The United Kingdom has an epic history
and a wealth of secrets still to uncover.
Every year, hundreds of archaeologists dig,
dive,
and sieve to find clues...
...to add to the great historical jigsaw of our ancestors' lives.
You know when people say, "What's the best thing you've ever found?"
Guys, this.
I'm Professor Alice Roberts.
This year, we've uncovered some astonishing finds
and made some truly ground-breaking discoveries.
Wow, look at that!
Each team of archeologists has been armed with a dig diary camera
so they can record their discoveries as they happen.
That is brilliant.
Dave, I love you.
Our roving archaeologist, Dr Naoise Mac Sweeney,
is out on the digs.
Who are we looking at? It's royal.
And I'll be inviting the teams to bring in their finds
for closer analysis.
That is absolutely beautiful.
This time, we explore Britain's west.
I've come to the edge of Dartmoor,
where traces of the ancient past are all around,
from castles to rows and circles of Bronze Age standing stones.
In fact, all of the west is rich in archaeology.
Join us to delve into an Ice Age cave...
We have found this beautiful woolly rhinoceros tooth.
...follow up on reported sightings of unexpected human bones...
Across the top of the cliff,
we've got human remains eroding out of it.
...and bid an emotional farewell to a very long-running site.
It's unique to be able to tell this story of ourselves in one place.
Welcome to Digging for Britain.
Our first dig takes us to the Cotswolds,
an area with a rich seam of Anglo-Saxon archaeology,
and the name itself is thought to relate to an Anglo-Saxon chieftain
called Cod and his control of this territory of the high lands
or "wolds", so "Cod's wolds".
This dig takes us back to around the early sixth century.
The exact location has been kept secret to protect it.
A team of volunteers led by MoD archaeologist Richard Osgood
is following up on the discovery
of high-status Anglo-Saxon artefacts in a field.
There's a chap called Chris, who's a local metal detector.
He's got permission from the farmer
to come and have a look at this field.
No-one knew anything about this field.
There was nothing on the historic environment record.
He was pretty shocked to find, not only a lot of Roman material,
but he found two really, really beautiful Saxon items.
There was a sword pommel mount from the top of a Saxon blade,
which was made of silver gilt,
and then a silver buckle as well,
so these things are what are called treasure.
Treasure is legally classified
as any piece of metal over 300 years old
containing over 10% gold or silver,
and it has to be reported.
Tell about your thoughts when you got that out of the ground.
I was totally stunned cos I knew exactly what it was.
You've not had anything like that before?
No, no, no. It's a detectorist's dream, really, isn't it?
Chris made his finds in 2016
and reported them to Gloucestershire Council.
It soon became clear that he'd stumbled on
a sixth-century Anglo-Saxon burial ground.
This prompted a swift call to Richard and his team
to formally excavate the site.
So we've got what we believe to be a nice skeleton over here.
So we've got a nice skull coming through.
The cranium coming up in that way,
and then we've got the jaw here with the individual teeth
just poking through at this point, jaw bone just there.
As we come down, we've got what is the right arm here.
Just the top with just the humerus,
and then we come into where the rib section will be
once we clean those down.
The finds date to a time when history and material culture
show strong links with the Netherlands and Scandinavia.
Most Britons at this time are thought to have been pagan,
and their burial practices involved interring the dead
with plenty of grave goods.
And this cemetery is starting to yield some very intriguing finds.
It's a nice, massive, big piece of a rim of a bowl.
Oh, wow. Yeah.
What is it, Janine, pottery? Glass. Glass?! Nice piece of glass.
Just a few days into the dig
and they unearth a very rare artefact.
Oh, wow. Well done!
Oh, that is wonderful. Beautiful.
You know when people say what's the best thing you've ever found?
Guys, this.
The raw material for this bowl
may well have come from the eastern Mediterranean,
a major focus for glass production at this time.
This exciting archaeological find is unusual,
as glass is so fragile, it rarely survives.
A bowl like this would have been precious -
another indication of high status.
Brilliant.
What really amazes me is that this has been in the ground
since the sixth century.
It's really, really shallow up there.
There's not much topsoil.
It's been ploughed for hundreds and hundreds of years.
And yes, OK, it's broken,
but it still survived.
Elsewhere on site,
the archaeologists are making more extraordinary finds,
Imagine that you're holding a sword there. You've got the handle there.
That would sit on the handle right there, so that's your guard. Right.
Wow. That is fantastic.
It looks like a bead.
The Anglo-Saxons are well-known
for their incredibly intricate jewellery and decorative metalwork.
We're thinking it could be anything from a helmet to a drinking vessel
to part of a scabbard.
It is indicative of a high-status burial.
It's made of silver, but it's got this gild again,
which is why it looks like gold, and it shines beautifully.
After 1,500 years,
it's still shiny when you put it in the sun,
and that's a really magical item.
In early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries,
the dead were typically buried fully-dressed
with other objects included in the grave
that still speak to us of their identity and status.
What have you got now? We've got a knife!
Yeah, I think that we've got a knife,
which is just sat over the pelvis area here,
but it's just sat on what is the left hip,
so probably a dagger.
Looks too small to be a spear.
Yeah, it's certainly all happening here.
I think we've got a very, very high-status burial
with a lot going on.
This unassuming field has proven an extremely rewarding site.
Richard has joined me to delve deeper into a couple of the burials
which seem to challenge our expectations.
This is photogrammetry of this individual, is it?
That's right. Yeah.
The quality's that good
you can actually see some of the finds in the burial itself.
You've got the... See this circular item just here?
Yeah. Now, that's... that's this.
Ah, is that a spindle whorl? Yep, that's right.
It's really, really nice and tactile.
Big solid stone spindle whorl.
And then just further up... Yeah. That's this thing.
Ah, what's that? It looks like a toggle.
Yeah, it's what we call an antler prong,
but it's something we think probably used within textile working.
It's got a suspension loop... Yeah.
...for wearing just round your neck as part of the weaving process.
And then what about those? They're beautiful.
Are they beads? These are polished pieces of amethyst.
And then you can see they've also been pierced
all the way through the middle for incorporation in jewellery.
These are objects that you would associate with an Anglo-Saxon woman,
but I'm a bit dubious, actually,
whether this is a woman that we're looking at.
So the first thing is that the bones are quite robust.
There's chunky areas of muscle attachment,
And then the pelvis,
it's frustrating that it's so fragmentary,
but we are getting, at the very top of that great sciatic notch
at the back of the pelvis.
I'm saying kind of probable male with that.
This is what's really interesting is the jaw,
cos that's an incredibly prominent chin.
And then on the other side,
we've got the angle of the jaw, which is flared out.
That tends to push me more in the direction
of this being a male skeleton. That's right.
So, yeah, so the sort of drinking vessels,
swords, shields, spears,
things that give you this real kind of macho and machismo feel.
Yes, you expect them to be potentially male burials.
But this one, if it's a male burial with female grave goods,
really does sort of tip that on its head.
And this is the other burial that we saw quite clearly in your film.
I was really intrigued by particularly that.
Can I pick it up? Yeah, if you do it very carefully.
That's really light.
It's so thin and fine, isn't it?
We're wondering whether that is a Saxon dish or bowl
or, in fact, maybe a Roman piece of glass as an heirloom.
Really? Wow.
And what's this here?
This is an iron object, isn't it?
That's the knife that we were excavating.
It looked really good in the ground all intact,
but it was held together by the soil, so that is the knife,
and it had a leather belt,
which had a little bronze studs and fittings that went with it
round the waist of the individual.
So this is what's astonishing about these Saxon graves
is you're looking at somebody who's buried fully clothed,
and then with lots of other items around them
which speak about their identity and their status.
So, yeah, all the attributes of a warrior burial -
sword, shields, spear and all this extra equipment.
And then what's amazing about that is that this is a warrior burial.
The individual in it was about ten years old.
So there's the top of the shin bone.
And, in fact, the very top of it is still completely separate.
And then, eventually, when it reaches its full length,
it will fuse and those two bits of bone come together.
So, yeah, a growing individual.
We're seeing exactly the same when we look at the teeth.
These are the milk teeth.
So those are the two baby molars,
and they're about to be knocked out very soon by the premolars.
So those two-cusped teeth.
You have to do all this objective archaeological science,
but you can't help thinking about the people
that laid that little body to rest.
When you're excavating, you are the first people to see this
since those that are grieving are putting them into ground,
and it's impossible not to project your own feelings
and emotions into this.
An amazing pair of burials that tell us interesting things
about identity in this period,
but will yield up more secrets as we apply more science.
The Saxons were originally pagan,
but then they converted to Christianity,
and they built the first monasteries in Britain.
In Shaftesbury, Alfred the Great founded an abbey
with a nunnery alongside it with his daughter Aethelgifu as the abbess.
Archaeologist Naoise Mac Sweeney
went along to see the excavations at the site.
The market town of Shaftesbury dominates the landscape of Dorset.
It was once the home of Shaftesbury Abbey,
the first nunnery in Britain
that became one of the most powerful and prominent in the land.
But the abbey,
like so many during the 16th century English Reformation,
was plundered and destroyed by command of Henry VIII.
I've come along to help archaeologist Julian Richards
look for any remnants of this important historic site.
We're trying to find out whether what's laid out here
is the actual truth.
Most of what Julian knows about the abbey
is from the findings of the last big excavations
completed back in the 1930s.
Following these, a plan was drawn up,
mapping what was thought to be the footprint of the original abbey.
Julian has pored over these plans,
but, for him, something just doesn't add up.
This is a site that has been dug before, you said, in the 1930s.
What made you come back to it now?
We want to see just what survived
and whether we believed elements of this plan, because,
just simply from an architectural and engineering point of view,
you look at some elements of it, and you think,
"I don't believe that. That's not in the right place."
The original Saxon abbey was rebuilt through the 11th and 12th centuries,
and subsequent modifications included a rich refurbishment
in the 14th century.
The cloister of the abbey was supposedly on the southern front,
commanding the view from the top of the hill,
but Julian suspects it was never there.
Well, this is where the cloister wall's supposed to be,
but when we excavated it, we found absolutely nothing.
The cloister is the beating heart of an abbey,
not just a place of contemplation and prayer,
but the structure around which
an abbey's principal buildings were arranged.
Back in 1954,
historian Laura Sydenham created architectural drawings
for her extensive study of the abbey.
But these drawings were based on the 1930s excavation,
speculating where the cloister may have been.
Locating the whereabouts of the cloister is critical
to establishing where the rest of the abbey lay.
So the last thing we're doing is a couple of slots
across the line of the cloister wall
to try and see if that cloister exists on the southern side.
So, come on, I'll show you what we're doing. Fab. Thank you!
Unearthing the foundations of the lost abbey
has proved a challenge in itself.
There's a modern rockery garden
which needs dismantling for the team to dig beneath.
So this is our next little problem
is removing a half-tonne block of stone.
Well, it's the end of the first week
of digging and it's been very hot
and we've moved enormous
quantities of soil,
but we're starting to get to grips, I think,
with the layout of the abbey
and what survives underneath these remains
that were laid out in the 1930s.
This is potentially where the wall is.
It's not looking promising.
As we dig, Julian is becoming increasingly puzzled.
Have you found a wall?
What does it look like?! It doesn't look like a wall to me.
Bizarrely, it's basically like a shallow ditch.
So, we've got no wall here, no wall there. A shallow ditch.
Three metres beyond that, we have got a wall.
But this isn't the continuous structure that we were expecting
to find here, marking the edge of the cloister.
It's just... a ditch!
Trying to dig another trench over there!
Julian's suspicions about the plans are becoming more compelling.
The trenches they've dug are not giving him the answers
he's looking for, so he decides to expand his initial dig outline.
In pursuit of the cloister,
the team have come across some telling features along the way.
So, these cracked and worn tiles are part of the 14th century floor
of this part of the church, worn by the feet of hundreds,
thousands of people who've walked over them.
And, also, you can see here, they dip down.
This is because they're sinking into a grave that runs
in this direction, because this part of the church will be where
important people were buried.
The abbey, profiting from royal patronage,
as well as being the site of St Edward's shrine,
became very prosperous. Over the centuries,
it acquired huge estates in the surrounding area.
It was said that if the Abbess of Shaftesbury married the Abbot
of Glastonbury, they would be richer than the King himself.
This made it a prime target during the dissolution
of the monasteries, and, in 1539, on the order of Henry VIII,
the last abbess signed the deed of surrender.
The lands were sold off and this great symbol of Roman Catholic
power was demolished.
Julian's keen to show me the spot where, just the week before,
there was a surprise find that paints a vivid picture
of the abbey's tragic demise.
The end of the abbey -
what evidence have you got for what happened here on the ground?
Well, this is the bit, really, that I suppose gives you a very graphic
idea of what happened, because this is where one
of the massive pillars stood that supported the central crossing
tower, but they've taken out every last bit of usable stone.
But what amazes me is that what came out of that in this corner...
...they didn't want that.
This! Who we are looking at?
We don't know who it is.
We don't... we can't work out which king or queen. Male, female?
Well, we don't even work out... Because the hairstyles
are very similar. It was an amazingly exciting find.
You know, not just from the point of view of it being a beautiful object,
but it does tell us something about how this part of the church,
which was the junction between the nuns' private part of the church
and the more public part, looked like.
This excavation first opened up this year, and they thought
they knew what they were doing.
They were just confirming a few things.
And, actually, what's been really interesting to see,
actually, our expectations being confounded and the whole kind
of thing being blown wide open.
We thought we knew where this giant church was.
We thought we knew where the cloister was.
Because of the kind of huge scale of the demolition that went on
with the dissolution of the monasteries, I mean, this entire
complex was just completely flattened,
almost nothing left of it.
That's quite a sobering thought, too, in terms
of what that would have meant for the wider community
and the kind of... They were economically dependent.
They were socially dependent on this place
and it just kind of makes you think
about the wider social effects of this change.
Despite digging all summer and discovering large sections
of the abbey, the puzzle over the cloister is yet to be solved.
Julian, tell me about the site that you've been digging.
What was the big mystery?
Our efforts at the moment have been concentrated
on excavating in the abbey church.
So, the abbey church, I think this is drone footage
that you've taken this summer. Yes, so this is the area.
In fact, you can see our excavation trenches here.
But we've always had slight doubts about elements of it
because it just doesn't seem quite right
and I've always felt that there's an element of imagination in this.
Right. Like there really isn't room enough for a southern
cloister before you go off the edge of the slope.
So, do you think those cloisters are entirely imagined, then?
I'm beginning to think that there isn't a cloister on the south of it at all.
Yeah. I think it's probably on the north. And what about the finds?
You've brought some wonderful things in. Yes. I mean, we found some amazingly fresh-looking tiles,
beautiful little things, but still with all their glaze on them,
which implies that whatever was there wasn't being walked
on much, so you know, the tiles tell a story, but then this one...
That's so lovely. It's absolutely fantastic, isn't it?
This was just in the demolition period rubble.
So, 1539, the place... They start smashing the place up.
And clearly, this, if you look at it, it's three-dimensional,
it's got a back to it.
Lovely! It's not a tomb figure, it's a standing statue. Yeah.
And it's royal as well, because you've got a crown and also,
these are representing jewels on the crown.
We think it's male.
It looks a bit like some statues of Edward II,
but we need to research this a bit more. Yeah.
So, that was a fantastic find. What about this lovely bead?
One of our volunteers was digging and said, "I've found a plastic bead."
And I said, "No, you haven't,
"because you're digging a medieval deposit."
So, is this jet? It's jet. But it's such a big bead.
If it was part of a rosary, to me, the story that, you know,
that object might be able to tell, you know,
was this a nun being ejected from there?
You know, her rosary broke...? Yeah.
Because this obviously just sort of fell into a corner
and then has ended up in the rubble.
But, to me, it's the story that an object like that could tell,
you know, if only it could talk.
As we go right back into prehistory,
archaeological evidence can become very thin on the ground.
And that's because our prehistoric ancestors
were nomadic hunter-gatherers,
they just didn't settle in one place for very long at all.
Our next dig comes from a site in North Wales which contains
precious, tantalising glimpses of very early modern humans in Britain.
Hidden away in a ravine east of the Vale of Clwyd lies
the entrance to Ffynnon Beuno Cave.
The first excavations here were carried
out by the Geologists Association back in the 1880s.
They found stone tools and plenty of ancient animal bones.
Over the decades,
this site has attracted a lot of archaeological attention.
This year, Dr Rob Dinnis and a team from the University
of Edinburgh are investigating the cave
and they're filming a dig diary along the way.
This is the first week we've opened up the trenches now,
so we've started to work in earnest.
And the cave's up there, so let's take a wander up and see.
There are two trenches, one inside the cave and one just outside.
What we're digging here is a spoil heap,
so that is material that's come from inside the cave that's been
re-deposited out the front, as part of earlier excavations in the 1880s.
Some of the earlier finds in the cave take us
right back to a time when Neanderthals were living in Britain.
The Victorian dig found these beautiful flint spear points,
characteristic of late Northern European Neanderthals.
Another find was a type of stone tool thought to have been
made by early modern humans around 35,000 years ago.
It's thought there is a hiatus between Neanderthals
and modern humans in Britain that spans several millennia.
As well as evidence of early humans, that first dig also turned up animal
bones of 16 different species, including cave lion and mammoth.
The reason why we're digging this is to look for material that was
missed in those earlier excavations and that appears to be the case.
We've already found some bits of Ice Age animal bones,
some animal teeth, as well as some small bits of stone tools.
The team is looking in the spoil heap outside the cave for good
reason. Early excavations often missed key finds.
Back in 2014, a human tooth was found in the spoil.
It was radiocarbon dated to around 2,300 BC, during the late Neolithic.
Inside the cave, Rob is digging down through the muddy
sediment on the floor, hoping to find untouched layers.
Most of the Ice Age sediments were actually
removed during the dig in the 1880s,
but we have been doing some work and we found quite a lot of intact
sediments that contain Ice Age animal bones.
We found a bank of intact sediments that contain rhino,
contain hyena, contain intact Ice Age material and fingers
crossed, we'll be able to find some archaeological material in there.
As well as Neanderthals and early modern humans, the archaeologists
are searching for evidence as to who else may have used the cave.
They've previously found a coprolite, or fossilised faeces,
belonging to a hyena thought to be at least 35,000 years old.
The 19th century researchers also found coprolites
and noted a number of gnawed bones.
They concluded that hyenas must have been living in the cave as a den
and were probably responsible for bringing
the bulk of the animal bones into it.
The team continue to dig down into the untouched sediments.
Here we are in the pit, having a wonderful time.
We are down to intact cave earth here, intact deposit.
We have found this beautiful woolly rhinoceros tooth.
Woolly rhinoceros went extinct in Britain 35,000 years ago,
so this means that we are in deposit that is at least that old,
which is significant because around that time is
when we think there were last Neanderthals
and the earliest modern humans in Britain, so we're in the right
time period, on track potentially for finding archaeology.
The assemblage from this cave is incredibly rare.
In fact, Ffynnon Beuno Cave is only one of three places in Britain
to have evidence of both late Neanderthal
and early modern humans in the same site.
It appears that this cave still contains a rich seam of archaeology.
Its secrets will keep archaeologists like Rob
and his team coming back here for many years into the future.
Most archaeological excavations tend to take place over a single
block of time, particularly
if they're related to construction and development.
University excavations, on the other hand, usually take place over just
a few weeks in the summer, but the archaeologists will keep
coming back if there's plenty to find.
One such dig near Bristol has turned into a real labour of love.
It's been going on for well over a decade
and is now just coming to a close.
Just north of Bristol, close to the mouth of the Severn Estuary,
sits beautiful Berkeley Castle.
It's the oldest building in England still inhabited by the same
family, whose ancestors began building it in the 11th century.
In 2010, Digging For Britain was on site with Bristol University
archaeologists who wanted to understand what was happening
here before the castle was built.
This year, we returned to Berkeley with Professor Mark Horton
and Dr Stuart Prior,
who are searching for more evidence of the origins of this site.
It's unique to be able to tell this story of ourselves in one place
and here in Berkeley encapsulates that, that idea.
When they first started their dig,
they suspected the site had been home to an 8th century Saxon
minster, but the scale of the monastic settlement proved
much greater than they imagined.
The amount of archaeology exceeded expectations and has brought them
back year after year to explore the minster buildings and boundaries.
So, this is the famous Berkeley excavation
and it is a veritable slice through history.
But the real interest of Berkeley
is the period before the conquest.
This is a time in which Berkeley was a minster or a monastery.
We found huge quantities of material associated with this
Anglo-Saxon monastery.
A minster is an important church, often accompanied by a collection
of monastic buildings, a place of prayer,
but also a place to live and work for monks and nuns.
Over the years, eight trenches have been dug around the estate to
assess the scale of the monastery.
The team are currently digging in a paddock to the north of the castle.
According to records, the Saxon minster here was demolished in 1043.
After the Norman Conquest, the stone was used to build later structures
in Berkeley, including part of the existing church and castle.
As well as the monastery,
the team have unearthed multiple layers of history.
We've got at least 1,000 years of history in one trench.
Starting at the top, we had 17th and 18th century garden features.
Below that, we had burials from the 17th century.
Below that, we had an English Civil War ditch.
Underneath that, we found Anglo-Saxon structures
and that's the most important find for us.
One exceptionally rare piece found at Berkeley is this exquisite
gold ring, a fine example of just how skilled the Anglo-Saxons
were with intricate metalwork.
But the team has found evidence of human activity even earlier
than the Saxons. They haven't found buildings,
but there are definite traces of Roman activity.
We've had a Roman roadway cutting across here
and this very curious ditch-like feature
and in the thin of that, we found a piece of broken up silver,
a great big piece of what we call hack silver.
Now, that's what the Romans paid their Barbarian mercenaries
to defend their villa estates.
Literally, chopping up the family silver.
And maybe what we've actually got is a little bit of family silver that
one of those mercenaries dropped and just left there in the ditch.
The Berkeley project has been an emotional
rollercoaster of a journey, both on and offsite.
For Stuart, there was
a time when he thought he wouldn't even live to see the dig through.
I had a serious brain injury three years ago.
Following an illness, Stuart's prognosis was dire.
They thought I was going to die. If I did survive,
they thought I'd be hospitalised for the rest of my life.
But Stuart fought hard.
Despite the seemingly impossible physical challenges
and against all the odds, he was determined to get back out
into the field, to return to the job he loved and the dig at Berkeley.
Fortunately, for me,
I'm a bit of a fighter and I wasn't going to give up.
Basically, fought my way back from being on my death bed
to being back at work again.
At the end of the dig, with heavy hearts,
they've made the difficult decision to call it a day.
Why it's ending, I'm retiring from Bristol University and you've
got to draw a line somewhere and kind of that's the end of an era.
In its closing year, the dig here has not disappointed.
A find late in the day provides
yet more evidence of the lost Berkeley minster.
So, perhaps our most important find this season is this ditch.
It's not a defensive arrangement, it's a boundary ditch.
It was a way of delimitating the edge of the Anglo-Saxon monastery.
And we know it's Anglo-Saxon because actually just last night,
this came out and it's part of an Anglo-Saxon buckle
and what's remarkable, it's still got traces of the gilding,
we haven't cleaned it up yet.
We're pretty happy that this is evidence of, you know,
what one of those high-status nuns would have been
wearing in the 8th and early 9th centuries.
Since 2005, this project has delivered year after year,
but now, it's time to say goodbye.
I will be sad to leave Berkeley.
A part of me will always remain at Berkeley
because I've loved my time working here.
So, tell me what you've found, then.
Summarise this kind of 15 years of digging.
So, essentially,
we were looking to prove that there was actually
a minster at Berkeley, because nobody even knew just
when we started that there was actually the minster at Berkeley.
What do the finds tell you
and why do they make you think that this was actually a minster?
So, you know, we've got evidence for maybe a scriptorium,
so if you were a king and you wanted to get any writing done, you would
go to a monastery, a nunnery,
and get your Anglo-Saxon documents drawn up.
And so we've got evidence for that in the finds.
So we've got this lovely little thing here, which is the astle.
So, an astle is a pointer for keeping your place in a book,
isn't it? That's right.
You can see there's a little Celtic cross in there.
So, here it would have attached onto a bone pin. Yeah.
And then when you get to the end of your page, you use the little
round bit to turn over your medieval vellum parchment, or the page.
So that's a beautiful object in its own right,
but it's telling us something really important about Berkeley.
It's telling us that there were people reading and writing.
Reading and writing. Yeah.
Yeah, so it's a longstanding, powerful, religious community.
What kept you going back?
We just didn't get to the end of all...
I mean, you keep going down and keep going down normally
until you run out of archaeology. Mm. And we haven't.
We've got pottery, we've got metal artefacts, we've got
all sorts of things that are Roman in origin, we've got
a tiny little scalpel here.
Oh, yeah. Can I have a look? Yeah.
So, would that have been used surgically, do you think?
I think surgically, or at least in some sort of bathroom kit,
so if you're chopping up your make up, that sort of thing,
or herbs and spices. Lovely. What about that pin? Is that a...?
I think that's almost certainly a clothes pin.
But you can see under the camera there... Mm.
The head of that is really ornate.
Yes, it's for holding your clothing together.
Before buttons were invented.
And then you've got strap ends, yeah? Can I have a look at that one?
That's one of my favourite finds. It's like a little dragon set.
You can just see where the strap would have fitted. That's amazing.
Oh, yeah. Yeah?
The Anglo-Saxons did love hiding little animals and faces and things.
That's it, yeah. And next is one of my favourite finds,
which my students gave the name of the Berkeley Gnome,
and if you put it under the camera, you can see it's a little face.
It does look like a gnome. Yeah.
So, imagine the cross guard on a dagger. Yeah.
On either end of it, you've got one of those little terminals.
Right. Yeah. Then we've got an arrow head.
Yeah, that's almost certainly 15th century, I think.
You can imagine being shot from the castle walls from one of those.
Mm. So, you've got find specialists looking at all of these,
poring over them, trying to work out what they all are.
That's it, exactly. So, we've got 15 years of research findings,
trying to work out exactly what they all are. Yeah. You know, for our final report.
And then it brings us right up to our 1980s builder's Casio watch,
gardener's Casio watch. A very precious archaeological item, that.
Well, we do total collections,
so our students pick up everything they find.
So if it's in the trench and it's buried, it's a find. Yeah.
It was in the ground. It was in the ground and somebody lost their digital watch
and one of my students found it. Very beautiful thing, Stuart!
Well, you know, in 200 years' time, when they've never seen
one before, and they're mystified as to what it was, yeah?
They'll be able to get it out of the collection at Berkeley Castle. Absolutely.
It can be very difficult to come up with
names for groups of people in prehistory.
We have absolutely no idea what they called themselves.
Often, we look at their culture, at the objects they made,
and use that as a label for them.
On our next dig, we're joining MoD archaeologist Richard Osgood
and his team of ex-military personnel in Wiltshire
and they're excavating a Bronze Age burial mound of a type that is
linked to the mysterious Beaker people.
This burial mound lies just five miles from Stonehenge,
on Salisbury Plain, and is known as Barrow Clump.
We're now at the site of the last of the protected burial
mounds in this part of Salisbury Plain.
What I'm hoping to find in this trench is anything that is
put into it that will relate to the early Bronze Age.
This site never fails to deliver.
Each year, there's been one really incredible story that's emerged.
I'm really optimistic that we might in this instance be
privileged enough to see a Beaker grave.
This type of burial mound is typical of the early Bronze Age,
around 2000 BC.
This is the time when the last stones of nearby Stonehenge
were set in place.
Although there's still so much about Stonehenge that mystifies us
to this day, we know it was built in stages, from the Neolithic
through to the early Bronze Age, the time of the Beaker people.
The Beaker people, it's a name that's been given
because the burials are of a particular type.
They are usually accompanied with a pot, the eponymous beaker.
It's a little drinking vessel that's found in the grave with them,
sometimes with other grave goods as well.
Most of our knowledge of these Bronze Age people
comes from their graves, which often contain these distinctive beakers.
Particular styles of vessels help with dating
and show how traditions spread.
The earliest known bell-shaped beaker pottery
comes from Portugal and Spain, but then the style spreads north.
Within 100 years, these beakers appear in Britain.
Two beaker burials have previously been found at Barrow Clump,
but Richard thinks there may be more.
And it's not long before the team starts to uncover human remains.
Well, the jumble of bones is a jumble of bones, but it appears
quite likely that this jumble of bones is a secondary feature.
Beaker burials are typically found under the centre of a mound,
often surrounded by a large ring ditch.
This would have been dug out by hand,
using tools such as antler picks and cow shoulder blade shovels,
tools often found left behind in the ditches.
Some mounds would be re-used for secondary burials.
These bones are most likely to be from a later time,
not a Beaker burial, as they're so shallow.
That's the trouble with it, because, ordinarily,
if you're just dealing with a single skeleton,
or even a couple of skeletons,
you know what's attached to what.
So you know what you're going to expect when you're cleaning them up.
With this being a total jumble, you've just got to be very
careful because you don't know exactly what you're going to find.
As they dig deeper into the mound, the team find a barbed
and tanged flint, typical of the Bronze Age.
It's a roughout for an arrowhead, so it's not complete, somebody's
started work on it, and they decided not to go any further with it.
It's a really nice find and it's definitely Bronze Age.
Barrow Clump is officially protected as a scheduled monument.
Despite this, it's also today part of an agricultural landscape
and an area of intensive military training.
There's loads of things that could threaten
archaeology on a military training area. A tank is 60 tonnes.
It's a really, really heavy thing.
That driving over a burial mound could potentially do
a lot of damage, so what we're looking at here is just
evaluating precisely how damaging those entities are.
Measures have been put in place to remind
the Army of the important heritage here,
but there are some local residents who are harder to control.
We put signs up just to make it extra clear, big spade,
sign saying "no digging".
What it doesn't do is tell badgers how to read.
The really big problems are burrowing animals
and over the years, we've been finding a lot of archaeology
that's been brought out from the badger setts.
Meanwhile, the team has worked their way down to what
they believe is the centre of the burial mound.
They've just come across a set of human remains.
I can see from here the femur and the pelvis of an individual.
Bones looking in really good condition.
So we're really excited because you've got what we've been looking
for for the whole three weeks in one small hole in this burrow.
Archaeologist Dorothy Griffiths was first to find the bones.
Truth be told, I was about to give up because we kept seeing
so much flint and so many rocks.
I have had a chance to make a snapshot to send and boast to
my friends back in America and those in Jamaica, so I'll be excited.
Having not done archaeology for over 17 years,
I am, as I said, overjoyed.
As the rest of the remains are revealed,
the team are confident that this is a Beaker burial,
but they have yet to find an actual beaker.
The real hope is that there's going to be a beaker at one end.
That would be the real triumph of this dig.
Now the dig has finished, the finds, including the bones,
have been carefully packaged up and taken off site
and our roving archaeologist, Naoise Mac Sweeney, has been
along to the labs at Wessex Archaeology to find out more.
At the Wessex post-excavation, I'm hoping project manager Phil Andrews
has been able to establish whether it was a Beaker burial they found.
Is this beaker from the burial? This unfortunately isn't.
This was found probably about a couple of hundred metres away,
but the burial we had didn't have a vessel.
In fact, it didn't have any grave goods with it.
And do we need to have a beaker for it to be a Beaker period burial?
We don't, but we know from other evidence, particularly
the size of the graves, which are very substantial chambered graves,
with timber linings, evidence of timber lining, that they
are of that period.
We're very certain that it is a Beaker burial,
and we will confirm this through radiocarbon dating in due course.
I'm curious to know what Phil has found
out about the impact of the military presence at Barrow Clump.
We're investigating the site, we've been looking at the impact of
military vehicles passing over some of the remains
and this is a classic example of the weight of vehicles has just
crushed what may have once been a complete vessel.
Overall, the damage being caused by vehicles is very slight,
certainly the damage from badgers is much more significant.
But military vehicles, they're not causing a significant impact at all,
which is good news. Which is great news for the archaeology, then.
Badgers are worse than tanks. Tanks, yeah.
Senior osteoarchaeologist Kirsten Egging Dinwiddy is examining
the remains for the first time.
So we've got a little bit of the skull there.
What bit of the skull is that? If I hold it like that... Oh, is it...? Not quite, no.
It's actually this bit here. Oh, wow! OK. Yeah. That's quite chunky.
I mean, if I feel mine, mine's very small.
Serious cheek bones. Yeah. So, are we thinking "he"? I'm thinking he.
The size of this individual and some of the traits
and things on the skull. If we look at some of the other bones,
the size of the head on the humerus there, that's quite large,
so I'm pretty happy with this being a male.
What's exciting about post-excavation is what it
can reveal - the age, the sex, so much more about who this person was.
So, that's really nice, strong muscle attachments there.
Not massively long, so not necessarily a very, you know,
hugely tall person, but certainly quite robust.
And, again, these slightly strange muscle attachments there.
An anchoring point for your muscles and attachments.
Bigger muscles need bigger anchoring points. Yeah.
What about the age, then? OK.
So we've got the ends of the bones are completely fused on.
Not only is it fused, it's started to get these osteophytes,
these boney growths at the edges, which is a sign of wear and tear.
It's not just an adult, then. It's an adult who's then lived longer and seen wear and tear.
Yes, certainly into the 40s, possibly up to mid-50s.
So, does Kirsten think the environment at Barrow Clump
is causing any damage to these bones?
You can see that's quite eroded.
You've lost most of the surface there.
What would have done that? Could be water flowing through the grave.
There are many, many things that affect the burial environment.
Even putting fertiliser on the soil,
that can leach in and change the chemical make-up of the soil
and the burial environment, which may adversely affect the bone.
Meeting Phil and Kirsten today has given me a real insight
into the research that is being done into the preservation on this site.
And it seems as though their findings are positive.
Military vehicles, tanks, rolling over these graves,
actually it's been really good to see that's not so much of a problem.
That actually, it's funny, it's the badgers, it's the soil chemistry
and those more natural things, so that's quite good to know.
Our next dig takes us to the coast of South Wales,
where strange things are afoot - quite literally, in this case.
Around 20 miles west of Cardiff, along the coast, near the
village of Monknash, there's a cliff proving to be a cause for concern.
After public reaction to what appeared to be human bones sticking
out of the cliff face, the police were called in to investigate.
The bones were identified as archaeological remains and Professor
Jacqui Mulville from Cardiff University was drafted in to help.
In this case, this is what we call rescue archaeology.
We get reports from the public and obviously, people are slightly
concerned at the idea you can see bits of legs eroding out.
Previously rescued bones from this site have been
dated to the 15th century, during the early Tudor period.
On this occasion,
there's been a report of a skeleton in urgent need of attention.
It sits right next to the coastal footpath,
a popular walk for the general public.
A bit of human bone here.
This sort of flat section here and there's a human bone here,
which you can't... It's very hard to see.
As the excavation progresses,
it's clear the lower part of the skeleton is missing.
Half the pelvis has gone,
so we don't actually have it with us today, and the bit we've got
left, probably, isn't as diagnostic as it should be.
With storm swells from the Atlantic often battering the coastline,
the cliff face is eroding backwards.
Coastal officer Paul Huckfield works closely with the police
and Cardiff University.
He's very familiar with this stretch of coast.
Across the top of the cliff, as you can see now, we've got one,
two, three, maybe four grave cuts,
with human remains eroding out of it.
Over time, as the cliffs have eroded more and more,
burials have just been exposed by natural erosion of the cliff
face, as it moves backwards.
The team know that the cliff is full of bones
and eventually plan to excavate the other visible remains,
but, for the moment, their focus has to be on the ones they can reach.
Jacqui hopes these will divulge more of the wider story.
We'll be able to work out more accurately who they were,
what age they were, what sex they were, and bits about their life
histories and by reuniting them and then reinterring them, we're
actually treating them, I suppose, in a much better way than them
sort of falling piecemeal out of the cliff.
As the team dig on, there's an unanticipated twist.
So far, we have the elbow joint right here,
the humerus pointing that way, which is the opposite way to what
we'd expect it, given that the legs are down there.
And then you have the ulna, so that's the lower arm,
coming this way, so we think maybe something...
The hand's behind the head.
So, we're all a bit perplexed.
Jacqui's unsure why the body is contorted in the way it is.
The burial has thrown up a few surprises.
What we appear to have here is somebody who's been
buried in a slightly sort of haphazard manner
and this suggests that possibly they were buried in a hurry,
or by somebody who didn't actually care.
It could be that they're actually compressed in a grave that's
too small because the person didn't have time, or perhaps didn't want to
make the investment to make a grave that was the right size for them.
So it is unusual.
The coastal location and unorthodox positioning of the bodies has
given rise to a number of theories, as to who these people might be.
One theory suggests they could have been victims of shipwrecks
and local legends tell of wreckers.
These people would put lights around the necks of sheep,
walking them along the clifftop, to lure ships onto the rocks.
For centuries, wrecking ships to loot cargo was a very profitable activity.
Over the course of the day,
the archaeologists begin to reveal the rest of the skeleton.
We're making really good progress,
we can now see most of the head, we've got the mandible exposed.
We can also see sort of the ribs, the pelvis and the lower back, so we
can see we've got the full torso of an individual who's
sort of slightly twisted.
Just before the bones are lifted for further examination,
the team gather some final evidence.
By taking a number of images, we can stitch them together,
using a photographic programme, and then that will allow us
to actually have accurate record of the articulation of the bones
when we get back to the lab.
These burials seem to be part of an unknown graveyard,
or at least there are no marked graves up on the top of the cliff.
No, so there's no marked graves,
but people have been found for decades, really. OK.
Since the 1980s, and some of the graves are aligned.
There's even some graves which have sort of disarticulated human
remains and are a little bit further back from the cliff.
So we're kind of like, who are they? Why are they there?
And you've got a lovely 3-D photogrammetry of the skeleton
as you were excavating it. Yeah.
What you've got is somebody whose arms appear to be above their head. Yeah.
And then their head is turned sort of to one side,
so the other burials that have been found further along the cliff,
they're all interred with their hands sort of down their sides.
So this is an anomaly. Right. OK.
And then we're missing the entire bottom half of this individual.
Presumably, that has just eroded out of the cliff.
Well, we know it was there because a member of the public
sent in a photo and you could see sort of the bottom of the legs.
Yeah. Ethically, you kind of want to reassemble them. Yeah, you do.
So you think this is a young individual, isn't it? Yeah.
The top of the humerus here, the epiphysis is completely unfused.
So that was still growing.
And then if I look at the teeth, first molar's through,
that comes through on average age six.
Second molar come through, around 12.
And I can see down in there,
the wisdom teeth still nestled in their crypts.
So you are probably looking at somebody who is a young teenager.
Yeah, but around that time, young teenagers,
you could be treated as an adult, really. Yeah.
You would have been in employment around that time.
Yeah, it is tricky, isn't it? Because with young men, or boys,
they haven't developed the kind of robusticity
of the skull that we see later on, but that is quite
a squared-off chin, but this is quite a feminine face.
Yes. Sort of smooth.
With the forehead coming down to the nose there.
We think it's a teenage boy,
who's been inserted rather strangely in a grave.
He's at a different level to all of the others.
Yeah. The others are all male. Yeah.
So, who are they? And why are they all male?
So, there's obviously some fantastic stories about smugglers
and pirates and things and, in fact,
there's a fantastic story that the pub, which is
actually now built of part of the sort of monastic range,
used to be a mortuary for shipwrecked sailors. Really? Yes.
And we know there were shipwrecks around that point.
Whether they were caused by the wreckers,
or whether they were just natural shipwrecks, we don't know.
I mean, there's quite a lot of, I suppose,
accounts of shipwrecked people not being buried in consecrated
ground, but actually being buried quite close to the edge of the...
Close to where they're found, by the sea. It's tricky cos it's all kind of circumstantial
evidence at the moment, isn't it? It is.
We know there were shipwrecks there.
We've got this intriguing story about the pub being a mortuary.
Yeah. So, what about further analyses on this skeleton?
What are you going to try? So, we're going to try and find out sort of where they lived
and sort of what they ate, really.
Essentially, the more sort of analyses you do,
the more sort of a complex picture you build up of somebody's life.
Yeah. So you don't know.
I mean, Britain's an island full of rich archaeology.
We will continue to find more and more coastal archaeology
because of climate change, storminess,
and all of those things,
so it's important that we have good mechanisms
and we get the public onside actually, cos, you know,
I always think there's these sort of lost souls. We should be bringing them back together.
And if anyone does know where his legs are, bring them
to Cardiff University. Please bring them back. Yeah.
It's been a fantastic year of exploration in the west of Britain.
From the discovery of Anglo-Saxon treasure, to hunting for a lost
abbey and digging to the depths of a Bronze Age burial mound.
We've shown there's still so much to discover to
further our knowledge and shed light on our past.
Join us next time, as we continue Digging For Britain.