North Digging for Britain

Hello and welcome to Digging For Britain, the programme which

brings you this year's most outstanding new archaeology.

Once again, over the last year, archaeologists were busy

unearthing our history in hundreds of digs across Britain.

They've gone to extraordinary lengths to

uncover long-lost treasures,

retelling our story in a way that only archaeology can.

And our archaeologists have been out filming themselves to make

sure that we were there for every moment of discovery.

Go on! Fantastic.

It's a tooth.

And they'll be joining us back here at The National Museum of Scotland

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

In this series we'll be touring Britain

and tonight we're in the North.

We discover one of the biggest and best preserved

Roman forts in Britain.

And we catch the very moment when a Viking boat burial is unearthed...

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

And see how rescue archaeologists are fighting

the elements to save a rare Iron Age site.

Over a million and a half people visit The National Museum of

Scotland every year.

They come to see some of the 20,000 artefacts that illustrate

key moments in our history.

From the Penicuik Jewels kept safe by a lowly servant after

Queen Mary's execution in 1587.

To Bonnie Prince Charlie's picnic set that he brought into combat

with the English at the Battle of Culloden.

Our first story takes us to Orkney

and to one of the northernmost digs in Britain.

I've had the privilege of visiting Orkney on numerous occasions

and I've seen some truly astonishing archaeology there.

Back in 2010, I saw the Westray Wifey, which is

the earliest depiction of a human from the British Neolithic.

In 2011, I was lucky enough to see

an intact Neolithic tomb being opened.

But in recent years, the most astonishing discovery has been

at the Ness of Brodgar which is quickly

becoming the most important Neolithic site in Britain.

Sitting right in the heart of the Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site

is the Ness of Brodgar.

Along with nearby Skara Brae and Maeshowe,

it now belongs amongst the most famous prehistoric sites in Britain.

Our ancestors settled to farm,

trade and thrive on this land over 5,000 years ago,

and because they built in stone

their traces are still visible all over the island.

At Skara Brae, we find elaborate stone houses.

And at Maeshowe sits a huge chambered tomb for the dead.

But the Ness of Brodgar is becoming another vital piece

in this Neolithic puzzle.

It's offering unique insights into how our ancestors lived.

The team filmed themselves in this, their eighth season,

uncovering clues to the world of our ancestors 5,000 years ago.

Some of the finds are quite prosaic.

They look like paving or fallen roof slabs. Bang, bang, bang.

And I was able to see a really pretty orange sandstone artefact.

And some artefacts tell of a confident trading people who

roamed the nearby seas.

The person who made this and the people who used it

and the people who saw it at the Ness of Brodgar

back in the Neolithic would have recognised an object which

invited parallels with Shetland, in other words, this is

an object being made by somebody and used by somebody down here,

who was aware of traditions of making tools that stretched up

through the Northern Isles and up to the Shetland archipelago.

It's clear that the Ness of Brodgar is important to people in Orkney

but exactly how it was used remains a mystery.

But some of the artefacts are pointing to something which could

be interpreted as ritualistic, something sacred.

What we're dealing with here is a fragment of a very classic

later Neolithic artefact called a mace head.

Like many mace heads at the Ness,

we tend to find them in fragmentary conditions, they're broken.

A mace head is part of a blunt Stone Age weapon or tool.

Now, some of these might have broken during use

but archaeologists believe that others

could have been ceremonially decommissioned.

We're getting deposits of objects like these at the Ness,

which suggests that perhaps sometimes we might be dealing

with a more deliberate act where sometimes an object, because

of its biography, because of who it was associated with in life, perhaps

when that person died, that object had to be taken out of commission,

deliberately broken in the way that people might have broken

swords at the end of a commission or taking weapons out of use.

These broken mace heads are adding

to a series of finds curated at The National Museum of Scotland.

So what have we got here?

Well, we have a selection of carved stone objects

all from Skara Brae which is a settlement

not too far away from the Ness of Brodgar.

And there's been an awful lot of speculation as to what these things

were, what they were for.

I think people agree that they were certainly symbols of power.

They're also, they could have been used as weapons,

because you could deal somebody at pretty painful blow

with one of these, or you could put cord around them

and swing them around and, indeed, there's at least one skull that's

got a depressed blunt fracture,

so they could well have been used.

With something like this, you could keep it in your fist

and deal somebody a horrible blow with a spiky point.

One of the things I really love about pre-history is finding

objects like this which are so intriguing and so enigmatic

and I don't think we'll ever really know what

they were used for but we can still really appreciate the art

and the skill that went into making them.

Oh, exactly, and clearly they would have selected beautiful,

aesthetically pleasing stones, probably cobbles from the beach,

and they wouldn't have had metal tools, obviously,

so they would've used stone tools, sand, water, a lot of elbow grease

and many, many hours of work went into making something like this.

These objects and the smashed pieces of stone maces

from the Ness of Brodgar suggest that the Ness may have been

a ritual site, and everyday the team find more evidence.

Here we've got quite a nice incised stone.

You can see there's various lines crisscrossing each other

here forming kind of chevrons, zigzags, patterns here.

This is a kind of piece of Neolithic artwork that's been

built into the main structure of the building.

We're finding these sort of decorated stones

built into all the walls internally and externally across the site.

The archaeologists believe that this prehistoric artwork

is further evidence that this was a ritual complex.

And now Nick Card and his team

believe that they have found the spiritual centre -

a Neolithic temple.

Here we're standing next to Structure Ten,

the so-called Neolithic Cathedral.

It's over, probably, 25 metres long, 20 metres wide almost.

Everything about it would just scream ritual, religion.

You still get a sense of what this building must have

been like in its heyday.

Truly amazing.

This Neolithic Cathedral has been robbed of its stone over

thousands of years, making one of this year's discovery's even

more remarkable -

the entrance to it, marked by the threshold stone.

What we're standing on here is the original entrance.

It's about 1.8 metres wide and almost a metre across.

We'd always been a bit weary about where the entrance was

and because of the robbing this was just not clear at all,

as we knew that it had to be facing towards Maeshowe.

This direct connection to the chambered tomb of Maeshowe

and the growing acceptance that Orkney's Neolithic monuments could

be linked makes the final discovery inside the temple astounding.

A standing stone at the centre of this ritual complex.

The archaeologists wonder, was this altar of central importance

in Neolithic Orkney?

Just half a mile away you have Maeshowe, a few hundred metres away,

Stones of Stenness, and behind us in the skyline,

the Ring of Brodgar.

They all seem to be clustering around the Ness

and I think 5,000 years ago, it maybe wasn't the great stone

circles of the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness

which today kind of dominate our thinking of this landscape,

it really is, it's Ness of Brodgar, 5,000 years ago that maybe held

that very central position and all these other monuments were

maybe just peripheral to what was happening here.

This important site really is shaping the archaeological world.

We always are kind of a bit London-centric,

southern British-centric,

with some of the great monuments like Stonehenge in Wessex area,

but this with the rest of Orkney is really turning the map on its head.

The scale of it, the architecture, it's an archaeologist's dream site.

A 5,000-year-old temple at the heart of a sacred landscape

built out of stone over hundreds of years

and what is most amazing of all is that the digging

suggests that this entire complex was abandoned almost overnight.

So what happens at the end at the Ness of Brodgar?

Well, certainly it seems as though this huge Structure Ten was

deliberately decommissioned and they marked the occasion by having

this ginormous feast with hundreds of cattle,

and of course we'll never know for sure

but we can say it probably wasn't climate change.

So there wasn't a tsunami, there wasn't a catastrophe,

they weren't invaded by other people.

I suspect that they had engaged in this sort of spiral

of increasing investment of effort so that by the time you've

built Structure Ten and you've built the Ring of Brodgar, you've involved

probably most of the population of Orkney and how then do you top it?

So it may well have been a kind of social boom and bust.

You know, they couldn't trump it,

so they realised that the number was up.

But also it's got a much more complicated story because it

seems as though people were coming from the Stonehenge area,

almost in a pilgrimage kind of way,

because you get houses at Durrington Walls near Stonehenge

that look like the houses at Skara Brae.

It does seem like a golden age for Orkney doesn't it?

Oh, absolutely, yes.

5,000 years ago, our ancestors abandoned a cathedral

erected here in stone and this year's archaeology is also telling

another story of the shifting power of the gods along the largest

frontier ever built on our shores.

One of the most obvious footprints of the Romans in Britain is,

of course, Hadrian's Wall.

Stretching from coast to coast, this 75-mile-long wall divided

the wilds of the north from the Romanised south.

And dotted along the wall were military garrisons

where Roman soldiers lived, trained and worshipped.

Now, recent excavations are changing the way

we look at religion along the wall.

In 2011, I visited the very start of a dig at the Roman

site of Binchester in County Durham.

The barracks sprung up in the first century AD

when the Roman army was asserting its power in north-east England.

The first trenches yielded just animal bone and other refuse

as the team searched for clues into the everyday lives

of Roman legionaries.

Three years on, one of the biggest

and best preserved Roman barracks in Britain has emerged,

offering insights into all aspects of Roman occupation.

I'm standing right in the trench of a Roman communal toilet.

Going to the toilet was a social activity in the Roman period.

There would have been a series of perhaps, one, two,

three, or even four toilet seats next to each other.

There was a big conduit coming through and when it rained,

which it does a lot up here in County Durham,

that water would have flushed everything through

and kept our latrine block cleansed and Roman Binchester,

if not sweet-smelling, would have made it a little less unsavoury.

Near the Roman toilets,

David and his team dug down seven feet

to reveal another incredible discovery -

a Roman bathhouse with plaster still clinging to its walls.

The end of our fifth week on site and in the last week or so

we have finished clearing out the interior of what you can see

is an exceptionally well-preserved Roman bathhouse.

Behind me here you can see we have the benches and this shows us

it's probably a Roman changing room.

Then David and his team make an important discovery,

one that explains the extraordinary preservation of the bathhouse.

This is the middle of our final week, week seven at Roman Binchester.

Beside me is a deep pit.

It goes down about seven or eight courses

and you've got a foundation at the bottom.

That's much, much deeper than we were expecting it to go.

We always thought the bathhouse survived really well

because it was partly terraced into the hillside

and then it got filled in with lots of Roman rubbish.

What's increasingly clear is the building was

constructed as a free-standing building

and then the street levels outside rose up around it and then

with the rubbish rising up on the inside, the entire thing became

embedded in Roman archaeology, either side of the walls.

The whole structure was filled right up to roof height with massive

quantities of Roman rubbish

which basically stopped it falling down.

And buried within this rubbish are precious objects that today

hold clues for us about religion and worship on these walls.

This is a silver ring with a tiny gemstone on it

and on that gemstone is a carved early Christian symbol and this

is found in the force itself,

so this has came from one of our barracks.

Right, so what have we got on there?

-It's absolutely tiny.

-It's absolutely tiny.

You've got an anchor and suspended from it are a pair of fish.

In the third and fourth century,

which is when this probably dates from,

the cross wasn't yet used as the symbol of Christianity

so, instead, it was other symbols such as this one.

That's how we know it belongs to the early Christian faith.

So what have we got here, what's this?

This is the carved head of probably a Roman God which

we found mixed up with all the rubbish in the bathhouse.

OK, so how old is that, then?

This is probably second or third century AD and it's beautiful

because it's got the nice carved hair, kind of classical-style hair,

but the eyes are very kind of Celtic looking.

The almond shape kind of reminds me of the kind of art which

the local indigenous Britons were making.

We've got the early Roman head there, the late Roman rings,

so we're spanning, what, three or four centuries

of religion in this site.

Yeah, there's a huge amount.

We've also found altars,

we've found all sorts of other religious objects and it would

have permeated their day-to-day existence. So the head, the altars,

they came from a bathhouse, they don't come from a temple,

but everywhere the Romans were they are expressing their beliefs.

And we also, there's a transition, isn't there, to Christianity?

I mean, the head is, can we call it pagan?

And then we've got the Christian symbology on the ring.

Absolutely, Christianity becomes a legal

religion in the Roman Empire in the fourth century.

This ring is probably some of the earliest evidence

we have for Christianity. And it's nice,

it shows that Binchester had a range of different beliefs

and that people were probably worshipping pagan gods at the

same time others were celebrating their Christian belief.

Almost 100 miles along the wall,

a team in Maryport has made

another important discovery

about shifting religious beliefs

on the Roman's great frontier.

So here we are at Maryport on the Cumbrian coast

and we're about to see the unearthing of a monument that

was originally carved in the second century when Maryport was

part of the coastal defences link to Hadrian's wall.

And you can see there some of my colleagues in action.

That's the excellent Tony Willmott,

the site director, one of Britain's...

That's lovely. What is that? Is that an altar?

That is indeed an altar.

It takes your breath away.

We're going to get this altar out now, see if it's complete.

I'm going to first of all get these big stones out then John's

going to dive in and clean it up, so, we'll get cracking.

And how close was this site to the wall itself?

Well, Maryport is actually part of the Cumbrian coastal complex,

so Hadrian actually extends the line of turrets

and towers along the Cumbrian coast from Hadrian's wall.

So we're quite a way south of the actual wall.

-Is it complete?

-Yes, it is.

-Ooh! Oh, gee!

And there you can see the text 'IOM' at the top.

That's something to do with Jupiter, I know that.

It is indeed, it's 'Jupiter The Best And The Greatest' -

'Jupiter Optimus Maximus.'

And below that we can actually see who dedicated it.

'PRAEF - prefect, commanding officer - VSLM'

Set it up to fulfil a vow.

That tells us the name, not only of the unit,

but of the man, a guy called Attius Tutor.

And we've actually got three other dedications

by this guy from Maryport.

Heave!

This is the bit where the guys risk a hernia.

It's a big thing.

CLAPPING AND CHEERING

Now all we got to do is get it to the car!

THEY LAUGH

You're on your own!

Worthy of Mr Hutton, isn't it?

What can I say? Shattered.

HE LAUGHS

Yes.

25 years ago when I started digging at Birdoswald,

I said if anyone found an inscription

there was malt whisky in it. John?

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

That's a fantastic find and the inscription just looks so crisp.

It does look crisp, doesn't it?

And that's Cumbrian red sandstone for you.

In fact, when we look at it very closely, you can see it has

experienced some weathering.

How many altars did you find there?

We're actually nudging the total of known alter fragments from that site

up to about 22-23 now.

Right. So why are they buried in the ground, then?

For a long time the assumption was that as these altars appeared

so crisp and as there were

so many that were obviously dedicated in a very short

space of time in the second century,

often by the same named individual,

well, the assumption was that each time a new altar was put up,

the one that had been dedicated the year before was buried on the spot.

So it was almost like they were being ritually buried

to make room for the next one.

That was the explanation

but, in fact, the Romans don't do things like that,

we know now they don't do things like that.

They were being buried much later.

They are dug to support a massive timber structure on the site.

So they were being used as foundations?

-They were being used for foundations, yes.

-So this is fascinating.

These Roman altars then which obviously had huge ritual

significance to the people that made them and set them up, are just being

used as foundation stones,

-as objects of as no ritual significance, really.

-They are.

Not any more, and Jupiter is no longer the best and the greatest.

There's a new landscape at Maryport.

From abandoned Roman temples telling of a death of an empire,

we travel 160 miles south to find ancestors living in Britain

just after the end of the Ice Age.

One of my favourite prehistoric sites has to be Star Carr

in East Yorkshire.

We covered this site on a previous series of Digging For Britain

where I talked to Nicky Milner about the astonishing discoveries that she

and her team were making.

Now this year, she's been excavating

at a nearby site

called Flixton Island

and this one goes back even earlier.

Back beyond 11,000 years ago.

Day seven and we're really excited because we're right on the edge

of what would have been the lake

and we've just started finding some animal bone.

Well, we've come down to the earliest peat

and we've come across what looks to be horse bones.

So we've got a horse pelvis, half of the pelvis,

and a horse scapula as well, which is really fantastic to see

the preservation of it, considering how old it is.

This site dates back almost to the Ice Age.

Organic finds from this era are practically unheard of

but Flixton is rewriting the record.

11,000 years ago this land was an island,

used by Stone Age hunter-gatherers.

When the water that surrounded the island drained, the lake bed

turned to peat, preserving vital clues to this lost world.

It's day 20 at Flixton Island and I'm sitting in front of something

very, very exciting indeed.

These are actually hoof prints which have been

made in the mud by animals over 11,000 years ago.

The horses were probably walking along the edge of the lake

in muddy conditions.

Soon afterwards, sand and gravel gently washed over the print,

preserving them in time.

These are quite small but we know that they are horse hoof prints

because we've actually found horse hooves in the trench

and this is half of a horse hoof and if I just put

that in there you can see that it actually fits beautifully.

And, Nicky, here are some of these horse bones from Flixton Island.

-They're incredibly well-preserved aren't they?

-They are.

And we've got a distal phalanx here, the very end of a horse's leg,

so that's the bone that sits just underneath the hoof,

as we saw in the film.

Yes, and that fits nicely into the hoof prints on site.

They're actually quite small horses, aren't they?

I mean, I'm looking at these bones and they are from adult horses,

the ends of the bones are fused to the shaft

so these aren't juveniles, they're adults, but they're small adults.

They do seem to be very small and probably more like pony size.

We've got this jaw as well.

This is quite small, too, and you can see the teeth in the end here

and then we've also got a piece of a pelvis, which

we know is a pelvis because this is the bit where the leg bone fits in.

Yep, that's the hip socket.

So these are wild horses on Flixton Island?

That's right, yes, and they become extinct quite soon after the

end of this site.

And what's really incredible is that these are the

last wild horses that we think we've got in Britain.

After that they die out.

We don't have any Mesolithic sites with horses on them.

And how rare is this site?

It's incredibly rare,

we only have about 30 in the whole country, which is a really

small number if you compare with other sites of different periods

and most of these sites tend to have lots of flint on them.

There's only one other site which actually has any bone on it at all

and so bone from this period is incredibly rare

and it just gives us more of an insight into the environment

and what people are doing at this time.

In fact, it's really, really unique for the whole of Europe.

It's a very, very important site.

As the month-long dig nears its end,

clues about human activity also emerge.

The team begin to notice that some of the animal skeletons

have parts missing.

We've got the middle bit of the spine here and it curves

round to the lower bit and then this large bit just here is the sacrum

which is at the bottom of the spine

and that's where the hips articulate at.

But what's really interesting is that up here

these vertebrae would have the ribs attached to them

but they're not there any more and the sacrum

would have the pelvis attached but that's not there either.

The team believe that humans slaughtered this horse

11,000 years ago on Flixton Island.

They must have come over in boats to the island

and killed at least six or seven horses.

And they seem to have just taken away the really meaty parts.

It's likely that they were here for a very, very short period of

time, just enough for this to have happened, because there's no other

evidence of occupation.

There's very little flint or anything like that.

What I love about being an archaeologist is that you

peel back the layers of soil to reveal a past landscape that

hasn't been seen for thousands of years.

This is amazing for us because it's a period of time which

we know very little about and it gives us a real snapshot

into how people were living just after the end of the last Ice Age.

So we do have archaeological artefacts as well from the island.

We do. This is a long blade and we only have a few of these,

but this is a typical tool of that period.

And what would it have been used for?

Well, we actually know from microscopic analysis exactly

what this particular blade was used for.

It was, first of all, this point was used for piercing through the skin

and cutting through skin.

This side was used for butchery of meat

and then right at this bottom end there's polish which shows

that perhaps someone was holding the blade using a very soft cloth.

So it's definitely a blade for butchery rather than

a projectile point for killing an animal?

Yes, definitely, we have proof it's for butchery.

Now can you be absolutely sure that the humans are implicated in

the death of these horses?

Because couldn't these horses have died naturally and this could

have just been an item that was dropped

by someone visiting the island?

Well, it's very rare, but we do have a few pieces of bone which do

have butchery evidence on them.

They've got cut marks, so we are sure

that they were actually killed by humans.

So humans killing these wild horses towards the end of the Ice Age,

do you actually think that humans were instrumental in the local

extinction of the horses?

Well, there are two possibilities. Certainly we've got evidence

here that people are butchering them and butchering large numbers,

but there's also the question of the change in environment.

The climate's changing at this time, it goes from after the end

of the Ice Age, a very open tundra-like landscape

and then it begins to get very wooded very quickly,

just within a matter of a couple of hundred years and the horses tend to

prefer the more open environments.

So perhaps it was environmental change,

perhaps it was humans killing them, perhaps it was a bit of both.

These tiny hoof prints, frozen in time, give us an amazing snapshot

of the world of our hunter-gatherer forbears as the Ice Age ended.

But such amazing archaeological discoveries are often under

threat from erosion.

Hundreds of ancient monuments are lost before they are ever

studied or even known about.

But in Scotland there's a team working to fight the tide

and record as much information as they can before it's too late.

The team is the award-winning SCAPE Trust and they've made

a name for themselves by getting to sites in the nick of time.

On Sanday in Orkney sits a precarious Bronze Age site

uncovered by a storm back in 2005.

It's now in danger of being swallowed by the sea unless

it can be rescued in time.

Tom Dawson has a plan to save it.

The site, unfortunately, is going to be lost to the sea at some point,

we don't know exactly when,

but it could be the next big storm which will take it away.

So by moving the site and reconstructing it, we are

saving something for people to come and look at, so they can share

in the exciting discoveries made by the Sanday Archaeology Group.

The team embarks on a complete excavation,

recording each detail for further research.

During this process, one find takes them by complete surprise -

a Bronze Age well covered by the bank.

And we've just discovered that at the bottom

they have actually cut into the bedrock so the material

you can see there is bedrock and they've made a large hole,

built walls up on the sides but they've just left the back as

bedrock and then placed that lintel spanning the two side walls.

And there is a gap, if I put my hand up between the bedrock

and the wall,

and presumably what happens is the water

would run down the bedrock here and then fill up this chamber.

This structure is an astonishing addition

to the already impressive site,

but being so close to the sea, it has little chance of survival

so the team carefully dismantles it for the move to the Heritage Centre.

We've had great support from the local community in Sanday

who've come out with their JCBs, their tractors and trailers,

and everyone's mucking in and helping us to move

the site from here, several miles to the other side of the island.

The result is that this 3,000-year-old piece of archaeology

has been saved instead of being lost forever.

It's been an absolutely fantastic effort and after just

a couple of weeks, here you can see the site.

We're hoping that people will come here

and learn about the site that has been rescued from the sea.

So that's a lot of work to save one archaeological site.

How many sites do you have like this across Scotland?

Well, there are hundreds of sites which are at risk

and we're working with communities all over the place,

so although the problem is large, by working with these groups

at least we're making a small difference.

SCAPE has also at work in the county of Fyfe, recording artwork

carved into a series of coastal caves during Pictish times.

This is Jonathan's Cave over in East Wemyss

and this is one of six caves that survive.

These are all very typical Pictish carvings.

That was a leaping salmon.

-Not a rocket, then?

-That's not a rocket, no!

And this is a double disk and a trident.

So if you've got Pictish engravings on the wall,

when do those date to, do you know?

Well, they're going to be probably somewhere between the fifth

and the eighth century AD.

And this is actually thought to be a Viking boat and this might be

one of the only representations of a Viking boat in Britain.

So there are a lot of carvings in this cave.

There is the largest collection of carvings

anywhere in the United Kingdom.

Well, in fact, anywhere in the world.

And here what we're doing is we're using are both laser scanners

and photographic techniques to make a 3-D recording both of the caves

and of the carvings themselves.

Right, so there will be a permanent record of these

carvings for all future researchers.

There will be, and this is the most accurate record

that has been made to date.

This is submillimetre accuracy.

That's fantastic.

So are these engravings in this cave actually under threat?

They are, they're under threat from a variety of things.

There's not only people who go in and occasionally write

things on the cave walls.

In the past, somebody set fire

to a car in the caves

which caused a collapse, but also

we have the instability of the rock and also coastal erosion, of course,

which, there is the danger the sea will enter the caves at some point.

So it's really important to create this record.

And I think you've been up in the Outer Hebrides as well, haven't you,

where the sea really is a problem.

It really is, yes. We've been up in North Uist,

over in the Outer Hebrides.

The site had been reported by local people

who had been finding wooden objects

and these have now been dated, thanks to the excavation,

to the Iron Age.

Oh, you're right on the beach here.

And are those little metre square test pits?

This is an unusual way of digging

but we were trying to stop the sea from taking everything away...

SHE GASPS

So the idea was that we could backfill the test pits.

This was a problem, the tide was covering the site twice a day

so we had to work fast.

So you're basically working at low tide

-and then you have to just get out at high tide.

-That's right.

-Bail out.

-We had to bail out.

So every day when we came down, the site would look like this.

Then we'd be bailing the site out and then we could carry on digging.

But what was frustrating is the speed with which the tide

could come up. So you might be in the middle of doing your drawing

and then you'd have to abandon your trench, come back

the next day and it'd have filled up with sand again.

-And then clean up again.

-Clean up again.

Have you finished work there or are you going back?

We're hoping to go back in the future but for the moment...

We were just trying to work out what might be there.

I have to say, I love the SCAPE Project.

You seem to go from strength to strength

and I do follow you year on year.

It's wonderful to see archaeologists working so closely with local

communities and literally saving archaeology from being washed away.

Rescue archaeology like this often turns up

astonishing chance discoveries.

But sometimes it's shear persistence by archaeologists that pays off.

Researchers in Western Scotland were in their eighth year

at Ardnamurchan as they set out to examine

what they thought was a pile of stones in a field.

They discovered something which had never been found before in

mainland Britain -

an intact Viking boat burial and they recorded

the moment of excavation and we're joined by Hannah Cobb who is one of

the directors of the excavation out there on the Ardnamurchan peninsula.

Hannah, talk us through your dig.

Initially we thought it was perhaps a clearance from farming.

The moment we took the turf off it was a boat shape

and we felt nervous.

We didn't want to say to ourselves, "This is a Viking boat burial."

But we excavated it very slowly, carefully.

This is the point where we lifted the axe taking it as carefully

and getting it in there as securely as possible.

But everyone was crowed round and everyone was quite

excited to see, so it was a lovely moment for the team.

'Well done, guys. That deserves a round of applause.'

APPLAUSE

And at that point you knew it was a boat burial

that you were looking at?

Yeah, and as we got down through the layers, we began to find

the artefacts and the fact that it was quite clearly a boat shape.

They're just wonderful, aren't they? Wow! So there's that axe head.

There it is, it's amazing

and it's actually got some of the wood

from the handle that it would have been on still preserved within it.

Just tell us about the sword.

The sword is fantastic, it's actually broken

but it wasn't broken when it was put into the grave.

It's broken subsequently

because of all the things that happen to artefacts

when they're in the soil,

but it's made up of some amazing material.

It's got part of a sheath on it and then on top of that

it's actually got this textile adhered on the outside

of it, which is really amazing.

All the way down there you can see the detail.

Oh, my goodness, could that be the clothing of the Viking himself then?

It certainly could and the way it was laid out

within the burial, it was against the side of the Viking

so probably pressed against either his clothes

or her clothes or the material that was wrapped around them in death.

It was a proper traditional Viking burial, then, inside a boat?

Yes, and unfortunately in this case, the wood from the boat wasn't

particularly preserved but all of the rivets of the boat,

so over 200 rivets from the boat were all preserved.

Did you have any skeletal remains associated with this?

Unfortunately, the preservation of the artefact is amazing and

the preservation of the human remains was very poor

so we just had two teeth

but we've been able to get lots of information from the teeth

because we've been able to do stable isotope analysis of them.

Oh, brilliant, so if you've done isotope analysis,

do you know where this person grew up?

It was somewhere north, further north than here,

potentially Norway.

So potentially an actual Viking?

-Yes, yes, indeed...

-From Scandinavia.

-Yes.

But what was it about this site that made the Vikings choose

to bury their chieftain here?

The team have been working on this peninsula for eight years now

and have identified a pattern of burials spanning five millennia.

First, they excavated a Neolithic chambered cairn,

then they found evidence of a Bronze Age cist.

They believe the Vikings chose to be associated

with these ancient burial sites.

As well as excavating the Viking boat burial, the team are also

investigating the cairn and the Bronze Age cist.

It's day one on the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project

and we're doing an amazing job at deturfing an enormous trench

and who knows what it's going to be.

There's bits coming out that might look a bit curby,

there's bits coming out that look like cairn material,

that's what we're expecting, but when it's from, who knows?

The piled rocks of the Neolithic cairn

are familiar to the archaeologists,

but the Bronze Age cist contains something very surprising.

Crawling into the excavation tent.

What we've got here, essentially,

-we've got a long bone coming up there.

-Wow.

Another bone coming down there

so we think that's... Foot's not really coming up

so it might have just deteriorated.

There's actually a knee up here, we think,

and that mushy stuff that's kind of broken off a bit,

probably the pelvis and the skull fragments are coming up somewhere

in here so it's kind of...

-So foetal, almost?

-Yeah, kind of foetal.

Wow.

Individual crouch burials in stone-lined cists

were common in the Bronze Age.

But after further examination,

the researchers conclude that this cist contains the remains

of at least two people, and this is very rare.

The Viking boat burial, the Bronze Age cist

right next to a Neolithic burial chamber

means people have been bringing their dead to this bay

for over five millennia.

It's incredible to think of that being a cemetery site for that long.

Yeah, it was obviously a really special landscape where people were

burying their dead for a really long period of time.

And I think the fact that the Neolithic tomb was built there and

was obviously very visible within the landscape was something that

then attracted people to come back again and again to the monument.

And just picking up on that Bronze Age cist,

the thing that really intrigued me from the video was that you

found two burials in that cist. That is unusual, isn't it?

It is, it's a very unusual thing.

Traditionally, Bronze Age tombs,

Bronze Age cists would have a single individual

and this wasn't just two people crouched as you would also expect

in a Bronze Age but it was sort of disarticulated human remains,

so bits of bodies mixed up.

Potentially, people were recalling the practices that

had occurred at this Neolithic tomb.

Potentially, this was just the way that they venerated their dead here.

Digs like Ardnamurchan tell us of long spans of ancient time

with changing burial rituals.

But sometimes archaeology and British history collide

to paint a vivid snapshot of a single event.

In the 15th century, the aristocracy, people like Richard III

and his noblemen, threw lavish feasts and banquets complete

with grand entertainment, music, games and lots and lots of drinking.

A dig in North Yorkshire has uncovered a feasting hall

from this period with evidence of revelry on an epic scale.

But they've also discovered how one night

the feasting and laughter came to a very abrupt end.

For the last five years, a team of volunteers has been digging

on the former estate of Sir John Conyers,

a 15th century nobleman.

Every day, the diggers

find new treasures

amongst the rubble.

The site has kept the team busy, logging artefacts

pulled from the ruins of this aristocratic banqueting hall.

You found it. Well done!

It's part of a latch, either from a door

or from a big piece of furniture, like a chest.

This medieval hall was massive,

it could hold upwards of 1,000 people,

and in this hall the powerful and influential met,

the movers and shakers of the day.

It was here that Conyers rubbed shoulders with King Edward IV

and Richard III.

This is a site where the important decisions on political power

in England in the mid-15th century,

the 1460s, the 1470s, are made.

The hall reflected Conyers' high social standing.

And as the team dig further, they find artefacts left over

from the lavish banquets that were thrown here.

Here we go, thank you.

It appears to be part of a serving dish,

either a meat pan or what's known as a dripping pan which was used

to serve sizzling meat dishes at the table.

We've got a bit of food bone. By the size of it, it is a hunted species.

We found a lot of evidence of people eating venison and boar

but sometimes other exotic species.

Being able to afford to eat exotic foods such as crane,

peacock or beaver was certainly a sign of high status.

But it wasn't just the food that was posh.

This is the handle of a one-gallon wine jug.

These would have been on the table to serve a half-pint drinking jug,

usually of red wine,

probably originating in the Bordeaux region of Southern France.

These feasts were integral to maintaining power and influence.

But for the Conyers, their influence would not last.

In 1485, Henry Tudor defeated Richard III, seizing the Crown.

So John Conyers went from being an ally of the king

to being a real threat.

-Erik, what on earth happened to this feasting hall?

-It was attacked.

A force, we believe acting on the orders of the Tudor

government was sat the north-west of the building

and they attacked it with cannon.

This is a piece of a cannonball.

So this is a cannon ball, you can be sure of that?

Oh, we certainly can.

You have a series of striations along the leading edge of it

caused by it being fired and going through the barrel of the gun.

So is that shattered on impact?

It did, it was fired into the building and it shattered,

bits flying everywhere.

There are probably other bits lying in there

that we've not been able to identify.

Probably started the fire that destroyed the building

and the collapse event that succeeded the fire causing

the vast area of rubble that we found.

So what exactly had Conyers done to annoy the Tudors?

He was intimately associated with the previous regime.

He carried the sceptre at Richard III's coronation,

he was made a Knight of the Garter by King Richard III.

He is alleged in 1487 to have been conspiring with

King James III of Scotland to place the Earl of Warwick,

who was in prison in the Tower of London, on the throne

in place of Henry Tudor.

So essentially he was on the wrong side.

He was most definitely on the wrong side.

And what about this pottery, then?

Is this high-status pottery?

It is very high-status pottery.

It was imported from Flanders, from Belgium

and would have been displayed prominently at the high table

and on the buffet that would have adjoined it.

So this little piece of pot, what would that have been part of?

It's a half-pint wine jug.

You can imagine the consequences

of drinking half pints of red wine on a regular basis.

We found evidence in the form of dislodged healthy human front teeth.

And other stranger things like severed digits from statues.

We have three severed fingers from statues.

-So these feasts could be quite rowdy affairs, then?

-Oh, yes.

Beautiful pottery, though.

It is, it's a type of pottery called lusterware that was very

popular in the mid to late 15th century.

And it's still lustrous as well.

-I like that.

-It is indeed, yes.

So we've got this family led by Conyers himself who were very

influential, very wealthy,

and we're seeing a snapshot, really, of them

presumably at the height of that wealth and influence.

What happens after this?

The family's influence and power declines after 1513.

It just disappears by 1518. They've declined into obscurity.

Conyers' downfall is documented by history

and the destruction of his hall by archaeology.

But what happens when an entire population disappears without trace?

Mysterious tribes ruled Dark Age Scotland.

The Romans called them the Picti, or painted ones.

But the Picts themselves left no written records and at the end

of the first millennium AD, they seem to vanish almost overnight.

So we actually know very little about them

which means every dig, every find, is all the more important, providing

us with clues that we can piece together

to tell us who the Picts really were.

In the small Scottish village of Rhynie, Pictish fever has

gripped the locals as archaeologist Gordon Noble descends

with his team, hoping to uncover evidence of a Pictish royal site.

And the place name, as well, seems to derive from 'Rhy' for king

and perhaps means something like 'a very royal place'

or 'place of a very powerful king'.

He's convinced that this is a royal site because since the 19th century,

Pictish symbol stones have been discovered in the village.

The most iconic of which is the Rhynie Man found in 1978.

It's day one at Rhynie, so we're almost the end of the day.

We're just starting to uncover our first test pits,

the layers inside those test pits,

and starting to find elements of the earlier village here.

The Picts were a tribe of people living in the late Iron Age

and early medieval periods,

before they apparently mysteriously vanished.

They were known to be fearsome warriors

and even defeated the Romans in the far north.

But today, they are proving illusive to Gordon and his team.

The previous three days we've been working in the village square

which is over in this direction here.

We've really only found 19th-century material in the square so far

so we've moved this way southwards to the south edge of the village

to try and look at areas where

two of the symbol stones from Rhynie came from.

We're doing a slightly larger test pit than we done before.

Gordon has been leading digs at Rhynie for the last three years

and as the project expands he's carving up more and more

of the village as they hunt for the enigmatic Picts.

He's confident all this work will eventually pay off,

because in 2012 the team found something spectacular,

so small, they nearly missed it.

And so what's this here? It looks like a little axe.

This is one of the really fascinating aspects of the site

is that we're starting to find objects

represented on the Pictish stones.

We have this really delicate little iron object here which is

an axe pin or pendant, very much like the axe the Rhynie Man carries.

And you can see here incredible metalworking skills

because at this period you can't cast iron, you have to forge it.

So incredible skill and patience needed to require...

To make this object here.

So ironworking was really important to the society, then.

Yes, metalworking is key to this period, really.

It's the emergence of the first kingdoms in northern Britain

in this period

and metalworking really underpins that more hierarchical

organisation of society.

So it's a non-monetary economy but these objects almost acting as

money, underlining that relationship between the king and his followers.

Well, the king and his followers are still nowhere to be found

in this year's dig as Gordon closes in on the very spot

where the first symbol stones were found back in the 1830s.

This is the nearest spot that we can identify where the symbol

stones where marked on the first edition map.

And when they were found, this appears to have been open fields

but, obviously, now we're in the back garden of a house

on my right-hand side here.

So we've opened a trench to see if we can identify any features.

Finally, in the last moments of the dig

a strange ruin emerges.

But is it Pictish?

It looks like a sub-rectangular building of some description.

Within the structure here we've got a post hole or a pit

in the centre there

and this is something we'll hopefully explore in future years.

What is the extent of this structure? What date is it?

Is it related to the Pictish activities in this landscape

or is it something much later?

In the end, this season at Rhynie has added little

to our meagre Pictish records,

but on another nearby dig this year,

Gordon unearthed one of the richest hoards of Pictish treasure

ever found, revealing some of the secrets

of their metalworkers' craft.

Now spread out before me is this astonishing Pictish hoard,

most of it freshly out of the ground.

First of all, how did you find this hoard?

The site itself was where two stone circles were located

and in the 1830s the landowners decided to improve the field.

So they removed the stone circles, blew up some of the standing stones

and in the process of clearing that site away

they found fragments of silver. But we went back to the site really

just to try and see if we could find out more

about the context of this find.

And we didn't really expect to find any more silver,

but within a few days we began to uncover

some of these amazing artefacts.

-You actually found more of the hoard.

-Yeah.

So what have we got here, these are Roman coins, are they?

Some of the earliest things that we were finding were these late

Roman coins here.

So these had been minted in the last couple of decades

of the fourth century.

And they are then circulating around Britain in the fifth century.

And they look as though the edges have been clipped off.

Yeah, they clipped the edges off because the Picts are recycling

the silver that's left behind after the Romans leave.

And eventually the coins become tiny as they clip all of the edges off

and at this point they are probably just worth their bullion in weight.

They're moving out of a coin-using economy

and into bullion based economy.

So the material, the silver, is what becomes important.

It tells us that they are appropriating material

from Roman Britain, reusing it,

making it into new objects of their own

and they give us the sort of starting point for this accumulation

of material coming together.

So we can date it roughly between 450 and, say, 600.

So who were the Picts, then?

Because, obviously, they were here in the north

before the Romans arrived.

Presumably they were still here during the Roman period,

and then there seems to be some kind of resurgence after the Romans go.

Well, they were first mentioned in late Roman sources as these

troublesome tribal groupings

and after the Romans withdrawal from Britain, they seem

to merge as the most powerful kingdoms in northern Britain.

And they're best known for these mysterious symbols.

The types of symbols that are on the plaque there

have been carved into stone monuments all over northern and

eastern Scotland and this is what we really associate with the Picts.

Pictish finery revealing the secrets of vanished master

metalworkers...

Hoof prints that led us to Ice Age butchers...

And temples to Roman gods fallen from grace.

Matt, we've seen a fantastic range of archaeology

from the north of Britain.

What really stood out for you?

The Ness of Brodgar,

that huge Neolithic ritual building. Absolutely incredible.

That's wonderful. I loved the Pictish hoard.

I mean the beautiful artwork, absolutely stunning,

but also the Viking boat burial from the Ardnamurchan peninsula

and that fantastic sword.

Really, really, stunning stuff.

Well, it has been a fantastic year, so good luck to all

our archaeologists in the north as they continue digging for Britain.

It's good night from him.

And it's good night from her.