2,000-Year-Old Treasure Hoard Is Largest Roman Haul Ever | Digging For Britain | Unearthed History

We may be a small island, but we have a big

history

that is still full of mysteries, which is why

ever

y

year

hundreds of archaeologists go out searching for C for our forgotten past. I have n

ever

seen anything like it in 2016, its discoveries have been more exciting. than ever, it's all happening now, little devil Yan, in this episode,

digging

into Britain, the best of the West is shown. Each excavation was filmed as it happened by the archaeologists themselves. Their dig diaries mean we can be there for every exciting moment of discovery Trucking Little finds magnificent and now archaeologists are bringing their finds, from pottery to metal work to human remains, to our laboratory so we can take a closer look and discover what they tell us about our British ancestors.

Welcome to dig for Britain. In this episode we join archaeologists from the west as they make discoveries that will transform the

history

of Britain in Jersey a horde of hidden 2,000-

year

-old

treasure

s is heavy reveals the terror of the Roman invasion oh that's incredibly beautiful in Tintagel Cornwall, An incredible Dark Age Palace is discovered in the mythical house of King Arthur. Look, I'm starting to travel on Flights of Fancy now and for me, this is where King Arthur lived and on Salsbury's plane, a lost map of the Earth's hidden trenches revolutionizing our view of the first world war this is as if the British had captured the German trenches and then had to dig in to meet the German counterattack from the top of the hill to put these revelations into context.

I've come to Bristol Museum and been given insider access behind the scenes to see some of the archaeological

treasure

s rarely seen by the public, but our first dig diary takes us 40 miles away from Stonehenge. 3,000 years ago, our ancestors built Stonehenge as a place of ceremonies and rituals west of the River Aen in recent years. For years archaeologists have come to believe that Stonehenge is just one part of a vast sacred landscape filled with monuments, but until now their discoveries have been made mainly west of the Aven, what lies to the east has largely been a mystery. until this year, when a team from Wessex Archeology began excavating at Buford, just three miles from Stonehenge.

The discoveries were not only unexpected, but they were also unique and are helping to write a whole new chapter in the history of this archaeologically rich landscape. leads the team Hi, I'm Phil Harden. I'm talking to you on the edge of the Salsbury plane, about 3 miles east of Stonehenge, which is in that direction and I'm working on a site here. We have been working here for a while. Christmas now and this is a really exciting site, come and have a look, the team have discovered something never seen in Britain before: a double henge, two circular banks and ditches, so what we find are two previously unknown henge monuments .

This is an incredible opportunity to find out. part of the ritual landscape in this part of the wheelchair, most importantly, just down the road from Stonehenge, so what Phil really wants to know is whether this site was in use at the same time as Stone Henge and exactly what our neic ancestors were doing here. Penetrating radar reveals a series of holes just outside the double henge, which is surprising. Phil hopes these provide evidence that he needs an excellent axe. It is a promising find that is absolutely beautiful with a blade there just beautifully polished. Neolithic axes were incredibly important tools used. for cutting down trees during the early days of farming putting one in a hole seems like a big sacrifice this would be very useful and to put one of these in a hole throw in a really useful ax why would you ? as well as dozens of ax heads, mysterious chalk balls that I found in the wells, precious, oh how wonderful these finds are that connect us to our ancestors and by the way, it is precious proof of what they were doing here .

I'm sure maybe they should have been. lucky moments maybe superstitious maybe totemic objects some kind of votive offering to the gods and maybe it brought them good luck in a week 40 wells are dug and what is found in each one is remarkably similar this is an incredible collection of material It's like people have a checklist and are placing objects in the well, these are such enigmatic clues, glimpses of the ritual that takes place at the Double Henge, they didn't want to come, but some of the wells contain something quite different now, that's what I call a bone it's from an orox God look at the size of it, a giant prehistoric cow, orox wasn't on the average Friday night takeaway menu.

I think what we're really seeing is holiday celebrations, who knows, it could be seasonal, it could be a marriage. It could be anything else, but what it isn't is today's garbage. This then appears to be a ritual site where our ancestors celebrated religious festivals, but can Phil be sure that he is a contemporary of Stone Henge? Can we show that these circular ditches are the same type? same date as our Neolithic wells, if we can do that then we will find an incredible ritual complex of the same date as perhaps Stonehenge. The team digs a trench through the double henge in search of evidence that will give them a date.

Phil, look at that. I got there because, yeah, that's decoration, ah, that's it, yeah, I swear that's decorated, little devil, it's a Potter bit, well, I get really excited about this because it looks like it's decorated, you can see there's a little ridge. there and a little bit of ridge there and these grooves and I think that's the best indicator we have of grooved wear, which is typical late Neolithic pottery, which is what we want to find grooved wear. Pottery like this dates from the same period as Stonehenge, so strongly suggests that this double henge was in use at the same time.

I invited Phil to come to our lab with some of his findings to give me a more complete picture of what our ancestors were really doing at this time. unique place, they are places where people gather and celebrate and they have to be ceremonial monuments, so these strange balls, I mean, what are these? They're made of chalk, which you'll notice in some places, if you look, look at that. You can see the actual manufacturing traces, now chalk is a very soft rock, if you start hitting it too much you will wear away those manufacturing traces, so I think they are raw material that is manufactured for some function and then placed.

In the well those spheres those balls are special now, what about the stone tools then? The axes also came out of the well, the axes were incredibly powerful objects for them, they are almost symbolic offerings to show their wealth, their status, their power. Because the material found in the pits is the Shelter, if you will, of the people who perform the ceremonies in our henge-type monuments, this completely unexpected discovery reveals an important ritual site where Neolithic people gathered for ceremonies and banquets at the time you. I've done all the post-excavation work on this, what are you going to add to our understanding of the Stonehenge landscape?

People in my place would probably have witnessed the construction of Stonehenge. They're just a few miles away and what we've done now. We are moving our knowledge from the west bank of the Haven River and showing that life on the east bank is just as important and it blows my mind. Simply put, Britain's first double henge is a massive discovery that in the next few years could fundamentally change our understanding of how our ancestors 4,500 years ago used the Stonehenge landscape. Discover the past with exclusive ancient history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians. Watch on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device - download the app now to explore everything from the wonders of Pompeii to the Buddika Rebellion and the mysteries of prehistoric Scotland.

Immerse yourself in the captivating stories of this extraordinary era by registering through the link in the description. Our next dig is also underway. on the Soulsbury plane just 5 miles from Stonehenge, but the story that is revealed is very different and took place just over a hundred years ago. 2016 was the centenary of the Battle of the Som, the bloodiest battle in the history of the British Army with 60,000 casualties. On the first day alone, those who led the campaign have been widely criticized for the way the battle was fought, for the inexperience and inadequate training of the soldiers, but does archeology support that perception that Britain's young men were sent to the Western Front like lambs?

A slaughter plain which covers an area the size of White Hall for over 100 years has been the site of Britain's

largest

military training camp during the First World War, yet thousands of soldiers came here in preparation to fight in the trenches of northern France. It is often thought that this training was too short and inadequate. Incredibly, a map has been discovered in the National Archives that could change this perception once and for all; suggests that the Army was at least planning to recreate the German trenches of the Western Front in these fields. so our soldiers could rehearse attacks against them, but were those trenches ever dug and used for training?

Yes, military archaeologist Richard Osgood has come to investigate to get a map of where they have cited these practice trenches, it's really unusual, you have individual notifications. on the map, so an S is a shelter, um mg, maybe you guessed it's a machine gun position, putting all that together is really a great opportunity, but anyway the map tells you what they're supposed to do, doesn't tell you. What is really happening? Perhaps this map was schematic. Maybe it's not what was excavated. Our job here over the next few weeks is to really see what's left underground and ideally get trench architecture and evidence of lives.

From the people who were here 100 years ago trench warfare dominated World War I with the invention of powerful new weapons, such as massive artillery barrages and rapid-fire machine guns. Soldiers were forced to dig trenches to hide and protect themselves. Soldiers could live in these trenches for weeks at a time before being ordered to the top and charge the enemy. I don't know what that is, if Richard can demonstrate that extensive German trench fortifications were recreated on the Soulsbury plane, it is proof that the soldiers sent here received comprehensive training in attacking German positions dispelling the idea that they were ill prepared on first day of excavation.

Richard's team begins searching for evidence of one of the German frontline trenches marked on the map. We are looking for a machine gun position. It is helpfully marked. On the map we are already finding many traces of the trench architecture and this is simply removing the top layer of soil. Richard finds a post with cleverly designed barbed wire hanging from it so it could be placed in the ground. without making noise, if you're putting up a barbed fence in a no man's zone and you're hitting it with a hammer, it's making a big noise and snipers soon get attracted to it, the way they work to deal with that is to put these things and it has a kind of corkscrew at the bottom and to put it in the ground you put a stick through this eyelet and then you roll it up in the ground and a few meters away they find the barbed wire that would have supported, you know, look at the obstacle of that, imagine having that in front of the feature you're trying to take, it's a real impediment and then right behind where the cut wire was found they discover what they've been looking for a section of a front line German trench , so we are in the front line German trenches and were hoping to find the firing positions.

Do you think we have any evidence of that rich man? We have really good evidence. what we've identified now as a fire echelon, so a fire echelon is what allows you to get out of the trench, so that when you need a fire, you can get up, you can shoot over the top and then when you're done, you can lower. in the relative safety of that extra foot and a half, so this is clear evidence that soldiers were training to capture authentically recreated German front-line trenches, but if the fortifications marked on the map behind the front line They would also be built if that were the case. demonstrate that the soldiers were training not only to attack the front line but also to fight to the rear.

Well, we havethis really interesting shelter and more importantly we have the corrugated iron roof that covered the shelter that we have. This small step here, which is probably some kind of seating arrangement so that with the roof up people could sit underneath, shelters like these would have offered some protection from the elements as well as shrapnel from artillery bombardments, which It's even more interesting is at the bottom. We have all this trampling that actually shows where the troops would have been walking during the time they used these trenches. The trampling floor is not the only evidence that these trenches were not just for show but were used by large numbers of soldiers. what we're looking at is a latrine or it's not a latrine um uh for you it's more of a urinal than a poet's toilet, we know this because of the light sandy yellow material at the bottom which was put on very politely Richard is now

digging

trenches even further back from the front line and here you find evidence of how soldiers were trained to continue the battle once the German trenches were captured.

There is a shelf facing the hill in each of these small slots. This is as if the British had captured. the German Train and have fought their way through the German front line. They have broken through the reserve and support lines and then have to dig in to face the alleged German counterattack from the top of the hill. It is evidence that important battle simulations were taking place here. After 2 weeks, they discovered an extensive network of trenches. shelters and machine gun positions are a faithful recreation of what soldiers might expect to find on battlefields like the S, they use The High Ground there, they use The High Ground in front of me um and the hillside behind me and these are just the German positions in this are hectares and hectares.

It's a vast training landscape. It is incredible that this map was lost and without it we would have had no idea that so much effort had been put into recreating such an astonishingly huge trench system. Richard's discovery in the field. changes the history of World War I and the view that soldiers were poorly trained before being sent to war. The people who are training through this in 1915 are getting the best experience possible. This is the example of generals who really do their best to do their best. the training required for what will happen in 1916, moving away from the idea of ​​these guys just walking around the parade square with broomsticks and then being sent to imminent death in the battle of the 1950s, even practicing in the Salsbury plane trench warfare must have been miserable, so what can archeology tell us about the men who trained here?

Richard came to the lab to tell me and you have some of the artifacts here. If we do it. This all has to do with morality. In many ways, you can get bored in the trenches. and uh wet and miserable and the only thing you want to do if you're sitting there cold and tired just have a beer and that can over there which is a can of condensed milk, right, and the soldiers caught it, yeah, you can. Imagine them sitting there in the ditch, they need an infusion and you pour the condensed milk over them.

You throw away the can and that, I think is lovely, it's about keeping your sanity, frankly, the other thing you have connected to that kind of thing is. is that thing, um, I'm really glad it was empty and we didn't damage it opening it because it's a sardine can. Can you imagine what that would have been like 100 years later if we opened it up but again having things like cans of Fish Teacups will make these practice trenches not look as bad as they might otherwise be. They're not under fire from the Germans here, but they still have the same kind of misery of existence, um, and that's the kind of thing that It's critical to get into training and what this is.

It has something written. You can see the Liverpool regge. He is part of the Liverpool Kings regiment. You think of the famous Kitchener sign in 1914, the big recruiting sign. These are guys recruited in 1914, but. We had no idea that they were probably here training for what became the Battle of the S and they left that carving behind, so they just carved it on a piece of chalk. Born soldier carving his regiment into this thing. and it ends at the bottom of the trench, but it's a fantastic album. They were there. Oh, it's lovely and we didn't know it.

That's why archeology is brilliant because it links you to people and that's so crucial that you go back to those. Individual stories of those guys who were here in the first war after that training experience, then they move on to this famous first day of the battle of the Som and for them they do quite well, take relative, yes, there are thousands and thousands. fig. 6 casualties on the first day but the Liverpool Pals fight alongside the French on the right side of the British attack and take all their objectives and suffer relatively few casualties and that is not the story one gets when thinking about the Battle of the S a Despite the extensive training that Richard has demonstrated, these soldiers received the training was not enough just a few weeks after their success on the first day of the Su, the four 4,000 enthusiastic young volunteers of the Liverpool Pals had received more than a thousand casualties.

A shocking one in four This is one of the greatest treasures in the Bristol Museum The Thornbury horde consists of 11,460 coins and was buried in the 4th century AD. just as the Roman army was withdrawing from Britain, but in reality this pales before a recently discovered horde one of the

largest

ever found, this time dating from the 1st century BC. C., when Great Britain was about to be assimilated into the Roman Empire. On the island of Jersey in 2012, two metal detectorists found a huge horde of 2,000-year-old coins in a potato field. Carefully excavated heritage, it was the largest discovery of aged iron coins ever made in the world.

The archaeologist wanted to discover what treasures were inside and what it tells us about the British Isles at a time when the Romans were advancing towards our shores. The Horde was taken to the local Museum where curator Neil Mara and his team began the painstaking task of cleaning up the mud. There were an extraordinary 70,000 coins and more treasures hidden within unusual, precious colored beads and gold and silver bracelets. This has been much more complicated than we expected. We're lifting one piece at a time, but everything is intertwined and wedged together haha, success, it's a piece of silver wire, probably from freshly cut jewelry and essentially just scrap metal.

Who would have cut this precious metal and why was it all? hidden as they dig deep ER In the Horde searching for clues, they discover their greatest treasure is heavy, it is heavy an incredible collection of thick neck rings adorned with gold torqus, only the most important people in Iron Age society would have worn rings of this thickness and weight. After 2,000 years in the ground, it took Neil four years to carefully separate it to reveal its contents. Now we have removed 50,000 coins, so we think that on path 57 there are about 20,000 coins left and you can see that there is still one.

Few things stand out with much of the horde now revealed Neil has made some surprising Revelations, well it is the largest

hoard

of coins of its kind in the world. We know which tribe really made it because, uh, the coins have already come off and we've cleaned them up. They are of a type we have seen before from the corosal tribe with a head on one side and a very, very abstract horse on the other. The Coro Salti were a tribe of iron-aged Celts who inhabited part of what is now Brittany in France, so why? Did they bury this vast treasure in Jersey?

Neil has come to the lab with some of this incredible treasure to tell me Neil, let's be clear about this, this is an absolutely huge horde, isn't it? I mean, now you have the stage where it is. In this horde we have more coins from this period than have been found in France, in all of France, yes, and as we move forward we find more and more apart from the coins, it speaks to the great surprise for us. I mean, this is one of the complete eight that we have. Can I pick it up? Yes, please do it.

This is an Iron Age gilded collar ring. Yes, how do you put it on your neck? They come in two halves, so you would literally give it away. like a twist like that and then they separate and the pattern is peculiar because it's not facing the observer, it's facing the wear that would be inside your throat, yeah that's beautiful, what about the coins themselves? Can you give us a clue about the date, I mean literally 99.5% of the coins in this horde date to around 62 BC. C. or before. Look at that wonderful little face of Beau's on that side.

We know that they were all made in the period leading up to The Invasion of Julius Caesar and so on. maybe they knew that Julius Caesar would come from the south defeating, you know, tribe after tribe after tribe and that they hid the wealth from him, actually obtained it on the high seas. Road, what brings us to Jersey is that we seem to be in a place that was quite difficult to get to. ashore and then maybe it was a place to hide and D buried it with the idea presumably of coming back for it later and maybe they were killed.

The burial of the Jersey horde reveals the fear that gripped the Celtic tribes as the Romans advanced towards our shores, but on the contrary, the Thornbury Horde in the Bristol Museum dates from a time when 300 years later the The Romans were in retreat, showing us that the collapse of the Empire could be equally tumultuous. The Horde of Thorns on display upstairs is just a small portion of the 11,460 Roman coins that were discovered and that is why I have come here to the shops to take a closer look at some of those coins and discover more about the horde, how was it discovered?

It was discovered by a man who was digging a fish pond in his backyard, so the remains of a jar were found with over 11,500 coins inside, all of a similar type, all from a similar period. . These coins act as a history of the Roman Empire. Virtually all currencies are constants, which is why Constantine, the emperor, is associated with the enabling of Christianity. be worried throughout the Empire and found in Constantinople and found in Constantinople so you get two types of coins so you get one coin in this horde that dates back to the founding of Rome Ah, that's beautiful, so we have a little wolf with Romulus and Remis below there is a beautiful coin look at that and then there is a female personification of the capital of the new Empire which is Constantinople and that is Constantinopoulos the coins are also evidence of the decline of the Empire at this time the coins have been greatly devalued there is very little silver The content and practically everything is made of copper alloy and it is also not that well modeled, so the coins are literally degrading, they are getting smaller, is this a sign of a ruined economy?

So as Rome goes into decline, yes, everything is debated, where? Are they minted then? Are they British coins of origin? None of the ones I've seen are actually from Britain. We know that because they have little marks on the bottom, we've kind of made it almost like an airline. map where these things come from and the furthest one we find is Antioch and Turkey and we have things from Thessalonica but also Croatia as part of the Roman Empire Britain was connected to diverse people and cultures throughout Europe and beyond and this was also a period of relative peace, but when the Empire fell apart it must have been a difficult and even terrifying experience for many people and why on earth was this volume of coins buried?

That's the $64,000 question because we have no idea that it was a difficult time. It's not like that, I mean, I guess there were numerous different reasons why someone could be burying money in the ground, they could, they could, they could be trying to hide it, um, they could actually be storing it, and you kept it and hid it from any. you didn't want to have them and it could be someone you thought would come to attack and clearly we have no idea why no one collected them in the 4th century AD, the Romans were retreating from Britain and whoever buried these coins never came.

Back to them, Britain was plunged into a period of uncertainty for the next 600 years, sometimes known as the Dark Ages. Our next excavation provides new and very strange clues about how our ancestors made sense of this disorder for archaeologists. Burial sites can offer precious clues. about how our ancestors lived and died, but sometimes they all also give us surprising information about what seem to us today to be strange beliefs and strange rituals long forgotten deep in the valley And in Herford, a team of archaeologists is on their way to Investigate an intriguing discovery near a remote cave.

On the first day, the site is located on a very steep slope that is densely forested on three sides of the site.There are vertical cliffs 60t high and immediately above the site is a small cave opening known locally as In Merlin's Cave in the 1920s an incredible find of prehistoric tools, pottery and bones was made revealing that this is of a sacred burial site for our Neolithic ancestors over 4,500 years ago, but in 2011 a new discovery was made by pure chance just below the entrance I was making. caving with one of my sons and we decided to try to get into this cave which is about 15 tons from the cliff face so I left my son sitting in what was a tree while he climbed the cliff here he discovered the flint scraper. lovely flint scraper and some pottery and some teeth Clyde took the finds to the county archaeologist the pottery was prehistoric the teeth were human and the flint was early NE lithic county archaeologist Tim Hover was so intrigued by the finds that he organized An excavation to see if he could find if there was a connection between these new finds and those in the cave, what he found was even more exciting.

We found two human skeletons placed under two of the trees. We carbon date them to around 600 AD. It was shocking that Tim had expected to find Neolithic skeletons, but these were skeletons from the Dark Ages of the 7th century AD. and they were outside a prehistoric burial site, but with such a large time difference surely there couldn't be a connection, so the following evidence emerged that one of the burials had bones deposited in the Bronze Age cave, so 12 13,400 years older than the burial, prehistoric human B appears to have been deliberately placed in the later tombs. Whoever buried these men clearly knew about the previous graves. burials inside the cave so what we wanted to know was who these people were and why they were involved with the burial in the cave we know they were doing something very strange very different are these two men the only ones buried here or are they part of something much bigger this year another dig was organized to discover it is a very unusual place to find people buried we are on a very steep hillside the ground is not very deep it is actually quite difficult to make a grave that is deep enough to bury a body now The reason we have returned here to do more research is to try to determine the extent of this burial activity.

Do we only have two burials or is it actually a small cemetery? A trench was dug a short distance from where the body was found. Two burials were found after 2 days of excavation. They start to get results. We just found a human bone sticking out of the side of the trench section. It is an M fragment of a large human femur. We are further south. of where the two previous burials are and gives us an idea that the extent of this burial area is considerably larger than we had previously seen. More human remains have been discovered.

We just found this, which is a human tooth. It's actually a human canine. an adult tooth and then some bone that is just out of the way now we are finding remains of other skeletons including the femur of a newborn child, so far all the bones found in these burials have been from adults but now we are finding evidence that even very young babies are being buried at this site. Analysis shows they date from the same period as the skeletons first found beneath the cave entrance. It is evidence that the team has discovered the graveyard of a Dark Age.

Community is an incredibly strange discovery The prehistoric burials inside the cave appear to have been so important to this community 2000 years later that they chose to be buried near the cave even though digging graves in this deep ground must have been incredibly difficult and another discovery en There is evidence that these people are also being buried along with bones from inside the cave. Now on the top of this bone, we can see inlays and this is in fact tuur or stalagmite that only forms inside caves. This bone came out of the cave. cave, so this provides a direct link between the cave up there and what's being deposited down here.

The University of Manchester team has discovered not only a forgotten cemetery, but also a strange funeral ritual that has been lost for 1,400 years. I'm interested in finding. Find out what archaeologists think was going on here, so we have Dark Age burials outside the cave and then inside the cave there appears to be a large number of human and animal bones from much earlier, from some period in prehistory, the iic um, he is buried with two cow bones, so this piece here yes, a little bit of cow and then there is the knuckle of a cow leg bone next to his head that he was also buried with.

Tim believes there might be a special connection between this particular man and the previous one. burials inside the cave and have you analyzed the bones? What can you say about this individual? He is certainly over 50 years old, if not around 60, when he died he was a very tall person or at least over 6 years old. feet we can see that lying here look, yes, the fact that he is big and robust and lived to a reasonable age would suggest that he was at least well fed, which may suggest that he was being cared for, so who does?

I think he was, I think just from the fact that he's buried with animal bones that must have come from the cave, he was actually in charge of looking after the contents of the cave for a period of time, so you're seeing this like a like a kind of cult center, so I think a cult is probably the way to look at it. They're honoring their ancestors and they're honoring a cave that, as far as they're concerned, has been there for millennia, but at the same time, both burials seem to be arranged in a Christian tradition, broadly speaking, um extended with arms crossed over the pelvis, so in that sense they are following the Christian tradition, but there is a bit of prehistoric bone as perhaps an indication that it is okay.

We're going to do this Christian style, but we'll include something from the past to show that we haven't forgotten that tradition. The Middle Ages were a tumultuous period in British history. The Anglo-Saxon tribes were invading and It was a time of great political and religious changes with the establishment of new kingdoms and pagan ideas competing with Christianity for supremacy. These were most likely not Anglo-Saxons, they were actually native Welsh or British, if you will, and they are adapting. to Christianity coming from the south and the east and moving westwards and they are gradually adapting such a strange view and I think it really reminds us that we don't expect everyone in England and Wales to do exactly the same thing at At the same time, the community of the Merlin's Cave dates back to their past combining funerary practice with what appears to be ancestor worship and perhaps that provided them with much needed tranquility during such an uncertain period of our history after the Romans abandoned the Britain of the Dark Ages.

It is considered a less civilized and more backward era in which we lost cultural and commercial connections not only with Rome but with the world in general, but now. A surprising new discovery at Tinel Cornwell challenges this view. Tin Tagel is best known for its connections to the legendary King Arthur, who according to myth was conceived there, this year archaeologists returned to Tin Tajil hoping to investigate its rich Dark Ages history and unravel the archaeological facts of our thean fiction. The remains of the castle that can be seen today in Tintagel date from the medieval period, but archaeological remains from around 600 AD.

Found in previous excavations suggest that there was once a large Dark Age settlement here. In 2016, archaeologists returned to Tintagel to explore areas of the island that had never been excavated before they wanted to discover what type of settlement it was. but what they found took them all by surprise on the first day of the excavation diary and today we started digging on the East Terrace right here and behind the castle on the South Terrace, we opened four trenches and that's where we are. Hoping to find what we used to call Dark Age buildings or buildings belonging to the 5th and 6th centuries, archaeologists from English Heritage and the Cornwall Archaeological Unit have only just begun removing the sod when they make their first discovery.

We have this possible. pavement floor layer evidence for terrace construction what it looks like is that we have three different flat terraces with slopes between them at the moment, we hope that when we remove some material we will find some nice walls, disappointingly digging further reveals no traces. of buildings perhaps there are some terraces that are being used for small small enclosures perhaps as cultivation plots instead of buildings, but for who these cultivation plots on the south side of the island were they make an extraordinary discovery, we have three terraces um this being the substantial wall at the south end and leading to another wall presumably for a construction building and leading nicely to a series of steps leading through part of the building above, so we believe this is the nice level floor of the building and the steps up This is your first big step.

Huge 1M thick rock walls are revealed. Never before has such a solid Dark Age building been discovered in Britain. A substantial building to speak of and a top end, but what is this building? In their search for clues, they find a garbage pit. next to it we have an animal jaw here, so you can see the teeth, something like a wild boar, maybe the remains of wild boar and other animals could be evidence of a Dark Ages feast. I can see and other surprising findings suggest that this was a high state building And, is that right?

It's such a shallow ball. Bonito Rim put some fruit in it or something. Oh it is beautiful. It looks like Foran, which is from Turkey, so it's a beautiful thing and KL Thorp, the small finds expert, is particularly so. excited about the discovery of an incredibly rare piece of glass, you like it, oh that's incredibly beautiful, it's definitely post Roman glass, mhm, it even has a rim which is fantastic and judging by the curvature I think it was a small conical cup between the 5th century and more or less the 7th century, a kind of merav motor glass originating from somewhere in France, so probably drinking wine that is always incredibly beautiful, the team simply did not expect to find so many foreign products from high quality that the people who lived here are clearly not only very rich but trade across great distances got a small Shir from what appears to be AA which is from the Aan Eastern Mediterranean area.

Wow, fantastic. Yes, on the 12th, the team

unearthed

the foundation of a building 11M long and 4M wide. They are convinced that the people who lived here must have had immense wealth and power. I don't think anything like this has been found before, so there were some surprised faces, and lo and behold, it went on and on, so this could be the style of the entire compound of buildings on the south side um substantial walls will support substantial roofs so yeah it's all good, very exciting, further excavations over the rest of the summer revealed that this was just part of a large complex covering much of the Tintagel this has amazed the team, they didn't expect to find evidence of such a rich community and of early Dark Age Britain, so do you really think you've discovered a Dark Age Palace and, if so, what it was like to live in it?

I'm not sure it's a real site, but whatever it is, it was a high status site because we have a lot of exotic stuff, yeah, I mean, we saw some of this stuff come out, so tell me about this Potter piece, yeah . well, this is very, very well made, it's probably part of the yes, it's probably a good table plate, a full bowl would be quite large, so you have this kind of large, expansive, fairly shallow bowl, probably for banquets community and um, this is the handle of a shirt that would have contained wine from the aan of Turkey and mares around the coast of Spain you don't know actually from tinel is this is a reconstruction of what one of these amre might have looked like from the aan of Greece but this would probably be for transporting wine, but it could also be for olive oil, we don't know, but and the archeology that you're seeing here, of course, dates back to a really interesting time when we're looking at Great Britain after the collapse of the Roman Empire we are looking for independent states, yes I mean Britain is divided into many small states like Mercier, Wessix and Kent and places and Cornwall continues in its own way and this may well be a real center with connections to largedistance.

I'm starting to imagine now and for me this is the Royal Apartments of the palace at Tinel, this is where King Arthur lived well, it has that extraordinary association of when Jeffrey of Monmouth writes about the history of the kings of Britain in the 12th century , says that Arturo was conceived in inkgel, yes, what did he invent? Whether he had taken it from various other legends, we really don't know, although they may not have found evidence of King Arthur himself on the equipment. I have discovered that Tintagel of the Dark Ages was a prosperous center of trade and perhaps even a seat of royalty, a bulwark against the turmoil engulfing Britain at this time in the past.

Infant mortality rates were much higher than they are today in the Middle Ages. I thought that perhaps half of all children did not live to adulthood, and yet when you look at the cemeteries of the time, there just don't seem to be enough burials of young people and infants, so the burial rights of children were different to adults and It is certainly possible and archaeologists in South Wales have been making some intriguing discoveries in the winter of 2014. Record storms hit South Wales. They were so ferocious that they eroded the coast of Pemer and human bones began to appear when the sand dunes were removed, revealing an ancient cemetery.

These skeletons may hold precious clues about our past, so for the past 3 years a doid archeology team has been trying to salvage what they can from this now dangerously exposed site. This is classic rescue archaeology. You can see here that the threat is obvious and it is happening and we are just dealing with it, it is the third day of this year's excavation and they are beginning to excavate the layers of the Dark Ages from the 7th to the 99th century and a burial emerges that It's incredibly unusual and completely different to anything they've seen. so far it appears to be a woman buried with a baby in the crook of her arms, that's it, that's amazing, yes, that's the baby's head, yes, the skull there, this in this area, okay, there's the arm left of the mother to find a child burial from this time.

It is extremely rare that small bones tend to decompose quickly in many cemeteries, but here children's bones are perfectly preserved by the coastal sand. Ken, do you want to tell me what you are drawing? It is a kissing tomb that contains the remains of It's like a baby. A baby. newborn probably a patal very small load you see L bit Yes and incredibly soon other baby burials begin to emerge, it is rare to find this many babies in a communal cemetery, no matter what date it is, it is rare to find them here. I have a large number of them because the preservation in the sand has been so good for the skeletal remains that in the third week they found an incredible 20 children's graves, a salient reminder of the infant mortality rates at the time and an intimate insight about how parents felt about we lost so many little children at such a young age 1400 years ago, so what we have here is a pretty nice bone pin, possibly a shroud pin, and some of the burials we've had here can be seen from the position of the skeleton's feet, in particular that these people seem to be wrapped in shrouds when they were buried.

There was an absolutely tiny baby. In fact, I dug it myself. His legs were crossed at the ankles, so again suggesting that he was wrapped. Before being placed on the ground, this pin would have been used to carefully secure the Shroud around this dead child before it was placed on his grave and out of the sand and an intriguing series of finds emerge. This is one of several areas where we found I have had white pebble courts throughout the site but these have been babies' graves so the pebbles were placed very carefully. We had one with over 100 densely packed pebbles on top and obviously a lot of care went into the baby's grave inside, so what did these quartz pebbles mean?

Excavation co-director Marian Shiner and osteologist Katie Hemmer have come to the lab to tell me about their discoveries and what they tell us about the attitude of dark-age parents toward deaths. of his children we do not know the purpose of the court pebbles are found in the context of Mory from the prehistoric period onwards and are found in other Welsh cemeteries of the early Middle Ages there is a Bible passage in the Apocalypse that speaks of a person Who has discovered that Christ has been given a white stone and in that new name there is evidence that in the late medieval period each man at a funeral brought a stone or took a stone and placed it on top of the grave, but you know there must have been over 130 people at that child's funeral, if that's what this means, and they're just at children's graves and they're burying very, very young children while they're babies.

Yes, what really stands out to you about the site is the level of care with which many of these babies and young children were absolutely buried. I think we need to move away from the old notions that people were not taking care of their children at this time; are investing the same amount of effort, if not more, in the burials of the actually younger members of this population, discoveries like this show how archeology can change the history of Britain by revealing lost religious practices from the Middle Ages and changing our view on how prepared our soldiers were when they were sent to fight. from the Western Front to the unique discovery in the Salsbury flat showing that the Stonehenge ritual landscape was larger than we ever imagined our ancestors made the country we live in today and through archeology we have been able go back through the centuries and touch their lives