The Mystery Of The Mesolithic Footprints In The Sand | Time Team | Timeline

hi everybody and welcome to this documentary on timeline my name is dan snow and i want to tell you about history hit tv it's like the netflix for history hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the world's best historians we've got an exclusive offer available to fans of timeline if you go to history hit tv you can either follow the information below this video or just google history hit tv and use the code timeline you get a special introductory offer go and check it out in the meantime enjoy this video this is the seven estuary england is over there wales is over there and newport's glistening behind us in the distance somewhere but what we're interested in happened down there seven and a half thousand years ago this was the winter retreat for a community of stone age people who lived and worked and hunted along this coastline it's covered in water now but when the tide retreats you can actually see evidence of these people but what the river's protected for so long it's now in danger of destroying and that's why we're here to lift some of the most at-risk archaeology before it's lost forever under the water this is a really treacherous site there's ploying mud unforgiving tides even quicksand even so we've still got only three days to do it [Music] for this dig we're focusing on the middle stone age or mesolithic period which lasted for 6 000 years from the end of the last ice age around 9500 bc in archaeological terms mesolithic sites are as rare as hen's teeth and at best normally only consists of scatters of flint or unstratified bits of bone or antler and that makes this beach at gold cliff in south wales very important it's packed with some of the best stone age archaeology in the country and the man in charge of untangling it is professor martin bell of reading university you've been down here a long time now haven't you yes 13 years on the foreshore in the seven history what is it that attracts you about this place well it's the exceptionally preserved archaeology really the water log deposits the sealed archaeological sites that are quite unlike the ones you get on dry land what do you reckon we can do here mate well i think there's a lot we can do to help martin a lot we can learn about this period i mean it's a very long period of the mesolithic we're probably talking about well five or six thousand years something like that and yet we know so little about it and i think part of the reason for that is that they they're not farmers they're hunter-gatherers and fishers and so on and they're moving about and so they don't build the permanent structures which we rely on to find and they don't leave all the debris behind so i think almost anything we can do to help is going to increase our knowledge [Music] so far martin has excavated 25 separate sites on the foreshore establishing that much of this beach was at some time a campsite for mesolithic hunters and their families and time team now have a unique opportunity to get involved in rescuing part of this rare british archaeological site the strong tides of the river seven are destroying the foreshore faster than martin can investigate it and it'll be our job to salvage some of the most at-risk archaeology before it's lost to the sea and this is our target 15 square meters of beach known as trench b it's being really seriously eroded by the waves ripping through and that's the site we're going to have a go at block lifting down there and then taking it onto dry land to do an excavation it's quite low down on the foreshore so we don't have a lot of time before the tide comes in this will be a race against time we only have a two hour digging window each day and that's not all be very careful how you walk because it's very slippery but hasn't somebody told me there's quick sounds there is quick sounds out there yet how do we recognize quicksand when you're sinking [Laughter] our restricted time on the foreshore will rule out normal archaeological techniques so instead of digging trench b on site we're going to move it to dry land where we can excavate it at our leisure you're very delicate with apparatus yeah well i'm a very delicate chap really the concept simple enough map out trench b into one meter squares and then divide each of them into lots of little blocks we then cut and lift those blocks take them off the foreshore and put them back together again in our nice dry trench tent and hopefully by the end of day three we'll have filled 15 of these meter square frames it is like cake making it it's going to take a lot of effort to get trench b to safety oh no you just get on and do it we want to get as much dirt up as possible as quickly as possible but martin's convinced it's worth it fines from nearby trenches point to a lot of metallic activity in this area so what kind of fines have you had out a lot of flints um large axe ads which this actually comes from the site that you're going to be excavating down lower in the tidal frame this was just five meters from the trench what's an ad to me well it's a woodworking tool isn't it i mean it's fantastic to find something like that because we know they chop trees down and work wood and so on but you don't often find things like that do you no in fact there are only i think four examples from wales and all of them come from this site so what do the finds that you've had so far tell us about what was going on here well a range of activities really i mean they're hunting in a big way clearly they're working flint it's one of the things they're coming down to the coast to do is to get raw materials to make tools which some of which they probably used elsewhere so the prospects for trench beer good but can we actually save all 15 square meters of it in just three days well it would help if we could all agree on how to do it [Music] no but that doesn't mean to say we can't cut though does it some blocks we have to lift out and then put in the tin that's really the bottom of the chin you need left i'd rather put the level actually on the tin in situ we can't put those tins in we'll use the other ones then yeah right but i need a hem of them the point of it is if you don't take it away then the seven will won't it that's it absolutely so i mean i would have thought that for the the sake of like two or three centimeters one way or the other absolutely who were they the hell with that degree of accuracy let's let's at least get made of it back to basics in it find and record despite gold cliff being one of the best mesolithic sites in britain i've been warned i shouldn't expect some sort of stone age village or town to appear in fact when we do get fines they'll probably be among the smallest things i've ever seen on time team and it's all because the mesolithic way of life is unlike any other we've investigated what we're looking at are people who are hunter-gatherers who had very mobile lifestyles these were people who moved a great deal around the landscape so they'd carry everything that they needed with them and as a result of course this means that there's not very much left behind they only left behind things that they didn't need what do we need to find in the next three days to give us a better picture of how long they were living here and what they were doing here well i think what's really wonderful about this particular site is that it was sealed soon after it was abandoned by mud covering the site and this means that we're actually going to find things uh just as they were left six to seven thousand years ago which is quite remarkable i suppose you know you could think of it in a way as a sort of a mesolithic pompeii but only without the you know the the volcanic disaster but if we actually uncover it we will actually be looking at a site as it was left untouched and with a remarkable range of materials except unlike pompeii this is not a site for geophys the lack of permanent structures plus the nomadic lifestyle mean there's simply nothing for them to detect but surprisingly stuart still thinks that maps and the modern landscape may help him with the story of stone age goldcliff stuart normally we'd be looking to you for ancient trackways and lumps and bumps that might be people's houses you're not gonna be able to give us any of that are you not not from this particular period here no but there are other clues i think can help us a picture of what the geology the natural land forms the way the rivers are working and so on to give us any clues as to why why they decided to spend time here you could go that way or all that way all that oil that way when we get off that second one square meters and then that would just be more efficient with people power as well and so you're having lots of people standing around yeah absolutely back on the foreshore the diggers have now solved the early teething problems and are working like a well-oiled machine the deconstruction of trench b is picking up pace or at least it was phil i can't lift anything both my feet are stuck but why are you holding under my hand just so i don't get sucked under oh blimey i'm not joking [Laughter] now we get this in here now you get it in there gordon bennett i know your feet are stuck again the sheer weight of this oh it's in there all right cool you stay down now yeah now you take it over there and get it wrapped i'm enjoying this every time you pick this up the weight forces your feet down we've not been having this problem you've got a low center of gravity or something with the first square meter safely lifted stage two of the process begins [Music] reassembling the blocks back in the salubrious surroundings of our trench tent [Music] back on the foreshore the tide is now threatening trench bee without diggers having done as much as they can down here it's time for them to evacuate the beach and get back onto dry land seeing all these trenches in the mud it's hard to remember that the people that we're setting out to discover didn't actually live in mud no absolutely not i mean the landscape that we're looking out at today is completely different from the one that they occupied 7 000 years ago or they're about what would it have looked like here well i think what we'd be looking at is a salt marsh there would be reed beds and probably trees dotted around and so forth a much more productive environment i think than the one actually that we have before us today and it's been protected by the sea for all these years and yet now the archaeologists are saying we've got to move it because the sea is threatening it why well i mean this unfortunately is partly inevitability of climatic warming and rising sea levels and sites like this are being uncovered and actively destroyed so i mean on the one hand we're very lucky that sites like this are exposed but i mean we leave it a a year or two and it'll all be washed away well the sea isn't getting this particular chunk of foreshaw it's now safely back in the trench tent along with our diggers who've swapped the backbreaking work of lifting the blocks for the backbreaking work of forensic micro archaeology this couldn't be more different from excavating a roman villa or a medieval cathedral here we're looking for fines that may be only a few millimeters across the whole process requires painstaking concentration every find must be catalogued no matter how trivial as it could shed new light on life in mesolithic gold cliff that's the pebble by the looks of it i think that is the pattern i put that in the pebbles bag right yeah definitely cue the pebble bag and despite this minute investigation of each block we're still not taking any chances the spoil from each square is then filtered through various sieves to make sure we haven't missed a thing it's an awful lot of work i mean the weird thing of course is that we might be doing all this this this this fearsome or this fearless exclamation there may be nothing here there might be nothing yeah that's right yeah there might be anything here at all but if there is you will find it while phil gets to grips with the minutiae of stone age goldcliff stuart and henry are looking at the bigger picture although now part of the mainland previous excavations show that goldcliff was actually an island during the mesolithic period a legacy still visible in modern mapping a while ago and you can see the drainage patterns are shown on here and peculiarly you see these arrows it marks the direction of the waterfall they're going away they're getting the wrong way on the coast all the drainage is going back that way which suggests that this there's a rise in the ground here you see the levels down here drop there's 22 there and 20. it's actually dropping away so that actually could be the edge of the island yes [Music] at last after eight hours hard graft we've found something that has the archaeologists all of a flutter a find that bears witness to the technical skill of these mesolithic people a find that i've been leaning on for two minutes without realising what i knew you'd be impressed i just knew you'd be impressed here you go have a look through that uh magnifying glass now along that edge there you will see where somebody has retouched that piece of flint so this is the just one end of the whole thing but of course this is the problem this is why we have to be so careful with our excavating technique because this is the sort of stuff that you get in the mesolithic this my nude piece of flint known as a microlith once belongs to a much larger sharpened edge but it hasn't just been worked once it's been retouched or resharpened suggesting that it was so useful to a mesolithic hunter that he went to the effort of making a new cutting edge once the original had been blunted and it was these flint razors that made up the tools of the hunter-gatherers seven and a half thousand years ago we know that we that these microliths these small blades they um they must have been set in some form of shaft or handle and they could be used in a number of different ways they're the original sort of plug-in tool so that you can use them what do you mean when you say plug-in tool well for example when when something is damaged or broken you can literally pull it out and replace it with a exactly similar component so that they could be used in a variety of different ways as shown here see the beauty of it is that you don't need a big piece of flint to make a long cutting edge i mean you've got what a couple of inches of cutting edge here you don't need one continuous edge you can put in some very very small bits of flint they are fairly impressive but they're pretty unsophisticated aren't they presumably there's quite a limit to what people would do with it no no oh look you look think about the the range of functions that you've got here you can go out and kill with something like that you've got this piercing thing you can use virtually the same tip to drill holes you've got cutting edges to do all your fine duty woodworking um you've got scraping tools to scrape skins to scrape woods you've got engraving tools as well you've got a whole range of tools all based around these small bits of flint they are very very sophisticated it's the end of day one it's been a heck of a lot of hard work and the total result from all that graft has been this a little bag of pebbles and the most microscopic find i think we've ever had the problem is the whole process is so frustratingly slow we've got to really get that process going much faster but what's really exciting me about tomorrow is that it'll be the first chance that i've had to see real evidence of mesolithic people on this site because tomorrow i'm gonna see some stone age footprints join us after the break day two of our dig on the stone age site in south wales and the rescue archaeology is already underway right then guys let's go let's go we're battling to save 15 square meters of this mesolithic foreshore before it's lost to the sea oh yes that's nice but it's turned out to be more of a challenge than we expected yesterday we only managed to salvage a tenth of our target before the tide came in today we've simply got to do better away from the filth and the fury of trench b the rest of the foreshore is emerging from the river seven including one of the most evocative sites we've ever seen on time team they're absolutely everywhere aren't there that one that's a cracker in it it's just unbelievable they may not seem much at first glance but these muddy impressions excavated by reading post graduate rachel scales are physical remains of the mesolithic people who once lived here footprints made by hunter-gatherers walking across this landscape seven and a half thousand years ago they're so fresh are you absolutely convinced that these are mesolithic absolutely convinced tony i mean their relationship to the geology around here there's a there's a layer of peat just below this which has been dated so there is absolutely no question that these are mesolithic footprints and there's a massive material above it they're absolutely sealed in they are sailed stratigraphically they have to be mesolithic [Laughter] wow that's incredible isn't it isn't that something yeah it's really neat you see the way they press down on there as they will it is just so totally a snapshot in time isn't it at the time these footprints were made this foreshore wouldn't have been covered with the slippery silty stuff we're walking on today but it still would have been pretty muddy and that in the right conditions is perfect for preserving footprints this would have been sort of um probably a salt marsh environment so the mud that they would have been walking would have been relatively soft so as the person's been walking they've sunk into the mud their footprints made an impression on the surface of the mud and then over time the footprint has filled in but trying to find these silt and mudfield footprints in a silty muddy landscape requires a special sort of excavation and that means phil experiencing a new touchy feely form of archaeology so there's that's the clay there yeah the loose clay sat on top of the sand it is definitely softer in there and is that how they normally appear yep they just normally appear like that and you either gently use them with the fingertips but other than that it's just a matter of literally lifting lifting the clay off peeling the laminations back bit by bit until you reach the level that the footprints are on especially it gets quite therapeutic afterwards it is it's very nice it's a it's a beautiful place to work it's a very calm place but it's about the only place that is calm the rest of the foreshore is a hive of activity further up the beach martin bell and his team from reading university are carefully scraping away the layers of their latest trench on this site while in trench b it looks like our hard draft and teamwork are paying off working a lot quicker and we're getting a lot more out in the moment we've just finished uh the half block we've missed yesterday we've taken out a meter there and that's the last block coming out from a meter over there so we've got two and a half meters already and we've still got another 50 minutes left before the tide comes in this site has turned out to be quite a challenge for our diggers but they're not the only ones stewart's trying to discover what made gold cliff such an attractive location to mesolithic man but apart from the fact it was an island situated between the mouths of two rivers the ask and the y he can't get a lot more out of his beloved maps these stone age people were nomadic hunter-gatherers who left little or no impact on the landscape and that's a problem if you're a landscape investigator so stuart's on a steep learning curve well when they're not here where are they going i don't understand this there are movement in this period i think that the idea is that they are moving upstream perhaps at different times of the year along the rivers because there are different resources available in other locations we know for example at certain times of the year that deer will move up into the uplands so to a certain extent they'll be following gain but also knowing every inch of their landscape and knowing when to move when plants ripen and so forth getting to every inch of the landscape and that's where i'm quite interested in actually plotting where a lot of these mesolithic finds have been in this area i mean i need to do that to get some picture of how movement is in this localized area could we actually go and do that now i'm struggling with that a map you see i need to see things on the map i can't i can't do it with that yes exactly what you mean the tide is once again threatening trench b so it's time for our diggers to retreat to the safety of the trench tent we've succeeded in salvaging three square meters of beach twice yesterday's amount although we won't know what's in any of it for at least a couple of hours but there's no such weight back at the footprints rachel and phil have just found compelling evidence that our mesolithic ancestors had to put up with some of the same hazards we faced today so what have you got there then rachel um basically it's kind of kind of thick brown kind of organic sort of splodge that was just in the heel of the footprint there yeah so um what might that be um it could possibly be done like that something we're looking out for at the moment this looks suspiciously like a mesolithic foot that stood in some mesolithic deer poo well we all know the business about walking along and finally got something stuck to your foot obviously the same is happening eight thousand and nine thousand years ago it's just another little bit smelly piece of evidence to add to the 177 footprints rachel has recorded on this site why is it that you've got so few footprints whereas rachel has found so many it's because the area that i've drawn to excavate mesolithic people weren't walking on it you can see they were clearly congregating in that area but not this way all these trails of footprints at first glance would appear to have very little rhyme or reason but as some of these smaller prints seem to belong to children they do offer us a tantalising glimpse of a stone age family and that's why rachel's keen to build up a database that will allow her to decipher the trails and get a better idea of what's going on so while phil goes for a hose down before rejoining most of the team in the trench room i've been volunteered to get my feet dirty makes a very rude noise every time your foot comes out the mud as soon as it gets too deep for you come back but don't come back across the footprints you've already made come on bridget in the name of experimental archaeology i now find myself walking hand in hand with bridget across a salt marsh that would have been similar to the one at stone age gold cliff i can't get a purchase with these muddy feet i know that people watching this will be thinking well it's a right hoot but actually it's not going to achieve very much does it have much purpose oh yes by studying the modern footprints here i can start to make comparisons and understand perhaps maybe people were walking faster or maybe stalking an animal or maybe if they were carrying a weight or say coming back from yesterday carrying a basket or fish or something like that go on you two right you want me to get down there and play mother yeah so with the help of various willing volunteers including young jake here we're going to make a variety of trails in the salt marsh so it's left to left isn't it yeah left left heel impression to say left second neck left heel impression then under the guidance of professor robin crompton an expert on the forensics of footprints we'll see how the results compare to footprints uncovered by rachel on the gold cliff foreshore but as with everything else on this site even the simplest of tasks can become a hazardous mucky business back in the trench tent the science of archaeology is proving equally messy yeah and that makes the instrument high and then no it doesn't no i haven't got a clue what they're talking about either if you add on 3.43 it's it's going but i think they're trying to work out a three-dimensional sum which would tell them how the blocks fit together oh you can put in a minuscule that's what i'm saying you start with the minus number i don't know where to use calculators i'll bring you an abacus next time well i'm glad they got that sorted out because the diggers have really got to get a move on it's fantastic that we've lifted twice as much of trench b as we did yesterday but of course what this means is we now have to process twice as much as we did yesterday that clay is orchestra and it's not a task anyone's savoring but dan has got a slightly controversial idea this process can be speeded up by just being less cautious we've got the meter square all marked out we know where everything's coming from we can just whip through it are you advocating sloppy archaeology not at all that's all salvaged everything we do is a bonus because the seven will have it if we don't get it no matter what level we get it at it's all a bonus isn't it oh this is some glutenous stuff i mean there is no way that this that this can be excavated systematically that is all just gonna have to come off and help may now be at hand in a most unlikely form bone even i know that this is not an archaeological tool well in fact it has been used on mesolithic sites in in denmark before so i think there's a good precedent for using it what are we going to use it for well you know those individual blocks that we take at the moment we break them up by hand before they go through the sieving process takes a lot of time we thought we'd mix it with water in this and it'll speed the process hold on a minute if we're going to chuck all that stuff into here it's going to smash up the fines well i've done some experiments and there is some damage there's no question there's some damage to some materials but you can put in little mollusks tiny shells and they survive perfectly well because what happens is most of the fragile things get thrown up into suspension in the cement mixer and don't get pulverized it's only heavy things like mortar and plaster which we're not likely to get and this is good archaeology he assures me that it will not affect anything except the speed of which we can do it although it's only the spoil that will receive the cement mixer treatment and not the unexcavated blocks it still seems rather extreme to me but it would be fantastic if we could speed up the sieving process because it's providing vital diagnostic information for the archaeologists now we seem to be coming out with seeds charred bits of hazelnuts from a variety of you know blocks only four of them about two in each could that be indicative of um some sort of hearth area that people are sitting there eating throwing away shells or is you know this isn't this is too little evidence yet to say something like that well it's a small amount of evidence but to me it's jolly exciting actually because previously we found just one single hazelnut for a start most of the evidence on balance suggests autumn and winter occupation but what we're building up here is a great jigsaw really bits of evidence pointing to different seasons and we hope that ultimately you know we'll have a really coherent story and we still haven't finished with the few millimeters of sharpened flint i was so underwhelmed by yesterday very often in making these things you have a little by-product little notched end that snaps off now at this particular side of these sites we very rarely find those snapped ends so it seems to me likely at least on present evidence that this microlith wasn't actually made on site and the significance of that means that it was brought in ready made possibly in some sort of halved or shaft and it's may have been broken and therefore pulled out and thrown away this tiny tiny piece of rock is in itself is telling a little bit of a story about this particular part of the site with the end of day fast approaching there's just enough time for stuart and robin to lift some plaster casts from our footprints experiment and they do seem remarkably similar to the footprints at rachel's site particularly the children's can you get a bag but the appallingly muddy conditions robin and stuart are working in also tell us that we've witnessed a unique moment in time one of the things that we began to realize from our experiments on the mud this afternoon is that those stone age footprints can't have taken much longer than about 15 seconds to produce because any longer and you start churning up your footsteps so we've got a window in time of about 15 seconds which we're trying to illuminate with lots of other finds and these fines are increasing all the time another flint has come up and for the first time small bones probably from fish or birds by tomorrow night we should have a very vivid picture of what was going on on our mud flats that day seven and a half thousand years ago when those little children were playing in the mud join us after the break it's the start of day three at our south wales stone age dig and despite the early bad weather everything seems hunky-dory over the bar and get me a sandwich [Laughter] but overnight we've had to face up to a harsh reality we're going to need all our diggers up in the trench tent all day because processing trench b's contents is taking much longer than we expected in fact we haven't even processed half of what we've dug already so with one day left if we really want to find out the story of this site we're going to have to apply forensic excavation and that means all of us scraping away at these great big blocks of mud and we're going to have to get cracking so we're not going to have enough time to go back onto the foreshore to salvage any more of trench b i can't pretend this isn't disappointing we'd hoped to save 15 square meters of at-risk archaeology but now we have to accept it's going to be more like five did you hear that we got a microlith out of one of these yesterday yeah the second one oh she just showed me this morning yeah but on the plus side we are salvaging evidence that would have otherwise been lost to the waters of the seven estuary i think that's absolute priority for sieving that one right i'll take that one away right now evidence that will add to martin bell's 13-year investigation of this rare stone age site [Music] over in the fields behind the foreshore henry's taking core samples to find out how big the mesolithic island was that's not going anywhere does it suck fast easier said than done back on site bone jones and his cement mixer are working flat out to process the spoil from the trench tent [Music] and in the incident room robin and rachel are busy analyzing the data from yesterday's footprints experiment to see what it can tell us about the trails discovered on the foreshore in the adult bridget the two stride lengths are very similar however in the child he's either increasing the frequency of his walking or increasing stride length every bit of evidence that we accumulate will add to the picture we're drawing of what life was like here 7500 years ago i've been systematically working through the material that's come out under the microscope we've got this hazelnut and you can see it's a lovely ridge surface on it and that's evidence that people were here and they were eating them because it's been broken we've got evidence of raspberry seeds and we've got evidence of elderberry seeds you've got raspberries we do we've got a lovely little raspberry on here you see it's got a black pitted surface yes i mean it's rather nice you can see that really clearly you can can't you but the really lovely ones these elderberry seeds i mean look at that you know the ridges on it ripples very nice evidence so is this fruit and veg that appears all around the year the elderberries and the raspberry seeds would have only sort of uh blossomed sometime between august to october so it's sort of autumnal food the good thing about the raspberry seed as well is that it's actually charred that might be a good indicator that it was people eating these raspberry seeds and as you know seeds get stuck in your mouth and there might have been someone eating it and maybe spit it into the fire so are we saying that people only inhabited this area on a seasonal basis from the evidence that we've got we can only say that they were in the area in the autumn time intriguing to know where they were the rest of the year isn't that it is intriguing yeah as well as underlining the seasonal nature of this stone age settlement these seeds also give a fascinating insight into the mesolithic diet a diet that would have been much more varied than you might expect jackie you've assembled a terrific range of ingredients here but how do we know this is available to mesolithic people well mesolithic people tend to live on the edge of the marshes the wetlands estuaries and these are sort of things that you actually have quite freely available in those areas we've got the crab apples which are the wild herbs goose venison duck of course lots of ducks on the edge of the marsh and of course fish the vegetarians would have had a thin toilet would have been ties hazelnuts and hazelnut pate and hazelnut muesli i suspect there weren't anything we're going to cook our own version of a mesolithic feast using the foods and methods available to the hunter-gatherers that once lived here but this was an era before plates pans or even clay pots were in use so what's the first job well the first thing we're going to do is actually clay bake the salmon yeah have you stuffed that i've stuffed that with some samphire which is actually a delicacy today but would have been everywhere in the mesolithic all right so it'll be baked in a clay shield in fact that's right that's going to protect it from the fire and keep all the juices in of the fish as well right so they would have got this clay from the estuary or somewhere that's right it's basically rubbish clay for making pots with but perfect for cooking right i've got a little surprise for you here i'm going to clay bake some duck eggs for you oh right that's the vegetarian option is it jolly good this is an experiment we haven't tried this before so we'll see what happens when we do it that sounds good i look forward to that okay all very tasty but nothing in comparison to the beast that phil's now helping to dig down in the reading university trench this is part of an aurochs are now extinct species of wild cow that featured heavily in the mesolithic diet [Music] and it's a pity we can't have it for our stone age feast because judging by the size of the aurochs tooth they're now excavating it would have been one heck of a hunk of beef if you compare these with the size of of modern cattle teeth twice the size plus if you've stick one or two arrows in him and you don't kill him down right he's he's going to be pretty knocked yes he wouldn't want to be here and run like hell yeah these fearsome creatures measured six feet in height weighed almost a ton and had horns the size of elephant tusks [Music] and hunting them required all the sophistication mesolithic man had at his disposal it's a fairly awesome weapon actually i mean this is the equivalent of a series of barbs yeah and the idea is that once you fire this into the flank of an animal it does stay in and it wiggles about and it creates a massive wound and it's a pretty horrible thing really so it wouldn't matter if that actually just damaged a big animal rather than kill it no because with bigger animals it would be difficult to kill it out right yes yes something as large as an aurochs i mean you can imagine it uh you know something the size of a large minibus kind of coming at you and you've just you're armed with this and it may well get away but the chances are that it's pretty badly wounded and it's bleeding heavily and you know you and the dogs can follow through and do the rest it's in remarkably good condition considering it's been in pretty much waterlogged conditions it really is quite incredible i know when they the bite on those really well presumably yeah still you better put that back in the bag i'll get on with this bit of bone i want you to carry on digging there might be more of that we're fast approaching the end of day three and there's a great sense of relief among all the archaeologists that we've almost completed processing our five square meters of rescued foreshore hanging on bone pretty good yeah we're going all right how much have you processed well we've done i think getting on for a couple of hundreds of litres of um soil so far that's pretty impressive but it's pretty good yeah how the fines been well we found lots of gravel and we found some bits of peat and we got nice bits of orange paint from the cement mixer so basically you found nothing you must be pretty frustrated you've come all the way down from york to look at this fantastic side but no fine but archaeology isn't always about finding what you expect and some of it's just hard grind and persistence is there anything here that you've seen which helps illuminate the prehistoric oh absolutely i think the footprints on the mud are fantastic it really brings us much closer to a very remote and distant past you're not sorry you spent the 96 hours in mud and cold water no no i think it's been brilliant i've enjoyed it very much but for some of our diggers the end couldn't come soon enough it's very painful it's a very painful way of digging how many of these little boxes have been done all together oh we've done five meters worth so that's 16 times five i can't i'm too exhausted to work that out if i'm afraid how much have we found uh we've not done bad we have found you know bones bird bones and hazelnut shells and tiny little microliths but this is the star find and it's a it's a nice almost complete stern tool guys that's a big one yeah the first bigger we've got it's got a brilliant edge on it it's still keen and you'd still cut yourself with it i reckon but you'll be pleased now it's over can't wait to get back to normal archaeology tourney in spite of the frustrations of our diggers this laborious process has provided us with some great finds but the trench tent isn't the only source of good results the experimental archaeology is also coming up trumps [Music] now have a rather tasty stone age supper cooking away and the results from yesterday's trek across the mud have produced valuable evidence for rachel's research it's been really really worthwhile i'm really pleased with the experimental results watching bridget and jake you know we've been watching how they've moved in the mud and how jake had to alter his stride patterns to catch up with bridget we've also learned to look from these plaster casts and recognize the differences between an adult footprint and a children's footprint and i can now go away and apply these things that i've learned from the experiments straight to my mesolithic area what do you reckon those kids were doing looking at the footprints the way they're running backwards and forwards all over that area i think they were just out really enjoying themselves we're now really getting a feel for the people who walked ate and hunted on this stone age island during the autumn and winter months but we also know that they would leave here to follow the herds inland during the spring and summer and having looked at how gold cliff fitted into the mesolithic landscape stuart and henry believed this island was the perfect starting point for these seasonal treks i mean this is the whole of wales we're looking at here so you see wales cornwall coming across here um our site is right down just about there you can see it's between the two valleys between the ask and the wires we know and you can sort of immediately see that where they where those go if you're following the rivers you're being taken straight up to the island totally different set of resources yeah so you start thinking about this seasonal shift between here and and then going up to the uplands at different time of year we know there are footprints along the shoreline here and there other footprints have been found up here towards the mouth of the us so it could easily move up to this river up here absolutely and i mean fact there is confirmation in the sense that there are a number of sites up in this upland area which we've never really been able to understand um in seasonal terms and yet when you look at it this way it would make very good sense if they were at goldcliff at a particular time of year maybe from here on in through the winter then one could well imagine perhaps in the early summer moving up perhaps following game like red deer into the uplands and the best way i think would probably be up the major river valleys and of course they could have done this quite easily i think with canoes and so on over the past three days victor has been quietly beavering away absorbing all the evidence that we've come up with and combining it into a picture that gives us a day in the life of stone age goldcliff in a way this is very artificially condensed because everything is happening that we know about which would probably spread out you know they're not even paying any attention to the fact that there's an aurochs being butchered about 10 years raging away it's a beautiful picture but it's sheer speculation isn't it no i don't think it is we know we know quite a lot about this period and of course we know a lot about this site from martin's work and so we've got the children's footprints of course we've got evidence the aurochs we've got evidence of butchery the flint work and so on so you know there's a lot there that we we know about already are you uh happy with this rather revealing skimpy dress it looks a bit contemporary to me well we don't have any clothes from this period of course because they would rot away we do have a little bit of evidence of even of textiles but not from this side and i think the general assumption is because we find bone needles they must have been sewing skins together because exactly what style they were in is anybody's guess and victor's rather let his imagination run away with him here i mean i'd happily take some offer i'm sure he would but the picture doesn't just reflect what we've found it's a reflection of what martin and his archaeologists have done over the past 13 years and will continue to do after we've left gosh that really is lovely victor everything we've discovered at goldcliff shows that stone age life wasn't a cliche of savages living on the verge of starvation they were in fact sophisticated hunter-gatherers in tune with their surrounding environment the tide may have reclaimed the site but even though trench b is underwater it's still providing us with information courtesy of the 80 blocks of foreshore we've managed to salvage in the very last one we've had what i think's our best find that is an aurochs footprint not that anyone cares they're too busy stuffing their faces with the mesolithic feast try some of this stuff this is docking i've never had ducking no well it's been clay baked but what is it the people who lived here 7 000 years ago were the last of the hunter-gatherers but gradually their way of life died out and a new style of living evolved based on farming and settlement but quite frankly from my point of view i quite like the mesolithic way of doing [Music] things

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 374,180

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

Id: hp4F_nKl0e0

Length: 48min 26sec (2906 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021