What Was Life Actually Like For People In The Stone Age

Here in Wales, melting ice revealed a dramatic world of mountains and valleys rich in natural resources. Everything that our early ancestors needed to thrive. Evidence of these early humans has been found all across Wales and today I'm in Anglesey where I'm meeting Dr James Dilley, an experimental archaeologist who has brought me to the site of the Stone Age axe making workshop to teach me the ancient art of axe making. Tell me about some of these tools that you have here. So for some of the tools I have in front of me would be exactly the tools and equipment of your neolithic axe maker here five and a half thousand years ago. I've got my beach pebbles that I've collected from the shore just behind us and this unusual looking item it's a red deer antler and these make really good tools for refining the axe head before you go to that polishing stage. Are you banging the axe head with it? Just like a hammer yeah. And we found these on archaeological sites so that's why you know they were used at this time. We have and examples have been found from the neolithic across Europe that still have pieces of stone or flint if they were using flint embedded in the face of the axe and you can actually see on my one there are still a few fragments embedded into it. The earliest example we have from Britain is from the site of Boxgrove an antler hammer from half a million years ago. Wow. So I can use that to take long pieces off and I have a rough stone here to take off the very sharp edges. If I was to strike the very fresh edges with an antler where they're very thin and fragile it just wouldn't be able to withstand the shock that I put into it. The pebbles I'm going to use to take off some of the first flakes from my block of stone. These need to be quite hard material this is quartzite metamorphic rock and I can use these to really strike very hard onto the microdiorite that we're sitting on. So they would have brought these up and then what they would have just left them here or they've taken them out? Almost definitely there's no sense in taking them all the way down the hill if you're going to come up again and it's an almost certainty that it wasn't continuous quarrying here like we have today in the nearby area and we certainly know from other Neolithic axe production sites that it was more sporadic and we don't know whether it was a local group that controlled the site or whether it was people traveling to these axe production areas. What we do know about the axes from here is that the finished versions traveled hundreds of miles. We're here in North Wales now but I'm from near Cambridgeshire and examples have been found there or famously in the ditch at Avebury again hundreds of miles away so these must have been desirable products. And why is this stone so highly regarded and so useful? Actually it's a fantastic rock for flaking. Now it's not as easy to flake as this stuff which is flint. This is very very sharp and does it come off easily the flint? That's it, it's very hard but hardness comes with brittleness and brittleness is not ideal for an axe head that's going to be hitting a hard tree continuously. What you need is this local material the microdiorite. Now this bit is particularly special because this is an actual Neolithic roughout that was abandoned over 5,000 years ago. That's amazing and this was just found around here? Just down the slope. And how long would it have taken to make this form, this shape here? This is not a final product? No it was abandoned at some point and it's hard to say why really because it's a good shape. I can only imagine that there might have been too much material that was taken out the back or because this is patina that's generated over 5,000 years they might have seen a fault that's under this that we can't easily see today. But to get to this stage from a flake that would have been detached from the outcrop of rock here to this stage, 10 minutes, very very quick. Can I have a look at the axe there? Of course, so this is a replica that I've made using the stone from well around you really so it's been flaked into a rough out and then it's been polished smooth on a sandstone block. It's amazing it's so smooth it's beautiful. If you look at the pieces of stone here they're so rough you just can't even imagine that it would turn out like this. And that's through the flaking process and about 30 hours grinding it back and forth on a piece of sandstone and all of that effort makes it a better longer lasting tool. It's a different way of using an axe over a modern or metal axe in that a metal axe creates a v-shaped profile because you can cut a flat angle into the tree but these axes work far better with a u-like profile in that you'll glance in the wood and using the head weight of the axe to peel off pieces. So you're going to show us what you do now? So I'll show you the process of making a rough out from just a raw block. So I've got my neolithic tools and safety equipment apart from the goggles of course. Really attractive goggles. I'm sure they used them in the neolithic if they had them. And then a big old piece of the micro diorite and I'll look for a good place to start my work. Start at this end and a big beach pebble and I'm going to strike it on the edge to take my first flake off. It's not hard hit. James moves through the various tools he showed me working next with the rougher sandstone and then the antler hammer for more precise shaping of the stone. So it provides me with a much thinner flake, a far more invasive flake and I know that the shock will follow that ridge and I could attack it from here or here. So here is a neolithic axe rough out. Wow look at that. It's hard to imagine that this has come from that bit of rock and it only took you what 15 minutes? Something like that but that's the quick bit. Yeah I know. Can I just see the other one? So that's the finished product here. Compare. Wow so you've got a bit of work to do really haven't you? Yes a bit of work and once you've got that grinding stone or polissoir for about 30-40 hours you will move a stone axe head to polish it 30 kilometers back and forth. This is great though it's really really beautiful. I'll take this with me then. Well now you can trade it in for your bronze axe as time passes. Flint and stone tools may have come to define this period but they're not the only bits of evidence our ancestors would leave behind. To discover more I've come just a few miles inland to one of the most remarkable ancient sites in Wales. Brin Cali Vi, the mound in the dark grove in English, was originally constructed in the early neolithic a period where we see the advent of agriculture, permanent settlements and investment in the landscape. The site consists of this huge henge, a bank and ditch, enclosing a circle of stones. Towards the end of the neolithic this site had a redesign, a makeover if you like. In the centre the stones were knocked over and a chambered tomb was created and it was covered with an earth mound and what we see today is really only half the size because it stretched 26 meters so it would have been absolutely enormous and a real feature in the landscape. Inside this long narrow passage leads to an octagonal chamber and in the chamber they found burnt bone, flint artefacts and a patterned stone. But that's not the most amazing thing about this place. Once a year on midsummer at sunrise sunlight creeps all the way along this passageway and it hits the back of the chamber illuminating it. Structures like Brin Cali Vi allow us an amazing insight into the lives of these ancient people. They give us a sense of the community, organisation, the skills that these people must have had to undertake significant building projects. This site demonstrates the ingenuity and the sophistication of the stone age people but it's really just the beginning of our story. Roughly four and a half thousand years ago everything began to change with the influx of a new wave of people to Britain. Arriving from continental Europe they would bring with them an array of new ideas and technologies including a unique type of pottery that would change life in Britain. They were the Beaker people but it wasn't just pottery they were bringing with them. This is copper, well copper ore and it's this remarkable material that came to define this period. At first copper was used on its own but by about 2200 BC people began combining the two metals copper and tin to create bronze. The metal that would come to revolutionise and define the age. To learn more about the discovery and mining of these metals I've come to the Great Orm, the site of the largest prehistoric copper mine in the world, to meet mine explorer and guide Nick Jowett who was one of the first people to explore this site. So Nick this place here is one of the oldest and one of the biggest copper age mines in Britain, well actually in the world isn't it? Yeah so for a period of about 200 years between about 3004 to 3600 years ago this was certainly one of the largest copper mines in the world. Analysis of the ore now tells us that this mine supplied 98 percent of Britain's copper needs during that middle period but also in excess and we now know that copper from this mine probably being manufactured locally into axes were being traded across Britain and across into northern Europe. There were hordes of axes in Holland and an axe as far away as Sweden that have now been proved by analysis to have come from this mine. So like 98 percent of the axes were from here? Yes so there are earlier mines than this in Britain, much smaller, but when you get to this sort of middle bronze age period they all shut down and all the concentration is here and this was the only mine then supplying all the needs of the country. Going out to Europe? Yeah. So it was, I mean it was famous then really in Europe? Oh yeah definitely yeah I mean as I say Sweden 1200 miles away from where we're sitting now must have sort of, they must have had that connection and known where the material that they were trading for was coming from. It's amazing and when was this place found? People didn't always know that it was here? No and in recent times up until 1987 all of this was buried in the ground. As well as being mined in the bronze age it was also mined in the 18th and 19th centuries. They brought hundreds of thousands of tons of waste material out of the mine and just dumped it on top. So just all this was all of this was buried? Yeah I mean if we see the entrances and the rock here there was no rock or there wasn't an entrance or any rock visible up until 1987. The mine was uncovered because the local council wanted to build a car park on top of it. They knew there were 19th century mines here, they didn't really know where they all went, they didn't know if there were big chambers underneath the area they wanted to build a car park. So they brought in some mining engineers and cavers they opened the old Victorian mine shafts and went down and as well as finding evidence for the 19th century mining found evidence for as I say what's one of the largest bronze age mines in the world. And you were one of the first people to go in? Yeah so I was sort of very fortunate in 1987 I was in a local mine exploration group and when the Vivian shaft was opened we were allowed to go in and just really start exploring. I bet that was an interesting experience? Yeah it was because we knew that nobody had been in those tunnels for you know for over 120 years and of course now we're finding tunnels that nobody's been in for three and a half thousand years. Fantastic so shall we go ahead and have a look? Yeah let's go and have a look. It really feels like a mine here it's quite narrow isn't it? It is so because of the very simple tools stone and bone and bronze that they were using they were reluctant to take out any more waste than they really had to so lots of the tunnels are fairly narrow. That tunnel is tiny. It is it's probably 30 centimetres wide we've found tunnels even smaller than that and of course that indicates that they would have been using young children. Oh really children were here mining? Yeah probably working as family groups maybe the adults working in some of the tunnels like these but children possibly five or six years old were working in some of these narrow tunnels but of course that was still happening 170 years or so ago so not really a surprise. This is the Malakai? Yeah so this is what they were mining here when you see how much they've left on that side wall it gives you perhaps a little bit of an idea of what they must have been taking out so for them to just believe that they must have been following some really really rich scenes of copper ore into the hillside. Because it was so valuable? Yeah it had a great value so for them to have left this you know they must have been mining really really rich veins. Let's keep looking. Oh my goodness this is enormous! It is well we talked about the fact that the copper runs in seams and that's what we've been walking through the tunnels that were mined out. In this cavern here we've just got three really really wide veins of copper that have converged in this central place and just been mined out into this enormous cavern. What kind of implements were they using here? How were they actually breaking into the rock? The main tools that we find that they were using were hammer stones and animal bones so this is a rib bone probably from a cow but when you look at the end you can see the end is worn and rounded so it tells us that's been used as a tool in the mines. I suppose they're very much a secondary tool yeah we think they'd just be battering the rock with these heavy beach stones so by going down to the local beaches they could find some of the hardest rocks you can find anywhere in the world would have been on the local beaches and they could bring them up they're smooth they're nice and easy to hold on to but incredibly hard and that is heavy. What do you think it was like here what what kind of a life was it it was dark it was cold? I think the conditions would have varied somewhere like the chamber here would have been quite a nice place to work there's plenty of space there's plenty of fresh air here it's the very narrow tunnels and you only really get an idea of what bronze age mining would be like when you get into a tunnel that you can barely move and to squeeze your way through that you get a real idea of what life was like for bronze age people just chipping away at the rock in front of them. Extracting the copper was just the first stage in a long process turning it into something that people could use required the knowledge and skill of a master crafts person. To help me uncover the next stage of this mysterious process I've re-enlisted the help of Dr James Dilley who is going to help me transform these raw materials in an ancient process known as smelting. This is impressive so what's going on here then? Well we're going to be doing the full works we're going to be crushing some ore smelting some copper making some bronze and casting a bronze axe into a bronze mould. That sounds good to me. Well to do that I'm going to need you to take over from me on the bellows I'll leave you to do that as I have a look at the furnace. This is the hard bit is it? Oh no this is this is the easy bit the laid back part. I've honestly got the hard stuff I'll just take this comfortable seat here and reach for my cup of tea but no we're going to be trying to get this furnace up to and maintain it over a thousand degrees celsius to melt our bronze. I've done some of the hard work to make it a little bit easier but I'm also going to have to crush some copper ore because there's nothing in here at the moment we're just starting to warm it up ready and then I'll move over to the ore crushing because here at the mine it's quite likely that in the bronze age they would have furnaces like this constantly on the go with people crushing ore bringing up fresh rock from underground those bringing in charcoal it'd be a whole community effort lots going on so we've very much scaled it down and just the two of us are going to be trying to do it all together well show me how these bad boys work then so it's just an up down motion as if you're cross-country skiing a bit like that really yeah yeah and you can see the air coming through so yeah you've passed the bellowing test so far yeah it's looking pretty good so now that you've got the hang of that I can get on with some of that important ore crushing so I've got my actual bronze age mortar over here with some of the ore that I've separated from some of the limestone here and I'm going to use just a simple hammer stone just to crush the ore bit by bit because it's a pretty soft ore that's malachite that is malachite I really don't have to hit it hard you can see how easy that's crushed down but if you were doing this on a large scale you'd be crushing down huge amounts of ore we're just doing almost a token amount but we only need enough for one axe rather than the 10 million axes that came out of the mines here is that enough for an axe those bits that you have there or would you need a hell of a lot more we would need a fair bit more but fortunately I've already been crushing up a load of the copper ore which I have in this crucible here so there should be enough in here between the copper that's already in here and some more ore that will have enough copper but I've still got to add that most important ingredient to turn this into bronze and that is of course tin all the way from Cornwall and we know from some of the bronze age shipwrecks that have been found and some of the other bronze age hordes that copper and tin ingots were highly valued and moved around an awful lot but we're going to be doing on a slightly smaller scale so it shouldn't take quite as long otherwise really we would be here all day just producing copper what about these these bellows here this is a really interesting design and is this something that we found well archaeologically I mean it would be quite difficult as it's wood but we do have a few rare examples of preserved wooden pipes from Denmark but they do date to the iron age but it's an almost certainty that people use something similar in the bronze age it's just a split white shade branch the bellows they may have had they're quite simple but we do have evidence of more simple bag bellows which take a bit of practice or gone easy on you on the pump bellows yeah I'm not quite sure that I'm bringing it up to a thousand degrees at the moment but it's looking good the glow of the furnace between the coal suggests it's around a thousand degrees so you're doing fine and the colour is that telling you it is the colour rather than the flames because the on a bright day you wouldn't see the flames but that bright orange in between is exactly where we need to be and that's what they would have looked for in the bronze age as well it's all by colour and iron if they're not sure they've just moved the coals out the way poke the top of the crucible and if it floats around smolten yeah you know that way so it's just about ready to go in it is exactly right so I'm going to pop this crucible in that's now full of our malachite and let the carbon monoxide that's coming off the charcoal do its work on this oxide ore so I'll move some of these coals so you've made a nice little hollow there yeah and it'll be just enough for me to bury the crucible that's got all of that crushed malachite in so I'll wiggle that in there right into the heart of the furnace and now start to put all of that hot charcoal probably some fresh straight back onto it and then once it's filled with all that fresh charcoal we can start that bellowing process to smelt the ore so I've got some charcoal on there we'll put some fresh charcoal in there as well so we have that really oxygen poor environment right around the crucible this fresh charcoal will provide a roof and insulation as much as anything so that'll probably do for now so if you can start with a gentle bellow because I'm sure there'll be some ash in there that's looking good excellent I can see some of the glow coming between the coals so now if we were working in a team during the bronze age I'd be perhaps preparing for that copper to come out but because we're going to be expressing the process a little bit because we're going to be casting an object rather than just making copper I need to think about the next stage which will be adding some tin and I have a piece of tin here ready that I'll be able to drop into that crucible in the near future so whilst you're doing that I'm also going to prepare the mould because we've got this bronze mould here now it might seem a bit counter-intuitive to try and cast bronze into bronze but we do actually have around 30 or 40 examples of bronze moulds from the bronze age either from the middle right through to the late bronze age mostly for axes but I think they were casting bronze into it because in theory if you manage the temperature carefully of both the liquid and the metal itself in theory you can cast into it without it going pop and the metal coming straight back out or it welding itself to the inside of the mould because if it does that we'll never open it again and it's a lot of investment and time to make one of these but in theory the beauty of bronze over just a clay or a stone mould is that you can keep reusing it but this mould is a special mould and this I've made specially just for this because it's a replica of a bronze axe mould that was found very nearby in Conwy just a few miles from here I've never cast into this mould before so it is brand new fresh off the press so it will be an experiment to see if it will actually work to get to that point I'm going to need to bind it and I'll use just some copper wire which we know that they were making in the bronze age for rivets or jewellery if I bind it quite tightly then that will stop the bronze escaping once we try to pour into it I'll pop that on the furnace just at the side because I want it to begin to warm up gently and in the meantime I'm sure that copper in there will be starting to smell and soon enough I'll be able to add that important tin to actually make it bronze How many people do you think would be working together on a smelting site like this? It's hard to say how large the smelting teams would have been but certainly for a mine of this size it's quite likely we would have had people doing a number of jobs from crushing ore to separating it. How long do you have to heat the mould then? The mould doesn't need to be heated too much and this will be part of the experiment to see how hot or cold it needs to be. So is this the big moment of adding the tin? So I think that it's been in there for quite a while and I can see that it's a really good bright glow so I think I'll add the tin in there so we can actually make our bronze and there we go that's it so that that will melt in moments now and we'll start to combine with the copper. As evening sets on the Orm and the tin begins to melt James prepares for the final stage of the smelting process. What do you look different? Well I've got some fully bronze age attire including these fantastic gloves as we can adhere to modern health and safety regulations as opposed to bronze age but I think we're pretty close now so what I'm going to do is carefully lift out the mould. And it's changed colour now hasn't it? It has yes it's much darker so I'm just setting it in this pot here just so that it's propped up. Sand as well. What's the sand for then? It's just to hold it up just so it doesn't tip over when I cast into it. It won't have a particularly good cast if it does that so I can feel it's pretty hot even through the glove and you do find the occasional bronze age pot which is almost unnecessarily tall and narrow and I have wondered before whether they are exactly for this process just filled with sand or soil just to clamp the mould together. So there we go okay pop that to the side and now it'll just be a case of seeing what's in there so I'll carefully lift the crucible out see it's glowing nicely in there so I'll start to move some of these coals out of the way and I can see it's very bright in there okay grab the sides of that wow look at that it's really beautiful you can start to see the top of the mould glowing as well and it's not going to melt it we will soon find out this is all part of the experiment like the colour changes very very quickly it does really cools down yeah that was solid within seconds of it being in there let's carefully get the mould out we can see where it's burned the sand around it and it looks like there's still a bit of colour in that so it will certainly fizz a bit when it's in there oh yeah normally when you've cast a bronze object you can dip it in the water for a few seconds take it out and it'll be cold but as you can hear it's got a lot of heat in that so it's exciting for you really isn't it it is yes we're in that moment of what could be inside so I think the water is staying on it now it's a little bit of steam but I think it's time to open it up otherwise we'll be waiting for ages so I'll put it on the stone here so I'll give it a couple of taps I have to be careful not to put too much force into these because you can start to deform the mould there's a bit of movement there we go oh that's beautiful so what do you think it's a pretty good cast it's pretty clean it's just missed the loop on the the corner and that's probably because it just wasn't quite hot enough but it's got very little flash on it and we've cast a bronze act whatever you say that's a small detail so we have proved that you can cast bronze into a bronze mould this is like one of the first experiments to do that well we've completed a natural experiment if I'm slightly lost for words it's uh it is a very special moment to actually use a replica of the conway axe mould here in the ore mine the the setting where they almost certainly did this over three thousand years ago that's really special I see thousands of years in the making but here we are a bronze axe when you think back to those heavy cumbersome stone axes it's amazing to think about the transformations in skill and organization it's really extraordinary but we're just getting started join me next time where we'll uncover how our ancient ancestors became true master crafts people and in doing so created some of the finest artifacts the world has ever seen our ancient ancestors left clues for us dotted all over the landscape clues as to who they were and how they lived you just have to know where to look I'm Miriam Cook an archaeologist who has spent my career rediscovering the lives of our prehistoric ancestors using hands-on experimental techniques I'm investigating and recreating key discoveries and inventions that changed the course of human history I've already helped make stone age tools and cast bronze in North Wales now I'm digging deeper into the skills and materials of the bronze age world this is the bronze axe head that we made at the Great Orm the difference between stone and bronze axes is that a stone axe you would just simply lodge it into a wooden hilt this however it's more complex and the process of hafting it is a little more complicated in the last episode I made birchbark tar the wonder product of the prehistoric age evidence suggests substances like this were used as an all-purpose glue and a preservative so I'm going to start spreading some of this birchbark tar onto the axe head an axe from this period discovered in Europe shows that birchbark tar was used to help fix the axe head to the haft so now I'm going to tie the axe head onto the handle so I'm just going to slather this on right let's give it a go but the bronze age wasn't all about making tools in this episode I'm moving beyond the day-to-day and into the world of bronze age bling where the craftsperson was king or queen the bronze age could be seen as a period of early globalization in this time raw materials ideas technologies were transported all over Europe sophisticated connections and networks forged through trade and perhaps even by interregional marriages were driving forces in the development of increasingly complex societies with their own distinct social structures for those that found themselves at the top of these new hierarchies an obvious way to demonstrate their social position in society was through what they wore or the possessions that they owned luxury items including jewelry would have been used by individuals to promote their position amongst their community and it would be the job of the craftspeople trained in the latest technologies and skilled at working in the finest materials like glass bronze and gold to serve this burgeoning market for bronze age bling to help me get a better understanding of the skills required to produce bronze age jewelry I've come to Jarrow Hall an archaeological investigation center in the northeast of England where I've enlisted the help of my fellow experimental archaeologist Marco Romeo Pitone we're going to use a technique known as lost wax casting so this is the beeswax as you know you've got some there it's not the easiest of wax to work with as I'm sure you're finding this yes I'm feeling it's quite difficult to keep it plastic and to work on it items created in this process range from simple shapes to intricately designed objects like animals or human figures making fine jewelry shapes with beeswax is a tricky process well I've been kind of experimenting with various things so I've been adding a bit of lard into it to see if that makes it a bit more money but it does it does help a little bit but it tends to get really bitty really kind of breaks into bits quite quickly you just need to keep it warm I'm really really keen to try and make this little pig figurine which I saw in the British Museum and which is kind of I suppose it's representative of the the first stage of the lost wax casting which is quite simple so you you kind of had a solid wax model hopefully we'll manage to yeah we'll have a go what you have to go out there so I'm I'm trying to reproduce some sort of bracelet maybe a torque very nice little torque worn around the wrist or neck torques are decorative pieces of jewelry crafted from a single piece of metal made from precious materials like bronze or gold it's thought they were symbols of wealth and power but I'm finding quite challenging as as soon as it cools down the the wax becomes brittle yeah have you tried any of that um oil though it might help I will now so I think I've got a little kind of body shape here of the pig um it's um oh yes what are you what are you doing there I'm trying to fix my bracelet here because it got broken into pieces oh no have you tried another bit of uh lard on it I didn't try the lard yet yeah the olive oil didn't work the way I expected no it's probably the lack of skill really well I don't know I wouldn't say that this is this is something that we find out with experimental archaeology very often isn't it that we we try this to to replicate these processes and then obviously our skills are very different from yeah there's no way that we would you know be able to do something that somebody that's doing it you know every day every day over years and specialized in that but it does give you an idea doesn't it it kind of allows us to go through the process in the world of bronze casting every mistake is a lesson it's about embracing the process exploring the steps even if our creation turns out less than perfect or maybe we're missing some tricks the head's the head's broken off oh no so so what what is your uh wax turned into there so I'm gonna put a hole in there yeah and it will become a medallion or something a pendant all right okay this is my pig it does look like a pig it's you know it's kind of um a wild one it's uh it's a wild pig a very wild pig but it has proven to me that um the craft people of this period were very highly skilled and I'm not and what's the next step then right so now we get the clay this clay actually I have treated I've added some cow dung into it which is very pleasant and also some sand well the idea of putting the sand in sands you know will melt at a higher temperature so the silica in the sand so it'll hold hopefully the clay will withstand the heat better yes and the cow dung holds it together as well like a temper yeah I'll give you some of that so put start building it around the little wax model once we form the clay around the wax we'll create a channel by poking holes through it this allows the wax to escape when it melts leaving an impression for the bronze to fill we carefully build up the clay ensuring the delicate items remain intact here we go I think mine looks great very professional looking once complete we'll put it in the fire to harden preparing the mold for the addition of our bronze mix but before we do there's one handy little trick so what I've done here is I've put a little piece of clay here because what I found is when I when I've kind of dried them in the oven or in a fire sometimes the shape that you've made it needs to be down downwards so that the wax can pour down so you can just see the wax the head of the wax poking out there yeah so when it heats up then that will all melt okay well I think that's pretty much done and yours looks great it's very smooth and lovely I think they're just about ready now to go and lay by the fire and dry fantastic yeah now we've created our wax filled molds we'll lay them next to our fire to dry whilst we get our coals up to temperature Marco and I created this small furnace earlier by lining a little pit with clay and allowing it to harden forming a tight solid seal from the wet soil beneath great so we have all of the molds on the side here and we've got the charcoal in so we're ready to go really aren't we yes get on with some real bellowing try and get that temperature up so what we need is a constant flow into the furnace so we need to alternate right yeah as we gradually find our rhythm on the bellows the temperature begins to rise melting the wax inside our clay mold and out into the fire you see the wax has come out on that yes but despite our choreographed efforts our experimental archaeology claims its first victim our little pig the mold cracks but Marco's item still remains having already added a bronze mix to our molds we've placed Marco's into the fire and surrounded it with coals to help kick start the reaction and transform the bronze into a liquid state now it's the moment of truth so shall we try and get it out then let's have a go it's one last surprise then let's see i'm quite excited yes and my face will drop right so we move carefully yeah from the surface the charcoal you can see that the mold is glowing it's glowing oh look at that so look look at that you see we didn't do the pig we couldn't get the pig going but we've got Marco's lovely little item here so so maybe we leave it just a few seconds maybe so we just let it cool down a bit just a little bit okay and yeah no i think you can oh dear it looks like something something is that it does i'm just i'm kind of afraid that i'm going to smash the metal but that's not going to be oh look look you've got it you've got it that's just what you made that was the wax thing let's see if we can get it oh yeah then that's what it is why don't you dip it in the water and it's just there in the barrel this gray our surface is obviously due to oxidation but if you polish it correctly you will find the bright color of the metal well i'm pleased with that i mean you know it shows that it works yes you know we we did the wax we made the little wax mold the little wax model and we put it in the clay we bake the clay the wax came out we poured and placed the metal inside the mold and here we have a metal object so it shows that the process works yes and the mix you use for your mold was very efficient it's almost like a little coin isn't it that's a success for me yes yes excellent in the hands of experts the lost wax process produced stunning objects made of copper and bronze but these weren't the only wonder materials of the age this blue bead is made from glass and whilst much rarer items made from glass have been found at archaeological sites across britain glass enabled the creation of colorful intricately designed small personal items items that could attest to someone's wealth or status archaeological scientist chloe duckworth is a specialist in ancient technologies including the ancient art of glass bead making so you get lots of different types of beads but people tend to especially with beads they tend to be drawn to things that are quite colorful or bright or shiny it's all about that kind of aesthetic property and often in many cultures we see that things like beads and other forms of jewelry they have these kind of properties of warding off evil so for example in the mediterranean still you get eye beads today and that's about warding off evil eye so a lot of the time that color and that shininess of materials like amber jet or artificial materials like faience and glass that are made by people it's all very much about that that color that appearance i imagine that at this period of time it's also a symbol of luxury or wealth yeah and that's the other thing because access to exotic materials like amber or jet obviously these things you know you don't just find them everywhere you go so it can be showcasing that you've been able to to afford this thing somebody's had to trade clearly beads and similar decorative items played an important role in how individuals demonstrated their status in bronze age society but to get a better understanding of how they might have been made and the skill required chloe and i are going to have first chloe is going to show me how to build a furnace using clay briquettes so here's one of our little bespoke briquette excellent and we've got clay and then there's hay worked throughout that and that's just going to create air channels so when we get it heated you know as the outside is cooler and the inside's hotter it won't get thermal shock that'll help it to stop cracking okay tell me where to put them yeah brilliant so you've got a few there starting with the thicker bricks as the base each one is carefully knitted together ensuring a seamless structure that will withstand the intense heat of the fire with careful planning a keyhole chamber takes shape at the back in this instance we've opted against using bellows instead we've leveraged the natural physics of heat as heat rises it draws fresh air into the furnace allowing it to intensify the fire on its own so what kind of archaeological evidence do we have for furnaces like this is there any in this period of time very little mostly what we have to go off are the beads that were made in them there is evidence for glass bead making in terms of little what we call spills or drops so when you've got this cane of glass that you heat as you make the bead if you drop a bit of that into the furnace you might find that so most of what we know is based on looking at traditional crafts and how people do that and also just experimental archaeology right so do we start building up i think we can yeah i think we can start to put and with this front part what we want to do is just it's going to be slightly moving in now right just initially i'm just going to pop it there really crudely and then i'm going to start to work it in okay oh that's it and then we really really just get your fingers in there now and we start to just make sure there's absolutely pushing it into the into the layer below really aren't you and what i do is i do one layer one push down diagonally and then i kind of pull up the opposite diagonal and just so much so much of it is just doing that to make sure it all becomes one structure so the type what type of clay would you use for this is it could you use just river clay you could use river clay you'd want to process it a bit we wouldn't want stones and things in there because they're a problem when you get it up to a high temperature and again you'd want to mix in some kind of temper so we've used hay yeah but you could use all sorts of things sand crushed ceramics yeah none of these would help to make it more thermally resistant each layer of clay meticulously shaped builds upon the last as our structure starts taking the shape of a robust furnace a tunnel at the front allows airflow our structure narrows at the top forming a peak like a volcano here the intense heat needed for glass bead making will be generated driven by the natural draw of the flames upwards we apply the final touches with a simple plank and the furnace is complete that's looking that looks fab looks like a kind of a pig's head make eyes on it with the furnace burning nicely chloe grabs a glass cane a slender rod of molten glass to demonstrate the process that we think our ancestors followed to produce valued items like glass beads so i'm going to suggest i'm going to suggest you take a white cane they just have a slightly lower melting point and that's it so first of all just flick it in a little and flick it out a bit and then back in that's it and just give it a little time and then you can kind of i'd usually start a little higher as well and then work my way down and then you can kind of get it right into there where we've got quite a hot quite the hot the hot part of the of this little volcano so i'm going to give you now a mandrel and so it's just a long metal cane and then the end as you can see has been coated with clay right and that's to stop the bead from sticking to the metal and you never get it off once that happens start wafting it at the top so that it has the chance to heat up gradually so we don't get any nasty thermal shock happening and then what you can do you can just keep that now that mandrel you can rest it into this slot here right here like that yeah so that's it just hold that there you'll probably have to hold oh yeah that's okay and then you want it yeah you want to just work on that glass um and then we're just going to let the flames really do their work on the glass you can see the the end of mine there it's got a little yeah mine's got a little bit as well right so i think probably down here is a really good spot if you keep it there and then just literally hold it there okay i can see the end of that glowing now really nicely and then start to gently raise it up that's looking really good so i'd lift the mandrel and rest it on the top here but with all the clay bit in now you're just going to turn that anti-clockwise keep the keep the glass down it is always such a balancing act that's it okay keep that glass nice and hot in there right and then you start turning your mandrel like this towards me just to anti-clockwise that's it and then just get that slight sorry i'm just i didn't mean to do that i'm just controlling it slightly um do i need to have it lower than the man so no it's fine it's just because that's where the heat is all right so the heat's there so now what i want you to do you're going to lift that up and you're going to just touch the really clear part the part that's really hot to the side of the mandrel and then wind the mandrel to the left that's it wind keep winding and keep now keep the mandrel a bit lower so angle that lower so that you're working in that really hot part that's it keep winding and then you're going to now pull the cane away slowly beautiful okay and i'll take that from you and now keep winding that mandrel and keep that quite low because at the moment um you've got a little bit of ribbing on it what we're going to do is we're going to use this tool which is a marver so what you can do now is you can gently lift out keep it horizontal and then just again horizontally just run it back and forth twirl it that's it you see it presses in so you can feel that you can feel it hard it's already getting yeah it already feels quite hard that's making it a little bit more cylindrical you can introduce that back into the heat now if you want so we can take this one now i'll take that from is that done then yeah that's beautiful so you've got a bead it's a little wobbly but i think that's nice and then once it's had a few seconds of cooling we're going to plonk it into this what called vermiculite it's a mineral right it's going to insulate the glass and it's going to cool slowly in there so we've got a blue cane here well actually we take one each yeah yeah yeah there you go and then just following the same rules yeah just do this thing where we're introducing it so we waft it watching the glass twist and turn at the end of the mandrel is mesmerizing it's fascinating to think that thousands of years ago bronze age craftspeople might have harnessed this very technique creating valued objects of both beauty and utility from our beginnings at a neolithic axe making workshop in the welsh hills to the furnaces here at jarrah we've been on a remarkable journey through time and human development we've delved into the origins of early forges revealing how our ancestors mastered fire to craft incredibly intricate items from metals and glass these processes as we've uncovered demanded knowledge and skills that continue to test and inspire today's experimental archaeologists what we've seen is an ability to master crafts clearly craftspeople were highly valued members of society and their skills sought after up and down the country but of course this was just the beginning the ingenuity of skilled individuals like those working at the great orm 2500 years ago would help guide us forward to even more complex times and thanks to experimental archaeology we can get a little closer to them thanks for watching this video on the history youtube channel you can subscribe right here to make sure you don't miss any of our great films that are coming out or if you are a true history fan check out our special dedicated history channel historyhit.tv you're gonna love it