Bones in the Barnyard Meet the Ancestors

When Edward Ware bought a building plot in a West Country village, he thought he would make a killing.

But his plans for six luxury homes were halted when archaeologists uncovered an ancient burial ground.

This sounds like a really exciting site, at least 2 to 3,000 years old,

but the big unknown is how many were buried there and who were they?

'The site lies in an old farmyard in the small village of Bleadon near Weston-super-Mare.

'Before being allowed to build, the developer had to have an archaeological survey done.

'By chance, one of the first trenches uncovered a ring of six strange pits.

'Two contained human remains.

'Andrew Young, in charge of the excavation, showed me the burials.

'But the bones in the first one were in a very poor state.'

As you can see, there are a number of long bones - two parallel here,

and a socket end, possibly a femur, in front of us.

-It doesn't look like someone's body laid in here, does it?

-No.

-The bits are all over the place.

'In the second pit, the burial looked far more promising.

'With the skull and the leg bones starting to appear,

'it looked like a male.'

I suppose we're used to graves being elongated and people being buried laid out.

This pit here is a more appropriate grave for somebody buried in this crouched position.

A position that maybe has ideas of being asleep or slightly submissive

or maybe even reflects the way in which a baby lies in the foetal position.

'The burials have caused quite a stir in the village.

'Archaeologist Vince Russett is giving guided tours.'

What you can see here is the excavation of human remains

of late Bronze Age date - that's probably about 1000 BC.

They're important as it's rare to find skeletons of this date.

An important thing is that they are human remains.

We have to treat these people with dignity - they are our ancestors.

Not an archaeological feature

in the way potshards or a grain are.

They are dead people and we must consider that all the time.

'With the burials getting so much media attention,

'how could Andy and Vince be sure they dated from the Bronze Age, 3,000 years ago?'

When we opened the trenches, we exposed the pits and some of them were looked at partly excavated.

From those pits, we recovered...

'Andy had the evidence - fragments of pottery from a burial pit.'

We could only say late prehistoric - plain, black and not Roman or later.

We had to send it to a specialist to get definition on that.

-And what have they confirmed?

-That it's late Bronze Age around 1000 BC.

'Back at the site, the better-preserved burial

'was coming out of the ground piece by piece.

'Every part is labelled and bagged before going to the bone specialist.

'Records show that the village of Bleadon dates back to Saxon times.

'But I wanted to know what the area would have been like in the Bronze Age.

'Our illustrator, Jane Brayne, is an expert at recreating the past.

'But she needs to start from today's landscape - this tower gives a wonderful view.'

-You've got the main landforms in with the ridge behind.

-Yes.

And the Celtic fields which are those bits up there.

And the edge seems to come just behind those houses there.

And the site is right at the edge of the dry area

-and by those drainage ditches, it would have been a wet, marshy environment.

-Yes.

-It gives it a very enclosed, safe sense.

-Yes.

Probably why the medieval village is also here.

We'll add environmental detail

-when we get the information.

-Once we know about tree cover and so on.

-Right, OK. Well, that's great. Hot day up here.

-Phorr, yeah!

'Much of the information Jane needs will come from the site itself.

'Every bucket of excavated soil is painstakingly sieved,

'revealing tiny carbonised seeds

'and the bones of fish and small animals.

'Samples of soil are taken, which will tell us about the vegetation

'which once covered and surrounded the site.

'And in fields below the village, deep cores are bored from the soil

'to find out how long ago it stopped being a marsh.'

I hope I've got a head for heights cos I'm going up to look at the site from above.

What you get from up here, about 60ft above the site, is an idea of its layout.

For the first time I can really see

that there's a cluster of six pits in a circle, two of which we know have got complete burials in them.

Another contains bits of human bone and the others haven't been studied.

And further on from that,

they've been burying animals - sheep, possibly some bits of pig

so there were all sorts of strange, probably ritual activities going on.

'Back at the burial, there were problems - time to remove the skull

'but it just wouldn't budge.'

-There's not much more we can do.

-Is that going in the right place?

As it's stuck we'll have to pull.

Let's try and free it if we can.

We have been but with the gravel on the side, you can't get much down.

< See if you can give him a gentle rock now -

see if you get any movement at all.

No, nothing. < Nothing at all?

-Something's come out.

-Never mind, it'll break anyway, up to a point.

-Oh, yes...

-Hold on tight there. Excellent!

-His jaw too.

I'm quite surprised that he came out in one piece, really.

I was expecting him to just collapse but it's good.

'Several weeks later, I caught up with the man from Bleadon

'in a laboratory where he's been examined by human bones specialist Simon Mays.'

It seems ages since I've seen him.

Looks very different as well.

I suppose last time I saw the burial, it was all crouched.

Oh, no! What happened to the skull?

Last time I saw that, it was in one piece - it was cracked a bit

-but it's fallen to bits.

-Yeah, yeah.

It was only held together by soil and when cleaned, it fell apart.

Oh, dear. Well, if we accept that that's a bit of a disaster,

-what have you been able to find out about the person?

-Well, firstly, it's a man.

-And how old was he?

-It's the teeth that really tell us about that.

This is part of his upper jaw. The white enamel crown on this molar has been completely worn away.

-And that sort of thing is probably characteristic of a man in his fifties when he died.

-Right.

'His dental health was dreadful.

'But it was the shape of his lower jaw that surprised me.'

The jaws of people in the medieval period and before that

are much more robust than are jaws of modern people.

Is that cos they had harder stuff to chew?

Yes. Their diet was very coarse whereas we eat factory-made pap!

So, are we all becoming weak-jawed? Would our jaws look very different?

I think they would. If we could bring this person to life, or anyone else from the medieval period,

they would look very lantern-jawed compared with us.

'As if abscesses weren't enough,

-'he also seemed to have fairly bad arthritis.'

-If we look here,

-the light is catching that.

-It's shiny.

-Exactly.

That should be a dull surface - the shine signifies advanced arthritis.

-So, is one bone rubbing on another and wearing it away?

-Exactly.

'By the end of my talk with Simon, I was getting a picture of Bleadon man - 5'6" tall and muscular.

'But did all that arthritis suggest a hard life?

'We know he was 50 when he died but when?

'To find out, Simon will send a bit of leg bone away for carbon dating.

'The discovery of the Bleadon man made me wonder if any of his relatives live in the village today.

'To find out, we called a meeting

'and asked for volunteers to take part in a DNA survey.

'All were asked to give details of their forebears and donate a blood sample for analysis.

'By comparing the DNA from these

'and a sample of the bones of Bleadon man, we might find a match.

'Did any of them think they were related?'

I don't know. You don't, do you?

I suppose we've got to wait for you people to sort it out.

I shall be very surprised.

There's a good chance that we are interrelated one way or the other

if there's just a couple of villages of hunter-gatherers interbreeding.

'The blood samples we sent to Erica Helgelberg, at Cambridge University,

'who specialises in comparing DNA from different populations.'

Anthropologists are always rushing off and trying to get DNA samples from people all over the world.

We don't really know that much about the background of British people -

they're a mix of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Viking,

and relatively few studies have been done on British populations.

It's a challenge to go to an English village and find out from scratch

just how many DNA sequences we will detect among these villagers.

'From Cambridge, it was off to Manchester University

'to meet facial reconstruction specialist Richard Neave.

'I was very anxious to know if he could rebuild the shattered skull.'

It's as if someone's just broken it into bits, to give me hours of amusement putting it together again.

But all the indications are that it's going to be possible to do that.

'Over the next two days, Richard painstakingly assembled the skull.'

Ha-ha! Oh! Ah-ha! Oh! >

-What is it?

-Oh. It's part of the nasal bone.

-Oh, brilliant!

-My God. Now, are we lucky or what?

Not a desperately prepossessing looking fellow.

-There's our lower jaw - pretty wild, eh?

-Hmm.

'Now the skull is complete, a plaster cast is made

'and this becomes the foundation for the facial reconstruction.

'Richard's assistant, Caroline, has to drill and insert over 20 pegs into the cast,

'each one representing the depth of facial tissue at that exact point.'

It gets more frightening as time goes on, doesn't it?!

The pegs were bad enough but when you put the eyeballs in as well!

'Next, the layers of muscle, soft tissue and skin are added.'

It looks like a strange hat at the moment, doesn't it?

'While I was away, the excavation of the second burial had been done.

'This turns out to be a woman, about 35 years old, who was buried with something very unexpected.'

The one day we weren't on site, look what came up with the burial.

I think this object will change the whole way we think about the site.

'At the conservation centre in Salisbury, I met with Mark Corney.

'I wanted his expert opinion on this new find

'which had now been X-rayed.'

-Ignore all these - this is the one.

-That's the one you're interested in.

Right. It's a brooch, what's called a penannular brooch.

Of late Bronze Age, we understood.

-Oh! Sorry to disappoint you - no.

-Why not?

-This is Iron Age.

It's a type that is not known before about 300 BC.

A problem with a Bronze Age date -

this is iron and you don't get that then!

So, we have to rethink about the burial date?

Quite considerably. But it's still interesting -

this type of brooch in iron is quite rare.

-It's just about 600 years later than we thought.

-Yes.

'Funny how such a small find can change ideas.

'But does anything else indicate the Iron Age?

'At Bristol University, I met Vanessa Straker,

'an environmentalist, who's been analysing seeds from the site.'

-So, did all that sieving on site pay off?

-Yes.

We've found a nice collection of the remains of the crops that were consumed by the people

-who lived there.

-What were they growing?

-Wheat and barley.

These are the two sorts found in the samples from Bleadon.

-Which one's which?

-This is a modern ear of emmer wheat here on the left.

And on the right is spelt wheat.

Neither has been grown in Britain for hundreds of years.

It's much harder to extract the grain from these "hulled" wheats

than it is from modern "free-threshing" wheats.

It would have been more complicated to extract the grain for consumption from these wheats.

-So, hard work for the farmers.

-Yes.

If you didn't know what date this site was, and you'd looked at all the seeds, what would you suggest?

I would think it was late prehistoric,

um, most probably Iron Age.

'At Southampton University, animal bones specialist Dale Sergeantson

'had just received a huge pile of bones from the site.'

My image of this man from Bleadon is that he's a farmer.

Does your first look at the animal bones bear this out?

Yes. Lots and lots of sheep,

including a lot of young sheep.

A certain amount of cattle and very, very few pigs or possibly even none at all.

Did they also have sheep dogs, then?

They certainly had dogs to guard the sheep and cattle and we found a bit of evidence for them in the site.

That's a tooth and we can get an idea from that

of the sort of size of dog it was.

We compared it with the dogs

in our reference collection and it's about the same size and shape

as the modern collie - perhaps a little smaller.

-Right. That's one man and part of his dog.

-Yes!

-What else is there?

-There are some other animals.

There's evidence for horse from the Iron Age.

But what is interesting is that the most obvious finds of horse

are two skulls from two different pits. This is one of them.

You can see we've arranged the teeth in a row,

but you can see the state in which it was found is very fragmentary.

So, just the skulls?

-Yes.

-Isn't that rather strange?

Well, the rest of it's eaten just as the cows and sheep were.

It was perfectly normal - people ate their horses in the Iron Age,

they ate every animal that died on the site.

And, in fact, that's a cow's tibia and it's been butchered

to be put into a cooking pot and stewed,

so that the lovely nutritious marrow can come out of the bone to be eaten.

I think we've probably got a fairly typical Iron Age assemblage here.

'Some of these ancient breeds are very different from today's

'as I found out at the Cotswold Countryside Park.'

These are Soays - small, slender,

their wool can be plucked instead of shorn and both sexes have horns.

These are Dexter cattle, the sort our Iron Age man would have had.

He would have milked them and also used them for pulling his plough.

They're lovely, aren't they?

'Everyone met to help Jane with the details for her ancient landscape.

'Andy was still sure that the site was Bronze Age.'

What you can say is that there's no Middle Bronze Age cultural material on the site

or later Iron Age material, excluding the possibility of that.

And you have to work from that starting point.

Well, this is interesting because...

Well, I didn't know about this iron brooch.

'But the evidence was pointing

'to a later date and only the radiocarbon dates would finally resolve this.'

This is the drawing I made on site to get a good sense of the landscape

and the feel of the place generally.

'Jane could now put the latest developments into her landscape.'

I made a much more detailed drawing.

We've included an Iron Age settlement - entirely conjectural,

we've no idea whether it was there or not,

but it seems likely that people were living there and farming.

This will be the final drawing, still unfinished.

I'm still undecided about what to do with the excavation site itself -

how to make it special. For now, mounds indicate the burial pits.

We know now that, the whole area was much more wooded than thought,

so I've brought the trees forward and hopefully given a sense

of the settlement being surrounded by trees, by quite dense woodland -

the species that you would find today in this kind of environment

where it was really quite wet -

willows, which cover the Somerset levels,

but also oak

and a lot of ash, there's a lot of ash.

We know from the faunal remains

that these people had horses - three skulls were found on site - and they would have been quite small,

something like an Exmoor pony.

And we know that people in the Iron Age had dogs.

So, a drawing like this is very much a coming-together of a lot of different information.

'In Jane's final illustration, we see a landscape of fields and farms.

'And downhill from the settlement, lying in a woodland clearing

'at the edge of the salt marsh, is the burial site.'

'In Manchester, Richard was putting the final touches to Bleadon man.'

It's what they do in the barbers, isn't it?

I'm just kind of fidgeting about.

He doesn't look anything like I thought he would!

It really is odd because this isn't the face that I expected I was going to see.

I feel I've almost got to know him from having seeing him in the ground as a skeleton,

and then seeing Richard rebuilding the skull, and the face emerging, but it's still a surprise.

I think it's a very strong face, it's almost got a touch of authority or nobility about it.

Yet, it's a person who probably had a hard life - which figures in the Iron Age.

I'd love to have met him in real life and been able to talk to him

but that's one thing archaeology will never let us do.

Right. Meet Bleadon man.

'I took the cast of Bleadon man to show Andy and Vince.'

What d'you reckon?

Very striking, I think.

'But I'd just had news that Bleadon man was 2,000 years old, not 3,000. He was Iron Age, after all.'

So, if I said that the radiocarbon dates suggested about 100 BC...

-I'd be very disappointed.

-Oh! That's what they are.

-Oh!

-I know!

I'll put it down gently.

-Really?

-Yeah.

Well, somebody has some explaining to do!

I mean, you said that you were disappointed. Why?

That's an interesting question. I think it's primarily

because the archaeological evidence that we gathered meticulously

doesn't correlate with this instrumental data.

And it's nice that when you look at a site in that detail,

you expect to be able to correlate the finds, the pottery

with the instrumental data fairly tightly - here, we have a huge difference.

But the unpredictability is the very reason why Andrew and I actually do this.

Now, we've got to explain how we fit this all together again.

We've had one idea about what the site was like and what age it was.

Now, we've got more complicating factors with a later date.

Fine! So we go back and ask new questions.

And hopefully, we can explain where all this fits in.

'Back in Bleadon, the burial site has sadly disappeared under the new houses.'

I'm Julian Richards, the archaeologist working on the series.

'In the village hall, nine months after his discovery,

'it was time for the villagers to meet their ancestor.'

And so, the question is now,

do any of you recognise this person?

George Wall. >

EVERYONE LAUGHS

What? There's somebody in the village that looks like this?

Ah!

Well, that's quite interesting. That seemed to be fairly unanimous.

There was a shout from several people about it.

The profile might be a giveaway...

'Another surprise was the results of the DNA study

'and Erica was here to explain.'

We can't say for sure that you're direct descendants

but it's quite clear that you do trace back to a common origin with this man and I think that's nice.

'Out of 48 people who gave blood, the DNA sequence of five matched with Bleadon man. But who are they?'

Move right in close - that's it!

Can you tip the head down for me?

< Can you lean right in close together? Heads as close as you can.

At least it's warm!

'After the meeting, it was time for a photo call.

'And we gave all of Bleadon man's five descendants

'certificates to mark the occasion.'

-How do you feel being related to him?

-I'm not very keen.

-You're not?! You think he looks a bit miserable?

-I do. Horrible nose!

Let's have a look. Hang on. What d'you reckon?

ALL: No!

I don't know! There's something there, I think.

-There is, is there?

-Yeah.

Subtitles by Judith Eacott BBC - 1998