The Saxon Graveyard Beneath A Farmer's Field | Time Team | Timeline

one of the great privileges of working at history here and making films together with our team at timeline is the access we get to extraordinary historical locations like this one stonehenge i'm right in the middle of the stone circle now it is an absolutely extraordinary place to visit if you want to watch the documentary like the one we're producing here go to history hit tv it's like netflix for history and if you use the code timeline when you check out you'll get a special introductory offer see you there look at this lot brooches clasps wristbands they were all found in this lincolnshire field by a metal detectorist and they're not only beautiful they're pretty rare but that's not all all these came from the surface but the detectorist dug a hole and he found this which is actually an anglo-saxon warrior you can probably just about make out these bones and this blob here is a shield boss archaeologists reckon this is an important anglo-saxon cemetery but it's now being ripped apart by plowing so time team have been sent in on a rescue mission we want to find out how big this cemetery is how old it is and whether or not there are any other warriors buried here as usual we've got just three days to do it and judging by these fines we could have our work cut out [Music] our biggest challenge is the scale of the site it's almost a kilometer long and 300 meters across so to help us target our trenches we've sent an army of field walkers to scour the surface for concentrations of fines before the diggers move in while we have plenty of fines from the detectorists to mull over helen this is quite an array of fines isn't it the most amazing group yes we've got everything from the from the uh mid-fifth century right on to the seventh century and the brooches and wrist clasps and girdle hangers all sorts of things what are these things that's a brooch you put it on your shoulder which way does it go it goes like that not on your shoulder obviously because it's a woman's bridge but but it would have looked nice anyway what can you tell just by this array of fines can you tell how many people there are well i've just been quickly counting up the broaches we've got 21 of them so that means that's at least 10 women buried somewhere in this field how are we going to find out more about this cemetery presumably we're not just going to stick in a load of test bits no we do want to dig one pit to try to re-establish the location of the grave that andrew found and to make sure we've got all the data we possibly can out of it but then after that we're going to try to look for the edges of the cemetery to find out just how big it is are we likely to find any more stuff i think so yes if you look at the brakes on these broaches they're very very fresh these have just recently been hit by the platinum and there should be a lot more deeper graves out there to find that's a pretty optimistic start i think i am very optimistic geophysics have initially been targeting their survey in the centre of the field where the metal detected fines so far have been most concentrated john's hoping that the sensitive mag scanners might be able to help us locate grave cuts but he's even more optimistic that he'll be able to guide us in by detecting metal grave goods such as shields knives or even jewelry from deep within the soil we were hoping the field walking fines might be able to give us an early indication of the extent of our cemetery but even phil's expert eyes have so far drawn a blank yeah it's definitely a rabbit drop they're doing a good job the field wall because they are finding stuff they're just not finding what we wanted them to find i think there's a few little bits of roman there's a few little bits of what may be medieval but in terms of anglo-saxon i'm afraid nothing so far our hottest lead to an anglo-saxon burial comes from andrew the metal detectorist so he's gone to help phil relocate his warrior if he can remember where that was i think it's very close to here very close how very close it's um here or here about so there's no uh it's no exact science as an archaeologist i mean i would i would tend to fix the plot by perhaps pace into a hedge you you don't use a system like that i didn't find it necessary to locate the spot so we are within 10 meters of it now then you reckon i would have thought so yeah the warrior roughly located the diggers are going in we're digging a large 10 meter by 10 meter trench to maximize our chances of finding andrew's warrior and possibly other graves that may have been placed alongside it's about where my spade is because the field has been heavily plowed phil's concerned that some graves may have already been disturbed and brought up into the topsoil so we're digging cautiously gradually removing very thin layers with experienced eyes looking out for any fines we're also sieving the spoils so we don't miss any artifacts and andrew's helping us search for metal finds in each layer as we dig our sites next door to our af skempton home of the red arrows oh now we're talking and it looks like they've come to see what we're up to meanwhile the digger is raising bones gold broaches everything else you know i did why didn't you see oh i was watching the red arrows it's mid-morning and most of the topsoil in trench one has now been removed but there's no sign of andrew's warrior however it looks like phil has found our first anglo-saxon i've actually got a piece of pot there and we've got lots more bits of pot in there all the way around but more importantly i've got bits of cremated bone look there's bits there look look there's that big bit over there so in here we've actually got a definite cremation burial oh it's a bit smashed up but it is but you can really imagine there's strawberry with somebody in it very soon you will not have to imagine it you will see it displayed before your very eyes but a skeleton at the other end of the trench might finally be andrew's warrior look at this alice you've got the eye orbit coming in here where did you spot that amongst all of this limestoney rubble well two reasons first i'm a professional and secondly the bone's in excellent condition so that must be the back of the head yeah the front of the head so the body's lying in here isn't he there's already going to be quite a buzz about this site not only do we seem to have our first body in that trench but apparently john you're quite excited about the geophysical look at this it's got some fantastic results whatever is that well there's two explanations for this yeah it's either a barrow with four chariots inside oh come on oh it's a pylon base that i've cut down and moved oh thank you very much thank you so much mate look there's lots of really good stuff all these iron spikes you can see them in this plot um lots of targets i'd like to go at so where are we in relation to the field well look the trench is there yeah that's on the ground yeah and then you've got this bank coming through and these iron spikes seem to be either side that's this bank running all the way along here yeah so yeah you can see it humping up there can't you it's right the whole length of the field and there appear to be iron spikes either side so whether you've got burials either side or whether you know it's being masked by the bank so how would you like to approach this well i'd like to dig some of those i'd like to dig the linears i mean we've got even hints of you know circular features there to try and make sense of john's dear fears we're gonna have to dig so we're putting in trench two alongside the bank feature right over john's strongest metal signal and phil's once again guiding the digger in the past hour alice has been carefully excavating our first skeleton and it's not just bones that she's finding there are grave goods with it oh there's something here first thing i found was something metal lying underneath the skull and it looks like it's iron it's got a sort of rusty orange color to it i've no idea what it is because it's hidden under the skull there's something oval and sort of copper-like but it looks like it might be glassy as well doesn't it broken piece to it which is almost shiny and there are some beads as well beads yeah where are the boots yeah they're beautiful um just here that's some orangey stuff on that bead yes it's got little orange spots on it and it's got a cross of blue that i can see just there it's absolutely beautiful and what about the state of the body well as you can see the top of the skull has been completely taken off with the plow and the shoulder's gone as well but the bone itself actually seems to be in quite good condition the bone that is there can you tell anything about the skeleton so far it's an adult and we know this is an older individual because the wear on the teeth here is really really severe and and on that one the crown has almost completely been worn away and we've also got a missing tooth there and you've got this really march remodeling so that tooth has been lost for quite a long time from andrew's fines it looks like we're dealing with a very early anglo-saxon cemetery probably established in the late 5th century around 480 a.d only 70 years after the romans left our anglo-saxons buried here were living through unstable times and inhabited a strange world of clan warfare and decaying roman villas after the romans left all these hordes of people came over from the continent didn't they the franks and the frisians and the saxons which are a lot well it was really pretty chaotic for a while for about 60 years after the end of the roman period it's hard to say who these people were it's just a bit of a mishmash so this is up to about what 470 something yeah about 470 yes and then it begins to be clear that what we're dealing with in lincolnshire are people who thought of themselves as angles so coming from this area here what do you mean thought of themselves as anglers well i think what it was really is the the top people the bosses were probably angles and so the the downtrodden masses and everybody else wanted to be angles to fit in with what was going on at the top but they were actually the people who already lived here just as the celts already lived here adopted roman ways now they're adopting saxons yes that's exactly it yes they're they're taking on the dress they're taking on the language they're doing everything in the new coming way so my whole idea which i got in the classroom which i'm sure you did too of all these hordes of people invading and occupying the land is probably wrong you'd really have to have too many people traveling across the north sea for it to be feasible uh it it does seem to be just the aristocracy just the elite changing ideas rather than changing bloodlines in trench one the archaeologists have made another breakthrough it's done to tourney hello dan something you should see here tony i think coming all the way we've got something new shield boss this here yeah are there any bones associated with it a bit of a school look got a bit of school there sitting in a nice really well defined grave as well this is the car what's that over there margaret uh it looks like feet so we've got the feet of the body as well well the trouble is that would have been a very very tall person if that's that person's feet now it could be that it is a very tall person or it just could be there another grave another grave or it's disturbed or something like that what does the shield boss tell us well i think it's a it says something about status no it means we've got a warrior class in the society represented in the sermon i've got my granddad's world war one trenching tool and i'm not a warrior well he was yeah but that's back a while all right at some time during anglian history there were fighting people here would you both agree with that possibly the iron shield boss is all that remains of an anglo-saxon shield that was buried here the wood and leather section have long since rotted leaving only the metallic central part which was used to batter opponents and the rarity of this find means it looks like we've found andrew's warrior grave [Music] but in trench two there's absolutely no sign of any metal work and a concern john has called for one of his team to check the signal is still there 400 nano tesla is that a lot it's quite quite strong i i would think something i don't know the size of your hat oh so the search continues stuart has been trawling through maps and aerial photographs to try and find out more about our cemetery's location and has discovered that the earth and bank running across our site is also visible in neighboring fields on the air photography that mark runs right across the field it continues through the field up to the north out there as well so there is something showing through there quite nicely and after looking at a 17th century map he's found there was once a road running through our site if this road existed when our cemetery was established it's possible that we've found our first boundary in trench two phil's finally found john's metalwork that's a talk you've got some industrial archaeology phil well you did say it was about head sourcing [Laughter] disappointment for john but in trench one the fines haven't stopped all day is that another bit of metal next to the shield it is and we think it's probably a broken blade whether it's a knife or a sphere or we're not sure at the moment what about these two bubbly things they look like rivets maybe holding leather or wood in place on the shield you solve the mystery of the feature we're almost 100 sure that we've got one very tall person and just running a tape along good six foot tall so very statuesque it's been a very good day one hasn't brilliant absolutely brilliant not only have we got this burial and all these finds but we've got this cremation that bridget's working on with all these little bits of bone here and this beautiful old skeleton with lots of interesting grave goods including beads and something green there that we haven't even got up yet but we've got a big problem which is that we want to ascertain how big this whole cemetery actually is but john's just told the archaeologists that you can't possibly geophase the whole area in the time that we've got left and consequently presumably we can't dig it there's no way we're gonna dig the whole field no so we need to work out some kind of way to ascertain how many people actually were buried in this we really need to try and know how big the cemetery was its most important thing and we've got to do that by tomorrow morning i've gotta have a strategy by then join us after the break beginning of day two and i'd been expecting to see the archaeologists here who were going to tell me what strategy they worked out so they could determine the size of this anglo-saxon cemetery but all that's been turned on its head by this geophys which is actually this way round yesterday john had done that but then last night after we'd all gone home he did this strip here which revealed this mysterious circle which is just over there past where jimmy's doing that gfiz and some of the archaeologists are saying it could be a barrow but we won't know until john's done this next strip here so that we can reveal the shape of it but whatever it is it's going to be pretty exciting and i reckon it's going to dictate today's archaeology while gf is finished scanning the last of the missing strips in trench one work continues excavating the two skeletons we found yesterday the one with beads and our warrior with his shield [Music] heavy rain overnight isn't helping matters and we've got a bit of a puzzle andrew we've got two skeletons here that lovely one there and one under the tent which one is the one that you found neither of these are the one that i found tony and yet you said put your trench in there and you'll come up with my skeleton that's true but i may have made an error of perhaps three meters or so ah so what do you reckon it is now i think it's close to where we're standing right here that's right with two skeletons in our first trench we're clearly right in the middle of an anglo-saxon cemetery so we're not going to continue the search for andrew's warrior mix back with us today and has joined a crowd of expectant archaeologists on the other side of the field to hear the results of john's intriguing geophys come on man they are look at that oh look at that that's so clear where is it on the ground um well just behind us i mean the entrance is here yeah and then it goes out for 30 meters towards that red peg and then it curves right the way around so i mean it's a big prominent feature it is big isn't it and do you think it's a wall or a dick no it's it's a ditch definitely a ditched feature a ditched enclosure i mean it's got this one entrance whether that could be a small henge it looks sort of like that like a neolithic hedge doesn't this is there any sign of a bank on the inside um i can't actually see one in the results i mean could it be a big round house big iron age round house so it's 100 foot across i mean that's not impossible not impossible okay how do we find out what it is i think we have to dig a hole in and see i was hoping you'd say where do we dig it well if karen's just writing it's a henge then we ought to be digging somewhere around the entrance side of things i would have thought if anything really that's got to be crucial because that the people deposit stuff in the ditches you know there may be post formations that sort of thing and if we we want a date then we want some fines of the right period and they're likely to be around the entrance mick i know this is day one for you and you're not up to speed yet but have they got a strategy that's going to find the edge of this cemetery i think so i think it's going to be difficult but we do have these earth work running across because if this is a pre-existing road that you know the cemetery went up to then that's that's perhaps a boundary in that direction we need to look at that and then i think the other thing is to look at all the metal detected fines and map them because that might give us the extent of the cemetery as well so we've got a number of things to try out to investigate john's possible henge we're opening two more trenches one right across the entrance to look for fines to date the structure and a second to take in the rim of the feature and investigate a mark on the geophysics matt's opening up our new trenches [Music] phil's continuing to look for anglo-saxons in trench two and henry has teamed up with andrew to map out his original finds to see if they can give us an idea of the extent of the cemetery yeah i don't think i found any brushes this side of the line at all in trench one we've got the painstaking process of excavating the badly broken cremation urn but we've now got enough fragments for our pottery expert to identify it it's very distinctly anglo-saxon you see all these impressions in the surface the clay was mixed probably with animal dung and then fired and obviously there's a lot of organic material in like seed cases and it's straw and all that sort of thing this kind of pot is a typical cremation iron material well not usually no i mean it's more the sort of stuff you associate with domestic settlements um theory being it was it was used particularly for cooking pottery on the other side of the trench dan's discovered our warrior not only has a shield but also a blade all right it's what i think is the spearhead i mean it seems the obvious choice there's a base of it there and it comes to a point there so if you're like he's got a clutched under his arm there it's the remains of a hadzax a small sixth century hand knife that many anglo-saxons would have carried with them i'm going to measure it with this now we've got some tantalising fragments of early anglo-saxon weaponry and to get a better idea of what they may have been like we've set craftsman ulfric and richard dara the challenge of making a replica battle shield using where possible authentic tools and techniques ulfric is making the shield boss based on measurements from the one we've found and is moulding a disk of sheet metal into a dome shape by heating hammering and cooling to keep the metal flexible so it won't crack when in battle using just his eye as a measure richard is first shaving down a section of seasoned poplar wood which will form the light but rigid skeleton for the shield this is then carefully axed to form the circular shield shape for almost two days now there's been nothing in trench two but phil's persistence has finally paid off john has a big old pop down in here look that's nice is it pot oh god it's pot right enough i mean i just just have this horrible feeling it'll either stop or it'll keep going i rather hope it's going to keep going and it's not doesn't look broken you did well to spot that so solid look at that it's getting bigger oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy see it's in this this brown blob which comes around like that oh look what we got in there that is that is broken skull it's a skull well that solves that one then another great so the pot with the ariel it's our fourth anglo-saxon and everyone's feeling pretty pleased with themselves but just when i thought we were getting to grips with this site our warrior in trench one looks like he might not have been quite what we'd imagined well at the moment it looks almost certainly like a female a six foot female it looks like it i would need to really have a proper look at the pelvis but the sciatic notch is really really wide and that's something that suggests this is a woman rather than a man really yeah really i'm not 100 sure yet but i'm getting there about 70 sure it's a woman and if it is she's a very tall female for this period is that the only evidence you've got well the other thing that comes into play a bit this is a supportive thing the bones are really quite smooth and very slender and that's usually considered to be found on female skeletons so at the moment she's looking very female it's a bit hypothetical at the moment though isn't have you got anything tangible that you can tell us about her um the only other thing i can mention is that she has got rather odd teeth um instead of having an overbite where your upper teeth go outside of your lower teeth like we most of us have her teeth met like that and her front teeth are very short where they wore against one another which meant she would have had a very sort of small little face and quite an unusual smile it's a six foot but not very pretty while margaret gathers more evidence to support her theory on the other side of the site there's no sign yet of john's hench three and a half meters from this end and after leading phil to a coil of rusty wire yesterday he's anxious to find a bit of real archaeology i can't see anything come on it's black and white it's brown and brown in here that's a difficult thing [Music] our lincolnshire anglo-saxons were not just living side by side with roman ruins but also among features from much earlier civilizations and stewart thinks our so-called henge may be the key to understanding why our anglo-saxons chose this site to bury their dead we know there are a number of prehistoric burials along this ridgeway there's evidence from a photographer that has won immediately north of where we dig in there's that nice enclosure that john's picked up on the geophysics which looks if it might be another prehistoric beryl enclosure and it's possibly one to the south as well and we know from other sites that the anglo-saxons love to bury close to where burials are already being established so i think we should be looking at continuity of tradition if stewart's right the anglo-saxons chose this site precisely because of these prehistoric monuments in trench one alice has now cleared the soil from our skeleton with beads and can see from the pelvis that she was a woman and arthritic scarring on her spine and worn teeth suggest she was probably a mature woman and we've got more beautiful grave goods have you seen the objects they're fantastic there's um there's these beads up here that's an amber one yeah and this one's got a lot of pattern on it there's another one tucked in underneath there there's these amazing wrist clasps which are copper just down there and then there's this ring here which i don't know whether that's part of a girdle hanger or not it might be right our anglo-saxons lived during the so-called dark ages an era from which no records exist that might tell us more about who these people were but andrew's fines can tell us when they were living here and that's because they were just as vain as we are the best way of dating is to use changes in fashion what like uh the difference between when we wore winkle pickers and when we wore chisel toes that's right yes so these these marvelous finds that are so beautiful are also absolutely vital as dating evidence and i can show you that by using these cruciform broaches this this is a really really early anglo-saxon one it looks just like a late roman brooch but it's got this little animal head can you see that looks a bit bitter yeah which is a really kind of germanic thing now that one is not that easy to see but if we move on to say one of these which is one of andrew's finds from our site that much larger animal head is really really obvious isn't it so that's later because it's developed more yes it's it's developed a bit and it's it's much bigger and then presumably this one it's got a cartoon face yeah look at those nostrils and they get bigger and they get flatter so yes you've got the next one even bigger and we we move on to these two from lincoln museum i mean look at that you'd never be able to to understand that if you didn't know what it was supposed to look like it's become completely debased completely stylized so very very much later trench two's now been extended into the earthen bank and phil's uncovered evidence that suggests our road could be contemporary with our cemetery so you're saying these might be rushed it's quite possible they're right on the area they should be are they concentrating in an area are they spreading all the way across here they were they were more uh concentrated on this side i mean i don't know what the um the actual gauge of a wagon would be you're going to want me to dig over there just to prove what gauge they were certainly a lot more than one though isn't there's a whole series of them we now think the road may form an outer limit for the cemetery to test this theory we're going to be digging on the other side of the ruts to see if the burials stop a few hours ago the archaeologists said that they thought that this strange oval shaped thing which might be a prehistoric henge could be the key to our site and the saxon cemetery had actually been built around it so we put a trench in there to try and get this entrance thing and that's this trench here john how did we get on well sort of mixed results we've got the ditch that's here yeah going clearly across yeah um but it doesn't stop what do you mean it doesn't stop there's no entrance there's no what it's completely circular yeah uh that i'm afraid was a mistake a gift is mistake yeah and the person's been sacked already i'm sure he has so we've got a continuous ditch it's clearly not a henge have you got any fines to date this ditch nothing at all well don't let's give up in addition to that trench there we've put in another trench here to try and pick up that green blobby thing and this is this one here matt hello we've got nothing in that trench except an undateable ditch how are you doing here snap we've got the we've got the ditch there just it wasn't the geophysics plot still going down with one animal tooth out of it so far well this is a puzzler isn't it it can't be a hinge presumably because it hasn't got any entrance so what could it be well it it still looks and feels prehistoric to me this is a ring ditch of some type yeah it could be that you've got cremations placed inside it perhaps for historic cremations or it could simply be a space reserved for some sort of activity in here and you wouldn't get any fines with it typical archaeologist it's a space reserved for some kind of activity we haven't got a clue what it is until we get some proper clients out of it we really don't know well this could still be the key to understanding our site but we're going to do a heck of a lot of work on it before we get anywhere near understanding what it is crikey is that skeleton actually holding that pot yeah it looks much like it uh you've got the fingers there look yeah there's the upper arm and i think the the lower arm must come in underneath right and then it looks like the fingers are draped around around the pot really that's rather unusual isn't it well i've been saying this a lot today but i've never seen anything like this before it's really quite remarkable and obviously you get pots in graves yeah but with the the skeleton actually holding the pot uh it could be unique yeah and this is the pot definitely anglo-saxon it looks it i mean it's plain it's undecorated but the fabric looks right um you know there's no it doesn't look like the prehistoric potter we get around here presumably your thoughts turn to somebody who's actually buried with these he's mugger i can equate with this skeleton he's just in that act of raising it to the lips yeah yeah oh no i've been there so frequently getting your mind back onto the job phil we were discussing this morning whether this alignment was the edge of the cemetery on this side i mean we've cleared quite a big area right there and where kerry's been looking over there there's not a trace of any burials in that so as far as we're concerned this is as far um to the east as these burials actually extend but funnily enough if this is the limit of the burials they also coincide with our earthen bank feature and with the alignment of the road so we now know that our road forms our cemeteries eastern boundary but we still don't know how far it might extend westwards one place where we are about to get some answers is in trench one is our six foot warrior really a woman no flaring it's a girl quite a small master who thinks it's definitely definitely a girl yeah end of day too and in here we've got a fascinating mystery we've got two skeletons both of which our bone specialists are pretty sure are women but one of them is the tallest anglo-saxon woman by 10 centimeters ever found by archaeologists in great britain and she's been buried in full military honours while the other one is decked out in jewelry why join us after the break beginning of day three and we still haven't managed to work out the size or the orientation of this anglo-saxon cemetery here in lincolnshire even though we've had some fantastic finds nor have we been able to decide what this enigmatic shape is yesterday morning we thought it might be a stone age henge yesterday afternoon we were tearing our hair out because we couldn't get any dating evidence out of it then yesterday evening in this little hole here we discovered this piece of pottery and immediately paul your eyes started shining and you said ah this could be the key to what this thing is why is this so important well it's a really nice piece of late neolithic or early bronze age pottery so two thousand two and a half thousand bc and can we date our feature from it yep it's right from the bottom of the ditch mixed up with all the charcoal in the primary silt it's as good as dating evidence gets what might it be a beaker they're kind of tall narrow sort of drinking vessels that kind of spring up all over europe um around about the end of the neolithic um why are they significant well their size looks like they might have been used as drinking cups and because they spring up all over europe at the same time it's thought that the liquid they contained the drink was a particularly potent and exciting kind of drink it's possibly the first thing the first time we can see early alcohol drinking there's another school of thought that says these uh chord impressions on the pot were actually made with hemp string and it's kind of symbolic of the contents we could be looking at cannabis beer no wonder your eyes were shining okay we can now date this feature but it doesn't help us understand what it is does it it does actually yes we think that this is an early bronze age barrow what we're looking for is um some kind of burial either a big inhumation grave perhaps or it could be a really small cremation and both of early bronze age date we're going to be putting a new trench right in the center to search for these bronze age burials and more trenches outside the barrow to look for anglo-saxon graves as the barrow may provide a focus for the anglo-saxon cemetery with the amount of activity around the site it feels like day one all over again not only are we digging the new trenches we're also carefully recording and lifting our skeletons in trenches one and two and we're still trying to determine the size of our cemetery but somehow in the midst of all this one of our diggers has managed to squeeze in a short lie down it's always up to then victor this underneath me yeah is up like that and then this top one is much more flexed up he's really jammed in isn't it that's right and this this one goes in underneath yeah and then he's face down with this arm underneath and then he got the pot and he's he's got his hands oh fingers over the top right and then this arm he's doing some up he's because he's that's right he's doing that yeah so how long have i got a load down here like this for you to draw it didn't really only take a couple of hours [Laughter] our craftsmen are working hard to finish our replica anglo-saxon shield having hammered the dome into shape ulfric is now attaching the button to the boss with a rivet this button section only seen on 6th century shields was used to trap blades in combat so they could be knocked from opponent's hands richard's going to glue a leather cover to the shield which should prevent the shield board from splitting and he's giving mick a crash course in anglo-saxon glue making so this is so the related milk yes the raw material right it's heated milk i'm just going to pour it into this bowl and what we do is we add a little bit of vinegar stale blue right yeah newcastle brown by look at me well um i'm not going to say what making sense and then we stir it so milk and beer so far because we've added an acid yeah if you notice it coagulates yeah so if you look what there is in there is this this mass of like cottage cheese yes cottage cheese stuff yeah it's a stage i normally took the milk down the density yes what i've done is is taking some wood ash right and added some water to it yeah to get out the the alkali from the wood ash and then i put that in and what it should do now is it should neutralize the acid in the first process it's very difficult to believe that's going to stick anything together we'll have to work on it a bit are you going to keep the solids and chuck the liquid no now we're going to use a whole lot of glue now right almost going off while you're doing this otherwise my hand will stick to it despite mixed doubts the glue really works but the big question is will the shield in trench one the archaeologists are carefully lifting the shield boss so that we can send it off to an x-ray lab in lincoln for analysis now that all the soil has been removed from our warrior woman we've discovered that her bones have spread out over time and after careful measuring we found she was actually five foot seven but that still makes her one of the tallest anglo-saxon women ever discovered in britain what makes her so special though is that she wore none of the typical female anglian jewellery but was laid to rest with a knife by her side and her shield to protect her in the hereafter for the last two days our whole focus of activity has either been here where our skeletons are or over here where our prehistoric feature is but suddenly while our backs were turned this vast trench has appeared right the way over here mick do you realize quite how far away from everybody else you are yeah that's good isn't it why well you want to know the extent of the cemetery we all want to know the extent of this cemetery we're not going to get it from the geophysics we're not going to get it from the metal detecting fines we're not going to get it from field walking the stoble and so on so the strategy needs to be in effect big test bits to see if the graves are coming this way isn't that a bit irresponsible well no it's what you do if say this field is going to go for a housing estate and you didn't know there was anything here but you know you wanted to just check it out you dig lots of pits or trenches across it to see if there was anything here but what if we find skeletons here we're going to have to excavate them carefully remove the fines it's going to take forever yeah we're not going to do that i mean when we're trying to define the cemetery all we need to do is to define any grave cuts we don't need to empty them and i think it's fairly clear there aren't any in here it doesn't come this far so the less we find the more we have to dig this could be the beginning of a very heavy excavation strategy all morning the archaeologists have been searching for burials in the centre of our bronze age barrow so far without success but all of a sudden it looks like things are starting to happen well we're just cleaning back and we've got lots of lots and lots of charcoal turning up already there's a piece of burnt bone over there so um and it's all within this red sand which you can follow around the edge here lots in a very wiggly line around there so rather than one feature full of red sand it could well be lots and lots of intercutting features and what do you think those features might be well charcoal burnt bone lots of small pits cremations that's very intriguing isn't it what about in the rest of the training well it just goes on it just goes on and on look at this see this linear thing curving off it's almost like a barrow ditch with inside a barrow ditch that's great to get such a fascinating trench in the middle of day three isn't it it is and it ain't saxon it looks like we've got a lot more digging to make sense of this new mystery after two days of delicate excavation phil's now ready to relieve his skeleton of the pot it's been clutching for one and a half millennia this is the first time an anglo-saxon has been found clutching a pot and the archaeologists are speculating that he was a man known for his love of alcohol who was given the opportunity to take his favorite drinking vessel with him into the afterlife see if i can go in with his trowel in here it's virtually like a wedge really yeah the importance of this grave is making even feel anxious can you just brace that bit there because i it is moving you should feel a lot happier if you could just support it there's an old crack right across the base actually so i mean that's been there a while i feel it moving easy right it's nicely it's pivoting about there so we should be okay if you can get something underneath it right we're free that we're free hang on hang on there's a piece of dirt let me i've got it you got that yeah i've got the heart i can't get my hands under it i've got the whole shoot i think you're going to hold the shooting match go beautifully done mine just supported under the track that's it beautifully done i feel quite hurt what snatched his point away from me as feared mick's new strategy for finding the edge of the cemetery has led to a proliferation of trenches and carrenza seems to be digging in ever decreasing circles towards our original trenches [Music] karenza the first two days the digging of the trenches was really quite leisurely but today we seem to have gone trench crazy look at that over there well what we're now trying to do is find areas where there aren't any burials which will tell us we're outside the cemetery but big strategy is way over there well exactly we know there aren't any burials over there the cemetery doesn't go that far so we're now moving in are there any burials here if there aren't any here we can move even further in that trench over there has already been dug there's nothing there and anything in here it looks as if there isn't at the moment no so does this tell us anything about the relationship between albaro and the anglo-saxon cemetery well no at the moment that's all really very confusing i was really expecting to find burials up near the barrow and we haven't managed to do it at all because we've found no more graves to the west and none around the barrow it looks like we may have a linear cemetery laid alongside the road and the scatter of andrew's metal detected fine seems to be backing this up just comparing that to the area where andrew's been finding all of his metal finds all the anglo-saxon stuff he's had was also from that within that blue blue line just there combined with the date of our finds mostly sixth century it suggests that this cemetery was used by just a few families over about five generations our old lady our warrior woman and our drunkard may well have known each other our anglo-saxon finds are now back from the trenches and cleaned and we've discovered some extraordinary jewellery the beads are beautiful aren't they they are but you have to look very closely at them to see how marvelous they are this one's got green and yellow twisted trails two of them two stripes and this is made by twisting together very very fine pieces of green and yellow glass and drawing them out like barley sugar and then rolling them into the warm surface of the red bead then we've got three that have got twisting trails of blue and on again on a red ground with with um with spots and we've got two amber beads we've also found these women's wrist clasps which are a form of anglo-saxon cufflink and they've been crucial in helping us date our finds because they're a fashion item in general wrist clasps are between late 5th to the end of the 6th century but because these look like they're a fairly early stage i'd say they were late fifth or early six say about 4 70 to about 5 30. all this jewelry was worn by our second anglo-saxon woman who was older and unlike our warrior wore traditional anglian clothes a necklace of beautiful glass and amber beads a tunic gathered together with the wrist clasps and a bag slung round her waist which was sealed with an iron ring digging on our circular feature has ground to a halt our early bone fines now turn out to be just animal bone naturally mixed with the soil well it looks fairly convincing as a ditch doesn't it and our barrow within a barrow is a frost wedge a glacial feature gouged out during the ice age but we've now done enough digging to explain what it was it was a barrow a 15-foot high burial mound surrounded by a ditch built by the beaker people a tribe of european settlers who brought metal working and sophisticated textiles to britain around 2500 bc the burials the barrow once contained are sadly long lost under the plow the x-rays of our shield boss are now back from the lab and they've revealed some remarkable hidden detail see this density here in a strip that's the grip the actual hand you know how it was held the grip yeah we did a block lift down deep enough to undercut it and luckily we got it what's it made of it's made of iron and we can see how the grip was attached to the flange this is quite intriguing do you see how this is at an angle the top of the boss and then here it's denser than the other side and so maybe we've got a little evidence of it being used in battle and it had a bash on the side oh it must have been mustn't it makes sense at last our shield is finished and ready for testing and we've got our own trench warrior phil eager to try his hand i think you're going to show me how to use it yeah certainly apart from being defensive it's also quite a good offensive weapon it would create a bit of space between you and your opposition punching with the shield boss nice and heavy don't have a nap gods don't recruit this could be dangerous well there you bent me noble look oh that's exactly the same damage as on the boss from the grave entrenched one yeah it was bent exactly like that that's probably why they'll stop using them eventually but what's it like for defense that's pretty stuck that is so does that mean you can't get it out of the shield and and say your spear is useless then it does because then then the the the guy on that side just deflects you away and you and you've got to go with it you've got to go with it yeah there's not only that you've lost your life because you just leave yourself open and he stabs you what about an axe oh look at that good god you'd be pretty immobilized with that wouldn't you it's come right through them it's your hand that's in there you're not actually going to take the blow on your arm or anything like that and there's one last test what damage can the boss do over the past three days the archaeologists have uncovered four and a half thousand years of our site's history a bronze age beaker barrow which the anglo-saxons must have looked on in wonder when they settled here the ancient trackway along which our cemetery was laid and finally the burial plot covering a little over an acre where our anglo-saxons began burying their dead around 480 a.d a small group of metal fines however attractive they may be we're only ever going to be able to tell us so much about this site but over the last three days we've discovered the prehistoric story as well as some of the more intimate details of the people who were buried here the beautiful beads worn by the women the man clutching his final drinking vessel and our tall woman warrior with her shield and knife have brought me that much closer to our small group of anglo-saxons who lived here 1500 years ago

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 495,272

Rating: 4.8713732 out of 5

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, time team, anglo saxons, british archaeology, british history, fifth century britain, bronze age documentary, tony robinson

Id: 5d2J5hkI68Y

Length: 49min 2sec (2942 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021