North Digging for Britain

We might be a small island, but we've got a big history

that is still full of mysteries.

So every year, hundreds of archaeologists go out hunting

for clues to our forgotten past.

That is stunningly beautiful.

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

It is all happening now.

You little devil!

In this programme,

Digging For Britain showcases the very best of them from the north.

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.

And now the archaeologists are bringing their finds,

from pottery to metalwork to human remains, into our labs

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 programme I'm joining archaeologists

in the north of Britain on their quests to discover

the lost worlds of our ancestors.

In the Outer Hebrides, we dive deep

to discover startling Stone Age technology.

Oh, my word.

I have never seen anything like that.

We join the team tracking down the famous monastery of Lindisfarne,

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

It is an incredibly exciting thing to be doing.

It's hard not to be like a little boy

when you finally get the trenches open.

And we are there when an excavation takes a surprising turn

to reveal the grizzly reality of life in a medieval village.

It must have been a catastrophic event that happened

that ended their lives.

I've come to the National Museum of Scotland

to see how these discoveries are helping to rewrite

the history of Britain.

I've been given behind the scenes access, so I'll be looking at

parts of the collections that are rarely seen by the public.

And I'll be getting up close and personal with some of

Britain's most remarkable and enigmatic treasures.

Our first dig comes from Burnswark in Dumfriesshire,

where some new discoveries are rewriting the history

of the Roman conquest.

When the Romans invaded Britain,

they swiftly conquered most of the southern tribes,

but they never conquered all of Scotland -

twice they tried and twice they failed.

But no-one has ever found any trace of a major battle.

Well, this season, archaeologists think they've got definitive

evidence for the first time of a Roman siege in Britain.

When the Roman army invaded Britain in 43 AD,

Burnswark Hill was home to a local Iron Age tribe

who built a hillfort on its summit.

But this hillfort is unique in Britain,

because just metres from the summit, it is flanked by two huge

Roman army camps,

one to the north, and one to the south.

For decades it has been believed that these were Roman army

training camps.

But now archaeologists think that they might be siege camps.

If they're right, it would show the Roman war machine in Britain

was far better resourced than we had ever imagined.

Andrew Nicholson is the dig director.

We have two weeks to excavate here at Burnswark.

We're putting two trenches here into the Roman south camp

and one trench into the Roman north camp, and we're looking

for evidence of Roman missiles such as lead sling bullets

and Roman stone ballista balls.

First, the team start to dig in the south Roman camp.

And on day one, dig coordinator John Reid is there

with a camera, as they make their first exciting discovery.

OK, here we are in the south camp and the guys have just

shouted me over.

So what have we got?

Oh, yes.

That looks very suspicious.

Yeah, perfect.

The first thing we uncover under the turfs is

a Roman ballista ball, a local red sandstone ball that would have been

launched from a catapult from the Roman camp up towards the hillfort.

We know from evidence across Europe that Roman siege tactics

were brutal.

This lethal stone missile would have been shot

from a catapult or ballista to maim or kill an enemy.

It was one of the many powerful siege weapons in their arsenal.

After a promising start, for the next three days the team dig

for more clues, and one small but highly significant find

keeps turning up.

Over the last few days,

we have managed to secure over 40 Roman sling bullets.

These are the very objects that we came here to try and find.

Over 40 is quite a significant amount.

These solid lead sling bullets were ammunition

for a simple but deadly weapon.

These are propelled from a hand slung catapult

at between 35 and 45 metres per second.

They were fired by specially trained troops called slingers, who could

disable the enemy with a fast and furious hail of lead bullets.

It's even more evidence that the hillfort was attacked.

But if this was a full-scale siege, the team would expect to find

more evidence of ammunition in the north camp.

But nothing has turned up.

Then, on day four...

BEEPING

..a metal detector picks up a strong signal.

This could be the breakthrough they need.

OK, here we are in the north camp.

Hi, guys.

-Hi, John.

-How's it going?

Well...

Have we found any bullets?

You wanted sling bullets, and we have one or two for you here.

Fantastic.

In the last count there was just over 20.

This is very, very impressive.

But when they dig down further,

they find more evidence than they could ever have imagined.

BEEPING

It goes off the scale, and there is still a large number of them

continuing downwards beyond these stones.

At the moment, we've got 169, give or take a few,

visible on the surface.

It's certainly the largest in situ collection of Roman sling bullets

that have ever been found anywhere within the Roman Empire.

The team now has clear and compelling evidence

for a highly organised and brutal Roman siege.

The sheer quantity of missile material that they brought

to the site is certainly a clue that there was an assault on the fort,

and that they are simply using overwhelming force.

We know that from 73 AD,

the Romans tried to conquer northern Britain.

But until now we had no idea that they used full-scale

siege warfare against the native tribes.

I want to know more about how that siege on Burnswark hillfort

played out. What was the outcome?

So, John, this is just a small portion of that great cache

of lemon-shaped slingshots that you found.

So they would fit in a sling like this, then?

That's exactly right.

And then you would turn it round your head, and then this flips out

and it has the same ballistic momentum as a .44 Magnum bullet.

That's astonishing.

This is the forgotten firepower of the ancient world.

Yeah. But what are these curious things?

They look like pendants almost.

Yeah, they're very exciting because they've never been

described before,

and the key element of them

is they all have a little hole in them.

And it doesn't go all the way through.

Doesn't go all the way through, and I had the theory

that they were for poison.

My brother, who knows nothing about archaeology, said,

"I fish, and when I've cast my fishing weights

"with a hole in it that size, they whistle as they go out."

So we made some, we tested them, and they whistle.

This is what they sound like.

WHISTLE AND CRACK

HE CHUCKLES

So what they are, we think, is a terror weapon that make a sound.

Until this dig, we had no idea

that the Romans designed bullets like these.

When you imagine that's just the sound of one -

if you've got 300, 400 slingers all going at the one time,

that is a lot of noise.

-So psychological warfare as well?

-Mm-hm.

WHISTLE AND CRACK

These bullets could travel at over 100mph.

To simulate their effect on human flesh,

John's set up a test using ballistic gel.

This is what the Britons at Burnswark were up against.

So you've got what looks like this large cache of ammunition

in the camp. Have you found anything on the hillfort itself?

Well, if you look at this,

the pink dots represent the spread of bullets across the site.

So we can see the positions that the shooters are standing in,

and we can also see where the recipient target area is

along the south face.

This ballistic map clearly shows that the people

on Burnswark Hill were totally surrounded by the Roman army.

So we now have the smoking gun of what took place here.

And what about the little cluster to the north of the hillfort?

This is a group of bullets that we didn't expect.

This is the only area that you can escape from, from the north.

Almost certainly,

a group of people met their end in that position there.

I mean, that's horrendous, because that's not just about

driving people out of that hillfort, that's about...a massacre.

That's about a massacre, yeah.

The evidence from Burnswark Hill entirely changes

our understanding of the Roman invasion.

We had no idea that they had brought this level of strategic

planning and firepower to Britain.

So, for our ancestors, the consequences of resistance

could be devastating.

Our next dig takes us to the heart of another British community,

who also faced adversity over 1,000 years later.

The Middle Ages in Britain were a time of unprecedented

chaos and turmoil.

Lives were blighted by war, famine and plague.

But away from the cities, we know less about how these events

affected the lives of ordinary people.

Our next site offers us a precious glimpse into the struggles

of one rural community during these turbulent times.

Thornton Abbey in North Lincolnshire was one of the richest abbeys

in medieval Britain...

..founded by Augustinian monks in 1139 and dissolved

by Henry VIII 400 years later.

Archaeologists from the University of Sheffield

have been digging here for five seasons, building up

a detailed picture of how the monks of this wealthy abbey lived.

But last year,

they began to excavate just outside the abbey walls.

It was here that the team made a shocking discovery that would turn

the course of the dig from focusing on the lives of the rich...

..to the much more elusive medieval poor.

We were originally looking for a rectangular building

but what we actually found was a rectangular pit

that was full of around 40 individuals,

all placed in the pit at the same time.

The bodies of 21 adults and 27 children

piled into a mass grave.

It consisted of one fill, suggesting that the bodies were placed there

and the thing was backfilled in one event.

We assume because they've been buried in one event

that it must have been a catastrophic event that happened,

that ended their lives at around the same time.

This part of Lincolnshire has always been rural, so whatever

killed this many people must have devastated the local community.

To find out what it might have been,

I've asked site osteologist Diana Swales to join me in the lab.

So, Diana, this is a huge number of people all buried in one mass grave.

When does it date from?

The radiocarbon dates come back from the 14th century.

And do you have any idea as to the cause of death?

When we excavated them, we had no ideas.

Our first point of call was to check that there was no trauma

at the time of death, so we had a good look through and checked

that nobody had been massacred.

There's no evidence for those kind of activities.

So we took DNA samples from the teeth and we sent them off

for analysis, and they identified the bacteria yersinia pestis,

which is the bacteria for the Black Death.

The Black Death swept across Europe in the mid-14th century,

killing a staggering 50 million people.

In Britain, it's estimated that a third of the population died.

Incredibly, this is the first plague pit

that's ever been found in the British countryside.

But what surprised the team most was its location,

right outside an abbey.

These were ordinary women, men and children, not wealthy monks.

So why were they buried here?

Then, just metres from the plague victims,

they make another unique discovery.

We discovered a long, thin building running on an east-west alignment,

and having excavated this we can now say with some certainty

that this was actually a medieval hospital.

So this explains the location of that plague pit -

and it's the first time a medieval hospital attached to an abbey

has ever been excavated.

It could give the team valuable new insights into medieval health care.

So we think this hospital was in use from the mid-12th century

until the dissolution.

That would have consisted of a hospital chapel which is the area

behind me and the area to the west, which was the dormitory

where the inmates would have visited and lived and died.

Experts aren't sure what relationship existed between

the wealthy abbeys and the local population.

So now Pete wants to find out.

Who WERE the people using this hospital?

Just a few days later, the team strike it lucky.

So just outside the walls, a possible church on all three sides.

We're finding a large number of individuals.

They've found the official burial ground of the hospital patients.

This is an extraordinary opportunity to look at the range

of diseases that medieval people suffered from.

The lower limb

of this old adult male

has been amputated just below the knee,

a long time before they died.

This young child is really, really interesting, because they have

a bulbous, very round head,

which looks as though

they have hydrocephaly,

where water on the brain is causing the skull to expand.

This skeleton here

has bowing of the femur,

and this looks suspiciously like rickets.

This is a malnourished individual.

Over the next week,

the team uncovers more victims of malnutrition and disease.

We're face to face with the suffering of our ancestors -

medieval Britain's rural poor.

In the last few days of the dig, the team discovers another burial,

this time inside the hospital chapel.

But this is not a poor man's grave.

We've just come down onto this,

which is a later medieval grave slab.

And actually we have the word "obit" and "Ricardus",

so whoever was buried underneath this originally was named Richard.

The archaeologists flip it over,

to try to find more clues about who Richard was.

So we've actually got a date for when this individual died,

which is the 2nd of April, and that's in 1317.

And obviously we have the individual himself, Richard -

he's in fact holding across his breast

a chalice, which would have been his kind of symbol of office,

definitely if they were a canon or a priest.

Underneath the elaborate grave marker,

the team finds the human remains of Richard himself.

The clues suggest that he was a key figure in this hospital.

Back in our lab,

I'm hoping that Diana can reveal what his role was.

-This is Richard, is it?

-This is Richard.

So we have his actual human remains, and we have this image of him

-as he was in life.

-Mm-hm.

So we know that he was bald on top, he's got hair round the side,

it's almost like a tonsure.

And so, how old was he when he died?

Looking at his teeth, they are very worn,

which makes me think that he is actually very old.

Gosh, that third molar there,

there's hardly any enamel left on it.

-It's really just the root, isn't it?

-Yes.

So do we presume that he was a priest who was working

in that hospital?

Yes. So he's buried in quite a prestigious location

within the chapel, and at this time there are no doctors at hospitals.

It's up to the priests to have a kind of caregiving capacity.

And what about the population that we see buried outside the hospital

in the hospital chapel?

Because you seem to be seeing quite a lot of children

buried there, and also a lot of pathology as well.

What it's showing is that we're getting normal lay populations

being buried at the hospital.

The most exciting thing about Thornton Abbey

is that we're seeing an interaction between

the normal lay populations and the monastic community.

-For looking after them?

-Yes, looking after them.

-Yeah.

At Thornton Abbey, the archaeologists were surprised

to find themselves unearthing the lives of the poor

as well as the rich.

And then they were amazed to discover

such a tangible link between the two that is changing our understanding

of medieval health care.

Archaeology gives us information about ordinary people

in a way that the history books simply can't.

But when we go back into prehistory, before any written records,

archaeology is the only way to understand how people lived.

Our next dig takes us back into the Stone Age,

where a recent chance find

has led to a completely groundbreaking new discovery.

This pottery is 5,500 years old.

It's Neolithic, but it wasn't discovered during an excavation.

Each one of these pieces of pottery was found by divers

at the bottom of a loch.

This led the archaeologists to investigate further -

what they discovered was truly astonishing.

The pottery was discovered on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides,

in the shallow waters around one of the beautiful islands

dotted across Lewis's many lochs.

This season, a team of underwater archaeologists set out

to solve the mystery of why the pottery was there.

What they found is turning our understanding of

the Scottish Stone Age upside down.

It's day one in the Outer Hebrides on the Isle of Lewis.

I'm Duncan Garrow, and this is my friend and colleague Fraser Sturt.

-Hello, Fraser.

-Hello, Duncan.

We're standing by a loch as you can see, and we've come

to investigate three islands within three different lochs,

the first of which is this one.

The team starts their investigation around an island in Loch Arnish.

So the kind of thing we'll be looking for is of course the pots

on the bottom of the lochs, but also maybe some other

archaeological evidence that gives us richer insights

into the kind of lives people were living at that time.

The water here isn't just freezing cold, it's murky,

and at first the divers struggle to see anything.

But after a few very cold hours,

one of the team does manage to spot something.

I happened to notice amongst the bad visibility, a little shape,

and it was just this rim that caught my eye which didn't look

like any other stones.

This is actually two pieces of prehistoric ceramic.

Pots like this were used for everyday cooking.

Could this suggest that 5,000 years ago,

a family made this little island their home?

It is a tantalising thought because, as far as we knew,

Stone Age people didn't live in the middle of lochs.

At Loch Langabhat to the west of Loch Arnish, the team go

looking for more evidence of island life.

They're prepared for another long, cold today of underwater hunting.

But within just a few hours...

Oh, Dan.

Oh, my word.

I'm just going to take some video.

I have never seen anything like that.

That is absolutely amazing.

This beautifully decorated pottery has been underwater for 5,000 years,

last touched by its Stone Age owner.

And the loch bed is brimming with pottery like this.

The archaeologists were right,

it looks like these islands were family homes.

They hope to find more evidence at Loch Bhorghastail.

It's a full day of diving before they find anything.

But when they do, it's incredible.

We've been out snorkelling and looking at the islet

out there, and we've found some beautiful Neolithic pottery

and timbers in situ.

These timbers are crucial - they suggest that Stone Age people

weren't just camping on these islands, they were building

permanent structures on and around them. And when the dive team

look even closer, the full realisation hits them.

This whole island has been built by hand.

It's definitely man-made.

You can see that it's now stones piled up on a natural rise, and then

we've also got split timbers which show that it's been made by people.

It's just been amazing, so this is really significant.

It's new Neolithic archaeology. So we couldn't be happier.

These loch islands were built by people five millennia ago.

Duncan and Fraser are now joining me to explain

how this discovery changes the story of Britain.

Duncan and Fraser,

this looks like a Neolithic settlement on an artificial island.

Yeah, that's exactly what we've got, actually. You're right.

They often use the term "crannog" to describe those, which is basically

an island, sometimes artificial, with a building or buildings on it.

But crannogs are Iron Age things.

-Yeah, that's what people have always said.

-Yeah.

That's amazing, cos that

pushes them back at least a couple of millennia.

Absolutely. We've got a picture of what people think

they may have looked like.

Crannogs are famously found in prehistoric Scotland, Ireland

and Wales, but until now we believed that they only appeared

around 800 BC, at the beginning of the Iron Age.

This new evidence shows that people were building

these sophisticated island homes 2,000 years earlier.

Cos they're not using natural islands - they're bringing

those stones out into the middle of the lake and dropping them there

until they've got an island.

There was a calculation done, and someone thought it

was 1,500 tonnes of rock that you might need to move.

So this isn't just, "Oh, we should build a little island,"

this is a... Well, you can say a monumental effort.

So what's next? You have to go and look at all the known crannogs,

which are presumed to be much later.

Do they have earlier origins?

It is quite possible, to be honest. Lots of them might be Neolithic.

It's an overused phrase, but actually

the archaeological textbooks are going to have to be rewritten.

-Yeah.

-Yeah. Exactly.

This discovery has pushed the invention of Britain's

famous crannogs right back into the Stone Age.

We knew that people were building houses back then,

but we certainly didn't know that they were building whole islands.

You can imagine that this would have been a communal effort and it seems

that the Neolithic communities of the Outer Hebrides

were well connected, and not only at a local level.

Deep in the vaults of the National Museum of Scotland,

I've come to see some finds which reveal

much wider connections with other parts of the British Isles.

That is such an incredibly well-preserved axe.

Where was that found?

It was found in Siulaisiadar, in the north of the island of Lewis.

We radiocarbon dated it, it came out between 3300 and 3000 BC.

Fantastic.

But the other thing that's really incredible about it is that

the axe head itself is not local at all,

it's from County Antrim in the north-east of Ireland.

-Really?

-Yeah.

-So it's travelled all that way?

-Absolutely.

It's one of several pieces of evidence that tells us that

the farming communities in the Hebrides were connected

with farming communities elsewhere.

And what about these balls -

I mean, they're absolutely wonderful pieces of art, aren't they?

They are superb, and these are very slightly later, but again they tell

us about long-distance contact.

So these three are from the Hebrides,

these two are from Orkney,

and then these are from elsewhere in Scotland.

What are they?

Well...many, many hypotheses, but certainly you could have

used these as weapons,

you could have dealt somebody a pretty good blow on the head

if you were to swing it and throw it at them, but I think

more importantly these were weapons of social exclusion.

Members of the elite were making long-distance boat journeys

as a way of showing off their power.

Most people would be just humble farmers, and not everybody

would have a boat but the people who were able to travel long

distances, for them this was a very important prop to their power.

The connection between all of these just demonstrates really vividly

the connectedness of the world in the Neolithic.

Absolutely. And the sea plays a very major role in all of this movement

of ideas and objects and people. I think we tend to think of the sea

as a barrier, but in the Neolithic it was like a superhighway.

Now the discovery of the crannogs of Lewis is starting to allow us

to piece together how some of Britain's highly connected

Stone Age communities actually lived.

In an island nation like ours, people living on the coast

have often been at the forefront of innovation and change.

Our next dig comes from Lindisfarne Island

off the shores of Northumberland.

1,400 years ago, this was the spiritual heartland of Britain.

The Anglo-Saxon monastery at Lindisfarne

was a beacon of Christianity in Western Europe, and an incredibly

important cultural centre.

For almost 200 years, Lindisfarne was a driving force in the

creation of a new Christian Britain.

The monks of Lindisfarne converted the pagan Anglo-Saxon kings

to Christianity.

And through their contact with the Pictish, Gaelic and Celtic tribes

of Britain, they produced some of the finest works of art

and scripture in the medieval world,

like the Lindisfarne Gospels.

This renaissance is known as the Golden Age.

But in 793 AD, this world was annihilated,

when the Vikings landed on these shores

and wiped the monastery from the map.

Remarkably, no-one knows the precise location of the early monastery.

This year, archaeologists went looking for it.

Their mission is to find this lost centre of early Christianity.

It's an incredibly exciting thing to be doing.

It's a site with such potential, it's hard not to be like

a little boy when you finally get the trenches open.

It's a ridiculously exciting place for an archaeologist to dig.

It's one of the touch points in the entire Christian tradition.

If they can find the original monastery, then they may also

find evidence of the monks who were the masterminds of its Golden Age.

Today, only the ruins of a much later 12th-century priory remain.

We're standing in a field to the east of the later medieval priory.

We did geophysics here, and we've put our two trenches out on areas

where we thought we could see possible structures.

For three days, the archaeologists scour the trenches

for any hint of a building.

A big monastery like this would have had lots of different buildings,

churches, workshops, craft areas.

What we're trying to do is find some of these structures.

On day four, it looks like they have made a breakthrough.

In this trench we were looking for a building, and we do seem

to have a broad band of rubble,

and it's possible that this might be

the foundations for a wooden structure.

We certainly know that other monasteries of this date

in the north of England often have buildings

with similar stone rubble foundations.

These could be some of the first stones laid down

by the Anglo-Saxon monks, when they built the original monastery

1,400 years ago.

But then, one of the team spots something mixed in with the rubble.

So we've got a possible cranium...

We're down here, we've come down onto the top of what looks like

the top of the cranium, so the top of the skull.

And there's other scatters of bone across this whole trench.

It does suggest that at some point there must have been

a reasonable size burial ground in the area.

The team start to wonder if they have found the monastic symmetry.

On day nine, they find something hidden in the rubble

that could hold a crucial clue to the world of Lindisfarne.

We've found a piece of stone which looks like it's possibly got

some carving or inscription on.

There's John just giving it a bit of a clean...

We're going to see what materialises.

Letters begin to emerge from the mud.

It's an Anglo-Saxon name stone.

-Oh, wow.

-Seventh, eighth century AD.

Cracking little find.

Superb. That is tremendous.

This is a so-called name stone.

This probably would have acted as a small headstone

at the top of a grave. When you find something like this

which has actually got the name of one of those Anglo-Saxon monks,

it's exactly what you hoped you'd find.

He may even have been involved

with the creation of the Lindisfarne Gospel.

I think a stone like this is pretty much a smoking gun.

We must be in the very near vicinity of an Anglo-Saxon

monastic cemetery. So it's exactly what we have been after.

Then, with just a few days to go,

the team find another key piece of evidence.

You can't just come up here and say these things to me. Where is it?

One of the volunteers over there in trench one has found a small coin.

It's almost certainly an Anglo-Saxon silver coin,

so again it is exactly the kind of thing we are looking for.

This coin was minted at the height of Lindisfarne's Golden Age.

We've had the name stone, now we have got a coin.

One piece of evidence, two pieces of evidence.

So I think it is safe to say we have found some really solid evidence

of the early monastery here and it's a really exciting day for our team.

These new finds are of the right date - they do seem to be

tantalising traces of that lost Anglo-Saxon monastery.

They're a link to the monks who were there

at the pinnacle of its Golden Age.

Well, what extraordinary finds

from this first season of digging at Lindisfarne.

I mean, this is fantastic, this is the headstone you found.

This is the prize find.

This is the really distinctive piece of Anglo-Saxon sculpture.

You can just about see there's an inscription on here.

It's an Anglo-Saxon name, so it's someone called Ithfrith.

I can see the "-frith" here.

Originally this would have been the top of a cross,

with the terminals here and here.

Oh, yeah. This is fantastic.

We're getting a view of Lindisfarne going right back to the time

when the first monastery was there, and those beautiful Gospels

were being made.

Yeah, I mean, the person who's remembered on that stone

may well have seen the Gospels being made,

may well have been involved in creating the Gospels,

so we are right at the peak of the Golden Age of Northumbria

with these finds.

And then that Golden Age disappears,

we have a whole sequence of Viking attacks on Lindisfarne,

and apparently an evacuation of the island.

But you're starting to query that as well.

We are.

We put another trench in another field

and we found this fantastic tenth=century comb.

This suggests that perhaps there was a presence,

a continued presence in defiance of those Viking threats.

Do you think there is any chance at all that you might find

evidence of that Viking attack?

What I think is really interesting is the way that these stones

have been broken up, and this cemetery has clearly been

quite badly mashed around.

Is it to do with the Vikings?

We don't know, but hopefully we will be able to find out.

In this first short season, the team unearthed far more

than they expected.

Next year they hope to dig deeper,

to discover more about Lindisfarne's Golden Age

and perhaps the famous Viking attack that destroyed it.

Lindisfarne transformed Britain with works of insular art,

a unique style which reflected a fusion

of different artistic traditions.

More than this,

insular art can reveal the spiritual beliefs of one individual.

One of the finest examples is here in the National Museum of Scotland.

Alice, this is a stunningly beautiful brooch.

When does this date from?

So this is the Hunterston brooch. It was made some point between

the mid-seventh and mid-eighth centuries AD.

It is the biggest, most elaborate brooch that we have from

early medieval Scotland, but it is also the flowering if you like

of an immense mixing of influences in northern Britain at this time.

So it's blending together several different styles, is it?

Yes, because this form of brooch is found in Scotland and in Ireland,

but here it's melded together with Anglo-Saxon interlace and animals.

Now, this cross-like decoration there,

do you think that might be a bit of Christianity coming through?

I think it's absolutely some Christian influence.

Early Christian art in Scotland and Ireland at this time

does embed layers of meaning, and although this brooch would have been

meant to be seen by other people like this, there's quite a different

reading of it possible to the person that is wearing it looking down.

What we're looking for here is this little filigree beast.

-This amber inset is its eye.

-Right.

-We've got two circular insets here

which are at the top and the bottom of its open jaw,

with these hooked teeth biting the cross.

Yes. That's extraordinary.

Before you told me that was there, I couldn't see

a creature at all but now I can see him and I can't stop seeing him.

And these two beasts are confronting either side of this cross.

This design derived from a really important early Christian text,

and that references the knowing of Christ,

so Christ will be known in between two living things.

And, as you say, this is facing the wearer.

It almost suggests that it's more important that the person wearing it

knows about all of this symbolism, and this is a talisman.

Absolutely.

We tend to see these brooches as status symbols,

as secular objects related to kingship perhaps or power.

But in actual fact they can be deeply Christian as well.

The Hunterston brooch gives us a powerful insight

into one person's faith over 1,000 years ago.

But when we go even further back in history, before Christianity,

it becomes more difficult to decipher what people believed in.

The beliefs of our prehistoric ancestors are mysterious.

They didn't write anything down, so we're left

turning to archaeology for some clues.

This season, archaeologists digging on Orkney have found new evidence

of very strange rituals, involving secret objects

including human remains.

They have been digging on the island of South Ronaldsay,

to solve the mystery of Scotland's most iconic Iron Age monuments

known as brochs.

The remains of 500 brochs can still be seen

along the Scottish coastline.

Once, these were remarkable dry stone towers up to 13 metres high,

and we believe that they were homes to elite tribal families,

defensive forts and statements of power.

But we don't know why most of them were abandoned

by the fourth century AD.

Here in Orkney, Martin Carruthers and his team have been

investigating one example known as Cairns Broch.

They've discovered clues that after abandonment,

this broch served another purpose.

This season, they kept us a dig diary.

So it's day one at the Cairns,

straight into the thick of the action.

From previous digs, the team knows that the walls of this broch

were deliberately dismantled in the second century

and the stone was piled up inside to create a mound.

So now, in their tenth year of excavating,

they're ready to remove the rubble from inside the broch.

We managed to remove a huge amount of rubble from the northern side

of the broch, and now for the first time in possibly 2,000 years

we're getting to look at this northern section of wall

which is particularly beautiful and stunning.

This outer wall was an impressive five metres thick.

It formed an impenetrable fortress 22 metres in diameter.

The team thinks that the answer to why it was dismantled

might lie inside.

For ten days they scour the broch floor for anything that might

help them to explain it.

Then, there's a breakthrough.

So it's day 17 at the Cairns, and we're on the outer wall of the broch

and Carolina has made quite a startling discovery.

What have you got there?

-A human jaw.

-Wow.

There's no doubt that it's a human jaw,

no doubt whatsoever from the shape of it.

Just next to it is something even stranger.

It looks as if that human jaw is closely associated

with a very substantial vertebral bone of whale.

It's quite a remarkable deposit so far.

The next day, there's more intriguing animal bone.

Lo and behold we've revealed all this amazing

set of red deer antlers,

that seem to be almost wrapped around

the outside of this whalebone.

These strange finds could be a clue as to what was going on here

when the broch was dismantled.

It looks like what happened here is that towards the end of

the life of the broch, they laid out these items

as a kind of decommissioning deposit, an act of closure

at the end of the broch.

I've asked Martin to join me in the lab to explain what purpose

these dismantled fortresses might have had, and how these

objects might have been used as part of an ancient ritual.

Martin, what a fantastic season at Cairns broch,

and these really are astonishing finds.

This whale bone here, this is fascinating,

-and someone has hollowed it out to convert that into a vessel.

-Yeah.

And then next to it are these antlers which we can see

really nicely here.

They've been propped against the outer side of the whale bone vessel.

And this is the mandible then

that was there with this whale bone vessel, and the two antlers?

And you've just got the remains of the holes for the roots

of the incisors here. So you are looking at an old person here.

Yeah. Well, that's fascinating

because one of the hypotheses we have

is that perhaps this is a fragment of someone

that's been curated and held on to for a longish period of time,

maybe even centuries, akin to the kind of saintly relics that

are kept for a long time in the medieval period.

The fact that this is an elderly person is interesting, because

they presumably had a biography and were a well-known,

maybe even renowned individual.

This jaw bone could have belonged to one of the Iron Age elite

of Cairns broch, whose remains were used in this strange ritual.

Are you saying this is specifically part of funerary ritual, then?

I don't think the presence of this individual is actually

recognising their death.

This is the use of a dead person in ritual paraphernalia,

and at the right moment in time at the end of the broch,

that is when this piece of this individual was then put back

into the ground as part of that deposit.

So effectively they're turning what had been a freestanding,

upstanding, massive, substantial house for generations

and they're turning it into a mound, literally an ancestral pile.

Martin is at last beginning to unravel the mystery of why

at least one of Scotland's famous brochs was dismantled,

and his strange finds from this season suggest that the broch

remained at the heart the community,

becoming transformed into a sacred site.

The excavation at Cairns Broch is still turning up amazing finds

after a decade of digging.

But sometimes it's one extraordinary find

that triggers a huge new excavation.

The Anglo-Saxons were Germanic warriors who in the fifth century AD

invaded Britain, bringing us our language and our laws

and setting up the first kingdoms in what would become England.

But there are few historical records from this time

and archaeological evidence is also thin on the ground.

But this year, a serendipitous discovery revealed

a forgotten part of the Anglo-Saxon story.

In 2011 in the small village of Little Carlton in Lincolnshire,

local builder Graham Vickers was metal detecting in a barley field...

..when he discovered some extraordinary objects.

Most of the things I found had been found in this area over here.

This is pins, brooches, styli like that one -

I've found over 20 of these.

Graham had stumbled across something incredibly rare -

prestigious objects and writing tools

belonging to the literate Anglo-Saxon elite.

So why were they turning up here in this empty field?

These finds were so rare, a team of archaeologists

from the University of Sheffield launched an investigation.

They were intrigued, because there had never been any evidence

for the Anglo-Saxons in this part of Lincolnshire.

Very quickly, dig director Hugh Wilmott and his team

uncover a big settlement,

a gold mine of new information about how

these mysterious Anglo-Saxons lived.

This is the Little Carlton dig diary for excavations in 2016.

We've just finished machining off the plough zone

and the archaeological features are already popping through.

Now he wants to find out what kind of settlement this was.

After just a few days of digging, the team get their first clue.

We've been finding lots of really exciting things.

This is a pair of tweezers that has been metal-detected,

and this is a pair of tweezers that was found yesterday.

They could be for cosmetic purposes,

but it has been suggested

that possibly these might have served other functions

such as for turning parchment pages in a book.

In Anglo-Saxon England, Christian monks were usually the only people

who could read and write.

So for Hugh, this is a big clue that this could be a forgotten monastery.

But on day eight, the team find something that tells them

that this was more than just a place of prayer.

It's rather hard to see, but it's a bit of a glass vessel.

It's definitely Saxon, and it is a sort of globular beaker.

And that's really a rather nice find, actually, Sam. That is good.

This is the kind of artefact that you wouldn't expect to find

on an ordinary site.

This is a high status drinking vessel.

It's probably a continental import.

Very nice.

This shows that the people who lived here

were wealthy, and trading with the continent.

But another find reveals something even more surprising.

One of the most unique artefacts we've got is this iron manacle.

It has a barrel lock here and a hinged loop here,

and this would have gone around the leg

of some captive or possibly a slave.

Slavery was a widespread practice in early medieval Europe,

and again this suggests high status, trade in individuals perhaps.

But again this is pretty much a unique find -

I don't think there's been another one found on a British site.

This is a remarkable find.

So far the evidence suggests that this site could have been

a monastery, an upper-class settlement and a trading centre.

Then, the dig takes an even more unexpected turn.

Now, two weeks into the excavation,

we're actually coming face-to-face with the Anglo-Saxons themselves.

This part of the site where we're digging is actually the location

of one of the Anglo-Saxon cemeteries.

All these people seem to be buried in a Christian style,

laid out on their backs and aligned east to west.

But on day 18,

the team uncovers an individual that is unlike all the others,

and shows some signs of strange burial rites.

It's our penultimate day here at Little Carlton, and we're just

finishing up the excavation, and one of the things we have been doing

is excavating this skeleton here.

And it's probably the most exciting thing that we have found so far.

What makes this a really interesting burial is the fact that they have

been buried on their front.

But there's something else that really makes this special,

and it's when you see how narrow the body is in the grave.

These are the two shoulders and there's about 25cm between them,

so they're really crunched together.

It's a bizarre burial for a Christian person,

but what more can it tell us about this Anglo-Saxon settlement?

So, Hugh, these are the bones that we saw being uncovered

right at the end of that video.

Looking at this skeleton in the grave, then,

this is somebody buried face down and very narrow.

Yes, absolutely. This one has clearly been bound in a shroud

or something like that, very, very tight.

And then there's something odd going on with his legs...

I hope you can tell me about this.

Cos here we're looking at the back surface

of a femur, and then you come down to here and there's a kneecap.

-Now, you haven't got kneecaps on the back of your knee...

-No.

..so this suggests that these legs have come apart at the knee,

and then have been put back together but twisted 180 degrees.

So I think what we can say for definite is that it was

buried in the ground after the body had started to decompose,

and that the limbs have started to fall away from the rest of the body.

But then great care has been taken to try to put the limbs back.

Absolutely. A great deal of care has been taken over this burial,

so this could be an individual who perhaps has died away from

the site, and has been brought back to be interred here specifically.

Because there are stories about the bodies of kings

for instance being moved.

Yes. And of course saints and holy people.

There could be something like that going on here.

This special burial then suggests Little Carlton may have

been a settlement of great importance, and it was perhaps

the resting place of an Anglo-Saxon king or saint.

So what you found then is a lost Anglo-Saxon settlement,

and possibly monastery?

Absolutely. No-one knew it was there before, and it certainly looks

a good contender for a possible early monastery.

You're really redrawing the map archaeologically.

Nobody knew this was there.

Little Carlton is so packed with information

that Hugh and his team expect to be digging here for many years.

At the moment, the finds are intriguing but hard to decipher.

But the more that they uncover,

the more they will be able to untangle the story

of how the Anglo-Saxons staged their occupation

and laid the foundations for the first kingdoms of England.

This year's finds in the north have changed the story of Britain -

from what it was really like to face the might of Rome,

to the forgotten Stone Age inventors of Scotland's famous crannogs...

Oh, Dan.

That is absolutely amazing.

..and the lost rituals of our ancient ancestors.

There's no doubt that it's a human jaw. No doubt whatsoever.

Through archaeology,

we've been able to reach out across

the centuries, and touch our ancestors' lives.

Next week's episode of Digging For Britain

comes from the East, and is packed with revelations.

Brand-new insights from the prehistoric village

dubbed Britain's Pompeii...

We've got a pristine image of exactly what was going on

3,000 years ago.

..discovering the site of one of the most decisive battles

of the Wars of the Roses...

Certainly we're getting close to the battlefield.

..and uncovering Shakespeare's lost theatre.

Quite thrilling to think that he was here, performing,

on the stage that was just behind me.