Time Team S06E10 Kemerton,Worcestershire

in 1990 someone flew over this worcestershire field and took this aerial photograph you can see all these extraordinary crop marks that aren't visible from the ground but what are they well we've got to close a couple of fields in this direction archeologists have discovered vast amounts of pottery and evidence of houses and deep pits all of it Bronze Age and in such large amounts it's considered to be of national importance but over here is Breeden Hill one of the largest Iron Age hill forts in the whole country so what's going on here local archaeologists have called us in to sort it all out in just three days presumably this is the field with the crop marks yeah these have been plotted from air pictures onto the map here this field here is plowed but we don't know what's in that at all and this for these fields here have been quarried and produced the whole mass of finds this is the one with the thousands of Bronze Age shirt yeah yes in some of this time the size of the bits that coming up okay dr. certainly that is quite amazing Tony and I mean a pottery of that age in that condition we know we just Falls to bits so what are we going to do we can field walk this because this is plowed and harrowed so we can do a field walking exercise across that and you never know what's going to turn up there and then in this field here we need some geophysics done but this is where we will do some revaluation trenches as well we've got four main classes of features beat these smaller blocks which may be pit but these things that's right the main features of this series of of earthwork features rectangular enclosure here more irregular enclosures and then these long linear features so seeing that you know perhaps the most cost-effective way of dealing that will be to put one trench through part of this rectangular feature cutting through the irregular so we get the relationship do you really want to go across somewhere like that don't you eh I'm gonna hit Tori's limits as well first yeah yeah what about something over the over this year comes across this I think through this area I mean we've got a whole massive they do look a bit different here in real maximizer features in yeah this green field is the one with the crop marks in it one of the biggest problems we're going to have this week is interpreting these lines could this be a building or is it a ditch surrounding a settlement are these rubbish pits and might this be some type of trackway trench one is going in here we're trying to put it across this crop mark is this edge the side of a building or a field boundary our first job is to find the crop marks using the aerial photograph what about nearly 50 50 meters really - to catch the other to get into the enclosure that's 100 meters we can see 100 involved doing a few sums is 56 millimeters right so 50 meters is going to be 28 28 millimeters so I'll tell you what you need you come 15 meters in and then 30 meter long trench yeah don't you battle do we we get underway laying out trench 115 yet Victor's already at work trying to reconstruct what this area might have looked like in the Bronze Age but we have a problem right now that I think is basic Bronze Age landscape now the next thing we got to do is move forward in time to the Iron Age and Roman period we're dealing with numerous periods here but certainly the Bronze Age from 2,000 to 500 BC and the Iron Age from 500 BC till the Romans arrived sorting out dating will be a bit of a nightmare we know we've got Iron Age over here and Bronze Age over there but what's the difference between the two of them time in a nutshell the Bronze Age is a lot earlier so the Bronze Age starts about 2000 BC and ends about 500 BC so it's 1,500 years it's a long time when the Iron Age takes over after that and it ends with the Romans coming so what might we find this typically Bronze Age and what might we find that's typically Iron Age what I'd like to find because it'll prove my Theory's correct is the Bronze Age is going to be more livestock you know cattle and sheep based the farming and in the Iron Age I'd like to see cat sheep and pigs but also our wheat and barley having done our sums we now have trench one open a little further along the main field we're also opening trench to over the crop marks now all of you got a little bag there and we're going to walk up and down these squares meanwhile in the field next door some of the local school kids are helping us out you can bring it back to me and then I will show it to the person who looks at the fines we're field walking as much of the land around here as we can we're looking for a concentration of material across any period which might give us some targets we're hoping for bronze or Iron Age stuff but back on the main part of our site I have a question for Mick what is a crop mullet and well it's a mark you see from the air in the crops that might or might not indicate archaeology but I can show you best through the diagram if we take a surface of the ground and we've got a big pit dug into it and let's say this is limestone or gravel or some well-drained soil like that then this is full of guns and you know filled up with soil and all the rest of it when you put a crop over the top of that what tends to happen is that crop will grow but where it grows over that ditch it'll be very much taller because it's drawing on a greater depth of plant nutrients to give a richer crop then when it ripens this bit of the crop will stay greener longer than the rest when it's ripening because it's drawing from a greater depth of moisture and so on in the ditch and so if you happen to be flying over at the right time and the crop happens to be registering that effect then you'll see these dark lines from the air so all crop marks will tend to be from old ditches well there might be there might be pose Tawes and and you know other features anything that gives you a depth like that and of course you can get the opposite effect which is if you've got for example a Roman villa or Roman Road and so you've got stonework in the soil then the crop growing in the field there will be stomach smaller yeah yeah he stunted over as it grows over that stonework and then when it's ripening that bit of the crop will wither and go yellow before the rest of the crop so you might see you know white lines in your crop light lines for the lower half of your face looks like eyes down the road a half a mile away at assuage works there's another crop mark that interests us these are sewage tanks but what are these lines why do we want to look at this when it's so far away from the rest of the site well essentially it's a trackway which which was forgetting animals and people probably from an area of farms over there yeah along the edge of the river towards the site that we're going to be working on so I mean they may be closely connected it may be the same people using it and now that John's finished the geophys which of course will be fantastic what are we likely to find underneath the ground um ditches we're gonna find houses I hope I don't know I keep my fingers crossed pits all sorts well we've got all those yeah so there's the sewage tanks there's the curvy trackway and here's this enclosure melissia pits inside and that's how the magnetic results fit there's that enclosure the curving track we've got a series of pits but what's more exciting as this anomaly here which well could it be a house could it be a barrow how big a cross is that that's about 10 15 metres across I'd be big enough no social spot on for a house so is this a house we certainly think that this may be a trackway but can we date either of them we get digging and open our third trench as we dig Victor is drawing a trackway so we can have some idea about how it might have looked in the Bronze Age your the trench we got we're on to the shallow growling oh yeah similar sort of stuff yet I gather you better find as well haha you're a trowel far look uh dear may I know what you mean dear mayor dear me do you know what that is not a yeah yes yeah no found accent it that is I mean well you can imagine i feel pretty chuffed about that you do really you do so you don't get many hand axes reindeer do you do now and I mean let's be honest it's called the hard enough act isn't this the oldest man-made implement we've ever found so he's an Iroquois just lying on the topsoil yeah you presumably look for the rest of it oh I can find the rest of it this piece of Flint is the oldest man-made item we've ever found on time team it shows that people were here well before the Bronze Age Victor has finished drawing his trackway and Frances is able to give me an idea of what it might have been like you see on the edge you've got a ditch marking one side and then a hedge which has been laid along the very outside of a thing and that was to stop the animals from getting off the track way so they're walking down the middle and you can see the dog driving a sheep there's another ditch and another hedge on the outside right now that's what it would have looked like in the Bronze Age this is what trackways would look like after a few hundred years maybe by the Iron Age this one I mean it's as good an exact parallel for a Bronze Age track way as I can think this one's actually running down to the river but you've got ditches on the side there's one down here it's got a bit shallow now it would originally have been much deeper and it's still holding water and then instead of a lave hedge we have a fence on the side but basically the point to keep the animals in so who would have made the decision to create this and the decisions would probably be made by sort of Council of maybe five or six top farmers in the area and maybe one big man you know calling the shots it's four thirty day one not a lot seems to have actually happened on the ground except we've trampled a few baby turnips except now I hear there's a bit of excitement what's going on well we've done the geophysics now and I mean we're getting some really clear results what we've now got is the enclosure ditch here coming down quite clearly there's a large pit pit showing on the aerial photograph but the confusing thing is this curving ditch now appears to be straight on the geophysics so what does that mean in terms of our trenches what we were actually talking about when you arrived was we think the way to tackle this is at cheap to open up an area because what we really want to know is how all these ditches relate to each other whether the same day which one's intercut with which and get a look at some of this settlement I think it really is the only way to understand sites of this type but we're looking at area 20 meters by 40 meters so we need to get on but it's gonna be think we should do that you can target that over your pit over the ditches and over that internally area caught you yeah I'm 40 by 20 yeah okay not funny army of volunteers thing you always say to me we ought to dig very carefully little trenches because archaeology's like any other part of the environment that once you bring it to the surface you kill it and now they're saying 20 by 40 that's the absolute opposite of what you always nag me about yeah but the problem we have with the type of site like this and Annie and it's true of a lot of British archaeology actually is that an awful lot of the structures are built in wood so it's not as if you've got a huge great you know Egyptian temple or big Roman structure this is all basically stains in the soil so we think that if we open a big air strip back clean ease we won't actually have a very complicated picture there and it is the way to deal with the site like this because there's not going to be any big stone walls or anything like that there so other archaeologists looking in won't say that Mick Aston and practices extry really bad archeology oh they might say that they do anyway there anyway yeah so we begin to open this big trench this will be our fourth trench of the day it'll cover an enormous area and hopefully give us a clearer picture of what was going on here and maybe we'll get a date down a trench three they've been digging furiously and there's a rumor going around that Phil has found something you can get in can we what is it okay let me put in the picture new Tony as well this is our enclosure ditch yeah with one side coming along there and the other side you're coming in on there okay and that comes up to our track way which is running off this is on that side on this side here's the other side of the track way not coming right through last row you can see that yeah and look what it's got on the outside of it a nice parallel flanking ditch yeah so that's what we were seeing on a geophysics yeah but the real important thing is this here this thing here this is where you get the rumor about the Saxon and it's no rumor it's stuff chock-a-block with the Saxon pottery and look at the end here nice big postal slap-bang in the middle of our section don't be a Saxon Gruber house so it's one of these sunken floor building yeah yeah I mean watching our garbage on the floor what's this house toy a very characteristic house he has a rectangular pit dug into the ground with a post at each end and you can either imagine it as a substantial building with a floor with the cellar under it or as a building you step down into the workshop or something in it hang on a minute we started out looking for Bronze Age or our age but this Saxon dwelling I mean Saxon that's a few hundred years after the end of shows that's right yeah but that's okay I mean winning a landscape that's used at different periods so we have found our trackway and we can show what this area would have looked like this house was built in Saxon times unfortunately we don't have time today to excavate a Saxon house but we're pretty sure from other sites that the trackway has been in use since the Bronze Age so we close down this trench and record it day 2 opens in trench - in the main field over the crop marks it's stuffed full of round features and ditches and carrenza is excited by it can you see the edge of is it curving is that dark band as the stones in it as lots of stone up there sitting on this dark features curving round like this last Greg and then back into bulk there we're wondering if that might be something to do with a heart but I'm most interesting thing at the moment is um just in here you see that darker patch there surrounded by this or insult this is a post hole and this is our best evidence yet for building really yeah now to me that doesn't look particularly good evidence what can you see there I can vaguely see a circle but that's about it well then what what you're seeing is the ghost of where the posts are stood in the past you have to remember that most buildings in the past were built of timber and the easiest way to build a timber building is to dig a hole put a timber in then backfill it round pack it around either with stones or soil or clay and that will hold your building up what happens of course when the post rots or is burnt or taken away is you just get the stain and where it was so I said to you before you British archaeologists made up a lots of stains in the soil really but because they were timber buildings we're always looking for the holes where the posts stood and that's that's good indication that we've got a building here somewhere are there likely to be any more posts around it can we chase the rest of the heart well yeah the probably well where that the problem is chasing it is that we don't know what shape is it's not like a sort of line you know a linear feature that you can see what direction is roaring coming I think your classic circular post else trucks you've got one in the middle holding the roof up and a load around the edge that are the walls now we don't know whether our post curl is that one in which case we could go in any direction whether it's that one in which case it's curving that way whether it's that one so based on it with no idea which way to go so what will we do then in this range well basically what we're going to do is because that curving feature is going into the bulk that where the edge of the trench that way there's a little linear feature here that's also going that way we're going to extend the trench in that direction and just hope that we may pick up some more post hills I mean we may be unlucky and they may all go that way that's our best bet it's just to make the trench wider and hopefully we'll be able to understand some of these features and see how they carry on over in our big trench we're making good progress phil has an army of people hoeing it's now looking seriously big but it's still not quite long enough yet in our search for iron and Bronze Age dates we've brought in a couple of environmental experts they're taking tiny fragments of material which will analyze it so you've got a pick you want to know what was that pit useful what were they throwing into it and quite often it is the waste from their dinners or it's the waste from some farming process and what I do is put a soil sample from a pit for instance and break it all up so that I release all those small things that people can't see very easily and wash it over or floats washed over onto the sit is this what I fear it might be probably not what's in there is plant matter and hopefully some cereal grains as I'm I'm just what I'm looking for cereal might mean Iron Age so this is important the field walkers are now sorting out what they've found and some slightly burnt flint well - they've got quite a lot of flint which is pre Bronze Age and even Roman stuff so we have more evidence that this area was settled for a couple of thousand years but it isn't specific enough so we move on in the incident room Stuart has come up with a picture of the whole area across the last 4,000 years this is where we are working excavating and if you look at these black lines here these are a series of crop mark trackways and linear features if you look at tape that that's a scruffy mountain look those are those trackways marked here relation to thee to the area we've got and you look in the landscape the main field pattern is that way our crop marks going that way there are these other features on the map which you're also part of that they look odd don't they make they do that out of place you know in a north/south a set of alignment they've got an axis which is like that so what does that mean well what it means if you go to the next slide here if you look at where the medieval and Saxon settlements are 'i'm Kemet in' over Barry can you see they're on this same line and this to me I mean this is really exciting far more fun than digging holes exactly we've got in the present landscape the layout of the villages is in effect a replication of boundaries that were laid out 3,000 years or a continuity of course continuity me there's part of me that's thinking this is a great story very exciting but it's just a theory it might have about as much value as ley lines is that is there any indication in our archaeology that there might be any reality yeah I think there is because down at the the sewage farm area we can actually see the change in alignment from that previous alignment in the prehistoric period through to something that's more north-south in the Saxon medieval periods and in fact you know Stuart gets excited about his maps and so on but the key piece of evidence came from that hole with that Saxon Hut in the bottom of it so you have to have the archaeologists will to back up all the interesting ideas about the landscape this is all part of a picture of human activity here over many centuries that we're now building up but entrenched to carrenza is getting specific results she's dug out a ditch which amazingly cuts the post hole she found this means that the post hole was there before the ditch was dug inside the ditch there's a piece of pot what we really wanted to because his date the ditch because that will help us date the post he'll all the other bits that trench seem to be coming with Romans pottery but the pottery up here is much rougher I don't know whether it's Saxon or Iron Age would you be able to give an opinion from that it's a nice we ensured that well I think from from this rim form it is actually a classic piece of Iron Age Potter really yeah really yeah Wow so that's that's really really interesting it's because if that ditch is cutting that post on the ditches Iron Age and it's possible that these post holes could be might be Bronze Age we may actually have something Bronze Age in our sites this post hole may be part of a Bronze Age house we widen the trench even further make what have you done this looks like for the song well it's the big trench we talked about but this is actually only half the area that we talked about but we thought we'd start with this to see what we've got and how easy it was to dig I suppose I'm being a bit cautious about it because it's a lot of commitment to time and people and if we can get the answers out of this here which it looks ok at the moment then we'll publish stick with this but we could we could double the size of it although this is only half the area we planned this trench goes over quite a few features at this end of the trench is where the the curvy features the curvy ditches okay other words that showed on the on the photograph we've got them coming in here look now you're getting into your trench no no rather you did what do you show me where cuz I can't see okay okay I will and that I will show you this you can see is dirt brown dirt or a blender first up and then look at this here this yellowy orange gravel that's the natural and you've got the orange ain't nobody here or there again on that side yeah and then as you come back here you go from orangey natural back into another ditch you can see the ditch now can you yeah again dark soil back we come up the other side orangey gravel now down we go again into the big square enclosure ditch that we got on the photograph which shows on a GF is it is massive it ah we're getting pottery out of it middle iron age at the top of it we've got an enormous complex of pits there's a beauty over there look to see it that's a rubbish pick but postholes so is that likely to be a building well it's one post of a building presumably yeah or a fence or whatever I mean if we can get a pattern of them and demonstrate what's happening well I mean you don't put buildings up where you put rubbish pits no she probably got sodas over here a building to enjoy and the rubbish pit sir so this is our best evidence yet for a settlement the houses would have been in here outside along the ditch the people who lived here kept their rubbish in pits from the pottery it looks like it's iron age this trench is now as big as we need so we simply decide to continue digging inside it sorry so you're going to help us make a Bronze Age absolutely them yes an odd actually their core but if they they don't turn the soil over they just you know go through the ground and ticularly top of it okay that's right I think we want something we're being helped out this week by these local schoolchildren we're going to try to make one of these a Bronze Age plow or odds if it makes something like that we think we can get either a cow or a ball to pull it for us there aren't many animals are know how to do this now because you know we use tractors such a lot you ready okay off you go let's go jolly good their first job is to find a suitable piece of wood so you all know what we're looking for tree that so well it will start from the bottoms are probably curving and then we want a nice curve to it okay so spread out let's find a tree shall we now once we've got the right tree for Simon here as to chop it down while the others hunt for materials suitable for binding the pieces of the plough together meanwhile geophysics are looking at a new area they're examining this small circle in the field next to our main site it looks odd just set off to one side like this so we'll run their equipment across it to see if it throws anything up it's all getting cleaned up there so the ditches are showing up a lot better this is the main one okay they're getting the edge of that quite clear now and all these features that people are looking at down here look at the half section through the various pits is all the occupation here inside that are you pretty sure that that means that there was a settlement inside it yeah I think all this evidence here that's producing you know animal bone which is in effect the remains of you know meat meals that people have yo chopped the bones up and so on plus the domestic pottery that's all broken shows that we're in some sort of settlement living area and the various post holes and pits are what you'd expect from the buildings and the various domestic processes that are going on there this is looking more and more like a large settlement and at the moment it's also looking very Iron Age what do you think of Mick's opencast mine boy it's been a cracking two days and I really think to be able to understand a side like this you do need to excavate in a large scale it's so much of our work today is is on a small scale tied to developments and and it's really great to be able to take it on a gravel size with crop marks you know you need a big area to understand what all the features mean don't you that's right it's not just thing that the features that enclose the god with poachers all right two pints of bitter totai trivia yeah Louise all you got is Jimmy won't show us to the Imagi beer no quite realizing this in fact I think you'll dance for two well I came on what we've been doing is so this is the main crop mark enclosure that we've been looking at we've been concentrating on a field to the west a small crop mark enclosure as I said this is where June ah look at that oh so it's really nice this is about a 20 meter square a really strong and cross anomaly nice entrance and as soon as it pits inside ignore this this is just a water pipe and and this is the earlier where we had fines from the the field walking so we're quite possibly looking at the previously unknown Bronze Age site in this area so your first look at that what do you think it might be I thought is a little by an aged farmstead or something I've absolutely no sure all Bronze Age in fact yeah but I mean obviously tomorrow what we should do is put a trench probably across the enzymes are submitted to see what de-tangle we've dug up half of worcestershire already yeah but we really got we've been going through the list of what we've got and what we've got to do and what labor we've got and we think we could we could tackle another one that will be good let's go for yeah well we'll be can sort out exactly where and how big and all rusted it can't we dawn day three and there's drama Francis Pryor has seen the geophysics results and can't wait he's up early and raring to go while the rest of us are still struggling out of bed by the time Phil catches up he's well on with it she's still too early for me you were such a grouch in the fall oh yeah Francis is nearly dark it was lovely firstly no have you got oh we got loads of stuff here we've got term Bullock have a look at it we got this enclosure here lit and there we have the end of the ditch it sort of got wider it's a sort of pit and just to the right where Phil's digging you see that gray patch and that's it that's any indication of date so far we've got some very soft pottery right I don't drop it that's real Graz stuff in it well yeah I mean you anything so I have an IQ now if it's gratin does that tend to mean that it's Iron Age or just rather man well badly made a lot of it's all grata at that yeah three historic period so that I think that's pretty on diagnostic at the moment yeah I I wouldn't like to say exactly no so we've got to get a bit more it's not Rome here I'll say that for a fact there's no Genoa just have to get on with them you don't mind what would you all minds okay all right then 11 Buffy Mick and I head across the trench one this trench is turning out to be a little gold mine at last the finds there are giving us some dating evidence and it's Iron Age it's actually getting really interesting now we've got this great collection of material after this one little hole and this is really a good cross-section of Iron Age life isn't it Malcolm now what it is I mean we're rustling I'm actually standing in the the fill of a whole series of gullies that are outside the main enclosure and here we've got a good assemblage of normal everyday domestic rubbish you would believe that looking at it now would you what can you see here on for instance we've got a couple of pieces of Iron Age pottery and they can see here they the light staining that's limescale so I've got an Iron Age pot where people have been boiling liquid are they that's fantastic but we've got animal bone from from the food that they were eating got larger chunks of pottery from from large storage vessels was this manky old brick looking some it's probably the an oven in a house and there's a bit here that looks as if you checked you got a a hole through maybe through the floor or something like that and then this stuff that you get a lot of that you wish to share this well this is this is called briquette aaggghhhh and these were large chunky vessels that were used to contain the brine and the the salt was evaporated out and then when you actually wanted to get at the salt you smashed open the container and that's right and that's why we find so many fragments and they're scattered over sneering I don't know the broken things here look this is a just a broken pebble but it's a potboiler again you know you haven't got an electric kettle so you put your water on your fire in a pot and you keep dropping hot stones into it gradually heats up heats up very very quickly because eventually the pebbles break up so you've got little microcosm really of a sort of Iron Age kitchen here you know I think that's really nice there you know you can see the stuff on the five got the oven you got the the animal bones of what they're eating what sort coming in you've got the water being boiled you've got stains on the pot and you've got the pop boilers where they're trying to eat the water so it might look like a scruffy little ditch but you know it's a little bit of Iron Age life back in the incident room our environmentalists are also coming up with results David has analyzed his phosphate readings these samples show that both humans and animals lived here but more importantly they suggest that they didn't really venture outside the limits of this large enclosure ditch so was this a farm meanwhile liz has looked into the grains she found the people who lived here were growing a form of wheat called Emma this might suggest they were Bronze Age Mick is itching to get his hands on the plow so will it fly yet um well not with your weight no it looks see if it'll go together though almost well it will go together there's just a bit more work to do to it can we try putting it together yep it's just the guys in which way up as you go that goes like that way around but at the back right that's it should do it man that's at it right oh no that's it so that actually rubs on the ground yeah goes along and want to try it out yeah go on it oh that's it oh look at that what happen I think it was pegged together it's up there's no way I woulda stand yeah and especially if it was in so rather than grass yes that's cracking and it just working isn't there yeah please really I think we need to be after all to the angle of the share as well don't worry yes well once we put some wedges in yeah change that now we just have to make the bindings to hold the plow together and we'll be ready to go that's a job for this eager Bunch back at Phil's new trench he's come across a rather large stone three-day core well still can't be sure that it's gonna what where it is smooth you see it's a beautiful curl definitely looks like a saddle burn hey saddle Quinn well that's what wife say I mean it I'd like to see I'd like to see it washed yeah yeah wait we've got some water there get your swilling off yeah go on which is an order is nice and smooth yeah it's got it isn't it look at that makes all the difference dinner they got us move as a baby's be on that agenda look at that okay we look really looking at Iron Age but you know the Iron Age going on for several hundred years lien be a nice and that may be a little bit more precise than that yeah we could suggest it's probably say about 5th century fruit of that second century BC there then there there speaks a local expert are you done yeah carrenza you found that house yet yes yep a trench has grown a lot since yesterday well we had to do that to find the house yeah where are we then you're on the middle of it Oh Oh your shows with the air it is coming here presumably over that corner that's just yes well you remember we had yesterday when you were here we had one post oh yeah yeah we have that conversation at post hills well in fact it doesn't look as if the post hole is anything to do with a house we found the house we found it's actually marked by this shallow ditch here which starts off here and then goes right round here all the way around here and the trench straightens up a bit here carries on round then just right out but round here yeah right around here right round here then reappears in the trench yep I think it's too big for me to afford it and comes round finishes about here so you we are under we are about in the middle end yes you are the half if though I was in the middle would have been more or less exactly just behind you behind me yeah so that is a sizeable it's huge ten meters goes the ditch is actually the drip gully where the rain running off the eaves would have gone yeah what sort of date you reckon teasing well the pottery we've had coming out of that drip gully has been consistently late iron age that Morvan wear so we're very confident about the date that's a later age it's a big house where is this a standard size for house in those days always this a high-status house they are terrifically variable from little tiny things to huge great things 50 odd feet across under said this was get 90 average yeah yeah so we set Victor to work it does seem that we're tying this area down to the iron age so he sets about drawing an Iron Age house for us right so I don't have to pull it then no you don't we found some wonderful oxen to pull it yeah what are they they're long horn oxen English longhorn oxen I think of names yeah they're Reeves and Mortimer that's the ominous isn't it is this play actually what like one would have looked in the Iron Age yeah I forget closely puts me in mind of those ones from the Danish bulbs yeah no it's absolutely spot-on yeah I like it a lot yeah that's what we Michael do my pee was okay are you ready absolutely pushing hard and one two three work on them boys oh yes yes yeah yeah needs a bit more weight on it doesn't it all welcome you have a girl oh if you ever go that I can see it needs to be done sticking a bit of goat there are cool core multimap oh yes that's better than it come on Mortimer taking a few of those baby turnips up Terry let's have a go guy you've got to kick it up in the air like this pushing forward yeah I look at that look straight back into the iron age it's not hugely strenuous is it no it's not too bad okay keeping it straight isn't it right all right push really huh come on board out it it's not my fault it's picking boom Francis you only go yeah lovely I love the sting but yeah oh look at the ass Allah proper fanfare oh yeah Getty want to do decent are you gotta push it well yes you do you honestly fact yeah yeah oh god stop I'm dropping very good very good look thank you for inviting us into your home it's lovely to see you what do you think of it I love this place the most important thing in the Iron Age just like today life revolved and in a roundhouse it does revolve around a central fire it enrolls around your stomach right so in the middle is the fire that keeps you warm but it also cooks your food the smoke goes up and out through the roof no chimney you'll notice if you had a chimney the fire would go limp like that and the whole house will burn down has happened in experiments unfortunate ones the thing about this house is that it looks out into the farm right this front door is very carefully placed you sit here you can look out and there you see the sheet and the cattle they're out in the farmyard and they're right on our line of sight so if you sit here you're sitting with your back to the fire you're looking out you're keeping an eye on your livestock you can see your kids playing out in the yard this is very carefully thought out this doorway doesn't put any other way the other thing about this doorway is it faces out onto more than hills and the Setting Sun and as the Sun Goes Down you say goodnight dear justice was there with you there with you all the time our site is now taking some shape we have a trackway which may have started in the Bronze Age we know it was still there in Saxon times in our main field we know that there was an Iron Age house here probably a farm next to it there was a larger settlement we can date it to the Iron Age but can we take it back any earlier back at trench one Malcolm has managed to move things on a stage further Oh crikey look at that well I know what that is I mean that's a nice flint scraper but what's this well that's a piece of beaker pottery get it so that goes back to 2000 BC you're gonna recognize that at all so this is the earliest pottery we've had from the site krykus into something early Bronze Age on the site I mean but that's right and then we've got a gap of about 1,500 years before we go on to the answer to the Iron Age site this piece of pot shows us that there were people on this site in the very early Bronze Age around 2000 BC but the finds suggest that this area is predominantly Iron Age probably under the protection of the nearby hill fort and in the field next door we can take the story a stage further asthma can I discover as we head across the Phils trench which casts new light on the social complexity of this site three days ago we said we try and find out whether these fields were associated with the Bronze Age settlement over there yeah or the Iron Age Hill site over there yeah so which is it well it's both isn't it a lot more than that because we've not only got Bronze Age stuff we've now got Iron Age stuff we've got Roman stuff we've got sex and stuff and of course a bit in the last couple of hours you found this early Bronze Age stuff which takes us back to back 2000 BC about 4000 years ago so I think what we're actually looking at is one community that's moved around the landscape on different settlements and farming the countryside around which is a fantastic story Phil how about over here what if we got our we've got a border de Tony I mean you remember this wonderful geophysics plot that we add of the enclosure well this morning we put in a trench across the terminus now incredibly in this terminus we've had an incredible amount of domestic refuse people throwing their rubbish into the ditch I mean look they're obviously eating off the fat of the land um cut marks beautifully cut marks on the bone look what they're eatin ears that they're grind in their own corn that nice and slow you know here we've got incredibly high state is imported pottery but they are Franzi the grip in this like it's a star of the show a little scrap of metal it went round the outside of a shield and shields don't grow on trees yeah you have pots in your houses if you're very very Witt rich and swanky you're one of the top men and what do you have you have a shield it's a symbol of status and power and here's their house this is where they are on the outside of the village looking in to rich and powerful to be living with the that's not ordinary pannier that's like a lot of other sites is anywhere I want on Dartmoor for example Kester we've got a similar sort of arrangement there so good three days Wow yeah it's funny all these little fines give you an inkling of what life must have been like in the Iron Age but the thing I remember most was hurtling around that field with those two oxen and that plow it was at that moment that I really began to understand a little bit of what it must have been like to be an Iron Age farmer you

Channel: Reijer Zaaijer

Views: 331,313

Rating: 4.8484693 out of 5

Keywords: time, team, full, episodes, season

Id: 6sPkd2uNrDI

Length: 46min 59sec (2819 seconds)

Published: Sun May 19 2013