Time Team S12-E05 Northborough,.Peterborough

this is Fenland falls near Peterborough and a few years ago an aerial photographer saw some interesting crop marks here and took some photos this is one of them and these are the marks they're huge about 200 meters across from here to here archaeologists had a look at the photos and got very excited they think that they're evidence of a 6,000 year old structure which they call a Neolithic causeway din closure but agreeing on a name and agreeing there very important is the easy part agreeing what they're for is very different is this evidence of a massive farm or some kind of settlement or a ritual site very few of these things have ever been dug so anything we find could help solve the puzzle and we've got just three days to do it you really wouldn't know a major monument was here in this field if it wasn't for the crop marks in the aerial photograph a ground-level there's nothing to indicate its existence so we're relying on geophysics to locate the huge rings of ditches hidden under the soil nearly sit cause waiting closures a bit of a mouthful isn't it well it is but I'm in three words Neolithic refers to the period so in this case it's around six thousand years ago cause wait well that refers to the fact that this is a rather strange site as it's got two ditches going round the outside and another two going round the inside and if you look closely at those ditches look over here for example you can see they're dug in segments like source string of sausages and the gaps between the ditches they're of a course with presumably this is the enclosure this outside yeah that's it I mean enclosure bit is the fact that it's enclosing a space but it's a lot more exciting than that because this is the first time in British history people are actually partitioning up areas of landscape for special purposes why they do it that is a brilliant question and that's hopefully find out what do you think Frances well I like a bit of ritual I like a bit of religion so I think they were religious and ceremonial centers to which people came from miles around I know you're gonna be polite in such a major figure in British archaeology but basically you think that's twaddle don't ya oh no I wouldn't I wouldn't say that at all no no but there's an alternative view here and that is that this area is rich in natural resources and in the Neolithic people starting to capture those resources and manage them in a way that they hadn't done before and I think it was the folks here so it's either Cathedral or Ambridge what about five huh wow this is $64,000 question Tony I mean if we locate the trench right and if we strike strike it rich we could have loads of fines and those could include organic remains bits of work wood and that sort of thing if on the other hand we don't strike it it right with the trench we could get virtually nothing at all whatever we get going to be very very important this is a totally virgin site it's never been looked at before it will have great implications both on this site and the other cos rating closures in the area the plan is to put trench 1 on the inner ring of the ditches on the east side and a second trench on the west side where the ring of ditches disappears under an area of thick mud left by an ancient river channel the dark band running down the middle is mud left by a Roman canal the geophysics team have finished surveying the areas targeted for the two trenches and the results aren't what was expected you've got the problem I'm afraid this is where the in a ditch should run we've done the geophysics and I can't see little there is something here isn't it I just think that's probably geological why shows up superbly well on the photograph I know it does but look at the other end we can't see that's us thermal a Kalugin stop link look at the geophysics that's so clear isn't it I don't understand why we're not seeing it at this end when it's so clear here does that alter a plan um yeah I'm not drastically I think we want to go for where we can see it nice and clearly so we'll send Uncle Phil off to that trench and what were you you'll stop here will you end because you're gonna need a lot of your experience on this sort of brain yeah to sort that out yeah it's gonna be tricky no I'll stay over here and maybe with a bit of help from Henry if he can pin the Airfone he should be able to mark that other side in the field yeah it's ugly with me see you later as the ring of ditches on the Eastside didn't show up in the geophysics it's down to our surveyor Henry to calculate where to put trench 1 he does this by matching the ditch outline seen on the aerial photograph to GPS readings it stood on it now as far as you understand I've set out these these two pairs of canes yeah should mark either side of the causeway which gives the ditch that side and a ditch that side on the west side the ditches show up clearly on the geophysics so John can tell Phil exactly where they're located so you should get the ditch coming through here terminating here a break and then another big piece or deep segement bit this way finding the rings of ditches is going to be key to figuring out why Neolithic people built these monuments what we do know is that after 2 million years wandering the landscape our hunter-gatherer ancestors began a more settled existence this changed from a completely nomadic lifestyle marked the beginning of the Neolithic Age which in Britain lasted from 4000 until 2500 BC when metals first came into use Klaus Wade enclosures were built from the very start of the Neolithic period and must have played an important role in the new way of life right I think we're done at the right level here Kerry you can see it's good and clear yeah so you see the change from the orange here to the clay very clear from up here is it yeah I think that's your Buried Neolithic soil right Francis's trench on the east side and Phil's on the west side are both placed where we think the inner ring of the ditches is if we look at these trenches in the context of the entire field we can get our first real sense of how big the monument is but it's not the only one discovered in this area so this is our cause waiting closure here and there's another one here and one here and one here and yet another one here yet these are very rare neolithic phenomenon and we've got five together why is that well I think it was deliberate I think these are marking the edge the boundary of a really important cultural territory culture well it could be culture it could be practical as well because if you if you look at this grouping and they are very close together they seem to relate to the value of the Welland and if you look at this geological map over here all these pretty colors are upland all this blank yellow out here is Fenland it's bog it's unpleasant but all these enclosures occur where the Welland mix the bog effectively they're on this sermon in between so I think we've got to look at reasons why they all cluster together so are you going to try and tie them all up for us well I'd like to eat sait it's a big task I'm going to go and look at these locations for the COS wedding closures we know about and see how they relate to the geography how they relate to each other see things somehow get back to the landscape of the Neolithic knowing where you found a ditch can be a bit tricky as they are after all simply holes dug in the ground six thousand years ago it's quite ephemeral that I killed isn't it though we need pretty vague yeah basically I mean it is it is it's very very difficult to see I suppose identifying it is just a result of of observation and experience really in it subtle changes in the color of the soil might be the only thing to indicate that you've come across one and after a little more digging that's exactly what Phil thinks he's got entrenched too along with some of the river Welland well he got here Phil we got the ditch haha you don't it don't look in that section how's it it's actually sloping up but on this side damn it you can see it is actually coming down there and then it dips down here it's very difficult to see it there but once you get along here you can actually see the edge very clearly against this white gravel and they rises up the other side and it's actually filled up with this this sticky sandy clay material and then up in here you've obviously got a lot of burning lor charcoal and a lot of the clay is very very red and I think they must have had an incredible fire burn in there it's great Phil but we're no longer working blind anymore do you we're not working but it's so difficult to see the edges I reckon we are working fine but we know where we stand we know we got a ditch it's the right shape it's got the right filling it's got evidence in it for having been backfilled now we're on the money there Phil I think to make a ditch at North bura Neolithic people dug down through dark clay soil into the lighter gravelly soil underneath we know from excavations that other cause wait enclosures that they placed important objects into the ditches then soil from the banks was put back over them this is what we call the backfill when the ditch was no longer needed the remainder of the bank would be placed back on top of it ditches might not sound very exciting to us but they obviously were for Neolithic people since they put so much time and energy into making them and if we're to solve the great enigma of what they did here it's in the ditches we'll find our best clues in Francis's trench we relied on Henry's calculations to locate the ditches and it looks like he's spot on miles has taken over the digging and he's got straight onto one hey miles is that the end of the ditch there yet just coming in you can see got all the whiter gravel there which the natural and then you've got all the darkest oil coming back here which is the fill of the ditch and rumor has it that in this whole gigantic trench you've had one fine one single fine from the upper levels of the ditch which is this very small piece of pottery is there any way that we could date this tiny piece of pottery yeah I mean that's a very classic piece of beaker pottery beaker is in the beaker people has it yeah as a big early Bronze Age so it's around about 2,500 BC and would this actually have been a beaker yeah it's a base of finely made very finely decorated drinking vessel you sometimes get them associated with burials but they are quite a common feature finding them as individual fragments in the top and neolithic ditches only another thousand years to go and we're in the nearly thousand years straight down the beaker style of pottery was brought here by migrants from mainland Europe although we can't be sure why they turn up on the top of Neolithic ditches it could be because the monument was regarded as a special place even in the Bronze Age what is it about the Neolithic that gets you going I think it's a period when everything happened what do you mean well it's when we stopped being ancient and actually start being modern in the Neolithic human beings start taking control of their own world you know they control their that their supply of food their animals the milk meat cereals flour so where did the causeways enclosures fit into that well I think the cause wedding closures are about settling down in the landscape as opposed to build monuments like this in the landscape and transform the landscape does imply some kind of feeling of power yes but it's a very particular part these sites are often about death and death and the ancestors the world of the ancestors obviously doesn't exist but in their minds it did and the ancestors were in league with something bigger and something more powerful so by linking yourself to heroic figures in the past you are linking yourself into God a great deals claimed for Neil if it cause weighting closures according to Francis their monuments built in reverence to gods and ancestors according to Ben they're more likely to be the first farms or villages but which is it or is it neither we've found the inner ring of ditches in both our trenches but what we haven't found is anything to help us answer these fundamental questions Neolithic ditches are the treasure chests of their age tomorrow we'll carry on digging them and perhaps we'll strike it lucky forgiving of day two that quest to find out what Neolithic people were doing here 6,000 years ago yesterday we were looking for the all-important ring ditches and we found a slice of one just here so now we're looking for evidence of people on the ground how are we doing on that score Francis well that's fantastic Tony we've actually got the original surface on which people would have walked around in the Neolithic this is this dark stuff here's the dark stuff here but you got look you've got burnt bone here you've got large piece of bone here you've got pieces of pottery there it's intact it's absolutely extraordinary people were walking here 6,000 years ago is this in the ditch ah no this is on a causeway no no explain how it works the ditch comes through to that drawing board so this is going this way it's going like that yeah they're just going like that it comes to a drawing board where it stops okay then you have an under grip which is his laws way the cause were going in is throwing in that direct yeah yeah and then the ditch picks up again over there so now we have the basic structure of the monument a ditch then a causeway and then another ditch the word causeway is perhaps a little confusing since it suggests a structure but in fact all they are is the gaps between the ditches the other segment of it is over here and have we found anything here yes same thing again everything's preserved there's been a lot of bonfires or something on the surface you can see all this all this charcoal here yeah and a sort of red fire crack silky how can you say for sure though that's Neolithic and not Bronze Age or even later ah that could be Bronze Age it wouldn't surprise me at all if they didn't use it in the Bronze Age but we do know there are Neolithic people here because clever old matt has fun let's have a look about ten minutes ago that you're not that is is that an arrowhead yeah it's a very distinctive leaf shaped Arrowhead is snapped across the middle that's why it's got a flat end and they're most commonly found in cause weighting closures it's a beautiful find it's absolutely cracking it's so thin and beautifully made that lovely ripple flaking on it lovely thing so at the very start of day two we've got our first Neolithic find leaf shaped arrowheads were made from the very early Neolithic period as around 4000 BC this one was either broken while being made or during hunting it was found outside a ditch in trench 2 and was most likely just thrown away the all-important placed objects will be inside the ditches and now that we found them francis helps matt mark out an area to dig digging the inside that's right yeah so anything from the interior will be in this side of the ditch I think it's going to be the best bit today if these monuments were part of a transition to a more settled lifestyle we'd expect to find evidence of a Neolithic village here the most natural place to position one would be in the centre of the monument santé geophysics team has been busy surveying this area is that it what your mating studies look we've got some fantastic results this might be the first evidence for activity inside the enclosure where's the others Bob I mean these blobs are I mean they suggest to me burnt features maybe pits does that allow human activity this could well be the traces of settlement inside the enclosure close it yes I mean I hope Ben's right because if it is it's going to be incredibly well preserved because we know there's much more alluvium there than we expected but it could be later than the Neolithic it could be Bronze Age you could even be Roman it's only one way to find out isn't it yeah just a cold the landscape around Northborough is no longer lush Fenland it's nearly all been drained for farming but not far away at Wood Walton there's a remaining patch of wetland fen Phil's come here with Maisie Taylor Maisie is an ancient wood specialist who worked on other cause waiting closures including one near here a Teton incredibly she found the remains of a Neolithic wooden bowl there Maisy once filled to help her figure out how they were made they were making wooden bowls from a particular part of an alder coppice now luckily for us this all the coppers has got precisely what we want there's some wood on this which is exactly what will make a bowl and you can see it I think quite easily because this is all sort of bubbled up here where it's been repeatedly cut and can you see it actually is quite bowl shaped already so that's the outside of the bowl yeah and we'll have to hollow out yeah the inside yeah it didn't grow naturally like this did it oh it is natural but with a bit of help from man this will be cut down regularly every say ten years or so to start the regrowth and you'd have a crop of rods come out round the outside the modern forestry they plant a lot of trees they harvest them bang everything's gone but in the past they used the woods as a resource they kept cutting down a tree here coppicing a tree there and it maintained itself in a fantastic balance you had a never-ending source of material so what we're doing is going back to the original techniques literally that started in the Neolithic but you're going to have the advantage of a chainsaw and yeah well I mean that is a bowl while Maisie and Phil gather up their would John is marking out the trench in the central area of the monument at least he will do when he's figured out where he is completely lost in this flat field I think you're a little disorientated perhaps are you sure that's the ones you saw standing I'm standing by just before no way we stood here move can I trust you that it is supposed to be here now that sorted out Bridget can get on with looking for evidence of a Neolithic village if they lived here there'd be a lot of human and animal waste and this waste would raise the level of phosphate in the soil poor Middleton and his team are drilling down into the ground to reach the Neolithic layer of the soil the samples are then taken to a lab in the incident room for analysis Paul you're our parameter effectively aren't you well perhaps that's one way of looking at certainly we're measuring how much there is in the soil in relation to human and animal activity which can certainly include excreta you were collecting your soil samples boiling them up with hydrochloric acid to produce that solution and then adding a reagent to turn the solution blue if there was phosphate present presumably looking at these samples this one's a quick win one-off picnic visit as it where and the dark blue one is from the village cesspit and that one's a real hot spot in the context of the side the plan is to take samples of Neolithic soil on a grid which covers the whole site any hotspots will tell us there was a large number of animals or humans here in Phil's trench matt has been digging down through the layers of a ditch there's not a lot of fine so far but one of them takes us back to the very beginnings of pottery well it's not exactly the crown jewels is it well no I think is for for the Neolithic and it's quite nice we've got a fragments of pottery come out who got this little sort of rim with these decoration on it even if that definitely nearly yes it is yes it is that looks looks like a piece of mildenhall where this is the first sort of pottery vessel that we see in the British Isles it's quite coarse and to our eyes it's very basic but this is state-of-the-art domestic product for the nearly thing all these clips we've got nice bits of fire crack Flint wet soap crazy lines on it suggest it's been in the middle of a half and middle of very intense fire where did all this come from well we think we've got the end of the ditch here so we concentrate on that it's all coming from the top over there where all the charcoal and burnt dog was if we get down in deeper hopefully you want fun some more meaty stuff this is the terminus of the ditch isn't it every time any of the archaeologists say ditched terminus they go or goe I'd what's so significant about it well if we get the the terminals or the bus end of the ditch it tends to be where there's a focus of deposits and so if we're looking for the evidence of pottery bone other kind of possibly and ritual deposition it's going to be in that end piece of the ditch folk to be honest my house I don't think this quite constitutes ritual deposits they almost look heard of domestic and 30 days only Daisy still got a and a half left mildenhall where was made from about 3600 BC they were round bottom pots decorated with simple lines and dots on the rim and sides this find gives us the first firm evidence the cause Wade enclosure at North borough was in use from the very beginnings of the Neolithic Age you couldn't wait then oh nothing was gonna stop me about this one in fact I was so excited about doing this that I actually made some tools before we came here I don't know what sort of tools you're after but this is the one I'm really excited about I mean look what I've done there is made a little chisel and I've ground the edge off and put that in a handle as well that's fantastic y'all never made one of those before so I don't know how it's gonna work well this is one of the great opportunities because you've got the drawings of the ones we found here and you can see in this one you the swirly grain of the the copies store but on the rim which is round here so that'd be on there you've got these funny little marks they show that these were made by charring and then scraping ah so are you using fire to actually soften the wood cuz you see I mean I've been looking at that wood and I'm thinking what if we got a gauge or layout with something like that that's a lot of work and a lot of time the thing is in the neolithic if you're sitting around in the evening and instead of watching telly you're watching you you're bowl charlie well I think before we can watch the equivalent of Neolithic TV you better want to get your Firestar in or carry on making tools alright it's mid-afternoon and fines are still very sparse so Francis is relieved when he and find something which might support his side of the argument I think we've got what looks like the remains of a pot with some sort of burnt material in it ooh yeah it's not sort of wet digested biscuit let's come back to mud it can't go back to being mud unless it's very very poorly fired very poorly fat but it is it actually on the bottom of the ditch that's the bottom there that's really hard yeah that's nearly there though yes it's pretty well on the bottom yeah that's interesting you got a pot on the bottom of the ditch near the center it's got charred grain in it it doesn't look much now but I reckon we're looking there at a deliberately placed offering all right and that's very good news makes me very happy good the offering pot turned mushy because it was only partly fired perhaps in a bonfire this fits the theory of the pot being used as part of a ritual the pot maker saw no point in fully firing it has they'd no intention of using it as a functional part Stewart is out and about on his tour of the other Neil if it cause waiting closures in the area I'm now decide to Upton which is about 11 kilometers southwest of the site we're excavating and here a causeway enclosure was recorded in the plow field and the slope that the enclosure is built upon is actually on the slope which tilts down towards the south out to that valley area down there which is a valley of the river Neen this enclosure clearly is designed to be seen from the valley of the river NIEM down here and to look over in that direction I'm at the Klaus wedding closure item that was excavated before this gravel quarry in taupe totally destroyed it what he found here is a causeway ding closure actually sating Lee in the bend of a river which was out beyond it got to remember in the Neolithic period this was floodplain gravels water flowing lots of different stream and river channels very difficult territory to actually negotiate Iain is definitely having a good day in trench one he's now uncovered some large bones in the same ditch he found the offering pot our bones expert Peter Rowley Conway is delighted to have something to look at so in where these from and they're all from the top layer this black showing in the section right well these are various amis our cattle bones this is from the rear leg the rear foot of a large animal large cow this could well be nearly thick in size because they get smaller after the bronze age so this is a big animal and what's this this is a forearm bone it goes right there and this looking at it has been split while the animal has just been newly killed hit it with a rock or something right at that point and split this sidewall of the bone off right to expose all the marrow inside and least wheel or marrow in those day so you find a lot of bones like this this had been cooked I would think not before it's had the side knocked off to get the marrow out because that would cause the marrow to dissolve so I think this has been done just off the animals been skinned and butchered Francis's trench is providing our first clues about what Neolithic people did here the offering pot at the bottom of the ditch is evidence for Francis's ritual activity but the cattle bone suggests there was domesticated cattle kept here which supports Ben's view that this was a farm as yet there's not enough evidence to prove either theory and what about the Neolithic village Brigid was looking for in the central area of the monument have we done burger well we've definitely got a press tour at top soil that covers the entire site and this is here this is all of this brown material here yeah within it we do have small areas that have charcoal rich a little bit of burning going on but nothing definite and now one glimmer of hope is over here where Marcus's is cleaned off onto natural and within buried soil here he's got this bit of burning going on and the geophysics Pike suggests this should be something around here not that great does that well mean what I think that well be yeah yeah I'm afraid it does to any but I'm in a bit of a crisis apart from that spike there's nothing in the middle of this GF is that you'd want to shake a sticker no I mean that doesn't surprise me see you're being a Western modern man you see a circle you see a target you go for the bullseye they went like that in Neolithic times they were obsessed with boundaries so this site is actually surrounded by not just one but two great ditches around the outside so it's double bounded so I think the key to understanding this site lies in those double ditches round the outside so what do we do tomorrow we dig them so all day today we've been moving closer and closer to the center now we're going to turn this whole dig upside down go back to the outside put all our resources there and hopefully get more evidence about the people who built this place on the side of our neolithic cause Wade enclosure we're working furiously away trying to find out what the Neolithic people were actually doing there but Francis has brought me here to would Wharton Fenn to show me what the fans were like 6,000 years ago pretty bleak place for people to live well actually not Tony okay come here in the winter and you get a bit bit damp but you actually lived on the edge of the Fenn I mean they weren't stupid they didn't like to live in water you put your house on the dry land okay and then you had fields around you of the dry land which you're growing wheat and barley but in the winter when proteins getting a bit scarce if you're living on the edge of the Fenn it's great because you can come out here you've got this stuff you can feed as hey it's us breed but you know she love it you can put this stuff on your roof as well to keep you nice and dries much better thatch than from wheat or barley straw I mean we're standing on most squidging peat okay but you dry this stuff up and it makes fantastic fuel so this is a wonderful natural resource was there anything to hunt Oh huge amount that bit of water behind us would have been covered in ducks that have been hundreds of duck on there you also had geese and then also lurking in the depth in there you'd have had sturgeon so they're probably at caviar in Neolithic I think living here in the Neolithic would have been terrific on days one and two we put trenches over the inner ring of ditches and one in the center to look for a village today we're going to shift our attention to the outer ring of ditches and put a fourth trench here where the ditches can be seen clearly in the aerial photograph Henri's calculated where these outer ditches should be and tells Phil where to put the trench we know that the inner rings of ditches were built at the very beginning of the Neolithic period now we want to see if the outer rings were in use at the same time or added later Paul's finished measuring the amount of phosphate in the Neolithic soil and the results are very interesting on the graph we can see three spikes of high concentrations of phosphate their location is along a line which runs from outside the monument into its central area well what you reckon is it's actually might be animals being driven in to this central area that's right I mean I think the levels are high enough they're way above anything we expect a general background even sort of fine fairly intensive human activity and the locational and suggests it may well be some kind of that's a drove way or something worthy the animals are coming roadway and animals yeah that's fantastic Ben you seem particularly excited about the idea that being sheep and cattle on this side yeah definitely because this is evidence for for these herds that we were talking about people actually sort of capturing these wild animals domesticating them and actually pulling them into the enclosure so this is definitely one up for the farming side of the argument much to Ben's delight in Phil's trench they've successfully located the ditches of the Outer Ring but so far there's no interesting finds from them which is frustrating Bridget a little we're section like five small pictures so far and found what three fragments of bone and a whole lot and that is it don't be negative Ridge Dom negative I'm not being negative I just think it's a little strange do you want loads and loads of Oi he didn't lose a coin you're complaining about the absent from er well of course it is always analyst to have something to keep you going in here Bridget's frustration with the lack of fines is understandable but what we have to remember is that this monument is six thousand years old which means it was built 2,000 years before Stonehenge so anything that's found here offers precious insights into a time when our ancestors first made their mark on the British landscape Phil takes a break from digging to see how Maisie and James are getting on yes he got quite a nice surface there for you to get a work on Phil's Flint tools are as precious to him as a jar of ale and now's his chance to try them out easy it's not at all the scraper does a good job on the charred wood but he's also made a stone-age chisel which he's been dying to put to the test so this really is groundbreaking stores I've never used one of these before this works like a trying this done it you can actually get in amongst it I mean I think if you were really using a wood with a nice grain on it it would it would split out so easily it would it would I mean you're getting such a nice finish fix Maisie likes it it's fantastic oh yeah hon ver chisel go wish I could spend longer but I can't or God get back okay but just carry on the experiment yeah okay they are saying so far that to follow in Phil's trench the line of the outer ring of ditches is now strikingly clear in the soil one of these for Francis I think this is a miniature version of a larger ditch the ring ditch that we've got in the middle of this enclosure now and reason I think that is that over here we've got a causeway so we got one bit of ditch ending here another bit of ditch ending back you say a causeway but presumably not for people to come across they just fall in well exactly you know it's obviously ridiculous as a practical thing yeah but what I think these causeways are doing and there are lots of them I mean that's more over there is they're dividing this ditch deliberately into short lengths why would you do that I think it's something to do with families look Victor's drawn a picture let me let me show you now this is a sort of thing that was happening see this chap here maybe he was the head of the family yeah and he's placing a pot just like that pot do you remember we found yesterday yeah but sort of half fired thing hopeless pot absolute disaster but it was full of charred grain it was obviously an offering it's not a practical pot just as that ditches of the practical ditch it's representing something and I think that charred pot just like that skull behind is representing a story in a family history so a bit like a cemetery where you not only bury people but somehow you use them as an act of remembrance yes exactly like that absolutely Francis is convinced Neolithic people used the ditches to commemorate their ancestors but do our finds support this view we've had more bones than any other find but did they tell us anything else other than the Neolithic people ate meat they tell us a very great deal what we've got here is about two dozen cow bones they had pigs they had sheep these guys know exactly what they're doing they're not in a kind of long transitional period they are full farmers they're waiting hazelnuts to be sure but most of their food is coming from domestic crops and domestic animals why do you say that shows it's another version it's an assertion which I can back up here's a cow bone that has been through it you might say this is a hip bone what's happened here they've been cutting the little ligaments that join them so you can break this into separate blocks of meat but this is not and I stretched not a ritualized bone it has not been buried with reverence in some important votive deposit it's been thrown away how do you know that because a dog has come along and chewed this away and this end here and after the dog is left it and mass has come along and had a go there just to where its teeth down a little bit and only after that has this bone become bait this is classic domestic refuse it's a rough I'll bone is this how it's likely to be here yeah these are perhaps the most interesting cow bones we've got this came out in three bits and they go together like this this is a male normally these bones are broken and you'd say right that's bull but because we've got the whole bone you can measure the length as well and that is very various thing because it's too long to be a bull so what is it what causes bone to grow in length like that is castration this bone comes from a Bullock they were maintaining Bullock's at least some to increase the meat yield and get more beef off the hoof so these aren't casual farmers who've just strode in after them these people know exactly what they're doing and they are getting 80 90 percent of their food from cattle and I think Northbridge joins a number of other sites to tell us that we've got sophisticated farmers in our hands these are not half-and-half people a hearty Neolithic steak was no doubt complemented with fruits of the forest some live yogurt and served up in handsome alder wood bowls ready for tea that is just so amazing I mean they are they are works of art and I mean the texture that wood down there is magnificent yeah that I mean that that that effect is exactly the same as we saw in those original drawings of the Neolithic ones you know I feel very very cheerful yeah I'm really pleased brilliant if you had to really list the sort of things that you've learned from it what would they be well we are we understand much better now why they use these copyist lumps and I think if we had to go back to the wood and get more we choose slightly differently we know more about them now have you even prepared a feast as it's all genuine Neolithic we've got evidence for all this the nuts the bear is the sort of yogurt each easy things loving nearly pick herbs fish honey get that in there mmm yeah oh I forget attached to those no bevy I suppose uh what we do actually have some cider as some fermented apple juice so why isn't air out and james hasn't made the little vacation ha ha ha drinking out of the bowl ha ha what you like a blackberry Stewart has now combined his knowledge of the Neolithic enclosures he visited with what we know about the one at North bruh this is the best understanding we have of the monument in its landscape at the time so it really is quite a lonely situation surrounded by water channels with only a few dry land approaches demands it very much so yeah I mean one of the objectives are set out from here was to try and look at this monument against the background of all these other caused weight enclosures here of five in this grouping which seem quite unusual if you look at these other enclosures can you see or put Barham its these abilities restricted in that direction can't see anything that direction at all but you can actually see in a cone down to the river that's offing - it's exactly seems how it collects the river as it were in that direction but there's no visibility that way so really they're all looking down onto the waterways and Ethne Northborough are also in very watery situations as we've just seen from henry's we can set exactly what do you think no Wilkin temperature my guess is that they are I mean one thing that makes me think that is the commonality of shape the wall got this very strong oval shape but what makes it particularly interesting at Northbridge actually got more rings than the others and that's the furthest east along the Welland and it just makes me wonder if that's kind of as far as they were reaching out and this one had specific monumentality that they wanted to implant on the landscape Phil's perseverance has been rewarded with an important last minute find what do you got Wow what have I got Gordon Bennett will this come from I des standing the bomb in the ditch sir this is the best bone we've had yet this is well now I wouldn't ask you if I dare you hurt this is an aurochs what wild cattle Jenny what we've seen so far this isn't covered this is a distal fit it goes right there in me it's about four times as big this has never been domesticated this is a wild animal through and through how frequently do they turn up on Corvette enclosures ah not very often let's put it that way it's a nice thing to find it's very special well let you see that it you know you're kind of saying how important it is the place where we found it is special what's cause it's right the bottom of the ditch it's right in the middle between the two ends but this did not happen by accident this has been such a quite deliberately it does seem just too much it's too much of a ghost Ennis is very much of a green Salinas I Barragan face him or made my day or ox were hunted in the Neolithic period but must have been quite a challenge to kill they were formidable beasts built like a Spanish fighting bull but twice the size at the start of our dig of the cause Wade enclosure at Northborough we had two opposing views about what Neolithic people did here Francis argued it was a place for rituals revering the ancestors and gods while ben thought it was where britain's first farmers gathered in their resources so after all this archeology are you still convinced that essentially this is a big farm well look we've got enhanced magnetism in the ditches here this is burning this is a debris and charcoal from settlement being dumped into the top of ditches on the interior of the enclosure again the anomaly is raised by their burning here so it comes out as yellow the phosphates to show that we've got animals being driven into the enclosure pulled outside and then driven in so you know I think it's pretty compelling your compelling um superficially yes but the burning on the interior would fit beautifully with people using this seasonally clearing off the the vegetation and then getting on with their religious activities it does stretch credibility somewhat doesn't it to think that this huge earth monument with these massive ditches around it was built simply to be a farm well not a farm but a place where resources are pulled into they dominated a wide area of this landscape they are farming it and they're bringing the resources back here I just don't think you let your cows into church do you you don't let them pull in church when they're there that's a point isn't it aren't you simply importing a theory which works well in other sites where they have found ritual deposits and sticking it here where they haven't found any well I've been pissed but the fact they haven't found any we've got that half fired pot which doesn't make any sense full of charred grain right in the bottom of a ditch and that or ox bone which is placed absolutely on the bottom of the ditch right in the middle and that thing is a deliberate placement so are you prepared to concede that there might be a ritual element here well look I think in everyday life there's an element of ritual that creeps in and I think we can pick that up through archaeology so I'm prepared to concede that they were doing things that were not wholly practical all of the time and are you prepared to concede that there was probably some farming getting on him of course I think what really worries me trying yeah I think if we continue this discussion for another two or three minutes we might end up agreeing so I think we should say it's not the cause Wade enclosure at North burrow was the grandest of the group in the area it was situated on an island surrounded by lush Fenland and river channels and seems to have been built in two phases the inner ring of ditches was built first at the very start of the Neolithic Age while the smaller ditches of the outer rings were added later the light gravelly soils of the banks would have stood out against the landscape and could have been seen from a great distance the effect of the whole monument would have been very dramatic no other great monuments came before it no other man-made structures competed with it over the past three days we've managed to tease out a picture of this part of East Anglia six thousand years ago if I'd approached the site then I'd have seen massive ditches ahead of me and I'd have crossed them along a series of causeways until I came to this huge central area and ahead of me I would probably have seen a group of our Neolithic ancestors hacking away at a carcass and have seen others commemorating the dead by placing bones and pottery into a shallow grave while they waited rather local settlers with whom they could exchange grain or livestock the phones are still on land today and the field boundaries stretch off into the horizon but it was right here our ancestors put down roots and created the first farming communities subscribe to the time team magazine trench one for just 18 pounds fifty a year and receive a free trench one hat worth eight bonds call Oh H seven oh four hundred twenty to forty cheering 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Id: wkwLQRMt878

Length: 48min 46sec (2926 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2013