Why This English Town Is Filled With Saxon Graves | Time Team | Absolute History

fourteen hundred years ago a bunch of pagan war-like foreigners turned up in this area and they never went home again who were they and where are they now [Music] this doesn't look much like an ancient site does it it looks more like a building site which is what it actually is or at least it would be if the owner was allowed to develop it but he's been told there may be bodies under the ground here ancient bodies and he's not allowed to actually build until all the archaeology has been sorted out but he can't afford to pay for the archaeology we're in the village of winterbourne gunner near salisbury in wiltshire where these newly built houses lie on top of a 6th century saxon graveyard we've got three days to find any new graves which may lie under all the rubble so the developer can get on and build so where the heck do we start in a place like this mig it's covered in rubble really it's a case of you know bringing the machine in and taking all the rubble off the top and having look what's what's there we're allowed to knock this sort of thing down i think we've probably got to get rid of the shed in order to get the machine in and to get a big enough air and a lot of these piles of rubble and so on will have to be moved as well why don't we do a bit of geophysics wouldn't that be easier well the trouble is the ground is absolutely full of rubble and modern rubbish you know particularly metal i mean you've got it's a metal and corrugated iron and pipes and that's going to throw a lot of the signals out so if we're going to find these stiffs what do we do first i think we've got to bring the machine in and get rid of the topsoil and get cracking on it [Music] okay [Music] [Music] no one knows just how big the saxon graveyard is so we can try and answer that question too at the back of the site there's a strip of open ground that's never been built on here may be the best opportunity to define how far the graveyard spreads carrenza's team gets started straight away what we're really trying to do here one of the most important things we've got to do is define the extent of the site we know there are graves over there just under the houses but we don't know what's here at home are there any geophysical techniques you can do here to pick up graves in this area if they're there we could try resistivity um but there's a lot of structures in the way which we're not going to get through like the concrete and if even if we try to move the vehicles we're not going to get true responses because of the moisture variation we'll give it a try in the region that we can so it's sort of a long shot it's a long shot might be able to pick stuff up okay well if you start getting set out we'll come and survey you in so we can put it on your map good luck [Music] back at the side the rubbish has been cleared and we can start stripping back the topsoil by now the developer david buckland has turned up to watch what we're doing do we know david is there any services through here any water you know gas electrics anything like that i think that pipe just down there is part of the old water main that used to run right up through the site um and there's an electricity cable that runs around the back but apart from that i don't know anything so we're always over this how do you know how deep you can dig without messing anything up well what we've done here is just take the top soil off as you can see scrape that back and you've come straight down onto the chalk which is a natural geology so all we're doing is just coming down onto that and then any features cut into that show up as dark lines so that for example here you can see there's a line across there where's the other one phil is it this one here i thought this was just done by the digger but it's no it's not i mean there's two lines you see and we think they're probably um this one here it's probably medieval ploughing something like that yeah but that's cut into the chalk you see hang on let's uh and so obviously any grey will show up in the same way as just a soil filled hole so how will you know when you found something like a grave well i think there are some we got back there which could well be the edge of a grave we've only got just the slightest corner of it but now why do you think there's a grave though it looks just like every other area right but what we've got is here we've got the very very nice short solid chalk you see that's very very white yeah and then just in this corner you see there's a soily patch and here look just a bit of charcoal now that's not that's not in the chalk that's that's an artificial thing so show me where you think roughly the outside edge of the outside edge of the grave would come around there and round there and it's heading off that direction just this direction here well i can't see it we'll just have to wait and see stood i've got some more archaeological information here i'm hoping we might be able to build up a sort of bigger picture not just the cemetery but the sort of settlement and anything else that was going on in the landscape that's right there's actually a lot of information around here meanwhile carrenza's gathering information from all previous archaeology in the area like the location of all other known graves under the next door houses this prehistoric burial mound surrounded by a ring ditch in the field next door and medieval village remains found near the village church it'd be amazing if we could locate the settlement where the saxons had lived before they were buried that's very clear i can see the sides very clearly now look felt down like that either side and a nice sharp every turn on this end yeah and i'm standing right on the end even slightly wider that's right yeah so presumably the heads this end and the feet going off down yeah with the first grave revealed i took the opportunity of asking david how he got into this mess when the chap in the middle started building they discovered all these graves and of course you know next thing is i get loads and loads of mail telling me that i can't do anything at all because of the graves that they've discovered on the site and the next thing after that is that i get a bill for the cost of the excavation and apart from the fact that i owe the bank about twice as much as the ground is worth the bill for the excavation is also almost the amount that the ground is worth so you snowed under with this massive debt yeah and you can't sell your land even at a loss to paid off because they say now they're asking me for a bill as well how's that affected you personally um well i used to have a little bit more hair hasn't done my marriage too much good as you can imagine um i've had four years of worry really phil caught up with local archaeologist pete cox who'd excavated lots of the graves under the houses next door we've got no problem about other graves cutting into it so it's just really a question of starting the process of you know layer by layer and taking it off and i suppose the other thing we've got to be careful of is grave goods yeah that's right they're they're going to occur sporadically uh some of the graves are completely plain um others have have broaches and things from where they've you know they've worn you know from shoals or whatever around their shoulders it's one of the key things really these wow the bones are very important because you know we're dealing with real people at last in archaeology uh but the objects with them are important because they're they're dateable right and they tell you about something about the community well let's hope we can get some then yep roy should we leave mick to go on with that you happy there then mick oh we've got some spectators here well obviously when we get into exposing the skeleton we're going to have to block off the the entrance to the site and actually sort of stop visibility yeah home office again is it that's right that's part of this part of the the the license bureaucratic rules so who were these saxons and why did they come here well when the roman empire collapsed it was a bit like the collapse of the russian empire in our lifetime immediately blood feud started and there were civil wars and you'd imagine that maybe there was some local tribe chief around here who was dying to have a dust up with another local tribe chief so what did he do he did what the romans always did in situations like this he called in mercenaries from northern europe the saxons and they were dying to come here for two reasons firstly because the sea level was rising so their pastures were getting flooded and secondly because their own country was being invaded by war-like tribes from all across europe so they came here they did the job and then they decided they weren't going home again whatever the local people thought bit like the russians in latvia and lithuania nowadays well at least that's my current theory and we've got three days to find out whether or not there might be some truth in it robin if we find any saxon bodies do you reckon they would have been mercenaries well we've only got one uh contemporary account of what was happening at around the kind the time that we're talking about uh a testile cleric called gildas uh states uh that the saxons were invited in by the british to help defend them against nasty attacks from the pits and the scots up north so i'm right well not necessarily you see we have a much later account ninth century the anglo-saxon chronicle which tells us chapter and verse for the saxon invasion as it moved north from the hampshire coast and they move inland achieve a substantial victory in 519 and finally win the battle of salisbury in 5-5-2 and they were saxons and they were saxons so could these dead saxons have been killed in one of these big set-piece battles they're earlier than that round about 520 and not only that but they include graves of women and children it's a settlement cemetery possibly at a time when the saxons were living relatively at peace under or with the romano british so they could be colonists uh and they could be mercenaries or they could be an invading army hello we're from time team on the television i wonder if you mind if we went on your balcony to have a view over the site that we're digging it would be quite useful to us yes did you know that that's very cool should we take our boots off yeah i think we've been mick and carenza are doing a survey of the surrounding land and looking for a high vantage point oh that's great that's lovely wonderful thanks thanks very much yeah i see you've got your holy soccer oh my god well that's a much better view isn't it there's a site look beyond that uh green field beyond the edge yeah that's the caravans that are causing the geophysicists right if the cemeteries up on the top there we might expect the settlement to be down towards the river actually more or less where the church is down there well actually actually there are some earth works just around in that field in the church and they've even been excavated as well well there's been a few trenches put across from that 30 years ago we might be able to find the fines for that as well yeah they're in the museum they're coming tomorrow they're not likely to be sex and are they they're more likely to be what medieval villagers they look like it's pity we can't see much in the way of um crop marks in the field where all these bearers are supposed to have been i mean there's that very good one we saw on the air photo have you seen this um that mark there we're um we're up here yeah um you've seen that that one there that's almost too good to be true it is i mean it really does could these prehistoric burial mounds or barrows that show up as crop rings be some sort of clue to our site the locals have known about them for years so where were these rings that sometimes become visible well it came over in the far corner there just over the other side of this head yeah yeah that's it yeah yeah and what sort of things were they then well it's just like the soil just dried right out you know and it left in the crops it just left a complete surface a dry how big dead oh you can take it i suppose if you take this quite a circle from there if you take from the heads here yeah from this head you're across to that fence there yeah crossways and that's the size of the circle around 20 30 feet does anyone have any idea what it might have been no no i think anybody's ever bothered meanwhile the geophysics team struggled to get a reading among all the discarded rubbish this size is a mess isn't it yes it is why can't david develop it the principal reason is that there is a condition on the planning application saying that he has to carry out an excavation before he develops the site and you slept that condition on i advise the district council that that should be put on yes um in 1960 ten graves were discovered on that side of the fence and in 1992 there were 23 graves found on that side and i naturally assumed that the anglo-saxon cemetery that these both relate to continue through the middle here and therefore it's very important site and needs to be excavated before development takes place but in the meantime david's been going bankrupt i understand this is the case unfortunately there's nothing personally that i can do about that but excavating is going to be very expensive isn't it yes it is yes so why can't you pay for that because he hasn't got any money i'm afraid we don't have any money either being part of local government um we don't have that sort of funds available well let's see what we can do we're already a long way towards solving david's problem yeah it's gotta be somewhere it's gonna be in that sort of area unless it's the other end of course i think we've got the first skull oh wonder look it's just coming out around there and it cleans it up a bit well that looks pretty conclusive doesn't it has he got a big crack in it that's fantastic jcb running backwards and forwards over the top well there you are first for time team our first skull stay with us for the next bit and we might even find out how it died it's the beginning of day two this place has changed a bit in the last 24 hours the amazing news is that where we expected to find at least a dozen graves we only turned up three look at this one over here because this one's uh second skull so that's that's in much better condition wow you can actually see the headies turn facing this way so the eye sockets are going to be in there you see yeah this is an interesting one this because it's a very special grave that they've marked with boulders quite wide we probably won't know till we've gone down a bit further we're sort of working on the idea at the moment that there's less burials in this area because there's something going on here rather than graves what would it be like a a shrine or something like that well that's a possibility i mean it it might be a building that's a shrine or it could be just for example a big tree or a pit this feature behind us this great brown area which ought to be chalk and isn't it might be a big hole in which stuff has been washed or it may be a remains of a barrow around which all the cemetery was laid so it looks as though the crowd of bodies gradually gets less as we get to this so whatever this is in the middle square oh hang on our third grave is obviously shallower than we thought yeah just there so that's what i am that's our third one then okay that's great so you're gonna go into that one as well yep yeah coming up thick and fast now i hope that's a lot [Laughter] as we scraped away the rubble from the graves we kept a lookout for grave goods in particular one of the most common things to be buried with a knife but even if we found one it would have deteriorated with age we wanted to know what a saxon knife might have looked like brand new ivor lawton has come to demonstrate traditional saxon blacksmithing he begins by building a forge in the earth into which he'll stack charcoal just as the saxons did by now the entire site is a hive of activity royal commission surveyors are plotting the whole site onto a digital map and at the strip of land at the back the geophys team are still trying to get the extent of the graveyard okay i've been avoiding you for the last day because i'm worried i've set your hands at the awful how are you getting on uh well we're finding that the anomalies were getting from any possible grades are just being masked by all the rubble here so it's it's looking quite up here so we're looking hopeful that if there's anything up here that we'll have a chance of picking them up but anything that we did yesterday was so you were just completely massive yeah it's worth a try i suppose yeah right so we can't actually find the graves we can't find the extent of cemetery by the geophysics no i think i better go and have a chat to the rest of the team and see how we're going to do that because that's one of the things we really do need to do is find out how far the cemetery goes the solution is to put a trench through the ground at the back of the site to see if we can actually see any graves as this is going on i've got time to catch up with a pathologist who's come to see our skeletons when it's in the ground like this what sort of information can you tell about the body well with what's exposed so far we can see that this is almost certainly a female the frontal area of the skull the brow region is very smooth if you look at mick for example he's got really big i might have big ones great big brown ridges super orbital ridges because i'm a neanderthal really and i haven't got any at all because i'm a female and uh and it's one of the the key and very easy to apply texting criteria and presumably it's an adult yes it's an adult um and we can tell that because of the size of the skull for one thing although that's not always an indicator because some adults have got very small heads and some children have got very long very big heads yeah i know but it's because they're getting getting some teeth and the bottom jaw coming through now there's the dual bottom jaw cover teeth are really very very good you can tell whether they had a hard gritty diet so for the saxon theory we would expect a lot of wear on the teeth especially the back teeth because of the way they produce flour which ended up with a lot of grit that's just a piece of bone quality it looks like a piece of ossified cartilage isn't this right from this yeah and again this ossification of cartilage takes place usually in older older adults so this is all pointing to an old female at the moment in what is very a very big and probably important grave i think my most predominant image of death is those little curtains that close at the crematorium before the things whisked away or else one of those big marble angels in the cemetery but presumably the saxons didn't have that kind of thing in mind when they were getting buried did they i think the thing we've got to remember here is that in the sixth century they were basically pagan and they continued to be pagan as far as the west saxons were concerned right up until 634 when biryanis converted them presumably because of the grave goods that we've found in various places around here it implies that they were actually prepared to go off on their journey and also that these would have been be of use to them uh after they got there you know they'd be feasting around the table with woden and their ancestors uh they'd be living a similar kind of life to that on earth which would uh require them to use all these things yeah if i was about to embark on the long journey to valhalla i'd need my car keys a map newspaper i'd take my personal organizer with my rac card and my credit cards in it need my razer a couple of cds a raikuda one that would be nice for the journey uh portable telephone airbrush a bit of hairspray and it's my car radio or at least the front bit that you take off so it doesn't get nicked i think that just about represents my life my little bag as well maybe and now i can die happily and a few hundred years later if anyone finds me or they find a bits and pieces of this and my belt buckle my metal fly and my earring on my glasses back at the site the situations changed dramatically the trench we dug to find the extent of the graveyard turns up something completely unexpected i think you found something in here yes indeed yes we've just started digging our first sample trench on the other side of this big clay area in the cemetery and we've hit on two features straight away you jump in yes do yes you're okay okay over there there's two things there's this small one here which seems to contain fragments of a pot and i think that line there is the actual part of the pot the top must have been clowned off and here yes we've got we've got a void and in fact oh look it's a piece we've got i think we've got an inverted pot put your hand in there at least that as far as this sure yeah yeah if that's the base if that's part of the base of the pot then i think we may actually be looking at if you imagine an inverted an yeah so we have got cremations here well i think i think we'll find that this is actually an an inverted cremation part of bronze age date can we get a roof over here because this is i think there's rain getting onto this now what have you got man i thought you got a trench open oh look at this we've got some cremations turned up at last we put your hand in and feel these bones or something can we get that roof now please as quickly as possible the base though mike it's just the water as it is because it's completely the soil's been keeping it solid yeah i mean you're going to have to get that out very very carefully aren't you yeah yeah yeah you look at that look it's called looking into the pasta quite literally what we have is a pot filled with the cremated remains of someone who died two thousand years before the saxons got here our investigation is thrown into pre-history down by the river phil's collared into helping ivan produce his saxon knife it's a two-man job involving critical timing when i take it out stop oh that's a really do i get i do get time for a breather yeah when i want to take it out of the fire stop stop the stop it going okay right it's amazing hey we've only been going what just a few minutes really yeah how many bands have you got that's four there four bands there yeah you have alternating bands of steel and iron all right so they're i mean they might look the same but they're not the same when when it's polished and etched you would actually be able to see the difference the differences in the metal themselves so really a really big thing like a sword would be a really it would really be a big of symbol then certainly would do yeah they're very expensive item in today's terms it would probably be equivalent to a small house no wonder we don't find very many on exactly that's like being um buried with your royals royce either has doubled the bar over and must now weld eight separate bands of metal into one so this is a pretty critical point though is it yeah i think this is going to be successful failure it's as close as that is it yeah how many goals have we got at it i think one one goal yeah so what are you looking at well i mean you're not just letting me get this hot no i'm looking um to see the right temperature how do you know um well once you get to the right temperature the metal starts to sparkle like a sparkler you think it's going got it oh wow we got it yeah we've got it i think so back at the site they've excavated the third grave a child's grave a crouched burial knees brought up to the chest probably bronze age the site is looking more and more complicated and there's more to come so the geophys team may not have found the extent of the graveyard but they've found an odd shape in the next door field about two meters wide and stopping abruptly in this position here boxes here is 10 by 10 meter grid so what would that ditch imply mick well it could be sort of curving around the area where we've got a big brown area of soil anyway so it might be some sort of border well it could be either to do with whatever's prehistoric there or what's anglo-saxon what surprised me is interesting is we've got this area that we think might be the barrow in the middle prehistoric barrow we've now got a possible curving ditch that you would expect around the outside of a barrow sort of ring ditch um and we've got prehistoric cremations that look likely just within inside that that area and that crouched child skeleton which could could be prehistoric as well i mean it it seems that it's very indefinite yet obviously it went like that yeah i'm not convinced it's a barrow yet at all i mean i i this is this is very interesting but i think you know we've got a trench coming through here to see whether the cemetery stands in that direction we're going to put another trench in somewhere to see whether the cemetery extends there well they'll pick up that if it isn't they're going to pick this up whatever it is so i mean i don't think we should speculate about this yes oh that's a bit impressive isn't it yes it certainly is gone down a bit further than i thought meanwhile conservationist meg brooks is excavating our three thousand year old bronze age urn certainly going down here i think i've just about got to the bottom there seems to be a little pattern or at least some grooves running around the side of the bottle that's right yes i think i think that's the shoulder there where the grooves are and then it's coming out into a neck and a little out turned rim so this site could have been a burial site for maybe two three thousand years oh yes it looks as if it goes right through people who've always lived and been buried here yes a sacred site indeed as the site's getting complicated mick and carrenza take to the air to see if they can make sense of it within the context of the surrounding countryside this is a new experience yes it is it's fantastic hey do you see that you can see the circle of that that's that thing that shows up there photograph in the field let's see yes you can even see you can see it lighter and darker in the middle i wouldn't believe that i've shown off that's very clear isn't it so that's the battle we know had the yeah the brothers hate uh more of this film can we move over to the right a bit jerry look at the size actually the similarity in size between that there's that showing there's a ring ditch there yeah yeah the darker ditch yeah that's actually a similar size to the sort of curve that's coming around on that bit we're digging isn't it we can see the curve on our side very clearly it's very similar size very similar that's that's showing really well they want to compare the size of the barrow in the green field with the brown patch at the back of our side we know that it goes under the house with the white van when suddenly carrenza spots something new on the other side coming up that trench there do you see that dark that's another ring ditch there isn't it well it could be well don't you see the one nearest that trench curving across they clip the edge of it it looks like a ring ditch that would have surrounded a barrow yeah i think that looks like a second ring ditch to me yeah well we'll see what they say back on the ground we're getting towards the end of day two and as you can see the skeletons are really getting uncovered now and they found some pretty interesting things in it over here this green thing here appears to be a brooch and there's a pattern or something indented into it there and here there's a long pin with some goo or something on it which may be decayed vegetable metal or something i don't know and over here this is a bead a glass bead with a hole right through it our first grave finds and it's looking pretty good i think it's been a brilliant day really exciting but something weird happened about halfway through the day at the start of the day we got this story about a saxon cemetery and we've had some fantastic finds we've got uh a brooch oh great you've actually had some stuff come out for now yeah and uh a big hole in all this of course yeah um uh uh bead large bead none of them in my grave you're not trying but this weird thing happened which was suddenly veered off into the into the prehistoric well there's definitely a prehistoric focus to that cemetery we've had three completely new unrecorded barrows in that wheat field near the the cemetery site so the guys who earlier on were saying about uh that they'd seen a ring in their field next door to our field that would be another barrier the really interesting thing is that there are three smallish ones in the field just away from the site the field nearest the site there's got one very large one it's exactly the same width as the one you're turning up in the trench so certainly there's a there's a prehistoric focus it'd be great wouldn't it if by the end of tomorrow we can find out a bit more about the bronze age use of the site and a bit more about how the saxons used it and then try and tie in the whole thing so that we can tell a little bit about the story of how this place has been used over what 3 000 years absolutely cheers [Music] i think it would be useful pete if you could um sort of tell us where you think we we've got to and quite where we should go in the remaining time that we've got well clearly we've got to remove the skeletons they've now been recorded all the archaeological recording is done yeah there's there's certainly more um work on the the the clarification of the ring ditch and the prehistoric features at the back of the scene sort of cleaning and recording that's right yeah so the the prehistoric site was a real surprise great surprise yeah didn't expect it at all we knew there was something happening with the density of the graves you know where they get thinner here yeah and it seems that they are very much respecting a focus but what exactly is the focus of the site we know our saxon graveyard looks something like this carrenza thinks this is a ring ditch surrounding a burial mound or barrow and we'll put in a new trench here to find the other side of it there are bronze age burials here and here but what's this dark area at the back of the site can we find out exactly what it is and the role it plays here but first victor's making a record of all our skeletons from which he'll recreate how they looked when they were buried this is the lady who was buried with a brooch and glass bead [Music] here's the bronze age child now we can get on and remove the bones what we need to do is get right in underneath this bone and once we do that then it should lift away quite easily without breaking you see sometimes we even find the kneecap the kneecaps have gone on this one just let paul gascoigne oh yeah here we go now if i give a bit of support for that end as well there we go now for a bone specialist obviously it's the joints which are because they can tell age disease the i mean that's where the the the um any evidence of disease particularly arthritis will be stored in there all the bones will be packed away to be kept in a museum where they can be studied at a later date we'll also box up the grave goods the broach and the iron pin the bead turns out to be amber and was probably imported from the baltic coast what do you think of that then that's fine that's the blade that over and i made yesterday i mean we had all that excitement that prehistory yesterday that i didn't actually get much chance to have a look at it yesterday all right see all these twisting that's it that's eight bits of metal all twisted together and then one blade welded on the side there and what that's for one the one bit for the edge and the other bit for the shape because you find so many of them normally stir it by now the new trench at the back of the site was open and carrenza had found what she was looking for it was the other side of the ring ditch she'd seen from the helicopter come across really nicely like that yeah more or less exactly as you predicted it's about half a meter off i think not bad though it the width of the ditch looks so similar to the one that we could see as the crop mark in the other field that was what made me so convinced that that really was was a ring ditch in there i mean this is confirmed i think that we've definitely got prehistoric funerary activity and burials on this site this is definitely what that is an hour later carrenza had made yet another discovery hello yes a minute yes certainly i think we might have another urn under here so we've got this so we're going to start excavating no i don't think so thanks um we haven't really got enough time and also i think we should actually leave this in place why well really you've seen how much time and effort it's taking to get those two urns out safely so they can be properly conserved it's going to take a similar amount of time and effort to get this out if it could be quite big like that first one i mean this has been in the soil for 4 000 years at that time it's it's got stable now it's in a situation with the soil packed around it that's keeping it solid it's in a stable moisture content as soon as we start to disturb it it's that stability is going to be lost yes we'll cover it up with earth and leave it for future generations of archaeologists 50 years time who knows what sort of techniques archaeologists might have by then to ask and answer questions about what's in that and that we can't answer i have to agree it seemed the best thing to do in the meantime meg's prepared the bronze age urn ready to be taken to the conservation lab in salisbury you got it on there but we still have questions left to answer about the saxons on day one we said we'd try and locate where they might have lived their settlement the field by the church has some earth works just the remnants of a medieval village that's what mick thinks it is but carrenza's found something which may prove it's saxon to that i mean we've come here partly to see if we can't see if this isn't a likely settlement site to go with a cemetery but i mean these earthworks to me look more like village earth works and there's these sharp corners and necklace and so on i mean yeah nothing obviously saxon though well in that case something else we've managed to rustle up from this site it's lucky actually we've had both a survey and and an excavation on this site this is the stuff on the sides of monuments that's right we've got the pottery some of the pottery from it out of salisbury museum i mean there's pottery here that i think that that looks perfectly okay an incredible stroke of luck saxon pottery which normally never survives in the ground proves that this was the site of a saxon settlement i mean i think that's really quite good evidence i mean it may not look very much but i mean that's so rare to get anything at all from a medieval village site that might give you an earlier picture it's excellent i'm really pleased and we've got the cemetery now we've got the settlement yeah our finds turn up at the conservation lab the urn will take months to work on but we can get started on the grave goods straight away oh i haven't seen this since they've come out of the grave we can't see much here because there's too much corrosion and chalk all over it so if i x-ray then we can see the shape of this pin and we'll also be able to see the decorative pattern on the front of this brooch here we are right now you can see that that pin has and that's the brooch it just seems to have a simple pattern around it doesn't it oh you can actually see a series of little stamped dots can't you tiny little ones yeah cool another one in the middle maybe that's incredible isn't it that really does make the point isn't it about lumps of honorable corroded gungy stuff i've got all the detail inside meg will now carefully scrape off the encrusted chalk from the fines eventually revealing the real object underneath we now know the broach was made of a copper alloy probably bronze and then gilded and here it is the woman who wore it probably wasn't royalty but she certainly came from a wealthy family for the last 24 hours or so we've been speculating that the key to the riddle of this graveyard probably lies in this big brown depressed area here about five minutes or so ago we found what may be the answer there where that dark shadow is we found this handful of charred human remains which represent what was probably the first person ever to be buried here about say three and a half thousand years ago they were laid here and then covered in flints and then on top of that some sort of low barrow was built and everything else that happened here after that was a direct or indirect consequence of that first person being buried there so our three days what's the story we know that about 3500 years ago bronze age chieftains buried their people in what we now know was a pond barrow a burial mound with a concave center other lower status burials took place around the perimeter two thousand years later the saxons arrived and built their settlement when they came to choose a graveyard they put it here near the older landmark but they put very few graves near the base of the barrow out of respect for an earlier [Music] civilization i think there's just a bit more tidying up to do a bit of bagging and that's just about it helena hello hello the big question is david going to be able to build his house now in the area that we've excavated where the saxon burials are i think the answer is yes it's the areas at the front of the site where there are all the rubble is and the concrete um and the air at the back of the site we've got some archaeology where i think they're going to be a few more problems and perhaps we need to look at that area he can have his house but he can't have his front garden in his backyard well i think i mean one of the quickest ways i can't have any water or sewer what we've done in the past on this site about services is actually rather than getting just the waterfall to come along and dig a trench is to actually take the topsoil off and clear a wider area to see if there are any burials and then put the trench around the burials if there are any there you're hedging slightly but basically you are saying to us yes david can build aren't you i think so i think it's going to be all right in the center of the site yeah what's the news he can build oh that's incredible i mean it is incredible isn't it if those saxons all those years ago had not respected the earlier site and thereby left a gap in the middle you wouldn't be able to do that probably that's amazing we've got a result we've got a result you

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 59,113

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history

Id: kdrpT_oDvfI

Length: 46min 42sec (2802 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020