Time Team S10-E01 Raunds,.Northants

this is Patton Morris Jones and two years ago they were digging a huge hole to put in this fish pond when they got a bit of a shock they unearthed a human skull right here in their back garden in wrongs in Northamptonshire and the local archaeology unit were called in and they said that what they got was a Saxon burial but they advised them to Ribery it because the cost of full excavation would be so much but Pat you didn't want to ribéry the skull on its own did you she's a true Time Team fan and you said that you're determined to excavate the whole thing yourself and as you can see she made a really good job of it and then you reburied the whole skeleton right but Pat you want to know more about the skeleton don't you I do would you call him Henry you want to know who Henry is whether he was buried on his own or whether there are lots of other Saxons in your garden in other words have you got a Saxon cemetery and Pat and Morris have invited us in for just three days to find out so where's Henry now when pattered finished excavating all the bones she put them into a bag and reburied them in this hole here but they've gone m'q yeah well rather unusually for us we've had the chance to dig them up and work on them before we came here and weeds great opportunity to learn a lot more about the burial be able to tell you a lot more about him when we've analyzed the bones but this isn't actually where he was found is it it is that's where his feet were where was the head then pointing over to roots was to an angle so the orientation was something like that yes right how long does it take you to dig him up it took a week and as a reward for all that hard work you found these lovely finds which we're gonna have a look at later on but in addition and you are so lucky I've been doing time ting for 10 years now and I've never found a Saxon bowl as lovely as this but she's what you got what is it uh it's an accessory vessel it was put in the grave possibly as a container for food and drink to go to the next world of the deceased it's very difficult to date this stuff and I think this pot shows quite why really the decoration these raised ridges are quite typical of the late 5th to early 6th but the shapes more at the late 6th to the early 7th century so it's a bit strange in that respect but would you expect this body to be buried on its own no I wouldn't I'd expect it to be part of a big Cemetery that'd be all over this area so how do we locate that we'd have to take a reasonably big area and take the topsoil off and see if we can see where the grave cuts were cut into the surface did you hear that phrase take a big area yes I did thank you what's your gardener depends how much you view god we can write off really you're happy to sacrifice 10 years of gardener I'm open to negotiation you're gonna have to come up with some pretty convincing argument if we start with the grass and the path area yeah that that would be yeah we could we could do a lot with that Mick's plan is to open up a big area across the middle of the garden Phil hello you can keep going look oh ha there's not a lot of room but then working in tight spaces is part of the challenge of back garden archaeology I just want to go on and do Summit death is a using radar but they never find anything and there are under pressure to finish so that the trench can be marked out where you going up there no no you haven't finished it I just got the weed well nobody rid me of this turbulent show and just to add to the confusion our surveyor is also called Henry I'm getting really confused with all this I should have called him something else died archaeologically speaking mores known about wrongs than most other towns because a major ten-year research project was carried out here in the 1970s a ninth century saxon church and graveyard was discovered to the north of our site and some badly damaged 6th century Croatian burials were found here the joneses garden on the slope of a hill is in an area that's never been excavated and Henry's burial complete with brave Goods suggests that the Joneses might have located a pre-christian Saxon cemetery something that's never been found in warms before well it won't be long before we find out whether there are any more Saxon bodies in Pat's garden but understandably she wants to find out more about Henry the skeleton she's already dug up and in order to have time to do the analysis we send an advance party here three weeks ago to dig up her bag of bones the Joneses had to smash up the concrete around their ponds to retrieve the bones they buried them in a special archeological sack given to them by Northampton archaeology so the bones were kept in very good condition we took them away to be cleaned and examined by our experts in the lab Henry was pieced back together and he's now been brought back two wrongs to be reunited with patent Morris but different parts yes very the big question Alice is are we right to call him Henry or should we be calling him Henrietta that's the big question isn't it yes can you see that not just there in a male pelvis it's very narrow in a female pelvis which tends to be wider all over and we find a much more sort of C shaped wider not so that is that's a male so how tall was he he was about average for this period because height changes through time and he was probably about the same height as Helen I would think I'm five foot nine by the way a close inspection of Henry's spine had revealed he had a bad back and a pain in the neck we've got sort of pitting there which means that all of the cartilage is worn away sources that is that's that that is classic osteoarthritis in his neck yeah Henry's teeth were also causing him problems what we see is a lot of bone resorption a lot of pitting of the palate suggesting yet she had what we would call periodontal disease or gum disease told Adam made him feel why don't you have Ben would have been very nice and obviously he couldn't have a course of antibiotics to get rid of it so he would have had quite a sore mouth and probably increasingly loose teeth which may have started to fall away because this was clearly active at the time of his - age he's got widespread regenerative change throughout the skeleton so he had a few miles on his clock he was probably you know by autumns you know well into middle age I would think these stains on Henry's arm and hip are intriguing they may have been caused by copper rivets on the sheath of his knife but what about the coppers staining on his skull well one on the skull is a lot trickier hit some and when you start thinking of helmets don't know but I think what that is is something that reminds us how much we lose just through the normal decay processes in a grave we could have lost masses of textile wooden objects horn objects inside that and I think what that's most likely to be is from a little copper alloy repair patch from a wooden vessel these are quite well known they're they're flimsy little things and there to fix so spit in the rim vessels are usually up by the head and so if that was turned so that the rivet was next to the skull the whole thing could have decayed completely and that's the only evidence we'd be left with this photo of a section across Henry's grave shows that it was cut into limestone and very clear to see wood geophys see this well it's not easy and because we've got all the overburden all the garden material seen through that is quite a challenge we won't actually detect a body we don't have a body detector but we might detect that cut into the bedrock assess my Victor's working on a reconstruction drawing based on this photo which shows the strange position Henry was lying in in the grave that space between his knees is big enough for a wooden box or you even have a feather pillow or a pair of shoes or anything you could you can imagine this is whether you can see the real value of a reconstruction drawing currently because you can't hedge your bets you've got to make a decision as I can see straight away that some of my ideas are actually wrong because the knife's vertical is patter more is found it the the sheath can't really be used to explain the staining on the on the hand or on the forearm it could explain the staining on the pelvis because this the top of the sheets in it in exactly the right place but I think we've got to look for two more things to explain these two patches here I mean it's we could possibly extend the belt out to give a a strap end like that yes I mean maybe he could have been really very fat indeed and oh yeah his tummy actually reached almost out here since literally here's a loose it just brings him to know if it's it makes him look like a real person now the way you haven't seen him before yeah yeah Rhys back in the area Phil's investigating the news isn't good yellow the dish yellow clay with the the limestone in it is the solid natural as you can see it extends right the way across this end of the trench yeah this is the material that we'd expect to see the grave cuts in and we've got nothing like that at all at all no lunch time and we've got a logistical problem to sort out why do we need to ship the spoil because we've only dug one end of the trench already see the huge pile that's there yeah we haven't even worked up - where's where the burial is if we come in after lunch and dig that part of the trench we've got no way to put the spoil what you can put the spoil elsewhere John doesn't want the spoil moved before his GF is this end of the garden do not GF is there now it's the LIA lunch meanwhile I want a quiet word with Patton Morris it's really nice this little gravelly rocker in that it is yes it took a lot of time to do when you put it in last year Mick wants you to dig it up he does double right well I'll be a bit worried about plants me suppose we put them in pots and put them over one side if but if that could be done yes then we would think about it years we're always neat and tidy you've seen the program it always looks just as it was when we first came here yeah more or less if you've ever wondered if archaeologists make good gardeners now you know as for me I'm just unlucky Oh felis know we're on the wrong television program they could of course be graves under here but for the moment dismantling this rockery simply gives us more room to maneuver and the Joneses still have another rockery so far completely intact that is some stiff Ashok tackle one attack clay we're now focusing on the other end of the big area we opened up and digging very close to where Henry was buried the question is if there are more graves in this garden do we know how far apart they might be spaced in the incident room Helen and carrenza are looking at a plan of an anglo-saxon cemetery at wake early twenty miles away our single grave could if we're lucky be say like one of these ones here absolutely surrounded by others all on the same orientation if were unlucky it could be like 21 and we would have meters to go to strip to find the next grave so although they're sort of all generally aligned and same east-west direction run sort of three clumps clusters of graves there's no boundary or anything like that there's no obvious edge to it no there usually aren't boundaries actually which makes one wonder how they relate to other aspects in the landscape we really don't know it's one of our big big holes in our knowledge did you manage to get your lunch done yes thanks Gaea fears have now surveyed the garden and they're Reza stivity plot shows evidence of medieval plowing it's our arable farming and that's just the ghost of it that was seen there but the radar survey shows signals that might be graves we've got these two blips which sort of corresponds to where the white patches are that's right so if Phil can get his string sorted out we're going to open up a new area to test the geophys if you're any sort of a colleague do doubt me out with ish what were some scissors it's late afternoon and I should know better but I honestly thought we'd have failed another grave by now I can't believe that we didn't find anything as either end of the big trench across the garden more worrying still is that we've also opened up another trench here at the back of the fish pond and that's not looking too promising either because of the alignment of the skeleton and the fact that nothing was found on the other side before we'd have a look at this side so we put in a three by two trench and so far unfortunately we've come up with very little you fell asleep absolutely nothing I still really enjoyed myself yeah-oh masochist meanwhile inside their house the Joneses are oblivious to all this because they're watching a video of the conservation work we had done on the Saxon knife and belt buckle the Patt discovered in Henry's grave so these are the x-rays she can tell us a lot more about what the actual objects look like here it's being cleaned up by the conservators just picking off any loose bits of corrosion and come away without damaging the actual blade of the knife this is how the finds looked when Pat last saw them and it's this encrusted blob of metal that contained the biggest surprise when it was x-rayed it revealed a lattice pattern that turned out to be part of the Saxon buckle despite that it's been very very mineralized but it's been possible to expose quite a sharp edge as the x-ray indicated was there and at that point offer the two together like that and there we have a perfect joint and what's very exciting that the edges were completely corroded over and there's no doubt at all that that is a genuine join and revealing an extraordinary it's very rare that you get such a positive join or something absolutely fantastic I think I would look like that oh no I mean I never dreamt or anything like that well Pat and Morris I'm very grateful that you've taken the trouble to collect all the pieces in the case of this object it looked the least interesting as it so far turned out to be one of the most exciting parts so thank you for giving us the opportunity to carry out some investigative conservation thank you very much indeed thank you for doing it thank you I'm absolutely amazing I'm really I'm overwhelmed I really am cuz I never expected anything like that well you remember what the objects look like last time you saw them yeah got them back from the conservator oh wow that's the buffets absolutely beautiful the x-ray of the knife allows us to narrow down the date planner is Barry that's cutting edge where the iron is thinner and it's got a curved back to the blade and this short handle we may be missing a bit here this curved back is characteristic of 7th century knives fantastic so we now know Henry was buried in the 7th century we've also been working on a reconstruction of Henry's belt buckle hi fantastic Pat look at that brilliant that's what it would look like why did we do it like that then I will part of its from the x-ray part of it from the buckle itself and part of its an educated guess we've added the loop in which you can't really see on the x-ray from other examples and also we've added in a bit of decoration along the edges which you can just about see on the x-ray but they again that's an educated guess and in fact the examples that this is taken from are all 7th century openwork buckles so it backs up what I believe is the date of the of the knife it's great isn't it the way that gradually we're beginning to bring Henry to lights is wonderful Mick let's be honest we really didn't do very well yesterday did we yeah we did we've got lots of trenches look they're all in red on this plan and what's in them nothing just the geology exactly so how on earth are we gonna find this anglo-saxon graveyard well we I think we have to look in more areas I mean if you look at the red patches on here where we've dug they how much of that he's of the percentage of the guys so far it's only 5% you see that's a very small area I drew this up earlier right this is this is our known berry all plotted there and there's ten more burials in the garden theoretically theoretically which on on the restrictions we've got we would miss completely even if we extended this and everyone well we might find that one up there it's a game of battleships it's exactly like battleships you can be in the square next door we can be an inch away from a grave we could still not seed so what else can we do well I think we have to increase the the area we've got a value we can triple the size of that we can dig an area here but the other possibility is to go outside the area isn't it these boundaries are modern they nothing to do with the original symmetry so where should we go we need to go somewhere where we've got space to do a big strip yeah and the obvious places is the allotments up here they're not being used at the moment we could get a really big area open there and that would that would really add to these small holes here well that would be good except I don't want to see us avoiding Pat's garden oh we're looking for more Henry's we're looking for more Henry's in her garden we're going to dig here in the corner of the garden even though it's going to involve a lot of extra work because this area is basically a dumping ground and a store for various garble projects but we're squeezing a second and much bigger digger into the garden today so we're not going to be put off by extra work if there are more Saxon graves in this garden then Phil's determined he's going to find them for patent Morris having found nothing here yesterday he plans to extend his trench big time cycle run from here through to yeah we should leave a bit through here for the digger yeah but yeah we can bring it right the way through well virtually as long as you like really a big big area yeah across the road in a neighbor's garden we've set up a Saxon camp these re-enactors are here to show patent Morris what they might have been wearing had they lived here 1,400 years ago oh it's neither this is Phillip hello how do you do Pik I feel the cost chance of course I was imagining it might be a bit more coarse but it's not Israel they could make very very small buff on the loom yes and Lenin for the dress I've got leather shoes which are very comfortable they take the shape of your foot they're very comfortable to wear and this is what you would have been wearing Morris nothing very basic very simple you can see here you've got about that same sort of width of buckle here and look that's the plate that you've got that beautiful punch decoration that actually came from your burial and the knife as well of course it's really nothing you can see it's got the same angle look curve back just the same as the one from your garden but that's right that's what gives us that that data's yes shouldn't century and gives us this handy point yeah we useful our search for a Saxon cemeteries attracted a lot of local interest and several people who believe they can help and I said that I picked up a skeleton in their garden they found a shield bus and I believe they found a spearhead if he's right and another burial was found in the neighborhood then we've definitely got to check it out on the newer what I called the newest site then yeah so it would be probably the other side a lot now this man a dowser believes he can help locate the graves that here they are the swings just there I'm willing to hear him out but his prediction that there are graves under the natural doesn't impress the archaeologists underneath national yeah I'll be looking at this Stewart on the other hand has been studying the maps and has discovered that in 1798 the Joneses garden was part of this parcel of land which had a very interesting boundary description it describes the north boundary be marshal's Lane it describes the east boundary in the south boundary and when it describes the West boundary yeah it says and on the west by the next herein described allotment the hedges ditches and mounds and fences which the last describe allotments blah blah blah and he mentions mounds and it's something potentially that might be important to me because there are sacks and cemeteries where there reburying saxon dead in earlier prehistoric burial Bronze Age burials and if you look at the topography here what we've firstly the garden there's the road out the front house where Henry was found somewhere there well the contour for the high ground goes like that this is the highest ground above the river valley here so it's a perfect place for a Bronze Age barrel because they're not always on the top actually they drop like what's called a force crest so then viewed from below they were on the skyline say we have some land somewhere yeah yeah yeah then there are a number of cemeteries where you get cluster burials around the mounds and yourselves and now Henry might just be on the fringe of that and so the allotment is within the sort of ring around where those melons plans might be so it might we might have look there just to update you on our game of battleships we've opened up two more trenches one beside the fish pond and the other alongside the garage the view from the conservatory isn't quite what it was huh come here you're looking very worried no I'm please say you found something else so were you worried about now I'm hoping it well I'm hoping you have I'm I'm worried in case you haven't we thought you were worried about the stage of your garden no not so good I need a little bit well I'm worried that we're not gonna find anything but in the meantime we do have more information about Henry David you've been doing some work on with teeth haven't you to try and give us a second opinion about the age of Henry yes when teeth develop in them in the mouth they're all sort of white like this and when you look at them under the microscope but from the age of about 25 onwards the teeth start to become transparent along the route from down here inside the bone upwards towards the crown and that transparency sort of spreads up the length of the tooth so really all I do is to measure the extent of that transparency and then compare it with teeth that we looked at before of known age and that tells me how old he was when he died this is where I've taken a tooth out of Henry this hole here and the tooth that we've sectioned to look at under the microscope is this one here it is quite a definite line actually say it and that's why I'm sort of fairly confident about it knowing the Joneses are particularly interested in this carrenza wastes no time in giving them the news now this might quite surprise you because we were thinking maybe it was in his sort of 30s or really forties but he was actually pushing 60 Joakim that's what you wouldn't you know I wouldn't think they lived on it that long it's a very good age for that for that time 35 maybe 40 but not 60 you know I didn't realize it I get to that age how did Henry manage to live so long how did he avoid an early grave although no early Saxon medical books survived there are 10th century herb or eum's that record herbal remedies in use for hundreds of years our surveyor who shares the same name as Henry has been press-ganged into trying out some ancient medicine well we believe Henry that your skeleton hand osteoarthritis is next yeah we've remedy here we've got nettle in oil so what I do that you rub that onto your neck nice and muscle is gonna make that feel better yeah for your sore gums we've got sage boiled in water right so so mouthful gargle and spit out right so this is a sort of second mate push then yes what's it taste like that's your right it's sort of like herbal tea and something else you can use that for as well you can use that if you've got an itchy bun how do you know about that dr. Alice Roberts is intrigued but not enough to actually try any of it using aspirin which is Bach as notes yes so call it like take Garrow for instance that's good for just about everything that ails you really since he likes how sexual absolutely aliens to go any aches and pains for a wound made with iron you can pound it with animal fat right and spread that on so able to keep the bugs out me yeah and she's honey for wounds you can use a lot of herbs in the her books are mixed with honey which of course isn't antiseptic yes and rubbing it onto the wound helps the the healing herb to stick to the wound and do it slow action yes right yes so what's the news on her this one guy nothing nothing again no we've come straight down onto the nut shop so how you feeling depressed get it the sad truth is that none of our trenches in the garden have picked up any trace of another grave and Mick wants to turn our main effort towards the allotments where gia fears have just about finished their survey but we're not giving up in here the plan is to leave our team of determined young diggers to carry on investigating the garden I think basically only got two options now we've got got to put a slot through here to link our two trenches and then do as Katherine suggested which was extend trench one this is this one here which way you want to extend it towards you right yeah another flower bed but no I think we can probably leave the flower bed we won't bring it quite that far but it will enable us to trace the soil that Henry was buried in or that their natural that Harry Henry was cut into see where that's going because that's definitely different natural to the natural that we've had in these two trenches sounds good to me and personally I'd love it if they turned out to be right further down the garden it looks like Phil's found a reason to keep digging Phil I thought you were supposed to be over there love look I am NOT leaving here Tony till I find out what is in that hole there you can see this this brown streak that goes around there look at the alignment is exactly the alignment that Henry was on so that could be a grave car not only that we've got a piece of Roman pot out of it that is not a geological hole that is an archeological hole it's the only glimmer of hope we've had and the only way to find out if it is a grave is to expose more of it anything there Phil Tommy look here's the edge coming down there don't see this yellow stuff that's the bedrock that's the natural and here is the brown rain milk oh look more pot and looks a bit Romani to me too why is it significant getting a piece of Roman pot when what we're looking for is a Saxon burial because simply the Romans come immediately before the the Saxons it's very very frequent to get Roman finds mix in with Saxon material Phil seems convinced but we don't know for sure yet maybe we haven't lost our game of battleships after all so more spread out oh look at that does that look like a grave by God don't have right and if it's like yours Pat the head should be the set the feet that's why should the feet batting it's a hit what a relief can I get me trou go yes is this the way you did the first one yeah did you do it like as meticulously this and just clean it all up and did it properly yes and that was instinct that told you how to do it just through watching time to true carrenza meanwhile has gone in search of information we've heard that there was an endless axial skeleton found in the garden of one of the houses along Spinney Street about 20 years ago you wouldn't know which garden that was no we respond by Motorola you found anything in awhile skeletons in your garden no how big is this some feral ground that's what we're trying to find out definitely eventually carrenza did track down the garden where the grave goods have been discovered and guess where it is that's right exactly where we're digging it's tipping down with rain now but since we found those grave cuts everyone's so up and even though we've turned Pat's garden into a hellhole she's happy as Larry cuz at last she's got a chance to dig with her hero Phil Harding are you quite happy about having burials in your garden yes doesn't skin no it's funny how some people do mind isn't it really it seems like only moments ago we found nothing in this garden and now hi we got another one yeah yeah the theory was right then it shows just where it is what looks like and that were actually sort of just on the edge of the grave cut right here it's quite a book see on this side because all the muck but we do have as you can see quite clearly the bone coming through here it seems we're going down so far we haven't exposed enough of the bone to be sure it's human but our young diggers are confident their strategies paid off pretty the same zits on the same sort of axis as Henry wars and the one they've got over there so hey I'm happy again so old archeologists one young archaeologist one yeah exactly yeah it's draw at the moment it's been a long wait but now it's getting exciting because in fields trench we can not only see the skull but the outline of what looks like another complete pot I suppose it's too early to sex it yet well from what I can see it looks like a female frontal regions sort of fairly straight down and it's very smooth so I think it's a purpose a woman and you can see the teeth yeah and you can see enough of the teeth to know that she's got her wisdom teeth so she's over 21 ish so there's looking good actually what have you got up your infill underneath here Tony this is a lovely green thing there but unfortunate is very very decayed because of the nature of the soil around it and then here very very difficult to sue that she got part of an iron object so that might actually be a single object pull how's your vessel Kelly love early days yet Tony I've just got the rim exposed starting got the full length of it so it seems to be lying on its side could the pot have fallen onto its side when the grave had been started to be filled in possible yeah I mean knocked it over yeah it's entirely possible so it's the end of what turned out to be a very rewarding day we're gonna dig a big trench but blimey right yeah it's tough going in the allotments all we've discovered so far is that the soil is very different sticking yeah it varies to hear my beats yeah um it's very different to over there and we're worrying that we might not be able to see grave cuts so what are you gonna do go further down that way no go go that way I think Helens plan for tomorrow is to open up an even bigger area in the hope that we can find out if the graves extend in this direction we want to be able to tell Pat if the burials are just a small group or part of a big cemetery ah so that's sort of hang on boy I think it I think this is a big bead no prizes for guessing who's in charge of excavating this skeleton today dealing with is a hole in the middle of it there were the bronze wires going in yes it is let it go it goes in there and there's the there's the water go going through there any boy that's beautiful this is growing this business in a fields gonna need all his experience because this Saxon woman seems to have all sorts of mystery items buried with her there's a small iron object in there yep and then there's this big copper plate in there and then I've got this big iron object in there which you know what I don't know whether that's a knife or what the hell that is like it down by the feet of the skeleton there's a further complication because it looks like there's more than one burial in this grave last night we got this small yeah but that's the one isolated yeah now we get you nothing black must be the other leg bazooms well it might be a humerus actually judging from the shape of it but obviously it's not a baby if these bones are what we think they are this isn't a baby we're dealing with a small child I think sort of toddler yesterday our team of young diggers reckon they'd found another Saxon burial in this garden and now they're sir top of the skull just think we're just go oh yes even I can see the darker soil of this grave which is small and narrow Alice can you tell anything from what you found so far and will be veiny just uncover the skulls so I can't really tell you much about it it is quite thinly so there's a possibility of my [ __ ] oil but then then if it turns out to be faulty rope nailed it I never said that very well I'll see you later so including Henry's grave we now have three burials in this garden but we need to find more to establish it is a cemetery and our best bet for doing that is in the allotments where we're opening up a massive area in search of more burials as we go this way towards ago Haydn's the geology is changing and it's more similar to where the burials have been found seems a lot sunnier over there doesn't it is that we're hoping that we might find one one would be good in the reenactors saxon camp pads looking at replicas of everyday objects like wooden bowls and spoons or Spurs made out of horn this is cow horn and it's very very pliable when you heat it up and put it into hot water you can then shape it and do the various things with it all objects that rarely survive in a grave I mean after all we almost never find traces of these handles and something like this boar tusks yes in a really acidic soil all this would go and you'd just be left with the with the metal bits and then you'd have to try to work out what you'd been left for yes which is precisely what Phil and Paul are trying to do at the moment a loose tooth just here and underneath the collarbone I think just see it sticking out with like a circle of wire I think it's bronze wire absolutely wonderful to actually see that means it's something that is this old you know eventually so yeah and you can see her kind of with the things that they wanted to get you to see who is that probably up there for a reason and now we're getting there you have the benefit hello who do you think the people were who were being buried in this Cemetery here they angles or Saxons or British I don't think they'd have thought of themselves as Saxons because all the areas where we know that people were later on thinking of themselves as sex and so a well to the to the south-southwest really they might have sorted themselves as angles but that doesn't necessarily mean they were all descended from angles because although we think of great waves of Germanic invaders coming across in the anglo-saxon period we've actually got about four million people maybe as many as four million people living in Roman Britain and to swamp that culture with migrating Germans would be actually a fairly impossible you give millions of them so it seems much more likely that the the old romano-british population just changed their culture because it was more fashionable to be a German so so they could be just the descendants of romano-british people but they wouldn't have thought of themselves by by this point I don't think as British they'd have thought of themselves as Anglian the second burial we've discovered is definitely that of a child although we can't tell if it's a boy or a girl without a DNA test we can easily get an idea of the child's age by examining a tooth see that the roots aren't properly developed because their points would be sealed they're quite open still and this is a sort of thing you see in someone who's about 8 right so we're looking at a child around about 8 8 obviously plus or minus a year or something away in Phil's trench having carefully recorded the female skeleton and the grave Goods all around it the next job is to lift the fragile mystery copper object in a block of soil so that it can be carefully examined in the conservation lab next pottery expert Paul blink horn bravely lifts the second complete saxon pot to be discovered in Pat's garden it's a cooking pot if you look at the way it's all blackened around the top yeah oh yeah that's sort this has been used on a fire something's been heated in it I mean we can guess it was used for cooking yeah so there's a number of reasons why this may have gone in the grave it could have just been to carry food and drink as a sort of your meal to take three to the next day I was like yeah thing yeah yeah oh it could also work as a symbol of a woman's status in life yeah but like she run the house like perhaps it was a symbol of a role in life that she was the housewife the cook but given that an anglo-saxon household might have consisted of several dozen people we are really talking about somebody was probably more like a housekeeper absolutely I mean you find female barrels with these these keys on the girdle and yeah as you got keys that means you've got control of the locked places so you just sand all right exactly so you have some control over the well for the house all as well as it's not subservient role yeah in Phil's trench it was thought that we might have a small child buried by the feet of the female but it's now clear that these bones aren't human any idea what sort of animal haven't got the species wrong yesterday I think I'll just keep quiet on that one and the interesting thing with that bone is there's no sign of butchery on it so it's not a jointed me that's gone on in the grave with her and you have to wonder if it isn't actually some sort of pets next Phil begins to lift the human skeleton starting with the feet and working his way towards the skull there's another question of once you've dug one you've dug one up no way it's a total challenge every time you dig one all these bones will be cleaned and pieced back together in the lab as was Henry's skull which was reconstructed by David Whittaker using candle wax as glue a task that took six hours to complete Victor now wants the experts opinion on Henry's appearance so that he can sketch him for Pat Morris the principle thing is to my mind it's a small skull I really expected it to be sort of rather heavier and more heavily built being his brow ridges here are not very well developed it is definitely not an Arnold Schwarzenegger Tamara that's more a fine face he's definitely got a but rusev chin stay quite quite aware here yeah very prominent there the other thing is that the cheekbones are quite wide relatively speaking so therefore I think his first would have come in from there down to the Chindwin long yeah there's still plenty to do although the absence of grave Goods in our second grave means the recording and lifting of this 8 year old Saxon child will be a much simpler proposition than the one Phil's taking on wonderful to have this little being phil has the tricky job of untangling the upper half of the skeleton from a variety of delicate brave boots so glass fell suspect it rather is isn't it oh look at it she's looking that beautiful blue color oh there's a piece of wire that comes across there yeah and then there's another one there and then we've got this piece here yeah Phil's uncovering what looks like a series of fine silver rings so you think all those little loops were actually linked together at once - well they look no then Oh something's moving there oh then no then we can we can we can leave that more or less in position we know that's actually moved yes there's another one underneath there look at that look at that so this a chain is actually underneath Parris no it's under me I don't want to miss any of this it's behind but I have to drag myself away because at last we've got some news from the allotment report Margaret as we've heard you got some bones we think the bones are human we just need Margaret to confirm it this is just fusing you can see that line along there that's where this part and that part of fusing together which means that the growth of that bonus ceased and the bone is now consolidating so this is somebody in their mid late teens the bad news is that the graves been largely destroyed by medieval plowing you can see the trace of a furrow in this section of the trench the only bit of the skeleton left intact are the legs there are the ends of the leg bones oh yeah and they're shooting off into the section and the feet will be outside the trench but at least this knife and other bits of metal work we fail with the bones tell us the grave is anglo-saxon how far away is this from Henry oh I know about 30 meters that way so could this be a separate burial or does it have to be part of the conglomeration of arable I think it's higher than my cleats separate even though we're in a different field now then we would have been in the same place so if we've got four are you happy to say that this is now a cemetery yeah I think we can officially now just what we wanted to hear with time running out the focus now is on finding out as much as we can about the Saxon woman buried in patch garden so her teeth when she closed them yeah any closure back teeth most people overlap all the time here but hers didn't they were sort of edge to edge is this a glass bead or is it made of stone pure shirk around here although it's hard to see this is a bone disk decorated with ring and dot design we're almost at the end of the dig and understandably the neighbors are curious about what's been happening in Pat's garden this shows their guard then it shows you the trenches we've dug we haven't been out to do as much work paths as we'd like to have done although we've now exposed the feet belonging to the burial we found in the allotments we'd have to dig a lot more of the local area to know how many more graves make up this cemetery you're all probably standing on top of anglo-saxon graves right now Stewart thinks the anglo-saxons were burying their dead close to Bronze Age burial mounds Cemetery might be there and we can create an impression for the joneses of what that might have looked like our cemeteries right on there what run horizon so if you imagine their bass surveyor Henry has produced a 3d model showing that the burials in green would have been visible from any settlement within this red zone while Victor has done a reconstruction but perhaps more than anything Pat wanted to know more about the skeleton she excavated and we've done our best to bring Henry to life for her of what we think he might have looked like and Martin's here to try and give you some idea of what he might have sounded like quite on nutty work world Cunningham manna Mill dist on-month rarest layered Omni thirst and lofty honest you probably want to know what that means right yes means they said he was the mildest of men the most gentle the kindest to his people and the most eager for glory and he does look like that isn't he absolutely lovely thank you very much and we've wrecked you garden as well nothing that can't be put back and worth it to prove that Henry wasn't an isolated burial but part of a pre-christian anglo-saxon Cemetery the only one ever discovered in ruins so what would you like us to do with it well I think try and keep eat two bits of each ring set for your saffron okay they look different sizes and they might have different characteristics it's all new and exciting detail about life and death in the seventh century totally independent okay but it's only after the dig when the finds are cleaned and the bones examined that we can picture this grave as it was when it was last seen in the seventh century this Anglo Saxon woman was in her early 20s when she died she was wearing her necklace of silver rings and glass beads she wore a bone brooch decorated with ring and dot design other objects had been placed around her a knife a river worn pebble with a copper ring through it a small copper plated wooden box of which only the copper survives and a cooking pot but for me the most unusual discovery was that there was an animal buried with her and this we now know was a small dog there's a case of mosaics mosaics mosaics at the break on Discovery Channel as the team discovers something rather unusual under a somerset pig farmer skies

Channel: Reijer Zaaijer

Views: 405,718

Keywords: time, team, full, episodes, season

Id: F5utCJ1z0zo

Length: 46min 40sec (2800 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2013