Time Team S08-E03 Llygadwy, Wales

welcome to a secluded Valley somewhere in deepest Wales time team have come here to solve an amazing mystery I'm walking down what may have been a medieval or even a Roman trackway but plunked right in the middle of it is this megalithic standing stones 3000 years older than the track over here are the remains of a Neolithic tomb and up there a possible Norman watchtower this may look like an old cowshed but there are early Christian symbols carved on the stonework could it be a chapel of some sort but this is the most amazing thing it's a natural spring might not look much at first gloves but in it the landowner has found hundreds of Roman coins and bits of medieval jewelry and blades and buckles and statues and these this weird collection of carved stone heads what on earth's going on here why of all these fragments of history and pieces of archaeology turned up at the same place time team have got just three days to find out come on we were alerted to this site by a neighbor of the landowner who was intrigued by what he'd seen the landowner agreed to invite us to investigate the gap we has been described by some archaeologists as a historical theme park even suggesting that the place may be an elaborate hoax as a consequence no local archaeologists wanted to take part in our program time team decided to subject the Gateway to the most rigorous archeological scrutiny inviting some of Britain's top experts to what amounts to a forensic investigation of the site first we examined the finds collected by the landowner - all of these came from the spring yes an incredible collection of stuff and it what are we God well we've got everything apparently from Bronze Age acts at this end we've got a lot of Roman coins what looks like a nice little Roman figurine here that's nice we've got a lot of brooches which I think a roman lot of buckles and a lot of lighter coins as well we've got medieval coins and we go right through to the 18th and 19th century so what can we say about all this look well the problem is that they're not in any sort of archaeological context 7 come out of a proper archaeological site on the other hand it's the sort of stuff that people might have thrown into a spring but from our purposes does it mean that it's all useless no I don't think so I think what we actually do is we need to have the hot the whole lot looked at to see what sort of chronology we're dealing with so you're going to start on that now I'm going to take it up in serum I got some experts do that for 30 the fine seem to indicate that this site is centered around what could be a holy spring a very ancient place that could date from as far back as the Iron Age these ancient Springs are extremely rare and only a handful have ever been excavated in Britain so given the finds we've heard from here what do you think would have been going on at sites like this sacred sites of his websites or crucially important people but it was the window into the world of the past the world of the ancestors it was how the world in which we live communicated to the next one I think there is this emphasis on personal items the idea of unhooking approach from your cloak and throwing it in with a priority incantation I think that was really quite important and the other thing that you often get is these personal items would be you ritually smashed first of all the things you offered up to these wells what were valuable I mean equivalent today of Land Rovers Range Rovers I mean swords spears daggers and a lot of personal ornaments as well the water would actually have been sacred itself and the whole thing be incredibly holy incredibly sacred with the spring carefully recorded and photographed giasses take the opportunity to conduct a thorough survey you're going even with an electric pump it's going to take some time to drain the water out of the spring because the fines are already out of the ground and out of context we need to pinpoint exactly where they were found the landowner bill samuel has a last-minute change of heart and declines to be interviewed but nominates his son-in-law Crichton to be his spokesperson when did you first start finding things associated with the spring well basically when we more or less started the house because we needed storm immediately and as he was taking the wall down bits of things just keep falling apart and that was five years ago and that was five years yeah and what all the fines in the spring or were they around it or spread much further some of the fines was in the dake a couple of bits pieces in the wall some the other side but basically more or less or on the deck area uh-huh only a few meters from the spring the Dyke area is now a stilted up drainage gully but with the aid of another water pump and a team of mud larks we can begin to clean it out and see if any artifacts remain did all the monuments look pretty similar then to how they look now as well like the neolithic tomb for instance no no only that some of the storms was cut obviously collapsed we've just picked them back up as we thought in the original position some of the ones you've put up yes but not all of them not all of them we now know that the area has been extensively landscapes but this shouldn't stop us proving whether the neolithic tomb is real or not filth Tony how do you know that there's apparently random collection of stones was a Neolithic - we don't know that it is a Neolithic tomb that is the major challenge we have to actually make sure that we find out definitely which way it is - all intensive purposes everybody looks at it says it looks like a Neolithic tomb we have a corridor of stones with a chamber that's this that's the corridor of stone this is the corridor passageway leading up to an end chamber and that would have been slotted into the side of a big mound are you happy that it's Neolithic I find it slightly puzzling um it looks right it looks okay but the fact that a monument this big is seemingly gone unrecorded I find slightly puzzling in the ten miles around shag add way there appears to be no shortage of bonafide ancient monuments duly excavated and recorded on the sites and monuments record this one's noticeable by its absence how do we prove that it's neither thing well first of all the easiest way is to dig a hole in it what we must do is to actually try and an excavate some of the stone holes so that we can actually see if there's any dateable material actually in the stone hole either Neolithic or recent the other thing we're desperate to do is get geophysics to see if there's any outside ditches or quarry's it's just possible if we go on under the nettles where the mound might be surviving we might see a bit more but there's not really a lot from the geophysics point of view I don't think but you're prepared to dig anyway so guys we don't need you physics results what we do not need geophysics results where are you going to do what we're going to do is we're going to go through here we're going to see if we can locate the stone hole that that stone is sitting in we'll see if we can get another stone holier obviously like I said we've got to make sure these things don't fall over and and we'll also see whether we can find some more stone holes in here the main thing is to try and get some date in evidence come on judge wood field is going to be concentrating only on the stones that Crichton says have never been moved or reacted there we are then chaps primary that's all the stuff right not the farmers band yeah I want you to get cracking on this I'm particularly interested in the date to the material and then when you've sorted out the dates whether it's what you'd expect from either a spring or a site of a particular date I've come back in about three hours LOL it will meet it will need it yes sir see you then decision that mom mmm not my period no no Wilder the electric pump seems to be keeping the water level down making it easier to clean the bottom of the spring which seems to be composed of a clay layer filled with large stones but as yet no fines so Carranza and Miranda decide to examine one of the springs more gruesome artifacts and there's been a lot a lot of strange things found here but this seems to be one of the oddest so that is very strange yes yes do you think it is well at first glance it looks like a head pillar and that it would be something which would one would expect to find in southern France later on aged say 3rd 2nd century BC attached to a temple which was involved in a kind of head cult how would it have worked well the Celtic goals in that area had a custom of fighting their enemies a lot and collecting the heads of their dead enemies and then bringing them back to their sanctuaries and placing the skull in a niche very similar to that this pillar would be standing upright as part of the sanctuary the skull would be some greeting at you and then sometimes associated but more often on other stones you get these carvings of heads the interesting thing about that one is that it's without a mouth and is that because their lower jaw is missing and you've only got the top of the skull no I think it's meant to represent somebody that's dead the idea that if you can't speak you are Tory intents and purposes dead but why do you think it's here well that's the big question it's a big worry it is totally different from anything else in Britain the fact that it's here is extremely odd and I do worry over about it John's worried as well he's now completed a comprehensive geophys survey of the spring and the tomb and found absolutely no evidence of any structure anywhere so maybe Phil was right that he doesn't need GF is to start work Jodie yeah what I just found Oh oh wow how about your hands off it it is so this is great great for isn't it you ain't gorgeous it's lovely I think I'll probably clip the end of it with the where is not sure that pot it's not it is it is port things looking up good god what you gotta fill if you'll never believe this Tony I was just going to pick this turf up to bang it in the barrel and what do I find beautiful little flinch scraper and this would be Bronze Age destination Canyon well I mean you could have summit like that easily in the Neolithic couldn't ya no problem and then like look the next turret for long and what happens prehistoric pot now I don't understand this what do you think process well it wasn't made yesterday was it um I thought I said that was prehistoric it's quite soft it just goes to show you shouldn't make up your mind before you've got all the evidence Phil Jodie and Francis were pretty convinced the tomb was a fake but now they've got seemingly in-situ archaeology to prove themselves wrong that could have been an ancient site here and that's how the Flint and the pot got here but it doesn't mean that those stones are ancient so are you saying that these could just be scatter or something that was dropped later if there was a prehistoric site here I mean just a settlement maybe someone stopped to have breakfast and did a bit of mapping and then later they came and put that stone thing up oh you see what I mean oh yeah yeah we got to be a bit careful but oh god I'm just I'm still being very cautious how can we really ascertain whether or not those fines are anything to do with this the crucial thing is if there's anything like this in the hole that was dug data saying that that's exactly what we do that's exactly that's exactly it that's what we said when we set out with the range so that's just about getting down low into the stone hole itself you've got to get into that another thought there's a good chance if you've got this sort of stuff knocking around on the surface it's a good chance we learned a lot then yeah back at the spring it's all getting very messy yeah play brother oh my goodness part of a Roman broken look at it please enamel enamel still early and rad grievant grinning red that's really quite rare it's expensive it would have been somebody's really value possession again it snapped so they would know can a lot of it thrown the rest of it into the water that is amazing it's in beautiful condition it's in the her condition and it probably would have been possibly the most valuable possession this person actually honey yeah yeah I'm now is the first yeah I'll find we have found yet we know congratulations that is brilliant that is absolutely wonderful what does that make you feel about the site now do you feel a bit more I feel a bit happy about it I must say I feel not happy now we've known salutely that we've got something yes absolutely yeah you cannot quarrel with that at all right time's up chaps really got going nicely very nice with this sorting material out into different periods yeah it is fantastic isn't it I mean there are more finds here than we might expect in a whole series of respective that's right we've got a figure of the god Hercules here and what looks like a goddesses head and these little animals here may be associate of gods so it looks like their ritual objects and we've certainly got all these brooches and if you look at them you can see they're all broken so if you've got all these is it reasonably fair to conclude that we're likely to have a Roman ritual spring not yet not yet it doesn't it's not doesn't contradict the picture but there is you know we're not totally settled buddy and what about all these coins here they're a good selection of coins from virtually any site from Roman Britain but they're not really happy about being a spring what do you mean they're not happy in being a spring well if you compared it with contine as well on Hadrian's Wall or the sacred spring at Bath then you'd have almost all the coins piled up there in the first and second century where we've hardly got anywhere we've hardly got any tongues in this law he then sloan hand the big wells trail off whereas we get started somewhere around 300 which is a bit of an odd time for a sacred pagan spring to get started just when sacred things are going a bit yeah so what do you think these might indicate well they're much more like the typical site finds from a villa from a settlement from a town that sort of things so might there be a Roma settlement round here it's likely the coins come from a Roman settlement but I can't tell you where that is curiouser and curiouser what about all these coins well these were struck in 1797 for George the third in the new steam presses which just been introduced to dish off Industrial Revolution very heavy penny pieces so was something happening here during the 19th century about which we don't yet know as a possibility it does look as if there's a big peak of activity and interest in our site around the early years of the 19th century of passivism hmm so what should we do tomorrow well it seems to me we've got to look for a Roman settlement and you know we need to get the Jew if his people onto that and talk to Stuart about it but we equally we need to talk to Robin on these stories about what was going on around here during that peak in the 19th century it's an amazing collection it's it's wonderful not only just begun keep going it's almost the end of day one and it's time to see if Phil and Francis have confirmed the Neolithic tomb was genuine Francis and you said to me that if you manage to get under these stones yeah you might be able to work out whether or not it's a Neolithic - so is it no absolutely a hundred percent not happy new be so sure there's no doubt at all we dug down and you can see this one here you can get your gadget roundly in your hand underneath it it's incredibly shallow I mean it I could push it over now with no effort and if I had been standing here for 6,000 years there's no way it would still be upright with foundations that deep not only that Tony we've she got some date in evidence it's very much yeah you remember when we said the crucial thing was actually being able to date the pitch that the stones were in yes you just see here this very stony material that is the actual filling of the pit that that stone is sitting in and look what we found in it that's not Neolithic as a new China and a piece of drain that is actually in here and so what we think happened is that that stone has been put up this has been thrown in afterwards that stone has got to be dated by this material and I mean what we're working oh I reckon printer years many years these files may be modern but these ones which we got up from here this morning are Neolithic Neolithic people could have been living here they could have been making pots making stone tools and actually live in here we're not disputing that but the the site itself the structure which looks Neolithic we can now show it not to be so we've achieved our goal but are you bit disappointed yeah it's great as it was it we've stopped a load of rubbish getting into the record you know archaeology has actually worked out how old yeah I mean it is a total thought process you know we set ourselves goals and each time we ticked them off so it seems we were right to be dubious about the tomb and we can now eliminate it from our sitemap but one of the spring we found a couple of coins and a roman brooch not enough hard evidence yet to prove that this is a real ancient site so I wonder which way things will go tomorrow it's the beginning of day 2 in our quest to find out if we're on the site of an ancient holy spring Roman artifacts are still coming out of the mud but they're not enough to convince our experts especially since yesterday when we proved archaeologically that the Neolithic tomb was probably only 20 years old today we're going to investigate a supposed Normand tower while GF is search for a possible Roman settlement now I'm going to try and find out why we've got so many 19th century coins we've got all these coins from the early 19th century short and around that period which seemed to imply that something special was going on around them have you any idea what that might be well we turned up the Reverend Thomas price an incredibly well-known bardic authority you know he was into the revival of Druidism and he came here to come D the parish in which was was situated as the Vicar of it in 1825 now he's not only into the revival of Druidism and Bardo Latorre if you like but also he's good at woodworking and stone working having looked into his his biography we find here in this picture he erect in his vicarage garden from stones that he's gathered from local quarries a prehistoric Cromley and a standing stone and you wonder you just wonder with with this creative antiquarian impulse whether having become acquainted with this site he doesn't decide to augment it with additions of his own to add icing to the cake we've got a wonderful portrait of him at the height of his powers so is there the possibility that everything that we've seen and everything that we've turned up down to this guy there's the possibility that he imported stones and built structures he was a great collector of Antiquities and he traveled widely in Europe when he must have picked up four kinds of artifacts so he could have created our antiquities on this site and he could also have popularized the site to a degree among the locals he could even have salted our spring with the coins that have been found with no more fines coming out of the mud at the bottom of the spring it's decided to start a trench in the boggy ground beside the supposed chapel and skull pillar another trench has been started to investigate what is known locally as a Norman Tower Varna Liz she's supposed to be a Norman Tower so what have you got so far well nothing Norman so far rise we've taken a little slot in here this will suck a floor that it is yeah a flagstone floor yeah and it's just coming off to reveal perhaps another flagstone flouride so I've got a bit of a sequence yeah how does that relate to the wall well I'm not quite sure yet about this earlier one the later one butted up against it so that's all right right but there's a few funny things about the whole building really looks very hard doesn't it you see one of the core balls there this this thing here yeah yeah that's what I'm supporting stones that runs through the wall but it's supposed to be the other way out upside down yeah yeah yeah so that's one thing and then there's the fireplace yeah there's no sign of any reddening or fire damage or anything so a fireplace that's never been used we got the building shap coming later today so you know he can have a look at it and tell us what he thinks yeah I mean I think in the meantime you just carry on and hopefully get some Achmed evil or Norman yeah but John's still looking for Roman or is he I think he may have given up in the spring trench extension Jody start to uncover what looks like another Roman pin it's a pin first water it looks like it's coming out to be a spoon yeah that's right perhaps you should call someone over yeah carrenza yeah you got something yeah it's a sword it's coming straight back that's it that's the handle of it well I know my god Oh what is it oh yes carry on come on have a look but good look what is it it's a sword you're kidding me not a sword in time dream before it looks as if this is the scabbard that's part of the scabbard decoration and that might be actually part of the sword blade ur Kryten held a on camera has this piece of land being disturbed since you were here not to my knowledge though no one's found anything like this before no this sword I think is sort of end of the Iron Age it's a Latin type what does that mean it's been named after a site in Switzerland which was on a lake and where dozens of swords were thrown into shallow water amongst posts so you would throw this in as part of a ritual oh yes absolutely and I'm at lap n they was very often thrown in with their scabbard still on how many are known from England well from behind like that oh Lord gosh a handle or two how many of you seen in Wales three or four at the most and the thing about that is it's so fancy that it may well have been made specially for offering they never have been used it could have been made specially for the gods and that makes it really exciting you'd look less excited than the others I'm really excited about it as an object but I'm really worried about the content yes what do you mean by that well we I mean we've been digging here this morning and we're what 10 10 centimeters below the turf and it's been it's a wet it's churned yeah so what's the significance of that well I'd be very surprised if he got there other than fairly recently so I think I think we might be looking at something at an antiquarian Rock to a poutine but surely I mean the fact that it's got the scabbard with it the fact that the handles still have handles incredibly delicate I mean if you live less than 10 meters below boil go you say it's all that it's surprised here but the fact that it is here this is unstressed off' eyed that's in our trench we are as far as we're concerned in terms of layers this is still the topsoil and there have been absolutely no other finds at all up here which is very strange and we've had very very few times that I've seen of the later nage absolutely and when you have laid on edge site yeah you have find coming out of your ears that everywhere I mean the Latin swords are at lat n I mean it's a deep little wave oh yes we don't know that we're not going to find any more we've only just done this little villa shortly but all all the fines from the site so far have been Roman surely at the moment it's far too early to understand why this is here and how long it's been here but in any way it surely is incredibly important behind know what yes yes yes as an object not a real option I think we're where any of us are worried about that as an object is very very important but it would be even more important if it was in a very early context but I think Jen and I are very very skeptical about authorities okay you're what do we do next well we've got to look round it get the whole thing and more important the conservators gotta get it out and look at it we need have much better idea yeah sort of the content we all where it is we've got no idea a little weak we came to this site because there's loads of fines from it and no context right that's why we came here and so we find object with finding objects all over the place that's important but it's the context that's absolutely critical to understanding this side so we extend yeah we worked very carefully really we found the conservator here happy absolutely so is it sorted then yeah I guess sorted huh so if we got any evidence for a Norman building no I'm afraid not my uncle Norman perhaps but we got some good stratigraphic evidence for it being 19th century 1919 so right um we've got this wall yeah and we took the floor off yeah underneath the floor there was this a make up of soil and these stones and they go right underneath the wall you can see that my underneath yeah underneath those Elise is something like a kilo marmalade jar or something you see right here yeah you don't get much better stratigraphic over those so you've got some dumbing that what's that gonna be like nineteen seen something like that if we've got that there will what does that say about what's going on up here that first glance it all looks very plausible in that somebody's obviously you know looked at the local architecture and followed it pretty closely yeah but once you start to actually examine it you can see that the jam stones actually are late 16th early 17th yeah right the giveaway really is this very grand fireplace and you know total expense for stone windows and the original eaves level is actually below the level of the joist sockets oh that's that's that ragged line coming down I'm the joy sockets are the black holes we can subscribe then yes you knew yeah so the eaves are actually about a foot below the floor which is not a way you build a house if you actually put the breasts on a stone back on top of the fireplace yeah 16th century though it is and follow the line of the eaves up to an apex you actually end up with about 7 foot Headroom with this huge fireplace and these windows really crammed into the side of it the building doesn't work as a building does it no no it doesn't look at some sort of folly or it looks very much like that as evidence of three different types of mortar used one of which is distinctly 19th century and it's owned in the core of the wall as well yeah it's actually got cold coal and iron slag in it which must have been there now so just in that revolution area in this area yes it is all seems fairly clear Stewart has had two days to interpret the map evidence and confirms what we already suspect in 1844 to decide the earliest data mapping we've got correct it shows a fairly ordinary farm complex down here the present house is just there Rob oh this is the house the farmhouse and this is the the farmyard down here right in 1886 1904 period the story moves on very different the tower has appeared here so that has appeared between 1844 and 1886 positioned in plain view of the farmhouse the folly was just another aspect of the Victorian passion two antiquarian eyes the sight can you tell us how far this is going that the actual saw blade well if he doesn't sweep there the removal of the fragile sword from the mud is a slow and laborious business hampered by a length of barbed wire that seems to be very close to the blade I'm a bit worried about this dog water it seems to be heading in the direction yeah go on no he can go over the top now it's got it gotta go it does this is a devastating discovery Mick and Jenny were right to be worried about the context of the sword how could an Iron Age sword be resting on barbed wire there's only one solution that the sword has come from another site and been put in the ground at the same time or after the barbed wire you wanted context and you've got you can do better you can do you can do better than that that's the stone away yeah and that barbed wire is definitely going under the sword into that house so [ __ ] is resting on both the barbed wire and the pose yet can we take a sample about barbed wire I think we sure that'll fine what I'd like to do is compare it with it this is modern barbed wire it's galvanized got Swiss pattern the barbs it is very similar the diagnostic in terms of datings if I take a sample and compare you an expert on par time I knew it we can't we just let it we can't we can't slide Lennie thing underneath with that stone in the way it can't slide anything underneath with the poster and their way I think you're going to have to support it it's resting on the stone there despite knowing that the sword hasn't been in the ground very long it's still a valuable piece of archaeology and has to be treated as such so the priority is to carefully lift it and get it to a conservator who can stabilize it and prevent it from deteriorating further Jenni okay I'm up listened yep spot-on game set match and you see that Tony look there is a piece of wood with our warrior attached to it and that's where the sword was slap-bang on the top of it that sword was lying on that post and that y is attached ooh you're going to drag the post underneath the sword without breaking it's very delicate you can see how thin the handle is it's the end of day two and the mystery is deeper just when we were all coming to the conclusion that the Reverend price may have been responsible for much of the archaeology around here we find an Iron Age sword lying on barbed wire who put it there and why tomorrow it looks like I'm going to have to ask some tough questions yesterday evening we found Ian's stead Britain's leading authority on swords and scabbards and today a Sunday he's traveled 400 miles by rail to tell us about this latents Ord if it is a lot n sword well it is a lot n sword yes I can say not at any rate and I've seen that bit sticking out so how can you be so sure yeah the shape of the Hilton there that that part there and actually belongs to the handle it's the end of the handle yeah that this blade as well the the profile of the blade which is is very distinctive but but also very rare are you happy that it's not a very craftily wrought replica no it's not a wrap of your night can you give us some kind of date for it somewhere between 150 250 BC something like that it wasn't made in Britain really why'd you say that okay at this time we were using bronze rather than iron scabbards I mean this this could have come from Latin itself only it's a Switzerland is this miss one so are you saying that it would have been manufactured at lot n and brought here by someone in the Iron Age or could it be one of the finds from not n which has got over here much later your guess is as good as mine I mean it was it well I'm I would think it's not being manufactured in Britain as any race when it came over is anybody's guess that is unusual yes I me not yes not it isn't the sort of thing in that you would expect to find here you know sort of south-central Wales no no Brian now we can see what alle ten sword will look like when it's fully restored worn by an ancient warrior hanging on his belt attached by what is known as a baldric and over two thousand years ago cast into a Swiss lake as part of the long-forgotten ritual but how did it get from Switzerland to South Wales and more importantly when this is a blow-up of the Magna photos of looking at Stuart meanwhile has turned up an aerial photograph from 1972 this is the hedge line yeah yeah that which was a derelict barn then is now the front of the house that's the tower there yeah so we've got all the reference points on there now the spring position would be would have been there this up it magnified and would change the contrast as well there's nothing it's nothing she went through guillotine sunlight so you yeah it would be clear when right what are the most telling points when you combine this with the maps yes that of a hundred years worth of detailed mapping in that farmyard none of these things have ever appeared in Springs a very important feature on maps so if there had been a spring there they lit have shown it that seems to me pretty conclusive you know stewards map evidence is confirmed by geophys who surveyed virtually every square inch of this site including the back garden and found no evidence of any archeology at all we still don't know who inscribed the early Christian symbols in the supposed Chapel so we open a small trench to see if we can find any evidence of a floor within minutes however they seem to have solved the chapel mystery instead of a floor they found layers of rotted animal dung and a drainage channel heading out of the building towards the spring so it looks like our chapel is in fact an animal house or stable but who drew the Christian symbols we'll never know but similar inscriptions in other parts of the country are often ascribed to the idol doodling zuv board but religious farm workers and who's responsible for these strange carved heads they could be subjected to microscopic analysis to try and find traces of ancient or modern chisel marks but this process is time-consuming and expensive and knowing that Reverend price was handy with his hands the probability is we'd be wasting our time and money shut up clean it really well isn't it it is in this much thicker than I expected it's really quite substantially sustained isn't it yes we've got no additional head stand here and we still got the hair down behind the recess have you managed to find an example of my idea well yes actually I have found from southern France from ultra more in the laron Valley this stone here which is a horizontal stone it was a lintel from a from a temple does that make you more confident this might be genuine then now you've found another example which has got the recess and the carving together well no actually the treatment of the nose is subtly different you've got the nose standing proud of the face no right yes the cheeks have been carved away either side and that's been left standing proud that's right what is if you look at that one the nose at all the different isn't it oh yes it's hollowed out in there and it's the sort of thing which you'd expect to find if somebody's copying from a drawing where it's quite difficult to see whether it's indented or not right because you can easily get confused by the direction of light coming absolutely right yes when do you think it might have been done my guess is probably sometime within the last couple of hundred years really why do you think that well it may be that it was part of the great druidic revival the 18th and 19th centuries in Wales it would be wonderful where it original it will be so exciting because it would be the only one from Britain the only one outside southern France but alas it is not to be so this is all the material that's been found around the spring that we've found that Bill's found this is everything that's absolutely yep how long could our 19th century cleric Thomas price have been the person who put all these finds around the spring in theory that's absolutely possible cuz with the exception of one or two modern coins all this material belongs to his time or before the problem is that he wouldn't have known how to build it up into the correct proportions that we would expect from large-scale excavation what do you mean like well nobody in the early 19th century would bother to dig up and collect this range of coins he also wouldn't have had the metal detectors to find it it's metal detectors that have produced this sort of coinage from some sites or the large-scale excavations of the 20th century that Richard's been involved on on other sites is there anything else about the finds that might indicate that they haven't been under the earth for a couple of thousand years what we've got here is a whole range of artifacts and awful lot of buckles again those are familiar finds from Welsh Springs but if you looked at color of many of the finds are quite different they look as if they've been in different soils here on the statuette you look very carefully you can see some writing on a swastika swastika is an ancient motif the trouble is it's been cut through the pattern er the green that's built up on the metal in the thousands of years since this was made so it can't possibly have been done in ancient times so some time after this had gone green someone has to market it and make it look as if there's ancient writing on it so someone sorted this spring with ancient Goods within living memory we went to the local agricultural wire surprise pig supply farmers around this area and asked him to look at this and give us a day that's the bit that came out of the trench that's the world that was underneath so yeah I took some samples from fences and so on roundabouts as well just to get some idea but the man at the suppliers said that's less than 20 years old less than 20 years old yeah yeah and I've actually found a match for it in the samples roundabout which is that piece there with the the weave and the spacing and the gauge yeah where's that from that's from just on the fence over there I'm sure that's where that sample came from all right it's just almost couple of meters from where the sword although it's still in the collin fencing so by Stewarts reckoning the wire on the fence can't be earlier than 1980 but as we clean up the area where the sword was found carrenza discovers that the offending length of barbed wire continues into the service trench a trench dug to supply power to the new house the barbed wire disappears underneath the service cables the last piece in our puzzle this is confirmatory evidence that the sword could only have been put in the ground at the same time or later than when the cables were laid sword was lying on top of the wire the wire goes underneath the service plate was right into the trench and the cables were laid in 1992 when the house was still to any room it's time for Crichton to hear the bad news from our investigations Crichton the sword is beautiful it is but there is a disappointment attached to it in fact there's a disappointment attached to two or three things on this site basically we can't tell you that this is either a prehistoric or a Roman sight but the biggest puzzle is the sword because directly underneath the sword was barbed wire which can't be more than 20 years old and the clear implication would be it was put there sometime after the barbed wire which is pretty contemporary it was laid down is there no way that the barbed wire could have gone under it or the sword washed down on it I don't think so because he's packed and with with Lottie done good and the wire goes right underneath it for quite a distance each way the clearly disbarred why was there in the mud when this sword went in on the top of it the conclusion that all our archaeologists have come to us that sometime in the last twenty years somebody has put a scatter of antique finds down have you any idea how that might have happened haven't got a clue just I'm going to do I have to ask you this have you or your father-in-law bought the sword device never do not and no they scattered the river really not then how do you reckon did it I haven't got a clue literally there's clearly been a long tradition of creative archaeology at figured we someone at some time must have planted the artifacts and done so with a motive perhaps they wanted to create a tourist attraction and exploit it perhaps they wanted to be able to launder artifacts plundered or illegally imported artifacts can be planted in supposedly legitimate sites when they're found again they can be sold with an apparently legitimate provenance it's a scam that's believed to be on the increase of ass this can only be speculation time teams analytical and forensic approach to this site must be hailed as a major success and a victory for archaeology struggling weekend absolutely fantastic and fines fantastic a sword in particular unbelievable bill said that he's going to donate that to the local news are that's fantastic in it I tell you what it's meant for me though its reinforces the importance of really a couple of boring archaeological concepts which the Stratego fee on sites and the context of the finds it readers not matter how valuable or attractive they are if they're not in the right context they can't tell us about the people living on that site and you know what I find really infuriating Mik all of these fines must have come from archaeological sites somewhere in Britain yeah yeah people aren't going to be able to interpret those sites properly because key bits of evidence are now missing fro they've been ripped out to the site of no so frustrating see those now they can tell us nothing over on civilization next we're getting into the spirit of things with the ghost hunters next on Discovery Channel though how an erst you turn for pickup into a nut gathering shaker find out after the break on Monster Garage

Channel: Reijer Zaaijer

Views: 324,116

Rating: 4.8996973 out of 5

Keywords: time, team, full, episodes, season

Id: RkP7Z8U9BEA

Length: 46min 15sec (2775 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/TheBurgerKftLettuce]

I can’t be bothered to watch the whole thing. Can someone tell me a paragraph long version of this?

[u/costococoa]

They still showed the episode and shamed the bugger that tried to stitch them up.

[u/BECKYISHERE]

well that was interesting, thanks for the link

[u/ac13332]

For those interested in the good bit, watch free 42mins on.

[u/Tegzay]

I love Tony Robinson especially in the series man down where he plays Daddy.