Time Team S14-E13 In the Shadow of the Tor, Bodmin Moor, Cornwall

welcome to one of the most hostile environments in Britain today yet in prehistory it was one of the country's most sought-after neighborhoods the Stonehouse at the heart of bombing more in Cornwall has been here for 5,000 years and believe it or not it was once an ideal place to have a home but what was it that drew generations of prehistoric people here what sustained them and why is this spot now so inhospitable we've got three days to chuck a lot of science for this one because the digging and there will be some digging on those houses and this can may not give us all the answers Cornwall behind one of the wildest and most romantic coastlines in Britain lies Bodmin Moor barren windswept and dominated by huge craggy tors weird granite outcrops that have been sculpted by millions of years of harsh Cornish weather this is a landscape that's been witnessed to thousands of years of human history a recent archeological survey recorded hundreds of prehistoric settlements here but no one can say for sure how old they are or even if they're all the same age what are we looking at Frances well this is one of the best preserved landscapes in Britain because it's all on the surface there's everything here we're going along a track way which is probably 4,000 years old and it's leading up to this Bronze Age building here do we have any idea how many people would have lived here during the Bronze Age here when we carried out the survey we recorded at least 200 settlements and 1,500 individual houses within those settlements now it's impossible to say whether people lived in them all the time whether they were contemporary and whether or not they were seasonally occupied or poni occupied but what we can say the sentence there at least a couple of hundred people up here at any one point maybe even a couple of thousand is this a doorway it is yeah it is eerie the idea of going into somewhere that's maybe five thousand years old what exactly we gonna do here Frances we're gonna do an excavation dig a hole and find evidence that all suggest yes this was a house or no it was used for livestock and will also date the this settlement lies just underwrote or the second highest point in cornwall but it's so exposed that you wonder why people would have wanted to live up here at all the archaeology though suggests but unlike now this wind and rain swept Moore was once a hive of activity if it was a Bronze Age settlement then we're looking at anything between a thousand and three thousand years before the Romans but it's still only a theory it's important that we date these structures properly and we're just the latest in a long line of archaeologists to come here Helen we've got a really crisp edge along here and another one here isn't this a trench hasn't displacement dug already yes you're right a distinguished local archaeologist called Dorothy Dudley brought a team here in the late 1940s and she dug a few small trenches through some of these features and nothing more had been known until just last week we came upon a box with some more material in it so it's a case at the moment of trying to put the various jigsaw puzzle pieces together and find out what she discovered so all I can see here is Moore and big stones is there anything that Jeff is can add to the mix of course there is I mean we don't actually know that all of these around houses I mean some of them could be stock pens they could be clearance cans if we can identify areas of burning that may indicate hearth and so help with the interpretation then we've got the whole landscape beyond well yes and the landscape shows up incredibly well on this weatehr photographed we're standing in that round house and Dorothy Dudley also excavated in that one and we got permission to dig there now there on either side of this great big enclosure and wouldn't it be fantastic if we could prove that that round house and that round house were in use at the same time in which case this whole thing would be a village we're beginning our dig in the doorway and the first challenge for us is working out which of these stones are part of the original walls which stones a rubble and which stones are just stones if these were Bronze Age buildings they would have looked like this low stone walls with timber beams forming a conical roof which would have been covered in turf or even hides if it was a house there would have been a heart in the middle for the family fire I say if because ten years ago the Bodmin Moor survey assumed all the house circles here were Bronze Age but no one's been able to accurately date the whole settlement some structures on the moor could be thousands of years older still because 500 meters away to the northeast is another huge man-made feature we suspect it's Neolithic and if it is we're talking at least 2,000 years before the Bronze Age this is my sort of world up here Tony it really is I absolutely love these great open spaces it's just so atmospheric and then right in the middle of it look Francis believes this mysterious Bank that looks like a ruins dry stone wall could be a colossal prehistoric burial mound but we might be pushed to find any evidence the soil here is very likely to be acidic so in other words bone won't be preserved so what are we gonna do here what we're going to do we're going to put a couple of trenches where people have dug holes in the past so here join the Second World War this is a training exercise so tanks used to come thundering through here so this time time teams gonna Thunder in and we're gonna knock a hole in here on the side of the trench and then we'll put another one up here where there was also another track we can be able to record the construction of this can and also find some traces of a buried soil off buried soil of all soils buried no no look let's suppose for example that this pan was was 4,000 years old maybe six days here though the soil that he's sitting on is gonna be buried and that will preserve so much information about the environment of the landscape at the time which I mean the thing is as Phil said it's acid FIF site so that means we won't get those which is a disappointment but we will get pollen and that will tell us an enormous amount about the environment the trees and grasses growing in this area this structures over 500 meters long and despite the foul weather Phil can't wait to get his teeth into the archaeology meanwhile your fears are working through our potential Bronze Age settlement they're looking for signs of burning which would have been left behind if they'd been a hearth in any of these buildings we're also about to open a second trench over this house circle and yet again there's evidence that it's been done before this time it could be our enthusiastic amateurs or perhaps squaddies on one of their World War two exercises I'm inclined to go for the military option hoping everyone's in it but this string that I've put here takes out a quadrant about a quarter of the whole thing and makes use of that trench and if you see if you come right here will virtually opposite the doorway so if there is a half with any burning it'll be right down there so I think that's the next thing to dig her thinking room well that would be great because I mean if we find that no one has been in here before your really good chance that if this is a health circle we'll have a good occupation deposit and that would be the best chance for getting dating evidence and fines and then we'll be able to release it up to that house served up they were met and Helena up on Phil's trench is difficult to see how he'll ever make any sense of this huge pile of stones but at least he's happy I'm sure yeah what's the weather look like looking good better than this morning please don't give the uncle of the Church of Troy over there or lish considering the selection of whether that's been chucked at us this morning it seems odd to me why anyone would want to live here or indeed go to the trouble of building a 500 meter long can but our local experts think that the first settlers here were drawn towards row or route or they'd have been in or of these rocky outcrops and there's evidence that they were worshipping here the tours were the sort of primary landscape features that were clearly venerated by the people that lived here here at route or we've got the hilltop enclosure which we know was probably nearly thick in date with us than other examples elsewhere on Boardman and these are almost certainly some kind of tribal gatherings centers for ritual ceremonies a meeting place for people to come together and sort of celebrate their lives within the landscape steward also believes row tour provides a connection between the mysterious stone Bank and the much later settlement he suspects both a focused on the tour but proving it can't be achieved by digging alone well he would say that wouldn't he I think it's on those sites where what's below ground actually might not be as informative as actually what's above-ground there's the stone sizes there's the shape and size of these banks or cans whatever they are we can look at how the constructed what they lined up with in the landscape so this is a classic case you've got to start looking at the obvious and try to understand what it's telling it in Phil's trench he's beginning to suspect this Bank is far from being a random pile of stones you've got one there and another very very flat one in there in fact you've got one here on edge and while I'm notes into this is bang-on lowing with the edge of the cairn there's a load of upstanding stone they just stick up out of the ground oh yeah and they go right away through here I reckon this is going to prove to be the edge of the can the build-up and the make up of it is going to be over that side and on that side is a collapse where it fell out I've got exactly the same thing on my side so mid-afternoon on day 1 and it feels as if we're close to some sort of discovery and we're beginning to make progress in other areas as well this morning Phil and Frances were banging on about buried soils and we've now taken our first samples from the side this should help us get a snapshot of what was going on in the prehistoric landscape what can you do with this mud once we've dug it up we can learn all sorts of things from a sieve of mud like this believe it or not we can look at the pollen grains they tell us about the vegetation which is growing around the side we've got a plant macro fossils the seeds they can tell us about insects and they're a very good indicator of the environment and also climatic change as well anything else there's also tests we can do it's called soil phosphate analysis what does that do or what we do is we take samples of soil from the trenches and we apply a series of chemicals and that will tell us how much phosphate there is in that soil sample so it's not just settling around with mud and spiders legs it certainly isn't what can you learn what can you tell us well it's I've always argued they can understand sites like this without this sort of environmental information it may not be as exciting as your big walls up there or your big field boundaries or your Flint tools but it's just as important in our first stone circle we're still trying to find 1/2 to help us identify this as a Bronze Age house rather than a cattle pen and then there's our other target Phil's getting more and more confident that this is a purpose-built structure and one of the most extraordinary he's ever dug and this tiny piece of Flint might be the first evidence we have that this can is much earlier than anything else on the site I just get so I show you the way absolutely magnificent what short night we're looking at for it up here how much of it is very early mezzo lithic you know six seven thousand BC no just wonder whether or not it's a toy tiny chip whether they don't say a spray pool somewhat like that and it gets dulled yeah and they're actually resharpen it a lot of the scatters that we get are like that where you get a lot of flakes and retouching material and not much in the way of tools and of course if you if you've got to bring flint what from the coast that's what we think mostly comes on bottom in law it comes from the beach pebbles that you get on the coast about 10 miles from - I suppose so in other words this stuff is very valuable material so if you've got a blunt Flint tool it pays your hashanah yeah one of the things that I was particularly interested in is where it's coming from because what you say it was right down in that bottom there Tracy yeah it's just this dark soil down the dark layer down here it's quite compacted and dry see and we wonder whether we're not again in to get into either the surface that was here when this thing was put up yeah or whether we could be in the top of a buried soil yes that's what we're hoping for isn't exactly a very slow beneath this structure whenever it is the light here on road tour would have been as dramatic to the ancients as it is to us today they worshiped the Sun and ran their lives by it and thinking about it so do we despite the impetuous weather it's been a good first day in our to house circles the diggers have finally got into their stride over on the Kin they're now looking at stones that haven't been seen for thousands of years and look at this we're now deeper than the antiquarians got down to and this surface too is maybe five thousand years old and tomorrow we're going to dig into it to see whether this was a place where people lived or maybe where they buried their dead day two on Bodmin Moor we've come here to unravel the mystery of this deserted landscape the once attracted generations of Britain's earliest settlers yesterday John's Jeff his results were what were you familiar inconclusive but today you're much happier Anya yeah they are they're quite exciting because we're getting the bigger picture now I mean these areas of enhancement at this end of the survey when you actually overlay them on the round houses they coincide exactly where's at this end we're not seeing any enhancement with the round houses so what do you think that enhancement might be well the enhancement I think is burning and so that could be halves so it suggests that these might well be lived in and that's right here yes but that there is a problem Dorothea Dudley actually excavated far more of these round houses than we thought it's just possible that we're seeing excavation disturbance by coincidence Tony I actually have her plan here now that one there with the very high enhancement happens to be this one and she doesn't appear to put a trench in it at all so are you happy for us to dig this house because so far we've only been allowed to dig houses that have already been disturbed and that's because we didn't want to damage sites unnecessarily and also to save you time because the trenches are there but we do want to get the story out of this site and we do need dates and hards give you dates the potential for dates through radiocarbon dating this large stone behind Frances here may be the site of the hearth it would certainly be great from our point of view if we were able to dig as it were a virgin circle wouldn't it be fantastic a fantastic opportunity now we can get on to some undisturbed archaeology in our new trench 3 and with Helens team still digging trench 1 and bridges team busy entrenched 2 we've got a fair chance of finding the occupation evidence that we're desperate for it seems to be them the floor so we've also got our environmental laboratory in a nearby farmhouse where Ben and Emma are examining the buried soils from the site to try to build up a picture of how the landscape looked and how it changed over the last 10,000 years looks a lot more organic in the church another archaeological tool at our disposal radiocarbon dating on organic remains such as wood bone and plant material back on-site in trench one Helen and Matt are beginning to make sense of Dorothy Dudley's 1950s dig I think you can vaguely see across here where it used to be in this few of stones but I'm mmm we've gone out beyond that you can see here all these collapse stones here let's just go over the wall of the house there this mess is often huge I think it might be even too many for a wall yeah and we have had a few couple of thorns as well there you go a little thumb scraper Wow look at that and it's been burnt yeah it's burnt Flint and it's found outside the walls just over there oh that's interesting because the two scrapers that were found by Dorothy Dudley's team were also outside but there these dents they're just outside the entrance and have you seen anything might be a target for carbon dating possibly you see these the ladies come down onto their yeah til 5 lakhs nice dark black and in the very center of it there is in fact a quite a strong concentration of charcoal I think we if we put a slot across the back or something and got the section down there got a good sample of it yeah we probably could get something at last we're getting to grips with these stone circles we've got trenches open in two separate buildings and it would be fantastic if they were both part of the same potential Bronze Age village but without doubt the biggest mystery on the site is Phil's Neil if it can built 6,000 years ago by the earliest farmers who only had stone tools this monumental structure is over 500 meters long and Francis believes it's no coincidence that it points east and towards the Tor he's also convinced that it's unique in Britain with only one or two other Neolithic monuments even remotely like it when we're up here yesterday in the pouring rain it looked at me like a rather random jumble of stones that you might put up to stop sheep wandering about but looking at it now it looks like a really big structure well the thing is Tony about these really big structures that very carefully put together or the whole thing collapses so I'm hoping that Phil that's got good evidence for however thing was actually built I mean you can actually see it on a surface Tony I mean if you look at the monument you can see that there are actually two parallel rows of stones running right the way up its length and that we've actually got some evidence of it in the trench here look there's that big boulder which is sticking up through the surface of the grass and we've got these big boulders coming down here and actually the infill is much smaller boulders and if you really want to see the other side much more clearly look at that whacking great stone in oh yeah so what you've got are these these two parallel they're they're like walls and the infill is just rubble there's just heaving stones in now outside of that we've got more stones and yesterday I thought that this was tumble stuff that had slipped off the top and slipped down either side but when you look at these stones here look there's that what all of those they're all flat they're all interleaving and if stones tip off the top of a monument like this what they don't do is lie flat they just kind of tip and jumble all together so now I think that these stones are actually part of the monument and probably laid in against the sides really to strengthen both of these walls so do you think the original shape would have been like a gentle slope and then a flat top yes I think it is I think you definitely definite to it what about the buried soil well we're just beginning to get a point where I think we've got it at the top is this sort of brownie gray stuff but the important bit is it's very black stuff and that black stuff is the buried soil but the important thing is that he's underneath this down here okay we've got something that looks like a wall but how do we know it's prehistoric why couldn't it be from any period well it's the formality of that facing which is very very striking it's been deliberately placed there and I think placed there to be seen from either side and this is exactly what you get around the huge Neolithic burial mounds the chambered tombs of Orkney and Ireland and all over the place and that is very much a Neolithic feature or even an earlier Bronze Age feature I'm actually quite excited about it was I think that's as diagnostic as anything else my father day absolutely it would have been a heck of a lot of work oh yeah well look at the whole point of these huge monuments is to bring families and people together from from a large area of countryside so the big monument represents a whole series of gatherings of the tribes it's job creation is keeping the other going to think that people were designing and building structures like this up to six thousand years ago is mind-boggling the next big question of course is what was the Neolithic thinking behind such a huge Monument meanwhile down the hill working our house circle trenches is painfully slow we're almost halfway through our three-day dig and we're still waiting for dating evidence Frances has no doubt these house circles are Bronze Age but bridges just discovered something that could upset all our expectations looking in the tops off over the other side of the trench and I've come across this there's a bit of green glass and this piece of vessel revving all right it looks a bit suspicious to me for the prehistoric or post medieval periods well this is going to throw a cat in among the pigeons because this is Roman glass it's the rim and then the shoulder with a little piece of wild white trail slip along the bottom I see it has a little bit lighter just there that's where it's very rare for caramel and I'd say it's about second or third century AD which is a great surprise I got to MIT I hadn't expected to find Roman glass out here in the middle of Bodmin Moor the first really juicy find from these house circles and it's definitely not Bronze Age but it does suggest that Roman tourists or pilgrims might have come up here to visit these ancient rooms anything from a thousand to three thousand years after the buildings went out of use you have to be tough raksha's now opening our third trench in the house circles go for it this is the first structure we've dug that hasn't been excavated before and we've got great hopes for the finds here up on the bank can Phil's ready to give up his buried soil for environmental examination fingers crossed there we go that a Gooden is it that's not bad yeah we've got the transition from this miss lower the orange natural material into the slightly more organic this is the material we hoping there'll be some preservation of parlament here so incredible that all that potential information is just in that little blue yeah now archaeology is big walls and fines and layers Ben's been taking samples like this from all over bodman more for several years by analyzing the pollen grains in the soil he's been able to paint a vivid picture of what this landscape looked like right through prehistory even from before the time the can was built this is a grain of oak pollen from what was previously carried out at this site from a peak deposit just just next to the archaeology what has happened is the peat layers build up over thousands of years this samples about 4000 BC peat layers build up and we can extract samples from that peak deposit and we basically will count the pollen grains in those in that sediment and that will basically give us a picture of the way the environment has changed through time and what we find for the prehistoric layers is as a certain as you can see the grain of oak pollen there are you scan across the slide you can see it's quite a few this is another one there oh well as other grains such as hazel in there as well so basically getting lots of grains of oak pollen hazel pollen not suggesting that we actually have quite a dense OK's or woodland but just because you've got pollen in the sediments here that doesn't necessarily mean that there were oak trees here does it the pollen could have flown in from somewhere else and what we find is that we actually tally up the number of grains on the slide and obviously high percentages of tree pollen you know the more confidence we can have in describing a forest environment to Sabaton and from the work that you've done how would you describe what the habitat was like it for that sort of RAM at 4000 BC we stunt reconstruct each of the periods and this is this to 4000 BC one what what you're seeing is really quite dense woodland running right up to effect with the tops of the tours and only really restricted by the stone where there's no soil for the tree to grow effectively so you just have very dense okayso woodland possibly bits of alder in river valleys as well but it's completely different how it is now and and certainly more sheltered from this work on bodman more Ben and Henry have been able to track how man has changed this landscape 10,000 years ago in mezack x hunter-gatherers would have roamed through forests here searching for food and shelter 3,000 years later at the dawn of the Neolithic period they began to choose places to settle and cleared this landscape to graze their animals a few thousand years later still in the Bronze Age they began to farm on a big scale clearing even more of the woodland so when it people thought chopping the trees down about 4000 BC at the beginning of the Neolithic how did they do it it stone access it must have taken forever well yes that's how we used to think but we do now know that throughout the Mesolithic people were managing the edges of woodland using fire and then every so often the fire would get out of control and burn down a great swathe of land so they did both I think why did they start clearing the land well the original purpose was probably to clear land for farming but there are only a few hundred or most a few thousand people around here then surely they wouldn't needed to use all this for fields well I think there was more to it than that Tony and the dreaded word is ritual Hey look come this way I'll show you what I mean no look at that Tony it's a different world you can see the skyline you can see the that the bank n pointing at the skyline I mean if you were a Neolithic person that would have been the realm of the ancestors that would have been a special and probably rather terrifying place up there Frances and Stuart are suggesting that the early farmers cleared avenues through the trees so they could have a constant view of the tour although I'm puzzled why they didn't just clear the whole lot you need to encourage the animals you need to help the animals to feed and they need they need things like this to feed on you'd have to leave stands of trees for the animals it also want to encourage this spirituality thing as well by leaving gaps in the trees join hands how you view these monuments and so on so you've got to view it as being a mixture so whatever this ritual was it was a balance between woodland and moorland absolutely another schools coming our way and we're having to protect the work we've done so far in some ways it's been a very frustrating day we found nothing archaeological to tell us when people were living in these house circles or if they ever did live in them but it's a different story in Phil's trench we're beginning to establish that this was a carefully designed and built piece of architecture and I can't help but think that all that effort and construction has got something to do with the powerful presence of wrote or we're losing the light now and the mists coming in you can hardly see wrote our anymore and all day we've been beavering away at this stone circle though frankly to very little avail until in the last few minutes in discovered this it's a half in other words people were living here this isn't just an animal pen or a can it's part of a settlement but when were people here and what were they doing hopefully we'll find out tomorrow it's the beginning of day three on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall and it's been tipping down all night but at least this morning's looking good well maybe not in the trenches somewhere under here we're fishing for some clues to help us understand a potential group of bronze age houses we're also trying to work out what the purpose of this massive stone Bank is a structure that supposedly predates the houses by at least 2,000 years the real key to unraveling this whole site is to get dates any chance that we'll be able to find out before the end of the day well I hope so tony was under that murky dark water that he in sponging off there there is a half and that heart is not charcoal in it and that charcoal will give us a radiocarbon date that will fix the period when this house was in use but science can be fallible and none of our radiocarbon samples subsequently proved to be conclusive so actually the best method for dating these houses will be good old-fashioned archaeology piece of pottery would be nice over at Phil's trench the Neolithic Bank can is proving to be a far more complex structure than we could ever have expected so rather than going for a second trench Phil's decided to concentrate all his efforts on deciphering this cross-section of the monument in World War two the army drove tanks straight through this Bank and although this desecration hacks Phil off there's a big plus yeah it's a veritable arsenal look it they've been used sounds good dented and yeah I don't wanna go when is she here who explosives day but then of course we round this ish morning not the farm boy or lashing among stones it that's the consistent thing it's all in amongst it rubbish no oily stuff yeah these World War two finds confirmed that some of the loose stones on the sides weren't part of the original Neolithic structure and must have been redeposited when the tanks breached the can that one's a really interesting one actually in the lab we're adding to our picture of the landscape as it looked when it was first farmed their dung beetles where'd you get them we got them from the section where we were doing the processing near stream and what do they tell us and they actually tell us about the environment they're telling us that there are animals grazing in the area when the deposit was formed how can you work leather because there was lots of dung and that's what they were interested in okay this tells us there was animal dung here but can you work out which animals the done came from you can sometimes yes and they tend to be associated with a large herbivores such as cows and sheep goat and pigs and horses and things like that so yeah they can be quite useful should true you sometimes dream about beetle it is town yes what kind of dream I had a nightmare about one last doing last night this is a big one it was a very big one Emma's dung beetles confirmed that livestock such as cows and sheep have been grazing these uplands for at least five thousand years and we may also be getting closer to knowing when early farmers occupied these houses we're still digging all three stone circles last night we discovered a hearth in trench one and IANS digging through that very carefully and is coming up with material that the people who lived here might have thrown in the fire there you go the broken piece of Flint in French to bridge is struggling with her first find of the day but it's not delicate archeology she's dealing with the frogs bite in trench three wretches nearly ready to live some of the stones this is the one house circle that hasn't been done before and underneath we should have intact Bronze Age archaeology we've also found a scatter of stones in all three of our house circles and Francis is sure it's not a coincidence this is a house I'm in little bad about that because there's a half there but you're looking front of you here there's a large heap of rocks and that heap of rocks looks for all the world like a can and cans are normally burial mounds it's strange turning your house into a burial isn't it and it is possible of course that there is a burial here a dead person beneath that can but it's also possible that it's a can to the house to the life in the house what do you mean like that it's very difficult to leave a home isn't it especially if you've enjoyed living in that home if you've enjoyed being on write or you're leaving it forever you turn the house into a can turn it into monument I it is a lovely idea that is there is there any way we can test it if we carefully unpick this can we can see whether it it comes after the house or or late phase of the house it could be that they make the house a monument but they may also be burying artifacts of life the artifacts they use like pot and other things in the house could be found underneath the can decommissioned in the same way that would be good it's just after lunch on our final day and at last something's come up in trench 3 that could focus this whole dig it's a small shirred of pottery and this could be the first piece of evidence that puts our house circle firmly into the Bronze Age well I'm so so excited about this because this is the first piece of pottery we've had in this trench well I think you're very right to be excited this is Bronze Age pottery it's what they call true visca we're here in Cornwall it's dates from the middle Bronze Age so yes this is a very exciting piece and I've just noticed on the interior if you look carefully and see the black area yeah that's actually internal residue and that's the last meal that was cooked in this pot so we're thinking that's about 15 I guess around about 1500 BC it's odd that something that looked so in a significant can tell us so much this piece of Cornish Travis koware confirms this was a Bronze Age home and what's more we know they were cooking here three and a half thousand years ago back in the farmhouse Ben and Emma are beginning to run tests on some floor surfaces from the house in trench one and material from Phil's can organic matter such as discarded food or animal dung rots down and leaves phosphates animal dung was commonly used as fuel in Bronze Age houses and by running these tests it could give us an indication of the level of human activity oh look you can see it going already over here which is always good you can just say hey since blue halo we've got developing there now the faster the sample goes blue is also meant to be a sign of how it was a phosphate if we keep an eye on which samples are going quickly it's quite interested that's cuz of the half ah now there you go because well obviously sat around fire just waste rubbish being dropped onto the ground and that's that's persist in the soil over over the millennia basically and the what are your initial impressions and basically we've got the hearth Sam thought that's gone very blue very quickly lots of phosphate lots of activity all the way through the centre of the house we've got you know again evidence of phosphate and even outside of the door and that's really gone quite blue and that went quite fast yeah then again we've got evidence of phosphate on the lower line there are three that have hardly any phosphates at all and one with just a tinge where were they from Phil's trench and the bank can and as you can see we're not really getting much evidence for phosphate high phosphate levels and nays at all so a clear distinction between the different trenches in terms of the concentration of phosphates in the soils this is the sort of science I can really identify with these organic remains have been locked in the soil for thousands of years the phosphates also tell us there was little human or animal activity near the can it was possibly a place kept sacred to the memory of the ancestors back on the more real archaeology is catching up with the science Bronze Age pottery seems to be coming up everywhere in trench one match found some more near the half for two and a half thousand year old pot this is really special it's contact decoration on it hasn't it yeah that where the chords been pressed into it yes it's true risk aware it's exactly like what Carl was showing me earlier on that sometime in the Bronze Age isn't it Francis yes it is it's in the middle Bronze Age to be precise between roughly 1500 BC and a thousand BC right and this is another piece also after this koware but I think slightly classier that one with the cord impressed chevron zigzags solutely that came from rakshasas pinched along with another little bit in here now the importance of that of course is that all of its pottery is identical and that means that for three houses that we've dug out of all of these houses are all contemporary and that means I would guess a penny to acquit but all of the houses are part of a village so we have ourselves a middle Bronze Age village that is absolutely fantastic this is the first time that anyone's been able to confirm that this is a Bronze Age village which is a great achievement and our environmental team can add to the story there's no evidence in the pollen analysis but our Bronze Age farmers grew any crops up here it seems they carried on clearing the trees for fuel and over the centuries the soil became too acidic to support anything else it would seem that unwittingly generation after generation of Bronze Age people were responsible for changing the face of Bodmin more forever raksha's team were the first to find that much-needed dating evidence and with just an hour to go they've uncovered something else that could take the history of this settlement back much further keep I just put those two pieces together there I think the brilliant thing about this is that is an old break you can see the dirt in there and so they've used it it's broken and they're just thrown it back in there and you're actually at the bottom now aren't you I am yeah that that's fantastic that's like the best dating evidence that we could have our finds people are very excited by this manky bit of flint technically it's a bit of rubbish a by-product from making a prehistoric blade or scraper they believe it could be early Neolithic about 6,000 years old and this tells us that this settlement actually goes back to the time the earliest settlers were building the care it's one of the most enigmatic structures we've ever investigated on time team and Phil's the first archaeologist to have been allowed to excavate it fully I don't think television can give you a sense of the magic of this Monument it's so big in the landscape there's so much work involved in it and it points so dramatically at the tour so what do we do guys we dig a great hole in the middle of it why do we do that Frances well I think it's essential Tony that we actually get down to the Buried land surface the old topsoil under the monument right at the center why what's so important about that well you know throughout this whole project we've been thinking and talking about the Buried saws what that does is represents the the environment that was there when they began the monument is the first part of the story and the first part of the story of this part of the site is that they took the turf off and that's crucially important because we know from other sites in Britain but the the actual alignment of the bank or the Barrow was actually cleared of soil first it's a sort of religious ritual purification of the ground before you put bodies in it once it actually prepared the ground what they would have done was to make these two parallel walls and what they did or they got these great stones and put them in end ways on and as they did that they filled up the gap in the middle with all this rubble and gradually built the whole thing up I rather suspect it was probably just about as highly as you see it now and then on the outside of it they stood these they lent these big slabs of granite against the walls which would have given this from an from a distance who would have given this a great impression of gleaming white boulders of granite that would have stood out for miles and then on either side they paved off the areas as well and like they've used those turfs that they've taken off and put them on top absolutely and that would make it even more spectacular so you'd have the white granite and then you'd have the green turf and that would provide a smooth walkway along the top of this thing as a sort of processional way it would have been unbelievably spectacular I'm not safe Phil often you show me pretty starak fines and your eyes are full of crazed excitement and I'm thinking it's actually a bit boring but this has gotta be one of the best pieces of archaeology that we've ever done on time team isn't it it's certainly one of the best I've done in of donkey's years this feature shows us just how sophisticated the ancient people were in their relationship with the landscape they'd have thought of the tour as we now think of a Cathedral or mosque and on solstices and other significant feast days they'd have left their homes to process towards the Rising Sun to commune with their ancestors and the spirit of rote or is as potent now as it was then continuing to draw pilgrims here for thousands of years from the Roman times up to the present day we're finishing this dig as we started it in the blustery rain looking at this huge magnificent monument a boulder can a boundary can there is neaten a proper name for it but what is certain is that it meant a great deal to the people who constructed it and it was part of a much wider landscape which hopefully will mean as much to the people who look after it in the future as it did to those who built it six thousand years ago well the series may be over but don't despair log on to the website at channel for calm slash time team to 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Channel: Reijer Zaaijer

Views: 503,721

Rating: 4.8616166 out of 5

Keywords: time, team, full, episodes, season

Id: -dROrgcniWk

Length: 47min 58sec (2878 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2013