silt and debris it's finally time to start sampling some of the timbers unfortunately this is a destructive process but it's the only way to get a carbon date the timbers appear to be in a fantastic state of preservation due to the oxygen-free conditions at two meters below [Music] so you appear to have made quite a mess in my back garden right now you asked us here to find out what this monument is we know it's we know it's a hinge and i think we're finding out not only what what it is but why it's here i think i think there's some interesting ideas developing out there yes go on i'm really really interested in the location and the orientation of this site because as you can see it's in a very striking landscape location and if you look there along the loch the way that the hills are going forms a perfect notch and what they've found is that the entrance way is really narrow and what we need to do is to measure across and see where the exact center of the site is and then see whether you get a significant alignment from the center through the entrance do you mind um holding a raging rod for us things are about to take a turn from the archaeological to the astronomical and if we measure from the center of the bank alison right that's that's nine meters 50 475 right okay i've got that here we're trying to find a significant alignment between the center of the henge the entrance and the notch but first they've got to find the center spot i reckon this is about the middle here and just what you have that's that's fine alison oh goodness 475 and that's exactly where i am come on look at this oh what did you write into that god francis could you just stand in the center of the entrance for us how's that oh wow there you are he's in the way of the notch is it another thing we need to consider is when people came here what did they see and to fully appreciate it they've actually got to go up there and look at it from sort of a different direction this is essentially where people would view it from when they approached it you can see that with the poles now you see it pointing straight towards that that notch on the skyline amazing yeah it couldn't be much better now yeah this has been very carefully chosen it's a very special place to find out which celestial body sun moon or star would have aligned with and nestled in the notch over 4 000 years ago isn't easy the earth's constantly if slowly moving around its axis as it moves through space this wobble or precession means that back in the bronze age everything in the sky would have been in a slightly different place henry and phil are still on the trail of their own alignment but the lining up of their pole isn't so easy one hang on yes yeah okay hold it hold it there do you reckon we might be getting it there let's see where this next one comes to oh look at that look at that right hold it there quick i steady you said it got it yeah got it henry's hard-won survey shows the remains of a stone causeway that once may have been two meters wide and raised half a meter from the locked bed either this was a submerged walkway offering defenses against invaders or it was the foundations for a raised wooden walkway long since rotted away last evening we opened a trench on what we thought could have been a prehistoric burial cairn allison this is turning out to be the fourth monument on our site isn't it yep what have we actually got here do you think certainly looks like a small curbed cairn with the curb going around there and we're standing on it here right yeah and that hollow there looks to be robbing where somebody's obviously gone to find the treasure or whatever so you reckon there was a burial in there which someone's dug into and thrown the stones sort of over there that way yeah but luckily for us they missed this one you think that's the second barrel i think it could be it's a very intriguing uh cluster of small stones that have been deliberately placed here i think we better keep these stones they might well turn out to be specially selected so we'll put them to one side this isn't going to turn out to be someone's cat is it 10 years ago this possible burial can is only 30 meters from our henge where new features are turning up everywhere starting to look like a swiss cheese over here it is but it's a lovely series of steak holes what we've got is lines of steak holes that would have had wood in them radiating out from the central post they would have stood probably about this high so would these have been little fences or something they could have been there could be an internal partition within the hinge their lines radiating out pointing to distinctive features in the landscape or marking the stars or marking the stars could well have been we just don't know how do you feel about having a ritual astronomical clock in your backyard no i think it's pretty cool now this is all a bit different it's looking a bit nicer now and that right smack in the middle of the entrance way we've got this sort of um roughly square pit and it's filled with stones with this gorgeous stone on the side this one's nice isn't it it's not been worked it looks as though it's ridged it looks like it's faced down this side but there's certainly one or two sort of tall marks where it's been rather crudely sort of dressed along this edge could that have fallen or do you think that's the position it was in or is it um i'd like to think it's fallen um we don't know as yet until we actually had a chance to lift this but it's quite possible that this fits onto this and that's actually a broken stump well it it may well and i say may at this stage be somewhat upright actually right in the entrance way so we could have our first actual standing stone when stood up miles's stone fits exactly in the center of the entrance and its alignment with the misty mountains can't be accidental with the small stones removed from the top of the possible burial francis instead of finding bones is starting to uncover what looks like a wooden fence post when we first hit it i thought it was modern and it's got a square edge but actually now that we've got a bit more exposed i'm rather excited in fact i'm extremely excited i think the reason why francis is so excited is that the wood looks like it's been cleft or split with an axe that's the way you work wood if you don't possess saws and in the bronze age they didn't possess sauce so they had to split their wood so if this is a bronze age steak alison does this make you think it's something other than a cremation it makes me think very hard yes because i cannot think of a single example of where you've got a stake above a cremation so maybe this is a thing that really matters and this was what was buried under this miniature can within a bigger care the soil around the wooden post is littered with tiny white quartz chips another sure sign we're in the bronze age though we don't know what they're for these hand-chipped mineral pieces may have something to do with ritual purification of the monument so confidently is a man-made absolutely yes absolutely and they're very common on sites for this period in typical time team fashion it's almost the end of the day and we've got fines everywhere now we appear to have a steak to go with our chips is that one of the steaks it's not really a steak it's uh in some ways more interesting why is it more interesting because it appears to be set into another piece of wood which is embedded down underneath the organic material it's about that deep so what does that imply it implies that it's part of a more complex uh wooden thing but do my always deceive me or are these two marks on the end there are two marks on the end absolutely whether there will actually be little signatures on it from the damage in the blade of the axe i don't know there are definitely two marks on it now fully excavated it's time to lift the very fragile wooden post okay well done that was new well done gosh and there you are with a one of these quartz chips sticking to it you can see it's pressed against that that absolutely mirrors that shape so it's been squashed on there yes for thousands of years yes and the wood has taken up that shape so i'm in no doubt whatsoever that we have a piece of four thousand year old wood i mean as far as i know nothing like this has been found in this kind of context in scotland ever i've that's absolutely extraordinary i mean isn't it i've never dug anything quite as odd that was just weird the only other items in this trench were two flat pieces of stone most likely to keep the wood straight and upright but the mysterious post still had one more secret to reveal when it was cleaned up it was found to be made not of wood but of highly compacted peat what francis had excavated was the ghost of a tapered wooden post which had rotted away leaving a void which had been filled by the slow deposition of pete [Music] i think it may be more to do with our marking of significant points in the landscape at significant times of the year than with any funerary thing we haven't found any cremated bone at all in here so they what they've done is to bury their sacred post with all the timbers removed from the crannog the last job is to replace the large rocks lifted on day one this is essential to maintain the stability of the archaeology and prevent further erosion all of the crannog fines are safely on dry land and it's crunch time first thing this morning we said if there was one thing that we wanted it was dateable evidence particularly out of the lock we've got some sheep's teeth burnt bone of different sorts in there i say sheep's teeth but in fact we've had a look at them we think it might be deer to you we've also got some sheep animal droppings in here probably sheep droppings and also there's charcoal so we know that people were living out there there's no doubt about that we also said that there were some small stakes and timbers and we've sampled some of those here's one of them that's the bottom of it there and we have cut marks on the end of it and i think one of the cut marks in particular in fact the nicest cut mark which is this one here is very small i admit that has little striations on it made by damage in the blade of the ax it was used to cut it but i think that's a very interesting one the cut looks at first glance to be scoop-shaped and for a moment we all got rather excited because scoop-shaped cut marks are a bronze age phenomenon and no one has ever found a bronze age crannog but the scooping could also be sag caused when a water log find is exposed to the atmosphere which must be what happened because radiocarbon dates put the timber firmly in the iron age between 100 bc and 100 a.d and are you happy to say that our henge and our cairner bronze edge yep i think they're bronze age i think they're probably at the other end the early end of the bronze age in fact alison thinks they're from the very beginning of the bronze age around 2000 bc which means we've uncovered evidence of 2 000 years of human activity here on loch mcdowell i think that that is something that's worth having a dram too so what can we now piece together about the prehistoric story of loch mcdale around 2100 bc a community of people settled and farmed on the land above the loch for a now long forgotten reason they placed some of their most valuable metal possessions in a granite cleft looking down on their ritual site a henge the focal point for what we would now probably call religion we've calculated that the wooden post at the center of the henge and the standing stone in the entrance aligned perfectly with the sun as it rose through the notch in the hills at the spring and autumn equinoxes almost 2 000 years later the people of loch mcdale moved down from their hill farms and built a krannog [Music] why they built it how many people live there and for how long will have to wait for a future excavation

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 196,529

Rating: 4.8796096 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, time team, scottish highlands, british archaeology, tony robinson, loch lomond

Id: iY1NsDMbI0Q

Length: 46min 8sec (2768 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2021