Time Team S11-E09 Wittenham,.Oxon

this is an Iron Age hill fort it's a kind of prehistoric castle carved as its name suggests into the top of an impressive natural Hill there are literally thousands of monuments like this littered across the British landscape but this one a wooden arm in Oxfordshire is very unusual because right next to it is another even more impressive hill with nothing visible on it except for a clump of trees the second Hill Round Hill as it's known has been battling archeologists for centuries they sure it's got something to do with the tribe that built the Iron Age fought but what previous archaeology has been small-scale but has produced some tantalizing clues in the 18th century two skeletons were found at the top of the hill and in the 1940s archaeologists put in a small trench somewhere down there and found evidence of a building and masses of Iron Age pottery so clearly something was going on around here but what and how does it tie in to the hill fort we've got just three days to find out oh and we've got a bit of a problem with some newts a local archeology unit has been excavating the Iron Age hill fort for the past three weeks it's never been dug before and they're hoping to discover when and how it was built and what it originally looked like they'd also love to find out what its Iron Age inhabitants used the neighboring Hill for Round Hill is only 200 meters away and is actually higher than the fort but they haven't got the time or money to investigate it which is where we come in so what can we do to help you with what you're doing well we've concentrated on the no it's never been dug but it's presumed to be an early on a sort of 600 BC hill fort the other hills more enigmatic and I think there's a lot to be done up there because we just don't have the background what are we gonna do them with well in the 18th century they found burials on the other hill here and so we've actually started putting a trench in the wood up there to see whether we can sort of sort that out well you've already started work we hadn't even done is your future no but it's difficult to do the geophysics in woodland like that so we've had to go for where there are gaps in the trees and then about 60 years ago a local chap called roads dug a hole down here and found the remains of what might be a Roman villa but they also found masses of Iron Age material so there may be some sort of settlement across this area that goes with the hill force or relationship well that'll be interesting so we're offered a cracking pace Phil and Frances are delving into the top of our Hill they've no idea what they're going to find there could be buildings up here or more bodies but they're convinced there must be something and we're not restricting ourselves to the summit of the hill it was somewhere on this hillside that local archaeologist PP Rhodes discovered his Iron Age building we want to find out whether it was an isolated structure or part of a much larger settlement but first we've got to find his trench we've got measurements he tells us the center of his square trench was five hundred and ten feet from the little Whitnall inferred Road at the point where the footpath meets the road here so 510 along there and then 103 between the center trencher back onto the road when it's all in feet of course yeah it is we can work out in a bit mass how far we have to go along the road there's just a basic offset from that point if they can find roads old trench we'll be able to expose more of the Iron Age building he found did you can get that before geophysics dips how much a chance the question then will be whether the people who lived in Rhodes Iron Age building had anything to do with the fort towering over them where Tim and his team have already opened a vast trench across the ramparts they're searching for pottery and features to help date the hill fort and find out how and why it was built we know we're near the bottom of this ditch yet but it does scatter these ramparts is really really quite so yeah I mean you've done a huge sort of slice through with a buncha two presumably give you the profile of the of the ditches right away from the interior to the bottom the aim is really to find to get back to the chalk and to get the full sequence if there is more than one cut of the ditch you know after all these sites was sometimes in use for hundreds of years of course when it was originally dug that chalk that they dug out of the bottom all the way up the side on the top of the rampart and on the outside it must have been an incredible sight yeah Leeming white source of absolutely an from here of course on the Berkshire downs opposite there were other hill forts yeah they're on a clear day you can see and could see us right here on Castle Hill and presumably there were fences along these banks well yes we in fact just over here we just started to uncover the a yeah look at that yeah don't have a look we've only had just had this cleaned up by machine but yeah we've already uncovered these dark circles one here one here they're quite quite I think a probably where posts stood on the front of the rampart so this should have held the fighting platform up on the top in fact that's right from the size of the post holes Tim estimates that the palisade would have provided a substantial and impressive added line of defense on top of the ramparts the summit of Round Hill is proving a trickier proposition try that further Phil's only been able to put two small trenches in among the trees so far there's no sign of buildings or bodies what's a natural standing gravel capping on the top with gold clay and chalk that's what we've got here there's the patch of gravel coming yeah there's the clay so that's a big fat nothing in trench one and the story from trench 2 is equally depressing it's utterly sterile very small no archeology nothing in here no there isn't it's just nice geology there may well be juicy archaeology on top of this hill but because of the density of the tree cover we simply can't get at it and Mick gives the order to abandon the summit what a disaster but all is perhaps not lost we've still got a huge area of ground below the summit to explore and the prospect of unearthing in it an Iron Age settlement if our luck turns if geophys can provide us with the target so what have we got there John well oh look right here that's good man coughing we're stood here then yeah and that's 80 metres up to that point you can see this fantastic ditched enclosure with an entrance at that point there what sort of date would you think that would be in oh just on morphology on age maybe romano-british should rise right well that would fit with excavation that was done somewhere in this area before which produced a lie no Jane romano-british pottery presumably we can't see roads change in that well it's only ten foot in size that that's linked ten feet is just that right we've got the 30 meter block here yeah well surveyor trying to locate that as we speak with a mixture of sort of schoolboy schoolboy maths and satellite service so we're waiting for them over how do you feel about that yeah well look I can give you some targets in the meantime I mean I personally like to dip that and dig one of those if not more right Soper pits I think but I think we should go for those to the terminal should be in here right that's a bit more like it nice crisp targets lots of wide-open space so in go our next two trenches trench three at the entrance of the enclosure which could have protected a small settlement and trench for where we're hoping to find another section of the ditch and one of the pits at least the trenches will go in when we've dealt with our next little problem the widnall clumps are home to a rare species of animal the great crested newt they're protected by law and we've only been given permission to dig here on condition that we stick to this previously negotiated zone and before we can start digging we've got to mow the area where we want to put our trenches and conduct a fingertip search any nudes we find must be evacuated to a place of safety will I know what if I say what have you seen any of the pictures you certainly will this is what they're looking for the great crested newt and this is a girl great crested newt so it sounds a nice job that's illegally yeah and a rash wasn't in the right truck fetching this area always a self-respecting you out of leg deer here with somebody come along with a mower and if you've got your legs left well you can see with Monat high and so that there's very little chance of actually being mon while we did it come out come out wherever you are it's a time-consuming process but no news is good news and an hour after we've decided where to put the two new trenches they're finally underway and almost straightaway in trench three Phil hits our first archaeology team Curtis returned it and certainly does got mortar on that side and that's I'm more from at least three four sides it's not a high quality floor is it I mean but it is a it's a workmanlike floor absolutely yes yeah we get a picture in addition to a monkey in a boat with a trowel all the fines have been Roman so far but Phil's got a long way to go before he hits the bottom of the ancient ditch so it could still turn out to be Iron Age and Henry's track down Rhodes his old trench so we should find something Iron Age soon so here yeah but basically my measurements from Rhodes is his description of where his trenches visit the center which is here well up Phil's trench is going over the end of the ditch at the entrance yeah the point you're telling me is about here that's well away from this noise that I have with the building because he's venting on the southeast corner of that building but his measurements put it just here we've got things here but the main building looks to be quite a bit over there okay find out so once the area's been dean uted trench five goes in here to locate Rhodes Iron Age building fell got a rope the old trench at the top of the hill this morning is this one any better I'll tell you what it is Tony things have so totally changed we're literally getting fines boy the bucket bull and these all from a trench absolutely John have a look down here some amazing Salvage it's a right old mixture we've got quite a bit of Roman material including building material and a range of pottery but in particular we've got a lot of Iron Age pottery mostly early Iron Age I think but the beauty of is it's in such big crisp pieces I think of that look they even fit together so I mean this stuff has not been moved for us and they didn't have quite sharp edges totally they haven't been rolled around a lot and and of course we've also got Tesla as well so we are dealing with a Roman building with a floor yep and again that ties in with what Rhodes found in 1948 now that Phil's found both Iron Age and Roman pottery in the enclosure ditch it looks as if people were living here from at least 600 BC to about 400 AD that's a thousand years of continuous occupation inside the enclosure there's no sign yet of anything Roman in trench five but matt has uncovered a layer of Iron Age pottery better still it's lying on a cobbled surface just as Rhodes described South is that ways yes so if we get that oriented so he's he's got that side of it in his trench our trench has obviously got the other side of it effectively coming around perhaps like that it looks rectilinear yeah it doesn't mean these red cobbles goes pretty much north-south straight along there and there's nothing nothing it must there at all so we've just tipped the corner but we've clipped the corner they hasn't disturb yeah no one absolutely I mean this is undisturbed here no I have you got your pottery yeah he has been really nice bits actually oh come on show them to us huge numbers huge miss yeah I mean look at look they're decorated piece Wow look at that one sort of some impressed decoration around there mmm early Iron Age I think thousand fantastic because one thing road says the reason he's so convinced that this is a square building that's of Iron Age date is that the layer above it has almost exclusively Iron Age pottery in it yep Matan carrenza are convinced this is the square Iron Age building described by Rhodes the question now is was it an isolated building or part of a settlement and did the people who lived in it have any part to play in the life the nearby fort like perhaps building it in the first place quite clever engineering this I mean it looks like a very large ditch and a very large rampart that actually stood the idea engineers are very clever what they do basically take the slope of the hill yeah and cut a terrace into it and then just dig down on the terrace so that creates what looks like a massive ditch here put on most the material down there so from below that looks like a massive rampart with a massive ditch behind it in another massive rampart it's just clever engineering minimal effort and maximum effect yeah what's quite interesting if you look so what you're going for are more of a display than the serious to do and I've looked at me I don't buy that now I've looked at and what's interesting I've seen on lots of hill forts where you get really massive structures like this on one side yeah go around the back end yeah and it's virtually nothing in terms of defensive capability and if you walk around this one what's interesting when you get round the side where the face is round hill yeah look at the size of the rampart and it's there and it's nothing of this proportion you mentioned you're very impressive here that's facing towards the Ridgeway and it strikes me you know that's where the opposition was over there so you made it look really grand over there towards Round Hill okay it's not as incredibly spectacular so they were probably friendly over there I also wouldn't fancy going across those ramparts I mean seriously if you have blokes up the top there was things yeah at bows and arrows you see I think sure that's the lads on the ramparts is the defence back down in the valley beneath our Hill Ian's been trying to get to grips with the enclosure and although he's hit archaeology he's somewhat baffled oh yeah and it's supposed to be a pip I mean here we are in the geophysics it's this row here isn't it yeah and it's supposed to be that blob there here but we've got a load of Flint so maybe it's the fill of a pit right we ought to be seen the ditch of the enclosure up there don't we well I think we might have the edge of this ditch coming through now right you see this line of white pile right sort of dipping down yep that's either the edge or it's a fill dipping into a ditch into all this big black morass well so that could be all ditch then couldn't it I don't think I've got a back edge yet right okay a new day a new set of GF is results and a big surprise this is the building we were looking at last night this is the thing that carrenza thought might be a roman villa or something and look at our resistance results now god that is the same area what is it resistant us resistance and the black is showing high resistance looks like a building it's aligned east-west and there's a hint of an apse at that end which is that is at the East End that is the East End hang on so if it's a line deist west and it's gotten out does that mean we're looking at a church or something like that Wow I mean it's the sort of thing that a church does in a I mean this looks too good to be true I I can't believe it myself to be honest where is it on the ground well basically we're just here but it's quite a big building it's 10-15 meters long we we don't need a big trench to sort that oh no we we need to put something across and establish exactly what it is that's right and how deep we've got to go down and then how well-preserved it is and then what sort of building it is so let me get this clear if it is a Roman Church that is very rare days very very rare very very important indeed we got a short this one it it's the beginning of day 2 and the archaeologists are very funny normally they're so laid back but you really get this sense of suppressed excitement this morning it may all crash and burn by tomorrow but at the moment it feels like we may have something really important but we won't know until we dig so once the area's being Dean uted trench six will go in here on the south wall of the possible Roman Church meanwhile in trench three Phil still trying to date the ditch that encloses the site and he's found a tantalizing clue test your knowledge on Roman artifacts no idea a very strange one here Lord she it's an iron thing and it's got a socket there yep see that and then it's plays out at this end it's got these two sort of notches in it it's almost like it's a kind of three-pronged fork yep yeah except not too many Roman Forks I don't think there we go this is it is it from a Roman context do you think it got all the Roman pottery cone it's got a Tesori with it has got to be Roman I have an idea actually I wonder if it isn't actually a perforated spearhead they're not very common they're associated in the literature with a particular rank in the Roman army of beneficiaries and it would be a ceremonial object as it happens we have an inscription from Dorchester just over the hill recording a benefit curious console heiress the discovery of a Roman ceremonial spear placed at the entrance means that the ditch is more likely to be Roman than Iron Age after all so to make absolutely sure Stuart's checking out the other section of ditch in trench for going on down the set I'm getting near the bottom if you've got anything to to date it I think it's firmly Roman because we're getting big chunks of this time I'm afraid don't be afraid it's fine it looks as if our chances of finding an Iron Age settlement are quite slim we now know that the enclosure dish is definitely Roman and the geophys results are pointing to a building that's probably Roman as well the only Iron Age building we've found so far is Rhodes in trench five what started as an Iron Age story is beginning to take a rather Roman turn but there's no doubt that this hill fort Iron Age and at the bottom of the pit within the ramparts Tim's team have made a disturbing discovery this is the body of a small child how do you know it's a child from the size of the bones some of them have come loose as as we've been cleaning this one in particular which is humorous there's born here measured that and the measurement suggests that the baby was about a month old when when it died can you tell which words lying what a bit confused about that at the moment you got the skull here that's front so it looks like the head was pushed down right forward possibly the bodies coming round like this maybe in a slightly crouched position we can't really be saying at the woman why would they put a baby in a pit well if this was a rubbish pit as people used to believe then it was chucking away a baby with the rubbish now I don't think people in the Arnage were like that people have never been like that so I think that was a deliberate placing and it's probably quite a special reverential very sad deposit do you buy that Tim I'm not convinced in Tarly I think that there are a lot of burials as as far as it says in these pits but with infants in particular you know you get Rowan infants in ditches all over the place and I suspect that they had a different view of how important these infants were so they may have just put them into the ground where there were convenient holes this is the the prosaic and the poet isn't without a glimpse of any newts Phil's hot on the trail of our mystery building in trench six yeah and already he's hit a layer of demolition rubble his layers and layers and layers it's too early to tell whether this is the rare Roman Church we hope it is but the roof tiles and tests arrive from the rubble confirmed that it is at least Roman a couple of hours later the first traces of the foundations themselves begin to appear Phil's confidence is growing this is where they reckon the war was going to be and here we've actually got big lumps and mortar which may we represent where they've demolished a wall and actually we've got bits of mortar and then beyond that is where the geophysics says that the anomalies drop died out and we just go into a coil but if we're going to prove that this is a church here then the trend is going to be where the apse is but you decided not to put it with it that's right I mean at the moment we haven't defined the apse well enough what we want to know is is what the state of this building is the best way to do that is to is to put a trench exactly where we've got a clearly defined edge if you've got a clearly defined edge that is the best way to start looking for the building and then if we can resolve that then we can either extend the trench we'll put in another one to actually look at the apps we've still got a whole Iron Age settlement to find and it looks as if Francis is about to open a new front well as it was on the Grouse is he you need fertile I am Tony yes I am it makes a great change from archaeology does it imply that you're going to dig yes but less than an hour ago Mick said to me whatever we do we mustn't put in any more trenches what we've got to do is concentrate on what we've got you know all I got at him over lunch why well I'm reasonably sure I think we all are but that enclosure is a Roman feature of some sort yeah and I'm interested in that early pottery that came out of it and just outside the enclosure here was a group of pits and I got a pretty good idea that they're going to turn out to be early Arnage so I'm really keen to get my fingers on that stuff so because you're the prehistoric expert you can pull rank with Mick who isn't basically well I won't say that what happened but there was a an exchange of views why are you excited about pits well the thing is these pits they were deliberately filled in the pottery is very fresh it's in superb condition and we'll get environmental samples out of them actually tell us how people were living on these comps and around these clubs so actually the key to explaining what life was like here lies in those pits the geophys results are showing a rash of pits all over the site which suggests a sizeable spread of Iron Age settlement here if Francis is right and these are pits and they are Iron Age hence trench seven into the thickest clump of them but in trench six fills initially enthusiasm and confidence are fast evaporating the more he digs the less of our mystery Roman building he finds it appears to have been so thoroughly demolished not even the foundations remain I still argue that in fact you can see the cut of the robber trench going right up to there I think it's been robbed totally away I mean we've got no floors we got virtually no walls so that when they dismantled it I mean they just mat dismantled it big time they just took everything away and that the only thing that was left was probably quite a discreet pile of rubble so sort of anything that was usable in terms of stone or whatever they've carted away pretty much the only fill will struggle to pick out the outline of the building let alone work out its function his only hope is that other parts of it have survived better so more in Hope than expectation Phil's opening a new trench to see if he can find another wall in better Nigg if there's one there at all luckily the news is better in Francis's new trench he's found his pit and it's full of bits of Iron Age debris which is going to get environmentally sampled we've already started to sieve the contents of the other pits and we found a mass of information to help tell us what life was like here in the Iron Age we found the bones and teeth from sheep pigs and cattle and we also found traces of wheat and barley all of which show us that this must have been a very rich and productive area for farming but the very presence of a fort a few hundred meters away reminds us of a darker side to iron-age life and although the baby in the pit was probably not a military casualty the archaeologists are now lifting it bone by bone and nevertheless disturbed by what they're finding I mean the one thing that is significant is that this baby's body's disposed of differently to most Iron Age day because on how we don't find them in the ground and what is this still disturbed me is that the head is really upside down in relation to the torso that is the top of a head that is the lower part of the head and it's really quite upside down it could have been a sacrifice that's quite a nasty thought and once the skeleton was removed another theory presented itself now that's interesting you see that white stone in there come across that before and sort of Iron Age context yesterday these appeared they were higher up but in this odd position here that's not resting on them it does look as if there's been some sort of careful ritual putting the baby into the ground doesn't it with a sort of ya burnt wattle and daub structure underneath it and then stones placed around its head there's quite a lot of care really but sadly we'll never know if it was buried by its parents or left as an honored sacrifice to the gods the baby has actually been the least of currents as worries all day she and Matt have been scraping away in trench 5 trying to reveal more of our only iron age structure yesterday they found a mass of Iron Age pottery dating to the sixths and 7th centuries BC and under it a cobbled floor surface and some post holes today they're extending the trench delving deeper into the archaeology and they found not only more of the Iron Age building but evidence of a second Roman building this is the Roman building mortar floor which has got mixed in bits of wall painted wall plaster from an earlier building in it so we know that's an earlier building and then down here we've got this Iron Age surface but this is the critical thing is about 8 inches buildup of plow soil here with occupation in it at all so that's telling us that between the mid line age at the absolute latest and the second century AD this part of the site at lease was completely abandoned there's no continuity of occupation from the early early iron age through to the Roman which means not only do we have both Roman and Iron Age stories to worry about on this side but an uncomfortable 300 year gap between the two when the site was apparently abandoned what's going on this morning we all seem so incredibly focused on mysterious apsidal building and then we seem to lose that because the walls were robbed out you've just got excited about your pits over here and John's just given me a brand new lot of GF is with a whole load of other targets it seems to me we've entered the land of intellectual anarchy does it all fit together what we're getting is a focus towards if you like domestic life yeah what we're seeing here is how people lived at the bottom of those hills and so I think we're helping to ask a lot of the questions that Tim's trying to answer next door now we've got the pits Frances ting is particularly interesting from my point of view because now we've seen these pits and we can recognize on the geophysics we can see how far this Iron Age settlement seems to be extending and it's already gone way beyond where we'd expected we were focusing on one enclosure but we don't know whether it's part of a much bigger settlement so if we have time it would be nice to look at that I think that's really what he demands to Dursley by about tomorrow lunch time we've got to look and see whether perhaps pop in a machine change across that well we're not going to walk away from our roman building home well Phil says it's been pretty well trashed he's been recycled we might be lucky just to get the ghost of a building there even if we only get the robbed out walls we can still find out something about its scale and even its character so I think there's some knowledge in it yet so a limited amount of work just to solve that would be yeah I might pick up our apps yep yeah let's go for that as well so tomorrow more jiffies results to explore one last stab at the possible Roman Church and hopefully an Iron Age settlement to go with the fort it now looks as if the settlement was far bigger than we could have imagined and we want to know more about the people who lived here who were they how long were they here and what were they doing we got to got one day left but we can't ignore our search for what we're hoping could be a very rare Roman Church yesterday we were very depressed when we thought it had been robbed out but this morning Phil's looking much happier I've literally gone down that much and look what I've come down on to this superb level incredibly compacted mortar floor whenever as I scrape it you can hear just how solid it is it's been protected by all this demolition rubble it must mean we're inside a building we've got to be with a floor of this quality we thought the whole building was going to be absolutely trashed it may not be as badly damaged as we thought it would be okay so that's coming along nicely what else we need to find that that third trench across the building they were looking for this is my apps it is it's yours yeah so Corder so where's the trench for that here oh sorry about that yeah look that should get the end of the building and maybe get the axe presumably uh why did you say we'll get the western end of the building you don't think it's an apse I am not quite as confident but whatever the thing is the end of the building so near the end of the building GF is are extending their search towards the hill fort to see how far the Iron Age settlement stretches in that direction and at last Phil gets a trench open to look for the apps so we might get a result on the possible church while he's busy in the trenches Stu and I have taken to the air to get the bigger picture and we're rewarded with the most exciting discovery yet hey crop marks dude hey look at that you can see the whole complex of them on this side of the road it's fantastic they only looks like this a series of track ways these enclosures well the little rail ones in the black spots I think they must be picked that must be part of the complex that we've got the geophysical results are on the other side of the road this is fantastic in May it seems that the crop marks could be one of the most valuable clues to help us understand our settlement what really impressed me about what we saw from the helicopter was that that whole field seem to be pockmarked with a little bit of depression it's quite clear in the IAS they stored grain in silos underground silos cutting oil at all called the gravel and you think well it would go rotten you know but he we've tried it and it doesn't what what happens is you seal the top of the pit with clay with the grain in the grain then uses the oxygen up and then it goes dormant in the carbon dioxide in the in the pit and it'll stay like that for several years and you've got the complete stored crop and just this age rubbish that you've got to set fire to or took away so that's what you're seeing from all those those dark patches or the storage pits when they go out of you sniffling with rubbish because that produces the nice dark crop mark that the hole attempts valleys full of them fills new trench has finally nailed the mystery roman building but not quite how we'd hoped he's now convinced that far from being a very rare Roman Church it is in fact a rather ordinary villa the confusion arose because of the way the structure was demolished it looks as if the west wall was the first to go and when it did all the roof tiles slid off forming a neat pile that's what looked like an apps on the GF is but if that's a little disappointing the overall story of the site is taking shape very nicely we've got a huge hall of pottery that stretches from the early Iron Age to the late Roman a staggering 1,000 years but having sorted the finds into a timeline we've confirmed what carrenza found in rhodes trench this is this is midline asian I've had to work quite hard to find any middle Iron Age material in our assemblages so far there's much less of it the late Iron Age ceramic Lee speaking is totally absent on this site it's just not there must be up for 500 years it might not be as long as that but it could certainly be it could certainly be 300 years Paul's discovery is backed up carrenza evidence from Rhodes trench that showed the site was abandoned for three centuries but it still doesn't explain why it happened John's turned up something rather intriguing to the latest geophys results and they're showing a couple of very strange anomalies you're gonna like this a lot right price to pay for it that's the extension of the survey what is it I uh I don't know I I put money on them being barrows I'll ensure barrows a sure you don't normally get them this far south I know well I've dug some in Northamptonshire and I know mostly there in Yorkshire but wow if they were well you occasionally get smaller age enclosures square ones in know in the Arnage but less than 20 meter square no this is very unusual yeah and they have dots in the middle oh yes we're gonna happen that's the point if if we're gonna look at those we've already worked out what we can do in the time we've got left if you want to change the agenda then something else to go can't look at this anymore well this is the obvious thing isn't it that's lose that new people over to me to do guys here but there's another problem that the bigger problem that's the limit of our license we can do anything that size you can't dig this side in fact we're outside just a whisk only I mean if we're not working over there could we shift it that I'm not sure it's not easy I think that's what we have to try and do if you were adamant that you wanted to do this we'd have to try and negotiate a t-shaped area too we can't expand the survey yeah yeah that's a possibility we might be on our movies we'd accredits your decision I think it makes sense because the hill fort just off yeah I just of the plan so we're moving towards the hill though we're trying to get the link between yes so in a way I suppose it does make sense to concentrate your efforts I can always come back to that later on well we knew yeah another year or whatever yeah yeah so you want to go for that oh I think we all don't see if I can have a chat with Tony with Stuart and do something about the area okay okay while we wait to get the go-ahead for our new trench Stuart thinks he solved the mystery of the missing 300 years and he's called Francis over to the hill fort to get his opinion on his new theory we saw some crop marks in that wheat field over there just beyond the road where the excavations are taking place and what I've done is had a look at the images and transcribed them onto here what what's in that field of wheat over there just on the side of the road look at that yeah what there's the road there's the farm in the distance yeah this is the enclosure that John found on his geophysics where the excavations are so there's a whole complex of things just in the next field to where we're actually working that sort of resembles of a class of sites there's banjo enclosures dozen dozen here which usually middle Iron Age in date and of course that's very exciting because that's what we're missing there earlier we got Roman but not middle and of course those middle Arnage settlements actually go with the hill fort as well as plenty of middle Iron Age stuff here right that was probably where the people lived who occupied this place is hill fort in times of trouble and I don't think you've known that I think that's really exciting we've had the OK to shift the t-zone but with time running out fast went desperate to get started anything that looks or feels like a newts if you find one tell me there's no way of bypassing the newt management scheme these things can't be hurried and after a rigorous fingertip search that is dean uted so with only four hours left it's up to the two old pros to see if they can find a square barrow with an intact Iron Age burial oh yeah what's better no fractures hit the bottom in Francis's pit and as we'd hoped the Potteries confirming that the pit is early iron age and it's contemporary with the hill fort to the two old troopers are putting us to shame with their perseverance bashes yeah I think I'm down they've been hard at it for three hours and already they've nearly finished yep I tell you what they feel if that pottery and everything turns out to be exactly the same as my pit over there then you're talking about a hell of a big supper whoa ah yeah yeah you're blown mush enjoy an old book I've been picking a dish and on the other side of the site underneath the Flint's ian's uncovered another large pit and a vast peace of pots that's extremely impressive I think it's about ready to come out okay fantastic never sent America brilliant yes yeah there could be a lot more in this pic so yeah big it's a very slack profile it's not very pronounced and I think it's very early iron age so we're talking with 7th century yeah why not yeah that sort of thing blimey yes that's I think that's really good I mean that's such an impressive piece of POD and it's a hell of a big pot to this massive pot was made locally and was used more than two and a half thousand years ago by the farmers to store their produce right you've got a nice selection of them mostly our early army schism know that's what are you yeah I almost that whole good Lord looks like a loon wait they're not look there's the perforation through it is good lord yes look at that soda whoa-hoo alright these Late Bronze Age you reckon yep technically it's um actually perforated cylindrical clay no no I don't know what it is technically it's it's a cracker it's a sort of sausage of clay which you stick a stick through to make the hole and then you hang it from the bottom of the Loom and you get a row of them and it tensions up the fabric well the cylindrical once you don't get them into the Arnage do you now I don't know so I don't know so that pushes the story back here by a couple of hundred years yeah yeah well I mean we've got enough pottery here as well I think to suggest people are living here because it looks like we've actually got structural evidence here oh we've got a post over there and we've got one in there as well we're beginning to get actual buildings I think actually in this in this herb enclosure come on look at my house gonna say not a lot in it but the main thing about their stitch is that it's very v-shaped I can't see any Barrow material slipped on the inside and the finds have been well sparsh yeah on the sparse Ishod yes that came from higher well the shape is nice mm-hmm yeah I mean for a possible barrel but there's no evidence for a barrel mount having slipped in I I think we say it's possible but not disproved yeah but let's be honest we've got plenty of evidence of people living here we've got merits with with domestic refuse I think that tends to believe that we haven't got a burial here we've simply got a nice little domestic enclosure yeah I think it's all a case of we could have both yeah after all the pits are earlier they're Late Bronze Age early Iron Age and this is middle Iron Age or later so they could turn over and do something else yeah I'll go along with that yeah all right your overall missing step right you want that joy pig back in the incident room Neal's combining the mammoth geophys survey with Stuart's crop marks and adding them together to make one grand plan well there we are then Tony you promised just the complete picture with all the evidence and there it is it's very pretty isn't it it's a bit more than pretty I think spectacular I'll explain what we've got here turn it remember all the the crop marks we saw from barely cutter there's the the detail of them here what I've done is transcribed them onto the shot you can see these are the lines here we seem to have two curvilinear enclosures here with with trackways and roadways and so on and what I've done is highlighted in red well I think you've got to two settlements effectively here this purple light I've highlighted is a very straight roadway very distinctly different from this group it's heading straight towards that but Roman enclosure though frost is still called these settlements they look like aliens they're a funny settlements are known as banjos and you've got these track ways around the outside probably to get livestock in and out of the settlement and then you'd actually had houses in the middle there it's very unusual in this part of England find two together that's a very unusual Tim when you were excavating up on the clump did you imagine that down here it would be as full of activity as this not at all no it's changed the picture really because with everything you put together here I mean we've got the early Iron Age the Late Bronze Age Middle Iron Age over here in these new enclosures are missing bit from this side of the road and the Romans fantastic really it's put the hill fort into its landscape context over what 1,500 years and it's not cost me a penny don't you believe it the story of the area around the Klumps stretches back to the Bronze Age nearly 3,000 years ago we now know that the hill fort was first built in around 600 BC in its shadow was a thriving community of early iron age farms which stretched from the very earliest structures immediately below the ramparts to Carranza's farmstead and into the distance then 300 years later they moved to a new banjo settlement and used the hill for farming eventually the hill fort was abandoned and a Roman villa was built here on the southern slopes of Round Hill three days ago we came here to try and work out the relationship between this landscape and that hill fort like most of us I thought the answer would come from the most obvious feature around here the top of Round Hill but if I've learned one thing over the last three days it's to look beyond the obvious the answer actually came from the air photos those amazing crop marks the thousands of pieces of pottery and building material and last but not least the most extensive geophysical survey time teams ever undertaken all of which helped us to tell the story of the largest archaeological landscape we've ever discovered oh and we didn't find a single Newt you

Channel: Reijer Zaaijer

Views: 304,430

Rating: 4.8929386 out of 5

Keywords: time, team, full, episodes, season

Id: BAuOGZsILG8

Length: 47min 5sec (2825 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 08 2013