Uncovering An Authentic 7th Century Anglo-Saxon Necklace

Everywhere you look, the rich history of the United Kingdom is there to be seen. But hidden beneath our feet, there's still a wealth of archaeological treasure just waiting to be found. That's why each year, all across the country, our archaeologists dig, dive and explore their way down. Oh my god, some of the best stuff you're ever going to see. Oh wow. Searching for fresh discoveries. Oh, hypercaust. Revealing the imprint of ancient civilisations. It's been there for five and a half thousand years. And unearthing fascinating objects. Fantastic decoration. Any musket balls yet, Aaron? Wow, look at that. Every dig adds new pieces to the ever-growing archaeological jigsaw that is the epic story of our islands. And I'm down. This year, I visit digs in some extraordinary locations. And solve mysteries using cutting-edge tools. Oh, this is wonderful. I'm joined by a trio of expert investigators. So you can see how that gives you a really unique signature. That's right. Excellent. So they were using food as a type of bribery. Who dig deeper to answer the questions raised by the finds. That's how he got away with it. Exactly. Finally, the archaeologists bring their best discoveries into our tent. Yeah, it's a cracking find. For up-close analysis. So it's completely unique impression. That's wonderful. Welcome to Digging for Britain. In this episode, we're exploring the best archaeology from the central regions of Britain. We unearth a mysterious Roman cemetery. I want to know why they were buried like this. Where skulls have been replaced with pots. Somehow this has got to mean something. We investigate the world's only surviving example. This is really quite exceptional. Of an iron age shield made from bark. You think, oh, it's going to be collapsible, but it's not at all. And we uncover the most ornate Anglo-Saxon necklace ever found in Britain. Blown away by that. It's amazing. Across the centre of Britain in the 16th century, wealthy landowners stamped symbols of their status on the landscape. Like Burley House in Lincolnshire. And Woolerton Hall in Nottingham. Many Elizabethan manors rivaled the grandeur of royal palaces. But not all of them have survived to the present day. Our first dig takes place close to Coleshill, 10 miles east of Birmingham. Here, the ground is being prepared for the nation's biggest infrastructure project, HS2. A team from Wessex Archaeology is investigating the site of a lost Elizabethan manor house that was torn down at the beginning of the 19th century. We know there was an Elizabethan manor here at Coleshill. But there's not much in the way of a historical record. And even less to see above ground. What's now emerging is an extraordinary fortified gatehouse that once guarded the entrance to the manor. And it's dwarfing all expectations. Oh my god, I cannot believe that you just had no idea that this was here. It was a massive shock for us as well when we found it. Stuart Pearson is leading the dig. So this is the gatehouse to the manor? It would have been. So this would have led right up to the entrance to our manor house. Can we get down and get a bit of a closer look? The team has fully exposed the base of one of the two octagonal towers that flank the entrance. Look at those walls. I mean, they're really substantial. This is almost like a small castle. And when it would have been fully constructed, it would have been visible for miles around. History has left its impression on the surfaces of these sandstone blocks. They're covered in telltale marks and scars. It's amazing. It's just incredible. And it's the more that you look at it, the more detail you see. Yeah. Now there's a lot of marks on these stones. There are. Is this tool marks here? So yeah, they're all tool marks coming down there. And if you look a little bit lower, you might be able to pick out a mason's mark as well. There. That's the one. And there's another one just further up as well. I can't quite see it from here. Yeah, that's the one. Same person then? Potentially. They are very similar. So it could be the same person that's put these stones into place and carved them. That's amazing. There's other marks as well, aren't there, on these stones? There are. There's little round marks. What are these? So this is what's really, really exciting about the gatehouse. When we were excavating this area, we found 42 of them just on this section of wall. So we started looking up and realising, hang on a minute, are all these little impacts? Yeah. And then that led us to believe that musket pools had been fired at the gatehouse. That's just extraordinary. So what you've got here then is a building which is being attacked by people wearing muskets. Yeah. And that makes me think 17th century Civil War. I think you're probably correct. So what we know about this area is the first skirmish of the Civil War was supposedly at Bridge, which is just two miles up the road. But this location is on the way to that skirmish. So we think potentially that this actually might be the location of the first battle of the Civil War. God, this site just gets better and better. This is incredible. So you've got this gatehouse, this building that you just had no idea existed. And now you've got evidence which could potentially rewrite history. This could be where the first skirmish of the English Civil War took place. The English Civil War kicked off in August 1642, a conflict between royalists loyal to King Charles I and parliamentarians. This part of the Midlands was split between rival factions with small bands of soldiers from both sides roaming the landscape. This nearby fortified manor house became a garrison for the parliamentarian troops, while the manor at our site was owned by an aristocratic family loyal to the king. Now, I'm not claiming that this is an entirely accurate historical reconstruction, but it's the best I can do. Looking at that, we know that there are two octagonal towers and that there's a building behind them. And looking at other gatehouses of a similar age, this is what I think it might have looked like. And really calling it a gatehouse doesn't do it justice. It's like a miniature castle. And it's not just for show, as we now know. Across the front of it, we've got all of these musket ball impacts. So could this have been the very first skirmish of the English Civil War? And it's not just traces of impacts that the archaeologists are finding. Dozens of musket balls have been recovered from the moat, each one a potential source of ballistic evidence. Find specialist Lorraine Mepham has lined up some prime suspects. So we've got some of the musket balls that have come out from right in front of the gatehouse here. There's quite a variety of sizes. There is, and that's quite exciting in itself, because obviously the size tells us something about the calibre of the weapon. Yeah. And in fact, the weapons are not necessarily standard calibre, so they're probably using whatever they had to hand. So have any of them definitely been fired? Well, some of them have, because some of them have traces of actually going through the weapon. So if we look at a couple that have actually been fired, you can see that this is actually isn't a spheroid. It's only rounded on one side. It's quite cylindrical. It's got the band round here, and then that rear end is almost flat. So this has actually gone through the barrel, and it's been compressed against the barrel here. So that shape is from being fired. And if you look at the band, you can see slight striations. Yeah. Running back. Yeah. So that has definitely been shot, but not necessarily hit anything. That's right. And that one looks like it's been flattened. Yes. Now this one has, as you can see, rounded at the top, but flattened on this. But interestingly, this is not entirely splattered against something. This has hit something relatively smooth, but at medium velocity. So it hasn't completely disintegrated. When you say relatively smooth, could that have been the front of the gatehouse? It could have been, yes. Yeah. It could have been. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Having found both musket balls and impacts on the walls, the team are close to a smoking gun here at Coleshill. Archaeologist and Civil War expert Bob Clark is visually impaired, so he's come down to the site to get hands-on with the evidence. Bob, how important is it for you to come to the site and to experience the evidence for yourself? Well, I work on touch more than I work on sighted experiences now. This is physical evidence. This is not something you read in a book. So somebody could write this right now and say, oh, there's two pop marks in there, and that's all they will tell you. For me, I can start to look at depth. I can look at angle, various other things like that, and start coming to some conclusions. So this is an opportunity to engage with the archaeology one-on-one. Yeah. So if we look at these two pop marks here, you'll notice that they're different depths. You know, you can get your thumb in there. Yeah, yeah. You can't get your thumb in there, can you, in that one at all? So if we look at here, we can say that's compared to that, which is shallower, is a higher energy. Do you know, I haven't even noticed that because I've not felt them, Bob. You're there automatically doing that, and I'm standing back and looking at them. Well, I would suggest that we've got two calibres there. So we've got musket balls which have emerged from the site, and we've got impacts which could have been caused by these musket balls. Could this be civil war action? What better place to shoot up than a royalist property? So with a known royalist site, we should really expect at least something like this. It's tantalising and frustrating at the same time. I find it amazing that we've got this evidence which is, you know, it's been buried for centuries and it's just been revealed, and then to find it covered with pop marks is just extraordinary. And then here we are trying to work out what exactly happened here at Coleshill. You know, before you probably wouldn't have even thought of asking these questions, but now we have this evidence, suddenly we've got a whole load of questions. I want to know more about who would have been firing at this gatehouse. Onyeka Nubia has come to Holmby House to investigate military movements around Coleshill during these tumultuous times. I'm here to meet Andrew Hopper, an expert on the English Civil War. He has found some fascinating documents that might help us understand more about what happened at Coleshill. There's no written record of a skirmish or battle at Coleshill Manor, but the house sits just outside the town, and Andrew has discovered lots of evidence for what was happening there. Hello, Andrew. Good to see you. Good. So, what can we learn from these sources? Well, this is a source from the very beginning of the Civil War, and it's the financial accounts of Robert Greville, Lord Brooke of Warwick Castle. He was a militant parliamentarian commander who came to Coleshill town on the 5th of July, 1642. He was at the forefront of opposition to the king and had been so for a long time, and he was ready for civil war. So, what do these records tell us? Right, well, this record here, it shows his efforts to win over the train bands of Coleshill. These are the local militia, who are a kind of part-time defence force who practice once a month, and the expenses you can see on this column here in pounds, shillings and pence, is all the money he spent on feasting. It sounds like, already, like bribery, Andrew. I can tell, just listening to what you're saying, it sounds like he's coming here to bribe the local people. Well, he's dispensing noble hospitality. Right, that's a euphemistic way of saying it. The parliamentarian leader put on quite a feast. Two lambs, three geese, three pigs, four turkeys, six mallards, 12 chickens and even venison pasties. Most ordinary people would not be allowed to eat venison. It was a very high-status meat. So, the idea of being offered venison must have been, you know, something that was really quite special. Yes, I think so. And he's using the local inns to dispense this hospitality. And Mr Elsinore's inn, it's the Angel Inn, only a few hundred yards from Coleshill Manor. Wow. And they're drawing beer for those that came in from the fields. Oh, I see. So, I imagine they would have been beating their drums and making a noise to attract people in from around the town to see what was happening. So, all of this looks like a spectacle, but a spectacle with a purpose. The drink, the food is to encourage people to fight on the parliamentarian side against their king. So, that means that a parliamentarian force was being raised right near our location. That's fascinating. And we have this account here, which shows that about 300 cavalry came through Coleshill in July 1645. So, these are Scottish soldiers that have been recruited by the parliamentarian. Is that right? That's right. They're fighting on parliament's side. And we can see that they established their headquarters in the vicarage, where the vicar, Mr Richard Adamson, spends eight pounds of his own money to look after them for two nights. And their horses, I see. I see their horses, yes. Yeah, and their horses. Are the local people voluntarily giving away their money and food and drink? No, they didn't have much choice, not with 300 Scottish cavalrymen descending on them. And there's evidence here that suggests what was happening. We've got Mr Josiah's Bull, gentlemen. He has to quarter 20 men and boys for two nights in his home. And then he complains about the oats, peas, beans, and barley, and linen, and other things, which they violently took away. Wow. And we see our old friend from the Angel Inn, Josiah Elsamore. He has to pay six pounds and 17 shillings to give wine, victuals, beer, and horse meat to the Scots troopers staying at his inn. And you can see the total losses that each household has had to fork out for the Scots. So is that the same landlord mentioned in the previous account? Yes, that's right. Three years before, he was being paid to throw on a feast for the soldiers. But now, here, the Scots are just taking it from him. Wow, that's fascinating. It just shows how, in the space of a few years of war, how someone's position can change. Yes, very much so. It shows how the war was a continual presence for the people of Coleshill. These sources help me to understand that there would have been considerable confusion and chaos around Coleshill. And it's not surprising, with soldiers moving in and soldiers moving out, that we would see, perhaps, the signs of war left at Coleshill. A month later, the team has fully revealed both octagonal towers of the gatehouse at Coleshill Manor. And they are covered with impact scars from musket balls. It's unbelievable, really. We knew we were going to get something. And as we dug and we dug and we found a bit more, we uncovered just a huge amount of lead shot impacts right across this whole section of wall. Something like 186, which implies quite a lot of people here taking a shot at this building. This extraordinary medieval gatehouse had lain completely lost and forgotten for centuries. And it clearly played a role in the Civil War, bearing the scars of action. With the manor owned by staunch royalists, it may have been an obvious target. And perhaps even the site of the earliest skirmish of that bitter war. Next, we make our way to a secret location just outside the village of Harpole in Northamptonshire. While excavating in advance of a new housing development, a team from Museum of London Archaeology uncover something completely unexpected. An Anglo-Saxon burial with a stunning array of beautiful, fragile finds. This collection of gold and gems seems to have formed an ornate necklace, which could be among the richest of its kind ever found in Britain. And as they dig further, they realise there are more exceptional items with this burial. The team spot hints of other precious metals peeking out of the grave and decide to block lift entire segments. And these segments have been brought here to the Moeller Labs, where the conservators are just starting the incredibly painstaking process of micro-excavation. And I'm really lucky to be getting an early look. Lead conservator Liz Barham is laying out some of the 30 unique pendants and beads, each of which is undergoing cleaning and conservation. From garnets and gold to colourful glass and semi-precious stones, all of these once hung together in a single necklace. Oh, just beautiful pieces. Liz, are these objects finely dateable? What century are we in, do you think? We think, on the basis of style of the finds, that this is probably a mid-to-late 7th century burial. And the balance of probability is that this was a high-status woman? Yeah. The bones in the grave had practically disappeared, but the jewellery is remarkably well-preserved. Dating to the 7th century, this is a hugely significant find. It's astonishing the range of different techniques that are brought together in this single necklace. Some of them are tiny, and this one's really tiny. Yeah. Then you've got these really larger ones too. Yeah. They've all been made out of golden wire. I mean, obviously, there's still a lot of soil on them, but you can kind of see, actually, this one particularly has this lovely green and black and white colour to it. That's beautiful. This would have been made out of strands of glass, waned around each other, twisted. Fused together, yes. And then assembled and fused, yeah. Yes. And we have the central pendant as well, which seems to have... It's very likely that these are garnets, set in these little golden enclosures. It's beautiful from a distance, and then you get closer, and there's just all this pattern and design. And the craftsmanship in that, when you look at the little cells, which are created with thin sheets of gold separating them, and then the garnets have to be cut to shape, presumably, to be slotted into each of those differently shaped cells. Yes, and you also have these tiny little curled wires set into this piece as well. Yeah. They're actually little S-shaped curls, aren't they? They must have been really difficult to make, at a time when there were no microscopes, no real magnification. Somebody's obviously taken a great deal of time to make this beautiful piece. And that coin is lovely. I mean, that's cleaned up beautifully, hasn't it? Yes, we can take this one out, actually. I can actually hold it in my hand. Yes, so there we go. So it doesn't look like a pendant that's just been decorated on one side. It does look more like a coin. Yes, I think it does look as if it's a coin that's been made into a pendant. It must be a real joy, as a conservator, to be working on such beautiful finds. It's really fantastically wonderful to work on these kinds of things. Once pieced back together, it's clear that this necklace is one of the most beautiful and important Anglo-Saxon objects ever found. It shouts wealth and status. But this grave hasn't given up all its secrets just yet. Riva Butilkova is still excavating this block-lifted sample, millimetre by millimetre. So, Riva, this is the segment of the grave where that beautiful necklace was found, or the pieces of that necklace was found. Yes. But you think there's more to find here? Yeah, we definitely do. We found what looks like silver. A weird edge over here. I hadn't realised there was any metal there. That's a piece of metal, is it? Yeah, it is. You can see it kind of by the greyish tint over here. It's quite difficult to spot, though, isn't it? It's not like the gold, which, you know, doesn't tarnish. Exactly, yeah. And what we see here is there is some wood. OK. Do you have any idea what it is that you're looking at? Well, yeah, that's a big question. We x-rayed the whole block to see what kind of structure is underneath here. And we found, actually, a really exciting thing. This over here. That's incredible. Yeah. A huge silver cross mounted on wood. It's the first time anything like this has ever been found. So this area over here, that's this silver part over here. Oh, wow. And you look at the surface here and it doesn't look like much. You've just got a few bits of wood and a few bits of silver. You start to think, hmm, what's there? And then you x-ray it. That's this amazing thing. I mean, that's an astonishing object, isn't it? This elaborate cross suggests the team may have found the burial of an early Christian leader or even Anglo-Saxon royalty. And how long is it going to take you, Reva, to complete this work? How long will it be, for instance, before you start to actually see the details of this beautiful cross? It's going to take a bit of time. Weeks or months? Months, probably. OK. Yeah. A few months down the line, we'll see this cross. I'm desperate to see it. Are you desperate to see it? You have to be so patient doing what you do. Yeah, yeah. But it's good when you're working with the microscope on very minuscule details. It helps to see the process through. And every day you're seeing something new. Exactly. Yeah, you're finding out more information. I was blown away by that. It's amazing. The micro-excavation and conservation work here at the Mola Labs will continue. I'll just have to be patient and catch up when the team have finished revealing what has already been dubbed the Harpole Treasure. Gold objects can survive almost indefinitely underground, but it takes very special conditions to preserve ancient organic material, like fabric or timber. Next, an astonishingly rare discovery takes us to the outskirts of Leicester. Here in 2015, a team from the University of Leicester Archaeological Services uncovered a remarkable piece of ancient weaponry. A shield made from tree bark, an object so unusual it even shocked the archaeologists. Radiocarbon dating shows this incredible shield is more than 2,300 years old. Placing it in the Iron Age. It's very rare for organic material to survive in the ground for thousands of years. Bark and wood almost always rot down, leaving nothing behind for archaeologists to find. But in waterlogged sediment, this fragile shield made from willow bark has survived in such good condition that it's possible to see tiny clues revealing how it was made. The shield is undergoing vital conservation work at the British Museum, allowing detailed investigation into just how Iron Age Britons worked with these natural materials. Now, a team of experimental archaeologists are trying to recreate a bark shield based on all this new evidence. Our objective is to have a shield that's complete and it's the kind of shape that we want. Matt Beamish is leading the project. What we're trying to do by experimenting is to understand how it was made and a little bit more about how effective it was. The team are working from a precise scale drawing of the fragmented Iron Age shield, taking great care to replicate each detail. On the surviving original shield, we can see slits for the stitches and we have one segment where we've even got some of the stitch surviving. The preservation was so good, even parts of the hazel rim running around the edge of the bark had survived. Tiny slits show the rim was stitched on. But the team have to work out exactly how that was done through trial and error using the same natural materials. Now it's time to bend this hazel because it's drying out in the sun. So it's good to bend this. Yeah, you see? I was afraid it would happen. Yeah, well, it doesn't matter. We just have to redo this. Right. It can be frustrating, but experimental archaeology is hugely valuable, helping us understand how objects like this shield were made and used. Do you think you've got answers? Then you're like, oh, well, where did they put that stitch? How did they join that piece of rim? How did they attach that? And it makes you study the object so much better. We don't know exactly where all the stitches went. So we've got only two. They're really close together and very far from the end. So it's going to be really ugly. But, well, if that's what they did, then that's what we've got to do as well. We can't go back to the Iron Age and tell them, you shouldn't have done it like that. We're happy to follow their method. One element of the design that surprises everyone is the shield boss. This boss was made like a small basket. Willow rods were bound together with thin strips of lime bark. And tiny holes show where it was stitched on. Most shields of bosses are made of metal, even if the rest of the shield is wood or hide. So this is really quite exceptional. And with the handle also stitched onto the back, the structure of the shield is complete. Right, done. Now the team will clamp the shield so that it stays as flat as possible while it dries out and hardens over a few months. It's really exciting to be able to put these components together and then see what the materials do as they dry. To find out how the experiment went and what they've learned about making a bark shield, I've invited Matt and Sophie to the Digging for Britain tent. And they've brought all of the prototypes they've made along the way. Some good, some not so good. So what we've got here then is a whole series of experiments, trial and error, trying to work out how this was constructed. I mean, I can see a couple of prototypes, but how do you start? I mean, presumably you start with the materials. Yes, I guess the materials were effectively our kind of core elements. We knew we'd got certain pieces, we'd got the body, we'd got the handle, we'd got the ring, and we'd got the boss. And somehow we had to articulate these things, remake them and put them together and try and end up with a shield. So what about this one here then? You've got the handle almost looks like it's attached to the outside there, which seems a bit odd to me. This piece illustrates really clearly that the bark is inverted. So this is a piece of willow bark that hasn't been constrained as it's dried. Right, yeah. Now that then says that they were forcing the shield to actually invert. So it's not even just flattened bark, it's bark that has been pushed into an opposite, an inverse curve. Yeah, it's creating a tension against itself, which adds strength to it. So this one looks a bit more successful because it's flatter than that, but it's still curving that way. You don't want that. No, that's right. It's not regular either. So this one was just clamped flat with some battens and then allowed to dry. And although it has stayed much flatter than this one, it's not got the kind of shape that we want. So that said, no, the way that we've done that one isn't quite right either. Yeah, and then this miniature prototype here, I mean, is that showing us that bark will dry in a very uneven way if it's not constrained at all? That absolutely shows that. So yeah, this piece has got edging pieces effectively on the rim and the rim has stayed fairly straight. Yeah. But it hasn't got anything across the body of the shield and it's actually folded up. Yeah. Now, there was something found in the enderby shield which you didn't understand and that was something called laths. And they are small pieces of applewood that are actually within the body of the bark. These images of the original shield show the small strips of applewood which help the shield stay flat. These are little pieces of wood that are driven in like this? That's right. That's just to show the principle that a piece of wood driven through the bark does actually help it to retain some sort of shape as it dries. But even there you can see that it has successfully managed to invert that curve of bark. Yes, it has. Yeah, and then we saw you working on this final version and now it's ready, it's dried out, it's complete and you've got a boss there as well. Yeah, that's a beautiful boss that looks so like the original. Isn't that fantastic? It's brilliant. Yeah, and it is really rigid. You look at it and you think, oh, it's going to be collapsible but it's not at all. Yeah, once you've got a well-woven piece of basket work it's very solid, it holds itself together. Yeah. And if one stitch got slightly damaged, you know, you've got all these other stitches that will help hold it. So we've got metal shields probably around the same time as this. Are they intrinsically better than an organic version? I don't think they're better. I think they're different. With the recreation there, it's a very agile shield. It's very light. It's extremely light and manoeuvrable. And I think you could still actually inflict some damage with that. I mean, I'm not going to do it, Matt, but you could still damage somebody. Yes, I think you could. And how rare is it? I mean, it's unique in Britain but do we see anything like this in the rest of Europe? It's unique in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Northern Hemisphere, really? That's extraordinary. And that it's come to light in just the last few years does give us an idea of how much we're missing in terms of that material culture if we're not seeing the organic material. 🎵 We dig for the gods that leave no bones 🎵 🎵 For the ships and the sunken sea 🎵 🎵 We rest the logs in the sky of stones 🎵 🎵 The famine road and the merchant's quay 🎵 Next, we make our way to the town of St. Neops, 20 miles west of Cambridge. It's here that a team from Oxford Archaeology are investigating a fascinating cemetery. When I heard about these discoveries, I simply had to see them for myself. So I've hot-footed it here. And I'm hoping to see some of this evidence emerging out of the ground. What we've got here are deviant burials, strange burials. What's particularly odd about these ones is that they've been decapitated. But it's the way these burials are laid out that's really curious. Each body was placed in the grave on its back, with grave goods buried alongside it. But some of the skulls are not where they should be. Archaeologists call unusual burials like this deviant or irregular. And these ones all date to the Roman period. I've come to meet Stuart Ladd to find out what's going on. These are quite bizarre burials, aren't they? Yeah. Because very definitely, the skull which should be at this end of the grave. It's not in the right place, is it? It's down at the feet, yeah. Yeah, and actually buried with a piece of pottery as well. So it's a particular mode of burial where the head is detached, moved down to the feet, and then a pot is placed in the grave up towards the head end. Yeah. And somehow this has got to mean something. Yes. It's easy to see a headless skeleton and suspect foul play, perhaps even an execution. But the fact that these bodies seem to have been carefully buried with grave goods suggests something else might have been happening here. So tell me more about the site. So we're on the edge of quite a busy Roman rural settlement just on the corner of one of their larger enclosures, which first comes into use in the late Iron Age. But the ditches around it get recut and recut, and that continues into the Roman period. So that means that we're on a site which has got at least 1,000 years of history going from the Iron Age into the Roman period. Society in Roman Britain was far from simple. There were people whose ancestors had lived here for centuries alongside others coming in from all over Europe and beyond, bringing their own cultures and practices with them. There's almost no such thing as a normal burial from this time. So your team are now moving on to these other two burials. I can see a skull in that one. So is that in the right place? Not exactly. So it's their position next to a leg bone, and you can see the jaw has actually been moved. But this one's actually a bit different in that we've had a little bit of bone in the upper parts of the fill as we've gone down. And so far, nothing is quite in the right place. So both of them, we're about down to the level. So we'll start to clean them up and get a really good view of where the bones are. Great. I can't wait to see what happens, what emerges in these two burials. As Harry and Ellie remove the final layers of clay, I can't just stand and watch. I want to know who this person was and why they were buried like that. Yeah, that's the age old question. Much worse survival. The conditions aren't ideal for digging but have been great for bone preservation. If we can find evidence of cut marks, on the spine or skull, it could tell us how the head was removed and perhaps even if that was the cause of death. Oh, I'm going to be lazy now, Harry. Can I pass you that? Yeah, sure. Thank you. Thank you very much. Little by little, this bizarre burial is becoming clearer. That's a second cervical vertebra. This came from just here, just in front of the skull. So vertebrae there and then the edibles there. Yeah. Can't see any obvious cut marks on that but it is covered in mud, so, you know. The heavy sticky clay makes it impossible to see whether there are cut marks on the spine but we may be able to tell other things about this person as more of their skeleton is revealed. What do you think's going on here then, Ellie? Who do you think these people are? I don't know. I think maybe it's maybe different family groups together. Yeah. I've just got a few fragments here from around the skull area, the skull that was down below the knees of this individual and there are some tantalising clues about this person. I can see how heavily worn their teeth are and so this must have been an adult, certainly. And this is an extremely prominent chin, a squared off prominent chin. So it may be that we're looking at an older man. When this evidence is cleaned up, we will get an even better insight into who these people were and perhaps even why they were being buried in this way, a way that we might describe as deviant but was clearly not deviant here. It wasn't even irregular. This is the mode of death for everybody that has been found so far on this site. To us, it seems like such an odd thing to do with the body, to chop off the head and place it at the feet. But here, it seems that this may have just been the normal way to bury someone and every newly discovered irregular burial could bring us closer to understanding why. A huge medieval castle can give any modern town or city a real presence, a sense of identity and heritage. Even just a few fragments of turrets and walls can lend a certain romantic antique aura to a place. But over centuries of change, some once magnificent castles have completely disappeared. So what can be done when we know that a city once had a castle but few traces of it remain? Next, we're on the hunt for a missing medieval masterpiece, Sheffield Castle. We know from historical records that a famous medieval castle where Mary, Queen of Scots, was once held as a prisoner stood in the centre of the city. But it was completely dismantled after the Civil War in 1648. And today, there's absolutely nothing on the surface to show what it looked like. Now, the site's being redeveloped and it's giving a team from Wessex Archaeology the chance to investigate. In 2018, trial excavations revealed the remains of the castle itself. But this year, they're trying to find out about its moat. We are doing geoarchaeological and geotechnical boreholes. Minica Rajic is leading the dig. With that methodology and approach, we are trying to be as little intrusive as possible and to gain as much information as possible. Borehole sampling like this can provide a complete cross-section of everything below ground. So this is a sample taken vertically down through the deposits, what we call stratigraphy. So the oldest deposits are down at the bottom and it's getting younger as we get further towards the surface. Richard Payne is supervising the drilling. It's always a little bit exciting, wondering, you know, what you're going to find. So the borehole provides us with a lot of information but only at that single point. So what we need is a number of boreholes spread across the site. But they all need to go back to the lab where we can get a much better picture of what's going on. Kat Jarman is visiting the lab to see the results. I've come here to meet Dr Daniel Young, an expert who has been studying these boreholes from Sheffield and hopefully we can find some trace of that lost moat. Hey Dan, so this is it, these are the cores. Yep, so this is borehole 14. Excellent, well, let's have a look. So lots of what looks like sandstone rubble as well as some brick and other building materials. Yes, this is brick with mortar or something, isn't it? So that's definite building material. Yeah, this is what looks to me possibly like, well, you know, bits of the castle. Excellent. It's incredible to find traces of the castle itself but evidence of the moat is much more subtle and takes an expert eye to identify. So this is completely different. So you've got a tiny bit of sandstone and then it changes completely. So yeah, we've got this very fine-grained stuff here which is very different from this layer above and that's mostly composed of probably clays and silts but with sort of various pebbly and stony inclusions as well. Yeah, because that feels very clay to me. Yeah, it's like putty, isn't it? Yeah, does that mean we've got water possibly? Potentially. What we have here with the very fine-grained clays, particularly at the bottom, could be evidence for sediments forming within water that was within the moat. So this is quite likely to be the moat, if that's what it is. That's what I think it is, yeah. Found it! Brilliant. Dan has looked at a total of 49 samples from the site and plotting them on a map can give us an idea of the size and shape of Sheffield Castle's moat. So how about this one with our possible moat? Where's that one from? That's Warhol 14, which is just here. Oh, okay. So quite far on that sort of eastern side of the site then. That's right. And these lines of Warhol's here, that's where you've essentially chased the moat. So this is a cross-section across the site with several Warhol's now. And from that information, we can see that the moat cut into the bedrock is about five metres deep and probably at least eight metres wide. Okay, so that's fantastic. I love this because, I mean, there's nothing there at all, but just from these sort of tiny, really, cores, you've got a really, really good reconstruction. Yeah, and there's still more that these Warhol's can tell us as well. So there's more information to come from these. It's all just hiding there, just under the ground. Using this data, the team can reconstruct the castle's moat, showing not only where it once was, but also how it varied in width and depth. Piece by piece, the mighty Sheffield Castle is being brought back to life. Many of our towns and cities can be traced back to Roman settlements, even to the Iron Age, but others come along much later. And our final dig takes us to a city with a surprisingly recent history, Oxford. The city began life as a fortified settlement, protected from intruders like the Vikings in the early medieval period. Little is known about Oxford before its Anglo-Saxon beginnings, but now, as part of a development to make way for new student accommodation, a team from Oxford Archaeology has been given the unique opportunity to dig down and search for evidence of what was here first, before the town. In Oxford, it's easy to imagine that you're in an ancient city, but one of the great pleasures of doing excavations like this is that you basically are discovering new things. Ben Ford is leading the dig. The excavation here is located in the heart of historic Oxford, within what is thought to be the earliest defended part of the Anglo-Saxon town, so we're right in the heart of that depth of history. As the team dig down, they're finding a vast array of medieval structures and finds. We think it may have been a stone-lined well originally, fairly well fitted, so there's a bit of persuasion to get rid of it. What we just found here is a nice hammered silver coin. I found this nice sizeable bit of pot. We think it's medieval. After only a few weeks of excavation, the team make a surprising discovery. This reddish colour soil here, this is the soil that was on the site from 10,000 years ago, and it's been preserved in this situation by what we think is a Bronze Age monument. They've stumbled on a Bronze Age burial mound, predating the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Oxford by thousands of years. This is that big deposit of soil that the mound is made from, and you can see that there appear to be phases of construction. So here is a reddish soil overlaying with gravel. As we come round here, we've got this level of charcoal, and you can see that the soil above the charcoal is slightly darker than the soil below the charcoal. So we think that this is the primary mound here, and that this charcoal layer was created by some fire, maybe a ritual-type ceremony on this mound before they then enlarged it. The excavation of this mound is really a unique opportunity. It's the first time in Oxford that such an earthwork has been found. With a burial mound, you might expect a burial, but so far the team have only found scattered fragments of human remains. First we had a very robust jawbone, then we got the other side of the jawbone, a piece of skull, some tibias, femurs, and a piece of pelvis. They weren't in an in-situ grave, but we think that those human remains come from a burial associated with the Bronze Age burial mound. Could the human remains found here be one of Oxford's earliest residents? To find out, I've invited Ben and osteologist Lauren McIntyre to the Digging for Britain tent, and they've brought some of their best discoveries ranging across the eras in Oxford. Right then Ben, what do the finds from the site tell us about in life in Oxford? They tell us quite a lot. There's a ceramic whistle. Yeah. Who knows what tunes would have been played for it. A gaming piece. So we've got a whistle and the gaming piece telling us a little bit about what they're doing in their free time. Yeah. And this is a decorated piece of window glass. Isn't that gorgeous? That's painted. Yeah. And this is a remarkable find from a large jug which would be held next to the table so people could wash their hands. Yeah. And it's in the shape of a stag. It's so beautiful, isn't it? It's really decorative. So this is the head of the stag just here, and that's where you're going to pour the water. Exactly. That's fantastic, isn't it? Yeah, it's high quality. Yeah. So you've got this very complex urban site, lots of different layers, but what we've got at the base of it is this Bronze Age mound with what looks like redeposited human remains in it. So Lauren, tell us what you can say about these human bones then from the site. Okay, so the bones were found in two separate pits, but when we look at the fragments, we can actually piece them all together and we know that they're all from the same person. So did these two pieces of femur come from different contexts? Yes. Yeah. You can see that they fit together really nicely. Yeah, they do. Yeah, there we go. So that's definitely from one individual. And what else can you tell about this individual then in terms of age and sex of that person? So there's not a huge amount of evidence to go on, as you can see, because there's not very much bone, but looking at the various bits of the pelvis, you can see that sciatic notch is quite narrow. That's a good indicator we're looking at a male. Yeah. And then also around the forehead as well, like the brow ridge is quite pronounced, and that's a good indicator that we're looking at a male as well. OK, so are these bones Bronze Age? Is this a Bronze Age burial that's been disturbed in later times? Well, we thought that on site. Yeah. But we weren't sure. So we took these samples here and sent them off for carbon dating. Yeah. It turns out that it's a Mid-Saxon burial. So this date comes back as 770 to 930. OK. So that's 3,000 years later than the mound is constructed. Yeah. So this is a Saxon burial that's inserted into a mound that is already very ancient at the time. Exactly. So our assumption is we've got a landscape of a huge number of prehistoric burial monuments, and those burial monuments seem to have become a focus for Mid-Saxon activity. Yeah. So he's buried at a time when there's not really any kind of settlement that we can say is Oxford at that point. Yeah. The town is imposed into that landscape at a later date. These finds come from 150, 100 years later than this chap's buried next to the mound. So there's a very significant change at that point in those 100, 150 years. Yeah. So from this one site, we've just got a fantastic glimpse of the layers and layers and layers through history. Yeah.