The First Anglo-Saxons Stories from the Dark Earth: Meet the Ancestors Revisited

Right across Britain,

archaeologists are unearthing the relics of ancient lives.

But so much of modern archaeology is what happens after excavation.

Today, forensic analysis and cutting-edge science,

as well as brand-new finds,

are overturning what we once thought

about entire eras of our ancient history.

I'm Julian Richards. Over the years, I've been lucky enough

to have taken part in some of our most important digs.

You've not?

A lead coffin?

Now I'm going back to some of my favourites

to discover the very latest stories of our most ancient ancestors.

The Anglo-Saxons.

Invading warriors who came to Britain

in the wake of the Roman Empire.

Bringing in a whole new era in our history.

As an archaeologist, this era, the early part of the Dark Ages,

really excites me.

Because unlike the time of the Romans that came before

and the later Anglo-Saxon period,

we know so little about Britain in the fifth century AD.

Just who were these early Anglo-Saxon people?

And more importantly, what happened when they started to arrive

from their lands over the seas in the east

and landed here, on our shores?

More than a decade ago, I took part in two remarkable excavations

that have opened windows into this mysterious world.

One was the grave of a powerful man.

Buried alongside his horse and weapons.

The incredibly well-preserved remains

of an early Anglo-Saxon warrior.

Now, over a decade later, brand-new scientific analysis

is revealing exactly who he was,

when he lived and where he came from.

It was such a stunning discovery and so exciting for us.

Once in a lifetime, really.

The other dig was very different.

A whole cemetery of men and women.

Burials with evidence for the lives and beliefs

of the people who settled the east of England

from the fifth century AD.

And today, even wider studies of populations like these,

together with DNA science,

are revealing the scale of the Anglo-Saxon invasions

for the very first time.

The Frisians were not just similar to the English,

but in genetic or statistical terms, we couldn't tell them apart.

These two digs show just how much in archaeology

actually happens after the excavations are over.

So now I'm returning to see

how the story of the Anglo-Saxon invasions has moved on

and how the very latest studies have shed new light on the Dark Ages.

A mysterious era from which our first English kingdoms

and the very language we speak today would start to emerge.

I've come to East Anglia

in search of one particular group of fifth century invaders.

We refer to these people who arrived

after the Romans left in 410 AD as Anglo-Saxons.

But in fact, this wasn't one homogenous group of people,

but rather lots of different groups of people

from tribes across the whole of the mainland of northwest Europe.

And in particular, from parts of Germany.

And these different groups came to different parts of Britain.

Saxon people came to the Thames Estuary and to the south

while the Angles settled in the eastern part of Britain.

And it's from the Angles that we get the name East Anglia.

And Angle Land, or England.

And it was here, in East Anglia, 16 years ago,

a team of Suffolk archaeologists made an amazing discovery.

I remember when I got the call to invite me down to the excavation,

it sounded simply too good to be true.

One of those rare discoveries that every archaeologist dreams of.

Let me take you back 16 years to 1997.

A military airbase, RAF Lakenheath.

Here, archaeologists had uncovered the grave of a man laid to rest

with all the possessions he'd need for the afterlife.

The man's on this side

and he's buried in a coffin

with his spear up at the top corner,

his shield, which is the big lump of metal on his chest,

that's his shield box.

It would've been a wooden shield, a circular wooden shield,

and the wood's all rotted away.

Down this side, you can just see, is his sword.

What an enormous sword!

-That's a warrior, isn't it?

-That is.

Somebody who's got a sword, a spear, a shield and a horse.

-I mean, there's no question.

-That's it, yeah.

The burial was dated to the early Anglo-Saxon period,

around the middle of the sixth century AD.

Nothing quite like it had ever been found in Britain.

-It's incredibly exciting.

-You couldn't hope for anything better!

This is absolutely brilliant. It's the best thing we could've had.

What made the find even more exciting

was the incredible preservation of the bones.

Including our warrior's 1,500-year-old skull.

From his remains, experts in facial reconstruction

were able to reveal how he might have appeared in life.

16 years after the dig,

the warrior's remains are held at the Suffolk Archaeological Unit

in Bury St Edmunds.

I never thought I'd actually see him again,

but being here now makes me realise

that perhaps if I'd met this person in real life,

I might've been a bit intimidated by such a powerful figure.

This is the leg bone of a very tall man.

And these marks here show that he had very, very strong muscles.

So maybe this was the reason this man was chosen to be a warrior.

Because of his strength, because of his build.

Or alternatively, he might have been born into a privileged class,

where access to more and better food

could have resulted in him growing taller and stronger.

Our warrior stood around five foot ten inches.

Tall for the time.

And his bones suggested he was still young when he died.

Around 30 years old.

When he was discovered, we thought he'd lived around 550 AD.

But now, new scientific research has revealed he was alive much earlier.

Over the last few years,

new and very high-precision radiocarbon testing

has been carried out on our man's bones

and has given us a far more accurate date for him.

It's also shown that he's far more interesting and important

because he's much earlier than we expected.

He was born in around 470 AD.

Now, that does make him special

because few burials date from these first few decades of the Dark Ages.

It's only a couple of generations after the end of the Roman period.

So if the Anglo-Saxons were warrior invaders,

then he could have been right there at the time.

Back in 1997,

archaeologists also found all the trappings of a seasoned fighter.

His spear and his shield.

And, close by his side, even in death,

his massive sword.

A team of specialists from the British Museum

was called in to help lift these rare and fragile finds.

And as the items were cleaned, their full splendour was revealed.

From the silver-plated rivets that held the shield together

to its centrepiece, scratched and scarred with use.

Most impressive of all, the huge iron sword.

Although badly preserved,

X-rays revealed an incredible level of craftsmanship.

This patterned blade was the creation

of a highly-skilled swordsmith.

Fabricated from nearly 80 individual strips of metal.

Hector Cole, a traditional ironworker

took on the challenge of recreating our warrior's sword.

-It's hard work, isn't it?

-Oh, yes.

This is where a good striker is worth his weight in gold.

And you can see the way the metal's moving, that it's quite plastic.

It's a lovely feeling under the hammer, isn't it?

I didn't realise it would move quite so much as that.

This is wrought iron. You can't get anything better.

Strips of iron were forged together

and twisted into bars to give our sword strength.

And also, a unique pattern.

The main body of the sword was iron,

but the Anglo-Saxons used steel to provide a sharp cutting edge.

This was an object that could only have been carried

by a wealthy and powerful warrior leader.

The work that's gone into making this sword is, to me,

one of the most amazing processes I've ever seen.

There are no less than 79 different strips of metal

woven into this one blade.

I can hardly wait to see what it looks like

when it's all cleaned up and polished.

-I didn't think it would come up that quickly!

-Mm.

It's gorgeous, isn't it? All sort of sinuous and swirling.

-It's a lovely pattern.

-You're pleased with it?

I'm very pleased with it. It's a beautiful pattern, this, yes.

Cor! That's a...

-It's a hefty blade.

-It's a weighty blade, isn't it?

If you brought that down on someone, the momentum behind it would...

HE CHUCKLES

-But holding it out like that...

-Yes.

-You'd have to have a strong sword arm, wouldn't you?

-Yes.

A sword in a burial is a status symbol.

It's a sign that you're somebody powerful and important.

But this man had something else.

Because next to him in the grave was this.

An entire horse.

And seeing it laid out here, one thing it reminds me of

is just how enormous that grave had to be

to accommodate not only a full-grown man with all his weapons,

but this entire animal laid out beside him.

Now, you'll see that there's something missing here.

That's because the head is so fragile

that it can't come out of its box here.

This, though, is what really gave a clue

about how important this person was,

how important the horse was.

Because on these fragile bones,

you can see little green stains here.

These mark where the bronze fittings of an elaborate bridle once sat.

Back in 1997, we found the finely-crafted decorations

still clinging to the horse's skull.

This enabled experts to piece together for the first time

the precise appearance of an Anglo-Saxon bridle.

So, where do those wonderful things go, then?

Well, this one actually fits on a separate strap, loose.

It dangles. It's just a decorative dangler.

And it's got this extraordinary face on it.

Then we have this, again, very, very beautiful...

-Lovely!

-..gilt bronze with three panels.

And at the centre, you can see the double cross.

These are placed obliquely on the fitting.

And then to either side, there are gilded fields

with a little animal on it.

And this, actually, simply sits in the middle.

Just here.

On the horse's brow...

we have another gilt-bronze fitting.

-With a big dent in it.

-This is the bent one.

And if you actually look at it very, very closely,

you can actually see what looks like a glancing blow on the gilding.

The dent was evidence of a severe blow to the head.

All horse burials of this sort of period...

An injury that was even more apparent on the skull.

Now we can get a good look at this massive depressed fracture here.

Is that actually what killed the horse, then?

I doubt that would have been immediately lethal.

Even though it's done quite a lot of damage,

it's actually a little too far forward.

If you really wanted to kill a horse with a blunt-instrument injury

to the front of the head, you'd want to aim for the brain.

It probably just caused a little brain damage, but not a lot.

I think the probability has to be,

given that that would only really have stunned it,

that something else was done to finish it off.

And the most obvious thing is opening up an artery

and allowing loss of blood actually to kill the animal.

Nasty, but effective.

From the moment our Lakenheath warrior was discovered back in 1997,

we knew he was an important find.

But our new analysis has made his story even more significant.

He was somebody who was physically powerful,

but also wielded social power, as well.

He was an elite leader.

But he died aged 30, in the prime of his life.

Now, new radiocarbon dating has shown

that he lived much earlier than we expected.

In the fifth century AD.

And that raises a very interesting question.

Because if he's that early and if he was born overseas,

somewhere over there to the east,

then he might have been one of the very first invaders.

Part of the initial wave of warrior opportunists

who came and seized power and land in this part of the country

in the wake of the retreating Roman Empire.

Now we've commissioned scientists

to carry out the very first isotope analysis of the warrior's remains

to discover where he came from.

It's a technique that simply wasn't established

when he was excavated 16 years ago.

Different areas of the world have different chemical signals

in their oxygen in the water.

And when your teeth are being made by your body,

it records that chemical signal of the water

in the place where you're growing up.

By comparing the results to data from various regions,

it's possible to discover if the warrior grew up

locally in eastern Britain or overseas.

So our results strongly suggest that he is local in birth.

He could be a second generation,

so his parents could be born in the homelands and have moved over.

Going on the results we've got,

I would put money on the fact

that he's not from the Germanic homelands.

That he was born in the east of England.

So it turns out that our warrior, early as he is,

wasn't an invader from across the sea.

So, what's going on?

Well, the analysis can't tell us everything

about our warrior's genetic inheritance.

If he was the locally-born son of an invader from the east,

then his isotopes would still mark him out as being British.

Even though to all the locals, he'd be very much an Anglo-Saxon.

But in some ways, this makes things even more interesting.

Because what it suggests is that by 470 AD,

these people are well established here in eastern England.

They've been here for at least a generation,

right off the back of the Roman withdrawal.

But we're not yet done with the warrior's story.

There are more clues about the life of this elite Anglo-Saxon man

and the society that he lived in.

Because our warrior wasn't found alone.

What we were unearthing 16 years ago was an entire cemetery

with burials spreading off in all directions from his grave.

160 in total.

And what these excavations have started to do

is to paint a wider picture of the community he lived in.

Back in 1997, surrounding the burial of our warrior,

we found lots of smaller graves containing children.

We've got a cluster of child graves all around the horse burial.

We've got an infant in here.

These bones were badly decayed and only fragments remained in the soil.

We've got the teeth up here, a bit of skull there,

an arm bone running down here and the ribs coming across.

You can just see them here. And then we've got a bit of the upper leg...

What I found extraordinary was that some of these children's graves

contained full-sized weapons.

-But isn't that a spear?

-It is a spear.

And that's a knife, as well.

Um...this is the third child grave we've had with weapons.

This, I think this is the smallest.

It's a bit bizarre, really. I don't know what it means.

That child can't be more than, what, three, four maybe?

-Yeah.

-It seems so incongruous to have a little grave

and these great big grown-up weapons in it.

Now, 16 years on, I'm returning to the excavation site at Lakenheath.

I'm intrigued to know what the latest research can tell us

about those unusual child burials.

And the other graves that surrounded our warrior.

The cemetery was discovered

near this sports pitch on the military base.

Archaeologist Jo Caruth has been analysing the finds

for more than a decade.

If you have a look at this, now this is the site plan,

and you can see this is the horse and rider burial here...

-With the ditch around it.

-That's right.

-And I've coloured this for you. The men are blue.

-Right.

-The women are red and the children are green.

-Right.

Do you remember when we were onsite, we were looking at this one

and this was a child with a spear, a big spear.

-Oh, a really tiny child.

-That's right.

And we guessed at how old it was.

Well, in fact, we've had... All the bone analysis has now been done,

and in fact, this is a baby. This is someone of six to nine months old.

-What? That young?

-That young.

It is interesting that we've got five children

with spears across this site.

But of those, three of them are between 11 and 12 years old.

Which is really the sort of age where we might be looking at

those children sort of stepping into adulthood.

So it's not really that surprising

that they might start to have a weapon set at that point,

perhaps training to be warriors of the future.

When they were unearthed, we wondered

if there was any link between the warrior and these children.

And now, recent forensic analysis

has revealed an unusual common feature.

If you have a look at his skull,

which I've got here...

and...

he has got a particular genetic anomaly on his skull.

And if you have a look...

if you have a look there,

can you see where the sutures come together,

there's an extra little bit of bone?

-That little bit there?

-That little bit there, yeah.

He's got this, but we can also see it on this child

and this child and this woman here.

And interestingly, we've also got it on this male here,

this male here, this male here

and this female here.

So that does at least suggest the possibility

that there are some family groupings in here

-and that some of the people buried around him may be relatives.

-Yeah.

There's something else about him I think you'll be interested to see.

Now, if you have a look here, can you see,

there's no male burials within quite a considerable area around him.

It may mean that because he's a particularly powerful man,

he doesn't need protection himself.

And possibly even having other warriors near him

would be seen as a threat.

Effectively encroaching on his territory, if you like.

16 years ago, we unearthed 160 graves surrounding our warrior.

But now, thanks to further excavation work by Jo's team,

we know this burial ground was even bigger.

Three cemeteries and more than 400 graves.

The burials span two centuries.

And our new date for the warrior

suggests that he's probably the earliest.

Given all this new evidence,

where do you think this puts the position of our warrior

in the bigger picture?

We are now looking seriously at the possibility

that this is a founding burial for this cemetery,

possibly for all three cemeteries.

And that this man, he's the first

and these are his people following on from him.

Today, we know so much more about the Lakenheath warrior

than we could ever have imagined 16 years ago.

We know that he lived much earlier than we thought

and that he wasn't actually an invader himself, but was born here.

And yet he does seem to have been the founding father

for a whole dynasty of descendants.

And we're not yet finished with the Lakenheath discoveries either.

Because analysis of what was found with the burials

is telling us more and more

about this extended family, this emerging society.

The 428 graves from Lakenheath have yielded up treasures.

Thousands of them.

And now, after nearly a decade of conservation and study,

they're opening up the world of the warrior's people.

Men and women living in Suffolk

between the fifth and the seventh centuries.

Beads are the single most common class of artefacts.

We've got nearly a thousand different glass beads.

-A thousand?

-Yes. The same number of amber beads, as well.

There's a real difference.

That's black and yellow. It's incredibly striking, isn't it?

-And then you've got blue there.

-That's right.

And that one, which is a type we find all over western Europe.

They've been commented on as being like Wedgwood porcelain, really.

-Yes. The blue and white?

-Exactly.

And the appearance that they give.

Some of the women's brooches reveal a particularly dazzling

display of craftsmanship and wealth.

That's incredible, isn't it? The workmanship on that!

And the gilding.

That would have looked astonishing when it was new, wouldn't it?

You can see the gilding, you can even see that very, very fine

punch-marking that's along there.

What we've also got on this are these areas here in the corners

and on the rounded footplate lobes

which were covered with silver sheet.

So you've get the interplay between the gold and the silver.

Interestingly, the process of gilding itself

requires a supply of mercury.

So there are resources going into the production of these

that more than immediately meets the eye.

Now, what intrigues me about this

is some of those little bits of decoration there

look like some of the bits of decoration on the bridle.

-Yes.

-From our warrior's horse.

There is actually a connection between this particular brooch

and what came out on the horse's bridle

in that this is the woman's grave

that is closest to where the man and the horse were buried

and in fact, in terms of date,

we would say they're pretty much contemporary.

It's perfectly possible that this could be the wife

of the man who was buried with his horse.

That is amazing if there really is that connection.

But it's humbler jewellery that reveals really striking differences

between groups of burials from different areas of the cemeteries.

Here we find that there's a very much

higher proportion of women there

than in the other places

who are fastening their dresses

by wearing a pair of these very simple, but very effective brooches.

-That's quite plain.

-It's a simple ring with an iron pin on it.

Now, conversely,

if we come to the largest burial ground that we've got,

the women there are fastening their dresses

by wearing a pair of brooches like this.

What's this telling us about Anglo-Saxon society?

Certainly what it says to me is this was a people

for whom the expression of their identity in appearance,

in what they had, not only around them, but on show,

really did matter for them.

It was making a statement.

They almost seem to pull two ways at once.

There's so much about this

that talks to me about a common Anglo-Saxon...

To be honest, I would say in this case, Anglian identity.

But even within that, without challenging your Anglian identity

or your incipient English identity,

you can also have an identity of this particular local group

as opposed to that particular local group.

Why do you think this micro level, sort of small identity,

is so important to these people?

This was a society in which, rather like a military group,

you depend on everybody doing their job and fulfilling their roles.

Now, these were roles that, yes, were very stereotype.

They were imposed by tradition.

They didn't leave space for a great deal of individuality.

The individuality, if you like,

we're seeing between these small groups,

not within those small groups.

1,500 years ago, a new wealthy elite

with a common Anglo-Saxon culture

began to emerge in southern and eastern Britain.

But this was more complex than a mass invasion

bringing fully-formed lifestyles and beliefs.

The early Anglo-Saxons,

just like today's second or third generation of British immigrants,

were probably riding multiple cultural identities.

They brought from their homelands the traditions of their ancestors,

but they would have been trying to work out not only who they were,

but who they wanted to be.

And our Lakenheath warrior, as one of these early generations,

would have been instrumental in trying to forge

an identity for those who followed.

But we still have to address that big question - just how many

Anglo-Saxons did come over from mainland Europe in the first place?

Scientists and archaeologists are just beginning to tackle this

thorny question. Was it invasion or was it migration?

Massed hoards or perhaps just a few intrepid settlers?

Individual finds or graves actually aren't that much use

because all they do is paint a snapshot of one person.

What you need is to cast the net a lot wider and that's what

archaeologists and scientists have been doing more recently.

Together, they've been looking at large Anglo-Saxon cemeteries

and also carrying out cutting edge studies involving modern populations and DNA.

But it still all begins with archaeology.

You just need a lot more of it.

Large cemeteries, ideally people of the same communities, who

were buried together at about the same time in that very early period.

And that's where another early Anglo-Saxon site that

I helped dig more than a decade ago would help to play a part.

Because two years after our warrior excavation,

I was called back to East Anglia.

The site was at a small village called Alwalton,

just 40 miles west of Lakenheath.

It was 1999 and early Anglo-Saxon remains had been

discovered on a building site.

As soon as I arrived, I was put to work.

But my first skeleton wasn't exactly in perfect condition.

Well, the skull is just where it should be,

but the unfortunate thing is that somebody has dug a trench

right the way across the top of the grave.

And taken away about half the skull.

'Fortunately, not everything in the grave had been destroyed.'

You have to dig something like this so carefully

because look at the size of these beads that I've just found.

They're absolutely tiny.

There's a mixture of glass, bronze and possibly even some amber.

'As I continued to dig, more treasures appeared,

'including a bronze brooch and even silver rings.'

Well, I've just finished excavating this grave

and it contains an amazing selection of finds.

There's some beads, what looks like part of a decorative belt

and down by the knees,

an extraordinary collection of iron, bronze and what looks like ivory.

'Nearby, some of the other diggers were making even more

'exciting finds.'

You've got a nice selection of stuff in here.

Yeah, there's those two brooches there.

-Yeah.

-And there's that copper ring down there and the ivory ring.

That's just like the one that I had from the grave over there,

only that one's in better condition.

Mind you, this is all in better condition, including the skull.

It's quite crushed but it looks as if it's all there, the cheekbones

and there's the nose bone and the mandibles going down there.

After 1,500 years in the dark earth, the skull was incredibly fragile.

It's all there.

But skulls aren't really supposed to be that shape.

So I think this is going to be a very interesting

reconstruction job for somebody.

Let's have a look, then.

At Manchester University, a forensic team got to work on the skull.

-Hmm, lots of bits.

-Lots of pieces.

Half a mandible.

A bit of the orbit on that side.

-And that side.

-At least we've got both arches, that's good.

Yeah. Let's have a look.

We'd found the remains of a woman of about 30 years old.

Looks like we've lost the top.

And although badly crushed, her skull still offered

the possibility of reconstructing her features.

She's got quite a...powerful face, quite masculine proportions.

Everything about it's quite large.

There is a slight asymmetry in the face, which, if you look at it,

you can see that one eye is slightly higher than the other, but as

this face is actually building, you don't notice that quite as much.

On the skull, there was actually a frontal suture that was

actually slightly open and the nasal spine was also quite splayed,

which is indicative of a biffed nose, which is like a nose which has

a cleft or a line down the middle of it.

And again this will be echoed in the chin.

She's going to have a cleft in her chin as well.

So altogether, she's going to have quite a memorable face, I think.

At last, we came face to face with Alwalton Woman,

an early Anglo-Saxon who lived around 500 AD.

Meanwhile, her jewellery was carefully cleaned,

revealing exquisite design and craftsmanship.

These rings and brooches could be linked to mainland Europe

and beyond.

When we first found these rings, my initial reaction was - is it ivory?

-Can you tell me what it is?

-Right.

What we've got here is actually a sliver

and if I put this under the microscope, you can

see the corrugations running across it here

and the striations running off those corrugations.

If we turn to this photograph over here, you can

see exactly the same structures and this is elephant ivory.

So this stuff's come all the way from Africa, which is

-quite a distance to Peterborough!

-It certainly is.

Though I think it would probably have come perhaps through

a series of traders. It doesn't necessarily come directly.

And it would probably have come as a piece of raw material,

a lump of material,

to be worked up in the areas where it was going to, into the characteristic

items that were required in the sort of luxury end of the market.

Alwalton Woman's amber beads were also analysed to find out

where they came from.

Amber can be found all over the world.

The richest source of amber in Europe is from the Baltic region.

From Northern Europe, particularly Western Jutland

and along the coast of modern day Lithuania.

So what did you do to find out whether this was Baltic amber?

Well, I took a small piece of the already fragmented bead and

slotted it into the sample chamber of the infrared spectrometer.

And we should be able to generate a fingerprint that we can use

to identify the amber to a precise geographical source.

And this region of the infrared spectrum is

known as the Baltic Shoulder

and distinguishes Baltic amber from all of the other amber sources.

The Dark Ages often get a rather bad press.

The idea that once the Romans left,

that much of Britain simply went to rack and ruin.

But the stunning jewellery from Alwalton tells a very

different story, of a wealthy society in touch with the latest

in design and with far-flung trading connections.

I'm coming back to Alwalton for the first time in 14 years

because ever since the excavation, this site has intrigued me.

It's not just that one woman that makes this place so fascinating.

But the whole population of early Anglo-Saxons who were buried

here between the fifth and the sixth centuries.

Since the dig though, this place has changed a lot.

Back then, it was a building site.

And now, it's a fully fledged business park.

That must be...over there.

So that hedge line was...there.

That's right.

'I had the excavation plan, but was struggling to get my bearings.'

About 20...metres. So, one, two, three...

Actually, it's quite a challenge to find a single

burial in a business park car park.

But I think with the aid of this plan, I think I'm in the right spot.

I remember there was a hedge over there

and that's where I excavated the first woman's burial,

that was actually quite badly damaged,

but then there was a whole cluster around here

and just about here, this is where we found that quite

well-preserved woman's burial, with all of those wonderful objects.

Altogether, we found 34 skeletons, mostly in just this one area.

And another 30 graves across the whole site -

an entire community of early Anglo-Saxons.

But while some were burials, within the same cemetery,

we also found evidence of a very different form of funeral practice.

Over here, we had something very different

and actually quite surprising

because in that corner of the site, it was mostly burials.

Here, it was almost entirely cremations.

And not just small pottery urns containing burnt human bones,

but the remains of a pyre site where the cremation took place.

Now, this complicates things a bit

because either society is undergoing a radical shift in the way it

views death and the afterlife, or at the same time,

you've got two separate groups of people,

each choosing to bury their dead in a very different way.

With most of the skeletons removed, attention turned to a new

area of the site where cremation urns had been found,

buried very closely together and all dated to the fifth

and early sixth century AD.

We all had our own urn to dig.

And I hoped that the contents of mine

would offer clues about the identity of these people.

But first, I had to get it out of the ground.

My first urn's turning out to be absolutely wonderful.

It's much bigger than I thought.

It seems to be complete and there's lovely decoration running all

the way down the side of it. The thing that bothers me

though is that there's some rather ominous cracks just starting

to appear and I do wonder

whether the whole thing's going to come out in one piece.

'Before trying to lift it, we gave it a little bit of extra support.'

Of course, what I'm not sure about is how much more there is

underneath cos I can't get down any deeper, so what do we do?

-Just try and see if we can...?

-Yeah, rock it.

-Rock it, loosen it.

Oh, dear. Hang on.

-I've got a...

-I've got a crack down here.

-Have you?

-Yeah.

What? You think the base has come off?

If we rock it that way, at least we should be able to see

whether it's actually...gone or not.

Seems OK to me.

Ah, there's...at the very base of it, the very base of it.

I think that's the best we can hope for.

So what do we do? Just lift this up and put this straight on to the...?

-Yes.

-OK.

'Luckily, the urn's contents were so tightly packed that nothing

'fell out through the gaping hole in its base.'

Now, that's the reason that we couldn't get the pot out of

the ground, this little lip at the bottom was firmly

stuck in the soil, but at least it's out now and that's the whole pot.

For us though, it wasn't the urn that was as important...

..as the burnt remains that it contained.

The common misconception with cremated bones is that what

you get are tiny fragments. You don't. If you look here, you can

actually see recognisable pieces of bone and what I do is I go through

and I pick out the bits that are going to tell me

something about the age of the individual, the sex

of the individual, and of course how many individuals there are.

For instance, this is a fairly distinctive piece.

This is what your ear looks like on the inside.

And because it's of a very distinctive appearance, even if you

get a very small piece of it, a tiny piece, you can

still tell what you've got and usually which side it's from.

And there are no other pieces here that suggest

any other petrous temporals, which is what this is called.

-So you've just got one person in the pot.

-Yes.

How can you tell it's a male though from all these tiny fragments?

In this instance, what I've gone on is basically the size

and robusticity, how heavily built the skeleton was.

For instance, if you were to look at this bone here,

this is actually the back part of the femur,

where you have quite a big muscle attachment coming in.

And that is quite a strong attachment down the back of that femur.

Apart from this one person, did you find anything else in the urn?

There were also some grave goods.

As you can see, there's a set of shears, part of a razor blade

and an unidentified piece of metalwork.

It's the sort of thing which commonly gets referred to as a toilet set.

It's all too easy to think of Anglo-Saxon men as alpha males,

aggressive warriors, buried with swords.

But at Alwalton,

we get a very different picture of Saxon masculinity

because here, the men are choosing to be buried with grooming sets

and with these - combs, which were found in almost every single

one of the urns that were discovered.

Cremation burials of men from north Germany also contained

grooming sets and combs.

So there does seem to be a direct cultural

connection between Alwalton and the Anglo-Saxon homelands.

In their own way, the burnt remains were every

bit as telling as our powerful warrior's sword.

Our two digs have revealed very different

pictures of the early Anglo-Saxons,

the people who lived in East Anglia during this mysterious

time that we call the Dark Ages.

The first, a warrior, buried alongside his horse and weapons.

Someone who seems to have been the founder of an entire community.

The other, a cemetery where the women were buried with fabulous

and exotic jewellery.

But where the cremated men took combs

and grooming sets to the next world.

Together, they paint a fascinating picture of a new wealthy

elite emerging shortly after the Romans had left.

A people who shared an Anglo-Saxon culture,

but who identified very strongly with their own local groups.

At Lakenheath, surrounding our warrior,

different groups of Anglo-Saxons marked themselves out from one

another through dress and appearance.

At Alwalton, two separate groups suggested even deeper

differences with seemingly contrasting customs and beliefs.

With these groups jostling for recognition

and power in this new land, we see modern England in the making.

And just two centuries later, these fierce local identities would

give rise to our first English kingdoms.

But there's another question in all of this. What about the locals?

What about the people who were living here

when the Anglo-Saxons arrived? How do they fit into this picture?

It's a question that goes right to the heart of the debate.

Just what was the size and impact of the Anglo-Saxon invasion?

The arrival of the Anglo-Saxons is always seen as a watershed moment,

a mass invasion that left England with a new people

and a new way of life and culture.

Sites like Lakenheath

and Alwalton seem to confirm the presence of a dominant new people.

It's as if the ancient Britons had simply disappeared from the land.

In early Anglo-Saxon England,

what we don't get is very much evidence for what you could

call Celtic culture in the south east of the country.

And that's very odd

because this is a culture that persists strongly throughout

the whole of the Roman period and yet just seems to disappear

completely as soon as the Saxons arrive.

And yet population estimates suggest that there were around

two million Britons living here after the Romans left.

So, just what happened to them all?

Once, the view was of local people either being killed or

driven to the fringes of Britain by bands of marauding warriors.

But the big problem with this theory is the total lack of conflict.

For all the big swords in burials,

there aren't cut marks on bones that show battles have taken place.

And there aren't any layers of ash that show where farmsteads

have been burnt down.

In fact, the big problem is the almost complete lack of any

evidence for widespread destruction.

But now, scientists have found new evidence that could help

reveal what happened to the local Britons.

Like the analysis of our warrior,

but applied to hundreds of burials, new isotope studies can today

reveal who was moving where, when, and in what numbers.

Dr Sam Lucy has been looking for patterns to build up

a picture of population changes in fifth century Britain.

One site we've got is all the way up here in East Yorkshire,

the site at West Heslerton.

The overwhelming majority of the population appeared to be

local to Britain, certainly, even if not local to East Yorkshire.

There were a few individuals, three or four, who looked as if they

could have come from colder oxygen climates,

like Continental North West Europe or Scandinavia.

The next site that we've got some results from is

at Berinsfield which is down here in the Upper Thames Valley.

There, virtually everybody looked as if they were local to that area.

And the final site that we've got good results from is right down

here on the south coast, Eastbourne.

There appeared to be two population groups within

the cemetery at Eastbourne.

One of which did look as if it was from outside of that local area.

Potentially again from slightly colder oxygen climates.

So if you're looking at these patterns as a whole,

you've got local, local, potential immigrants,

and then potentially a few immigrants,

so I think, if anything, this has to make people rethink the extent and

significance of potential migration that we've got in this period.

Sam Lucy's findings suggest that only tens of thousands

of Anglo-Saxons migrated to Britain in the fifth century,

compared to a local population of around two million.

New science is taking us

a step closer to understanding the Anglo-Saxon invasion.

A lower number of people,

but people who nevertheless had a massive cultural impact.

The isotope work of the last decade is absolutely fascinating

because what it's shown us is that we do have locals living within

and alongside these new Anglo-Saxon communities.

But they're just very difficult to single out

because they've adopted all of the new Germanic dress and fashions.

But in some ways, what's even more interesting is that we're now

starting to get a handle on the size of the Anglo-Saxon invasion

because if you deliberately target this early period,

the fifth and sixth centuries, a time when we think there are lots

of Anglo-Saxons coming into this country,

then we should find lots of evidence for immigrants. And we don't.

So what that means is that this migration is much smaller

than we've always thought.

But there's startling new evidence that suggests

that as well as bringing cultural change,

these new people also had a massive genetic impact.

And this time, the evidence doesn't come from ancient bones,

but from living, breathing people.

From all of us.

Since the digs, more than a decade ago,

a new scientific tool has been growing in influence.

And that's DNA.

You can't look at an individual and pinpoint an Anglo-Saxon gene,

but by studying a whole population, it is

possible to detect statistical similarities or differences.

-Hi, Mark.

-Hi, Julian.

-Nice to see you.

'One recent study compared the Y chromosome of men from England,

'Wales and an area of the Netherlands once home

'to the Anglo-Saxons, called Friesland.'

So we chose Friesland because Friesians have their own language

and it's the closest living language, apart from English, to Old English.

And we compared all those Y chromosomes and what

we found was the English towns were very similar to each other.

And the Welsh towns were really quite different.

But the Friesians were not just similar to the English,

-but in genetic or statistical terms, we couldn't tell them apart.

-Really?

Studying modern DNA,

the English samples look totally different to the neighbouring Welsh.

But almost identical to the Friesland samples,

where the Anglo-Saxons came from.

So what's going on?

If it is the Anglo-Saxon migration,

how big would that migration have to be to have this effect?

And what's the answer?

The answer, remarkably, is somewhere between 50 and 100% replacement.

So we're looking at a contribution of these Anglo-Saxon

migrants of between 50 and 100%

to the ancestry of English men.

That's...a lot more than I would have expected. An awful lot more.

Right.

'The results seem to contradict isotope studies, which suggest

'a comparatively small number of Anglo-Saxon invaders.

'But there could be an explanation.

'And it's all down to power and wealth.'

If a smaller number of Anglo-Saxon migrants came over

and if they have a higher status,

that probably means they're wealthier, and if they're wealthier,

that means their children are more likely to survive to adulthood.

So if they kept apart and they didn't interbreed too much,

then we can show by computer simulations that in about ten

generations, even a small migration can lead to

an over 50% contribution to the ancestry.

So what you're saying then is that a smaller number of,

to use a word, an elite that came over, if they were really

successful, then their influence could gradually expand.

Including their genetic influence.

So we don't necessarily need to have this massive migration.

We could have a smaller migration of more successful people, basically.

-Correct.

-Right.

-Correct.

Surprisingly, DNA studies of modern populations are opening up

windows into the ancient past and together with new isotope

studies of fifth and sixth-century populations,

as well as a wealth of traditional archaeology,

we're finally building a clearer picture of the early Anglo-Saxons.

I visited two amazing excavations, at Lakenheath and Alwalton, that to

me really opened up the mysterious world of the first Anglo-Saxons.

And now, new science and archaeology have brought us

much closer to an understanding about what was

going on in the fifth century, at this time that we call the Dark Ages.

It's shed new light on who these people were and just how many of

them might have come across the seas to settle these new

lands of the fifth century.

And one thing is also very clear - our Lakenheath warrior,

whoever he was, left a lasting legacy.

We now know that this emerging Anglo-Saxon England was about

far more than just marauding invaders,

but our warrior still fits into this increasingly complicated picture.

And in an even more fascinating way.

He may actually have been a fighter,

somebody who wielded that mighty sword in anger, but

we now know his influence spread far beyond his prowess in battle.

His real influence lay in his genes.

The warrior, together with the people we found at Alwalton,

reveal a new society emerging from the ashes of the Roman Empire,

ruled over by a wealthy elite of Continental migrants.

They were people in a new land who followed the customs of their

homelands, but who also, over a few generations, forged a new,

local and very distinctive culture.

And despite their small numbers,

even their genetic line has come down to us today.

Each new discovery, each scientific advance,

has taken us one step closer to understanding who these people were.

These elusive early Anglo-Saxons that laid

the foundation for our modern English nation.

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