2,000 years ago life was very different for us and today here in Pembrokeshire Wales we're about to travel back in time to see how homes were built in the age of iron [Music] [Music] hi Liz how are you know hello nice to meet you lovely to meet you so this is an Iron Age village this castle handless yes so when we're talking about the Iron Age when exactly was that well the Iron Age in Britain is from 600 BC to AD 43 when the Romans invade because it's still the Iron Age but because the Romans invade it becomes history is opposed to prehistory but that's when the Iron Age is in Britain and why did they call it the Ice Age well it's called the Iron Age because iron starts being used for the first time you know they've had bronze I've had the metal age and then iron starts being used it's just much before that in other places in the world but by the time it gets to Britain it's about 600 BC so we say 600 BC for the beginning of the Iron Age using of iron to make sores and cauldrons and metal implements of various sorts and the site that we're standing on right now can you tell me a little bit about how this was uncovered well it's always been known to be an Iron Age hill fort because it's got these great big banks and ditches all the way around it which they're about four meters high you know so they've been here for the last two-and-a-half thousand years and it's been written on all the old maps as Iron Age hill fort you know so it's not a great surprise but in 1980 it actually gets bought by someone who's not a farmer and he's actually interested in these bumps and ditches which no one had been before and he starts to excavate it and he finds the remains of round houses and that's what he does for the next two sort of 11 years excavates rebuilds and then when unfortunately he dies the parish Coast National Park by the site and continued the same thing reconstructing making it into a little village I suppose and obviously open it to the public to come and see what life in the Iron Age was like well how lucky that they did and so this village here this is a reconstruction based on the archaeological finds on the site absolutely yes so where we found post holes so you know to make a house big posts in a big circle you can probably see them just behind me you would dig a hole for your post and then you'll pack it with upright stones and the post is long getting it right you know it would not have survived 2,000 years nothing of it would survive but those stones you know it's never been plowed this site so those stones remain there for 2,000 years and you find a post hole look around find another one it's a bit like doing that thought to dope puffle you did as a child you know you find another one another one think hang on that's a roundhouse there there's a big gap a duel in the middle fireplace so then you've got the design on the floor for a round house and we thought let's reconstruct them and see what they're like reconstructed so the people who lived here what do we know of what their lives would have been like well it's surprisingly large amount we know because we found lots and lots of itty-bitty things as well like we found burnt food we found burnt pig bones lamb bones beef goat and deer and we found burnt grain from wheat and barley and rye and oats so we know they're growing crops and eating it we found grinding stones for turning those wheats into flour you know we've got an idea of their sort of lifestyle just from the artifacts that we found and so how many people would have lived here within the village we've estimated about 70 we think that in any one times about eight houses and there's various grain stores and things and the mounts that we see here surrounding the village this would have been part of the defense's well yes they recognized as defenses but they were also built after a long period probably 20 years in the building and we think there was an element of Defence but it was also an element of status it's gonna look good in the landscape if you've got these big banks and ditches you know that's going to impress the people that you're trying to impress which might be your own people but also your enemies you know so building these double banks all the way around which some of them weren't you know as I say about three four meters high it's going to look good and it's something can be seen in the landscape overseeing this time there's only two forms of communication really one is face to face talking and the other one is making a big gesture in the landscape that people can see there's no written language so you know having the simple fence isn't it's kind of heat banks and ditches and so moving into the village can you talk to me a little bit about how the houses were laid out well this was obviously the main entrance in and there was always a central area which might have been for rubbish to be collected in or it might been where food was brought in and might have been just a general meeting area but we didn't find much in the middle as far as I know now just looking at these houses it looks like it would have taken an immense amount of work to construct one of these it would have taken a lot of organization the chief would not have decided to build that house that he's built over there unless he had the oak for it and this he had the reed for it the mud for it the cow manure for it the hazel we reckoned that was about 2,000 pieces of individual hazel was used for that house Wow and so he would be encompassing the forest and it wouldn't have been a question of oh we wanna build a house can we get the wood it would be more a question of we've got the wood we can build a house you know so copies in the word you know chopping down the trees letting them grow again to just as you want them you know that's part of the organization and the chief would have been in charge of that and how would these homes constructed based on the archaeology we think that first of all you decided where it was going to go and then you put posts in a big circle with the door which you'd have chosen carefully obviously perhaps facing self that seems the most sensible then one supposed to R in there woven with hazel and then they're covered with a delightful mixture of clay cow manure pig's blood and horse hair called dog and so the weave in is called wattle wattle and daub quite you know classic in Britain and once you put the wall down you have a wall plate going all the way around the top we found this out by trial and error the first house we built didn't have a wall plate and so after about 35 years the house had twisted and corkscrewed so now we always build them with a wall plate and interlocking wall plate which makes sense then the roof goes on and the some evidence that is sort of a central post so you put up a central post right in the middle of your house and then from that you build a tower could be in a wood tower and once you're at the top of that tower you can then pull up all the long pieces of oak to form a sort of basic shape of your house but if I show you in the house I think you will understand it a bit more absolutely let's take a look so this was the Chiefs house then this is the Chiefs house it is impressive you wait till you get inside before we step inside though this roof it is so interesting to me this is all done with reeds is it that's right it's River Reed and it would have been local it's a very Reedy area anyway and you've got to remember that way back 2,000 years ago all the valleys of Britain would have been quite Reedy filled with boggy reeds it's only in the last sort of three four hundred years that we started to drain the country even he went back to Queen Elizabeth the first time you wouldn't recognize Britain it would have been completely different but in the Iron Age there have been plenty of reed they might have you straw as well but it seems likely that they used reed and this is completely water proof then obviously absolutely so water proof that I absolutely sometimes have to go in with a watering can and watered the floor to dampen down the dust because it's so dry in there right Wow and then talk to me about the water collection here in order to make sure that you don't get water in the house you have to have faster as much steeper than the average about 50 degrees is best so you've got 50 degrees and the water rushes off and it falls into the same spot all the time and believe it or not Wales has rain so that's another thing that we find in the archaeology is we find the drip gully of a house so you excavate in a long trip gully and that shows you the outer furthest mark of the house and it gives you an idea of how much of the overhang there is to so I mean this is a big overhang but we found the drip gully for this house so we know that there was over a metre of overhang so what size is this house this is about 13 and a half metres wide so it's big it is big yes ridiculously big and why would you want a house that big I'm sure it's not just because he's got a big family I think you've got a big ego as well as a big family you know right it's a fetus it needs to be seen in the landscape and it needs to be seen that the chief has spared nothing to build his fine house and of course it might mean just his home it might be the Town Hall the magistrates courts you know so this is a status this is a functioning house and then stepping inside the home it really is quite impressive isn't it well yes I mean when we built this house way back in 1999 it was so long building it good sort of 3/4 of a year that by the time it was finished you know it sort of yeah yeah house and then when it was finished we went it's big you know we have noticed how big it was as we were building it so looking around at the way that you've laid everything out in here to what degree is this based on archaeological evidence and how much imagination has gone into the reconstruction and here well to be honest quite a lot of imagination because you don't find artifacts you don't find carved benches it just doesn't survive we just had to imagine this is the Chiefs house you have had a fire we know there was a fire in the middle we know the door is here and so you've got to have somewhere to see it so we've got this little circle of benches here but how its laid out who knows I often think that there was such a thing as a time machine and someone from the Iron Age came back it might stand here laughing and said you you've got the roof right but you know we didn't furnish it like that we've done our best we've tried not to be too fanciful like for instance the CAF benches the pattern on the ends of them is based on the talk sort of period they had bronze talks and gold talks that turn up for some reason you know people have abandoned them and we find them so David Lloyd the carpenter who made these for us he based them on these talks so again it's quite fanciful so just looking around here how would the space have been used if we don't know we find things like grinding stones and loom weights that we know that have been loom we know that there have been an area for grinding not flour you can't do that southside yes lots of activities have to be done in to be honest most would have been done here where we're standing in the doorway this is where you find little artifacts things like women's jewelry beads you know they're holding a child you're trying to do something else the child pulls your beads they fall down here this is where you lose them you don't lose them at the back of the house you lose them in the doorway where there's light so really the loom ought to be here but obviously with members of the public coming to visit us here we've had to arrange it in a different way so you can wander around and see the difference of the crafts areas but it probably wasn't how it would have been in the Iron Age well certainly to keep a house of this size warm he must have had to have a roaring fire going yes I mean we've had roaring fires going before when we found even in events and you're still cold you'd have worn layers you'd have worn you know lots and lots of layers of wool and you don't kept busy we're very lazy today we like sitting around you know everyone on the computer people get cold now don't they if you sit at the computer yeah he's suddenly cold because you're not moving these people would have had so they don't eaten a lot more calories than us but they don't get warm there's such a vast space up there but you're just not gonna heat this place yeah and looking up at that roof structure from were then you can really start to get an idea of just how impressive it is and also a glimpse into the engineering that's gone into making this building possible absolutely I mean obviously we didn't sort of disco oh let's have a go at this and let's do that we did get some help from structural engineers obviously we told them how big we wanted it we told them we wanted it made of oak hazel organic rope of some form like Nestle but we had hemp instead you know read mud etc we told them what we wanted and it ought to be tied together we didn't want nails of any form and we wanted it to be constructed in some way with pulleys and whatever and they came up with this design for us they said this will work and it did luckily so when you built this this was constructed with manpower and not modern machinery absolutely we didn't use a cherry picker or anything like that to make this house and it was a very small number of people who actually built this house you know it was about three main carpenters plus one fracture took him nine weeks to thatch this house Wow that really is very impressive well I can see that the chief was definitely living in style what's going on in the next house well this is the meeting house we think because it faces east so to a dark house and Isis a women would have worked in the door way doing all their work and why would you have your house facing east and it's also away from the prevailing wind being westerly coming off the Atlantic you know so we've given it the designation of the meeting house at a place where the men would have come in the evening straight from work it's the pub you know the place he would come to after a day's work you're cold you're thirsty you want to talk to people you want to sit around and you know and this is the place you would come it's just got benches and it's dark but it's warmer because it's away from the prevailing wind and it would be you know just like the pulpit where we have placed you with the sit and chat with your friends of course not women because women's work is never done they would come in here perhaps later but I think this would be where the men come to relax a bit warm a bit chat etc well I'm already feeling quite at home in here I just wish I had a pint to go with it again the fire in the center and there's no chimneys in here where does all the smoke go if you had a hole the sparks will be drawn up and fed by oxygen coming in through the hole and so those sparks they may not burn the house down tonight but perhaps tomorrow morning with the gust of air suddenly the house would flare up so what you do is you have a big fire the bigger the fire the more the smoke the smoke goes up and the sparks go into the smoke and as they go into the smoke they're starved of oxygen so you can have a massive fire the top is smoky it filters out but the house is so big that the smoke level is way above the average person you know it's about eight foot you know it's two and a half meters so you know it works really well that way so we've seen the Chiefs house and the meeting house but where would the more ordinary folk reflect this is the more typical house the next one we call is our cook house because when the fireplace was excavated way back in the early 80s they did find a lot of burn bone things in there so we think that it was used a lot by the women of the village for the general cooking for everyone perhaps so it's believed that the cooking would have been communal might have been its the awful lot of guesswork this fireplace definitely revealed a lot of burnt bones or said you know pig and goat and sheep and things but it's a classic little howl as well littler house and the Chiefs and it's laid out as a family house this would have been perhaps ten people living in this house several generations and what size is this one this is nine meters across which is a classic size for a 9hs really and when you think of the house that size it makes a bit of sense that there would have been more people living in it doesn't it absolutely yes and if you're a sort of teenager you didn't leave home and get a flat all generations would have been living here you know granny and aunties and um you know unmarried brothers and sisters all of them here so it could easily have been sort of fifteen or so living in his house right and can we see how its laid out on the inside Wow it definitely is weirdly cozy in here isn't it yes I like this house because it's not so big I mean I find with the Chiefs house that it's just massive anything it's rather drafty actually and quite cold whereas this is cozier you know he's got all the signs of domestic life in it's got the shelves for pots and pans and it's got grinding stones and a lovely comfortable looking bed in the corner there and herbs hang in so we think this would have been a pleasant house and obviously again here we just have reconstruction and there's a little imagination that's gone into it but can you talk to me a little bit about how the home is laid out there is some evidence that they had sort of subdivisions because I mean this one has got eight internal posts which represent postholes will be found here so this house did have internal posts whereas the other ones we looked at didn't and so it makes sense to have use that central post to build a small internal wall to make subdivisions which could be storage could be sleeping it's a bit of guesswork and a little bit of sort of what the archaeological evidence shows us so grinding stones have been found here or corn stones as are sometimes called two different sorts we've got something that's called a saddle quern which is sort of basically a stone bowl and it would have been a good little round rock would have been used for grinding up the grain and we've also found some evidence of the what we called rotary corn which is it's got two pieces so a big stone at the bottom big stone at the top so like two wheels very much like the early mill really and that would have been worked by young children probably you know sort of boys and girls would have been grinding the daily grind you know very important to keep get the flour done we've had some experiments done here to see how much you know how long it would take us to make the flour for a family and it's all day you know you are grinding flour all day in order to make the bread probably then they would have made the bread in the evening mixed it with water and salt you know left it overnight natural yeasts in the air would get into it come the morning build up the fire cook it and then you start again the daily grind Wow yeah they're not joking about that then are they no it's been a hard life fence and they would have been and then there are several other much smaller houses over here what would these have been used for well this one's pretty obviously a grain stall we think because there will you find a four posts in the ground and something built off the ground you don't find fireplaces you don't find an obvious door built off the ground to make sure that your grain grain is like gold you know it is to keep you going through the year that must be dry so raised off the ground is you know guaranteed that it's going to stay dry in there very important so pretty obvious that is our grain stop yeah and this other house is we think the blacksmith's or the forge right what makes you think that well during the excavation they found quite a bit of slag iron on the floor and they also found a little pipe which would have gone under the ground and come up in the middle of the fire and we think that was for bellows to be worked well ordinary cooking fire wouldn't need extra air pumped into it to get temperature you know bellows would have been used for really pushing up the temperature will work in iron rocking metal Wow interesting so this house is it's only just been built and we've still I'm not a door on it and one of the last things we did was the wall the mud on the walls you know it's a mixture of clay and him so here within this village we think there was maybe 70 people here at one point what would have happened to the people of this village well we believe that they left village about 50 BC like the gatehouse gets burnt down and sort of caved in in a very sort of definite way is an accident it's definite and so we can date that to about 50 BC and they move just outside we don't know why I mean you can speculate that perhaps there was some illness here or perhaps they just fed up with it being so windy up here here who knows but they leave about there they cave in their own gatehouse which encloses the hill and they move just outside and they go on living there for quite a bit during the Roman period we've excavated that as well so is there still more excavation and potential treasures to be uncovered on this site 27 years of excavation and most of it's done what we've been doing is the archaeologists come back from time to time when we've rebuilt the houses just to confirm that they're right about things you know so we've had them back but we've also got a boogie area on the way up the hill to the left of the main path which has never been excavated and access are exciting you could find anything in a bulk so it's very possible that the you know the bodies in there or or just plain artifacts that might have been given to their gods who knows but that's never been excavated so expecting never will be it will probably be a massive task to do that but one does wonder what's down there well is this has been a real treat for me it's really interesting to get just a little glimpse of insight into how these people used to live thank you so much for sharing it with me thank you for coming what's really interesting to me is the impressiveness of the architecture the amount of effort that's gone into constructing these really is quite remarkable you can see that this was truly a communal effort and it's really interesting to see the way that people have come together to share their living spaces to share their village and how really its cooperation that made these structures possible it's wonderful just to get a tiny glimpse into what lives would have been like [Music] [Music] you
