The Puzzle of Picket Farm (South Perrott, Dorset) | S12E10 | Time Team

thirty years ago the leg family took over this farm in west dorset almost immediately they discovered that one end of this field was difficult to plow and they put it down to the stony soil but then earlier this year roman fines started to crop up all over the field roof tile pottery roman coins brooches what's going on the legs are itching to know is there a roman building here that could account for their broken plows time teams got just three days to find out and let them know well rain's forecast for the next three days but at the moment it's spectacularly nice isn't it it's beautiful wasn't it when did you first realize that there might be something under that well i've played this field about 25 times in the last 30 years and as a rule we would break two or three of these shear bolts every time we plan it so that's what it ought to look like and that's the new one and that's a broken one but it could just be boulders or something we do get a lot of big standstone boulders but then these fines started to come up yes that's right so metal detectors they found a number of um roman coins and brooches which were confirmed by dorset county museum and bournemouth university and then this year a shadow appeared in the field yes when i was playing it this spring because the soil was damp the soil was dark yeah and there was a square shape of lighter chalky color about how big about four times the size of that reservoir four times this big well it's going to be some structure isn't it guy if there's a building that size on the top of the hill it will be very very exciting i've seen the coins which are great yeah lots of them they're roman there's no doubt about that we've got some structural debris here which i started looking through some of that not roman so i'm not quite sure yet but there's a real enigma up here what could it be i think and it's only a theory the most likely thing it will have been is a roman temple right up here it's not an ideal place for a villa or a farm there are lots of temples built in hilltop locations particularly in the late roman period and that's the same period as the coins how do we find out what it is well i think we've got to do some geophysics over the area where the farm machinery was bent to see if there's any structures buried there but we've also got the chance here to do some field walking because although there's a crop on the field of maize the plants are far enough apart to give us a strip to walk along to pick up any fines what about that crop roger john's already been blundering his way through it well i've got lots of years to grow crops on this field this is a once in a lifetime opportunity geofiz have been at it since dawn we're also metal detecting and walking the field [Music] there's enough space between the maize plants to look for more roman pot or tile just lying on the surface if fines are clustering we can investigate the hot spots one of our legion of roman experts has been looking at the building material that's already been found from the fines that we've got can you tell what sort of roman building it is well not from this because none of this is convincingly roman you're kidding no i'm not i can see why people have thought it at first glance some of you think oh yes that looks like it's a piece of roman inbrex but it's actually very hard and got an uncharacteristically smooth surface same with this it looks like a piece of tequila the flange roof tile but it's actually far too thin and it's been molded and roman brick and tile is hand made so we've got metal fine he's like the car yeah we've got the coins brochures and the brochures but there was never a roman building here oh well that's not necessarily the case because we could have a building in timber there's certainly roman activity up here but from this there is nothing to indicate a substantial stone or tiled roofed structure sorry this is going to be one of those digs and the news gets worse the field walkers finds have been washed and mapped and there's nothing roman and your fears are looking even glamour than usual yeah so what have you got on the geophysics john it's a bit disappointing really um what about this blob here well that looks to be a large piece of iron so it could be modern then right but there's no clear archaeological targets at the moment from the geophysics right lordy lord our only remaining lead back to the romans is the coins and brooches but they at least are looking more promising the metal detectorists even found three more coins this morning okay what have you got there henry this is basically a map uh plotting where all the previous metal detecting fines have been in this field and basically we have the red dots showing the coins we've got the brooches the yellow triangles and the ring and that end and it does show a cluster sort of where we stood roughly so it sounds if in the absence of a geophysics target we probably ought to have a look at that concentrated area in the middle there yeah which which is presumably more or less where we are here this side of the hedge mick seems very relaxed given all this bad news and everyone's putting on a brave face but the truth is we're sticking in a trench on a broad scatter of metal detectors fines and outside the geophys survey area i wonder if our spectators have got any idea of how close to disaster we are so what we do then is we will strip a bit of an area rather than just going straight down that's right and then try it in case there's still stuff in there in the tops does that bit of a figure there well that could be couldn't it our roman double act guy and richard have been looking at what kind of roman coins have been found to see if the dates and values give us any clues as to why they were here do we reckon we know what we've got now yep quite a few coins yes i know we've got coins even i know we've got coins what kind of date early second speeding up in the third quite a lot of fourth century stuff are they valuable in ancient terms no so what does that imply you'd either use them for everyday purchase on market stalls or fairgrounds or something like that and not worry if you lost them or if you're giving them to a shrine or something the tendency is always to give the worst stuff the copies the forgeries the foreign coins what about the other metal fights well there's brooches um some of which may be as early as the first century and one that goes up to the middle of the second century but look at it's broken now it's quite common in a religious context to give away broken broaches just as you might give away worn out rubbish coinage you give away scrap metal rather than good stuff so lots of fines but no structure yeah we've got a real mystery the coins are great the brooches are great it's a very very strange place what do you think it might be well you could have coins uh and no living both on a fairground or a temple a fair ground yeah market if the coins were here because of the fair or market this could turn out to be the shortest and least interesting time team ever something so ephemeral would be unlikely to leave any other archaeological traces everything now seems to hang on the only trench we've opened look where's the boy ashton might as well call in the wrinkled professor while we're at it [Laughter] i'm worried when you have a stern face we got we got what looks like our natural look coming in there but look there's some looks coming round here and we appear to have an edge what i was requesting is to take out a bit of this and and see whether or not we can i mean this if this is a a ditch or something like this coming around yeah you need to see that natural the other side that's why it's exactly what i'm saying okay let's do that what phil thinks he's got is a man-made ditch cut into the natural geology he's found one edge and to confirm it he needs to find the other one that's the other side of it then nice one that is i like the look of that it's curving round is curving round all right we'll have a bit more off phil just um pick it up here looking better on it is he's pleased about that look at that hallelujah there is some archaeology here we now have two edges to our ditch you're thinking flints and pottery aren't you but this doesn't look roman they didn't build in curves but the people who came before them did which is great for phil because he loves the prehistoric that's gotta be good mick gotta be good you see what we're interested in is you've got the natural there natural bedrock there this this stuff yeah and you see there's an edge yeah comes across there yeah and it's coming across there as well so the summit yeah going round there that way the question now is what is it it's a mystery that's going to keep us busy for a while and really it's a bit of a fluke that we found it at all but the quest for roman has not been derailed by phil's possible prehistoric discovery geophys and the field walkers have now moved on to the next field in search for an explanation of the roman coins mysterious shadowy square might yet be evidence of something roman the trick is to get him to remember where it was presumably he didn't actually mark the position of this shadow thing well it was roughly in this sort of area roughly approximately so how are we going to work out where to dig well if you look at the maze plants yeah they are sort of stunted in this area and it is still near on the ground so is that a different theory or does that relate to the shadow now that relates to the shadow i think and was it around here god this is like extracting teeth isn't it and was it round here that the bolt shed on the plow yes here and all along the ridgeline ah we're getting somewhere now does your gfiz indicate anything which might have sheared his bolts i hear you saying no before you've even said it look with the eye of faith you might just see something in there yeah if i didn't know it coincided with roger's sort of area i wouldn't have bothered with it where is it well we're stood on it now so do you reckon it's worth putting a trench in here well we've got nothing to lose i mean if this is where the plow was hitting solid material okay we've not got anything special on the geophysics we still ought to look at it well this is not the most scientifically placed trench we've ever had but uh we'll have a go john we'll have again not so another trench goes in without very much precision it is a rather obvious ditch but that couldn't matter less to phil who's now revealed a very nice curving feature which is producing artifacts oh you mean you've got roman stuff look we've got church yeah that's the local equivalent of the flint the actual green sand there that's right and we've got flint itself which really does begin to look make it look as though it is prehistoric yep but if you really wanted evidence bronze age pot if i'm not mistaken oh i'd agree with that that looks like sort of good early middle bronze exactly exactly what you'd expect with a ring ditch like this which is right i mean it's only going to turn into a barrow yeah that's perfect not a roman insight excuse me while i just pummel you if they're right and this is a barrow then phil's found part of a ditch that ringed a man-made mound in the middle of which may be a burial if that's the case we'd expect the ditch to extend into the next field where geophys and the field walkers have been looking for roman stuff we've done the field walking here and there's nothing roman here at all just a lot of medieval but what's the gf is like john have you finished it yet well it's a clear barrow there you just walk through the boundary yeah and look at that clear arc we've lost the middle of it because of the the modern boundary but it's there guy do you think that this barrow has got anything to do with the roman fires well it's exactly what i expected when i came up here but no the reality is that the romans did pay a huge amount of attention to pre-historic monuments after all they were dotted around in the landscape they were impressed by them they made offerings to them that could explain the roman stuff up here so what do we do about the barrow well i think we need to learn a little bit more about it and the obvious thing is to go and look at the center because if it's a barrow he should have a burial in it so that would confirm that it's a barrow but the middle could be just on that hedge line couldn't it that would be a problem well it would but uh i think it's more likely to be in into the field given the plots that we've got john and henry are going to look for the center of this possible barrow which appears still to have a roman dimension to it just outside the ditch matt has been exploring an area where detectorists have found a cluster of coins and it's produced something rather interesting matt you see i've got this kind of black circle thing here yeah i think we should get a metal detector or something over them can we borrow you for a minute sweep over these two it's not very promising well if you dig out in chunks yeah good distance away and then break out a big lump we'll get will to go over the chunks that we take out yeah i see so it's in there somewhere so now we just if we just split it up into two or three yeah then we can go over each bite spread that out of it ah hey there you go fine i find oh beautiful oh fine mark come have a look at this mate got another one oh yes actually can you tell anything about that or does it need to be cleaned up well it's going to be either late third or fourth century do you know the size and thickness alone that that's enough to give a good indication so what are all these roman coins doing in a prehistoric site the answer is not in roger's mysterious shadowy square bridget has found only geology so his bolts must have been sheared by plain old rocks even though everyone's bottling up their feelings it's been a tense and frustrating day for the archaeologists nerves are beginning to fray particularly when one of the crew steps into phil's newly cleaned trench [Applause] david and on the other side of the hedge the hunt for the all-important center of the barrow is also proving frustrating no one can agree where it is i've faced it i think that's where the center is k for carrick yeah not a chance we'll mark the perimeter and we'll see who's right i'm going to extend it from the trench oh you do what you want you know what length you got there center center two centers then two centimeters you got three different you were right mahdi this morning this yeah i'm never very good in the morning no but about this site you were going ooh there's anything here i think it was quite a sort of high risk thing actually you know we had a group of finds and a few other finds that might or might not have been you know roman tyle and so on and it seemed a lot to the base the you know the work on it seems to have paid off this time it does yeah it does what's going on over there guys i don't know why you're squabbling we're gonna be digging a trench about five by five it really doesn't matter whether the center's on kerry's point on henry's point or on john's point what matters is are we gonna find anything in it we'll know tomorrow beginning of day two yesterday we found this beautiful bronze age ditch which the archaeologists are saying ought to be part of a burial mound so yesterday evening we projected where the rest of the curve of the ditch should be so that we could excavate the center of it and hopefully find the burial but this being time team there's a fly in the ointment mick come here what's the problem well when i was up in the crane last night when everybody else had gone home looking down on the site it seemed to me that this curve of the ditch that we got here like that was actually wider than what we've projected in the field next door but we had three guys working that out last night so they all got it wrong well they may not have got it wrong it just looked different from above and it worried me that we might be basing where the ditch was and basing therefore where the middle was on you know it just didn't look right so how are we going to work it out well i think what we've got to do is we've got to go out that way with the machine which we do now and actually find the ditch on the other side and only when we found the outside can we then work out where the middle that's right we need to get that first to go back and recalculate the middle we're tying up an awful lot of our resources on the bronze age aren't we are we going to lose sight of the romans no because if you remember both mark and guy were saying there might be a roman structure in the middle of a barrow anyway put in later on and in any case we might get more roman fines you know going out across the area of the barrow there and we're carrying on here we've got roman stuff on the barrow over here if you come over to where mark is look phil can we walk across your lovely ditch yeah that's right tony mark yeah you got something for us yes tony at the end of yesterday having cleaned back in this area scanned by uh one of the metal detector users and we've got these three little shallow scoops and in the bottom of each one a roman coin wow it's a third and fourth century i do so do you think these were actually put into those holes deliberately yes why on earth would you dig a little hole and put one coil in well we'll see what marks if it sounds like an offering to me yeah i wonder whether you're coming up here but perhaps you believe these to be your ancestors real or not yeah maybe you're asking a favor and in exchange for a little bit of coins putting a coin and perhaps a joint of meat or something but do we know whether the romans actually did this yes from other sites religious sites we sometimes find little sheets of lead with prayers or even curses written on which are then carefully folded or rolled up and deposited within the temple precinct but what about the actual burying of a coin in the side of a barrow well we found coins on barrows but this is the first time to my knowledge in southern and western england where we've actually now started to find these little hollows so we're really getting some good answers here so not only have we found a new bronze age barrow perhaps 4 000 years old but also the first evidence of roman veneration for a prehistoric monument in this part of britain two thousand years later on the other side of the hedge the search is now on for more sections of the ring ditch to get a fix on where the center of the barrow is that's crucial because it's where you'd find a burial in a classic monument from the bronze age to get to the bottom of its history phil's been cutting vertically down through the stuff that filled the original ditch and he's very pleased with his work i think that is an absolutely impeccably cut section that will be so plum people will write books about it phil of course has had the advantage of modern metal tools the people who first dug it would have done so with deer antlers that's a very interesting looking section you got there phil been a pleasure to dig mick that really has and even better to clean up i mean it does look glorious and we've got the full story there aren't we that's right it is the complete story from the construction of the barrow literally right through to the present day see what they've done is that they they've dug this very impressive ditch and and they've had to go through this big scene of green sand churros the first thing that's happened is that the top at sides of the ditch up here have weathered down that's this material here and it's covered up the base and the sides all this top bit i think that's plough soil which is actually washed into the top of the ditch but this is ploughing the barrow mound itself probably but if you look here see what we got there oh crikey that's grotty old stuff in it that's beautiful it's a piece of an urn bronze age urine it's got the finger pinching oh yeah these are the finger marks of the potter on this side so where's this from well it's actually from the ditch itself but you see it's lake bronze age right and i think that what we're looking at here is is um an urn that's actually been placed in the mound right and as the mound has been plowed away that fragment of uranus worked its way down into so this is out of the middle of the barrow i think this is out of the boat itself even though the mound itself has been plowed away bits of bronze age pot are circumstantial evidence of cremation burials in a classic barrow it's one of the practices that arrived in britain in the bronze age so what was the difference between the bronze age people and the people before them well primarily we see the kind of monuments they're building in round barrows and we see very rich graves we're seeing people accumulating wealth for the first time so perhaps we can talk of the first time of kings or defined leaders how long did the bronze age last in this part of the world from about 2500 bc we get our first evidence of metals and round barrows up to about 1600 and then there's there is a very substantial change from the into the middle and late bronze age where we see lots more agricultural settlements farms uh dividing up the land and pretty much all we can see around us here in dorset all the field systems all the plowing going on begins in the later bronze age so would it be fair to say that the bronze age was the beginning of the modern world exactly beginning of the modern world prehistoric monuments are never just placed by chance on the top of any old high ground neighboring hills and rivers and other local monuments can all shape where they're constructed [Music] stuart's looking at why this hilltop was favored with a barrow he's already found one possible clue our site appears to be almost completely encircled by rivers why that's significant and why the romans took an interest in the site he's now got to figure out at the bottom of phil's beautiful little trench there are some mysterious features which are exciting miles you see we've got these like almost like post holes and post pipes in each section look hell are they quite clear as post homes we were just debating whether that's the sort of thing you'd expect to get you do in quite a few later bronze age and indeed early bronze age barrows the ditch acts as a palisade trench so you've effectively secured the timbers right at the base of the ditch and the soils then piled up around them so they wouldn't have to be very deep they wouldn't have to be very deep at all they're not very well defined are they i mean they're not perfectly circular no no no but i mean that that's nice because i know a couple examples in dorset and in sussex where they've dug the ditch out the posts have been inserted so really what you've got in phase one is a is a timber circle right sitting in there and then they they whip the post out you know fairly quickly bury it all and backfill the ditch but i mean that is that's fantastic this is intriguing a palisade around a barrow is definitely not a common feature of bronze age monuments [Music] we've revealed most of the ring ditch on the other side of the hedge now we can try to work out where the center is and whatever it might hold [Music] we're also still looking for possible roman reuse of the barrow remember those romans who brought us here meg there don't seem to be any post holes in there or any of those little depressions that mark horny was finding early no i mean there's a lot of features to dig you know within the ditch yet but we don't seem to have those little coins and little holes on this side of the barrow so does that mean that this is a bronze age story well what we've got is you know an undiscovered bronze age barrow that we've come across by accident almost which is obviously why the roman stuff is here and i think we've got the opportunity to have a good look at it now we should do that but i can't see any marks for burials there no but there's a lot of features in the middle that we're going to have to clean up and empty and after all there are all sorts of different sorts of barrows apart from ones with a big central burial there's lots with peripheral barrels around the outside there's lots that have cremations putting pots and in fact that bit of pottery that phil found he's probably one of those cremation that's been broken up so even though we haven't found anything yet it doesn't mean that there isn't something exciting in here somewhere no no i'm sure there's going to be because there's such a range of types of burrow and when we're like we've got miles with us who knows about these things so what does our expert think does our monument conform to a standard pattern of bronze age round barrows i thought our barrow was going to be circular and we might find a burial slap bang in the middle of it well it does appear to be circular most round barriers that we see in the uk you've got a sort of nice round ditch and the center we've got a mound and somewhere in the center there's going to be a burial but the more of these we dig the more we realize that the mound itself covers sort of a multitude of sins sometimes there are burials sometimes there's a remains of a house structure sometimes there's a remains of a fire sometimes the mound itself just contains a whole range of different artifacts they have a sort of tribal material pottery flint work animal bone is all accumulated in the mound as some kind of tribal marker some kind of statement so not all of them have a burial smack in the center but by and large are they around shape usually i mean when you see them in the landscape what you see is like one of these comedy kneecaps sitting up there that's the mound but you never know what's actually inside there could be anything sometimes it's a body but sometimes not in our case not we've now excavated what we think's the center and there's no evidence of a burial but from the ditch brigid has come up with a few fragments of bone found some little bits of bone here it's incredibly poor and degraded worries me as if we've got a burial yeah i don't know if we're actually going to find the body itself that's all there is yeah yeah but i mean there's charcoal in this soil as well there is yeah and there may be another commotion or something that's been placed in the top of the tube exactly you can't see anything in the soil there's no stains associated with burials or yeah but we'll keep digging after later examination none of the bone could be positively identified as human so still no definite evidence of a burial here any evidence may have been scraped away with the mound itself unless we've missed something in the middle and there still seems to be some doubt about where that actually is indeed henry was so perplexed that he decided to plot the exact shape of our feature using his extremely expensive global positioning system which is accurate to a few centimeters and he's made an extraordinary discovery have a look at the plan this is our the ditch of our oh it's frankie whatever we have here now you see it's not a circle zoomer because he's not circuit it's difficult to find the center very difficult to find a center you sort of got a blob about two meters where it could be right around the center there and where is that on the ground the center of that yeah is just down we can see that stone there but it's actually a whole area around that thing but yeah you want to be taking at least a meter meter and a half around that to give you an idea so potentially under the section here can i borrow that because that's that's a real conundrum though is i need to go and think about that and while mick's struggling to digest this unusual shape bridge has turned up yet more surprises it looks like we've got a piece of burnt timber and what's interesting about it it looks like it's been burnt somewhere else and then it's been dumped into the backfill of this ditch how big is it well you can see we can see this much here but there is a lot of burning up the other end there as well where everyone's digging um that's also associated with some burnt dorb what's that telling you mate well it isn't quite what i'd expect with a barrow although you know you do get funeral pliers for burning bodies and so on but it's it's rather helping with with what is a very odd sight it seems to be now i mean i'm going off the idea of it being a barrow oh really yeah but look at the shape of it if that was your bike you wouldn't get home in a house oh no that's right and you know we we've hardly got any pottery from it at all you know i mean we've got few odd bits that might be bitter cremation iron and we've hardly got any bone from it either cremated or ordinary bone so i'm beginning to wonder whether it's a battle at all whether it isn't some other type of site but it is another type of site is it going to be of interest well yeah because i mean there's masses of features in it we've got the ditch round you've got lots of features inside we've got what probably entrance over there so there's a lot to go out to sort out but i'm just wondering what on earth it is this site gets more and more peculiar on day one we thought we got a roman temple day two we thought we got a classic bronze age burial mound now mick thinks it's something entirely different what we'll find out tomorrow beginning of day three and not content with putting a huge trench in all the way over here and extending it all the way down there not to mention two huge trenches on the other side of that hedge mix gone trench crazy and you're extending the whole thing over here what's going on we've got some geophys anomalies here what do they look like they're just blobs on it but given that that is looking very interesting exciting now we've got to spend the whole day looking at it we've got to look at this as well to go with it what do you reckon it is i have no idea i just i just feel in the water that it's going to be very significant you're a professor you ought to be able to tell us yeah but i think we're back in pre-history here and that's that's you know we need some specialists i mean miles is our man for this without any doubt we've left the first field behind all our efforts are now in the second field investigating the barrow and the geophys blobs they might be an entrance which would be unusual in a standard bronze age barrow it's one of a number of puzzles that have got the archaeologists scratching their heads about this monument okay right matt if we can get a nice meter section through that charcoal that'll be absolutely brilliant unlike most bronze age round barrows our barrow isn't circular as henry revealed and after his bombshell we double checked the middle area in case there was a burial there but no and no burials anywhere else either and our puzzling monument seems to have had a palace said as well we've got the ditch swinging around here our army of diggers have got just one day of scraping and shoveling left to find out what this prehistoric thing is enclosures and barrows have a big timber facade on the outer edge encouragingly there are plenty of fines one that may be very significant has got phil in raptures look at that profile when that curves down there classic scraper shape that is that in just a five minute job that's beautiful workmanship i mean that's gotta be late neolithically bronze age amazingly to an expert like phil a stone tool can be dating evidence the trimming on this scraper suggests skilled craftsmanship from the neolithic or stone age these skills were largely lost in the bronze age when metal replaced stone tools it may add yet another thousand years to our monument and that would definitely account for the odd features is it true that he wasn't that interested in archaeology until we came along that's right absolutely i can't keep them away now it is interesting what is it that interests you most the contrast in the color of the the ditch and the center i never knew any of this was under here i've i've been over it so many times and not realize this stuff was underneath it that's proper archaeology talk isn't it he's interested in the the subtle differences in the shades of the soil not the coins then no coins are boring seen once in war among the odd features of this prehistoric barrow thing were the geophys blobs just outside the ring ditch so is it part of an entrance complex uh definitely not no no looking at it it's starting to worry me whether it's actually some kind of quarry because the sides of it are extremely irregular right and there's not an awful lot of material in it either i see so they've used that to actually make the mound that would be a nice assumption to make actually so one oddity explained but there's another in the barrow itself bridge and ian are investigating an intriguing area of the ring ditch which has clearly been filled with burnt material the thing about the streets that's amazing is the finds that are coming out they're coming out left right and center and it's ian who's really finding them and i'm just looking at him jealous as anything what have you got well he's just writing all these tools here cool look at them all i mean we've got he's got this one here wonderful thing it's a scraper he used to scrape off hides and things like that there's this one here that's another scraping edge he's found this one here there's all sorts of things they've also gotten some pottery in here absolutely brilliant stuff this one here you can have a thumb decoration there or a lug that's fallen off what kind of period do you eat this is well i'd go for bronze age but very early bronze age maybe transitional i think you're probably about right and i think one of the really good key indicator that sort of provoked discussion is from this piece of pottery here it's a rim it's got whip core decoration what do you mean by that well can you see here you've got like a piece of string has been pressed into the wet clay before it's dry the string decoration would have been applied before this massive collared urn was fired about 4 000 years ago absolutely wonderful it's just the most exciting trench i've worked on i don't know for how long the field archaeologists are starting to say that they reckon this might not be just a plain old bronze age site that it might be very early bronze age or on the cusp of bronze age and neolithic or even neolithic what do you ring it's neolithic without a shadow of a doubt why'd you say that well based on the actual shape of the monument and the artifacts coming out of it it is very clearly all like neither thing do we know much about these neolithic people well we're really dealing with the the first agriculturalists the first farmers the first builders of monuments uh in the neolithic prior vanilla that we just got sort of hunters and gatherers not really having much of an impact but the neolithic farmers are the first people who start building things big monuments in the landscape cutting down trees playing fields what sort of date well it dates from around about 4000 bc so our monuments at the tail end of it's about 3000 bc can we work out anything about them as people um we we can we actually finding this the skeletal evidence is often quite rare we find bits of bodies but we don't find complete individuals and that might be what our monument is it might be a place where bodies are left to decompose and then selected pieces are taken away from burial elsewhere do you find many monuments like this around here not around here no no so this is actually quite rare it feels in a nice gap in our neolithic map we appear to have lurched more than 3 000 years back in time since we arrived at the site poor old victor has been struggling to keep up with this archaeological mystery tour it's not that long since he rubbed out the romans right wow hello victor well it's a lovely drawing of a bronze age round mound um got a bit of bad news though i'm afraid yeah we material that's coming up now looks uh neolithic so i think we've added about a thousand years onto the date of the the mound redrawing is in order there uh yes redesign i'm afraid but as far as the activity is concerned what would they be well that that is the um six million question really what is going on inside our evidence for a number of these sites is you get bits of human remains in the ditch and one suggestion is this is an exposure burial site where bodies decompose probably not the sort of the nicest of pictures to do but possibly a body's decomposing in the center and bits rolling off into the ditches wow steward's come up with yet another piece of evidence that supports miles theory that this may be a neolithic site it's all to do with the visibility of the site from the surrounding countryside this landscape has just thrown some real surprises in here this model here shows the green shows that the high ground and the other colors show the low ground where the monument can't be seen so it's there so essentially you can see it when you're somewhere away but when you're near it's invisible that is that's a very neolithic thing to do to get seclusion you're not wanting to show off to the landscape you're actually wanting sort of privacy around it and our site has got that quality if you look where the rivers are here put the rivers on this 3d view of the site there it's like in the middle of the circle of all those rivers it is and it's actually sitting right in that triangle of them again typical neolithic thing putting monuments close to watersheds and sources of rivers different in the bronze age because the barrows and burial in the bronze age is up on the higher ridges they want these things to be seen and the only reason you're getting bronze age activity on our site is because they continue in the the older traditions it's it's just perpetuation as it were what about when you get to the roman ah different story that is a roman road you bang on there yeah we've got roman settlements here and we've got them up here yeah now the line of least resistance between them crossing these watersheds you see if you went to the left you've got all these tributaries to get across if you went to the right you have the same problem but look in between you can just go straight down that ridge so that means there's a pattern of movement develops very close to our site and i think that's why you're getting the coins put those people just passing close by so it's a landscape full of some real surprises actually so it's much far more complicated than ever expected when i came here bridge and ian's area of burnt material has produced one final surprise which may help to nail down the story of our mysterious prehistoric monument ian look at this i think i might have another piece of pottery but i'm not sure actually what it is it's very dirty oh nice i don't think it's pot it's it's dorbz look that's where the hazel road went through scotland that's absolutely brilliant because yesterday we had some burnt dawg up that end there there you go this is the house we've got the house wattle and daub was made by weaving hazel rods together and then daubing them with a mix of mud straw and dung our dorb may have been part of the palisade around the monument phil's post holes suggested a circle of timbers and in between there may have been wattled hurdle making it continuous and this structure would be more typically neolithic than bronze age funny that they didn't seem to be able to do circles though phil himself has found a quiet spot and is now in his own personal you've been heaven into exile not at all i've just been playing i've just been getting so much hassle from everybody up on site about stone tools i keep talking about these stone tools i keep eulogizing about them and they keep wanting to ask me all about them so i'll tell you what i've done i've pinched a couple of the best ones that no scraper and while they're nobody's looking i'm gonna make a couple there you go that would yes it's not far off that would have been the right blank you see yeah so what you're actually using here though isn't classic flint is it it's chart well that's right it's the it's the flint equivalent out of the green sand yeah funny thing is i have devil's own job talking to all the locals around here because they keep on talking about this is flint yeah and to me this light is as you say it's chewed but it works just as well look at that yeah lovely straight edge and when that is razor sharp absolutely razor sharp the chert tools that have inspired phil are the best evidence that our monuments neolithic about 5 000 years old but the potter is all bronze age and could be over a thousand years later our experts have got together to see if they can crack this puzzle were so excited about this pottery that we asked you to drop everything and come up here from salisbury to see us what is it um well this is a very interesting little collection of early bronze age pottery they seem to be several different vessels represented here of which this is probably the best example this is a rim from an early bronze age collard urn do we know what that would have been likely to have been used for these vessels are quite often associated with funerary remains they're used as burial urns but they can also be used in a domestic context give us a date what do you reckon i'd say somewhere between 2000 and 1500 bc miles what about the tools well there's a nice sort of range of scrapers and knives and notch flakes coming up so quite a dense collection of tools now earlier today you said to me i'm sure this is neolithic and yet you're now saying that it's bronze age do we have a problem here well certainly with the flint work there so i would say late neolithic and or early bronze age yes so there could be a chronological overlap between the two what i don't understand is we've got this huge egg which is representing our site right and we've got our hedge here all these finds came from a trench just here on the ditch these ones came from here but nowhere around the rest of the ditch have we found anything at all what do you think is going on well i think it's important to bear in mind that all this material is coming from a very sort of organic rich charcoal rich layer in the upper levels of the ditch so there's some kind of deposit going on this is not rubbish material this is some kind of deliberate deposit of flint tools so church tools and pottery why are people burying their tools and their wallets people are coming up here in the very late neolithic and early bronze age depositing these tools this pottery in the upper levels of the ditch in much the same way i suppose that 3000 years later the romans are coming up and doing the same thing with their coins this site has produced one of the biggest range of fines we've ever seen on time team 5 000 year old neolithic chert tools to 500 year old medieval coins there's something from every period and together they've unlocked the secrets of this site we came here looking for a roman temple and instead found what we thought was a classic bronze age barrow but it's now clear that our thing began its life in the neolithic about 5000 years ago as an enclosure ringed by a ditch and quite possibly by a palisade which was later burnt the enclosure may have been used to display dead bodies tools and pottery were also deposited in two sections of the ditch in the bronze age a mound was thrown up using material dug from quarry pits just outside the ring ditch the mound was probably still visible in the roman period and local people passing by were moved to bury their coins next to it which is where we came in do you remember on day one about midday when we weren't filming and you grabbed my arm and you said oh i hope we haven't got you here in a wild goose chase it's like we were concerned it was just a pot of coins and there was nothing else here it was far more than that wasn't it that's right what is the guy who's not interested in archaeology think of it there's something in it it gets you after a while you're glad we came yeah yeah really glad had fun you know i can't remember a time team that's been more of a roller coaster ride can you mick and it all ended up with this fantastic late neolithic burial mound the ditch of which is being lovingly created by the whole team and the finding of this was a fantastic piece of luck this was dug 5 000 years ago and it would probably have remained a secret till the end of time certainly we would never have come here if it hadn't been for a handful of fines deposited by a group of people worshiping a completely different set of gods two thousand years ago [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 446,038

Rating: 4.851625 out of 5

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, Bronze Age, South Perrott, Dorset, Roman Temple, Roman History

Id: xsjk2PxXac8

Length: 47min 48sec (2868 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020