The Mystery of the Manor Moat | FULL EPISODE | Time Team

[Music] hard to believe it but this field is a bit of a hit with archaeologists not when it's like this obviously but when it's like this it's a real Beltre because over the years it's produced metal brooches bead studs and loads of pottery including this it may not look much but it's actually part of a sixth-century cremation urn a classic sign of the complex burial practices carried out by the anglo-saxons so if there is a Saxon cemetery here can we find it and if we can what else might be down here and most importantly what will it tell us about the way our ancestors treated the dead oh and by the end of the dig one of our team is going to have witnessed their own Saxon funeral spooky [Music] we're spending the next three days in the rich agricultural landscape of Southeast Leicestershire over the years these fields have been investigated by archeologists as part of the Langton Brooks survey and they found all sorts of evidence of anglo-saxon activity and we've now used their results to focus in on two of the most intriguing areas hidden amongst these massive fields [Music] this is the result of the groups field walking as you can see it's a simple grid and on it is written the various concentrations of fines that were discovered this is a classic way to discover anglo-saxon sites which quite honestly very difficult to find using other techniques but we're not using this just for archaeological information as you can see we've chopped down about two hectares of oil seed rape that's about five acres and we've done that based on the information on this grid which is a great idea Mick but some fines in the field and we're looking for cemeteries and goodness knows what it does seem a bit of lacks of faith yeah they're not easy things to find from field walk in all in fact geophysics but luckily I have two partners in crime with me on this Jackie who knows about the the bones and cemeteries and Helen knows about fines that come from cemeteries so I'm gonna defer to them a lot at the time all right Jackie what do you think when you see that what this is showing is is the concentration of pottery and the kind of pottery that's been turning up up here is the sort of decorated pottery that is normally associated with cremation urns so we may well have a cremation cemetery that's one of the suggestions the other thing this doesn't show you is that we've also got metalwork fines from here we've got brooches and strap ends exactly the kind of things that you get in animation burials so we could have a mixed right cemetery hello anglo-saxon England is your passion what are you thinking about well I'm thinking about how exciting it is that we don't just have what what I think must be a cemetery up here we've also got this other very interesting site down here now we've got concentrations of pottery that's not decorated that looks more domestic and there's no metalwork down here so possibly what we may have is a settlement and a cemetery from the same period we've also got probably a Roman villa there but surely we don't want to excavate a Roman site when we've got all this anglo-saxon to do but it can help us to understand the transition between Roman Britain and anglo-saxon England it's a lot for three days though isn't it yeah that could be the understatement of the year we really do have our work cut out here even without the additional burden of the search for a villa Saxon sites can be nigh on invisible to geophys their buildings were made of wood and play which rots away leaving just organic stains in the ground and from John and his teams point of view cemeteries and burials aren't much better I mean what you're effectively looking for is a hole that's filled with the same dirt that has been dug with that's right we may just have to take a gamble and rely on the field walking results let's see if Jeff is are well on the way doesn't this let's see how they get on this if they can get anything at all because it's quite likely that they won't in which case you'll have to go with this anyway but there's yet another problem everything about this site is big even the squares on the field walking grid these squares each site is 10 metres long so the precision is really not good but I mean it suggests this is sort of 40 by 30 meter concentration that in so we're going to put trace 1 in to investigate the greatest concentration of results and it's going to be massive so we want 40 from that corner we plan to dig a whopping 40 meter by 40 meter trench it's so big and it could take us all three days to dig it that's all of us the Midlands for you Helen if we have got a cemetery what kind of indications will we get first of all I'm hoping we'll see grave cuts the outlines are the tops of the graves then as we go down bones I don't think we're gonna get any bone because the soil here is so icy to run Boulder clay we might get a smile but so we're going to have to rely on grave Goods and we can't be using the metal detectors as much as possible to alert us to the presence of metal grave words but when we do find them we'll be able to date them and we'll be able to say something about the person who is buried with them so while the machine starts in the southwest corner of trench one to look for grave cuts we'll send in the metal detectorists at the top corner to see if they can pick up any more evidence of the metal grave Goods brooches Spears belt buckles and the like that characterize anglo-saxon burials definitely got something there but and as if on cue this is just come out the ground it's really a rather nice late to 36 century fragment of a small long bed exactly what we would want from a burial site of this period might suggest a woman do they wear these on their shoulders these are indicating appropriate burials I would think so you don't find hardly any of these on settlements I find them with dead anglo-saxon women unfortunately this particular dead anglo-saxon woman's brooch is a good 30 meters away from Phil's trench Phil you got anything yet not a sausage tyranny now this is really weird because we've been excavating like mad as you can see they've got an enormous amount of dirt out already and nothing at all but over here where the metal detectorists have been working they've got loads of lovely little metal fines including this one which they think is some kind of fastening maybe off a belt it is Saxon and it's got these lovely little pieces of gold decoration on so nothing there where we thought we'd find a load and lots of stuff here what's going on having a clear afternoon day one here at West Langston in Leicestershire where we're looking for a possible anglo-saxon cemetery and already we've cleared 10,000 square meters of oilseed rape and we've dug a hundred square metre trench and what have we got three interesting anglo-saxon finds not from the trench but over there and in the trench nothing but we're not giving up yet on this trench although we are starting another one as Mick's told Phil to open up a new area over the concentration of metal detecting finds from this morning and within moments it looks like the switch has paid off for dr it's not a grave but it is something that gets even the most hard hearted archaeologists all of a quiver it's a nice big ditch the master strip comes through well about that we look then it's coming through here here's the light here's the dark and here's the light again there is summit coming through there the good news is the ditch is just visible in John's early geophys results for this field but that's just the start of it we've not extended the survey and if you follow that trend through because John and his team have continued their survey and his new results are a revelation it looks as though we've got a massive ditch it's just a pity that it doesn't seem to be anglo-saxon but actually some 600 years earlier in anglo-saxon terms that looks fine aged to me that's interesting because if that was visible in the anglo-saxon period which it sounds like it was then that could have provided a focus for the burials couldn't if you do get the odd anglo-saxon cemetery that is focused around Iron Age linear earthworks particular in East Yorkshire I know this isn't the classic Bronze Age ring ditch but it's not East Yorkshire I know [Music] so trench three goes in over the Iron Age feature that appears to surround the top of this hill and this being time team our first find is an Iron Age it isn't even anglo-saxon that looks home yeah it's like a braided Samian where doesn't yeah but we do now have to admit defeat with our original trench where we had such high hopes for anglo-saxon burials there's nothing that's on the critical grave size and shades there there is absolutely nothing in it on the plus side it means we can now throw all our diggers at the two trenches that have the Iron Age ditch in them and more importantly the possible anglo-saxon cemetery that lies inside it we clearly there's a lot going on in there we'd be better going off through where the main that seems to be where you might expect it to get the focus back to be T's not right on the crown of three rounds the crown of the hill so where are our saxon lists at this crucial time in a different field getting all hot and bothered about a roman villa I don't understand you both you are the most passionate about anglo-saxon England yet you'll draw like moths to a flame so this Roman villa when you're an archaeologist you are interested in the origins of things and if you want to know about the beginning of anglo-saxon England how it all started and what its foundations were you've got to go back to look at the late Roman period the key word is transitional Toni it's so convenient to talk about history and periods with sort of Anne's and beginnings but of course on the ground at the time there was there's no sort of sharp break like that you've got to remember that the Romans who leave her an absolutely minut secretary of society they're leaving behind lots and lots of ordinary people including the kind of people who would have lived in this villa wherever it is and once the administration of society begins to to collapse think that it all just gets too hard and one day they wake up and they think for heaven's sake you know is it really worth putting on the toga and sitting in this drafty stone building why don't I wear the trousers why don't I live in one of these nice wooden buildings is easy to hate and it's incredibly difficult to get that fine dating anyway in archaeology and particularly in the 5th century where we've got and we've got no coins and we've got none of our usual means of dating I think this place offers us a possibility in that the villa and the anglo-saxon settlement might be in the same place they might have stratigraphic archaeological relationships and therefore we can see the relationship between those two cultures [Music] so we're now starting to look for evidence of anglo-saxon settlement in this field and how it might relate to the villa discovered here in the 1970s the Holmes grand plans for the villa field are going to have to wait until tomorrow because back up in our potential cemetery field films now finding archaeology inside the area surrounded by our potential Iron Age ditch aware of this actually come out at a trench yeah where is a pottery expert well you know in needham we've got some terrific Flint a whole mass of Roman like Iron Age pottery and I know exactly where he is up the hill at rakshasas trench where he's now confirmed the ditch is Iron Age but what's more it was visible right throughout Roman times and on into the anglo-saxon period we have got four sheds of early middle Saxon and made pottery so we finally found what we're looking for the interesting thing is the the Saxon pottery all seems to be coming off the top of the ditch right now you just do sometimes get Saxon simcha featured Hut's actually dug into the top of ditches yeah well there we are it's your tusks rhetoric on men so possible evidence of anglo-saxon settlement right at the end of day one it's just a pity it's in the field where we expected to find a cemetery and the two don't normally go together come on have a look at this it's the same confusing story in Phil's trench in here look we've got this you see look there you can see the edge of it going along there and background here it's it's a big square feature now is it a pit is it a grave I really don't know but the stranger thing is look here we've actually got what looks like a beam slot just a beam slots when a beam slot would be a foundation for a building so is it actually a settlement I don't really you know one thing I do know is we actually got pottery which somehow another I'm sure it's got to be Saxon this is really intriguing it looks like we might have evidence of where the anglo-saxons lived in the cemetery what were they doing living in a cemetery I really don't understand this site beginning of day two here at West Langton in Leicestershire where we're looking for an anglo-saxon cemetery and yesterday we put in this very large trench and found absolutely nothing which of course was very disappointing to every member of our team except one who seems positively gleeful about it here is the guilty party why are you so cheerful well as soon as we knew that there was nothing archaeological in that trench I realize that that suddenly makes this enormous geophysical feature much more important because if they're using this as a boundary then that rich becomes outside it should be empty that's right and everything else becomes inside and therefore we're likely to find much more but we are pretty confident that we've got some kind of substantial anglo-saxon activity going on in this trench well I don't think so I won't cinema well we've got an Iron Age ditch we've got no features that have got anglo-saxon pottery not yet what ring not yes I've been here five minutes I mean with this this plenty of time I think I might be with John on this one this trench is a bundle of contradictions the animal art here is is really good really crisp really well well-made the metalwork we've discovered like this belt fitting we found yesterday says anglo-saxon cemetery these things attach to the gaudy kind of heavy man's belt that could have carried something heavy like a sword but the archeology Phil and his team are now carefully unpicking suggests anglo-saxon settlement an anglo-saxon settlements and cemeteries don't normally go together this clearly been a lot of activity up here and all of it seems to have occurred inside the massive Iron Age ditch GF is discovered yesterday this is what we thought it's morning and John and his team haven't finished yet that's stunning lots and lots of ditches but this fantastic piece of survey work isn't from the cemetery it's from where the villa was discovered in the 1970s well that's gotta be Roman hasn't it although the geophys seems to show everything here's Roman we're interested in this field because it's also produced evidence suggesting an anglo-saxon settlement so we're going to put our first trench in based on the highest concentration of Saxon signs from the earlier field walking survey but we might be able to kill two birds with one trench here as our target just happens to be over one of the many possible Roman features in this intriguing field it almost looks like there's one ditch there and there's another one here isn't there so two ditches but even three in fact we've got the hand grab it look wise just come off the sport it back up in the top field we're now convinced we've got an anglo-saxon cemetery we've actually got four separate pieces it seems like they don't outlast the first half of the sixth century and everything else fits in with that same date range it's all late fifth or sixth century which is quite tight and quite early but it is a cemetery well that can to come from anything else but then you see there's a problem because this map weren't here and all the other men were come from this end of the trench that is exactly the same area as all the pottery from the field walking and also from the pottery that we're getting Paul is out and look at it and it kind of hints that the actual pottery is not cemetary related but domestic-related in other words it looks like we've actually got a settlement and a cemetery in the same area yeah the pottery extends into the 8th century potentially so I mean we could have and I think that's very likely we've got a cemetery to start with and later on we've got a settlement over the top of it so we're now looking at an anglo-saxon sites that spanned centuries and was at different times a home to the living and the dead but all the evidence suggests any trace of that later settlement in the ground has been lost to agriculture archaeologically what we have are the remains of that early anglo-saxon cemetery it would seem these peoples stamp on history their legacy doesn't come from how they lived but from how they treated their dead and that's got us thinking in order to understand a bit more about anglo-saxon attitudes towards death and cremation and burial we're going to set up our own ritual because the whole thing's actually much more convoluted than you might think and we had a vote and the team unanimously decided that the person who should die would be Raksha that's not quite true that you volunteered yourself I did you're mad but the good news is that because we're going to need you in the trench for the next day and a half you don't actually have to die what we're going to need you to do is go through all the preparations and you happy with I am as long as I you know come out the other side and scathed that's fine then what a ceremony it'll be for the cremation feasting music and a narration just as soon as we finish the pyre mat always yeah so from now on we'll be relying on the graves and grave Goods to tell this site story there's not to me of engineered in it it's something we've been doing since the very beginnings of time team and to explain how it's done Helms decided to teach me the art of dating burials using an example from time team's own stratigraphy our archives oh that's about 15 years ago is there it's a winter born gunner near Salisbury that's right anglo-saxon Cemetery site there you are on your grave I wouldn't have a map book no no no it's that no that's absolute dating isn't it that newspaper except of course it wouldn't survive because it's organic oh yeah let's pray [Music] now I think the mobile phone is very instructive there is not a very hilarious because they changed so fast so you could call that absolute day to you yes that's that's really good dating but things like your your glasses and your belt buckle and so on they they change perhaps a bit more slowly if there'd been any disturbance to that grave and it had taken the mobile phone out you would probably date it earlier than it really was you think you would wouldn't you I mean those glasses must have been around for a while and that jumper that's got to that's got to be very dangerous carry on about the jump the other thing about this burial which is so obvious is it all the staff laid around it - no Cossacks and what do you think that would mean mainly displaying your status within the community somebody has laid a dead personality it's got some of your personality in there but it's also some of what other people in your community of wanted to display about you thing is what we see in the grave is only the final part of a more involved mortuary ritual if you were cremating somebody would be even more complicated so Sam I was wondering where you were taking me and you've brought me to my own funeral pyre yeah I know that sounds bizarre doesn't it but all for a good cause actually surreal yes what would a woman in the anglo-saxon times have been buried with well typically we find well with her best regalia with her best finery which would include metal worked collect cloak fastenings risk class that sort of thing that you tend to show up it archaeologically yeah they would so I've got my trowel that will definitely come out that's right that would be a very important object for you and of course let's not forget your shovel yes it's very small so we're calling this the ritual shovel and something that's very special to me is my stripy diggin hat right well course that would have to go with you so these are things which are really personal to you and they might include if you had pets a dog or even a horse which is something we find a lot archaeologically these would be so personal to the individual that nobody else could deal with them so I couldn't have Matt with me as well well let's put it to him that's a good idea bring it on and even as we're discussing the finery left in anglo-saxon graves up on site Phil is uncovering a spectacular example of a grave good oh look at that oh the way it shines in the Sun it's now just after lunch on day two and in the space of a few hours Phil has miraculously uncovered not one not two but at least for potential burials you can actually see it in here and in fact the easiest way to see it is actually to focus in on this area of stones you can see that it is actually an oval type area that's one of them the next one is a little bit easier to see actually it's a very clear line with charcoal down one edge up and you can see underneath this bucket you've got bead there another one there over there so we know that there's mortgage have been a and amber necklace you said for burials and I've only shown you three of them look at this last one underneath here what's going to live well here is an enormous brooch I mean between this enormous bow that's a really big one I know absolutely stunning as good as the plastic here the higher we can get the better Billy [Music] it looks like we've now got ourselves a mini time team in this one trench there's the iron aging closure ditch fills for burials plus a number of other intriguing targets identified by the metal detectorists and there's no shortage of archaeology or targets down in the villa field where we're hoping to find an anglo-saxon settlement Tracy this is the Tesoro then yes look what I just found alongside oh that's nice that's gotta be hyper core style well that's a good start without digging we're now putting in the second trench to look for evidence of day-to-day Saxon life so far yeah no Saxon again but so far this field has remained stubbornly Roman mad you see Mars away from everybody else I've been abandoned why'd you put a trench in here the reason why we chose this part of the field is because this is where most of the anglo-saxon pottery came from field walking so have you found anything anglo-saxon no but we have found quite a lot of Roman stuff which i think is probably being dragged around and associate with the villa so what are you gonna do well there's been a lot of talk about what these things could be they look a bit like a planned Roman town there could be field boundaries so we're going to carry on down get to the bottom of that ditch and when I pull out a bit of anglo-saxon pottery and say here it is here then we can say yep it's an anglo-saxon field boundary [Music] what would the gia fears and the finds there's obviously a fantastic Roman story here do we going across one of the ditches at least because they may have reused those stitches and somewhere there may be Saxon material in them if they are room but find it strap something - yes and yeah and bizarrely our best chance of finding later Saxon activity is to continue investigating this Rome and landscape back on the hill were continuing to get more information on how the dead were treated here including it seems signs of our first cremation on site I think I have got a tiny we need a little bit of burnt bone out of here I mean it looks like a piece of one of the forearm bones so you can tell from a piece of bone that small there is a piece of him four on it's now almost the end of day two and thanks to the motorized Lone Ranger of the pottery world we now have proof that as well as burials we have at least one anglo-saxon cremation on-site oh yeah that's accent oh yeah definitely that's that's quite nice quality as early/middle as you'd expect the sort of thing we're looking for the handmade stuff the problem is the shape of this feature doesn't match the normal practice of cremated remains buried in a jar or a pot what we've got here may not be the remains of a burial it may be the remains of some other cremation related type of cremation related deposit well you might be a pyre it might be pyre debris it might be the remnants of a pyre site that's really rare though isn't it it is it is quite rare yeah but that's why you know I'm not too worried about that not being part of an urn but I am interested in what part the Saxons in as part of our own burial ritual it's finally time to cremate Raksha and it's an event that's not only attracted a crowd but could actually help us understand more about our site Chucky's why do you reckon they burn the bodies do you think it was a question of hygiene well it's all you should say that because the Romans certainly did it for hygiene but the main thing is it's an immediate transformation process you're going from one state to another and that both has a visual effect and has a spiritual meaning behind it you're nodding did the story support that yes amplify beautifully in the poetry especially the Old English epic of Beowulf where we have an unusually detailed account of a cremation especially when it culminates with the rather immortal phrase heaven swallowed the smoke the sense that the soul is released from the body of finds its way to heaven up in the sky as we've said we need rats are in the trenches tomorrow so she gets a last-minute reprieve I bet you never thought you'd see your own funeral but as we want to see if we can recreate the archaeological remains that Jack is found up on-site we're throwing a rack of pork ribs on the pyre the results should be interesting because it's looking a bit toasty on top of there we're gonna give our final day here at West Langton in Leicestershire where we've been looking for evidence of an anglo-saxon cemetery and after a very shaky start this has turned out to be a highly successful dig we've got evidence both of cremation and burial up on the hillside there and yesterday evening in order to learn a little bit more about cremation practices in anglo-saxon times we cremated raksha who miraculously has come back to life again today looking none the worse for wear but Jackie this whole process it's actually given you some rather interesting evidence as men yeah well the first thing is we had a pile of wood that big and look how much is left of it and that's because we had a very good oxygenating fire but how does all that relate to what we've got up there well what it kind of signifies is what we have and what we haven't got the number of things when is there this deep red colour which is where the burning has taken place now that I don't seem to have it there but I do have some of the components we see here I do have some of the fuel ash the charcoal so by looking at the components that I've got here I'm comparing it with what I've got out of my feature at the top I may be able to work out better what kind of deposit I have it looks like it's going to be a busy day because we've established that inside the massive Iron Age ditch is an anglo-saxon cemetery with evidence of all sorts of burial rituals from Jackie's cremation I think it is the most gorgeous thing oh yeah to the grave with our star find this fantastic gilded broach is it an equal arm broach it's isn't it these things blow me away I've only ever seen one of these once before and that was in 1975 and it was a dig in my own village I've never ever seen one since I never ever dreamt I would be here and actually have one in front of me we've so far identified for burials in just one small portion of our trench Phil Phil you've got some and the finds have suggested they all belong to women this certainly looks like another broached on that and we've got a little smear of iron there which presumably gonna be the pen that is until now Helen you know we had four burials looks like we've actually got a fifth one really yeah I mean you see it was it's actually in here oh wow that's a small Longbridge definitely do you see that it was a kind of nick yes yeah so it's a what's called chef 101 one two three rounders loaves and that is likely to be upon the shoulders here is it I'm a woman they've set up on these shoulders I'm worried about the position of the of the bowing but look what we've got this morning gotta SH iron think comin up at that end there it's kind of Chi Bueller though isn't it because the obvious thing that that looks like is this is a feral office of a spear yes that's what I was working this is a lady she should not have a spear I heard there's some fairly wild women around up here in the sanctum what's now very clear is the amount of effort that went into staging anglo-saxon burials whether it was the intricate grave goods on an inhumation burial we don't actually put all of the bones in there no they very rarely seem to fill the vessels to capacity or the sheer time and energy involved in a cremation that's child soft tissue you very rarely find that in archaeological mmm deposit because it is so brittle [Music] should we be seeing cremation and burial on the same side it's not at all uncommon it seems that the you could make a choice between information in cremation but we don't know what's underlying that that choice it could be something like you're the cultural affiliation that you feel so if you think you're part of the Anglian culture group you'd be more likely to opt for cremation if you feel you're a Saxon or a Kentish person you'd be more likely to opt for information that but these are just broad trends but one of the other things is of course what becomes the fashion and it sounds a bit superficial but if something becomes taken up by said elites quite often that will slowly filter down to the lesser mortals you're nodding wisely so well this is a question which has been asked over and over again I mean that was an Icelandic scholar back in the 13th century who tried to make sense of it and he imagined that there'd be an age of burning and an age of bound building but I sometimes wonder in the end if it's just a question of what the family does after all it's a very personal thing and it's tradition is what grandad did and we still do that with wakes of course pottery as well even at this late stage of the dig this Cemetery trench is still producing new discoveries so one only the ditch is there mm-hm but our other field is also crammed full of archaeology and it's the big chunky variety there's the other ends there a good one seven meters we had hoped to find evidence of anglo-saxon settlement or even more burials near or on top of an earlier Roman villa here but instead we seem to have stumbled upon a site that could keep a team of diggers going for a month everything does look as though it's on this regular alignment yes oh I think it's fairly safe to assume that's all Roman I mean I think we all know that we're not gonna get anglo-saxon stuff here and lessees for action don't we we've now only hours to get our heads around what we've uncovered in the lower field Roman but at least we've now solved one mystery in the cemetery the mystery of the grave with the potential cross-dressing wild women with the brooches and spear I can't see with their heads work you said where their heads were yes there's not one person in here this - we've got one set of teeth there yeah and we've got another set over here can you tell anything about these people no but I can I I was always aware that this is gonna be a slightly tricky grave because spear and brooches mean man and woman and you and they shouldn't be in a single grave so I thought we might have two graves we might have a double grave and we now have the proof that we do have a male warrior buried alongside a woman you can see where Jackie's pointing at yeah the button on the top of your shield post so that the hands would grip under there and the board would come out here and get tipped down into the ground there fantastic this grave gives us a tantalizing glimpse into how one anglo-saxon man and woman were last viewed by their family and friends and yet we can only guess if this was some sort of husband-and-wife burial or just an opportunity to lay two people to rest at the same time [Music] we now have only a few hours left of day three but with storm clouds looming the whole dig looks under threat of grinding to a halt cool Matt have you been upsetting that gods it was getting pretty bad isn't it yeah and with as much manpower needed as possible on the top field we have to admit defeat of a sort down in the villa field is like roaming in the bottom of the ditch like throwing the middle light roam at the top late Roman on top of the cobbles there we can't find any anglo-saxons but boy have we uncovered a fantastic Roman site I think this is one of those beautiful trenches I've done in my life to be honest we know unit from the geophysics now being dug this there are some major Roman features own these would have been visible to the anglo-saxons for hundreds of years I mean stop waxing lyrical will you let's get out and play in the bigot the Roman archaeology we've uncovered down here is bigger and more complex than we could ever have expected but only further investigation we'll have to wait for another day because we've got our hands full with the cemetery clean the whole thing up chop some square up sections and have another go there really hit it right in fact at the last count we still need to sort out five burials and a funeral rack shall no longer with us she's just ashes to ashes dust to dust but we want to keep her memory alive don't we so so you've created a sort of anglo-saxon epitaph for her that's right it's simulated in the Old English style which would be a very important function of the poetry in a basically a society that values poetry is its central medium and a bit like the Queen mother's funeral there was a great declination of titles and achievements in rapture case of course it's her supreme skills as an archaeologist although archaeology is a modern word so the equivalent I reckon in olden was his digger lay there I love this phrase you've written after it sharp shovel wife yes again this is a formulae style and for that for the actual delivery of course our senior man here and an absolute natural for the part is of course our dear old Uncle Phil why is he a national well because with that natural wiltjer accent you've got a voice there that is closer to the authentic Old English dialect then my more posh southern accent or such stone wasn't there on the earth but before that our Reiter in chief needs to sort out the brooch II uncovered come on baby and that means lifting it in a block of its surrounding earth to keep it in one piece got it and all that efforts worth it because back in the conservation lab the brooch now heavily taped to hold it together is revealed as a fragile but gobsmacking work of art it's pretty impressive I feel it's amazing it looks if he's pretty awesome ah this one here is only the fourth one of this toy yeah yeah fourth to be found in Britain but there's probably the best of the lot the next stage is also the most nail-biting all right just try and lift it removing the brooch from the block of earth I'm gonna do it now yes once it's cleaned up it's obvious that it's one of our best finds ever and even more importantly it may just offer us a rare insight into that elusive crossover period between the Roman and anglo-saxon ways of life we've added a word with our specialist here at Wessex and he reckons there a mid 5th century so about 450 really so they're within a generation of us or into the Roman period absolutely but you see this one was probably a bit older when it went in the ground because around here all the way around the edges there's a lot of wear so this thing was probably quite old when it went in the ground but nevertheless it was probably worn by a descendant of the Romana Britons or in that area then very nicely it's safe to say this dig will stay with us for a long time to come we've got bits of cremated bone not a lot but it's there we've got flecks of charcoal we've got redeposited anglo-saxon pottery even the cremation remains on site or from a rare discovery what this most reminds me of are features that you sometimes get in anglo-saxon semi cremation cemeteries in the South of England which are cool for posters and which oddly enough as it sounds like has a post at each corner and it may be that what we've got here is a little more treehouse where the cremation burial itself was made in top and pie debris was deposited in the future below it it almost seems like a Victorian Cemetery that you've got all these different kinds of burials going on at the same time that's a really good analogy actually because all of these burials I think would have been marked in some way what a little mound may be flowers planted on them something like that that we can't recover archaeologically and then you've got to imagine the whole thing contained within this big Iron Age earth work as with so many anglo-saxon sites the evidence of settlement has almost completely eluded us and yet we've still learned so much from the departed [Music] but it's now the end of a hectic three days and the time to feast and celebrate the culmination of our own burial ceremony let us honor our sister Raksha Dave's daughter digger lady Sharpe shovel wife who elsewhere wendice our own little ritual and the evidence we found on the hill are separated by centuries but maybe we can just feel a link to the anglo-saxons who left the stamp of their identity on this Leicestershire landscape some 1,400 years ago - Raksha [Music] [Music]

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 306,653

Keywords: Team Team, Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode

Id: t91oD1wELIA

Length: 47min 45sec (2865 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 25 2020