Who Were The Lords Of The Isles? | Time Team | Absolute History

[Music] it's hard to believe but these buildings were once at the very center of a kingdom that dominated the whole of western scotland for over 500 years these people are from the national museums of scotland and they've got one final chance to unlock the secret of that kingdom the lords of the isles what can the time team do to help [Music] so [Music] over there somewhere is donegal on the coast of ireland and if you climb to the top of that little hill on a clear day i think you can probably see it although not today looks nice now but it's been tipping down i'm absolutely drenched anyway about a thousand years or so ago settle as a ride from ireland here on the isle of isla and it was their descendants who became known as the lords of the isles and for the past five years archaeologists from the national museums of scotland have been digging on that little island in the middle of the loch you can see why they've concentrated on the island can't you there's the remains of old habitations on it it's close to the shore it's very dramatic looking but what they hadn't had the time or the resources to do is look any further afield and that's what the time team is going to do over the next two or three days we're going to dig round the little lumps and bumps around the loch because the national museums have only got the resources to dig for this summer after that no more money so if they don't find anything this summer they never will i'm going to find out exactly what time team are going to do i'm gonna dry off first mick yeah hi tony what's the plan well we've got all sorts of work started all over the place already we've we've got the geophysics going up on the mound there and you can see the surveyors up there as well and then we're going to be looking at the lakeside round here with the divers they're going to be looking in the salt over here we're also going to be over there where we think we've got these guard houses uh where phil and the others are on the on the other side on the side of the lock and you haven't actually had a look at the mound that we're going to look at no we haven't our remit has been to to look at the the two islands here and uh we're coming to the end of that phase i don't quite understand because the mound seems to me as a layman just such an obvious feature why haven't you looked at it before well because we our rebate really has been to stick to the two islands but it's only really by being here that the importance of the mound has has dawned on us and that's again one of the reasons why it's useful to get in other people who can help you see things that perhaps you fail to notice because you saw so much into the job in hand that you can't take a wider look david's keen for us to investigate the mound because he believes it could have been used as a ceremonial site by the lords of the isles possibly the place where they inaugurated their leaders our plan of action is to carry on at the guard house site until we've got some geophysics information about the mound what we're hoping is that the geophysics survey will tell us if there are any signs of buried stones or structures under the ground the national museums of scotland are currently working on two trenches on the main island this one which is trying to find more evidence of medieval buildings or signs of earlier occupation and this trench which is positioned at the water's edge in an attempt to learn how the causeway linked with the island have you shown something yeah we just found a little glass bead down there well not a bead might have been the makings of a bee just while you were bailing yeah if we'd been traveling we might have missed it because it could have gotten coated with mud and stuff where is it um oh it's beautiful isn't it we've only been here about five minutes obviously four years of excavations here in finland have produced hundreds of fines brooches like this one [Music] and heart pins like this pieces of pottery all helping to provide a picture of how the lords of the isles enjoyed life here in the 13th century this is victor's reconstruction of how this bit of pot would have looked when complete it's a santong jug which david believes would have been brought in with the claret from france but all of these finds have come from the main island and the smaller council island but what can we find from the mainland phil is working at the guard houses the geophysics are working at the mound at the far end of the site and the divers are working in the silt at the edge of the causeway which would have linked the island to the mainland but at the moment they don't seem to be having much luck well the bad news is visibility is dreadful there's a lot of silk coming down the stream and the peat's making it very dark as well so it's uh if we work here we're gonna have to be very very tight the trouble for me poor ignorant southerner is that the lords of the isles is one of those scottish phrases like speed bonnie boat or you take the high road that sounds incredibly evocative and i've absolutely no idea what it means well it all started in 1156 with this chap called summerlead who was a a petty king in in in argylsha and he cast lustful eyes on an isla off the coast of scotland won a famous sea battle and drove the norse out of isla and he made his headquarters uh here uh had descendants who settled uh and established a mini kind of palace uh at finland uh they didn't start calling themselves lords of the isles until the 14th century and even then they assumed the title out of the blue so were there lots of lords of the isles at one time or was there just one lord who ruled over all of the islands well from the 12th century onwards basically one lord in fact after summerlead uh you know died in battle against one of the kings of scotland in 1164 uh the whole thing was split up amongst his sons but uh one of his grandsons was called donald uh and from him all the mcdonald's uh conceivably in the world including the fast food bloke are descended from that one grandson of summerlead meanwhile as the rain continues to fall water levels continue to rise making the archaeological going tough however phil's pressing on at the far side of the lock we're digging here because there are 17th century documents which tell us there were guard houses here housing up to several hundred men protecting the ferry crossing onto the island it's easy to forget especially in bad weather like this that these islands were a special place for the lords of the isles so important in fact that some of them chose to be buried here look at that that's brilliant isn't it quite an impressive collection isn't it yeah these are found um late last century in the ruins of the chapel up there this this is brilliant isn't it the one in the middle of it yeah do you think the lords of the isles would actually have looked like this oh undoubtedly a lot of the the top people in west highland society wore armor like this because it's very light they were able to to stride across hills through the bogs and heather um they weren't encumbered with plate metal and you see the the the garment the main garment is wearing a nakatan a quilted garment probably made of linen or cotton and stuffed with all the material like wool or grass i can see david how um that sort of padded clothing would be very effective against the sort of side swipe with the sword uh you know to sort of perhaps absorb the impact yes but i can't see how it would actually stop anything going through it you know sally ann is here because you're gonna make us a replica yes one of these it might be something that'll become clear if we do that we actually see what it what it what it looks like well i think you'll find also if we make it up out of linen that linen does actually stop a sharp blow better than you'd think it would particularly if it's stuffed with uh tau which is the untreated um unworked linen fibers it's surprisingly good now this gentleman may have been wearing um mail underneath this as well right yeah which would also have stopped the blow so yes have you got a volunteer who we can i have got a volunteer somewhere yes who is it right rat chest measurements [Music] so we have just two and a half days to try and produce an accuratum for rat all i can say is i hope it's waterproof it's a scottish room wreck and dates back to the the mists of time when i was when i was young and punk was alive and afraid in addition to the geophysics survey of the mound carrender and stuart are preparing an earthworks plan recording any lumps and bumps in the ground which may represent the outlines of old buildings and give us a clue to how the mound's been used in the past mick has decided it's time to check up on how phil's getting on at the guard house with him is donald mcfadden local farmer and a member of the finland trust who were responsible for bringing archaeologists to finlag and lock in the first place what we would like as a reconstruction of what the island had looked like when what the 13th 15th century when those people were there in fact we're already well on the way to granting donald's request victor started work on a reconstruction based on the information provided by the excavations here over the last four years we know there would have been a prestigious building on the council island here and a posh guest hall and a chapel at this end of the main island and access for important people would have been by ferry which was protected by the guard houses on the far side of the log are you getting on then phil well apart from this being the wet side of the lake not too bad this is uh donald mcfadden from the finland trust very pleased to meet no getting on you donald's very interesting excavations that we're doing well not too bad i mean you might be surprised to know that when we arrived here this morning this was like a swimming pool well actually all this through here was full of water i mean that must have chucked it down last night so the first thing we had to do was to bail the sight out but uh what are you getting well you can see we've got quite a nice preserved building here there's obviously more walls under here that's right we got a nice turf bank there nice turf wall there yeah and then through the middle we got the central part of the building and on the other side uh the other side of the building they're using turf cut into blocks like buildings putting a timber roof on the top of it you know timber and thatch on the top correct that's a traditional building and it's possible it could be a guard house being similar with the sage well we got nothing to prove it at the minute you know we just don't know unless we can get until we can get some dateable fines and it doesn't look like we're going to get them at the minute we've got nothing out of it at all nothing at all well you can see what the state of play is mick i mean it's getting pretty impossible and i mean looking at it i mean it's not done it's not going to get any better is this for the next it doesn't look like it does it i reckon we should break for lunch all right that's the best thing you need i think any good news well actually yes we've done some work up on top of that mound that you can occasionally see through the rain both the earthworks survey and geophysics i think do suggest there are some possible buildings there's something up that would be worth having a look at the earthworks survey actually does show some sort of lines that might be the remains of walls suggest there might have been a building there this is the top of the land here and what's showing up as slight bumps in the ground is this feature here and you can see this there's a very regular turn to it here that looks like it might be the remains of a wall of a building or something like that it's a bit difficult to tell exactly what it is because there's rocks sticking up through the grass which is natural this is obviously interfering to some extent we're at the moment trying to think where to put a trench but john what does it look like yes i mean the geology is difficult we are getting correlation with the topographic survey and this is um the area where it correlates well with the earthworks we've got a strong so that is the same lights there so how do we make a decision precisely where to put our trench well we've got this accurately plotted out and given that the earthworks and the geophysics car light on this anomaly i mean i'd have thought that was a good target to go think so the thing to do i'm tremendously relieved about that actually so we and yes i trench through that would be very interesting and i certainly agree with you wholeheartedly that it doesn't sound as if it's something that's 19th or 20th century so we're going to dig where they correlate on the anomaly that's right so trench two gets started on top of the mound with everyone lending a hand for the moment we're going to stop work at the guard house site but the fact that we didn't come across any fines at all not even the usual bits of 18th century clay pipe suggests that it is an ancient site and could well be one of the guard houses mentioned in the documents work on the akaton is now well underway and every effort is being made to make it as authentic as possible this for instance is incredibly smelly sheep's wool which has been collected from the surrounding fields and already our excavations on top of the mound are beginning to produce fines that's a bit more like it than that hey yeah i mean that's just happy with that oh yeah absolutely no question about that oh is this the only piece where you've got some more well actually no but there's a couple more here it's all flint then i think we'd have had a wild whip of joy pretended by the pottery no no no no i'm quite happy to have a prehistoric sight up here oh wow look at that then oh yeah we don't want any pottery with this stuff that same white flint isn't a nice little assemblage actually still about something a bit later where is this from then well you know we started over there on the causeway in the reeds and the visibility was too bad so we moved down to the council aisle looking for the causeway there yeah and i think we found the edge of the causeway and also at the edge of it the remains of what looks to be a midden which is where all this stuff's coming from there's still a lot down there there's uh wooden artifacts still lying in the in the bottom waiting but that's for tomorrow but some of this stuff is really nice that's boring mainly yeah yes and there's butchery marks on them too right so these are food remains of animals they've chopped up and yeah this looks like chop marks isn't it yeah that's absolutely all broken through yeah i think sometimes it's actually something that we've sadly missed on the excavation so far is that we haven't actually had any medieval middens really on the island itself so this is this is really exciting this is going to give you the diet once you can get some sort of date isn't it i mean it's yeah it's fantastic and there's so much of it there this is all from an area about half the size of this palette very small and there's loads more yeah that's great it's all coming down to tomorrow isn't it yeah great smashing thanks very much it's not so romantic up here now yeah well we're getting some good stuff get that bit of flint phil yeah we have you know we had some flints yesterday yeah and david was pretty cautious because they get flint all the time don't let it blow away totally what is it well it's what we call a microlift i mean it's a very small piece of flint but it's been deliberately shaped and the important thing is that it is a very diagnostic piece of flint what does that mean well it means that they can be tied down to hunters who were probably the first people who were living in scotland maybe what six eight thousand years ago well how do you know that this is man-made because it looks to me just like something i dig up about the garden well can you see that along this edge here some very very minut microscopic almost chips along the edge yeah can you see that and remove from there and in fact we got the same thing on this side as well little tiny chips along that edge and that is not the sort of thing that would happen accidentally what would they use that for then phil well these things are used basically collectively you use quite a lot of them in this in a tool called composite tools and um they've always been accepted as being arrowhead tips and things like that barbs but now when people are increasingly becoming aware that they're used for drills engraving tools scraping tools i mean you name it they virtually you virtually use them for anything so what sort of people were these we're basically hunters and let's be honest what a better place to observe your game than up here i mean you got a full view of everything look you could look have a look out at the lake and animals coming down what have you superb catchment area so are we really starting to say that this is a prehistoric site or is it too early yet i personally think it's we're probably a bit early that dan flint doesn't make a summer you know but but at the same time flints that are up here they haven't they haven't migrated here they the flint is likely to have started up here it hasn't moved down we're right up on top of a hill um no i think we've got a we could have a mesolithic site up here right so beginning of day two last night i thought we were going to discover the remains of celtic lords and ladies and we've ended up finding some new stone age people little stone age middle stone age people sorry can we get out of the wind and have a council of war yeah so the decisions taken to extend our trenches on top of the mound in the hope that we can now answer two questions is this a mesolithic site and was it used by the lords of the isles thousands of years later to speed up our survey of the rest of the site we've brought in a satellite mapping system that'll quickly enable us to produce a large scale map of the area the global positioning system as it's called has already mapped the mound which you can see here and this may enable us to work out where the water levels have changed and if the mound was ever an island hi er come see our new toy yes yes how does it work we've got a series of satellites up in space that are telling us where they are and we're measuring our distance from those satellites and from that information we can get our coordinates of the ground point here with respect to those satellites and with respect to another station so what we're looking at is getting coordinates to an accuracy of 10 or so millimeters in plan around the countryside and within 10 15 millimeters in height wherever i walk with the pole so these satellites are sending down information about where they are in space and if you've got them the information from four or five of them then you know where the bottom of the pole is exactly yeah like sort of electronic tape measure yeah so now wherever i go i'm just measuring coordinates of the ground the gps system uses american military satellites which shows that star wars wasn't a total waste of time currently all's working well and it's beginning to produce a picture of the complete landscape of finlaghan all the finds are dealt with in here fines such as this medieval belt buckle which was found in one of the national museum's trenches yesterday but of course our newest source of fines this weekend is in the midden discovered by the divers between the two islands now my understanding of the plan for today was that mick was going to help with the underwater archaeology but apparently there's been a change of plan i think we're probably eating enough now if we get there we can crawl and scramble forward just onto our knees just follow me down [Music] despite the fact that the peat gives the water a brownie appearance the visibility is actually very good underwater archaeology like this involves using a suction pipe which is called a lift and is effectively a large vacuum cleaner which sucks up the unwanted silt and helps to keep the water clear [Music] hmm [Music] how you getting on then tony oh it's fantastic it's so much easier than digging on the surface there's fines all over the place yeah a little bit of wood a little bit of bone i've got a stunking big bit of bone about about that big i don't know what it is we can have a look later on can you see the stratification that we were on about yeah there's there's certainly three strata yeah there's the silt first of all which is very gray and you have to be very careful when you send it otherwise you just mess up the visibility all around you yeah and then below that there's like rusty pebbles and then below that there's the actual mid of the spoil heap that we've been working i can't believe i'm getting excited about a medieval rubbish tip but there's not just the midden down here you can see the big stones that were once part of the causeway which linked the council island with the main island the material coming from the midden and the evidence being found in the trenches on the island all add to our understanding of how life was lived here in the medieval period among the finds from the island have been several harp pins and mary mcintyre a member of the finlagon trust is pretty keen to hear the kind of typical instrument that would have been played in front of the lords of the isles 600 years ago [Music] do it's amazing how a bit of sunshine can transform everything the whole valley looks glorious now but what was it about these islands that made them such an attractive place to live apart from the exciting weather of course what are we looking for well at the moment we're heading out down the sound which which is the obvious way in because it's a long sheltered inlet and anybody coming from ireland or from the south west or you know down towards the isle of man or anywhere like that would have come up that way and use this long inlet to come in exceed in front of us now look this um sort of jetty coming out it's really natural boulders coming out in a line look under the sea see down there look i think yeah this is where they beat the galleys and so you can see the this long sheltered beach going up very clearly in the water and running from that beaching place coming right through uh is this road that uh you know they would have used to get to the meetings at mid lagoon itself so we need to give a weary eye out as we go along so we can't pick up traces of that you can see the logic of it so clearly can't you there's this really quite welcoming bay out there and then this very fertile land at the middle with hills and mountains on either side and let's not forget it's a well-used landscape it's got prehistoric stuff in it it's got no stuff in it and so if this place was already revered as an important center then you legitimize your own activities by establishing yourself there as well i guess it's underneath us now looking yeah that that must be running away through there look and then going over the shoulder of the hill down there and he's heading down for the god houses that we've begun to look at to get the ferry across so they're coming across this slope and their first view would have been of this island you know in the end of the lake this is the piece that uh tony excavated yeah is there anything else in whistleborn though nick yeah they're very small pieces there's not so much big pottery in this but these two pieces have decoration on them both they come from the same pot now these strike me as being very interesting actually i've seen pottery rather similar to this coming from ershar more particularly from don donald castle which belonged to king robert ii it's where he actually died in 1390 and these i think belong to quite fine jugs um they've obviously been covered with a green glaze and decorated with wavy line patterns which i think was put on with with a comb it's rather rather interesting to think that if i'm right that um saint potter is getting to don donald castle in the late 14th century and also here as well it's kind of nice to add to the idea of the council aisle with quite important people coming and meeting here and maybe drinking wine and indeed yeah it's changing the weather certainly cheered everyone up and for the first time this weekend i can actually see the paps of jura that i've heard so much about our actions really beginning to take shape and with the help of local volunteers they tell me it'll be finished early tomorrow just that for the arm cemetery is that okay no i think that's fine no that should be all right um not too solid around the waist side okay so that it can be bolted in because that's the hip that he'll be carrying his sword on but the big question for today is are we making any sort of progress on top of the mound are we finding anything that would justify our spending so much time there phil and carensa believe they've got some news for us yeah they're all here and they all want to see it hi what are you reacting to this then what'd you think of that mick good lord well there wasn't much on up here so we thought we'd strip a bit more turf well it's it's it's either a little stone row or a something like that well that's what we were speculating it might be an enclosed area of ritual significance yeah yeah it's like a structure isn't it yeah what's this well a sort of stone-lined underground chamber for what not normally for storage um the most of the car in the east of scotland is like the first corner here that's what we're wondering i mean it's a synthetic do i have a choice i'm not following him that's that might well be natural that bit tony i'm not sure about that but it's these big boulders here clearly artificial it's clearly man-made structure can you remember tony we just had these two boulders here that we thought might have been a wall this was the first trench we opened that's what phil and i were thinking it seemed to be the only sort of structure with your possible structure we'd had up here and so we thought well you know bother it we'll follow this this is something interesting up here we were following gut instinct plus the geophysics and the yeah i was going to say is this what we saw on the geophysics and the earthquakes that that's brilliant oh very i mean this is fantastic whatever date it turns out to be it's going to be something wrong it's a major monument that we didn't know about before it's completely undiscovered it's fantastic so we came here looking for laws of the aisles and last night we had middle stone age we certainly had it this morning and now we've got this burial chamber from gwen any day prehistory who knows from any day who knows we got a lot of work up here yet tony it's called a past day let's have a drink yes please i don't mean to see over-eager i'm very pleased [Laughter] just thought i'd do a bit of scraping of course in the outside [Laughter] treasure hunter beginning of day three and there's a howling gale coming from totally the opposite direction from howling gail yesterday phil i didn't understand for the life of me why people would have built up here every bit of weather just batters us why didn't they build in the lee of this hill we've got to remember tony that that in the in the stone age in really in the early times this area would probably look totally different to what it is now very very dense woodland so to be loads and loads of shelter and when you say the stone age you're talking about mesolithic and old stone age what were they well basically you've got three periods of the stone age you've got the very oldest stone age we we call it the paleolithic and that goes right back to the first people who were living in this country about half a million years ago now and um they were living here until basically the last ice age went away and that we were talking there maybe 12 000 years ago 10 000 bc and the next group of people we call them the mesolithic peoples the middle stone age they're still hunters and they're moving around catching animals gathering fruits and what have you and then maybe about 4000 bc you start getting the first farmers and they're the people who are responsible for clearing a lot of the woodland and do you think that this is new stone age if it's any of them this is what it's going to what it ought to be yeah so you reckon it could have been a big stone corridor with made the earth over very likely yeah i mean you you just can't tell in a lot of cases a lot of this could be eroded away the dirt the mound so what are you gonna do well what we should do tony is take a section we call it a section which is just a trench running through the middle across it and that will give us some idea of how deep the layers are and we'll be able to see what this upright stone is doing how well it's bedded into the ground and it will also give us show us what these uh ones that are lying on this side are um and we're probably taking about a meter across something like that and how deep until we get to the bottom [Laughter] now that we've got a prehistoric site on top of the mound karen's has gone to have a closer look at a standing stone which is positioned here and it seems to be aligned with the mound and the paps of jura if you stand on the mound look at the stone you see right on to the perhaps of jura i must admit that when we were stood on the mound last night i did notice how the stone was directly in the cleavage of the path of juror in fact but i've been going through the the documentary sources and i come across the accounts of the travels of a chap called deliciously martin martin in about 1695 and he recalled that uh that time at any rate there were two standing stones six feet high on the east side of lochvan lagoon now the only snag with that is of course that uh this is at the north end as opposed to the east side i'm not really worried about that i might say robin i think that it's quite difficult to get your bearings here abouts and um i i would guess that this is likely to be one of the stones that martin was referring to except i would refer to this as the end of the lock rather than the side of the lock well i i i'm not too worried i think that um i must admit that walking over here just now there's some interesting sort of patterns in the grass there's one area of the grass hasn't grown which which there could be a stone under there stopping it growing um and there's actually quite an interesting sort of circle of paleographs that there could even be a feature running around it i mean i wonder if we could get the david's interested in this thinks there might be another one here we got the geophysics in to have a look so the buried stones influence the the type of the way in which the vegetation's grown over it yes because there's a stone under the grass there's less moisture and the grass doesn't grow as as well i mean it doesn't seem to be a problem here was it dry earlier in the year david it's very dry in there yes i would like john to do this i think it'd be well worth while encouraging them our accordance now finished and rat not only looks warm and dry but makes a pretty convincing lord of the isles that is brilliant it looks much more practical than i thought it would be i thought he'd just look like rat dressing up as a pretend soldier so if you can draw your sword you've got the chainmail suit under there so even if anything penetrates that's right and you've got the sort of swords that we're talking about here are not designed to to thrust they're designed to slash and break well i raised the question when we discussed this earlier as to you know whether sort of clouting him across like that whether you know it would you'd get through but clearly that's really quite quite padded isn't it i think what does it too hard you know i think what is important is this is a brand new one and probably after his first first escapade out um in the hills and his first combat this would be quite badly damaged yeah but he would take it back home hunt it over to somebody and the next time it went out it would have lots of repairs and patches and it'd just be serviceable what about these fittings at the back i mean it's it's um i mean obviously you've got to get into it somehow and it's it's it you can presumably undo all this well if i show you very briefly this um he couldn't do this himself so it was basically at the mercy of somebody else but it's double thickness on the back where it wraps over and he's strapped into this very very tight now i mean when we put rat in here he was quite upset that we're pulling him so tight quite simply if you held the body tight and compressed it if it was hit the internal organs don't move around all right so the chance of serious bruising and internal bleeding was restricted for the fighting period so he had a reasonable chance of getting off the battlefield in some state of uh survival and do we know that he would have had two-tone trousers or tights there are a lot there is a lot of evidence to suggest that um they were slightly fancy in the color use uh and different legs if i can just show you rat if you're not too embarrassed about this the legs are actually separate oh yes it's possible to one of these one of these legs is from another pair as it were that had been damaged so they're hoes rather than trousers yeah so you've got one vulnerable place right despite the bad conditions underfoot the geophysics team are working as quickly as they can to produce a survey of the area around the standing stone on the mound phil's hoping to find some dateable evidence as he digs deeper around the stones how'd you fancy some carvings on the rocks that'd be all right oak springs eternal tony i've just been looking through to see what other sites there are that might be the same sort of date around here to see how how new this might be and it's really exciting because i think you can see from this distribution map that this is all sites of the same date and these are all stone age and these are all around the coast that's it they're all around the coast where are we and we're here right inland and there's nothing there at all it's been recorded before it's a sort of it's a lovely sheltered valley as this part of the world goes um it has this sort of it's secluded from the sea but very accessible to it and it it is the only area on the island that that in fact on any of these islands on isla or dura or on say that that has any of this inland settlement at this earlier date as far as we know this seems to be quite profoundly altering our concept of of the settlement on the island if you look on the um a few thousand years later in the bronze age you've got a lot of um evidence that people were were living up here though we've all moved inland then yes but we've pushed it back perhaps well with the mesolithic evidence we've pushed back settlement up here for more than three and a half thousand years nick just before you go how have you got online with the weekend good stuff important stuff absolutely it's great it's a very very exciting site um i didn't for a minute think it was going to be so rich especially in three days yeah um but it's really tremendous stuff and it's given a real insight into certainly to me anyway into the council and the sort of things that might have been going on there when you look at the island it looks very barren and very bare but now that we found this material you can i can anyway actually imagine the the house with the door open the heart playing the light coming out you can imagine you know smashing jugs and people coming out in the morning you know throwing the stuff into the lock yeah and with all the old bones and everything else and that's exactly where we find you just lie there because it's underwater it's it's not disturbed there's no bacteria to break down things so tremendous preservation and we're very exciting to see what comes out of the site in the future it's tremendous we now have the first geophysics results from the area around the standing stone one two three well i think what do you think they are anomalies or pits brilliant um pits rather than stones think pits um possibly a couple of meters across that's absolutely stunning once i don't understand what might it be well it could be a stone row it could be a major religious landscape i mean the point is they they seem to be pointing towards the perhaps that's the the real point of interest i don't think we're going to be able to finish this one today this is this is big [Laughter] i'd better clean this loose up and then see if we can get him up here what's on the bottom of the train what have you got that right here oh there's more stones big old stones and uh oh dear i think you definitely gotta get david yeah looks like a bone like you know hey that does look like bow that does look very much like a bone well you better go down to get to get david up here and get him up here pretty quick oh my god yeah when they said it was something urgent i thought i mean i don't know whether it is human but um well there it is brilliant hang on a minute let me get my famous dental hooks this is the long bone in here there's no question about that yeah but then we got the joint there now that that's a hinge joint so that's either got to be i'm sure that's an ankle joint well i think it's a it's it's um it's not i don't think it's a hand i mean look at the size of that condition always in good condition well a lot of the bone down the island is is very soft very mushy but of course with all the limestone around here and that that's presumably helpful all right uh so is it human couldn't i don't think it's like a piece of a sort of an ox bone the four leg of an ox something that's not i i i don't think it is human but uh i mean it gives you some hint of what the hell is down here though doesn't it yeah why might there be any more bones down here i don't know actually i think is is the honest answer have you any ideas well i mean we we haven't really got enough here to see have we but but it seems to me that um the only reason the obvious reasons are it's either debris from from feasting and so on which you've seen down the island or it's some sort of or it's some sort of deliberately buried deposit for for ritual reasons this raises the question what are we going to do now does it not well i think it does i mean my inclination to think we can't get much further there's no way we're going to go on digging into you know we've if you like we've done the evaluation work this is an incredibly important decision incredibly implication you've done amazing you've done an amazing good job in such a short time and i i feel that there's no way we can just uh leave it like this i think we're good i mean it needs a more delicate longer time to to work on it doesn't it yeah to get the the best isn't it always the way just when you find something really exciting you run out of time and apparently there's more to come so this is the second printout yes you found any more well one two three pits yeah do you want a few more yeah well you tell me what you think of that oh my goodness that's is it in the same alignment as the rest of the geological no it's not in the same alignment it's a geological strike um talk to claire and we're a bit confused it looks geological but the alignment isn't right so you tell me to get a massive landscape of stuff here we've got all this activity with stones and pits and god knows what up there we've got the ken or whatever it is on the mound and they're a distance apart you've got this huge sort of landscape of massive ritual monuments all ahead of the lake here it's a seriously big religious site if it's a religious size it's a seriously big anomaly [Music] of course a lot more work will need to be done before we can fully understand the prehistoric evidence on this site but the geophysics survey of the field does suggest that the standing stone may have been just part of a larger configuration of stones possibly a stone circle like this or more likely a stone avenue which was aligned with the paths of dura to the northeast but also designed to provide an impressive approach to the mound itself we started our investigation on the mound with the view that it may have been used by the lords of the isles but what we've discovered this weekend is a ceremonial or ritualistic site belonging to a period thousands of years earlier the time team view is that this was a stone-lined burial or storage chamber which would have looked like this the bone is almost certainly cow or oxen and was probably placed here for ritualistic reasons in addition on the main island the national museums of scotland have found this piece of prehistoric pottery it comes from a pot that would have looked like this and it was found alongside possible evidence of prehistoric round houses so the big picture of this site during the new stone age might look like this with people living on the island but using the mound and the area to the northeast for religious activity [Music] our work this weekend has established that the area around finland has been important to people from as early as 6000 bc right through to the occupation of the islands by the lords of the isles in the 13th century so with all this new important information david should have a strong argument for raising more funding and continuing the work here in fact it's so important that who knows the time team may even be back weather permitting

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 53,055

Rating: 4.924922 out of 5

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history, tony robinson, time team, lords of the isles, islay, scotland, finlaggan, david attenborough

Id: bSPVk3qgkrw

Length: 46min 49sec (2809 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020