‘Dazzling’ 4,000-Year-Old Treasures Unearthed In Amesbury Archer Discovery | BBC Timestamp

And here he is. We've got beakers here. Real ones this time. Terrified at the prospect of even touching them, because these are some of the oldest, the earliest beakers in Britain. This fragile, lovely beaker, a classic. Now, also in amongst this dazzling array of grave goods is metal. There are copper knives in here, and this isn't just any metal. Look at this. Here's one of them. It's a copper knife. It would have been a wooden handle, maybe, coming out to give you a grip on it. And there's the cutting edge. These are the oldest metal objects found so far in Britain. And alongside the earliest copper, and I can't believe I'm about to touch this, is the earliest gold. This is the earliest gold jewellery, been wrongly described previously as an earring, but it's not. It's a decoration for hair. You would put it on the end of pleated hair, or a braid of hair, just for decoration. Look at that, look at how fine it is. It feels as fragile as the foil on a Terry's chocolate orange. And I feel as if, with an uncontrolled nervous twitch, I might crush it flat. Look at it. Amazing. Put it down. Taking a tooth from the Amesbury archer, scientists could discover where this new metal worker had come from. First time we'd ever had a tooth that old in our hands. It was amazing, beholding something that old from another human being. Teeth contain traces of atomic elements, strontium and oxygen. And the pattern of these traces can reveal where someone spent their childhood, even after thousands of years. We were absolutely overwhelmed with the results. It was absolutely amazing. This guy didn't come from Britain. The Amesbury archer wasn't just an early beaker man, but one of the original pioneers. Born 1,000 miles away in the Alps of Central Europe. You just can't possibly think of somebody walking all that way. I was amazed. I was just totally amazed. And I was absolutely over the moon because he was different, and you see so many individuals who are just like everybody else and then all of a sudden, here's one guy who's just totally different. After travelling 1,000 miles, the Amesbury archer ended his days here in Wiltshire. Buried alongside the things that were important to him in life. All of this so far makes him fascinating and compelling. But there's one last item in here that makes this individual crucial to our story. It's this item here. This is called a cushion stone. It's used for working and finishing metal. Look at it. It's seen years of use. Look at how smooth it is. He would have used the smooth surface of this one to work, to cold work metal and give it the finishing shape and the finishing touches. So, this individual, this pioneer from Europe, he didn't just own metal things. He knew how to get metal, how to make metal and how to work metal.