The Prehistoric Remains Buried In The Isles Of Scotland | Time Team | Odyssey

[Music] welcome to the isle of barrow in the outer hebrides we're about 50 miles off the west coast of scotland it's always a tad blowy here but recently a particularly strong storm ripped apart this entire sand dune revealing this and i know it's difficult to see but believe it or not all this is prehistoric archaeology but what even i can see is over here this is a burial look can you see those bones which i suppose are ribs all this has been exposed for the first time in thousands of years time team has been called in on a three-day rescue mission to examine this extraordinary windswept site and to record the evidence before it's all blown away forever [Music] time team travel all over the uk but this trip out from glasgow to the island of barrow in the outer hebrides really feels like a bit of an adventure for a start the only place to land a plane on this island is on the beach already it feels like we've come to a very different part of britain there are only about a thousand people living on barra today and large areas of unspoiled landscape contain fantastically preserved prehistoric archaeology the only threat to it is the extreme weather which can blow away thousands of years of history in a matter of minutes we've been called in to rescue some archaeology here at allersdale on the western side of the island where some burials have been exposed in the sand dunes i have to admit if i'd come here on my own without any archaeologists i would have had no idea this was prehistoric it just looks like ordinary beach scatter look at this this looks like something that a couple of teenagers might have put together for a beach party last year i mean i agree does it look like somebody's had a fire for a barbecue or something yeah victor's done a drawing look of showing you what it would have looked like originally you see with the burial in the middle there with all the stones around the edge well yeah that's convincing but it's not proof isn't it well it is because this actually has been excavated there was a rescue excavation here when this site was revealed and the radio carbon date of 1800 to 1400 bc middle bronze age if it's been excavated why are we digging it because since that excavation there's more erosion gone on that way and opened up a lot more structures over there so there's lots more to do so we know some of these burials are middle bronze age approximately four thousand years old but what amazes me is that they vary so much in size phil is that a burial yeah that is i mean you couldn't get a body in there tony you could get them in there if it was cremated the point is that this this is the style of burial that you get up here we're calling kiss burials some people like to call them a cyst burial but to me that's more of a medical term the sort of thing you lands you know but either way kissed or cyst it's it's the this style of burial where you get a little array of stones and it's like a stone-built tomb and you put the dead person in there it's it's typical so is that one a kiss burial two yeah i mean it's a different size and shape but it's the same basic idea this is going to be a race against the clock we've got three days to learn as much as we can from the wealth of prehistoric material exposed here before it's all lost for good we've got a rare chance to build up a picture of life here thousands of years ago and there's real excitement because we've never dug on a site like this before thankfully we've got two experts with us who have mike parker pearson and keith brannigan a bit of a mess to sort out isn't it yes what we're looking at is a jumble of stones it looks chaotic but it's a very complicated sight the reason it's complicated is that a lot of the clutter here is relatively modern archaeology originally it was in the layers above but it sunk down as the sand has been blown away leaving it all mixed up with the bronze age burials the first job will be to clear away the much later stuff so we can see the prehistoric remains more clearly we've been looking at this we've got a plan of this site made during the rescue dig a year ago it shows the four kisss that have already been dug and the site of a prehistoric roundhouse that's never been investigated and is now being severely show me where the eroded is uh that's the floor here this black deposit sitting above the sand yeah is being uh tilled off there by kate yeah the wall we think is running around there and up here we do seem to have the entrance porch so this is the wall here we think the wall is running through here here's one side wall here's the other one so we've got a porch here it's not easy to see but this is the remains of a prehistoric round house with the doorway still intact although this half of the building has been eroded away i feel very nervous walking about on all this archaeology yes it should be it's very fragile and to find this kind of thing a floor that people walked about on at on slept on it's really remarkable people have been building round houses on this island since at least neolithic times that's about 7 000 years ago but it's more likely that our roundhouse was built in the bronze age some four thousand years ago or later still in the iron age making it a mere 2500 years old to find out just how old it is we need to find some dateable evidence like pottery but one of the main goals of this dig will be to learn more about the many weird burial practices that went on here in the bronze age and the most urgent rescue job is to investigate a kissed burial here which is being badly eroded this kist seems to contain not only the skeleton of a small child but also the cremated remains of another person on top of it these bits of bone are blowing away yeah it is the problem is that both of these individuals actually look like juveniles they're probably about five or six year olds so the bone is very very light and as you can see it's almost excavating itself because the sun's blowing and it's blowing away i mean and what's that with this that's an ear bone all right so that's underneath here so that's what it looks like on the inside basically yeah jackie can tell that the cremated remains were also a child burial because this tooth has survived the fire and is still intact so that enables you to say that it's a juvenile rather than an older person yeah right jackie's challenge today will be to carefully unpick the evidence in order to work out the story of this double burial obviously they were done within a short relatively short space of time picture that they'd know that this animation burial was here now whether they were done at the same time and for some reason one individual was cremated and the other one wasn't um or whether it was several years between it yeah and the grade was marked in something is there any way we could tell whether they were related at all no it's it would be conjecture really i mean the fact that you've got two individuals within the same grave suggests that there's some sort of relationship but in a close-knit community they could be just good friends yeah thankfully nowhere on the island is more than a 15-minute drive away and we've found a bolt hole to escape the wind the local school is going to be our incident room over the next three days stuart why do you reckon our settlement so close to the sea i couldn't see a harbor or anything like that there no it's actually quite difficult not to be near the sea here on an island which henry's model shows really well the little red dots where we're digging just in there look how it's dominated by these mountains and high ground these are rocky outcrops really difficult to to settle on to live on but round the fringes here you've got these low-lying areas locally they're called maca it's a gallic word meaning low-lying fertile ground it only occurs on the western isles of scotland and in ireland and it's very rich agricultural grounds it's an ideal place to settle one of the nice things about the maca is because it's very soft you can actually dig into it elsewhere where it's rocky you can't dig into the ground so it helps that concept of digging down and getting shelter there with the maca grassland providing the best place to live on the island it's possible our site here could have been occupied over thousands of years so how old is the roundhouse we're revealing in the sand phil reckons he's found the answer we got this whacking great shirt of pot literally lying on the floor a shirt from a cooking vessel and we've actually got the top part of it so if i very carefully pick this bit up you see we've got bits of rock in here so this is all going to be locally produced this is local clay the other side would have been out here right and the bottom of it down there it's a big old pot yeah and you can see the sitting on the outside and that's from the peat fire so it actually sat in the fire itself and you say this is where the main central cooking hearth would have been yeah right in the middle of the house because just over there you can see as you go in you do get more and more burning you've got masses and masses of charcoal right in the edge of the trench that is the edge of the fire then yeah the fire would have been right down there we're on the very side of it and from other sites where we've excavated house floors like this this was the cooking area so i'm not surprised to find that there at all this chunky bit of pottery suggests our roundhouse is iron age probably built around 500 bc a good thousand years after the kissed burials were placed here in the bronze age we now know we're investigating two different periods of activity on this site but the intriguing question is how did they manage to make pottery here in prehistoric times because then as now there were very few trees on the island and no ready source of wood to fire a kiln over the next three days we're going to carry out an experiment to build a kiln based on evidence found on barra so is this the sort of structure they would use to fire pottery then yeah we found something like this at the neolithic site on the other side of the island um where they they dig a pit put a bomb fire and essentially put the pot in the bonfire and then they build a dome over it of uh either peat slabs or slabs of turf so it's not killing us no no it's what we call a clamp right and they're using peat to do this uh yeah yeah that's one of the really interesting things about it that by the time you get to the early bronze age around here there's almost no wood left so that really apart from getting it going the only thing you can use seems to be pete so it's going to be very interesting to see whether we can get a successful firing just using pete so it's a genuine piece of experimental archaeology then to see how you do it whether it works whether the fuel works that'd be very exciting yeah we've dug up some local clay to make some pots for this experiment and enlisted the help of a professional potter prehistoric pottery was made by hand using coils of clay but amateur potter mick aston isn't happy with his materials it's just rubbish it falls into pieces it's all cracking up around the edge it's just like the generation game here isn't it it's terrible there's not enough clay in proportion to the sand and that the clay is the bit that helps it to stick together and the sand is what gives it the strength and if the ratio is not quite right then he can't really make much of a thought out of it perhaps the answer is they didn't use this clay for potting on the island because it doesn't seem to be suitable at all no it doesn't no but if they can't use it for pots then if if there's evidence of kilns are they bringing the raw clay in from somewhere else i mean that sounds even more or did they know a better source and more pure sounds i'm relieved to see yours fall into bits as well well our potters will just have to do their best so we at least have some pots to try out in our prehistoric clamp kiln tomorrow out in the sand there's no rushing the delicate job of excavating the double burial at the moment jack is busy carefully removing the cremated remains before she can start work on the burial underneath henry is making a 3d model of the landscape and can show the areas geofiz have surveyed around the site so far although most of what they've detected is natural geology their latest survey just here has revealed something they're really excited about what we've done is work our way round from the main site so we've come round in an arc avoiding all the steep slopes and look we've got this fantastic response here i mean this to me looks like a bronze age round house bronze age or iron age yeah it's showing up really clearly we're standing right in the middle of it here you can actually see it as an earthwork as well can't you see yeah come on let's have a look at it this bank round here look also it's a big thing yeah well this must be the edge of it round here yeah and some of those stones around that side must be the other side well you could bring up a big family in that couldn't you yeah and it comes right the way around to here i think that's the inner face of the building so you've got a wall that's going to be really thick well this is fantastic it looks like geophys have detected the biggest round house i've ever seen the trouble is mick's not sure we've got time to dig it so what we should really do is carry on with what we're doing there see how we get on and then if we've got the time think about this and anything else john comes up with just now it's our work here that gets priority so that's both top and bottom jaw yeah we've got the hole yes that's quite a ball coming around which is nice and that's the rest of the upper jaw that's in it's taken almost a full day to excavate but we now have the story of this double burial the original kist was built for a four-year-old child who was buried in a crouched position with a circle of stones placed around it to mark the grave and protect it from the wind then sometime within their living memory another child of a similar age was cremated somewhere close by on a pyre like this the ashes were then placed on top of the earlier burial and the stones were rearranged into a smaller circle to mark the newer grave i couldn't make head no tail of this this morning but now it's really starting to make sense isn't it i mean i must confess that when you said if we take the boulders off and we clear the sand off you'll have the archaeological deposits in the side only half believed you this morning well we're starting to find these uh new kiss over there and down here as well as our early iron age roundhouse there's another one and that's probably a later building who knows what else we've got up there it's very really good what do we do tomorrow well once once we've looked at those kisss there's something earlier underneath them hang on hang on hang on if those a bronze age early middle bronze age yes and you said there's something earlier underneath them and that's going to be early bronze age or neolithic yes probably early bronze age if we're really lucky there might even be a house under there that'd be fantastic we started off this morning with a beach and already we've got an archaeological site thanks to some sterling work in really difficult conditions and tomorrow we're going to get down into the archaeology that's if the weather holds beginning of day two here on barra in the windswept outer hebrides and here's part of time team you don't see very often the wind's so gusty that we're having to strap the portaloo down otherwise it might end up in glasgow and we've got sandbags all along the bottom of the tent to stop that blowing away the reason that we're prepared to suffer all this horrible weather is because just around the corner we're doing a rescue archaeology job we've got some fantastic stuff around there all prehistoric at least two houses possibly four burials and we've got to work as quickly and efficiently as possible because the weather is so unpredictable that what with the wind and the rain the whole site could be blown away at any moment with no time to waste jackie's started work here investigating another bronze age kissed burial luckily this one hasn't been damaged by erosion as yet and the calcium in the sand has helped preserve these bones incredibly well jackie reckons we could get a really good story here as you can see we've got all the stones of the kiss surviving here and this has protected this grave and the full of the grave from the scarring of the sat of the wind coming up the same way as we had in the one we have looking at yesterday and the other thing is that as you can see from the skull here you've got a full-size adult so the bone is much more robust than the young individuals that we had yesterday it's not only human bone that's preserved well we're finding sheep cattle and bird bones giving us some idea of their diet this bird bone in fact may also have been used to decorate this bit of bronze age pottery oh it's almost a perfect fit look one in there one in there one in there we're also getting fines we've never seen before oh well this is a slightly unusual looking bone and in fact it's the ulna which is part of the arm of a gray seal so this is telling us that not only are they having sort of domestic farm animals land animals they're actually going out and they're hunting if you look around the island you can always see the gray seals popping up the times you hunt them is in the autumn and that's when they come onto the lamb to pop and they're much slower because obviously they're protecting their pups and things and that's when you catch them we have evidence for them seasonally going out to the islands and actually hunting the seals in prehistoric times the people living here were completely self-sufficient it's very different today when almost everything arrives by boat here at castle bay which is the nearest thing to a town on the island in the bronze age one of the best places to live was here on the maca where it was possible to grow crops in the sandy soil amazingly we've now found traces of prehistoric plough marks in the sand so this was all that's left of an area of fields which probably covered most of this and would that have been in the early bronze age that's going to be early bronze age because it seems that the kiss are cut into it so there's one there dotted all over this here today it seems odd to find plough marks here but in the bronze age there were no big sand dunes on this site this area of maca was mostly flat arable fields maca landscapes are rare and only thrive in wet and windy conditions in the uk they're only found in the north and west of scotland and in western ireland just under half of scottish macca occurs in the outer hebrides and our dig here on barra is a rare chance to discover all sorts of details of prehistoric life in some cases very weird stuff like burying a sheep under the floor of this iron age round house we've actually got a sequence of features you see that this black stuff there now that suddenly stops there so our our burial is later than that but it is very very clearly underneath the floor this black layer that runs royal right the way across is the floor of our iron age hut so this burial must be at least iron age and mike was saying that in the northeast quadrant which is where we are it is quite common to get animal burials buried underneath the floor that's right absolutely cracking we're uncovering a rich story of activity here over many centuries it starts with evidence of plowing here in the early bronze age about 1700 bc and then later on all these bronze age kisss are placed here around 1400 bc we might also have some cremation pies here where they were burning the bones around the same time and then at this end of the site we've got two round houses that are early iron age around 500 and 400 bc mike reckons that the roundhouses we're digging up were part of a small settlement that existed on this spot over thousands of years just one of the many clusters of houses dotted all along this coastline they're not quite villages they're hamlets but they're separated about three quarters of a mile apart but under this lot there must be many many more of them yeah i think this whole area that we're on at the moment this is will just be one small bit five to ten percent of the total area of this is the prehistoric we haven't for example got the settlement where the people that were buried here lived what we've got our iron age has and i bet it wasn't far away and it's quite mind-boggling how much must be buried here yes although we're uncovering the story of bronze age burials like this one which jack is now able to tell us is the grave of a woman we haven't found any trace of where these people were living 4 000 years ago [Music] with this in mind mick has decided that we should open a small trench here over the massive round house geophys detected yesterday we want to know if this building is part of the iron age settlement or if it could be the remains of an earlier bronze age roundhouse just a mile or so away we're going to attempt to get our experimental prehistoric clamp kiln going we want to find out if it's possible to use peat as a fuel to fire pottery because wood was in short supply here back in the iron age it's thought they probably had enough driftwood to get the kiln going in fact we're using paper and wood as kindling just to make sure it lights okay the whole school that's these seven kids are keen to see what happens because they've made their own creations to go in the kiln and apart from the occasional use of a blowtorch they'll be watching an authentic experiment with prehistoric technology the plan is to let it burn for at least five hours and then we'll open it up tomorrow when it's cooled down here phil go some cracking wall you've got mate can i come in your house by all means tony yeah make yourself at home and i'll show you some of the objects that you'll find in my house we've got these whacking great slabs of pot i'm going to try and look enthusiastic that is a big piece of pot look at it yeah it is it's covered in sand i know but is that iron age it is iron age but you see the bit that we're really really excited about is that they we're not sure but we think that could be part of a mold where they're making bronze is that burning yeah it's made out of clay and they would actually have the shape of the bronze object in it and of course you pour the bronze in and you get the bronze object out because actually although we call the preceding age the bronze age we hardly ever find any evidence of it on our dinks well that's right but of course you know just because they're into the iron age doesn't mean to say they stopped making bronze yeah but of course our real find is not in here at all it's what's behind you yeah you see we've got three courses at a wall but the thing that is really really nice about this we've actually got the floral that they walked and lived on so we've got phil's iron age roundhouse here but the really exciting news right now is in this trench match you've got your own sand fit to play yeah it's great isn't it how are you getting on well not bad i mean it was really difficult to get this turf off it's really tough i mean as you can see underneath it it's just this sandwich we're just shoveling out yeah matt's discovered that the building here is no ordinary roundhouse but the remains of a massive iron age wheelhouse a much more sophisticated building so called because it was divided up like the spokes of a wheel so what are we actually looking at here then well this trench is is just less than a quarter just smaller than a quarter of the whole wheel so the center of it is just beyond the the red peg there right we've got the entrance to the wheelhouse here which we've picked up on the geophysics the gap in the wall and in the corner we've got the beginning of the spoke in the center there just where the red peg is and then it goes obliquely out of the trench just along that way and then behind you there so this is this is actually the outer edge probably isn't it so yeah i mean but is it the sort of thing you'd expect to find well what i didn't expect was what appears to be the great depth of stone work on a reasonably solid wall by which i mean a wall which is two-faced over there it looks like you've got an outer face interface massive stones with some some of the best machine i must say i've ever seen on the lineage site in the western arms it gets better and better not only have we got a well-preserved iron age structure here but it looks like there are fines sitting on the floor of the building this is just one of several pieces of whale bone we'll find out more about them tomorrow so as we approach the end of the day we've not only got our early iron age roundhouses here that date to around 500 bc but we've now got a later iron age building a wheelhouse that dates to around 100 a.d and as if that wasn't enough jackie's also made a remarkable discovery while she's been excavating the burial of this bronze age woman jack has detected two different layers of sand one layer that built up around the edges suggesting this burial had a cover on it and a second layer that filled the kissed completely there must have been something over the top but the allowed material to get in from the edges but it's obviously not going to be wood is it because there isn't any wood you know really on the island so something like like wicker work or rush matting or something or it could have been a skin or textiles or something like the skin would last quite well shoe skin or something like that if the cover was made of animal skin then the kiss would have looked something like this when the burial took place some four thousand years ago finding evidence of a cover over a burial is a unique discovery and jackie will continue to investigate this burial tomorrow but already with the three kists we're excavating and the four burials that were dug before we got here it's clear that there were all sorts of different burial practices going on here in the bronze age [Music] some are crouched burials one seemed to be a small mass grave containing babies and fetuses another had teeth from one burial thrown into the grave of another individual one grave had cremated remains put on top of an earlier inhumation with bones pushed aside to make room into the kist what does our burials expert make of all this well this one's interesting it's the woman in the fetal position because she's lying on her right side and it's something we find all over britain at this time is that women tend to be buried on their right sides and men on their left sides um it does suggest that there may be a difference in lifestyle between men and women at that time but what about these other things mike some very strange things going on aren't there i think when we talk about early bronze age burial practices we are always thinking of either inhumation like that crouch that's putting them in the grave complete yeah but of course what they're really doing with probably the majority of people is in a sense rendering down the corpse turning it into bones so it may be that somebody's remains are basically dispersed broken up and put in different places maybe in a grave maybe the rest in the sea for all we know i think we're looking at a way of life in which the respect for the ancestors was far more important than in our own and of course keeping the actual remains of the dead is in a way not just a mark of respect but a way of memorializing them of of remembering who they were so that they have to be treated in a way that we'd find quite odd maybe inhabiting the same space in some cases maybe being carried around as keepsakes i suppose you'd really have a sense of continuity you'd know where you were in the family if you'd always got your granddad with you because he got his femur yes and i think it's right really interesting when those things are finally laid to rest especially where we have these disarticulated bones because in a sense that's saying that's enough they now pass beyond memory into forgetting i can't remember a time team where there are so many different things that i've wanted to see on day three there's the iron age wheelhouse itself of course fantastic structure which surely can only get better over here there's phil's iron age round house tomorrow he's going to go into the floor are there going to be any fines there we don't know and then there's the pyres there where ian's digging what's going on there and probably most exciting is that incredibly evocative bronze aged woman crouched in her kissed are there going to be any grave goods associated with her we won't know till tomorrow what i do know is that virtually everybody has sloped off down to the pub for a few drinks and some music it's got to be done i think beginning of day three here on barrow in the outer hebrides where we're doing a rescue job on some fantastic prehistoric archaeology the weather forecast said it was going to be better today than it was yesterday so i don't know what's going on but at least the rain drains straight through the sand and doesn't create muddy trenches and it doesn't blow all over the place so the archaeologists quite like it lucky them rain or not we've got some amazing stuff to dig today phil's going to be investigating the doorway of his iron age roundhouse which we think dates to around 500 bc outside of the main dig area we're unearthing something even more impressive this huge structure is what's known as a wheelhouse a building that would have looked something like this and was built later on in the iron age around 100 a.d but we're also digging some burials that were here some 2 000 years before any of the iron age buildings these kissed burials are bronze age although some have been damaged by erosion this burial of a woman who lived here 4 000 years ago is perfectly preserved in the soft sand thanks to jackie's expertise it feels like we're getting to know this lady who was aged between 35 and 45 judging by the wear and tear on her knees i'm beginning to identify a lot with this it's female it's my age and i've got rather dodgy knees too it's beautiful the way her hands have come together in front of a face we see this is one of the one of the arms coming up to the wrist here this is either one coming up to the wrist and what you can see here is this knuckle bit of the hand and from there on you can see the fingers are curling round so really what her hands have done they're coming together like this yeah in front of her face [Music] yesterday afternoon in phil's roundhouse trench over there he showed me this little bit of crud and said it was evidence of bronze making but then when the cameras had stopped rolling he said to me i hope i haven't made a mistake because if i have i'll look a right wally so phil are you a wally i don't think i am tony i'm more convinced of my statement than i was yesterday the truth is now that i've got into the entrance passageway to our roundhouse you come through the entrance passageway and the doorway to the roundhouse would be here and what they've done is they've blocked it off with these big stones now the actual truth of my my statement yesterday lies in the material that they've used to block that doorway off because we've got here some whacking great slabs of fired clay those are the sorts of lumps of material that would have come out of an oven or a furnace the sort of structure that you would associate with metal working so why were they blocking the door off well this is something we find in quite a lot of sites in this region in this period can you see between phil's feet yeah there's a thin stain coming this way and that's where there would have been a stone slab which would have formed the threshold so you step onto that and into the house they've taken that out yeah they've then piled up these big rocks where the house doorway used to be so it's in abandonment they've sealed it up then when it's been maybe yeah maybe the inhabitants died they closed it off having seen similar evidence on other sites make sure they're not working metal in the doorway but using things like molds for swords and other industrial material to block up the entrance when they abandoned the round house it's possible metal working was still viewed as a magical process and these fragments may have been left as a symbol of their power phil's next job is to carefully unpick the stones in this doorway to see what else he can find to shed light on these weird practices meanwhile over in this trench where we're uncovering our iron age wheelhouse matt's been lifting the pieces of whale bone that were discovered yesterday and i'm intrigued to see what our expert makes of them well i can tell you that it is whale bone and i can tell you it's a large whale i can also tell you it's actually it's a rib and there has been some suggestion that people would use ribs structurally because they've been found lying on top of houses this one i'm not sure it really is been used in a structural manner because it's been worked at the end and i can tell it's ribbed because if you look at the ends it's got sort of thick bone around the edge and then this sort of honeycombed bone on the inside and that's just typical of a rib it's quite a large whale though and also put it down i mean if you think about a whale all the whale is is a head and a spine yeah and some flippers so there's a lot of meat that you can get without needing to bring the bone back so there is a deliberate reason why they brought it here they bring it back and if you think we're living in an environment that's generally treeless there's not many trees and if you want to make anything you they tend to use a lot of bone to make tools and whale bone is fabulous because whale bone's the nearest thing to wood you've got it's big and you can work it now pieces like this bit of vertebrae have clearly been cut and used for something although it's hard to know exactly what but this was the most prized bit of bone because it's the strongest it's from the mandible the jaw of the whale the mandible is actually this bit here yeah and it's because whales most of their bodies supported by the water so they have these sort of very light honeycombed bodies but the mandible is obviously the business end of the whale so this is where they make the densest bone and this is where you make the finest tools we have other ones that look like they were sort of used for weaving this i don't really know but you have to remember that what we see on these sides is lots of material that we don't normally find in other sites because they're making things out of bone here that normally you'd make out of wood and the wood would rot away and the wood would generally lost away so it's a bit like digging a waterlogged site you know you're getting preservation of things you've never seen before in the main dig area we've got the two iron age round houses here and a series of bronze age burials but this area remains a puzzle we thought this was where they were cremating bodies in the bronze age but the latest finds here suggest they may have been making pottery well you can see the the black layer in the middle where when they've fired this the the firing hasn't reached right through it's just stopped on the edges which is one reason why this is just crumbling it's going back to being just raw clay almost basically what they've done is they've just got some clay made into a ruffled pot and thrown it into a fire somewhere yeah well that sounds a lot like what we've been doing trying to make prehistoric pottery this is the moment of truth our experimental clamp kiln was all about trying to use peat as a fuel instead of wood everyone here made something to put in the kiln now they get to see what happened to it many of the pots have broken because of the poor quality local clay but some of the other pots were made with different kinds of clay and these are fired well what does that feel like it's quite strong very yes this was actually a different clay that's a modern clay called craft crank ah that's what we use in modern pottery classes isn't it so does that show that that our kiln as a kiln has worked it's not it's not that there was something wrong with the kiln it was something wrong with the clay yeah because this is really good the hard stuff yeah that's interesting because if if the if the clamp worked then all our skepticism about the um peat as a fuel yes was misguided yes whereas our complete cynicism about the clay was entirely justified yes halfway through day three and the sun's out again and there's lots of work going on particularly recording you can see this is phil's roundhouse and it's been gridded for various sampling as it's turned out there were two sheep buried under this floor and the bones will be radiocarbon dated to get a more exact date for this roundhouse but right now we reckon it's early iron age dating to around 500 bc but look can you see these stones here and you see how they go round like this this is definitely another roundhouse it's cut into the older one and we think this is probably something like 400 bc is that right phil that's about it tony having a nice time it's cracking i've got down onto the floor again we're getting some lovely pottery to date it too [Music] and it's not every day i can say this but we're actually excavating a third prehistoric building located here this impressive structure was built in the later iron age around 100 a.d can i get inside a building like this is called a wheel house because it had a central living area and rooms radiating off it like the spokes of a wheel so what's this thing for it's like a guard house or something well this really is the reception area yeah some people would call it a guard cell but i think it's far more likely this is where you put your hat and coat and take your wet boots off and then i come down here is this the entrance yeah so you're coming into the actual building itself now yeah and i think this is where the door would have been if you look to either side yeah you'll see there are a couple of little holes so you got one there that's right and you see there's no one behind you there so if you wanted to actually shut the door you can place a wooden beam across there and then i've got one spoke along there and there's another one there another one going along here and it looks as though we have a third one over there but what's really impressive about this particular wheelhouse is its size we reckon the main room in the middle must be 25 to 35 square i think one of the interesting aspects is that they probably took more people to build them than would have actually lived in them so it suggests that some people are an elevated social status who can actually call on others to provide the labor so this could be a really swanky version of the roundhouse that phil's excavating down there oh very much so this is a grand design for the period this is the biggest wheelhouse ever discovered in these islands and it must have appeared even more impressive when it was built some two thousand years ago as we go in through the doorway we can see the large living space in the center of the building with as many as six small rooms radiating from it it's possible that this impressive building was the manor house of its day and it's got to be the best prehistoric building we've ever excavated our rescue operation has turned up so much prehistoric archaeology that we've got our work cut out to record it all before the end of the dig this is a rather fragile but complete prehistoric pot that will go back to the labs for further investigation by the way if you check out the time team website you can find out what happened to some of the finds after the dig and see a lot more of prehistoric barrier are you done then phil we are mick we had a good drive right at the end and i'll tell you what we've saved the best to last jolly good this is the real gem oh crikey isn't that a gorgeous little bone pen look yes they've made that out of an animal bow and you can see the surface there that's right it's a sheep's forearm yeah basically and presumably it's for making holes in leather or something like that that's right they said they were bone tools but that's the first one we've seen anyway that is it's a beauty though yeah fantastic smashing in addition to the wealth of iron age archaeology we've now excavated a total of six bronze age burials in this area and the latest news here is that there's more to add to the story of this bronze age woman jackie believes that the angle of the skull suggests her head was resting on a pillow when she was laid into the grave almost 4 000 years ago a kissed burial that we also know was covered with something like animal skin it's a very different idea really from putting a body in a hole and covering it over it's almost as if they were hoping that perhaps the dead would walk so we're getting insights into these practices the way of life which in some senses make you feel that you're almost sitting at the graveside itself watching this go on and that's what is so superb the quality of the archaeology is something we really don't find in the rest of britain and northern europe it's almost the end of the dig and i want our experts to help me picture the landscape here in prehistoric times when the lady in jackie's burial was alive here in the bronze age what would it have looked like the sand was already here and it's probably got this kind of grassland over it and behind us the sea may have been a very long way away maybe as much as a kilometer or even further sea levels were lower in prehistoric times so there would have been even more maca grassland than there is today but how are they using the sandy soil here good grazing above all but it is also very easy to cultivate of course it's very light they collect their rubbish they manure it with seaweed so they can turn it into quite a good arable land as well and very easy to turn without of course the benefit of a proper plow these high sand dunes weren't here back in prehistoric times around 1700 bc this area would have looked more like this and amazingly what we found in the sand were the traces left by an art a prehistoric plow a tell-tale sign that they were farming the sandy fields here in the early bronze age but the picture changes in the middle bronze age when we know these fields were used as a burial area with kiss dug into the sandy soil we didn't find any trace of bronze age roundhouses although there must have been some close by but by the early iron age around 500 bc we know there was a cluster of round houses here a small settlement with people farming and hunting a settlement that in the later iron age around 100 a.d we know included my favorite building from this dig the huge wheelhouse when i first came here my idea of what the hebrides was going to be like in prehistory was a few people clinging to a rock trying not to be swept into the sea and over the years i think i've just my whole perception has changed when i realized that they led a very comfortable life that they were doing nicely thank you you

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 271,139

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, time team, tony robinson, british history, prehistoric history, prehistoric scotland, archaeology, archaeological dig, ancient britain

Id: 2Zn2b66ZKkw

Length: 47min 45sec (2865 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 08 2021