Unearthing An Ancient Hill Fort Settlement | Time Team | Timeline

[Music] this slope could once have been part of an ancient capital in a rather unlikely place the Ely housing estate here in South Wales the hill is called Chi Rai it's pretty mysterious and no one's ever dug it before but it may well once have been a vital fortress for the world's tribes who lived here 2,000 years ago this mighty fort built on a hill may have been the center of power for this entire region and with insightly the back here Tony untouched by spade or trowel for centuries will we be the first to unravel its secrets for I'm hoping it's down to our team of archaeologists to solve the mystery of this hill could this be the long-lost capital of South Wales and if it is will we be able to find it in three days see the thing about long-lost places is you never quite know what you're gonna find do you [Music] well here we are builders is our Hill for this nine quite loca is a walking up through the entrance of a hill for with ramparts towering up on leader so to be absolutely a mensch you know it's a big hill for is one of the biggest from South Wales here it's a major centre yeah but the thing is Neil it's big so we've got to get cracking absolutely Oh [Music] also making their way up to the fort our our geophysics team their task to survey this vast hilltop in search of an ancient tribal center that may lie hidden here oh wow you wouldn't have thought it was this open up here when you clambering up the ramp Oh Jordan so this is about five hectares that's ten foot pictures No Claire I which means forts in Welsh overlooks Cardiff capital of modern Wales built atop this massive Hill trees now cover the spectacular earthworks that give our site the classic profile of an Iron Age hill fort but more than that its size and commanding position suggest that it could have been the old capital and busy hub for the Welsh clans of the area time team site director Francis Pryor has seen what he believes could be an Iron Age ditch and it's got him very excited I mean look really suits incredibly clear over there it's really as mysterious as it's cracked afternoon well I don't think it's mysterious Tony so much as unexplored you know it's a hill it's a hill form so any design age then yes it cyanate that gives us a lot of time to play with you know is it a start at the beginning you know 600 500 BC or is it started much later 300 200 it could be either one what's the thing we're expecting to find what we're looking for Tony is where people actually live I mean that's our main objective but initially we want to find the earliest feature on the site and I think our best bet lies really just back in that ditch I mean you can see it just as clear as anything we're getting to the geophys first no sure we don't leave Jim Francis 20 years of time team Ouija Affairs and then we dig the trench we are going to be doing a trench here hang on a second you got a cane here yeah and and one right over there where you are it was a zonking great trench it says are looking great ditch yeah everything is tourney we've got to get on and dig it yeah so would you mind please bring somewhere else oh yeah blame me around in the grass [Music] the temptation to dive straight in at car ID is too much for any red-blooded archaeologist to resist this huge site could date back to the beginning of the Iron Age in Wales as early as eight hundred years BC if this was an Iron Age capital our ancestors would have lived here in large numbers and left evidence behind ditches are a good place to look for artifacts that have wronged in have been thrown away Francis is convinced the curving ditch he's digging is Iron Age the turfs barely off and it looks like he could be right very often what happens with Iron Age ditches you have collapse over the years coming in and and so I mean your actual age of that ditch is what twice as far back as we recommend yeah very encouraging you know nice wide ditch natural-appearing over there bank it's just what we expected clues to the importance of this site lie all around us ramparts [Music] [Applause] [Music] the massive banks and ditches that surround this hill they're part of what's always drawn iron-age specialists Neil Sharples to Cairo for years he's been dying to dig here we've been talking blithely about this place being a hill form but I'm actually several the hill fort is only know it's well it's a difficult question that's why we're probably in avoiding it well it's a hill and it's a fall right now maybe it's definitely on a Oh what do you mean by fort well somewhere where there are soldiers somewhere where there are defensive structures we can see that there are ramparts here can't we so what were these ramparts for well I think at a simple level they're creating a an enclosure that defines and gives identity to the people who live within it defining of community seems that a bit hippie dippie to me well no it's you could you were people in the period before this in the Bronze Age people were living in small farm stairs in the fields in the landscape the end of the Bronze Age there's a major transformation and people gather together at these places probably quite special places and then they surround themselves in these ramparts and ditches why would you define yourself in such an incredibly military way well list it it's not necessarily a military way that's the way you look at it that'd be very very surprised if we found a spear inside this hill for any weapon you're making it sound like something built my social services that's just because it took a lot of people to build it it doesn't mean that it was a community project does it it's a big statement a sense of belonging and it's a sense of pride community pride we are a community with strong vibrant we've got lots of resources we've got lots of manpower you know we can build a major impressive monument that's gonna really put all our neighbors into the shade they're gonna look at our our ramparts to say gosh that's impressive I don't want to tangle with them they are a really important group of people the geophysics team is using magnetometry to survey Cairo it's a technique that uses magnetic waves to locate disturbances deep in the soil we're looking for circular features traces of Iron Age round houses that may have lain buried for more than 2,000 years Francis has asked the team to survey a strip running across the middle of the hill fort if there really were lots of people living here in the Iron Age there should be evidence in the GF is the first set of results are already in this is what we've got now we did have a bit of a wish list this morning which was going to be lots of archaeology possibly some ring ditches yep so how many of your wishes have you fulfilled um not quite as many as you'd hoped I'm afraid like none yeah we're verging on that Francis you wanted rain gauges yes yeah it's it's not exactly Iron Age London is it not really I mean am i imagining something or is that something there tell me there is alright yes there is something curving through there well can you drop a set on that I think I can manage it yeah it's not much to go on but then Iron Age archaeology isn't for the faint-hearted or the short sighted round houses the typical homes of the period were made of wood mud and thatch and after long centuries rotting in the ground there's not much left to see [Music] while Phil's opening up trench to back at our first trench Francis is hoping his archaeologists gut instinct has been proved right if this really turns out to be an Iron Age ditch it'll help us today to the hill fort yes we've got a ditch there yep no problem so that's your ditch Matt it's not exactly defensive visit no this the gray silt that we thought was the ditch field at Delhi is the top of this natural boulder clay here so he carried on back this way and you can see the dark ditch fill there oh it's really clear yeah lovely edge there it goes all the way to here how deep do you think it's going to be I mean I've been nibbling away at the edge along here and it's going it about 45 degrees so you may be talking maybe half a meter deep follows that I know fine so anything that absolutely nothing I mean the fill of this ditch is really solid it's almost the same as the clay there so I think it is very compacted and very old the proof is really going to be in the excavation isn't it yeah well at the base of this hill fort is Ely the biggest housing estate in Cardiff unaware that an ancient capital might be in their backyard some of the Ely residents have turned up hoping to find out something about this place so what's it like I mean this fantastic ancient irony does I know it was like like hidden his not like not many people knew about it being here and like after all this know by now over the next few days we're hoping to tell the local people if and when Kyra was occupied and exactly what was going on up here so we better hurry up and find something when the archaeologists just called me over and said there's a house in trench to a house in trench too so I came over here and look this swathe of brown soil and a few stones dotted around what your flippin housemates actually I couldn't have put it better myself Tony there are sways of brown so but it really takes the the eyes of a skilled archaeologist to actually pick out what's in the trench well it only got you here well I'm gonna have to do then I know look if you remember that when you looked at the geophysics remember there was that curve in thing which we thought was probably the wall line of the round house well we think we've actually located that in this trench the giveaway is you've got one edge coming along there you can see on this side it's somewhat grittier and then it in here it's Claire and you've got the other edge coming around here and swinging around in this direction and we think that that is either the foundation of a round house or maybe a drip gully we're looking for a huge community over yes but huge communities live in houses if we're right in thinking that this is our house we are beginning to actually get a grip of that community but it's all a bit tenuous it is not tenuous do you always cynic if this was a capital packed with people we really need to find their houses and date them Francis thinks that dwellings next to the ramparts could be better preserved because over time soil tumbles down onto the houses protecting them from later plowing Jim afternoon got any more results for us certainly have you'll remember Francis that after this morning's efforts we were sort of grasping at straws hopefully whoa that more what you're after oh I can't believe it we got one one two three four five what six round houses I guess they're optimistic but I'm with thee yeah yeah I mean I can't tell you Jimmy I think you may change your mind overnight but at the first glance where do you reckon you'd want to take someone well obviously go for that round house it's it's obviously in such good condition ten minutes ago we had drip tray and now we've got practically a whole civilization well we'll have to prove it to find out when weird that means digging tomorrow [Music] beginning of day two here in South Wales and yesterday we spent the whole day searching for some signs of Iron Age life in this empty field and found virtually nothing at all until round about 5:30 p.m. Jimmy from geophys came up with that isn't that beautiful lots of interesting Lin ears and circles and mysterious shapes for an archaeologist this is just about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on so how are you gonna start your fun-filled day mate well we've got a green site here Tony look the geophys has shown up a row of houses snuggled up against the back of the ramparts which is what you often find on Hill Falls and then look at that one that's the best preserved of them all so we're putting a trench in that from the front door which is here so we're gonna do that half there but you think these aren't the only round houses here don't you yeah I think there's another rule running along here and there's certainly one there there's another one in there another one there another one yeah I'm quite happy I think that's a rule it's so funny because yesterday I was really taking the mickey out of you for this idea that this was an Iron Age community rather than an actual military fort but if you've got two rows of houses like that that is the beginning of the community and the commands happy I think this proves for I was she was right I am you know we've got a community here I mean if you count them up I mean we've got at least five on this rule five or six in this room you know we've got at least ten houses eight to ten people in a family yep so you know that's 800 people yeah you know I'm really happy I think that's what we've got to find something Tony we haven't found what anything done birdlime gone yeah okay yeah we're quite excited required only an archaeologist to get that excited about this amount of bones the bird limestone together with our stunning geophys results have convinced Francis that he's found an area that was very densely populated by iron age standards it could be the first step to proving that Kyra was a very important site but the minute the top soils off disagreement follows geophysics hedge on Gator thinks he can see the marks of the round house in the ground but Francis is convinced that the jagged edges they're seeing were caused by Ice Age glaciers 10,000 years ago for the future they're at the very end that's showing up Meissen clearly that's a proper feature it's got pottery on it there's nothing in there which is archaeological honest look at the edge of that John see that the way wavers yeah like that that's cut my eyes I think that is the ditch of the round house and that's the break that's the entrance there so the green is the edge of the trench where we're standing yeah and that anomaly there yeah is that anomaly and you're saying that's glacial yeah and so it's pure coincidence of that is at the end of that ring yeah well I don't believe it you know well I'll take the hat off to you it is it is there is no archaeology there take my word for it so we'll have to come back here then and then once we've found it we can follow it if we want but I think the key thing now is to find it because we're we're we're lost until we do if Francis is right we haven't got our round house yet but he's not giving up he's now extending the trench to try and find it [Music] [Applause] we know next to nothing about this site and very little about the Iron Age in this part of Wales except that it lasted for 800 years but there are clues about the nature of the people who lived in the area and perhaps on our hill fort itself it's a beautiful map isn't it looks like middle-earth it's a cracker in it doesn't it doesn't it what does it represent but what it's showing us is the Iron Age tribes of Wales or at least it shows us how the Romans described the Iron Age tribes of South Wales we have wonderful account from the Roman historian Tacitus and he he gives us this picture and this is a nice sort of representation of that where are we we're just here this is Cairo so we're deep in the heart of these people the Seiler is absolutely in the heart line with this alien is that's right what do we know about the Solaris the Lawrence tells quite a bit about them in some detail about the ferocious resistance that the Tyler is mounted to the the Roman advance a 25 year guerrilla war what do you think is the relationship between our hill fort and the salary's defense of their own territory generally well it could be quite important because it's big in the scheme of things and in the terms of South Wales it's one of the bigger hill forts and I think that we really should be thinking of this idea is is it sort of a clan based tribal confederation so you would have had important regional centres and it may well be that we stood in the middle of one of them here in Cairo we've now got three trenches up and running in our search for houses and finds so far maps ditch trench has given us nothing but help is now at hand the kids from Ely are coming to dig in our trenches maybe they'll bring us good luck there's still a bit of cleaning to do in there all that muddy clay and then we'll get into the features and see if we can find really good stuff you are gonna get get stuck in there Metin Raksha don't have any trouble putting them all to work nothing like a bit of slave labor to move this excavation alone yeah what'd you do but who were these ancestors that our kids are digging for we know they spoke an ancient Celtic language and we know that this language became modern Welsh and they've left behind colorful everyday objects some of which were kept in the National Museum of wares [Music] hi Ashley and kaya we're taking two of our diggers Ashley and kaya both Ely born and bred to see them Cariah hasn't given us any fines yet but some of these Iron Age artifacts were found close to our fort these objects here are all from one hoard they were all found together people have actually brought things together deposited them put them into the ground maybe as a sort of oil or ritual act giving them to the gods and a lot of these words from from this part of the world they relate to horses so I think we can say horses were really important to these people and if you can imagine you know because chariots with those things mounted in the horse trapping you know would have been really colorful in that really does say something about how sophisticated they were and I think that's important for us to remember can you see this over here can what's this Iron Age pie in it big mug isn't it can Katie it's the right idea yeah I think it's a little bit more than a point yeah but four pints four pints that's a lot and they I think the idea is isn't it right that they used to share these I think I think you'd want to to share that round a bit a bit much otherwise [Music] these precious objects tell us that the Iron Age people from this area lived lives full of ritual and color to give a sense of how challenging it was to make objects like this we're going to make our own communal drinking cup to discover a bit more about Iron Age technology cassie is going to help metalwork at Dave Chapman make a bronze handle for the cup and the process starts by getting metal from stone this is gonna sound a bit of a stupid question but this is the Iron Age so why bowls well they're using the bronzer quite extensively as a decorative metal there's a really beautiful metal that takes lovely shapes and you can cast bronze well as you can cast I am making it really nice decorative shapes so any any shape you can make in wax you can then cast that casting into bronze bronze is an alloy of copper and tin locally mined malachite is a good source of copper ore but to extract or smelt the pure copper we need more than just heat it's actually about creating carbon monoxide which is bonding with the copper in the with the carbon in the stone to creating carbon dioxide and copper metals so we're forcing a chemical reaction to take place whether you're smelting now or 2,000 years ago extracting metals from ore is a complex process Dave's using raw material from the local environment in this case turf from our trenches to control the gases inside the furnace the carbon monoxide reacts with the or separating it into pure copper and the waste product slag it's all we do drop put in the water at this stage the copper is still attached to the slag Oh lovely after cooling the copper can be knocked out it's a big effort for a small amount of copper we've got a lot of work to do before we're ready to cast our bronze handle the cap is under way but it would be great to find a real Iron Age artifact and it looks like Francis's first hunch about where to dig was a good call Frances the whole field is abuzz with archaeologists saying that one last we've got a significant fine this is it is Tony and it is a crap I am really excited about it it looks just like a piece of rock to me well it is a piece of rock dang it would have been a much larger piece of one this is AK worm it's a corn grinding stone one of the things about these querns right is they were quite sophisticated bits of kitchen equipment go on this would have been part of a much larger thing this is a pop stone I mean there being another one at the bottom line which it would have rested like that when you pour this grain through that groove there which is actually a hole oh you can really see that curved shape in there yeah so that goes in there and he goes could meets the bottom stone of any BC look there's another groove there and then that distributes the grain as it grinds and that after after added a couple of generations of use planes of weakness development and eventually the thing cracks and they say something rude in our age and throw it into the ditch but why are you so excited about this I mean it is frankly just a broken thing in the bottom of a ditch I'll tell you why this tells us that there were people actually living here they were making flour in the houses which were probably just over there so it's very very important not mat where exactly did you find it that's important to get this right it was just on the bottom the ditch just about there and why is that so significant well as you can see it's a big thing and it was found right at the bottom of the ditch so I don't think it was something that was lying around but accidentally slipped in I think this was thrown in there with rubbish so it has to date the dish Matt you know why he's so triumphant this is his trench that he's stuck in before GF is and it's turned up trumps you'll bang on the money yeah it's really been good Tony I'm really excited about it this brilliant late Iron Age find dates are and it's proof that Iron Age people were grinding corn here at Chiron and where people were grinding corn they were very likely to be living and even farming in the surrounding landscape but to prove that this place was some sort of Iron Age capital we need evidence of large numbers of people living here and that means finding plenty of round houses yet halfway through our time here there's still no definitive evidence of a single one the pressures on we're at kirai hill fort in south wales a massive and explored site we're looking for evidence that this place was once some sort of Iron Age capital we're halfway through day two and even though we've got this fantastic geophys quite frankly what's been coming out of some of our trenches has been less than inspiring so we're putting in trench four here over the oval enclosure which you could see on the geophys and that is right at the entrance to the whole Iron Age hill fort so hopefully we'll get something here that's pretty exciting [Music] we've already put in three trenches to try and give a sense of how many people may have lived here and when with the help of the local kids from Ely we found a single late iron age corn grinding fern which points to it being a domestic site that so far on this giant hilltop we found no houses it's been a while since I've caught up with Phil he's always firmly believed he's got a round house at his trench but is he any closer to proving it okay clear up Ellucian we'll have a cup of tea give me some good news mate I've been looking around the other trenches you can't see a thing you're so negative you want something positive yes please well I can positively tell you that that ring ditch that foundation gully or whatever it was is not foundation gully or a ring ditch I'm gonna be really really positive I can think I can say positively that we do have a building in this trench and where is the build well is it actually in front of you where Kelly is you see she's got digging a post hole there yeah now about a foot behind her feet there is a gray patches another post hole there we've got another one look there's a gray patch there with another post hole and that all ties in with this feature that I'm digging here now I've measured them up the distances between them are the same the distance is that way are the same they form a regular rectangle now whether or not that's a rectangular building or part of something round I don't really know is that positive enough we've got we've got a building here really is a struggle finding anything here it is incredibly difficult to see any forms of features in this in this brown soil well that's not to be wondered that the thing is for 10,000 years ago this was an emaciated wood gracias that frozen and every time the ice froze it would open up wedges in the ground and it would bring the clay up from below and it would mess around with the natural and that's why it's a dog's breakfast all right don't give us a lecture just three years drink your tea but where is my never mind Gordon Bennett where's Murray Jase your tea please Oh positive thinking is all very well but the reality is that fills trench remains inconclusive our building could be round could be rectangular could be Iron Age but we've got no fines and no date it's game over a trench - but it's not time to give up on Chi ride just yet and we've also got a replica Iron Age drinking cup to make dave has added a small amount of tin to the copper we smelted earlier and is melting them in a crucible to make bronze it's almost ready to pour into molds which contain wax replicas of the handles of the Cardiff Museum is it ready Dave getting there now yeah it's good and hot from over here I think this is a very magical process I must have seen so there must nose to them as well even after thousands of years you still get to excited by it you can imagine that the people who did it must have had really high status in the community I should think so yeah our bronze is now ready to pour into the molds to create classic Iron Age style hands fantastic colors how long with or it'll cool down about 10 minutes sinara you can see that the bronze has a consistency of chocolate admit sir this temperature good good note I'd like to do the honors I'm okay with this side gently yeah oh yeah this fragile isn't it that's our casting yeah do you see the edge of the casting examples yeah yeah a quick wash and brush-up and the handles are very nearly there here we are probably around 2000 years and something like this was made on this side two thousand years ago Kyra would have looked very different tree cover is hiding its most dramatic features its ramparts can only be seen using modern lidar techniques which involve firing laser pulses from a plane at the site these allow us to see through the trees and reveal the giant banks and ditches whether as neil has always believed they were for showing off while we're defensive the one thing these ramparts definitely do is ensure people enter through the front door Francis put trench four over the feature at the entrance to see if it's a part of our Iron Age story oh yeah yeah what I've got I've got the sides now yeah and these stones along the site and the bottoms probably underneath these stones down here fantastic I mean those stones strike me very much as if they're there in citria they're placed there almost oh yeah they're not tumbled in I mean these are definitely being placed on the sides of the ditch all the way around there's one behind me as well and what sort of date is this well we've got two bits of pot out of this we've got one which is almost certainly Roman that one there that's out the top yeah this is romanovna it's fairly fairly hard and fairly fresh and then we got this very delicate handmade piece yeah and the Roman ones nice and fresh and this is fairly weather that's been lying around on the surface it's almost almost certainly yeah well that leads me to think that this is almost certainly wearable the new group it's looking that way and interestingly I mean we've got also what like to post holes here either side of the entrance so they could be gate posts can be gate posts or maybe fence posts yep now it's looking more more like a Roman farm but because when we say Roman we actually mean the Romans would be actually the plain people as we're here in the in the Iron Age das wearing Roman clothes romano welsh romano welsh yeah smashing a romano british cattle enclosure at the entrance to our fort is not what we want when we say romano-british we mean the period that follows the Iron Age when the Romans occupied Britain and our Welsh tribes had started to absorb roman ways but at least we found more evidence that this site was primarily domestic to be honest we've all been a bit disappointed today the lack of fines got to have been son and what they've done is to prove that this is definitely a late Iron Age site but that's about it really the truth is that from this huge site this massive hill Falls that closest we've got to the dense population hinted at by geophys are a few undateable postholes have we been digging in the wrong place the last two days we've been searching for an Iron Age capital up here on this hill but we've been thwarted by the geology and the thick brown sticky clay the geophys has been absolutely fantastic although it's offered us what seems like a a whole Mirage of little hearts and settlements and we've got a few files which are pretty good too but what we haven't got is a date for the time when this place was at its heyday and that's what we're gonna try and nail down today [Music] if there were large numbers of people living on this fort they would surely have left evidence of their daily lives but we're simply not finding it so Frances has come up with a new plan that involves looking from iron age ovens [Music] I don't understand if we want to nail down the dating why is our last throw of the dice gonna be looking at another ah because Tony we've done that end of a site we've done this side of a site what we haven't done is this huge area over here the middle the middle yeah and that is covered as you can see on the GF is by these oven kill me things all right do you think that by the end of the day you can give us some robust dating we are employing the right techniques to do it that's not an answer really yes it is very political answer [Laughter] whether they're ovens or kilns these features showing up on the magnetometry could be a sign of a busy occupied part of the site so it's our last-ditch effort to find more evidence of occupation at Cairo and an exact date [Music] but when Matt actually dig some of these hotspots the anomalies turn out to be Rome are no British slag proving that lots of people were working up here during the Roman period but it doesn't help us in our search for our Iron Age people yet just when all seems lost Kairi surprises us we think we may have finally found some promising features in the Roundhouse trench ditch ends features which would have formed the front door to around house [Music] Frances extended this trench yesterday and it seems to have paid off it's a real breakthrough and that's not all if we've got solid proof of one round house or the other circular shapes that showed up on the Geo fees are almost certainly round houses too but we still need dating evidence [Music] with time running out even site director Francis has picked up his trail he's got a posthole a feature you'd expect to find in a round house and even better there's pottery in it but is it enough to date the house look what we're getting out of it right on the door yeah I mean it's only body shows but I&H they've got to be on edge so if this pottery matches the stuff that mammy is getting that's fantastic because it's a straight line going through the front door isn't it pretty much yeah I mean it's ya know that way so I mean that would sort of indicate that these two features probably are part of the house right okay and you'll do a bit more digging but I want to make most of this but Francis reasons that his posthole and a pit outside the door that name is digging line up with each other putting him right in the heart of our round house [Music] the pot shirts he's finding have grit in them which means they're iron-age but to give us an accurate date we need bigger pieces if we know the shape of the pot we can date it and date our round house our Iron Age communal carp is almost finished we've made a wooden vessel the same size as the one in the Museum of Wales and we're now fitting the bronze handle smelted from scratch on this hill if you're off would you reckon right I think it's cracking it's wonderful object congratulations to both of you it tells us something about these people doesn't it you know talked about communal activities and feasts did hope it was communion because if you have back to yourself it might be tempting to try but I think you're probably want to come back at our round house the fines are coming thick and fast and in the nick of time naomi has found something we hope poor bling horn our fines expert can date pottery the rumours are true and it's not just any old pottery I think it's the pottery that we're looking for so yeah yeah so those are Stephanie inhc the angle s it's gonna come around something like that's that's a big pot my basic Astoria or something and it's in good Nick and there's more obvious so that's that's not stuff that is in the future yeah yeah I'm excavating this post hole here and we have got another large piece here in situ is almost ready to come out oh great stuff on their own naomi has found a large section of parts from a post hole at the entrance to the Roundhouse time in it yeah it's different part I think almost certainly I think you've got a full profile it's all the way up to the rim here you got something interesting below your finger like this nail hey what we present got name is Noam he's got a post hell down there and so far we've had a little piece of a place of what looks like a big storage oh that's a big metal Bible look at it but we've also got this let me assume it's doing the guy it's funny little cut gorgeous isn't it I don't think that's middle to late you think that might be early I think that's early this is probably the only complete profile of an earthly net so that Ivor was in the South Wales no joke very many of them know what struck me about it this interest as well you've got this big shirt of a big jar on this little cup with it it's almost like a representation of a drinking kit you've got your big pot with your beer or whatever in and they've got your little cup for scooping out and it's right in the top let me have a look it's right in the top of a post more of its due in there yeah yeah so this unassuming piece of pottery this tiny cup with its distinctive profile from bottom to top turns out to be the key to the whole dig it's the most complete early Iron Age cup ever found in South Wales not only is it a truly spectacular find in its own right it conclusively dates our site to the earliest part of the Iron Age a job well done we came here looking for an Iron Age capital in one tiny area of our site we found a terrace of round houses from the very early iron age around 800 BC that could have housed a hundred people glass ears later industry and plowing make karai difficult to read but if the rest of the site was as heavily populated as this one little corner we could be looking at hundreds or even thousands of people living here at its height looks like our hill fort could be the ancient building co-op of meals dreams it's a place where people had kitchen accidents and performed drinking rituals in the home ah romano-british farmstead proves that this hill continued to be occupied on into the roman period before being abandoned [Music] it's time to celebrate the community of Kyrie past and present what has amazed me is the sheer length of time that this place has been occupied how long do you think thousand years so for me it's it's the sheer fact that we've been able to find buildings we all need somewhere to live you're only got to look down there and see the homes of so many people that to me is the important thing that there is a real live settlement on the hill all those thousands of years ago [Music] drinking from it we will bond together

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

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Id: hYyHIxPqfvo

Length: 46min 15sec (2775 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020