Time Team S12-E11 Skipsea,.Humberside

meet a real-time team fan this is Francis Davis who lives up here at skips Ian blow East Yorkshire and to put it mildly you're fairly interested in what was going on in this field on you absolutely why it looks like all your other fields except they plow deeper one year and we turned up all these fine which are really fantastic we've got everything from this prehistoric Arrowhead right through to medieval in fact Francis was so excited that she paid at her own expense how do you fist team this doesn't blow way to have a survey and as you can see there's a heck of a lot of activity so clearly something was going on here but what exactly we don't know this place is an archaeological blank sheet so Francis has invited us here and how long have we got to find out three days just three days if we don't get blown away is this a bit winded look at that Francis don't see that very often do you Porter to 9:00 in the morning and we're already putting in our first trench it's because you shelled out for the geophys Nick we might as well send Jeff his home then well I don't think we can because we've only got this one strip across the side of the field and we need to extend it into the rest of the field so if these features carry on their what we've actually done is started the two trenches one look where the ends of what look like a couple of terminals are can you see those Francis yes so there might be an enclosure or something there and the other one is across that big linear feature down the middle which might be some sort of ditched boundary or something like that I know him though he's getting really excited but look at that GFS it could just be field boundaries or medieval drains good Nick how would you feel if that's what we got firing but at least we'd know what it was but of all the pottery that we found two and a half three years ago I'm hoping it's a little bit more than that that's what we're here to find out that's why we put in the judges in it looks as if there's a lot happening this palimpsest of sites one on top of another one a palimpsest yeah yeah I don't think we've done one of those they're like a prehistoric elephant does no no no it's where the site's been reused time and time again and so you get this buildup of activity well it's going to be a battle against the wind today because Francis's field here at skip C is on the East Coast just above how this is our first visit to this bit of East Yorkshire and I think I'm reassured to hear that this field isn't as windy all the time GF is are working as quickly as possible to extend their survey on this ridge of higher ground while these two trenches give us our first look at what they're detecting already just digging through the topsoil is turning up more finds slag and I I reckon that's medieval that one but the one we're popping so far the luckier members of the team are starting work in the incident room France what we're going to try and do for you to help you understand what's going on in the field is get all the fines you've had into a time line so we can each see exactly when there's lots of activity going on and when it dies away I think feel you've just about gone on top of their historic yeah I mean this is this is lovely little a little collection of thing this all came out of the same field within sort of 50 metres either way it is straight away Phil can tell Francis that all her Flint finds date to the early Neolithic period around 4000 BC what you've actually gone is evidence so that the first farmers that were actually living in Britain but you need an expert eye to appreciate some of them it's just been flight very very finely at that end what you're actually gone there's a little n scraper some actual scraping tool for dealing with hides and skins and things like that that's right the other thing that is immediately nice is this lovely little leaf Arrowhead Phil's able to date this to the Neolithic because the shape of Flint arrows changed over time earlier in the Mesolithic they were smaller and looked like this while later in the Bronze Age they developed a Barb and Tang but film saved the best till last this is a real classic what we got is this lovely polished axe but you see it's actually snapped across there and what this tells me is that it was actually in the half like that when the blow are probably a very unfortunate blow hit the tree there is so much flexion in the handle and the axe that it just literally snapped the actor off and in so doing it took this whacking great chunk over the side of the axe and I'll tell you what if you put as many hours into making one of those is all we have if you do that the air turns blue this Neolithic axe ground smooth to give it a superior cutting edge was as good as the technology got in the Stone Age but Phil things Francis would have found a lot more Flint in this field if people were actually living here four thousand years ago he reckons her Flint finds could have been left by a hunting party just passing through so nice to find but nothing to do with what's showing in the geophysics that wind I reckon this must be one of the windiest days we've ever encountered but it doesn't seem to be putting anyone off in fact all our experts seem really fired up and excited by the potential of this side really they're just a bunch of big kids there's this rivalry developing between them about who's gonna be able to tell France is the most information at the end it's it's like a little competition going on Stuart's got this massive advantage because he's already done quite a lot of work in Skip see Stuart unfair you're ahead of the game I've done a bit of work here in the past Ernie what have you got well just to orient you here skip see this lumber ahead up here this is and all see this is coming around to the Humber estuary holes down here now this whole strip of land is known as Holdernesse now it's very different in the past to what it is now it was marshy and boggy there are a whole series of it Mears which are inland lakes islands of sands and gravels sticking out above them and the field that we're digging here is on top of one of those gravel ridges I'll tell you what it is far more coherent here that it's possible to be outside okay you go on tea break over oh try to get your tea oh it's still over Stewart's going to be looking for clues as to what's been going on in the area around Francis's field but he'll have to get moving if he's going to compete with geophys who've already extended their survey this is where we've put in the trenches to start with and it appears that it's medieval features there but it's still early days the thing that intrigues me though in the extension is this clear well I think it's a boundary yeah and there's lots of noise activity to that side and it seems very quiet as we go down the slope so I'm keen to investigate that back I think we need to put a trench across that because that looks as if it's a boundary of something now we're nice to know the date of it given we won't have time to dig everything it's crucial we make the right decisions this trench trench 3 is going in here across what could be a ditch marking the edge of a settlement but to me this huge circular blob looks more intriguing why aren't we digging that Stewart as ever it's quick to reassure me that they know what they're doing that shape there there's been a lot of Sun coring the maps actually show that they were saying quarries here and on the air Photography on this particular wood and another one you can see big areas which should dug out now that they look like sand quarries that suggests that's what that possibly basically the game is working out what all these squiggles mean and in addition to digging we're hoping that an analysis of Francis's finds will give us some clues as to when the site was occupied the story seems to be that there was virtually no activity on this site until around the time of the Norman Conquest 1066 and then we have pottery going through into the Tudor period 16th century and later but it's the rarely found norman period pottery that's got our pot expert interested so what do you think is telling us about what was going on in that field just after the Norman Conquest it looks like the kind of Sandwich that comes from people actually living here and using these pots it's not the kind of thing that gets spread on the field in the manure heap the pieces are too large and too crisp Francis I'm told the favorite piece of yours actually is this bit yes mainly because we couldn't figure out how went together but also the thumbprint because to me that was left I have somebody real according to Potter John Hudson this was part of a skillet a kind of frying pan but he's a bit puzzled by it yeah normally when he put handles on like this year old the pot by the base and he pulled the the pot out now when the block is to show me I stopped playing with it for a long time thinking there's something wrong with this and it's on upside down because that should be there and this around its side should fit in the palm of your hand there nice and easily anything going there so why they put it on upside down I don't know it you could only ask the person who did it in his long dead as Francis is so intrigued by this bit of pot John is here to try and make a replica for her this is the sort of potter's wheel that the medieval Potter's of this area would have use it's called a momentum click wheel it's just simply put a piece of tree trunk mounted in a frame which spins quite freely they didn't notice much production but they were produced by the mass yeah people would break these very easily and just discard them they're only say 20 for a penny 20 for failing that's yeah something like that they would be very cheap I mean but just look it's not a millionaires job as you can see from a from by your jacket this is the easy bit tomorrow John plans to fire it in a kiln so that Frances can have a completely finished pot there's the thumbprint I'll just snip that off there it's all right yes that's fine no I wanted I want you to be satisfied there you know I am quite happy now because it has intrigued us for ages what it could actually be meanwhile upon our windswept Hill we're slowly starting to make sense of our puzzle of squiggly lines so why did we put this trench in you know we've got this network of ditches yeah I really wanted to get some dating evidence and see what's happening to them I thought there might be an actual break at this point as well so that was a good point it turns out that the strong anomaly is actually an iron spike in the trench there this looks modern but over in the corner of the trench bridge has uncovered some burnt stones that obviously need more investigation you can see on top of this really big one it's got lots of heat affected material and it's as if hot ears been running across it what's through there like exactly yeah in terms of dating evidence the only clue we've found so far is one bit of pottery prehistoric yes that could be that could be Iron Age in this area the Iron Age pottery is usually quite coarse undecorated but we've also got things turning up that surely can't be Iron Age come on have a look at this look at it what this thing here oh yeah it looks like a piece of old Jones no no no listen about a sled and then it's got this big we obviously got this big bit of irony but we got piece of airplane please not mislead really I don't understand why you're getting a bit excited about that minutes it's with some debris that looks pretty late well I know it does but at the same time it's inescapable that there is a ditch running along here and there's no immediate sign of anything that has been actually cut through to allow this to be put in what what is the lead thing their fill is easy it's some sort of vessel or tank or something yeah it's like a big sort of well it's a shallow bucket there's the bottom of it yeah there's the rim of it and it the hole both soldier below squeezed together right we're going to have to dig a bit deeper to find out more but hopefully not as deep as these two are going in search of the environmental story Henry you're down at the bottom of the hill the archeology is right at the top of the hill is this kind of environmental stuff really gonna do anything for us yeah I don't think you can understand a site like that it's wrong the edge of this old wetlands unless you understand what the wetland is and how the environments changed you just don't understand how the archeology could work but surely she's a modern pond in here that's just been built well that is but oddly enough is actually built right over the top an ancient pond how do you know that well we've been coring really here if you look here you can see these sediments that we're pulling out in the core you don't have a feel of that trying to get your hands dirty that's basically a silt and that's been laid down by oh yeah by water either by flowing water or maybe still water so you basically stood here on an infield lake Hornsea muir is the only one still to survive and give us a good idea of how big these ancient lakes could be but understandably our team of chuffed because they've discovered new evidence of another one here well take some sediments away what we'll do is or take it back to the laboratory and I'll analyze prepolymer and that polymer tell us about the ancient environment or hopefully give us some clues what the environments like when's activity happening on the slope odds are that if we can work out what's going on up there we've got a confusion of ditches thanks to trench three we now know this squiggly line is a boundary ditch but the only dating material so far is the bit of Iron Age pottery found in one of the ditches in Phil's trench we've got one ditch in there yeah we've got another one in here yeah which has got our tripod and our picture in so you calling this a truly fun day yeah well it's got three legs oh it's got one there one there and one underneath and this is the picture that would have sat on the top of it what we don't know is whether it's actually sitting in the ditch or whether it's in a much later feature and then is there another ditch here well I'm standing on that the natural here's another spine this yellowish stuff but here this dark stuff is another ditch running parallel with the others and they're all heading towards this pile of stones now we've opened this up and look we've got an area of play come their films also found bits of a crucible making him think that this could be a furnace for iron working the ditch runs under the furnace so there are at least two periods of activity here complicated sighs isn't it just as Mick predicted this is looking like a site that's got traces of people living here over thousands of years no it would need to be according to Stuart it's easy to see why he's been working on a graphic that shows how this landscape looked before it was drained it shows that Francis's field on this ridge of higher ground would have been one of the few dry places to live in this area not only that but stewards keen to point out to me that this hill next door was once a very important site this apparently was the site of skip C Castle the center of the whole of Holdernesse in medieval times but it's actually much more than that these the earthworks here are actually spectacular I think that actually starts in the early prehistoric pood it's possible it's even Neolithic a huge great mound situated in the bottom of this bog out here this was one of those mirrors one of those lakes and this would have been a spectacular monument there then this big Ridge round here is probably an Iron Age enclosure very close to that earlier Monument and then finally when the Normans come along they they put their castle on top of that mound and reuse all this as part of their modern bearly castle so this was an important strategic site in both prehistoric and medieval times and it's right next door to us suddenly I'm starting to get excited about the possibilities of what we might find tomorrow Tony - Mick can you hear me yeah we're right on the top of skip see Castle we're about kilometre away from you and even from where we are we can see the glint of the digger oh so you would have been held to see this sighting in earlier times presumably with a great mare between us absolutely right have you been getting on I we just got some really cracking geophys results John just brought over the shows the site going on into the field next door a huge density of features looks really exciting so we're gonna have to run a changing that tomorrow his France is happy very tell her if she's having a good time now I think tomorrow's gonna be something really special listen to this this is from the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer written in the 14th century Lord's Day is in Yorkshire as I guess a marshy country called Holdernesse and this is it it's all been drained now but in ancient times all this would have been bog and marshland except up here on this hill there would have been people living and we know that because the owner of the field Francis has had loads of fines from the prehistoric right through to the Tudor period and she's invited us here to help us sort the story out yesterday the archaeology was really confusing but apparently there's a new geophys which could hold the key to the whole site look at it was a massive responses just gia fees are excited about their latest results yesterday we started with just this small area to go on then they added this and now they've extended into this field and discovered the signals are getting busier and stronger but is their plot showing human activity or just geology I think it's mainly human activity there's a lot of ridge inferring coming through in on this line have you got your the epic yeah that's one thing you can confirm from the aerial photograph there's a whole block of fields with ridges going that way all over that area so it suggests any of that that's visible there is going to be underneath that Richard for MIT we've got to have a look at some of that stuff oh I think so yeah and I think because we've got ridge and furrow cutting through it we've got to be careful that we don't pick something that's going to be been wrecked by the region thoroughly where if you look at the detail this boundary we talked about yesterday I think it may well curve round there can you see sort of ditches curving like let it come on to there and back well it could do it the pictures so complex right but I think if we had a look at least one of the a yes yeah but clearly we've got things beyond as well with magnetic fills intrigued by this big blob that something's not another big bucket again is this mr. Lunt this looks so intriguing would you be prepared to go away from your fascinating bucket and one finder that thought to that so we've yet more squiggles to investigate we're going to open a trench here and over this big blob and geophys don't want to waste any time doing it what I've got time for cut I do it's so cold here I want to cut back on because they don't have to do the digging blob well good who'd be an archaeologist on a cold day in Yorkshire without wind we've got rain nos next I don't think snow is predicted but anything's possible it's easy to forget that when we started here virtually nothing was known about this hill this area was an archaeological blank but even so I don't think any of us expected to find so much surviving and stretching all the way across here there's a kind of competition going on amongst the team to see who can impress Francis the most and now that Phil's moved on from trench one we've got two would-be detectives trying to make sense of the lead bucket we discovered yesterday is burning on the base there is building harmonization there yeah if we take this on both sides TV is heavy isn't it completely solid and quite safe absolutely nothing on it to give its age away but someone no it's a nice little someone will know someone will just tip it up in heaven yeah better look no it's reason why it was Chuck's away it's not got a hole in it there's nothing why not reuse it's one of the easiest metals to recycle isn't it you know well valuable piece of kit really we're also attempting to show Francis what some of her pottery finds look like by making replicas of them to get the job done in time John's had to make his kiln out of modern materials but Victor's planning to show Francis the kind of kill the original pots were made in it's rather larger than that huge things yeah quite quite big films yeah yeah and if a mouse could move how to cut it but it seems such a shame to spoil so that she could join all of Francis's finds were discovered during field walking in this field and Stuart's been wondering why we've had to dig so deep to reach the archaeology here you farm these fields for it for a long time he's got a theory that might explain it but first he wants to talk to the farmer who used to plough France's his field how deep do you plough it uh approximately nine inches deep all over but it was different over there the soil the soil gently different Stewart believes that a lot of soil was dumped here to fill in some sand quarrys in this field there's some pics marked on the map in this area here in the 19th century the digging sand out or possibly clay something of that sort of order what this means is that we can't be sure Francis's finds belong in this field they could have been mixed up with the soil brought in from somewhere else I think has been in fill more than ever what we really need now is some secure dating evidence and here in trench two it looks like matt has come up with the goods not only can he confirmed this GF is black line is a large ditch but he's also discovered the base of what looks like an oven built in the ditch after it had silted up most important though he's got some dating evidence for us in the shape of lovely large bits of pot francis i wanted you to see this pottery that Peters got because you're getting very excited about it look alright I have a tear Frances you can see that it's a jar or cooking pot it's got a nice groove around the inside of the room for putting a lid in and even on the outside the actual soot from the last time it was used to make a a meal spilt over the edge and got burnt on let's say you see 11th century oh wow either side of the the Norman Conquest round about the time of the Norman conquer you don't see it every day of the week so well they may not look like it but they are excited about this bit of pot which would have looked something like this and I have to admit that I'm beginning to get excited too because it means that we're digging up a site that was probably occupied at the time of the Norman Conquest it could even have some connection with skip C castle which is literally just on the next hill along do we know when the Martin Bailey was been it must have been built between 1071 and 1086 because his fairly precise because 1071 weren't as the man Drago was given hold on us and 1086 he went and it was given to somebody else jugo who was it well he was a Fleming we know almost nothing about him except that he came from Flanders with William the conquerer he was married to one of the conquerors relations and the Conqueror gave him not only skip C but the whole of this district known as holding us all the way down to the Humber so he was a big powerful man he was indeed yes the Norman motte-and-bailey Castle must have looked something like this and was positioned here not only to control access along these sand islands but to provide a lookout against invasion from the sea it's hard to imagine now but our sites just across the Mir was next door to the centre of power in Holderness in the 11th century now more than ever I'm really curious to know what was going on here in France this is field the question is can we work it out since the very first time team that we ever did about 12 years ago every time there's been a problem to do with something metal coming up we've called for Gerry over there from Bradford University to sort it out for us and our problem this time is that we've got this little tripod and we've got this lead bucket but we don't know what they are or what a date of them is Gerry can you give us a hand whether that that they're difficult to relate together and it's possible that the tripod is there and for example that the lead bucket was sitting on the tripod we say heat underneath and you're just gently heating something now one of the things that would immediately come to my mind it's not not allergy but it'd be something like salt making whereas common to use lead dishes to basically boil the brine to elect salt form so that's possibly one thing I a sort of an organic process nothing to do with metallic e-date looking at the state of the preservation of the iron because it's in very good condition I suspect that it's at the earliest early medieval probably later good at last we're starting to get somewhere but what about the possible iron working furnace in this trench there are two basic questions to ask what is it and how old is it I suppose is there it's the big question right what is it the Clay's is quite pink but it hasn't really been highly fired it's not fired hard so I don't think it's a particularly high temperature process I don't really think it's to do with metalworking also you've got the ash being scraped out that way and it does look at the moment as though there aren't lots of little bits of fragments of slag in each other no not really no it's all around you can see the bags over here well I think this is just slag that's kicking around the site and I think this is probably more an organic process something maybe even just smoking fish smoking meat making brine it's not industrial activity but there is industrial activity in the area so we now know something about this end of our GF is we know this was a big field boundary ditch that was open in the 11th century but later had a clay oven built into the bottom of it we've also got evidence of other low-temperature processes going on here most likely to do with salt making apparently they've been three other LED buckets found in coastal regions in Yorkshire and they to date to the 10th and 11th centuries ours apparently is far superior because it's been made from just one piece of lead as a valuable commodity it's been deliberately folded before being put into the ground presumably for safekeeping only the person who left it never returned to retrieve it now having made some sense of this area we're going to record what we've found and closed these trenches down at the moment Phil's working here in the blob trench and we're hoping he might find evidence of the actual settlement where people are living but Phil's not sure exactly what he's uncovered as yet and the excitement right now is in the new geophys plot that John's about to reveal to Frances this is what you've seen so far and we've extended the survey towards Oh crikey just goes on and on alarm doesn't it and look as this massive yeah well I'm calling a d-shaped enclosure you know I was getting quite excited about but then we continued the survey - he's just going on it it's just unbelievable but it certainly changes my point of view from out of my kitchen window because of thinking what was out here I'm just wondering whether it's certain John's never seen anything quite like it to him it looks more Iron Age than many evil so where do we dig to find some answers if we're going to get some dating evidence for dissing enclosure then I think that would be a good place to go in the first instance so trench number six gets underway and it doesn't take long for Raksha to take off the topsoil and reveal the ditch but can she tell what date it is originally by the shape of the ditch we thought that it was iron age in shape but the pottery says otherwise it's actually medieval this is the stuff Peter - my untutored eye that looks a better class of pottery than we've been finding anywhere else yeah and it's also the the largest amount we've had on the site so far I mean this is really more for many of the trench we've got these late Saxon or or early medieval cookbooks yeah this one decorated with some impressions and we're seeing stuff we haven't seen before on the site the the appearance of glazed pottery these and glazed jugs so Mick what do you think this is a medieval D shaped thing might be I don't know we've not seen anything like this and we've not seen a site with this type of geophysics that produce is predominantly the sack so normal material I mean it's made us all think this afternoon quite what we're dealing with best of all all the pottery in this trench dates to around the time of the Norman Conquest and there's loads of it suggesting we must be close to where people are actually living but not only that because we aren't finding any later pottery Stuart thinks we may be discovering a settlement that was given up for farmland by the early 14th century because as this aerial photo shows Francis's field was covered by medieval plowing the cone slide is actually quite a relevant part of our story here this is apparently the fastest eroding coastline in Britain with something like two metres falling into the sea each year in medieval times the coastline was way out here and we know that several settlements such as Klayton were recorded as falling into the sea did all the people who were living in was now under the sea tend to move in the direction of snakes exactly like that's the critical point because it's like not only do they have to move and live somewhere else but they they've lost that much agricultural ground therefore on the ground that was left there's a more intense period of agriculture and it's that intense period of Agriculture we see the physical evidence of in our field and that's one of the main reasons why skip see actually group is a settlement the close language retreating so almost the end of day two and I feel as though we're starting to pull together a great story for Francis and it looks like she should also have some replica pottery to look at tomorrow because it's almost ready to come out of the kiln we'll also be trying to make sense of our GF is map by colouring the ditches in blue to make them stand out from the lines related to plowing that are confusing the picture it's going to take some sorting out especially as GF is have just revealed more of the puzzle I think we have to try it a different strategy in the remaining time we've got collections of pottery the sack so normal stuff 11th century stuff and we've got loads of ditches what we can't define really is where the buildings are so I think what we do is to dig where we've got a lot of pottery inside one of these enclosures to find the buildings you know all our trenches have been across these black lines on here we need to get inside because that's where the buildings will be of the farmsteads that are defined by the ditches right so we've found where people have been working here over the last couple of thousand years and where they were chucking away their pottery tomorrow we're going to see if we can find where they lived our final day and with no time to waste we're opening another trench its main goal is to find evidence of one of the buildings that was part of the norman period settlement we're discovering here it's the day francis has been looking forward to when we start to put together the picture of what we've discovered about life here in medieval times these animal bones for instance include cattle horse sheep and goat all animals that could graze on the marshland and it's clear every last use was being made of the bones we have some evidence of cut marks on the ends of some of the bones in this case this is a cattle bone and there's some cut marks on it that suggest M dismembering and skinning and in the case of this bone which is again also from cattle and a bone that's quite typically and broken across the middle to extract the marrow giasses have added even more to their amazing map of human activity in this field the problem is we only have today left to try and make sense of it this morning they've moved into the field next door to see if they can find out where the settlement actually ends but it's a great problem to have we're discovering a settlement connected with big history the Norman Conquest an event that had terrible consequences for the people living here who resisted the change William the conquerer came up to the north and brought an army up here and in the winter he wasted the north it was called the harrying of the north he burnt the villages he burnt their seed corn which means they're going to star the next year and many many thousands of people died and what do we know about the fact all of these changes had on the daily lives of the people who are actually living here by the time we come back to doomsday book in 1086 20 years after the conquest the population has fallen to only seven families and the value has gone down from 32 pounds to 6 pounds but it was not completely empty because some places in doomsday book are just recorded as this is waste when nothing is happening at all so the people using this pottery would have seen a lot of change and a lot of suffering absolutely yes whether we can fully understand the features we're digging or not everything has to be recorded so that someone can puzzle over it later oh I've got that one here in this trench put in over this GFS blob the archaeology is very complicated and would require a bigger trench to sort it out but below these medieval ditches fields found something we haven't seen on this site before one thing that we have got in this trench is is evidence of the earliest occupation on that on the hill and it's a circular thing Phil reckons he's found a curving ditch belonging to an Iron Age round house a reminder that there's evidence of earlier occupation here but it's hidden by the later medieval settlement on top our environmental team have dug some six meters deep into this site taking soil samples through the different layers of archaeology around this pond now after working around the clock to process the results they reckon they'll be able to impress Francis with what they've discovered it might not look very exciting I might not like a flint axe or something but it sells us just as much about the past as any artifact spam the sediment from beneath your pond a full of very particular sort of pollen grain it's this pollen grain that's birch pollen it shows us the sediments down there about 13,000 years old that's very old the end the last ice age but in terms of the archaeology on our site probably the earliest thing we have is the Neolithic this your axe which we found from there absolutely for cutting wood we can tell you a little bit about that - yeah exactly as we move into the Neolithic period we start getting different sorts of pollen grains we get this one we get this one finally this one this is all tree pollen we got hazel pollen down there an oak pollen and lime pollen so it basically seeing a very wooded landscape at the time the Neolithic activity in fact the landscape would think we'll probably look something like this very close woodland in most areas but most of our evidence in the trenches dates to the medieval period and they can tell us that the landscape by that time had become very different what you see in the pollen record is you start getting grains i disappearing this is grass pollen so you get an opening up the landscape that woodlands being cleared completely and as we move on still further we get these sorts of grains or cereal pollen appearing so we had cultivation so in medieval times the landscape here looked something like this impress of course are they good yes of course here but are they the best how well that will have to wait and soon right John you haven't peaked at this yet have you no but I'm going to elitist yes absolutely no I haven't to know him there's so much for Francis to see today she's going to be rushed off her feet right now it's time to see the replica pottery there you are fences thank you very much and just to compare that with the original how does it feel to be holding in your hand the original object was started the whole interest in this area off for you I don't know it's absolutely amazing it really is because for ages and ages we didn't know what this could possibly be and we had loads and loads of ideas and none of them very sensible but that's definitely a sensible I would be quite happy to eat out of that I wouldn't if I were you up until now we've been excavating through the big black lines on the geophys but today we thought we'd try something new we'd excavate between the lines to see if we could find any evidence of any houses and this is the result huge trench with absolutely nothing in it not very helpful the grand plan hasn't exactly set the world on fire is it no we've not really got a lot from that trench at all we've extended the geophysics and we've got lots more targets and we'd been talking about going for those but too late in the day to do any more about that so I think what we need to do is actually go back to where we had most of the finds from what most those sexo norman pottery finds these rakshasas and actually extend that and see if we can see more of the buildings and structures there so that was raksha's original trench yep we're going to take it right up to the this street frontage yeah and see if we've got a building that butts to the road basically dig as big a hole as we can in the time that we've got available yes seems your plan booty seems like the best strategy so we're extending raksha's trench and moving extra diggers in for one last push to find evidence of a building but khurram's has had some worrying news that the evidence might not be that easy to recognize I gather the possibility the buildings might have been made of mud but I don't quite understand how that could work well this area has very little in the way of natural building materials is nono Timbers no stone and mud or clay was the obvious material to use I've got a piece of mud here from the last mud house in skip C was demolished in 1970 and it shows straw or in it pebbles a great variety of things including Isum Shaw cow dung and anything else scraped from the fields do we know what that would look like well I have a photograph of the last mud house in skip C and it had brick wall and pan tire roof but it was extended to that height in the 18th century before it was just mud and there's a lump of mud here which would have gone 6 foot high and then there would have been attached roof so the medieval houses on our site were built of mud what evidence would we expect find of them probably very little but the mud would have looked a bit of difference because of the pebbles in it and that maybe the damage would have a different consistency from the mother of the already natural mat around it sounds difficult to me but at least we've got Phil helping in this trench now and maybe we're close to a building here because we are getting loads of fines Terry think I found a brooch that's very nice um no that that is a buckle this piece is the tongue that fits over this rod and the strap you see comes and fastened around here the other end groups underneath so it's about yes that's yes it's a copper alloy belt buckle and little molded ends twelve thirteenth century there are so many finds here that I can't believe we're not going to find a building carrenza meanwhile is wondering what this settlement was called the established view when we arrived here was that Klayton the place that's named in the doomsday record but has vanished now has vanished because it was eroded by the sea but we've now found a settlement of that date over there Susan says the logical inference is that is the settlement of Cletus - you're not convinced well came across this reference in a document of 30 note 6 which shows Nova hydaburg either Klayton their new harbour for Klayton now the implication to me there is that the harbor and cleated are on the coastline well yes I agree that's one interpretation but I have another one which is that the settlement itself was further inland and that Klayton really needed a landing place on the coast the other reason for thinking this is Klayton is that all these lands in the southern part of skip C parish will call Klayton lands even as late as the 18th century they were part of the copy hold of the manor of Clayton and it seems logical if we've got the settlement obviously evidence of some settlement for the dig inland that this could be Clayton and in fact his honor sort of prime spot it's the highest point in the that's right is the high ridge in the parish I've just worried wait with pinion the tail on the donkey that we found a certain what we've got a name we making the two together only we got the tail in the right place I'm a client agree with Susan well Stuart may not be sure about the name of the settlement but he's got plenty to tell Francis about the history of her field this enclosure map of 1785 shows the shape of the original medieval fields now if we look at the evidence from the aerial photography those are the fields of rhegium furrow they were still surviving when this aerial photograph was taken in the 1940s as some some more up here for in Victor's drawing shows the kind of settlement that Stuart believes was here just before the Norman Conquest but he reckons the settlement was abandoned when this field was needed for Ridge and furrow plowing as skip C was expanding then later on it happens again in 1765 enclosure bill imposition of regular fields all across this landscape the open fields that were part of the ridge of our system disappeared so the field you've got now is like a capsule of all those events in history times almost up and after collecting something like a quarter of a million readings geo fees are ready to sit down and report to Frances well this is how the field was two years ago when we first came to do the survey for you obviously if you ignore the trenches in the cars and that's what we managed to achieve in the three days that is totally unbelievable I'm still amazed myself I mean we've gone into your neighbor's field now and it just continues in all directions we've not actually been able to find a limit to the site well I thought there might have been a small village or a small settlement up there but to actually see that license done some wonders with the graphics converted the dots and the blobs and so on into the sort of ditches okay we haven't got the houses and so on but that's sort of the first stage towards rebuilding that picture then it all disappeared and got covered with the rich and flora yeah the plowing and finally out in Francis's field Phil's got some last-minute good news Oh Mako rang we've got our building yeah I really do I mean what we got is this kind of were this big hollow area yeah which is running from from Matt and the edge is running right round here so it looks like we got the end of it right and then along here we got this definite row of stones inside we've also got stones we never had stones anywhere else in the site and along this row with stone you know you even got a sort of gravely core to it as well smacks to me so that may well be a wall liner summer beyond it we got what looks like a ditch added to that this ditch is crammed full of fines what does our buildings historian think I think those liner stones is a clue because often with a mud house you would want a firm base a solid base that wouldn't rot wouldn't get damp and so cobblestones there would help the gravelly piece is interesting because the type of mud wall we've got has pebbles in it has holes that sort of thing is maybe the remnants of some bit of mud walling it's difficult to reconstruct with so little solid evidence but we do know something about medieval mud houses from the few that survived into modern times basically we're talking about farmsteads that looked something like this essentially a building that when pulled down would leave little more than a few stones and the scatter of pottery to tell you it was ever there it confused by all the information you've got as it all become crystal clear I think it's almost become as clear as mud but there's just so much absolutely so much whose evidence really impressed you I think GFE is because they have shown the extent of it but then the evidence of the fact that we've got at the bottom of our pond is thirteen thousand years old that the end of the last ice age and we can actually tell what the scenery was like then but it's just the whole thing is overwhelming but it's the importance of what this plot has revealed that tips the balance in favor of GF is their survey is showing a range of periods of occupation dating at least from the iron age through to a rarely found settlement of the norman period untangling the many phases and ditches is a massive job but this is Victor's attempt to show francis what life was like here around the time of the Norman Conquest John you won you're the best and the time team guides to the archeological sites of Britain and Ireland by Tim Taylor is now available price twenty pounds to order call Oh 8 7 Oh 1 2 3 4 3 double 4 or click on to channel 4 comp slash shop tonight at 8 some super satire from Bremner bird and fortune but coming up next here on 4 watch out Homer Simpson is in the house

Channel: Reijer Zaaijer

Views: 341,314

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Id: w1XPnvqAylg

Length: 48min 51sec (2931 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2013