East 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 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.

-We 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 must have had a bad day, when he never brought these back!

Their Dig Diaries mean that we can be there

for every crucial moment of discovery.

Oh, wow!

Whoa!

Do we have a winner here?

-I think it's stunning, yeah.

-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.

In this programme, we're joining teams of archaeologists

across the east of Britain to share in their biggest new finds.

We're there for the grim discovery at a Crossrail site

that reveals the brutality of Roman rule in Britain...

If they show signs of injury, then these are beheading victims.

..we dive deep in the Thames,

searching for clues to explain a mysterious naval tragedy...

It was really amazing, actually,

that that's been under the water for 350 years.

..and we explore a British story in Belgium,

as a team reveals the secret advantage

that helped Wellington snatch victory at Waterloo.

What you have here is basically a hollow ball, packed with gunpowder.

To understand how these discoveries and more

fit into the story of Britain, archaeologist Matt Williams

and I have been given special access to the Museum of London.

Its unique collection tells the story of the East

from this area's earliest inhabitants.

So these are people beginning to settle

in the landscape around London?

The first Londoners.

And we'll get to see parts of the museum

the public rarely get access to.

There are 20,000 skeletons down here.

Our first Dig Diary is not from Britain, it's from Belgium,

but it explores a very British story,

Wellington's victory at Waterloo.

In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte faced the Duke of Wellington

and his European allies at Waterloo.

Wellington's victory ended Napoleon's rule and settled

the fate of modern Europe.

200 years later, and the international team of archaeologists

travelled to Waterloo to excavate the battlefield for the first time,

hoping to understand how one farmyard had become pivotal

to the outcome of the battle,

and how the allied army

successfully defended that farmyard against the odds.

According to Wellington,

Waterloo was, "The nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life".

We know that his victory hinged on finding a way to get ammunition

to his outnumbered troops stationed here at Hougoumont Farm -

but we don't have proof for how he did it.

Now, archaeologists from Waterloo Uncovered are searching for clues,

and for evidence of the French onslaught

fought off by Wellington's men.

We've been working down in the stubble field

for the past three days, and that was an area

that at the time of the battle was occupied by a wood.

The French did advance up through that wood,

and that fight within the wood is not fully understood.

There are some eyewitness accounts, but it's fairly vague.

We know what Wellington's men occupied the farm,

and now, for the first time, we can understand how fiercely

they had to defend it, as the team's investigations revealed

the intensity of Napoleon's opening attack.

DETECTORS BEEP

This tree faces onto an open area,

where we know there was a lot of fighting.

There would have been shooting

coming from the wall over there, 40 yards away.

So, either way, these trees are going to be right on the backstop

for any sort of musketry that's going on round here -

and, of course, at chest height,

balls that had hit trees are going to be fired

at human beings who're milling around these trees.

It's pretty remarkable that, 200 years later, it's all still here.

Wellington had 1,200 men defending Hougoumont.

It's believed that Napoleon sent 4,000 to take it...

..and now metal detecting is revealing definitive proof

of that savage assault by the French.

By the wall, picking up multiple targets

that look like French musket balls,

all concentrated probably within a foot square. I've picked up four.

One of them, if you can see - that's if I don't drop it - is embedded.

It's still got brick dust on it.

The shot struck the southern wall, which the records say

was where Napoleon ordered his attack to begin.

Now, inside the farm,

the team uncover great quantities of French musket balls,

which reveal how desperate the Napoleon's army fought to get in.

Further in, we're looking at a musket shot

that has been fired at close range, it's impacted.

So, what it looks like we've got here,

is the French making it at least to the top of the wall

and firing down into the enclosure,

possibly also through the loopholes.

All of which has got to be defended -

so, I think what we've got

is a picture of a very, very brutal fight on the wall top -

much more so than the accounts, in some cases, lead us to believe.

Records tell us that the British defence

of the southern wall held firm.

While on the north side of the farm, more French troops

desperately attacked the heavy gates of the farmyard.

It's a pretty formidable target once it's closed.

But you have to close the gates first

and that's where the whole battle could have turned.

So, we're opening the gates. Check no Frenchmen... OK.

The gates had been left open.

30 French soldiers seized their chance and burst through.

If reinforcements managed to join them,

a British massacre and a French victory at Waterloo

would have been inevitable.

An absolute desperate fight,

and the men who came to close this gate left that fight

going on behind them, turned their backs on it

and pushed the gate closed against this great press of Frenchmen

who would seize the advantage and were trying to get in.

So, a pretty key moment in the battle.

According to the history books, Wellington's Coldstream Guards

forced the gates closed and saved their army from disaster.

But, on day seven, the team finds possible evidence

to show that Napoleon only intensified his efforts

to seize the farm.

What you have here is basically a hollow ball, packed with gunpowder.

It was fired by the French from the ridge behind the complex.

That fire happened in the afternoon of the battle

and the idea was, basically, to burn down the buildings.

And they succeeded in that -

these explosive shells set fire to the chateau, the house,

which burned to the ground,

and the various outbuildings were burned as well.

And so, from this - on the face of it - fairly unexciting lump of rust,

we've added another piece to the jigsaw

that is the battle of Waterloo.

Napoleon followed this barrage with an attack on the blazing farm

by another 5,500 men.

But Wellington could only call upon an extra 800,

leaving him in a precarious position.

To hold the farm, he needed to keep his outnumbered troops

supplied with ammunition,

and a trench dug in a sunken road at the back of the farm

may reveal for the first time how he did it.

I think that is the 1815 surface.

What makes you think it's 1815?

The pottery and the coin that came out.

The artefacts from the bottom of this trench

date to the year of the battle,

showing that 200 years ago,

the road's surface was several feet lower than it is today.

That would have provided the Allies were crucial cover from the French.

And the team also think that this sunken road

gave Wellington hidden access to the farm,

to get his supply wagons in without the French noticing.

If you've actually got quite an enclosed hedge line

and you've got, literally, almost a tunnel,

then that would have given him so much better cover -

and although it was still a feat to get the horse and wagon down here

under French attack, and then to get it across to the gate

and into Hougoumont Farm, it does, actually, to me,

give me a better picture of what that...

the surrounding must have been like.

This dig may have finally revealed Wellington's secret advantage -

a hidden road, that enabled him to keep his troops armed,

to defend Hougoumont Farm,

Defeat Napoleon and win the Battle of Waterloo.

To explain more about how the battle was fought and its grim aftermath,

the dig team have brought some of their finds into our lab.

So, Charlie, how important was Hougoumont Farm in the battle here,

in the context of Waterloo, or generally?

Certainly for Wellington's army it was very important.

The French are in blue and the British are in red,

and Hougoumont, here, stands together with the wood to the south

and the orchard in front of this ridge,

guarding Wellington's right flank.

Had the French got through at Hougoumont

and seized control of that,

they would have been able to secure, potentially,

a battle-winning advantage.

I think we always tend to think, or at least I always tend to think,

of Waterloo being a battle of the British against the French.

-But, Dominique, there were other people there as well?

-Oh, yes.

There is a lot of other nations involved in the conflict

and you have Hanoverians, Anglo-Dutch, Brunswick,

Belgo-Dutch and, of course, the Prussians.

They played an essential role in the English victory.

We've got some of the finest here.

Dominique, can you tell me what that is?

Well, I can tell you that it's a French musket ball,

because it's smaller than the English one,

-as you can see, very clearly.

-Mm-hm.

I think we've uncovered why there was an Allied victory.

They simply had bigger musket balls!

LAUGHTER

And the fact that the French ones are smaller than the English one,

means that the English could re-use French musket balls,

which is not the case on the contrary.

So the English could fit the smaller bullets,

the smaller musket balls, back into your own rifle.

Oh, so it IS a significant advantage, yeah.

Yes, the documentary sources, the eyewitness accounts

and the archaeological finds, they do agree on one thing -

this was a brutal battle.

Do we have any idea what the total human cost actually was?

Yes, probably around 12,000 killed - and you have to add to that

the wounded and the disappeared, so, around 50,000 people.

And what happened to all the bodies then?

Most of the armies would have moved on

by the time we get round to burying the dead,

so we're talking about local people, the farmers, peasants,

the people who lived on the land, trying to get rid of these bodies

that will be stinking, causing a great mess

and getting in the way of agriculture.

So, they're tipped into a grave and gotten rid of.

Anything that is useful and can be used, can be sold,

will be stripped from them,

and the bodies will be disposed of as quickly as possible.

Scavenging among the dead for valuables was grim enough,

but around at the time of the Battle of Waterloo,

this common practice took an altogether darker turn.

I've come to see the evidence for myself,

right in the depths of the Museum of London.

Well, this is the Museum of London's bone store,

and every one of these boxes

contains at least one human skeleton.

In total, there are 20,000 skeletons down here.

Amongst them is remarkable evidence of a macabre but lucrative trade -

one made possible by the vanity of London's rich,

and the huge death rates at battles like Waterloo.

So, this is an incredible bit of dental work that's been carried out?

Yeah, I mean, this is remarkable.

So this is the mandible, the lower jaw of a female,

and she was buried at St Marylebone Church

and we know her name because she had a coffin plate,

and that survived in enough detail

for us to be able to read what her name was,

so, she's Mrs Charlotte Bampton Taylor,

and we know that she died in 1837 and was 77 years old.

And to be buried where she was would indicate she had money,

she was high-status - and looking at this,

that you can see here, which is a remarkable piece of dentistry.

-Is that a real tooth that's there?

-Yes.

-It's a false tooth in her mouth...

-Yes.

But it looks like real human tooth?

Yeah, it does, it's fantastic.

So, it is a real human tooth, from somebody else,

and it's been put into an ivory plug to fit it in,

and then to actually stabilise it within her own mouth

and around the teeth is this metal wire

that's been wrapped around,

and that, from tests, has come back as being platinum,

So, very expensive.

It's an extraordinary piece of 200-year-old dentistry.

But more extraordinary still is where the tooth

itself may have come from.

When we see this sort of form of dentistry,

we have a term that we relate to as "Waterloo Teeth".

-Related to the Battle of Waterloo?

-Yes.

And that's because we know that, unfortunately,

when these men were involved in these battles

and somewhere such as Waterloo, you've got very high death rates,

you've got lots of people that are dying,

you then have an opportunity to actually claim something

to make money, and that would be the teeth.

Teeth were very lucrative.

So, people would actually then go around extracting the teeth

to then sell and use in other people's mouths.

It's extraordinary.

So you've got this well-heeled woman,

-she's lost quite a few teeth...

-Yes, yes.

She's lost this tooth right in the front,

which does affect her appearance,

and she's paid to have this expensive dental work done

so that she can smile at somebody

-with a dead man's tooth in her mouth.

-Yes!

Stories like these are why I love archaeology -

it has the power to shock us with grim revelations like this

about what London's rich did in the name of vanity -

and it can surprise us, too,

with new insights into an iconic battle

that defined Britain and Europe for centuries.

But few of archaeology's surprises

come as unexpectedly as in our next dig diary.

It comes from Lenborough in Buckinghamshire,

where one amateur made the find of a lifetime.

In the early 11th century, marauding Vikings terrorised southern England.

Ethelred was the Anglo-Saxon ruler who attempted to buy peace,

paying off the invading armies with sackloads of silver.

It was a waste of money.

Within a generation, England was ruled by a Danish king

and the Viking conquest was complete.

1,000 years later, in Buckinghamshire,

an amateur metal detectorist made an astonishing discovery,

including evidence of the desperation of the Anglo-Saxons

in the face of the Viking threat.

And, luckily, he had a camera with him.

In December 2014, Paul Coleman was taking part

in an annual metal-detectorist rally in Lenborough,

and he was planning to call it a day.

BEEPING

After an hour and a half, we'd got back to the same point

we'd virtually started from,

and decided that with only one musket ball to show

between three of us that there wasn't a great deal in this field,

or if there was, it was too deep for us to pick up.

My friend's detector interferes with mine,

the radio frequencies are very close,

so I asked him if he would move over.

He said his was fine, so I should move.

So I did, I moved four or five yards away

and walked immediately onto a large signal,

which turned out to be...a really large signal.

As Paul began to dig down, he saw something unmistakable.

So, as soon as I saw that shiny disc, I knew it was a coin.

I also know that it was potentially more than one,

because the signal was really large,

so I just had an inkling that this was going to be something special.

When I bent down to pick that one up and I saw the others,

that's when I realised that this was a large hoard of coins.

With the help of the Portable Antiquities Scheme,

Paul uncovered a lead container

overflowing with silver and gold coins.

He could scarcely believe his eyes.

-LAUGHTER

-There's serious cash down there.

-He had one job.

-Yeah, one job. All he had to do was look after them.

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

Straight away they began to wonder

where this huge fortune had come from.

Then they spotted a clue - the name of a king.

That looks like Ethelred.

Is it? Is that Ethelred?

-Well, it says on there. Can you not...?

-Yeah, I think it's Ethelred.

Ethelred was the English king from 978 AD to 1016.

He was so desperate to end the Vikings' raids,

he tried to pay them to go away.

Ethelred's name is crucial to dating these coins

to sometime in his reign, 1,000 years ago.

-It's getting to the bottom, in't it?

-It's getting dark in here.

CHATTER

-Be careful, cos some of them are really brittle.

-Yeah.

Light was fading. Under the guidance of an archaeologist

from the Portable Antiquities Scheme,

Paul and his friends worked quickly and carefully

to rescue the treasure, but the stash seemed never-ending.

It's a sad day when you run out of bags

to fill silver coins up with, in't it?

-LAUGHTER

-Especially when they're that deep.

Shall we just leave the rest, then, because we haven't got any bags?

-Like you can afford to.

-Yeah, we have.

-Oh, we've got some more, OK.

-No.

-Just put less in.

E-mail head office and see who's...

See if they know whether the coin guy's in.

They took the hoard back to the safety of a local farmer's kitchen

and spent the rest of the night counting out their treasure.

5,252 silver coins,

each one a millennium old,

many in near-mint condition

and priceless to historians.

They were sent to the British Museum,

where numismatist Gareth Williams

began piecing together what this remarkable hoard could tell us

about Britain 1,000 years ago.

Now he's brought along the most revealing specimens

for us to look at in our lab.

Well, Gareth, these coins are looking absolutely beautiful

now that they've been cleaned up -

-and this is just a small sample of the collection.

-That's right.

Altogether, over 5,000 coins,

so, one of the largest hoards of Anglo-Saxon coins ever discovered.

-And when do they date to?

-They date to the late Anglo-Saxon period.

And we've got coins in here of two kings -

Ethelred II, who ruled from 978-1016,

and his successor Canute, who ruled from 1016-1035.

We've got the savings hoard of the earlier part,

and then a currency hoard, coins withdrawn from what was current

at a time of burial, which is the last few years of Canute's reign,

so probably sometime in the 1030s.

-Can you pull out one of each ruler?

-Yes, certainly.

Here is Ethelred II.

And here is Canute.

Now, these aren't portraits of either of them.

Coins of this period generally just imitate late Roman imperial designs.

And both of those are just images of late Roman emperors

with the king's name on.

Canute was the Danish king

determined to seize power in England and to establish Viking rule here.

In desperation, King Ethelred

resorted to throwing money at the problem,

earning himself an unfortunate nickname.

The English kingdom, which was more or less quite a new creation

by the 10th century,

was under a lot of pressure by Viking raids,

from Viking armies, increasingly, during the reign of Ethelred.

And we know Ethelred as Ethelred the Unready.

The indication is that it's a contemporary nickname.

And the response to these Viking raids

seems to be paying in greater quantities of money

to Vikings quite simply to go away, as well.

And we know the Vikings don't go away,

they see the English kingdom, which was very rich by this time,

as a great source of...of wealth.

The coins in this hoard

reveal how desperate Ethelred became

when faced with a full-scale Viking invasion.

So, Ethelred tried paying them to go away, that didn't work,

he tried fighting them to drive them away, that didn't work,

but he also tried a third method,

and that's also represented in this hoard

by a rather unusual type of coin.

And, you can see, this doesn't have a royal image on it.

Yes, I can see this is a little lamb,

he's carrying a cross under his arm,

he's got a halo as well.

-So we're quite clear about it being a holy lamb.

-Yeah.

This seems to be part of a sort of coordinated year of prayer

and increased piety in the year 1009.

The point was that the Vikings

were seen as God's judgment on the English for their ungodly behaviour,

and so the theory was if the English became more godly,

maybe God would reward them for that with support against the Vikings.

-So literally reduced to praying for help?

-Exactly.

This new hoard reveals the last hope of a desperate king.

Coins minted with Christian imagery

in the hope that God would help him beat the Vikings.

But Ethelred's piety was in vain -

Canute seized power, and the Viking conquest was complete.

Finds like this have made it a remarkable year

for archaeology in the east of England.

And in London, one giant engineering project

has offered an unparalleled opportunity

to peel back the layers of the capital's history

to reveal how the city first began to boom.

Since Roman times, men and women have flocked to London,

driving its population from 30,000 two millennia ago

to 7,000,000 today.

And the capital is still growing.

This is one of its newest and biggest developments, Crossrail,

London's high-speed underground rail network.

It's a massive piece of civil engineering...

but it's also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for archaeologists.

The vast excavations are revealing what life was like for Londoners

as the city mushroomed over two millennia...

but what we're also discovering is the cost in human life.

Liverpool Street railway station

in the very heart of the city's buzzing financial district...

where within a week archaeologists from Crossrail

and Museum of London Archaeology

found a huge 17th-century graveyard right outside the train station.

It's the first week of excavation

with the MOLA team down here at Liverpool Street.

Behind me, we've got the full team,

up to 60 people every day in two shifts.

And we've about a metre of the burial ground off so far

and removed several hundred skeletons already.

400 years ago, this cemetery was used to bury London's poor.

It was a time of phenomenal population growth in the city,

but one that left this graveyard jam-packed.

You know, we're not looking at a lovely flat green field

with neatly laid out rows -

a lot of these graves are intercutting

and right on top of each other.

And you can see here two grave cuts

with coffins laid side by side,

and just here, between the legs, you can see another skull,

showing that these two graves actually disturbed another one

that was already in situ when they were put in.

Skeleton after skeleton is unearthed from the densely packed graveyard

and it becomes clear that many have something in common.

One of the more interesting things for me personally

is the number of older adolescents and young adults

we're finding in this cemetery.

Normally, this is the healthiest time of your life

and you shouldn't be dying.

We know that the population

grew enormously in the time of this cemetery,

from about 50,000 up to nearly 1,000,000 in London.

I suspect that these are migrants coming in

who were unprepared for the infectious diseases

that you get within the urban landscape of London at that time.

Diseases like tuberculosis, measles and smallpox

killed tens of thousands every year.

Now this dig has uncovered the young men and women

who may have come from across Britain

for a better life in the capital, only to die an early death.

But there was worse to come for 17th-century Londoners,

as the team revealed when they discovered a mass grave

containing evidence of an even bigger killer.

They've brought the footage into our lab.

And we've got some more extraordinary footage

of your finds at Liverpool Street.

This is pits which contain the remains of numerous individuals.

I mean, those bones are crammed in there. This looks like a mass grave.

Yeah, it is. Some 3,000 individual burials have been excavated,

but this one really stands out,

because it's clearly a multiple burial,

you know, with very many people

being buried at the same time in a large square-cut grave.

A gravestone found nearby offers clues to the deadly disease

that killed the occupants of this mass grave.

-We do have just one or two examples of gravestones from 1665.

-Right.

-This is one, isn't it, here?

-Yeah - and we can relate,

in the case of this individual, back to the burial registers

to see that it is recorded that she died of plague.

So, what we have here? Mary Godfree.

That is, that's Mary Godfree -

died, I think, 2nd of September, 1665.

It shows she was actually a victim of the Great Plague.

August, September of that year, you know,

many thousands of Londoners died.

This burial ground was one of the main places

where those victims were buried,

so it's quite likely we've come across evidence

for one of these mass graves.

The Great Plague of 1665

was a horrific chapter in London's history.

It killed 100,000 people within a year.

Historic accounts famously describe cartloads of the dead

dumped unceremoniously in giant pits...

..but now evidence from this dig is showing us something very different.

What we can tell is each of these individuals

was in a coffin when they were buried.

So, there was care being taken

when they're being put in the ground -

and that's perhaps something that we don't learn

-from the historical record.

-That's correct.

Although this was a period of high mortality -

they really struggled to keep up

with putting the bodies below ground, which they had to do -

they did take time just to place them in coffins

and to lay them out carefully in the graves.

So, to me, this shows a level of care

that perhaps we didn't suspect beforehand.

Some of the historical records

-suggests that things were a bit more haphazard.

-Hmm.

Daniel Defoe, you know, describes cartloads of corpses

being dumped, you know, into pits.

And this is not what we're seeing here.

It really brings it home

what a terrible time this was for Londoners.

This dig shows us how disease was part of everyday life

in 17th-century London,

but it also reveals that even when faced with a deadly epidemic,

Londoners were still treating the dead with dignity.

The Crossrail dig is right in the heart of the capital,

an area that has been densely populated for thousands of years,

where today every layer of excavation

reveals another layer of history.

It takes the team all the way back

to Roman London and more tales of death,

not from disease, this time, but deliberate violence.

We're working on excavating this Roman road,

which is a major Roman thoroughfare.

Yeah, so what we've uncovered just in the last day is...

a number of skulls appearing in this area.

They're actually mostly upside down,

so they're not completely obvious.

There's literally a line stretching from there, the last one we found,

all the way back to the end of the dig.

The possibility is that these are beheading victims.

Just a few days later,

another remarkable burial shows more evidence of Roman execution.

CHATTER

Yeah, we've just had a really interesting find

down here at Liverpool Street.

We're in the eastern ticket hall excavation

and we've just found an intact burial

that most likely dates to the Roman period.

And the most interesting thing about it is, you can probably see,

the skull has been detached

and placed between the knees of this individual.

There could be a number of different reasons.

The first one, obviously, is an execution and beheading.

We know that Rome ruled its empire with an iron fist,

but can remains like these

really be evidence of its rough justice in Britain?

As an osteologist myself,

I want to see the bones with my own eyes.

So, Don and Jay have brought one skeleton into our lab.

It's interesting to have such explicit evidence

of decapitation at this site.

-And, I believe, this skeleton shows decapitation again?

-Exactly.

What we have here is the remains of a male adult

that we found in the cemetery.

And what's very interesting to see

is in the neck area on the first thoracic vertebra

we have a very clear cut mark going through the skeleton.

For example, this facet would normally fit on here,

but it's been sliced off by a very sharp blade,

and this cut has properly caused

the full decapitation of this individual.

There's a polishing of the bone, isn't there,

where the blade has come through here?

So right at the base of somebody's neck.

Do you think this would have been a blow coming in from the back, then?

We believe so. It seems for the blade to have come in

and to have not affected the other spinous processes,

it seems that the neck probably was flexed,

-in which case you'd suspect that the cut did come from...the back.

-Yes.

So, by looking really carefully at the orientation of those cuts,

you can reconstruct the grisly last moments of that person's life.

Severed vertebrae,

decapitated skulls -

it's chilling evidence of the brutal reality of Roman rule in Britain.

But there was another side to life in the capital 2,000 years ago.

One object in the Museum of London's collection

reveals a touching tale of love.

This is one of my favourite objects in the museum,

and this is actually a tombstone.

We can see the letters here that spell the name Claudia Martina.

And this has been set up to her by her husband Anencletus -

and the really interesting thing about Anencletus

is he only has one name,

which tells us that he's actually enslaved, he's a Roman slave.

So that means that we had a free British woman marrying a slave?

Yes. So Claudia Martina, her name tells us she's freeborn,

she's married this man Anencletus,

which was actually in defiance of social norms at the time.

And, you know, my romantic soul likes to think

that there's a huge love story here,

that she defied convention to be with him.

So, it's still a very uncommon situation, then,

-in Roman Britain?

-Yeah, absolutely.

She would have needed permission from his owner

to marry and live with him,

and she would have given up her status as a Roman citizen,

so it wouldn't have been an easy decision for her.

But this tombstone reveals that Anencletus may have been worth it.

Thanks to his education,

he was elevated to a position of responsibility in local government,

which, unusually for a slave, may have made him quite wealthy.

Anencletus, we're told by this inscription,

he works for the local council, so, actually, his status,

it would have been relatively high for a slave,

so he would have been literate, he would have been earning money,

he could have had some wealth, he had position -

so, really, for a woman like Claudia Martina,

he might have been a good bet for her and to make a sound marriage.

From merciless justice to merciless disease,

archaeology has shown London was forged in tough times -

but from a Roman love affair

to Londoners' respect for their plague dead,

it's also shown the humanity at the heart of this city's story.

Not all archaeology involves digging into the ground.

In the Thames Estuary,

a team of divers is battling the elements

to solve a maritime mystery -

and they've sent us this dive diary.

In 1665, Britain was gearing up for war with the Dutch,

primarily to win back valuable trade routes to the New World.

Among the Royal Navy's flagships was the London, a mighty gunship,

140ft long and armed with 76 cannon.

It's thought that on the 8th of March 1665,

she was still crammed with guests,

yet to disembark further down the river,

when suddenly, in the mouth of the Thames,

an explosion blew her to pieces.

No-one knows what caused that explosion,

and to have any hope of solving the mystery,

the first challenge is to rescue the London

from the savage currents and ravenous wildlife

of the Thames Estuary before she's lost forever.

In 2014, Cotswold Archaeology, Historic England

and local Southend residents launched a rescue mission.

The team returned in the summer of 2015,

when they recorded this footage.

So, this is day two, and we're back out on site of the London.

Our main objective for this season,

which is the excavation of the gun carriage.

This was found at the end of last year

and we just sort of uncovered the very top of it,

so the priority for this season

is to continue excavating the gun carriage.

We are to commence dive operations now.

Unfortunately, the wreck's location

means that the London isn't going to give up her secrets easily.

As you can see here,

we're right next to the main shipping channel

in and out of the Thames, so this is a very busy shipping lane,

and some of the bigger ships are churning up the water -

and we know that because when we're down there,

visibility goes from OK to nothing,

and the noise kind of vibrates through your chest.

But noise and poor visibility aren't the team's biggest problems.

As turbulence from passing ships stirs up the sediment,

it exposes the site to the destructive forces of nature.

So, we've got marine organisms like teredo and gribble

that eat the wood, and that kind of just destroys it,

and that can happen very quickly.

So, this is what is really important -

the work that we're doing,

and especially recovering this gun carriage,

because if that remains in situ as it is,

it will not be there for very much longer.

Despite these treacherous conditions,

the team has recovered a wealth of finds,

which show how the Thames silt

can perfectly preserve the artefacts hidden beneath it.

This looks really... In really good condition.

You can see the grain.

-It doesn't look like it was used very much at the time, either.

-No.

-There's not much in the way of...

-Not much wear.

-Very nice.

-Yeah, nice. Well done, Steve.

Some more recent finds.

This is what I recovered a few weeks ago.

A little sundial compass.

To me, this would have been like a Rolex watch of the day.

You would have the sundial, the compass in there, matched it up,

that would have lifted up and they could get the dates or the time.

Steve believes that this probably would have belonged

to one of the higher ranking crew members..

The chap who had this would be in the nice cabin, you know,

far more comfortable than down towards the bilges.

These are just a fraction of the objects recovered from the wreck

so far, but time and tide wait for no man,

so the team's focus soon returns to the star attraction.

The gun carriage is the main objective of this week.

And we've been progressively digging out that carriage

and trying to uncover it as much as we can.

Once we've uncovered it, the aim is to recover it.

Working in such poor visibility,

the team relies heavily on the underwater survey,

which reveals much more detail

about the location of the carriage within the wreck.

So, this line here we think is the bottom of, you know...

close to the bottom of the ship, and this kind of dark line here

is where the carriages are, which looks like, well,

what we think is the main gun bit, cos that's what we think -

we've got the side of the ship here, lying on its side

because the carriages are pointing downwards

rather than lying horizontal.

And the fact that the gun carriages,

or at least the one that we're excavating at the moment,

has got all its associated gun furniture, tackle,

kind of tells us that this object, this artefact,

hasn't moved very far from its original position.

Finally, on the very last day of the dive,

and after three and a half centuries lying on the seabed,

the wooden gun carriage is rescued from the depths.

We've finally recovered the gun carriage,

and that was a real effort.

It was in a really awkward position

to try and get to the bottom of it, it was, you know,

trapped under many artefacts, very fragile artefacts,

so we had to recover them carefully without destroying them.

But eventually we've got it out and strapped it up and recovered it,

and it was a great relief when it finally broke the surface.

It was really amazing, actually,

to think that that's been under the water for 350 years

and then suddenly it rises up.

Weighing in at around a tonne, this is the first complete gun carriage

to be recovered from the London.

It's just one of a wealth of clues rescued from the seabed.

Some of which offer intriguing insights into the final moments

on board the doomed ship.

These finds were all made in a small area,

suggesting that the London was jam-packed

with supplies and ammunition.

It sounds like the gunpowder was all together then in one place,

to cause such a massive explosion to rip this whole ship apart.

The area that a lot of the material has come from

is not much bigger than this table.

These are only sort of a small selection of what we found -

and yet we've got over 80 fragments of linstock,

a huge number of hand spikes.

And it's early days, but we would think

that perhaps we've either got excess supplies on the ship

or, because it was fairly early in the voyage,

perhaps they were putting everything out on deck to redistribute it

between all the guns that were on the London.

So, the ammunition had yet to be safely stowed -

but one find shows how the cannons would have been lit.

An incredible achievement, to get that gun carriage out of the water,

but here we have some of the other artefacts, as well,

and what have we got here?

We've got a selection of linstocks

that were used to light the cannon from a safe distance.

I'm intrigued by these items. How do they work?

They are turned wooden sticks, basically.

And you would have a rope wrapped around these,

which we call a slow match.

And the end of it passes through this hole here

and is slowly smouldering away at one end,

and then you hold it at the end and light the cannon.

And on this particular one, we've got some scorch marks,

obviously real evidence to show that they have been used

and have been scorched by the slow match that was around them.

It seems, then, that the London was crammed with ammunition,

and she may also have been crowded with guests

who were yet to disembark downriver.

But the archaeologists also made further finds

which hint at a possible cause

of the terrible accident waiting to happen.

There's some quite personal items, really -

-these are little tobacco pipes, are they?

-Yeah.

Tobacco pipes, though, I mean,

this was a ship that was going out to war,

that obviously had cannon on board,

you've got a ship that is packed full of gunpowder

and you've got people smoking?

I know, it's a bit of a recipe for disaster, really, isn't it?

I guess health and safety might have been a bit different 350 years ago,

but with the crew members, you've got visitors onboard,

you've got over 300 barrels of gunpowder,

naked flames from both the linstock and people smoking,

from the candles,

they're going on their outward voyage

and then something happened and it blew up.

So, we don't need to be necessarily looking for a suspicious reason

for this explosion?

It doesn't need to have been arson or done with any intent,

it could have purely been an accident?

I think that's probably most likely.

And I think a really important message, as well,

which is, "Do not get on a warship full of gunpowder and smoke."

THEY LAUGH

Yes!

We may finally have a plausible theory

to explain the London disaster.

A flagship vessel fully loaded with gunpowder, a distracted crew,

and someone's disastrous mistake.

The Museum of London bone store

holds more evidence of the dangers of naval life.

This man served in Nelson's Navy in the 1800s,

and lived to well over 50 -

but his skeleton tells us that his life at sea was brutal.

Although, obviously, we're looking at him as a skeleton, he's dead,

what we're trying to do is look at the things

that we can see on the bones

to tell us what actually then may have happened in their life

and how then they coped with it -

and looking at his skeleton, he's remarkable,

because when we see lots of the things that we do,

he obviously had a hard life

and managed to survive lots of nasty insults and impacts.

-This collarbone has got a healed fracture in it.

-Yes.

Now, that must have happened years before this individual died,

cos it's healed quite nicely,

although it has never regained its original shape.

So, these are the kind of fractures that you might sustain

from a fall onto the shoulder.

-Are there any other injuries?

-There are.

He's got some fractures to the ribs - again, all on one side,

and they would appear to follow a similar pattern to the clavicle,

so that might indicate that that's happening at the same time,

it's the same event.

We've then also got the fracture of the femur, we can see there...

It does make you wonder if this all happened at the same time,

-it's all on the right-hand side of his body.

-Yes.

And these are the kinds of fractures that you might get, for instance,

from falling from a height. What else, Jelena, then?

He's also got a fracture to the first metacarpal,

and then we've got the fracture also there on the radius,

where you tend to sort of fall, you put your hand out.

-He's got a broken nose.

-Yes.

So, you can sort of see, there, you've again healed,

but you've got that sort of deflection.

Again, this is most likely not to have been caused by a fall,

but actually to have been caused by some, how do we say,

interpersonal aggression?

-Punched in the face?

-Yes.

-JELENA LAUGHS

With the vertebrae that you can see here,

they are all very frilly, they shouldn't look like that.

And then you can see where you've actually got

some crushing of the vertebrae, so if we come there to that one...

Oh, yes, that's lost a lot of height.

So, a thoracic vertebra, a vertebra from the back of the chest,

-there's a fairly normal-looking vertebra...

-Yes.

-..and there's the one that suffered this wedge fracture.

-Yes.

So, that's been completely squashed, reduced in height,

so he's got a whole suite of changes that you would be looking at,

but also then you're thinking of the consequences and impact

of how he would be able to function in a daily life,

but also how he was functioning while he was still at sea

and then also later on in older age, the, you know, potential pain,

discomfort, that you might have from these.

It's phenomenal when you're looking at the skeleton

and you can see so many things that have affected them in life,

but the fact that they actually were able to survive -

and particularly when we think of the times in which they lived,

they wouldn't have had all the things to help them that we do now,

so that's even more amazing, that they've actually survived, really,

so, they really were hardy and tough.

The London set sail in 1656,

just as our Navy began to assert its will across the world.

Within 200 years, Britannia ruled the waves.

Sailors like this man made that possible -

and he was left with the scars.

But in the mid 20th century, the tables turned,

and Britain was on the back foot

as it desperately defended itself against savage attacks

by Hitler's Luftwaffe

But one thing remained the same -

Britons put themselves on the line for their country.

Our next dig takes us to West Sussex,

where archaeologists are shining a new light

on a story we think we know so well - the Battle of Britain.

But their new discovery reveals forgotten heroes -

a machine and a pilot.

EXPLOSION

In the summer of 1940, waves of German Luftwaffe filled our skies.

Hitler's plan - crush the smaller RAF

and then launch a full-scale invasion.

Standing in his way - the iconic Spitfires

and their daring British pilots.

But a dig on this hillside is reminding us

that Spitfires didn't win the Battle of Britain on their own,

and that our British pilots weren't the only heroes.

We are excavating the remains of a Hurricane

shot down in the Battle of Britain on the 9th of September 1940.

Hawker Hurricanes actually shot down 50% more enemy planes

than did Spitfires -

yet it's the Spitfire whose name has become iconic.

The Hurricane was, if you like, the forgotten hero

of the Battle of Britain.

I mean, it's not forgotten,

but it didn't get all the glamour of the Spitfire.

Unfortunately, this Hurricane never made it back to base.

This is the impact crater.

It's slightly ovalled.

It's where the aircraft's come down and hit.

Then, obviously, the weight of the aircraft

has displaced all the earth and the chalk.

We've had pistons and valves and bits of engine cases.

Now we've cleaned it up, we can see where it is.

We can now proceed to go down and see what else is there.

Amongst the finds recovered

is evidence of the sheer violence of the impact.

This is part of the ammunition box

that contained the 303 rounds for one of the machine guns.

It's just a thin aluminium box, but when the aircraft crashed,

as there was a lot of ammunition on it,

what happened was the force pushed all the ammunition

down into the box, and we can actually see, here,

this is one of the bullets -

it's actually punched its way through the box

and made a very neat little hole there, so that's a cracking find.

75 years to the day after the crash,

one of the larger pieces is discovered -

part of the propeller assembly

from the nose of the plane and it has survived intact.

This is where the propeller blade would go,

so the propeller blade was sticking out here,

and that would be rotating,

and there'll be another one about here

and another one about here.

So, you've got the three-blade Rotol hub.

Here to help with the heavy lifting

is a group from Operation Nightingale -

an initiative to rehabilitate British soldiers

recently returned from active service.

The team today is largely composed of military veterans.

Excitingly for us,

we've got three Polish soldiers that served in Afghanistan

and they're working alongside British veterans,

people who have fought in Afghanistan and Iraq,

but also people who have served in Northern Ireland

and, indeed, in the Falklands campaign.

For these Polish veterans,

this is a chance to celebrate the other unsung heroes of the story -

the Polish pilots who fought for the Allies in Squadrons like the 303.

APPLAUSE.

This is great for me,

because the pilots with Division 303 are Polish heroes.

Polish flying heroes -

and Sergeant Wunsche,

this is a great, great pilot with the Squadron.

303 Squadron was a predominantly Polish unit,

and it became the most successful in the Battle of Britain,

shooting down 108 German planes in a single month.

The Polish pilots, they were almost, if you like,

the forgotten heroes of the Battle of Britain,

they were relatively small in number

and what they did, just like the Hurricane, really,

was disproportionate to their numbers,

but they achieved an incredibly high kill score.

Their determination to get at the enemy was second to none -

for obvious reasons, their country being invaded -

so, consequently, their kill rate of enemy aircraft destroyer

was significantly higher than any other squadron.

21-year-old Kazimierz Wunsche was a Sergeant in 303 Squadron

when his Hurricane was shot down on the 9th of September 1940.

Luckily he managed to parachute to safety,

and as the presence here of his daughter

and granddaughter testifies, he lived to tell the tale.

He was slightly injured.

The oil blew into his face, so he had some burns,

and he had something injured in his leg and his back.

But after staying in Hove Hospital for a month,

he went back to flying and he was flying until the end of the war.

My grandfather died when I was six months old,

so I never got to really know him,

and I'm amazed that we found this plane.

The last person to see it intact before it went into the ground

was my grandfather, and that means a lot to me.

There's a piece -

I think I'll remember it till the end of my days -

it's the Morse panel.

He would have touched that,

he would have looked at that on a daily basis,

every time he got into the plane.

If his radio had gone down, that might have saved his life

and so to see the words "Morse" and all the other bits on that piece

is just incredible and it does make me feel a real connection with him.

The 75th anniversary of the crash is marked by a rare sight -

a fly-past by a fully restored original World War II Hurricane.

You've got really quiet.

HURRICANE ENGINE

Now, what are you actually hoping to discover

by undertaking an excavation like this,

because we know that Hurricanes were used in the war

and went down in the war

and in fact we know that this actual Hurricane went down in the war,

so what other information are you hoping to glean?

This really is not going to change the story of the Battle of Britain.

However, you can get little vignettes from it,

and it's the personal stories.

Occasionally you get bits of kits from the pilot.

The ammunition will also tell you a story

about that particular day in September 1940

in the hope that this aircraft

was going to bring down some of those attacking aircraft.

I think that's really important to remember,

that the Poles played a very big role,

but there were pilots from Czechoslovakia, as was,

French pilots, a couple of Americans, South Africans,

Australians, people from all around the world

contributing to this global effort

to stop this hideous entity from being able to invade.

So, this artefact, although it is just a bullet,

it's way more than that,

because this has got a narrative of those days in 1940

and, you know, a critical part of our island's history, really.

What do you think it was about the Polish pilots

that gave them such a good kill rate?

I think there is almost a visceral hatred

that goes on with the Polish pilots.

We've been talking about the defending of Britain,

with the Battle of Britain.

Now, the Poles didn't have that luxury in 1939.

Their country had been invaded, it's the reason Britain goes to war,

and so they are fighting to try and liberate their country

and the only way they can do it at that time

is to fight back at the Luftwaffe, and so they are a determined bunch.

They are a group with anger.

They are a group that perform incredibly well.

And despite this plane crashing, of course, Wunsche himself escapes,

and, as we saw, his daughter and granddaughter in the film,

-I think the archaeology is very important to them.

-It was.

And to be able to have that hands-on for your family tree,

that's a physical manifestation of your heritage

which is really, really powerful.

So, you are able to put your fingers

where your grandfather or father had put his in the cockpit,

or to look through a piece of Perspex, a bit of glass,

so you are looking through that same viewing screen

that your relative had,

and that's a really strange feeling in archaeology,

to be able to have that direct connection

with people from the past.

This dig has helped a family connect with their war hero

from a brave generation,

and reminds us all about the foreign pilots

who risked everything to save Britain.

It reveals the power archaeology has to tell our stories

whatever the era,

from a bloody battle fought in our skies in 1940

to the brutal oppression of Roman rule.

While from the silt of the Thames

and from a trench in Waterloo...

..new clues have helped us solve age-old mysteries -

to reveal not only what came before us,

but to show how our past still shapes who we are today.

Next time on Digging for Britain - we are in the North scrambling

for clues to the first Kings of Scotland...

I think I've got it.

..we're there for the Viking find of a lifetime...

-Oh, wow!

-Oh!

Do we have a winner here?

..and unearth a forgotten graveyard of ancient warriors.

It looks absolutely fantastic.