West Digging for Britain

We might be a small island,

but we've got a big history that's still full of mysteries.

So every year, hundreds of archaeologists

go out hunting for clues to our forgotten past.

I have never seen anything like that.

In 2016, their discoveries have been more exciting than ever.

-It's all happening now.

-You little devil!

-Yeah.

In this episode, Digging For Britain showcases the very best of them

from the west.

Each excavation was filmed as it happened

by the archaeologists themselves.

Their dig diaries mean that we can be there

for every exciting moment of discovery.

Cracking little find.

Superb.

SHE SQUEALS

And now the archaeologists are bringing their finds,

from pottery to metalwork to human remains,

into our lab so that we can get a closer look at them

and find out what they tell us about our British ancestors.

Welcome to Digging For Britain.

In this episode, we are joining archaeologists in the west

as they make discoveries that will transform the history of Britain.

On Jersey, a 2,000-year-old hoard of hidden treasure...

-It's heavy.

-Really?

..reveals the terror of the Roman invasion.

That is stunningly beautiful.

In Tintagel, Cornwall, an incredible Dark Age palace

is uncovered at the mythical home of King Arthur.

See, I'm starting to go on flights of fancy now.

And to me, this is where King Arthur lived.

And on Salisbury Plain, a lost map unearths hidden trenches

that revolutionise our view of the First World War.

This is as if the British have captured the German trenches

and then they have to dig in

facing a German counterattack from up the hill.

To put these revelations in context, I've come to Bristol Museum.

And I've been given privileged behind-the-scenes access

to see some of the archaeological treasures rarely seen by the public.

But our first dig diary takes us 40 miles away...

to Stonehenge.

3,000 years ago, our ancestors built Stonehenge

as a site of ceremony and ritual, west of the River Avon.

In recent years, archaeologists have come to believe that Stonehenge

is just part of a vast sacred landscape full of monuments.

But so far, their discoveries have mainly been to the west of the Avon.

What lies to the east has largely been a mystery -

until this year, when a team from Wessex Archaeology

started digging at Bulford.

At Bulford, just three miles away from Stonehenge,

the discoveries were not only unexpected, they were unique.

And they are helping to write a whole new chapter

in the history of this archaeologically rich landscape.

Sieve this out a bit.

Phil Harding leads the team.

Hi, this is Phil Harding.

I'm talking to you on the edge of Salisbury Plain

about three miles east of Stonehenge.

That's in that direction there.

And I'm working on a site...

We've been working here since, what, just before Christmas now,

and this is really quite an exciting site.

Come and have a look.

The team has uncovered something never seen in Britain before.

A double henge - two circular banks and ditches.

What we've found are two previously unknown henge monuments.

This is an incredible opportunity to unravel part of the ritual landscape

of this part of Wiltshire.

Most importantly, just down the road from Stonehenge.

So what Phil really wants to find out is whether this site was in use

at the same time as Stonehenge

and exactly what our Neolithic ancestors were doing here.

Ground-penetrating radar reveals a series of pits

just outside the double henge.

That is amazing.

Phil hopes that these will provide the evidence he needs.

HE LAUGHS

An axe. Excellent.

It's a promising find.

That is absolutely gorgeous.

With the blade there just beautifully polished.

Neolithic axes were incredibly important tools

used for the clearing of trees during the earliest days of farming.

Putting one in a pit seems like a huge sacrifice.

There would be plenty of use left in this,

and to place one of these in a pit, throw away a genuinely useful axe,

why would you do it?

As well as dozens of axe heads,

mysterious chalk balls are found in the pits.

Lovely.

Oh! What a gem.

These are finds that connect us to our ancestors,

and for Phil it's precious evidence of what they were doing here.

I'm sure they must have been...maybe lucky mementos, maybe superstitious,

maybe totemic items.

Some sort of votive offering to the gods.

And maybe it brought them good luck.

In one week, 40 pits are excavated.

And what's found in each one is remarkably similar.

This is an incredible collection of material.

It's as though people have got a checklist

and they are placing objects into the pit.

These are such enigmatic clues,

glimpses of the rituals being carried out at the double henge.

But some of the pits contain something rather different.

Now, that...

..is what I call a bone.

Hoo hoo hoo hoo!

It's from an aurochs.

God, look at the size of it.

A giant prehistoric cow.

The aurochs was not on the average Friday night takeaway menu.

I think what we are really looking at

is festive, feasting, celebrations.

Who knows, might be seasonal, it might be marriage,

it could be any other things.

But what it is not is your day-to-day rubbish.

This seems, then, to be a ritual site

where our ancestors held religious feasts.

But can Phil be sure that it's contemporary with Stonehenge?

Can we prove that these ring ditches

is of the same date as our Neolithic pits?

If we can do that, then we actually find an incredible ritual complex

of the same date as maybe Stonehenge.

The team digs a trench across the double henge,

looking for evidence that will give them a date.

Phil, look at that.

What you got there, then?

-Pot.

-Yeah, but...

a decoration.

Ah!

-That is...

-Yeah.

I swear that is, that's decorated.

You little devil, Johan.

It's a fragment of pottery.

Well, I'm getting really, really excited about this

because it looks like it is decorated.

You can see there is a bit of a ridge there and a ridge there.

And these grooves. And I think that is the best indicator that we've got

of grooved ware, which is the typical late-Neolithic pottery.

That is what we want to find.

Grooved-ware pottery like this dates from the same period as Stonehenge,

so it strongly suggests that this double henge

was in use at the same time.

I've invited Phil to come into our lab with some of his finds

to give me a fuller picture

as to what our ancestors were really up to at this unique site.

They are places where people are gathering together and feasting.

They have to be ceremonial monuments.

So, these very strange balls, what are those about?

These are made out of chalk.

What you'll notice, in some places - look at that -

you can see the actual manufacturing traces.

Chalk is a very soft rock.

If you start beating it about too much,

you will wear those manufacturing traces away.

So I think that they are ritual material,

being made for some function,

and then they are then being placed in the pit.

Those spheres, those balls, are special.

Now, what about the stone tools, then?

-These were coming out of the pits, as well.

-Axes.

Axes were incredibly powerful objects to them.

They are almost symbolic offerings to show their wealth, their status,

their power, because the material that is in the pits

is the refuse, if you like, from people that are carrying out

the ceremonies in our henge-type monuments.

This completely unexpected discovery

reveals a significant ritual site

where Neolithic people gathered for ceremonies and feasting.

By the time you've done all your post-excavation work on this,

what are you going to add to our understanding

of the Stonehenge landscape?

The people at my site

would probably have witnessed the construction of Stonehenge.

They are just a few miles away.

And what we've now done is we're moving our knowledge

from the west bank of the River Avon

and showing that equally as important is life on the east bank.

And it just blows me over.

I'm absolutely...

Britain's first double henge is a massive discovery

that, over the next few years, could fundamentally change

our understanding of how our ancestors 4,500 years ago

used the Stonehenge landscape.

Our next excavation also takes place on Salisbury Plain,

just five miles away from Stonehenge.

But the story it's revealing is very different

and took place just 100 years ago.

2016 was the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme,

the bloodiest battle in the history of the British Army,

with 60,000 casualties on the first day alone.

Those that led the campaign have been widely criticised

for the way the battle was fought,

for the inexperience and inadequate training of the soldiers.

But does archaeology support that perception

that the young men of Britain were sent to the Western Front

like lambs to the slaughter?

ROCK MUSIC PLAYS

SOLDIERS SHOUT

Salisbury Plain. Covering an area the size of the Isle of Wight,

for over 100 years it has been

the site of Britain's largest military training ground.

During World War I,

thousands of soldiers came here

in preparation for fighting in the trenches of northern France.

However, it's often thought that this training

was too short, and inadequate.

Incredibly, a map has been uncovered in the National Archive

that might change this perception once and for all.

It suggests that the Army was at least planning

to recreate German trenches of the Western Front

in these fields so our soldiers could rehearse attacks on them.

But were those trenches ever actually dug and used for training?

Military archaeologist Richard Osgood has come to investigate.

To get a map of where they've sited these practice trenches

is really unusual.

You've got individual notifications on the map,

so an S is a shelter.

MG, you might have guessed, is a machine-gun position.

To get all that together is really, really a huge opportunity.

But nonetheless, the map tells you about what they're MEANT to do.

It doesn't tell you what actually does happen.

Maybe this map was schematic, maybe it's not what's dug.

Our job here over the next couple of weeks is really to see

what's left under the ground.

The ideal would be to get architecture from trenches

and evidence for the lives of the people that were here 100 years ago.

Trench warfare dominated World War I.

With the invention of new powerful weapons,

such as massed artillery bombardments

and rapid-firing machine guns,

soldiers were forced to dig trenches to hide in for protection.

Soldiers could live in these trenches for weeks at a time

before being ordered to go over the top and charge at the enemy.

Don't know what that is.

If Richard can prove that extensive German trench fortifications

were recreated on Salisbury Plain,

it's proof that the soldiers sent here

received comprehensive training in attacking German positions,

dispelling the notion that they were ill-prepared.

On the first day of the dig,

Richard's team starts to look for evidence

of one of the German front-line trenches marked on the map.

We're looking for a machine-gun position.

It's marked, helpfully, MG on the map.

Already we are finding lots and lots of traces of the architecture

of the trench. And this is just stripping the topsoil off.

Richard finds a post from which barbed wire would have been hung,

cleverly designed so it could be put into the ground

without making a noise.

If you are putting a barbed wire fence in into no-man's-land,

you are hitting it with a hammer and it's making a big noise.

And snipers soon are attracted to that.

The way they work out how to deal with that is to put these things in.

And this will have a sort of corkscrew at the bottom.

And to put it into the ground you put a stick through this eyelet

and then you wind it down into the ground.

And a few metres away, they find the barbed wire

that it would have supported.

You know, you look at the obstacle of that,

imagine having that in front of the feature you're trying to take.

It's a real impediment.

Then, just behind where the barbed wire was found,

they discover what they've been looking for.

A section of a front-line German trench.

So we're on the German front-line trenches

and we were hoping to find the firing positions.

Do you think we have any evidence of that, Rich?

We've got some really good evidence.

We've got what we've identified now as a fire step.

A fire step is what lets you stand up out of the trench.

So when you need to fire you can get up and fire over the top.

And then when you finish you can get down into the relative safety

of the extra foot-and-a-half worth of soil.

This is clear evidence that the soldiers were training

to capture authentically recreated front-line German trenches.

But were the fortifications marked on the map behind the front line

also built?

If they were, it would prove that the soldiers were training

not only to attack the front line,

but also to fight right through to the rear.

OK, so we've got this really interesting shelter.

And importantly we've got the corrugated iron roof

that covered the shelter.

We've got this little step here,

which is probably some sort of seating arrangement,

so that with the roof above, people could sit underneath.

Shelters like these would have offered some protection

from the elements as well as from

the shrapnel of artillery bombardments.

Even more interesting is

at the very bottom we've got all of this trample,

which actually shows where the troops would have been walking

during the time of using these trenches.

The trampled floor isn't the only evidence

that these trenches weren't just for show,

but were used by large numbers of soldiers.

What we're looking at, is it a latrine or not?

It is a latrine.

It's more of a urinal rather than a proper toilet.

We know that because of the yellow sandy-like material at the bottom.

That's put very politely.

Richard is now excavating trenches

even further back from the front line,

and here he finds evidence of how soldiers were trained

to continue the battle once the German trenches had been captured.

There's a shelf facing up the hill in each of these little slots.

This is as if the British have captured the German trenches

and they have worked their way through the German front line,

they've got through the reserve and support lines,

and then they have to dig in

facing the presumed German counterattack from up the hill.

It's evidence that major battle simulations were taking place here.

After two weeks they've uncovered an extensive network of trenches,

shelters and machine-gun positions -

a faithful recreation of what soldiers could expect to encounter

on battlefields like the Somme.

They utilised the high ground over there,

they utilised the high ground in front of me

and the hillside behind me.

And this is just the German positions.

This is hectares and hectares.

It's a vast training landscape.

It's incredible that this map had been lost,

and without it we wouldn't have had a clue

that so much effort had been made

in recreating such an amazingly huge trench system.

Richard's discovery on the ground changes World War I history

and the view that soldiers were poorly trained

before being sent to war.

People that are training through this in 1915

are getting as good an experience as they possibly can.

This is an example of generals really trying their very best

to give the training required for what's going to happen in 1916.

Getting away from the idea of these chaps

just walking around the parade square with broom handles

and then being sent to imminent death on the Battle of the Somme.

Even practising on Salisbury Plain,

trench warfare must have been miserable.

So what can archaeology tell us about the men who trained here?

Richard has come into the lab to tell me.

And you've got some of the artefacts here.

Yeah, we do. This is all about morale, in many ways.

You can be bored in the trenches, and wet and miserable,

and the one thing you'll want to do

if you are sitting there cold and tired is to have a brew.

And that tin over there, that's a tin of condensed milk.

-Right.

-And the soldiers bayoneted it.

-Yeah.

-You can imagine them sitting there in the trench, need a brew.

You pour that, the condensed milk in, chuck the tin away.

And I think that's lovely.

That's all about keeping sane, frankly.

The other thing you've got connected with that sort of thing

is that thing. I'm really pleased this was empty

and we didn't damage it in opening it,

because that's a tin of sardines.

You can imagine what that would have been like a hundred years on

if we'd opened it... But again, having things like tins of fish,

cups of tea, will make these practice trenches

not seem quite so bad as they might otherwise.

They're not under fire from the Germans here, but nonetheless,

they've got the same sort of misery of existence.

And that's the sort of thing that's critical to get into the training.

And what's this? This has got some writing on it.

You can see Liverpool Reg on it.

It's part of the King's Liverpool Regiment.

You think of the famous Kitchener poster in 1914,

the big recruitment one.

-Yeah.

-It's these guys, recruited in 1914,

but we had no idea that they were pretty certainly here

training for what became the Battle of the Somme.

And they've left that carving behind.

So they've just carved that in a lump of chalk.

Bored soldier, carving their regiment into this thing

and it ends up in the bottom of the trench.

-But a fantastic record they were there.

-Oh, it's lovely.

We didn't know that. That's why archaeology's brilliant.

It links you to the people and that is what's so crucial,

that you get back to those individual stories of those guys

who were here in the first war. After that training experience,

they then go through to this very famous first day

of the Battle of the Somme.

-And for them it goes pretty well.

-Really?

-Yeah.

Because there were thousands and thousands of casualties.

Famous figure of 60,000 casualties on the first day,

but for the Liverpool Pals, they fight alongside the French

on the right-hand side of the British attack

and they take all their objectives

and they take relatively few casualties.

And that's not the story you get

when you think of the Battle of the Somme.

Despite the extensive training

that Richard has shown these soldiers received,

training wasn't enough.

Just a few weeks after their success on the first day of the Somme,

the 4,000 eager young volunteers of the Liverpool Pals

had received over 1,000 casualties.

A shocking one in four.

This is one of Bristol Museum's greatest treasures -

the Thornbury Hoard. It consists of 11,460 coins

and it was buried in the fourth century AD,

just as the Roman army was withdrawing from Britain.

But actually this pales into insignificance

beside a recently discovered hoard, one of the largest ever found.

This time dating to the first century BC,

when Britain was on the cusp

of being assimilated into the Roman Empire.

The island of Jersey.

We've got something on the surface there.

In 2012, two metal detectorists found a massive hoard

of 2,000-year-old coins in a potato field.

Jersey Heritage painstakingly excavated.

It was the world's biggest discovery of Iron Age coins ever.

The archaeologists wanted to find out what treasures lay inside

and what it tells us about the British Isles

at a time when the Romans were advancing towards our shores.

The hoard was taken to the local museum

where conservator Neil Mahrer and his team

began the painstaking task of clearing off the mud.

There were an extraordinary 70,000 coins.

And more treasure lay hidden within.

Unusual coloured beads.

LAUGHTER IN BACKGROUND

Rather lovely.

And gold and silver bracelets.

This has been much more complicated than expected.

We're lifting one piece at a time out,

but everything is interlinked

and fitted around each other.

Ha-ha! Success!

It's a piece of silver wire, probably from jewellery,

just cut up and essentially just scrap metal now.

Who would have cut up this precious metal, and why was it all hidden?

As they dig deeper into the hoard looking for clues,

they uncover its greatest treasure.

-It's heavy.

-Really?

It's heavy.

An amazing collection of thick golden torques -

ornate neck rings.

Only the most important people in Iron Age society

would have worn neck rings of this thickness and weight.

After 2,000 years in the ground,

it's taken Neil four years carefully picking it apart

to reveal its contents.

We've now removed 50,000 coins,

so we think we're five-sevenths of the way in.

About 20,000 coins left,

and you can see there are still a few things outstanding.

With so much of the hoard now revealed,

Neil has made some startling revelations.

Well, it's the biggest coin hoard of its kind in the world.

We know which tribe actually made it,

because the coins that have already come off and we've cleaned

are of a type we've seen before from the Curiosolitae tribe,

with a head on one side and a very, very abstract horse on the other.

The Curiosolitae were an Iron Age tribe of Celts

that inhabit part of what is now Brittany in France.

So why did they bury this vast treasure on Jersey?

Neil has come into the lab with some of this amazing treasure to tell me.

Neil, let's be clear about this,

-this is an absolutely enormous hoard, isn't it?

-It is.

I mean, it's got to the stage now where, in this hoard,

we've got more coins of this period

than have been found in France at all.

-In the whole of France?

-Yeah. And as we've gone through,

we found more and more apart from the coins.

Torques were the big surprise for us -

I mean, this is one of eight complete ones that we have.

-Can I pick that up?

-Yeah, please do.

So, this is a gold Iron Age neck ring.

-Yeah.

-How do you get it onto your neck?

They come in two halves.

So you'd literally give it a twist like that

and then pull apart.

And the pattern is peculiar,

because it's not facing the observer, it's facing the wearer.

No, it would be inside, by your throat, yes.

Yeah. That's beautiful.

What about the coins themselves?

Do they give us a clue as to the date?

I mean, literally 99.5% of the coins in this hoard

date to around sort of 62BC or before.

-They're lovely.

-They are beautiful faces, aren't they?

That's a wonderful little face, on that side.

We know that those were all made in the run-up to the invasion

by Julius Caesar.

So perhaps they knew that Julius Caesar was coming from the south,

defeating tribe after tribe after tribe.

-Mmm.

-And that they hid their wealth, they actually got it offshore,

rowed the thing to Jersey -

that seemed to be somewhere that was quite hard to reach,

quite hard to land, so perhaps it was somewhere to hide,

and buried it with the idea, presumably,

of coming back for it later, and were perhaps killed.

The burial of the Jersey hoard

reveals the fear that gripped the Celtic tribes

as the Romans advanced towards our shores.

But conversely, the Thornbury Hoard at Bristol Museum

dates from a time when, 300 years later, the Romans were in retreat,

showing us that the collapse of empire could be equally tumultuous.

The Thornbury Hoard that is on display upstairs

is just a small portion of the 11,460 Roman coins

that were discovered, and so I've come down here to the stores

to look more closely at some of those coins

and find out more about the hoard.

How was it discovered?

It was discovered by a man

who was digging a fish pond in his back garden,

so he found the remains of a pot with over 11,500 coins inside.

All of a similar type, all of a similar period.

These coins act as a history of the Roman Empire.

Virtually all the coins are Constantinian.

So Constantine, the emperor that's associated with

enabling Christianity to be worshipped across the Empire.

And founding Constantinople?

And founding Constantinople. So you get two types of coins.

You get one coin in this hoard which hark back to the foundation of Rome.

Oh, that's beautiful.

So we've got a little wolf with Romulus and Remus underneath.

That's a gorgeous coin - look at that.

And there's a female personification of the new empire's capital,

which is Constantinople, and that is Constantinopolis.

The coins are also evidence of the Empire's decline.

By this time, the coinage has become very debased.

There's very little silver content

and virtually everything is made out of copper alloy

and also not quite as well modelled.

So the coins are being literally debased, they are getting smaller.

Is this the sign of a crumbling economy, then,

as Rome goes into decline?

Yes. They're debasing everything.

So where are these minted then? Are they British coins in origin?

None of the ones that I've seen are actually from Britain.

We know that because they have little marks on the bottoms of them.

We've done a sort of almost like an airline map

of where these things have come from.

And the first one that we found is Antioch, in Turkey,

and we've got things from Thessalonica, but also Croatia.

As part of the Empire,

Roman Britain was connected with diverse people and cultures

across Europe and beyond.

And this was also a period of relative peace.

But when the Empire crumbled, it must have been a difficult

and even frightening experience for many people.

And why on earth was this volume of coins buried?

That's the 64,000 question, because we have no idea.

This was a troubled time, wasn't it?

So, I mean, I suppose there are numerous different reasons

that somebody could be burying money in the ground.

-There could.

-They could be trying to hide it,

it could be effectively banking it.

And you kept it and you hid it from anybody you didn't want to have it.

And that may be somebody you thought was coming to raid.

And clearly, we have no idea why nobody collected it.

By the fourth century AD, the Romans were pulling out of Britain.

And whoever buried these coins never came back for them.

Britain was plunged into a period of uncertainty for the next 600 years -

sometimes known as the Dark Ages.

Our next excavation provides brand-new and very strange clues

as to how our ancestors made sense of this upheaval.

For archaeologists, burial sites can offer precious clues

as to how our ancestors lived and died.

But sometimes, they also provide us with surprising insights

into what seem to us today to be bizarre beliefs and strange rituals,

long since forgotten.

Deep in the Wye Valley in Hereford,

a team of archaeologists is on their way to investigate

an intriguing discovery near a remote cave.

Day one. The site is up a very, very steep slope,

which is densely wooded.

On three sides of the site...

there are 60-foot-high vertical cliffs.

And immediately above the site,

there is the opening of a small cave.

Known locally as Merlin's Cave,

in the 1920s, an incredible find

of prehistoric tools, pottery and bones was made,

revealing this to be a sacred burial site

for our Neolithic ancestors over 4,500 years ago.

But in 2011, a new discovery was made, purely by chance,

just below the entrance.

I was doing caving with one of my sons

and we decided to try and get into this cave,

which is about 15 foot up the cliff face,

so I left my son sat on what was a tree throw.

And while I was scaling the cliff here, he discovered a flint scraper,

a really lovely flint scraper,

and some pieces of pottery,

and some teeth.

Clyde took the finds to the county archaeologist.

The pottery was prehistoric,

the teeth were human

and the flint was early Neolithic.

The county archaeologist Tim Hoverd was so intrigued by the finds

that he organised a dig to see if he could find

whether there was a connection between these new finds

and the ones in the cave.

What he found was even more exciting.

We found two human skeletons

are laid out under two of the tree throws.

We carbon-dated them to about 600 AD.

This was shocking.

Tim had expected to find Neolithic skeletons,

but these were Dark Age skeletons from the seventh century AD,

and they were lying outside a prehistoric burial site.

But with such a huge time difference,

surely there couldn't be a connection.

Then the next piece of evidence emerged.

One of the burials had bones deposited with it

dated to the Bronze Age from the cave,

so 1,200, 1,300, 1,400 years older than the burial.

The prehistoric human bones

seem to have been deliberately placed in the later graves.

Whoever buried these men clearly knew

about the earlier burials inside the cave.

So, what we wanted to know was who these people were,

and why they were involved with the burial in the cave.

We know that they were doing something very strange,

very different.

Are these two men the only ones buried here,

or are they part of something much bigger?

This year, another dig was organised to find out.

It's a very unusual place to find people being buried.

We're on a very steep hillside.

The soil isn't very deep.

It's actually quite hard to make a grave deep enough to bury a body,

and the reason we've come back here to do further investigations

is to try and determine the extent of this burial activity.

Do we only have two burials, or is it actually a small cemetery?

A trench is dug a short distance

from where the two burials were found.

After two days of digging, they start to get results.

We just found a human bone

which is projecting out of the side of the section of the trench.

It's a fragment of a large human femur,

and we're further to the south of where the previous two burials are.

And it's giving us an idea that the extent of this burial area

is considerably larger than we'd seen previously.

RATTLING

More human remains are uncovered.

We've just found this,

which is a human tooth.

It's actually a human canine,

an adult tooth.

And then a little bit of bone

which is just from the path.

Now we're finding remains of other skeletons,

including the thigh bone of a newborn child.

Now, up to now, all of the bones found from these burials

have been of adults, but now we're finding evidence

that even very young infants are being buried at this site.

Analysis shows that these date from the same period as

the skeletons first found beneath the cave entrance.

It's evidence that the team has uncovered the burial ground

of a Dark Age community.

It's an incredibly strange discovery.

Prehistoric burials inside the cave

seem to have been so important to this community 2,000 years later

that they chose to be buried close to the cave,

even though digging graves on this steep ground

must have been incredibly difficult.

And another discovery is made -

evidence that these people

are also being buried along with bones from inside the cave.

Now, on the top of this bone here we can see encrustation.

And this is in fact tufa, or stalagmite,

which is only formed inside the caves.

This bone has come out of the cave,

so this provides a direct link between the cave up there

and what's been deposited down here.

The team from Manchester University

have discovered not only a forgotten burial ground

but a strange funerary ritual that's been lost for 1,400 years.

I'm interested to find out

what the archaeologists think was going on here.

So, you've got Dark Age burials outside the cave,

and then inside the cave there seems to have been a lot of bone,

human and animal bone, from much, much earlier.

-Some period in prehistory.

-From at least the Neolithic.

It's buried with two cow bones.

-So, this bit here?

-Yeah.

-So a bit of cow rib.

-That one.

And then there's the knuckle of a cow leg bone by his head.

That he was buried with as well.

Tim believes there could be a special connection

between this particular man and the earlier burials inside the cave.

And have you analysed the bones?

What are you able to say about this individual?

He is certainly well into his 50s,

if not in his early 60s when he died.

He was a very tall person, or at least he was well over six feet.

-We can see that...

-Yes.

-..with him lying out here, can't we?

-His leg bones are...

-Look at those thigh bones.

-Huge.

And the fact that he is large and robust and lived to a reasonable age

would suggest, if nothing else, he was well fed,

which may suggest that he was being looked after.

So who do you think he was?

I think just with the fact that he's buried with animal bones

that must have come from the cave that he was actually in charge of

looking after the contents of the cave for a period of time.

So you're seeing this as a sort of cult centre, then?

I think a cult is probably the way to look at it.

They are honouring their ancestors, and they are honouring a cave

that as far as they are concerned has been there for millennia.

But, at the same time, both burials seem to be laid out

in broadly speaking a Christian tradition - extended,

with arms folded over the pelvis.

So in that sense they're following the Christian tradition,

but there is this little bit of prehistoric bone,

as perhaps an indication that, OK,

we're going to do this Christian style

but we're going to include something from the past

to show that we haven't forgotten about that tradition.

The Dark Ages were a tumultuous period in British history.

Anglo-Saxon tribes were invading

and it was a time of great political and religious change,

with the establishment of new kingdoms

and pagan ideas vying with Christianity for supremacy.

It's highly likely that these weren't Anglo-Saxons,

these were actually the native Welsh Britons, if you like,

and they're adapting to Christianity

as it comes from the south and east,

and moving up into the west,

and they're gradually adapting.

Such a strange site. And I think it really reminds us

that we don't expect everybody across England and Wales

to be doing exactly the same thing at the same time.

The community at Merlin's Cave reached back into their past,

combining burial practice with what seems to be an ancestor cult,

and perhaps that provided them with much-needed reassurance

during such an uncertain period in our history.

After the Romans left, Dark Age Britain

is often thought of as less civilised and more backward -

a time when we lost cultural and trading connections

not only with Rome, but with the world at large.

But now a striking new discovery in Tintagel, Cornwall,

is challenging this view.

Tintagel is best known for

its connections with the legendary King Arthur,

who according to myth was conceived there.

Well, this year, archaeologists returned to Tintagel

hoping to investigate its rich Dark Age history

and disentangle archaeological fact from Arthurian fiction.

The castle remains that you can see on Tintagel today

date from the medieval period,

but archaeological remains from around 600 AD

found on previous excavations

suggest that there was once a large Dark Age settlement here.

In 2016, archaeologists returned to Tintagel

to explore areas of the island that had never been dug before.

They wanted to find out what kind of settlement it was,

but what they found took them all by surprise.

Day one of the dig diary,

and today we've started excavating on the eastern terrace just here,

and over behind the castle on the southern terrace.

We've opened up four trenches,

and that's where we're hoping to find

what we used to call Dark Age buildings,

or buildings that belong to the fifth and sixth century.

The archaeologists from English Heritage

and Cornwall Archaeological Unit

have barely begun to strip off the turf

when they make their first discovery.

We've got this possible floor layer of paving.

Evidence for the construction of terraces.

What it looks like is that we have three distinct flat terraces

with slopes between at the moment which we hope,

when we take some material away, we'll find some nice walls.

Disappointingly, further digging reveals no traces of buildings.

Maybe there are some terraces which are being used for small enclosures,

maybe as cultivation plots rather than for buildings.

But who were these cultivation plots for?

On the south side of the island,

they make an extraordinary discovery.

We have three terraces,

this being the substantial wall at the southern end,

and leading to another wall,

presumably for a building,

and that leads nicely to a set of steps,

and they lead neatly through part of the top building.

So we think this is the building, nice level floor, steps up to it.

This is their first big breakthrough.

Massive one-metre thick rock walls are revealed.

Never before has such a solid Dark Age building

been discovered in Britain.

Substantial build, top end.

But what is this building?

In their search for clues, they find a rubbish pit next to it.

We've got an animal jawbone here, so you can see the teeth -

something like a wild boar, perhaps.

The remains of boar and other animals

may be evidence of a Dark Age feast.

I can see...

And further surprising finds

suggest this was a high-status building.

THEY CHEER

A shallow bowl, nice rim.

Put a bit of fruit in or something.

Oh, it's beautiful. It looks like Thracian, which is from Turkey.

That is a beautiful thing.

And Karl Thorpe, the small finds expert,

is particularly excited by the discovery of

an incredibly rare piece of glass.

Hope you like it.

-Oh, that is stunningly beautiful.

-Yeah.

That is definitely post-Roman glass.

It's even a rim, which is fantastic,

and judging from the curvature I think it is of a little cone cup

between fifth and sort of seventh centuries AD,

sort of Merovingian glass, originating from France.

-For what? For...?

-Most likely drinking wine.

That is just... It is stunningly beautiful.

The team were simply not expecting to find

this many high-quality foreign goods.

The people living here were clearly not only very wealthy

but trading over vast distances.

Got a small shard of what looks to be amphora.

That's from the Aegean area, Eastern Mediterranean.

Wow. Fantastic.

By day 12, the team has unearthed the foundations of a building

11 metres long and four metres wide.

They are convinced that the people who lived here

must have had immense wealth and power.

I don't think that anything like this has been found before.

So there were some surprised faces,

and lo and behold it's gone on and on, so this might be the style

for the whole precinct of buildings on the southern side.

Substantial walls will hold up substantial roofs,

so, yeah, it's all good.

Very exciting.

Further excavations throughout the rest of the summer

revealed that this was just part of a large complex

covering much of Tintagel.

This has astounded the team.

They didn't expect to find evidence

of such a wealthy and sophisticated community

from early Dark Age Britain.

So do they really think they've discovered a Dark Age palace?

And if so, what was it like to live in it?

We can't be certain that it is a royal site,

but whatever it was, it was a high-status site

because we've got so much exotic material.

Yeah. So, I mean, we saw some of this material coming out.

Tell me about this piece of pottery.

Yes. Well, this is very, very finely made.

-It's probably part of...

-It's very thin.

-Yes, it's a fine table dish.

A complete vessel would be quite large,

so you've got this sort of large, expansive, quite shallow bowl,

probably for communal feastings.

And this is the handle of an amphora,

which would have contained wine coming from the Aegean,

or from Turkey, Marseilles, around the coast of Spain.

And this is not actually from Tintagel, is it?

This is a reconstruction of what one of these amphora from the Aegean,

from Greece, might have looked like, but this would be for carrying wine,

probably, but could also be for olive oil - we don't know.

And the archaeology that you're looking at here

of course dates to a really interesting time.

We're looking at Britain after the collapse of the Roman Empire,

we're looking at independent states.

Yeah. I mean, Britain does break into lots of little states,

like Murcia and Wessex and Kent and places,

and Cornwall carries on in its own way,

and this may well be a royal centre with connections far afield.

See, I'm starting to go on flights of fancy, now, and to me

these are the royal apartments of the palace at Tintagel.

This is where King Arthur lived.

Well, it has got that extraordinary association,

from when Geoffrey of Monmouth writes about

the history of the kings of Britain in the 12th century.

He says that Arthur was conceived at Tintagel.

-Yeah.

-What, did he invent this?

Had he pulled it out of various other legends? We really don't know.

Although they may not have found evidence of King Arthur himself,

the team have discovered that Dark Age Tintagel

was a prosperous centre of trade and perhaps even a seat of royalty,

a bastion against the turmoil that was engulfing Britain at this time.

In the past, infant mortality rates

were much, much higher than they are today.

In the Dark Ages it is thought that perhaps half of all children

didn't make it to adulthood, and yet,

when you look at cemeteries from the period,

there just don't seem to be enough juvenile and infant burials.

So were the burial rites for children

different to those for adults?

It is certainly possible, and archaeologists in South Wales

have been making some intriguing discoveries.

Whoa!

In the winter of 2014, record storms battered South Wales.

They were so ferocious that they eroded the Pembrokeshire coastline,

and human bones started to appear as the sand dunes were stripped back,

revealing an ancient cemetery.

These skeletons may contain precious clues about our past,

so for the last three years, the team from Dyfed Archaeology

has been trying to save what they can

from this now dangerously exposed site.

This is classic rescue archaeology.

You can see here, the threat is obvious and happening,

and we're just dealing with it.

It's day three of this year's dig,

and they are beginning to excavate the Dark Age layers

from the seventh to the ninth centuries AD.

One burial emerges that is incredibly unusual

and entirely different to anything they've seen so far.

So it seems to be a woman buried

with a baby in the crook of her arms.

-That's right.

-That's incredible.

Yeah. That's the baby's head, yeah?

Skull, there.

Pelvis in this area.

OK.

Here's the mother's left arm.

Finding an infant burial from this time is extremely rare.

Tiny bones tend to decompose quickly in many cemeteries.

But here, the infant bones

are perfectly preserved by the coastal sand.

Ken, do you want to tell me what you're drawing?

It's a grave containing the remains of what looks like an infant.

-An infant?

-A newborn, probably.

-Yes.

-Perinatal.

Very small child - you can see the length of it.

And incredibly, other infant burials soon begin to emerge.

It's rare to find this quantity of infants

in a communal cemetery.

Doesn't matter what date it's from, they are rare to find.

Here we've got a large number of them

because the preservation in the sand

has been so good for skeletal remains.

By week three, they've found an incredible 20 infant graves -

a sobering reminder of infant mortality rates at this time

and an intimate insight into how parents felt

about losing so many young children at such an early age,

1,400 years ago.

So what we've got here is a really rather nice bone pin,

possibly a shroud pin,

and some of the burials we've had here you can see from the position

of the skeleton, the feet particularly,

that these people look like they were wrapped in shrouds

when they were buried.

There was one absolutely tiny little infant,

I actually excavated it myself,

its legs were actually crossed at the ankles, so again,

it suggests it was wrapped before being placed in the ground.

This pin would have been used to carefully secure the shroud

around this dead child, before it was placed in its grave.

And out of the sand comes an intriguing series of finds.

This is one of a number of areas where we've had white quartz pebbles

across the site, but they've been on the graves of infants,

so the pebbles have been really carefully placed.

We had one with over 100 pebbles on the top of it, densely packed,

and obviously a lot of care invested in the grave of the baby inside.

So what did these quartz pebbles signify?

Dig co-director Marian Shiner and osteologist Katie Hemmer

have come into the lab to tell me about their discoveries,

and what they tell us about the attitude of Dark Age parents

to the deaths of their children.

We don't know the purpose of the quartz pebbles.

They're found in mortuary contexts from the prehistoric period onwards,

and they're found at other early medieval Welsh cemeteries.

There's a passage in the Bible, in Revelation,

which talks about the person who has found Christ

being given a white stone, and a new name.

There is evidence that in the late medieval period each mourner

at a funeral brought a stone, or took a stone,

and put it on top of the grave.

But, you know, there must have been over 130 people

at the funeral of that child, if that's what this signifies,

and they are only on the children's graves.

And they're burying very, very tiny children, infants.

Yes, it's the thing that really strikes you about the site

is the level of care that a lot of

these infant and young children were buried with.

Absolutely. I think we have to move away from old notions

that people didn't care for their children at this time.

They are investing the same amount of effort, if not more,

into the burials of the really youngest members of this population.

Discoveries like this show how archaeology

can change the story of Britain.

From revealing lost religious practices of the Dark Ages...

..and turning on its head our view about how prepared our soldiers were

when sent to fight on the Western front...

..to the unique discovery on Salisbury Plain

that shows the ritual landscape of Stonehenge

was bigger than we'd ever imagined.

Our ancestors made the country we live in today,

and through archaeology we've been able to

reach back through the centuries and touch their lives.

Next week's episode of Digging For Britain comes from the north,

and is packed with new revelations,

from what it was like to be in the thick of a Roman attack...

These were propelled from a hand-slung catapult

at between 35 and 45 metres per second.

..to the astonishing technology of the Scottish Stone Age.

It's definitely man-made, so this is really significant.

And the discovery of the famous monastery at Lindisfarne,

sacked by the Vikings, and lost for over 1,000 years.