West Digging for Britain

Britain has an epic history,

but within it, there's a wealth of untold secrets still to uncover.

It's a really key find. Find of the week.

So, every year, hundreds of archaeologists set out

hunting for clues to solve the mystery

of who we are and where we've come from.

We've just found this amazing pendant.

Over the past year, their discoveries have been more exciting than ever.

This series will explore the best of them...

-I've just found a coin.

-Oh, marvellous.

..brought to you from the field in a very special way.

Each excavation has been filmed for us

as it happened by the archaeologists themselves.

It looks absolutely fantastic.

He said he had a bad day, but he never brought these back.

Their dig diaries mean that we can be there for every

crucial moment of discovery.

-Oh!

-Wow!

I think we have a winner.

-I think it's stunning.

-Incredible.

Our archaeologists will be joining us here in our special lab

to take a closer look at their finds

and to figure out what they really mean.

This is so exciting.

Welcome to Digging For Britain.

This time, we're exploring dramatic discoveries

from the west of Britain.

We'll reveal how the invaders and outsiders of the past

have shaped our world

and give tantalising insights into the spiritual beliefs of our ancestors.

We'll explore evidence of foreign pilgrims

and strange rituals around Stonehenge...

It's an immediate link to the people that lived here.

A lost British city rediscovered after 700 years.

At least 100 buildings going up in flames all at once.

..and the warrior invaders we now know were more than just legend.

These discoveries are rewriting our history.

To find out how, archaeologist Matt Williams and I

have been given special access to Salisbury Museum.

Its unique collection spans nearly half a million years of life on this island.

So, these are all Anglo-Saxon grave goods.

This is absolutely beautiful.

This is the Warminster Jewel.

'And we're going behind the scenes to the back rooms

'ordinary visitors don't get to see.'

That is enormous. That is a shin bone or a tibia.

Less than ten miles from Salisbury Museum is Stonehenge.

4,000 years ago, the spiritual beacon of Britain and Europe.

Today, an enduring mystery that leaves us asking,

"Who came to this vast monument and what did they do here?"

The answers may lie buried in the hills and valleys that surround Stonehenge.

Archaeologists have been interested in the landscape around

Stonehenge for some 300 years, but now new technology has revealed

hidden details in the landscape that haven't been seen before.

We've discovered Stonehenge didn't stand alone.

It was one of a network of sacred monuments

along the River Avon in Wiltshire,

many of which have lain hidden for thousands of years.

Since they've been identified,

archaeologists have wondered what clues they might conceal.

At the end of the day, though, the only way to understand how

all these monuments linked together is to excavate them.

And that's what a team from the University of Reading is doing.

They're digging just ten miles from Stonehenge at Marden Henge.

A henge is a circular bank of earth,

which we can still make out at Marden.

Archaeologist Jim Leary is digging here, hunting for clues

to explain the rituals our ancestors practised in this landscape

4,000 years ago.

12 days into the dig, his team strikes it lucky.

They've found the outline of a building right inside the henge.

OK, rolling.

OK, well, this is a very, very exciting moment,

because we have just uncovered our Neolithic building.

You can see the edges of the chalk floor very clearly on this side, on this side.

Some features showing up in the ground that have yet to be

excavated, so what goodies await us underneath this section here?

The team's next job is to look for evidence of what kind of building it was.

And on day 16,

they make an intriguing discovery just outside its walls.

Here we have the remains of an external fire.

This was a big bonfire and it's all emanating from one place

and it's created this huge spread of charcoal and ash and burnt stone.

The presence of burnt stone is puzzling.

They're pieces of sarsen stone, a type of local rock,

and clearly scorched.

But it's not clear why anyone would put rocks on a fire.

Then inside the building, they find a second hearth.

So, one of the really key elements of the building is the huge

hearth right in the middle.

This is where there was significant amount of burning,

so much so that it's discoloured the chalk into an orangey hue.

But interestingly, there's no charcoal at all.

I don't believe that this is an open flame fire.

Wood-burning fires produce charcoal,

but there's no trace of any in this inner hearth.

So, if it wasn't a fire, what was the source of the heat that

discoloured the ground inside the building?

So, we have a little bit of a conundrum,

but I think the key is the burnt sarsen stone that

we're getting in the charcoal spread outside the building.

Jim has an extraordinary theory that these mysterious twin hearths

reveal a ritual practised by our ancestors in the Stonehenge landscape.

I think what's happening are people are heating up the sarsen stones in the external fire

and that's a fire that we know is this open flame bonfire.

And then I think they are picking up the hot stones,

probably with two pieces of wood, and then they are carrying them

into the building and they are putting them in the central hearth.

And piling up these hot rocks.

And then I think people are using the ledge around the edge

to sit down, close the door, pour water on these hot rocks

and create a sauna.

And I think this building was being used as a sweat lodge.

It's an intriguing idea and Jim has brought his finds into our lab

so we can explore it further.

It's a really interesting site, Jim, and it's quite a persuasive

hypothesis I think you've come up with.

Well, I think so. I mean, it might not be the answer,

but it's the best solution that we can think of at the moment.

We've got some of the sarsen stones here, Jim.

These are the burnt stones, are they?

Yeah, so we're finding burnt stone within the external bonfire,

the outside fire, and here we have some of those fragments.

They've been clearly heated up,

they've changed to a sort of pinkish hue, fire-cracked and broken.

So, you've got the hearth outside where you're finding these burnt stones,

the burnt air inside.

Burnt stones don't make a sauna.

What else have you found?

So, the building itself is very well made. The surface is well-prepared.

There's a nice ledge around it, which just seems appropriate.

The internal fireplace, the internal hearth, it's huge.

I mean, it's utterly dominant and I just cannot envisage

other things going on inside this building.

You wouldn't have room to live.

So, we need to focus on that hearth but that's our clue

that's our way into understanding the building.

Jim, a prehistoric sweat lodge, I mean,

is there any precedence for that kind of thing?

It's not a crazy idea.

And of course if you look in the ethnographic record,

it's replete with examples of sweat lodges.

It's a fantastic way of purifying the body, of cleansing the self.

And although we'll never really know how it was used,

if indeed it was a sweat lodge,

it's very tempting to ascribe some kind of ritual ceremony or

purpose to it when it's in this landscape, so close to Stonehenge.

That's right. We're in a landscape surrounded by temples.

Stonehenge is a temple, Marden's a temple, Wilsford is a temple,

Avebury, Silbury Hill, these are all ceremonial monuments.

This sweat lodge is brand-new evidence of an intriguing

ritual that may have taken place near Stonehenge.

But who were these people and where did they come from?

Jim's team starts another dig at another henge,

this one less than three miles away at Wilsford.

And from day one, trench supervisor Rose is feeling confident

she knows exactly where to look for clues.

She's learnt from previous digs that the entrance ways to

henges can be the site of major discoveries,

so that's where she puts her first trench.

So, in this terminus, we hope to find the majority of finds.

Normally, you find very precious finds there,

because that's where they've dumped, like,

ceremonial objects or whatnot, that's normally where all

the good finds are found, so we're going to do a big

slot in the end and hopefully we're going to find some wonderful things.

Just three weeks later, Rose is proved right,

when she makes a discovery more exciting than

even she could have hoped for.

A Neolithic burial.

She calls Jim to come and see for himself.

-It's beautiful. It's absolutely beautiful.

-Absolutely.

-The hands and, yeah, I think it's absolutely beautiful.

-Incredible.

Finding human remains within a henge is exceptionally rare.

An incredibly powerful link to our ancestors.

So, obviously, what we have here is a crouched inhumation. OK...erm...

This individual's lying on their right-hand side,

legs pulled up, arms crossed over.

Basically a foetal position.

And...

It's extraordinarily evocative.

I mean, it reminds us that these monuments were constructed

by and for real people.

This was a real individual.

They lived and they died.

It's just brings it really all to life

when you see something like this.

This person has been tenderly and carefully placed within the ditch.

You know, so it's got some...

It's really, really important

and really, you know, just such a lovely discovery,

just an immediate link to the people that lived here.

Jim knows a burial like this could tell us

who worshipped in the sacred landscape around Stonehenge

and as Rose carefully excavates the skeleton,

she finds an important but fragile clue.

So, we have exposed and removed the rest of the body

and we're now left with the top three cervical vertebrae

and the skull and a tiny piece of the scapula.

What we're going to do is we're going to try and block lift it.

The reason is because we've got these tiny little amber beads

coming up that are really fragile and they look quite crushed,

so in order to keep all of that together, we're going to try

and block lift it, wrap it in bandages

and send it off to a specialist to be excavated properly.

Jim has brought the preserved bones back to our lab.

As an osteologist myself, I'm thrilled to see this evidence.

The fact this person was buried in the entrance to a henge

shows they must have been significant.

Now I want to know what else the skeleton can tell us.

We can see that his bones haven't quite fused fully,

so he's still in the process of growing.

You can see that the top of the humerus there is separate from the shaft,

so we can get quite a good age in terms of his biological age.

He's in his mid-teens, you know, around 15.

How old is he in terms of his chronological age?

We'd be looking at somewhere between 2400 BC and 1800, roughly speaking.

The fragments of an earthenware cup in his grave showed that this

boy was one of the Beaker people who may have come from the

continent to settle in the landscape around Stonehenge, 4,000 years ago.

They were dazzling craftsmen

and Beaker burials often include valuable jewellery.

This boy's grave was no different.

The only proper grave good from his grave was a beautiful amber necklace.

So, this is them here?

That's right, you can see the sort of orange amber coming through there.

Amber that might even have come from the Baltic, possibly.

Well, quite possibly, yeah.

'It's a clue showing how Stonehenge and this network of sacred monuments

'drew pilgrims from across Europe.'

The amber necklace, the way it's buried,

very, very different to what went before.

This is your...

You know, what you would expect from a Beaker burial.

This is a new, cultural group of people.

Very different to what went before, which seems to be quite...

an insular culture.

All of a sudden,

we're getting very much an outward-looking group of people.

When they arrived here, the Beaker people transformed Britain

with new skills and technology.

To understand them better,

Matt's examining Salisbury Museum's star exhibit -

another extraordinary Beaker burial known as the Amesbury Archer.

He was discovered close to Stonehenge itself

and he was buried with an array of fine metalwork.

Like these golden hair wraps.

Well, he was also buried with some of the earliest copper

objects that have been found in Britain.

We have three copper knives and daggers found in the grave

and here is one of the daggers here.

The Beaker people transformed Britain by introducing metal.

And these fine metal objects suggest that the Amesbury Archer

himself may have been a gifted metalworker,

a skill completely unheard-of in Britain

until the arrival of the Beaker people.

And so this is just on the cusp of the Neolithic bronze age,

so metalwork is just being introduced?

Well, that's right, it's a new technology that's just coming into this country at the time,

so it is incredibly rare and you have to imagine that

when this was new, it would have been golden in colour,

it would have gleamed, it would have been a very impressive,

although very small, object.

So, this would have marked out the Amesbury Archer as somebody

important, owning really unusual objects like this.

So, if he was just a visitor, do we know where he was coming from?

Well, that's the interesting point is that we've done oxygen isotope

analysis of his teeth and we've been able to work out where he grew up.

And we've discovered that he probably grew up in Central Europe, possibly in the Alps region.

He's a foreigner, effectively, coming to this area, perhaps spreading

this new information about metalworking.

This immigrant to Britain had travelled across the continent to get here.

Stonehenge may have been the reason why.

Stonehenge at the time when he was alive, about sort of 2500 BC,

was a temple and many people would have been visiting this area

to perform ceremonies and visit ceremonies taking place there.

Perhaps he wanted to meet those people.

Perhaps he wanted to share this almost magical understanding

he had of metalworking technology with these people.

So, he's come hundreds of miles with this incredible new

technology which must have astounded the locals

or the people visiting Stonehenge.

It's no wonder he was given such an incredible burial.

That's right, buried with over 100 objects is absolutely exceptional for this period.

Together with the Amesbury Archer,

the new discovery of the Marden boy shows us more clearly than ever

how the power of Stonehenge pulled in pilgrims from across Europe.

4,000 years ago, in this ritual landscape,

people were purifying their bodies,

visiting the temples and burying their dead.

And the incomers from Europe brought metalworking technology to Britain,

propelling us out of the Stone Age and into the Bronze Age.

At Winterbourne Kingston in Dorset, a team from Bournemouth University

has also been investigating evidence of religious rituals,

this time from the Iron Age, around 2,000 years ago.

What they've unearthed is eye-opening and very strange.

They've discovered extraordinary new evidence -

bizarre animal burials pointing to very odd beliefs and rituals

and they had their cameras rolling right from the start.

The geophysical survey of the area

had revealed an array of dark markings in the landscape.

As the team excavated these,

they uncovered the remains of a settlement over 2,000 years old,

which included a number of massive storage pits.

OK, well, I'm in the base of one of these cylindrical

Iron Age storage pits.

You can see it's fantastically well cut,

nice flat-bottomed base to it,

and we've got absolutely no idea

what they were storing in these originally,

although we presume it to be grain, that there's some kind of

grain silo for storing grain over winter.

The grain pits are vivid evidence of a thriving Iron Age settlement.

Then at the beginning of week four of the excavation,

they find something very unusual.

Where Elisha, Zach and Emily are excavating here, we've got

what appears to be the remains of three sets of pigs.

Very strangely, the pigs have not been butchered,

they have been placed in the pits whole.

This is a real dramatic wastage of animals.

These are good, viable animals, a good lot of meat on them,

but they've been deliberately killed and placed in these pits.

But if the animals weren't killed to be eaten, then what is going on?

Now, we presume they've been sacrificed as a deliberate kill,

that these are offerings for some kind of god of the underworld

for some kind of god to assume the continual protection

of the herd or the community.

But this possible evidence of sacrifice is just the beginning.

In week five, the team discovers even stranger practices.

Yeah, we've got a front leg.

-That's another front leg.

-Yeah.

And there's a bit of humerus here as well.

It's the remains of a sheep,

but it has a cow's head placed on its hindquarters.

So, it's kind of like this.

The discovery is unprecedented.

By day 22, the team has discovered even more burials of these

strange man-made beasts.

Nothing quite like this has ever been discovered in Britain.

Right at the very bottom of the pit,

we're getting a whole series of specially placed deposits

and what we can see in this particular example, we've got

part of a horse's leg here, partially articulated

and a cow's rib.

And what we're finding in a number of these pits is there's sort of a...

almost like a hybrid animals of cow and horse.

Where you find a horse's skull, it's always with a cow's jaw.

Sometimes you find a horse's head with a cow's body.

They're mixing and matching the two animals.

Obviously both animals are important to them for different reasons.

So, incredibly, it looks like our Iron Age ancestors were creating

hybrid beasts from the body parts of animals sacrificed to their gods.

It sounds unbelievable, but Miles has brought the bones to the

studio so we can see the evidence with our own eyes.

Miles, this site just gets more and more interesting, doesn't it?

This isn't just rubbish, they're not filling them

in with discarded remains of butchered animals.

No, the one thing actually we're not getting in any part of the site

is normal rubbish material, not sort of discarded waste.

This isn't disordered dumps of material, there is

a very specific order going on here.

But when we're finding our horse and cow,

they are cut up and obviously you wouldn't be able to cram a whole

horse into one of these pits in the complete state,

but they are cut up and they are being placed with other body parts,

so it's a rather sort of macabre jigsaw puzzle.

And that's what you've got here, is it?

-That's a cow, I assume, cos of the horns, and a horse?

-Yes, yes.

In fact, one of the storage pits when we found it,

it was actually sort of resting the cow's skull on top there,

so it was creating this rather bizarre hybrid animal.

-Like a chimera. A mixture of different animals.

-You could say that, yes, yes.

It is a direct attempt to create something that doesn't exist in nature,

where they are dismantling or dismembering animals

and then reassembling them whilst they are still fleshed and bloody.

And there don't seem to be any cut marks on these bones at all.

They seem to be pretty intact.

I mean, you'd expect to see cut marks here where muscle had been taken away,

meat had been taken away from the cheek,

and then perhaps cut marks on the inside here where the tongue had been taken out,

-but we can't see any evidence of that.

-No, no, exactly.

In most of them, we're not finding any kind of evidence that meat's been removed

or indeed that the bones have been broken up to get at the marrow.

And we're getting quite big sections of animals in there all together,

so perhaps there is a way of by re-assembling them in there,

you are creating almost like a deity,

or you're creating a deposit that the gods would accept which

would ensure the long-term survival of your community.

By next year, Miles may have even more answers.

But for now, it certainly looks like his team have discovered

a new Iron Age religious phenomenon

that had been entirely forgotten about for over 2,000 years.

Our next dig diary features another staggering find.

This time, an entire city that disappeared for seven centuries

in Monmouthshire in Wales.

Ten years ago, an archaeologist developed a hunch

that a pretty little village on the Welsh-English border had a forgotten past -

that it did, in fact, lie right at the heart of the English struggle

for dominance over the Welsh in the 1200s.

One particular field was crucial to his idea,

so he gathered up his life savings, bought the field and started digging.

That archaeologist was Stuart Wilson and this year he's kept us a dig diary.

Today this sleepy village is home to around 3,000 people,

but if Stuart is right, then 800 years ago, this was a very different place.

Evidence is being unearthed outside the village in what is now

Stuart's very own field.

It was here that his hunch came good when he discovered an entire

medieval high street in the middle of nowhere.

Could this be the medieval city of Trellech -

the centre of power and industry that was lost in the 14th century,

and for which archaeologists have been searching for generations?

Well, here we have a series of workshops in medieval times.

And what we have down is iron slag floor surface

with stone-lined drains

and a nice central fireplace in the middle.

So, you could have walked up along here with your horse,

with your dagger or bits of armour, come in here into a hard working

surface where the metalworkers repair whatever you're coming in with,

right next to the main road in medieval times.

The remains date back to the 1200s.

The sheer scale makes it clear

that this was just part of a huge settlement.

And as the dig continues,

Stuart's team begin to turn up clues as to what made this town grow.

One of the things that we find consistently in each

and every trench we dig, is this stuff.

It's iron slag.

These nuggets are the by-products of smelting iron

and the town produced so much of it, they started using

the slag as building material in floors and on their roads.

Iron production on this scale indicates that Trellech was

a major centre of trade and industry.

Stuart's team has found evidence that this was no ordinary place.

We do have a lot of indications here that the people who lived here

were extremely wealthy and we've got a couple of very nice finds from

previous excavations that really show the wealth of these people.

The first is this medieval flowerpot.

We could really say it's a unique piece because it's the only

medieval flowerpot that has ever been found in Wales.

Another piece that we have is this one.

Most people see it as some sort of a dish, that comes out

of the kitchen but actually this would be on top of your roof.

This is a medieval finial.

It's a very high-quality glaze on there,

it's a very expensive object

and it would have a large ceramic spike on top of it.

So if lightning would strike, this would break

and your roof would still be intact.

Showing to the people of your village that you can actually

afford to break an object like this, really shows great wealth.

For Stuart, the evidence of affluence at the site

confirms that he has indeed discovered

the lost town of Trellech.

This was no small Welsh settlement

but a vast English military supply base.

Now he's also uncovered remarkable evidence that its great

wealth could have made it a target for attack by rebel Welsh,

who may even have attempted to burn the place down.

The buildings we found were quite interesting.

The buildings could have been burnt down in a very severe house fire.

We had glass actually formed out of the thatch,

which has actually melted in the fire.

We found the mica on the stone had melted,

a glaze on the stone itself.

So a very, very severe fire.

We think of a great attack on the town

in about 1295/96 by the Welsh.

Not only is it possible that this English-run town was once

burned down by the Welsh, Stuart is also finding

compelling clues that the Welsh posed a constant threat.

For here we have a massive round tower,

which looks like a good fortification to the manor house

but also to the town.

It's a really nice stone construction.

It's got a single stone wall about a metre thick

with an iron slag core to it, and inner stone wall,

and all built up of one nice circle rising upwards.

We think it's defensive because of its sheer size,

the way it's been built,

it's very well constructed.

In fact, it's not just how this tower was built

but where that indicates its purpose was defence.

If this stood up nice and high, it would see across the gardens

of the neighbouring burgages,

along this road, along Tinkers Lane

and across the entire common fields.

Stuart is convinced that the round house construction shows just

how solid Trellech's defences needed to be,

in order to see off Welsh aggression.

But a big question still remains -

why did this 700-year-old town just disappear?

I'm still intrigued by how you came across this to begin with, Stuart,

given other people have been looking for Trellech for a long time.

How did you put all the clues together?

You're never going to discover an elephant

by looking through a microscope

because you're looking too close at it. You need to stand back.

When you stand back and actually look at the landscape,

it's speaking to you.

You've a map here - shall we have a look at that?

Does that give us any clues?

Yes, it does.

These maps are extremely useful.

When does this date from?

This actual map dates from 1881.

What we have are thin fields

here following the main roads

and more thin fields.

The thin fields carry all the way down to the south.

With the large fields behind.

Why are these fields like they are?

They're all man-made, they must have been here for a reason

and when you then compare it to medieval towns.

Let's take the buildings out and what do we get, we get this pattern.

-The thin fields are where the buildings used to be.

-Right.

-Then they back on to large fields, which are the common fields.

-OK.

Exactly what we've got here.

The buildings would have essentially lined up in the plots

along here and these lines here form the back of the buildings.

Exactly. Yes.

From the documentary evidence, you had an indication of the size of it

in terms of numbers of houses.

We knew there were 378 taxable buildings in 1288.

That is massive.

It's even bigger than Cardiff at the time.

-We are talking a really, really big town.

-Mmm.

I can recognise one thing over there - that's the iron slag

and that's a product of what made this town so rich.

Oh, yes.

Now this is iron slag.

They use this as hard-core.

By recording how much we get off this every so often,

we can actually start recording up how industrialised the town was.

That will take decades of work.

At the moment we've only got a very, very small sample.

Why is it forgotten? Why did it disappear?

Yes, the Welsh rebelled but basically they had been defeated.

The military reason for it being here has gone.

Combined with that, 1314 happened to be the first year

of five very severe weathers in this country,

which caused a great famine.

That precipitates a big economic depression.

That means the civilian market for iron reduces.

Then the economy goes, then the population goes,

then it gets hit by the second wave of plague.

Then you have civil war at the end of the century.

So within a century, everything that could go wrong, has gone wrong.

Trellech was left without a purpose.

Gradually, the people left

and this great, medieval hub withered and died.

-So how many more fields are you going to buy, then, Stuart?

-Well...

-That looks pretty good.

-I reckon this one here.

If there is one field I would really like, it would be 121, just here.

If you ever go up there, you can

see where the ground just slopes off

and clearly a building just under the ground

and if I was going to build an important building in the town,

that's exactly where I would build it.

That's where I would like to dig.

How long are you going to spend excavating medieval Trellech?

All my life. I was hoping to do my field in 70 years.

I've only done ten years so far

and the 70 years hasn't reduced because it's only increasing.

So it'll probably take me another 100 years to do the field.

So unless I live for an extremely long period of time,

then it is going to take me longer than my lifetime.

Our successors will all be here discussing, still, medieval Trellech

on a dim and distant version of Digging For Britain.

Yes.

Next year, Stuart is sure to have even more

revelations about life in the lost medieval boom town of Trellech.

This work highlights the real power of archaeology,

to bring to life stories

that are only hinted at in the written record.

Discoveries like Trellech are the result of years of searching

and our archaeologist dig diaries mean that we can be there for that

all-important moment of discovery

when all the hard work pays off.

As in our next dig, where to learn more about the

first Homo sapiens in Britain,

archaeology was the only hope.

This dig diary from Torquay in Devon

takes us back to the ice age.

Kents Cavern in Torquay is one of the most famous

prehistoric sites in Britain.

Excavations in the 19th and the early 20th centuries

produced finds dating back to the last ice age,

including animal and human remains.

Recent re-dating of the human bones has placed them

at older than 40,000 years,

amongst the oldest human remains in north-western Europe.

But now archaeologists from Oxford University think they have

discovered a previously unexcavated entrance to the cave,

so it seems that there are new secrets about to emerge

from Kents Cavern itself.

Kents Cavern in Torquay is a popular tourist spot.

This extraordinary site has given us the oldest

modern human remains in Britain

but Rob Dinnis and his team

believe that this famous cave system has more secrets to give up.

They think that this mysterious wall

could conceal a previously undisturbed cave entrance,

so they're swapping their trowels

for pneumatic drills to go looking for a breakthrough.

So first day at Kents Cavern, we've just arrived on site,

we haven't done anything yet

but one thing we want to do is to see what's behind this

wall here and also under the concrete on the floor here.

We're going to be doing some building work to remove this

and then to see if there are any cave deposits lying behind it.

So fingers crossed.

The wall was clearly built in the 20th century

and Rob believes that whoever built it

inadvertently hid a long-forgotten cave entrance,

which he hopes may link to a very important part of Kents Cavern -

the main vestibule.

It was here that excavations in the 1920s and '30s

uncovered a long sequence of ice age settlements within which

were ice age animals but also the stone tools

left by late Neanderthals and early modern humans.

One of the areas that interests me is this area up here.

This is the North-east Gallery

and, if we're right,

at the other end of the North-east Gallery

is where that wall is outside.

During the last ice age,

Kents Cavern lay at the end of a massive grassland

linking Britain to northern Europe.

We know that early modern humans lived in nomadic tribes here,

hunting wild animals for food and clothing.

We know very little else about them.

So could this unassuming breeze-block wall

be hiding priceless clues?

Still recording...

This is the end of day six.

The good news is it's definitely a cave entrance.

It looks like it's a big cave entrance as well.

The next good news is that it looks like you've got

cave sediments behind the wall which have not been messed around with,

they seem to be in place, which is great.

It means the early excavators have not dug this before.

It might look just like a wall of mud but if Rob is right,

it's a spectacular find.

Cave sediment undisturbed for tens of thousands of years

that may contain precious evidence

of how our ice age ancestors lived.

The plan now is to remove a bit more of the wall,

try and find the top of this bank of deposits and then

we can excavate down through it to see if it contains anything.

After days of meticulous preparation and then excavation,

the cave finally begins to yield the first

of its prehistoric secrets.

OK, so we've just gone through a spit that's been very sterile

and now we're just coming into some very loose cave earth

and there has been several small carnivore teeth come out

and just see in here,

there's a much bigger tooth coming out.

It looks like a bear molar.

Before long the tooth is followed by more remains,

first the bones of a paw.

Then a pelvis.

They find a prehistoric British brown bear,

possibly 40,000 years old.

It's very good because it's telling us

that the bones are not coming from a long distance, they're probably

the same part of the same animal

being deposited very close together.

This proves that Rob is right.

The cave entrance has not been disturbed

and in the future, there's every hope of finding more clues

to the lifestyles of our ice age ancestors.

Now Rob, how exciting.

Kents Cavern is such a famous site when it comes to Palaeolithic Britain

and to find undisturbed sediments like that.

-I mean, that's like Christmas.

-Yeah.

And much more than we were expecting.

Where is that breeze-block entrance?

The breeze-block wall there is exactly there.

Right, OK.

Really importantly, was it used by these early modern humans?

Exactly, that's really the question that has driven us to go back

and look at the site.

It's possible that this was the entrance through which

all of the archaeological material came.

How can the bear remains tell you about the cave entrance

and whether it was open or closed?

The fact that we've found these bear remains,

they all seem to belong to one individual,

a brown bear and the fact that we have that at the end

of the North-east Gallery, at this new entrance,

suggests that that bear hibernated there, didn't wake up.

Really by dating the bear, what we're hopefully going to find out

is when was that sealed up,

when was that cave entrance sealed up

and that should give us a clue as to when it was open.

So this cave entrance would have been open

when the cave was being used by the inhabitants of the cave?

Cave entrances were incredibly important places.

You probably saw a lot of activity in them

because they had benefits of both the natural shelter of the cave

but also the daylight and so day-to-day activities were

probably carried out near cave entrances and, of course,

day-to-day activities you would expect archaeological remains to be there.

Evidence for a huge amount of activity in this cave

but ultimately what happened to these people?

It seems that with the climate being volatile,

people came and went from Britain

and probably didn't stay for very long each time

and then we pick up glimpses between maybe 40, 30,000 years ago,

we see glimpses of people but then they seem to disappear completely.

This is on the run-up, then, to the last ice age, isn't it?

-The peak of the last ice age.

-The peak of the last ice age.

When everybody clears out of Britain.

-We have ice sheets coming down as far as the Severn.

-Yes.

So it becomes totally uninhabitable, even in Torquay.

40,000 years ago,

brown bears like this shared the landscape with our ancestors.

But Britain was home to many more ice age animals.

I'm going behind the scenes at Salisbury Museum to see

evidence of the extraordinary wildlife,

once native to Britain, killed off by the end of the last ice age.

-Let's get you an example of something we've got.

-It's enormous!

-Ox bone.

-These are the ancient European cattle. That is enormous.

-That is a shin bone, or a tibia.

-It is.

These were huge creatures, weren't they?

That's right, before they were domesticated.

In the Neolithic they were absolutely colossal beasts.

Allied with that, we've got teeth.

-Oh, mammoth teeth.

-Yeah.

So these are the cheek teeth,

specifically for grinding up all the grass that they ate.

-That's right.

-I love seeing this actual physical evidence

because I think we know that there were woolly mammoth

here during the ice age

but it's very difficult to think yourself back in time

and when you see this evidence, it suddenly becomes more real.

Yes, it does. They were almost depending on those animals, as well.

I'm sure they were probably hunting some of these species that were

living here at the time. It was a coexistence.

Now most of them do leave Britain, don't they?

At the peak of the last ice age, when the ice sheets come down?

That's right. The advance of the ice sheets pretty much pushes out

a lot of the species that were living here, the whole country

is almost inhospitable, both to animals and to humans.

Yes, it was impossible to live here and, of course,

at that time there was a land bridge as well.

The sea levels would have retreated because they were soaked up into the ice

and that enabled people and animals to move back across the Channel.

Archaeology and geology come together to reveal what happened

in Britain at the peak of the last ice age.

By around 30,000 BC, the advancing ice had driven humans

and wildlife out,

leaving Britain a deserted, frozen wasteland

for 10,000 years.

But as the climate warmed, a new wave of humans

arrived from continental Europe to re-colonise Britain.

The first colonisers were Stone Age hunter-gatherers

arriving in small bands,

following herds of game across the land bridge from the continent.

Because the population was small and mobile,

it's very rare to find archaeological evidence of them

but a team of archaeologists in Jersey has been making some

extraordinary discoveries.

In 2011, Digging For Britain was there when a team

from the Ice Age Island Project

discovered signs of significant human activity.

Flint tools that suggested a large Stone Age hunting camp was nearby.

It's amazing to be finding these little traces of them, isn't it?

It's very exciting, just because it's so old

and it's really nice to be the first person

for 14,000 years to be touching these tools.

This was a promising start but the next four years proved frustrating.

Lots of scattered flint,

by 2015 still no direct evidence of a campsite.

We are yet to hit an archaeologically significant sediment.

The Holy Grail would be objects that have remained in situ,

undisturbed by the passing millennia.

The problem is, the site is on a gentle slope..

Over the last 15,000 years,

the ground has shifted downhill in a slow-motion landslide.

This destructive slide would destroy any precious evidence of a campsite.

But...finally, halfway through the dig,

things start to look more promising.

This flat ground here really provides the last opportunity

to find a significant area

of in situ or well-preserved archaeology.

We're at the tipping point in the geology as well.

It's a really exciting position to be at.

On day 14, the team makes a significant breakthrough.

This is a flint over here

and it seems like there are two pieces

which were originally part of the same core.

If you're right and these stick together,

then we're starting to see a part of the site

we really haven't seen before,

where everything is a lot more intact.

It suggests that this area hasn't been disturbed by the slow

landslide, giving the team a fighting chance

of finding an actual campsite.

The artefacts aren't all at crazy angles,

they're relatively flat and they are relatively larger.

That will tell us a lot more about what the people are doing here,

how people are working at the side

and it may be pointing to really good high-resolution archaeology.

We've found some really fragile pieces of what look like bird bone.

It's this particular darker band that seems to be packed

full of goodies. It's the first evidence of organics

we've had on the site and it's really quite exciting.

Could this mean that the team has hit the jackpot

and these are the leftovers of an ice age barbecue?

Nearby, something absolutely extraordinary has turned up.

Evidence that this is much more than just a temporary camp.

One of the new things about this year

is we're getting all of this granite material.

Big, large blocks of granite.

I mean, is this natural or is there any human impact here?

If we look close at this big stone, you can

see that actually it's fragmented in several places.

-It's actually broken there in situ.

-Absolutely, yes.

The team believes this may have been a man-made paved surface.

It's incredible.

Nothing like this has ever been found in Britain before.

It means that this could have been a semi-permanent settlement, used by

some of the first European tribes to colonise Britain after the ice age.

Matt, this site just gets more and more exciting

and you've certainly scaled up your excavations this year, as well.

So rather than stones just moving around

and having ended up in those places,

do you think they're actually lying where they were dropped?

Yeah, the geology is looking different.

It's looking as if we've got an intact land surface there.

And, yeah, we're not finding things at crazy angles,

higgledy-piggledy, or in these little mud flows,

we're finding things in a spread, nice and flat,

behaving themselves finally.

And some evidence for that is this amazing paving stones,

or paving slab. What do you think that's all about?

OK, what we've got at the moment are big, granite slabs.

Very close together, sometimes tessellating,

sometimes lying over each other.

We never found these big blocks before, within otherwise very sandy,

silty and clay deposits.

There needs to be an explanation for how they got there.

At the moment, humans bringing them,

placing them there is our best explanation.

So, what do you think these stones were used for, then?

Are they something to stand on, to sit on, or perhaps even to cook on?

I just don't think we can say at the minute.

We've only clipped the very edge of the preserved sites.

These sorts of pavements aren't unknown from other Magdalenian

-sites across Europe.

-Hang on, when you say Magdalenian,

what age are you talking about, what do you mean?

Magdalenian is the term for the stone tool technology and these

are the representatives of the modern humans,

the end of the coldest part of the last ice age,

who end up moving out all the way across Europe, across into Germany.

Then ultimately into Britain, as well.

So this is a hunter-gatherer camp that you've uncovered?

I think we can be quite confident in that, yeah.

Finally locating this camp is

a triumph for the Ice Age Island Project.

The archaeologists have given us a rare

and direct connection back to the first humans who came here

after the ice age and began to build the Britain we know.

The next dig diary tells the story of another group of incomers

who transformed this island.

Warrior invaders who stormed into Britain in the fifth century AD.

They were the Anglo-Saxons.

They gave us our language, our laws

and the beginnings of our modern culture.

But they left us little written record of theirs.

Now one of Britain's greatest treasure hoards could at last

shine a light on this race of warriors.

In 2009, the discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard

astounded the world.

It's the biggest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold

and silver ever found.

It's absolutely astonishing.

I never, ever in my career thought I would be holding this

kind of treasure.

It's just incredible, unbelievable.

The hoard was found near Lichfield,

once the heart of the powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia,

where it was buried around 675 AD.

Now six years of meticulous conservation

and research have revealed a picture of the people who owned these

unique weapons, bringing to life a band of elite warriors,

once thought to be only the stuff of legend.

The conservators have sent us their lab diary.

According to the famous Old English poem, Beowulf,

the Anglo-Saxon invaders were aristocrats, adorned with gold.

But with no hard evidence, experts assumed this was just legend

and that the Anglo-Saxons were simpler, warrior farmers.

Now, this incredible hoard of silver, gold and garnets,

could prove the Beowulf legend is at least partly true.

But first, they need to clean it.

Today I'm working on an object from the Staffordshire Hoard.

This is a hilt cover and it's made from gold and garnets.

I'm cleaning the object to remove the soil.

I'm using a solvent and that softens the soil

and then I'm using this thorn

to pick out the soil when it's softened.

The thorn is really good because it's quite soft

so it doesn't scratch the surface of the gold.

Now the conservators need to piece together

the nearly 4,000 fragments to make complete weapons.

So here I've got a very fragmented hilt guard.

It's a very elaborate hilt guard in a sense it has

a lot of decorative panels and decoration along the side of it.

Because it's so fragile, in so many parts,

I've had to make a custom-made mount which then appropriately allows

it to be shown as it should be shown with the panels on the side.

In the future, it can be displayed in all its glory.

Restoring this will take thousands of hours.

The priceless materials are as incredible as the craftsmanship.

You can see in each of the individual cells

is an individually cut garnet

that's been cut exactly to fit into these unique cells.

The gold was imported from Europe and the garnets from India.

Proof that the Anglo-Saxons created a wealthy, sophisticated

British aristocracy that was not just the stuff of legend.

This is a very elaborate piece with very finely crafted decoration

and this particular item would have been

a pommel for the top of the end of the sword.

It has a piece of every single type of material that you would

find in the Staffordshire Hoard

and, obviously, it shows that this person has been of a high ranking

to have this as part of his weapon.

Conservation work is already showing that there were over 100 weapons

in this board, each one owned by an individual aristocratic warrior.

We had no idea that this Anglo-Saxon aristocracy

was so big, or so rich.

The final step in the hunt for new information

is to create a replica sword.

And here we have it, the replica sword is absolutely beautiful.

It's gorgeous.

This is the long-bladed sword of the period.

It's a slashing, overarm weapon, quite a clumsy weapon,

not for duelling and it's here with its replica gold mounts

at the end, based on examples that we have found in the hoard.

Yes, so this is the gold work here that we can see

kind of replicated here and the very end, the pommel,

-that's what this is based on, isn't it?

-That's right.

This is an exact copy of that pommel.

Were they ever used in war?

I mean, certainly you can do a lot of damage with a blade like this.

Across the hundreds of fittings on these weapons,

we are seeing degrees of wear

and where we find the most worn-down parts

is on the top of the pommel.

It's possibly to do with a warrior having his hand rested

perhaps on the pommel, but interestingly

in contrast where we don't find the wear is on the grip.

If these weapons were frequently being drawn

and frequently been wielded, we might expect to see much more

wear on the grips than we do.

Maybe it is a case that these weapons were also to be appreciated

at an intimate level in the feasting hall, probably between warriors.

The nature of this board and, I suppose,

the very numerous artefacts that are contained within it,

as you say, they were having to rethink what

we know about the structure of society at the time

because there were many more people, obviously, carrying

-around this kind of superior weapon than we'd thought in the past.

-Yes.

I mean, this changes the whole landscape of looking

at the warrior in Anglo-Saxon England.

I mean, clearly there were swords of this calibre with this

level of decoration in much wider circulation than we appreciated.

So was this Beowulf and his warriors?

The sword that Beowulf the hero uses to actually kill

Grendel's mother is actually described as having had a hilt

wrapped with gold, potentially with wire ornament.

It could well have been a sword very like this.

The Staffordshire Hoard paints a new

and vivid picture of the powerful Anglo-Saxon warriors who

ruled Britain in the seventh century.

But what was their relationship with the Britons they lived alongside?

Salisbury Museum holds the remains of the Anglo-Saxon Ford warrior.

I'm getting to see him face-to-face.

Re-assessing the objects from his grave in the light of the hoard

will fill in more details in this picture of Anglo-Saxon Britain.

Adrian, I can't get over how well preserved absolutely

everything is from this grave.

Yes, I mean, this is the burial of the Ford warrior,

as we call him, who was found just to the

north of Salisbury in the 1960s in an Anglo-Saxon burial mound.

Yeah, he is buried with all the trappings of somebody who was

clearly going off into the afterlife to fight.

The Ford warrior was buried with a long knife,

a scabbard,

spearheads

and this, the boss from a huge shield.

Typical grave goods for an Anglo-Saxon warrior.

But other objects in his grave

give a more subtle insight into how these invaders integrated

with life in Britain.

We've got this hanging bowl here

which was when it was discovered was found to contain

crab apples and onions.

-Really?

-Yes.

-So a meal to take to the afterlife.

These are interesting objects.

Although what we see here are very typical Anglo-Saxon items,

this thing here is a more indigenous native British object.

You have here a combination of influences.

You've got predominately Anglo-Saxon influence but this item here

is something that was used by local people, as well.

This is fascinating, isn't it,

because we're moving away from the old simplistic idea of this

invasion of Anglo-Saxons coming into Britain

and wiping out everybody and replacing them,

towards an idea we have a smaller influx of people,

assimilation and cultures blending a lot more.

The Staffordshire Hoard has thrown a new bright light

on the Ford warrior.

Together they reveal the true size

and wealth of one of Britain's earliest aristocracies.

Invading warriors,

who blended their culture with that of the indigenous Britons.

Laying a foundation for the language and legal system we use today.

These Anglo-Saxons were just one of a wealth of people who

came here from Europe and helped to build Britain.

Our island story is rich and complex.

But from ice age caves to Stonehenge,

from forgotten Iron Age rituals to lost medieval cities,

archaeology brings us

closer to understanding how our ancestors made us who we are today.

Next time on Digging For Britain, we're in the East,

unearthing the victims of rough justice in Roman London.

The possibility is that these are beheading victims.

We're there for a metal detectorist's find of a lifetime.

I bet he had a bad day when he never brought these back.

And we dive deep, hunting for clues to a naval disaster.