West Digging for Britain

This is Digging for Britain...

..the programme which brings you

this year's most outstanding new archaeology.

All year, in hundreds of digs across the UK, teams have been

uncovering new archaeological clues which help us to tell our story.

We'll be looking at highlights from all the digs with in-depth

analysis from archaeologists who are going to extraordinary

lengths to uncover our history in a way that only archaeology can.

And they've been out there filming themselves to make sure

that we were there for every moment of discovery.

It's in perfect mint condition.

And they'll be joining us back here at the Dorset County Museum,

to help us make sense of what the new finds actually mean.

Tonight, we're in the West of England, as we meet

army veterans on the hunt for Anglo-Saxon warriors.

We investigate Britain's earliest leprosy hospital, changing what we

know about how sufferers might have been treated.

And treasure hunters find a 3,000-year-old gold hoard

but with a very unlikely owner.

We're in Dorchester, home to the Dorset County Museum,

established in 1845,

and famous for housing the study and notebooks of one of

England's most well-loved writers,

Thomas Hardy.

But it's also home to some of our most important treasures,

like The Chickerell Rings, these Bronze Age gold torques

discovered by metal detectorists.

And the Langton Matravers Axes,

the largest hoard of Bronze Age axes ever discovered in Britain

and which some believe were made as a gift to the gods.

In our first dig, just 50 miles away from the museum,

more extraordinary Bronze Age remains are coming to light,

at Barrow Clump, in the heart of Salisbury Plain.

Over the last three years,

archaeologists from the Ministry of Defence, who owns the land,

have been excavating a Bronze Age burial site.

This ancient site dates back to over 5,000 years ago

but archaeologists have been called in now because it's in danger.

Badgers are burrowing through the soil, destroying the archaeology,

so the team must hurry to recover and record as much as possible.

And after only two days on site, their work pays off with

an important discovery, a Bronze Age burial urn

so fragile that its temporary protection is a bucket.

There you go! It's really, really exciting, this.

You can see the rim of the pot coming round here

and within it, bits of collapsed pot

but all this burned material which we presume is burned human bone.

We'll lift it out as a block and we'll excavate that back in the lab.

It's a fantastic find.

Having gently excavated the urn, osteoarchaeologist,

Jacqueline McKinley, carefully lifts the collar.

Voila!

Like doing a sponge cake.

If I lift that up can you see all that lovely cord

decoration on the inside of there?

Brilliant, isn't it?

No sooner has the first urn been rescued

but a second vessel is found.

This much larger urn has been buried upside down.

It is moving though, isn't it? I'm just worried.

After a tense hour, the urn comes out in one piece,

carefully bandaged.

It's actually a food vessel, Bronze Aged food vessel,

which I know looks like a bandaged head at the moment.

But the reason that bandage is there is

because it's slightly elasticated so it gives support to the vessel

and stops it falling apart while I'm getting things from inside it.

And Jacqui, you're in the process of looking at this material,

I think, from the first urn, the urn with the cord marking on it.

That's right, this was actually quite badly damaged on the site,

it was only about 10cm left

so I decided, in this case, to excavate what was inside it on site.

And today, actually, is the first time I've seen this, now that

it's been washed and cleaned up again.

And at this point, what can you tell about this bone?

Well, what I've done is I've pulled out some very useful

pieces of bone, like, for instance, this here, which is

part of the super-orbit, which goes about there,

and there's a few other pieces around there, like, for instance,

this one, which is from there,

which is part of the diagrammatic arch.

The skull is very useful,

one, in that you have a very easily identifiable piece of bone, which

you only either have one or a pair of, so they're very useful for doing

minimum numbers of individuals, but also a lot of the skull

is very diagnostic in terms of sexing the individual, the adult individual.

And what about the sex of this individual,

is this an adult male or female?

Looking at the general size and robusticity,

I would say it's most likely to be male.

And do you think these were high-status individuals who were

treated in this way and buried in the Barrows?

Status?

Well, you know, in the past, the antiquarians always thought

that everybody was a chief, it was always chieftains,

it was always men, always chieftains, who were buried in here.

So, this would have been a King?

It would have been a King, yes, undoubtedly, or a prince or

something, but when you actually look at the individuals you

find in these places, they are a mix of individuals, you could get males,

females, children, and one of the things I have noticed when

I've been looking at material from these barrows, is that you have

quite a large number of females with infants or young children.

Now, if you think about your community

and what matters to a community,

one of the important things there is the future and your future is your

children, so really, the children and the mother, the mother that

produces the children, could be seen as very important to the community.

So, it's not really surprising that they're quite often chosen to

be buried in these positions.

But these urns aren't the only things that make this dig special.

In a unique project, known as Operation Nightingale,

the MOD archaeologists are working closely with injured soldiers

for whom this is vital therapy.

This pioneering scheme is introducing

veteran Armed Forces personnel to the practice of archaeology.

Operation Nightingale's really a recovery opportunity, some of them

will want to, having had, maybe, a tough operational tour, will

want to just come out and experience some very benign atmosphere.

You can see how it's quite cathartic in the broadest sense that you can

come out here, be with your friends and just get to understand a little

bit about the past landscapes over

which you've trained over many years.

For many men like former rifleman, Kenny Kendrick,

it's been a lifesaver.

What happened to me is

I suffered a mental breakdown while over in Germany and it's

given me a whole new lease of life, a new career. I left the army

and I've become an archaeologist full-time and once I start

digging, it's very hard to stop. If I'm not told when to take a break

or have a drink or have my dinner I'd probably dig until it gets dark.

In fact, the disciplines of military

and archaeology are not such strange bedfellows.

Anyone who's watched the news

footage from Afghanistan or Iraq has seen people, military

figures, looking for IEDs and things like that with a metal detector.

Critical skill in the military, key skill on an archaeological site.

Just do that area again.

'There's almost a symbiotic relationship, in many ways,

'there are so many crossover skills and its quite an'

inspirational thing for the archaeologists amongst us to see that

and working together as a team, and it's a team thing that is crucial.

As its name suggests, Barrow Clump is a barrow, or burial mound,

so it's no surprise that the team uncover skeletons.

He was a very large bloke, these femurs are truly huge,

and his feet are, the toe bones, I've never seen anything so big.

As burial after burial appears,

they soon realise they're unearthing an Anglo-Saxon cemetery,

dating from the sixth century AD,

just a few metres away from the original Bronze Age burial site.

There's huge progress on site.

We started off with one or two grave cuts that we could see

and over the weeks we've now exposed at least 12.

There we go.

Like this spearhead.

And shield boss,

the metal centre of a shield which would have protected the hand.

The original shield could have been up to a metre in diameter.

These are warriors' graves.

But with so many on site, the team are beginning to wonder, why?

One of the theories that were put forward to me

by one of the soldiers on the project was that

the outside of the ditch seemed to have quite a large concentration

of males with shields and thought that this was perhaps something

like an equivalent in death of the Saxon shield wall protecting those

buried inside the monument, which I think is a really lovely idea.

So, it is interesting to have all those Anglo-Saxon burials

alongside the Bronze Age ones, but is it unusual?

No, there's quite a lot of evidence that Anglo-Saxons would

choose what were obvious, important, particularly mortuary important,

landscape features in which to bury their own dead.

This would have been very obvious features at that time.

The mounds would have been quite obvious there and people would have

recognised that they were very important to people in the past.

In a way, the same way as in the Bronze Age, they were almost staking

a claim in that landscape by producing these mounds.

The Anglo-Saxons, by coming in and burying their dead there,

may also have been staking a claim to the same land.

Well, in spite of a growing number of warrior graves

at Barrow Clump, there's still one thing that's eluding the team.

Chap in front of us has between his knees,

the remnants of an iron shield boss

and that's one of several we've now had over the site.

To the left of the individual,

just poking out above the grave, is the socket of a spear, so,

all those things that you'd expect, perhaps, to find with a warrior.

What we're missing from that

and something you see referred to throughout Saxon poetry is a sword.

Swords were prized by the Saxons

but are extremely rare finds.

Richard's greatest hope is that they'll find one

but despite unearthing 75 graves, the prize is proving elusive.

However, the badgers burrowing on this site have

left a trail that leads the team right to this year's prize find.

As we were going down, we had a lot of badger packing material

so we weren't sure

whether they would have disturbed any remains that were there.

As it happens, we do have a badger run that does run right

alongside and has damaged the skeleton.

But the rest of it is very well preserved.

And, we're very lucky,

the fact that we've got a sword lying alongside it.

So, this one's got the big three, really, in that it's got

the spearhead, the shield boss and then a sword alongside.

Now all they have to do is get the sword out,

an extremely delicate task,

carried out by Lynn Wootton, conservator with Wessex Archaeology.

So, a sword, which is

sitting right on the top arm bone,

which is coming out in fragments.

I'm going to try to get the whole lot up in one go.

If the sword survives excavation, the trick will be to find out

if it's pattern welded.

This was a complicated method of forging a blade

to produce a top-class sword.

A clue, perhaps, to the man who was buried with it.

We're thrilled to be joined by Richard

and some of his colleagues from the Medical squadron

And we're especially lucky because we're going to x-ray

the sword in real time, right here, in the museum.

But before we do that, Richard, what can you tell us about it?

We're really excited about this

because this was the only sword we had, it was

found by one of the soldiers of the project, so really, really exciting.

And what we really want to know is to see whether it is one of those

fabulous, high-status weapons that's pattern welded and really

part of the whole mythology of Anglo-Saxon England,

of the sword with its name and that sort of thing, it's a powerful item.

And this came out of the ground in one piece, didn't it?

It did and it was a nervous moment,

having this thing lifted, Excalibur-like, from the ground.

There you go.

Oh, that's mineralised wood.

So yes, a real thing of beauty

and then the sword being such an important artefact

in the sixth century, this was really quite a thrill to find it.

So what have we got here? This is the handle end

and bits of copper along here?

Right, you've got the remnants of the scabbard,

perhaps you can make out little traces of mineralised

wood, which is the fabric of the scabbard, and these are the gilded

copper alloy mounts at the side of the scabbard, same with the top

area, might have some decoration, x-ray will hopefully show us that.

And then perhaps you can see some elements of the horn handle

that was here in its sixth century guise.

So that's been mineralised. So is there an iron core

running through the middle of that?

I think so. We can pick that up on the x-ray.

And have you cleaned it up at all or

is this just as it came out of the ground?

This is subject to immediate stabilisation so it doesn't deteriorate,

and then the full conservation will happen after the event.

Brilliant, well, I think we should probably let

Sergeant McDowell and Sergeant Barnet get on with the x-rays.

We need to clear while they do that.

That's a good idea.

Wow, look at that. That's come up beautifully, hasn't it, Richard?

Well, this is fantastic

cos you can see all the things we really wanted to see.

Course, the thing you really think of a sword in this period is

whether it's pattern welded or not.

And that was the real question we wanted to answer.

And the answer is, yes, it is, which is fantastic.

How can you tell that?

Can you see all these little sort of zigzags in here?

Can you see there's a sort of crisscross element

right in the middle of the blade, up here?

That's really indicative of these three bars of iron that've

been twisted and twisted to form...

Well, there's a debate at the moment as to whether that's for strength

or for decoration but it certainly would've been very beautiful.

A bit like a herring or one of these fish, beautiful, decorated thing.

-You see that in samurai swords as well.

-It's exactly the same thing,

cause it's a strengthening thing

and you can see how, perhaps, making out the white lines

going down the sword, can you all see that?

See that?

That's the actual edge of the sword where this pattern welding goes on.

And then the hardened steel edges are on the side there.

So, that's when it starts to bevel out towards the cutting edge.

That's right, and so you've got a thing of beauty

but a thing with a real purpose to it, these aren't just prestigious

objects for no reason, they're also things that can actually kill.

It was great to be able to see all that

without actually having to start taking that soil off.

It's fabulous, it's a non-intrusive

way of finding an awful lot of data and information

about the artefact without rendering it fragile and vulnerable, really.

OK, so, who was the man who had this artefact then?

That's a very good question.

He had not only this, he had a shield with him,

he had a spear and he had a knife,

so he's got more or less the panoply of arms going into the grave.

He's right in the most important part of the burial mound,

so he must have been somebody with a degree of power and wealth.

This isn't an everyday item, as I said, it's

the only one we've had out of the 75 burials, so he's an important man.

The soldiers believe that the owner of this sword might have been

a local king, or warrior chief,

who was buried surrounded by the burials of other warriors

and placed in the ground with his spear, shield and sword.

This find, close to a Bronze Age cemetery, contributes both

to our understanding of Anglo-Saxon burials

and shows how they reused earlier monuments for their cemeteries.

But there's another group of warrior dead here at the Dorset Museum,

who are central to a long-running debate.

For years, historians have argued whether the Romans

invaded Britain or staged a peaceful takeover.

So, Rebecca, Maiden Castle is famous because it's a

really beautiful hill fort but also for the cemetery that's up there.

Exactly. There is what has become known as the war cemetery

at the eastern end of the hill fort.

And these are two of the skeletons from that cemetery?

Yeah, these two are very, very special young chaps

because they are the ones that contain the most unique evidence

that we have that enables us to pin this cemetery down to AD43.

So, let's have a look at these two then.

I can immediately see something which looks a bit suspicious.

Yes.

And it's got an arrow pointing to it as well.

I know, it's very helpful.

Which is this bolt here.

I'm just going to move this vertebra out

so that we can have a good look at it... Look at that!

-Well, that's amazing.

-It is.

It's actually embedded into the bone, so it's passed through that

individual and lodged in their vertebra.

Is that a typical Roman weapon?

It is, it's a classic Roman ballista bolt

and that's how we can date these burials.

So, we know that although the individuals,

the pottery they're buried with is late-Iron Age, that absolutely

dates them to the Roman invasion

because none of those weapons are here before the Romans get here.

So, it's coming in like this, right through the guts, through the

kidney, in fact, and grazing the

vertebra and coming right to the back, here.

So that's enough to kill somebody?

Yeah, absolutely, but there is more.

So, very obviously,

this young chap here has got a rather large hole in his head.

-So that's where he's been bashed on the head.

-Yeah.

Then these lines, you only get the fracture lines running off

in these directions if it's something that's happened at the time of death.

And then it kind of gets worse for this guy

because then this very little knick here

and that's out of the back of his mandible

and that's where someone with a sword then tried to cut his head off.

Right, OK.

Then they've had another go because he's then got this blow,

which has actually peeled off the bone on his mandible here.

Nasty.

Yeah, so they've tried to cut his head off twice.

He's really been hacked, hasn't he? This is vicious, this is violent.

-And it's not...

-Yeah.

-..just one piece of evidence of violence,

I mean, shock and awe at its worst.

It is very, very shocking.

So, the Roman army are going above and beyond what is necessary

to kill someone.

But we know that when they are conquering new territories

they really did go and decimate people.

These skeletons graphically reveal one side of the story

of the Romans' arrival in Britain.

But in 2011, I visited a site in North Dorset

which told a different story, the Durotriges Big Dig Project.

For several years,

archaeologists have been digging at Winterborne Kingston.

The dig was originally started as an Iron Age exploration

looking back almost 2,000 years to when members of the Durotriges tribe

lived and farmed here before the Romans arrived.

Well, this survey of the site, which is a magnetic survey,

shows us the Iron-Age ditched enclosure

we call the banjo enclosure,

that's because it superficially resembles a banjo

with the body and the neck.

Do you think this was a defensive enclosure?

Not at all, not at all.

This is effectively an undefended farmstead.

'But as the team continue the dig, they started to turn up

'more and more signs of Romanisation,

'influencing the lives of the local inhabitants.'

So, you've also got pieces of chicken

and, of course, we're familiar with chicken today

but in the late Iron Age this is an exotic animal,

this is coming in from the Roman world.

Presumably, they're selling their produce and their grain

and they're getting these luxury food items in return.

This particular fragment is a handle of an amphora,

a large storage vessel that would've stood up to the height of an adult.

We can tell by the fabric and by the shape that it's from Spain

-and it would have probably held wine.

-That's lovely.

It is, so we can imagine that they're eating chicken,

they're drinking wine,

they're sort of plugged in to the Mediterranean world.

So, for these Iron-Age farmers,

life with the Romans appears to have been a peaceful coexistence

in stark contrast to the massacre at Maiden Castle.

You don't see evidence

of a really abrupt transition at your site, do you?

No, you can't really tell when the Romans arrived

because there's small amounts of Roman material coming in

in the 1st century BC.

As we go on to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd century AD

there's still equivalent amounts of Roman pottery.

It's all very low-level stuff,

there's no sudden break when the Romans arrived, there's no change,

there's no dramatic increase in Roman artefacts.

And we're seeing that right the way across Dorset.

I think like Native American societies, they're picking

and choosing a few things that facilitate their lifestyle,

but there's no major change in settlement or religion going on.

It takes 300 years after the invasion before we start seeing

real significant Roman material like villas and temples being created.

There's a big time-lag between the arrival of the Romans

and their final evolution of Roman culture.

I think the main thing is the picture that we're used to

is too simple, isn't it? It's much more complex.

It is, you get this black and white idea, the Romans arrive,

those who they don't kill

end up living in villas and towns straight away.

It takes three centuries for that kind of Roman culture

to really take a hold in this part of Britain.

You've been digging at this site now, Miles, for quite a few seasons.

How's the picture been changing over the years?

It's been changing quite a lot

because we started out with an Iron-Age settlement,

we were looking at that transition from Iron Age to Roman

and what we're finding is evidence going on a good three centuries afterwards.

So, we're doing a geophysical survey around the whole area.

But we're finding more evidence of later Roman material.

I think a couple of your more plucky students filmed

-this year's dig for us, didn't they?

-Absolutely, yes.

We're in day three

in trench one at the top end of the site

and the cleaning back has revealed exactly what we were hoping to find

really, which is, we've got this large, it's about 15 meters across,

square enclosure defined by a very thin ditch. And the interior

of which, there's a whole series of small pits and other features.

It could be a shrine, it could be a temple,

it could be none of the above.

It could be some sort of animal agriculture enclosure.

But until we start going down into it we're not going to know.

It's a very nice distinct feature

and it fits beautifully in the trench.

And, once again, because it's dug down in the chalk,

it shows up fantastically.

Miles and his students are hoping that this find

will yield clues about the people who lived here.

Were they farmers who adopted Roman ways?

Or were they Romans from elsewhere in the Empire?

OK, so it's the beginning of day seven and we're quite excited

that inside the square enclosure, in trench one,

there's four rectangular cuts which look extremely like graves.

This is the team's first major clue as to who might have lived here.

We've started cleaning up these rectangular cuts

and they have, actually, thankfully started turning up into graves.

We were wondering to begin with, cos these are east-west aligned,

whether they were going to turn out to be Christian burials.

But the heads are at the eastern end.

If they were Christians you'd expect them to be at the other end,

so facing the sunrise on the Day Of Judgment.

We've got a skull coming up here

and we've got just part of a pottery vessel coming up at the other end.

So these are unlikely to be Christian graves,

and neither do they appear to be Iron Age, as in this area

those tend to take the form of a crouched burial.

The expectation is that they are Roman because in 2013,

just in the next field,

they excavated a late 4th-century Roman villa.

After another day's digging, the team begin to find

strong evidence of a connection, as more skeletons start to appear.

You can see just here in this particular grave

we've got one coffin nail coming out here.

So we know that these individuals are all in coffins,

which is probably another indication

that they're not early Christian, which tends to be buried in shrouds.

We've also got a spindle whorl which is another little nice object

they're taking with them into the afterlife and quite a lot

of late Roman female burials have spindle whorls buried with them.

I don't know if that's an activity they would have done in life.

One of the other cuts that's been excavated,

we've had hobnails coming up, the little nails

that are hammered into sandals in Roman footwear, suggesting

that they're going into the grave wearing almost military-style boots.

At the moment, we can say that these are Roman,

they are almost certainly late Roman,

and the provisional evidence at present suggests

they are contemporary with the villa.

Which is what we're hoping for, to try and find a link

with villa occupants and the house they actually occupied.

Just a day later, Miles and the team uncover three female

and two male skeletons.

That was the end of day nine, things are going extremely well.

The square barrow in trench one is turning out rapidly

to become what appears to be a family mausoleum.

We've now got at least five graves in there -

what looks like one immature, one juvenile character and four adults,

none of which appear to be Christian,

all of which, at the moment, seem to have indication of grave goods.

It was traditional for Romans to bury goods with their dead

like footwear or pottery.

Like this bowl they found in one of the female graves.

Hopefully, we'll start to get all those out

and get a better idea of their date.

Still hoping they are the occupiers of the villa we excavated last year.

If they can get an accurate date for the pot,

it will give the team an even better idea of who these people were.

Miles, when do these burials that you've just been finding date to?

Well, that's the question. The pot that comes out with them,

this particular vessel, we know is made sometime around 370, 380 AD

but the question is,

how old is it at the time it's gone into the grave?

That's lovely, it's got imprinted pattern on it.

It's got this rosette pattern all the way around,

but you can see it's very worn,

the slip's worn off and it originally had a base, it had a foot

on it which has been broken off and it's been worn smooth.

And given it may have taken 40, 50, 60 years

before it's actually ended up in the grave.

So we're seeing people who have been buried in Roman-style tradition

but they haven't got access to high status Roman goods.

I suspect given that we've only got a few spindle whorls,

we've got fragments of pottery,

there's not a lot of Roman status goods going in with these graves.

I think we're dealing with a sub-Roman population.

This is the people who are, sort of, traditionally

grubbing around in the remains of their Roman world.

So, do you think this is after the collapse of the Roman Empire, then?

I think it is. I think we are dealing with the last people

who still have a remembrance of a Roman world.

They're still clinging on to one or two items

that link them back to that past.

But they're no longer working

within a functioning Roman administration.

So, I think we are dealing with people

who are probably dying and being buried

probably sometime in the mid-5th century,

so we've probably got 450 AD

as, probably, our cut-off point

for the time these people are going into their graves.

There is a theory that the bodies at Maiden Castle are the natives

who were taking one last stand against the Romans.

Is it possible that the bodies you've got, or you're excavating,

are their descendants, hundreds of years later?

That'll be fantastic, if we could prove that, obviously.

But if we got good DNA samples from both,

then, we might be able to say that these are the descendants

from the iron age inhabitants

and that would be something rather spectacular.

Because we still don't know, yet,

whether the people who live in the villas

are the descendants of the indigenous population,

or whether they are 1st generation or 2nd generation migrants

from another part of the Roman Empire.

The Romano-Britons, who lived and died in the villa,

offer clues to the poverty of the twilight world

after the Roman army left, in 410 AD.

But less than 100 miles away, at Chedworth,

another dig is unexpectedly revealing the glories

of Roman Britain in its heyday.

First discovered by the Victorians 150 years ago,

Chedworth is a late 4th century courtyard villa complex.

In August, a team of archaeologists from the National Trust

started a two week dig to find out more about the villa layout.

Unfortunately, they had very little recorded information to go on.

The last person to dig here was Sir Ian Richmond,

Professor of Archaeology at Oxford University,

whose notes were lost, after his death in 1965.

All that remains of his work are some modern concrete path borders,

which the team believe Richmond laid down to outline

a 2nd century Roman bathhouse.

But they were in for a surprise, as Martin Papworth explains.

When we started our excavation here,

we really thought that Ian Richmond

had dug everything, including the wall lines,

where he put his concrete, and also the bits in between,

which we call the "islands".

So, we were quite surprised when we lifted a turf

and we found bits of tesserae coming up, bits of mosaic coming up.

And there were no records of any mosaics

in any of these areas, between the walls.

The "tesserae", or tile pieces, are revealing what might be

a border in red, cream and blue,

but whether anything else survives, of the central pattern, is unclear.

There are areas...there are going to be big holes in it,

there's going to be areas where the mosaic could be lost

and Carol's working over here. She's got an edge against the wall,

but lots of loose tesserae there, in a worn area,

away from the wall.

So we just need to gradually uncover

and show what lies within these walls.

There's also something else puzzling the team.

They had thought they were working on a series of baths

in separate rooms.

The other strange thing is that we've taken the concrete up,

we've cleaned underneath the concrete

and we're not finding walls, yet, which is quite peculiar.

Pretty soon, it becomes clear

they're no longer dealing with a bathhouse.

We knew from the beginning, when we first lifted the turf,

that there was going to be mosaic underneath here,

but now we can see it's part of one great, long mosaic.

In fact, we now believe it's part of the grand reception hall

of the villa.

So, rather than having five or six

little bits of different rooms of mosaic,

all this mosaic joins up into one big pattern.

The team make other finds,

which give more of an idea of the decoration of the villa.

We found bits of broad plaster on top of the top soil

and, in that, we've got patterns in red, blue and white, green.

-TAPPING

-And, so, we must think of this floor

as being part of something really grand.

Emerging from the rubble, an extraordinary, huge artwork

and an insight into the wealth and power of the Romano-British.

So, if we were looking at, in terms of,

did this person consider themselves Roman?

Were they presenting their life as being part of

the Great Roman Empire and the whole link to classical civilisation,

well, this, surely, must be someone really showing off their wealth

-DIGGING

-and their link to Rome

and, really, presenting themselves as Roman.

The team had started the dig thinking they were looking for

a 2nd century bathhouse and they've finished up

with a show-stopping grand reception hall.

I think it's amazing how much you can find by going back

and revisiting existing archaeological sites,

-where you think you know everything already.

-Yep.

And find some incredible mosaics.

Jon, how do those mosaics compare to these incredible mosaics

that we're, literally, sitting on, right here?

Well, we're very lucky, in Dorset,

that we have an awful lot of mosaics.

Over 60 have been found in the county.

But, in the county museum here, we have 12

that have been relocated from around the county,

including this one from Durngate Street, in the middle of Dorchester.

And what have we got here? Is that a serpent over there?

Yeah, we've got serpents and we've got drinking vessels.

The serpents represent rebirth and that's Bacchus's drinking vessel,

so it's good luck and celebration.

What can these mosaics tell us about the people who owned them,

or who owned the villas where they were?

Well, the complexity of them, and their intricacy,

suggests they were extremely wealthy.

Also, there are things in them that tells us

that they want to be part of the wider Roman culture.

Their use of mythology, the imagery for the Roman gods and legends

all suggest that they really want to identify with Rome.

So were they locals made good,

or were they Roman officials who'd moved in?

That's going to be the million dollar question, isn't it?

I think it's... My own instinct would be it's going to be

a combination of the local population who have done well

from Roman occupation, from trading with the Romans,

and, also, those officials, from Rome, who want very grand houses

in what was a very important part of Roman Britain.

So these beautiful and intricate mosaics

tell us of a vanished Romano-British world

when at least SOME, in the west, enjoyed the riches of empire.

For the past seven years, a team has been excavating

one of the earliest leprosy hospitals, near Winchester,

dating back almost a thousand years.

And what they have been finding at St Mary Magdalen

is really helping to change our ideas about leprosy

in the Middle Ages.

Just a mile from Winchester city centre, St Mary Magdalen

was, once, a busy complex of buildings,

but, now, nothing remains above ground.

The last recorded medieval building on this site

was a late 15th century almshouse.

But archaeologists from the University of Winchester

have been slowly peeling back an extremely rare medical history.

As the dig unfolds, the team is filming it themselves

and in charge is chief investigator Simon Roffey.

This is the north wall of that infirmary, running across the site,

so I'm inside the medieval infirmary now

and as I step outside,

into this area here,

we have evidence of what we think may be

the wall of a possible cloister.

Last year we found whole pots and metal objects

evidence for, perhaps, medical practise.

But more importantly, the team have uncovered 20 graves.

The condition of the skeletons leads them to believe

that there was a leprosy hospital here dating back to 1070.

It's the earliest excavated leprosy hospital in Britain.

The cemetery holds about 85% of individuals with leprosy -

men, women, children and babies.

It's the highest sample we've had from any British site.

In the Middle Ages, it was thought that those with leprosy

were unclean and sinful

and that the disease was a punishment from God.

'In 2011, I went to look at the skeletons

'they'd uncovered, for myself,

'and see the full, shocking extent of the disease

'with osteologist Dr Katie Tucker.'

Now, this is extreme, isn't it?

Yeah, this is erm... Suppose you...

don't know if it's the wrong word to use,

the BEST example of leprosy, that we have on the site.

-Yeah, you can see the massive amounts...

-Goodness me!

-..of bone loss.

-Yeah.

Totally lost the front of the nose.

And you actually see, these are the sockets, here,

for the first molars, so all the bone has been lost,

-back to the first molars.

-All the way back to the first molars?

-Yeah.

That is just horrific, isn't it? I mean, look at that.

You've lost all of the front of the upper jaw here.

And the bottom of the nasal cavity.

-And the hard palate, of course, has gone.

-Yeah, yeah.

It probably would have been difficult for this individual

to eat, without choking.

Yeah.

-It's quite a shocking disease, isn't it?

-It is, yeah.

-I find it shocking

to look at it in a skeleton and, I think,

it's not surprising that it was...it carried such a stigma with it.

-I mean, they would have looked alien, really.

-Mm.

-Especially with the facial lesions, as well, in the soft tissue.

-Mm.

And probably would have needed help

eating, maybe, because...

Well, they may have even had difficulty picking things up,

-because they'd started to get loss of feeling in their hands.

-Yeah.

I think they probably would have needed quite a lot of help,

during the last few years of their life.

Some accounts suggest that those suffering from leprosy

would have been outcasts and not given the same treatment

as ordinary citizens in life...

or in death.

But back at St Mary Magdalen,

the team believes that the graves themselves

reveal a very different story.

What we can see here is, erm...

a grave that's been well-cut, cut into the chalk.

Anthropomorphic - it's tapered down towards the feet end.

There's a head niche there, to hold the head of the individual.

And around the grave, you can see the lip,

which would hold a lid, or a ledger, on top of it.

You can see that all these graves are well-separated,

they've been marked, as well.

So, what we're seeing here is a certain level of care and attention

that's gone into building these graves.

It's clear that these were no hasty burials.

In this religious hospital,

people with leprosy seem to have been treated with respect

and buried with care.

The archaeologists also believe that one particular grave they uncovered,

back in 2011, supports this idea.

This skeleton of a man was discovered buried

with a scallop shell -

a traditional pilgrim badge, that he may have carried back

from one of the most famous pilgrimage sites in the world -

Santiago de Compostela, in Spain.

Simon believes that this man proves that medieval leprosy sufferers

could be treated with respect and dignity

and not always with revulsion.

This is the shell we just saw in the VT? The pilgrim's shell?

That's right. This wonderful artefact was

from an individual with mature years,

he had early stage leprosy.

Clearly took this with him to grave, as a, sort of, way of proving

that he had done this arduous pilgrimage,

to Santiago de Compostela.

But I think, more widely, this badge tells us

about the status of the hospital.

I mean, here was a man of religious sensitivity,

wealth, perhaps, and the means to go on a pilgrimage

and here he is, buried in a community of leprosy sufferers,

so this really challenges this view that we have that

leprosy hospitals were somehow excluded from society,

the community were outcasts, this sort of thing.

But do you think he could he have been excluded

when he developed the outward signs of leprosy? I mean, he's there

in the hospital, he's buried within the hospital cemetery,

and not with his own community.

I think, when we look at the archaeology as a whole,

what we have is well-appointed timber buildings, originally,

got substantial postholes on the side,

we have a chapel, we have a well-ordered cemetery.

We've also got evidence for medical provision, on one example.

All this put together, I think, tells us

this site wasn't a site of outcasts, it was...

these were people who had a certain level of status, I think.

Cos there is the traditional view, the medieval view,

that leprosy was, somehow, a sinful disease,

but this doesn't appear to be the case.

It's a very complex issue, I think,

where we have this, perhaps, belief today

that leprosy sufferers were sinful, were outcasts.

This has only recently been challenged

by certain revisionist historians

and, also, our work at St Mary Magdalen, in Winchester.

So it's really important, then,

because it's showing these people were looked after?

Certainly, and leprosy is a disease that affects people today,

in places such as India and Brazil, among many other countries.

There's only about a quarter of a million

new cases of leprosy identified every year.

And leprosy is still stigmatised in these countries,

so part of what we're doing is really challenging this stigma.

There are many "dark ages" in archaeology,

periods when we're trying to piece together the story

from fragmentary evidence

and, because of the nature of that evidence,

we often find ourselves focusing on adults.

Children are conspicuous by their absence.

But, now, a unique find from the English-Welsh border

provides us with a precious connection with a bronze age child.

Every year, some archaeological finds are turned up by amateurs

armed with metal detectors.

On November 9th 2013, in a pit near the Forest of Dean,

two metal detectorists, Lee Todd and Steve Moodie,

joyfully unearthed a group of bronze age bracelets.

The bracelets were then sent to the headquarters

of the Portable Antiquities Scheme,

at the British Museum, for investigation.

This year, Dr Neil Wilkins

and his team are trying to solve the mystery of this hoard.

The first set are two bracelets,

wrapped inside one another, or "nested",

as we would say.

These have been crumpled, probably after they've been deposited,

but one side is still beautifully intact

and they've been very carefully decorated.

The second set is even fresher,

Still has its plug of soil, within the centre,

but there's nothing inside the soil. We've done an X-ray to make sure.

This, again, is two bracelets

that have been wrapped inside one another.

Both bracelets have been cut, or trimmed, on one side

to remove the terminal, so they couldn't be used again.

And we can see that on the outermost bracelet here.

The goldsmith, or worker, who produced these bracelets

was working as part of a long tradition of gold production

that stretched back several hundred years

before these bracelets were deposited.

But this hoard contains something exceptionally rare.

The third set of bracelets, which are by far the most spectacular,

but what's absolutely fantastic and unique about this set

is just how small they are.

You can really see it, against my hand,

that these could not have been worn by an adult. This little offering,

a little bundle of joy, if you like,

seems to belong to a very small individual.

These must have been worn, if they were worn at all,

by a small child, or an infant.

There's very little evidence of what it was like

to be a child 3,000 years ago.

And Neil believes that all the evidence here

points to these bracelets belonging to a very important youngster.

We see so little of what it's like to be a child

in the bronze age and how society's even structured.

We see very few houses and everyday life.

But the fact that a child or an infant was able to wear these

gold ornaments does suggest that they inherited their status,

that it was passed from parent and adult to children,

rather than something that they earned

in the course of life and that tells us quite a lot

about how society may have been structured

and how status may have been acquired.

This child's bracelets, small as they are,

help us to understand the bigger picture

about society 3,000 years ago.

And, back in Dorchester, there some are matching clues.

A precious hoard, found near Chesil Beach, in 2010,

in the grave of a teenage girl.

In the end of the iron age, particularly in Dorset,

it was common to bury

some of your very finest things

that you wanted to take with you to the next world,

as part of your burial.

So we've got these very wonderful beads.

-Wow. What are they made of?

-They're made of glass and they're of types

that have not been seen in Britain before, from this period,

-cos they're thought to have come from North Africa.

-Wow.

So the trade links and the connections are really mind-blowing

in terms of where these people were trading with and connecting with.

-And what's this? Is this a bracelet or an armlet?

-It is a...

I think of it as like a bangle.

Reminds me of the cheap bangles kids had, when I was a teenager.

-Probably not cheap in the iron age, though.

-Definitely not cheap

in the iron age. She's also got her tweezers,

which are very, very fragile.

And this, sort of, old-style brooch.

So some really interesting things.

Probably her finest pieces of jewellery.

So what's this here, it looks very intricately decorated?

Well, this is, I think, the most wonderful thing.

This is a bronze mirror, buried across her heart,

so a precious object to her.

-That's the back of it we're looking at?

-That's the back of it.

The other side, if I just flip over, you can see is smooth,

it's obviously very corroded now and a bi conserved,

but would have been polished bright, to take the reflection.

So anyone owing a mirror like this, would they have been seen

to have special status, or something like that?

I think, as a young girl, she was probably

from an extremely high-status family,

but the Romans thought that mirrors had magical powers.

They used to cover them, because they thought

if you saw the reflection without meaning to, it would be harmful, so

the self-image is very important in these times.

It's so amazing that we can get a glimpse

into a teenager's life, from the iron age.

I think so. I like the fact that it's not really that different

from how a teenage girl might be today, with tweezers and

bangles and beads and mirrors and, you know,

these are still important things in a teenage girl's life

and they were in the iron age, as well, quite clearly.

These iron age trinkets,

possibly belonging to a chieftain's daughter,

remind us of a Britain before the Romans arrived,

back where we began this programme.

But this year's digs have thrown up one last twist

in the complex tale of the West of Britain.

For the Romans, the Far West was "frontier country".

And, in the past, we believed that they got no further than Exeter.

But, a dig at Ipplepen, in Devon, is literally pushing

the boundaries of Roman Britain in the West.

I visited this site three years ago,

when it was just a tiny collection of graves and a Roman road.

Now it's turning into something much more intriguing.

It looks like it's an adult female.

You can see it's got quite a high, straight forehead,

which is a feature on females and quite small arches.

You can feel, on yourself here,

you've got quite low ridges, supraorbital ridge.

So I think it's an adult female.

Got half of the mandible here, which is this part,

we've got this side and all of her teeth

and you can see they're very worn.

So all the enamel has actually come off

and we've got the dentine exposed.

The team finds no evidence of the cause of death

in this skeleton, but this woman was probably

about 30-years-old when she died.

After some careful excavation, the first Ipplepen resident

is off to the University of Exeter for radio carbon dating.

'So it's the end of day eight'

and, kind of, quite an emotional moment,

lifting the first skull of the site.

And, always, you've got to remember, you've got to be really respectful,

that these people were real human beings

and it's just quite amazing to think that they lived here, on this site,

2,000 years ago and how different the world must have been then.

By day 12, the team have uncovered another nine burials

and over 2,000 small finds,

all adding evidence to their theory that this was a Roman settlement.

Although, some of the objects are a bit of a mystery.

I've got quite an interesting find here.

Not sure exactly what it is,

but I've got a feeling that it might be a cosmetic case,

with make-up inside.

We immediately wrapped it in bandages

and packaged it up to be conserved and looked at,

so we'll know more, at a later date, exactly, precisely, what it is.

But what's, perhaps, the team's biggest clue

to a Roman presence is the position of the graves.

Even though it's partially cut in to the edge of the road,

-it is still respecting, generally, the line of the road.

-Yeah.

It's a roadside burial.

It's deliberately placed at the side of the road.

As burials were forbidden in Roman cities,

the dead were buried on the outskirts, often along the roadside,

just as the team is finding here.

So it's day 18 on our excavations at Ipplepen.

We've now got a total of 16 skeletons.

So it's quite clear that what we're dealing with here

is a Romano-British Cemetery, which is very exciting.

It's amazing to see the way this site is developing,

because when I visited, and we stood on that hill in Ipplepen,

all there was, was a road and a couple of roadside burials

and, now, you've got a whole cemetery,

but what about the road itself?

Where does it go?

Don't know yet.

I suspect probably from Exeter and out towards south Devon.

But it's just really fascinating. We really didn't expect to find

such a well-preserved Roman road, so far west of Exeter.

We're still only scratching the surface

but this year's excavations have been a real revelation.

Here's just an example of the absolutely lovely stuff that we had.

This is what was being excavated in the VT.

And is it a powder compact?

-SHE SIGHS

-We don't know.

We still don't know? Come on.

This is a real mystery artefact, actually.

Experts have looked at it, at the British Museum,

and there's the possibility that it might be a lead weight

that's been set into a case,

-into a copper alloy case.

-How strange!

But I'm not sure why you would do that.

Unless, perhaps, it was a weight

that maybe belonged to your grandfather

and it was a kind of keepsake, or something.

So the jury's still out on this mystery artefact.

We had hoped that it would be a ladies compact,

because its really nice to see the female side of Roman Britain.

Yeah. And a beautiful brooch.

A beautiful brooch.

And, you can see here, it's got amazing enamel

set into the cells there

and it's even intact, with its catch plating,

its pin and its spring. I mean, it's such a lovely example,

which dates from probably 75 to 175 AD.

-And is that a tiny bead there?

-Yeah.

We've got beads, we've got coins, we've got hair pins,

we got mystery objects.

And, Danni, you came in,

to our studio here, in Dorchester Museum...

Incredibly exciting.

You told us you've got a radio carbon date.

Yes, we took the latest burial, which is dug into the roadside ditch

of the Roman road, so it's the latest one we've excavated so far,

and the radio carbon results have come back as 7th to 8th century.

-Really?

-Yeah!

-So it's a long-running cemetery, then?

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. It's just absolutely stunning.

So we're not just dealing with 1st century Roman stuff

going through to the 4th century Romano-British,

it's carrying on well into the post-Roman period

and this is so important for Devon and Cornwall.

That is fascinating.

And just remember that you heard it here first.

We are rewriting the history of the Romans

and the Dark Ages in the south west, here on Digging for Britain.

From the Saxon warrior's magnificent sword

to the prized possession of a Bronze Age child,

the West has provided us with a richly-woven tapestry

of our past.

What were your favourites?

I think it's two grave goods that stood out for me.

The first was that Roman bowl, which had been buried after a time

when we think the Romans had left and looked after for 60, 70 years

and, then, placed in the grave.

And, also, the pilgrim's shell, travelled all the way to Spain,

all the way back again and ended up here, buried in a hospital.

And what were the highlights for you, Alice?

Well, I'm really intrigued by the story of what happened, exactly,

when the Romans arrived here, in the West.

Because, on the one hand, we have that slaughter at Maiden Castle,

incontrovertible evidence of extreme violence,

and, then, on the other hand, a much calmer transition

at Miles Russell's site, the Durotriges Big Dig site,

so that's fascinating.

Well, it's been a marvellous year for our archaeologists,

here in the west. Good luck to them for next year.

But for tonight, it's goodnight from him.

And it's goodnight from her.