Secrets of the Dead

An ancient lump of timber

spotted in a quarry in Southern England

leads to a massive archaeological excavation

that reveals a prehistoric village

perfectly preserved in mud and silt.

The site is so extraordinary

it's been called the British Pompeii.

This is the crown jewels in terms of

what it can tell us about past humanities,

the way people lived in this landscape 3,000 years ago.

The village was built at least

1,000 years after Stonehenge was erected.

During this same era in Egypt,

the pyramids were completed,

and the golden era of Akhenaton and Tutankhamen came to an end.

Yet little is known about what life in Europe

was like at this time.

Were villages like this isolated places,

with inhabitants living difficult and primitive lives?

This dig may answer these questions.

So, experts from around the country

will join the team to unlock its secrets.

For me, it's just so amazing to be part of this

and it's exciting.

It's, you know, it's a moment in time

that's been captured.

For the first time ever on a dig

of this scale and complexity,

the team is mapping the entire site

to ensure no evidence is lost.

There's a bowl here, there's a bowl there,

there's a bowl there, there's a collapsed storage vessel just there.

They're using experimental archeology

to investigate what life was really like.

The results have been incredible.

Far from being primitive, it seems the European bronze age

saw the beginnings of industry, wealth, urban living,

international trade, and war.

Yesterday, we found a bronze sword.

But at the heart of this discovery lies a mystery.

This village was wiped out by a sudden catastrophic event.

The fact that that contained their food

suggests that the fire event took them by surprise.

It wasn't planned.

Over the next 10 months,

these archaeologists hope to find out

what really happened to this village.

The evidence they find will shed light

on the roots of European civilization

and the world we live in today.

In a rural, water-logged landscape,

a small village buried for millennia

is slowly being revealed.

It sits on the edge of must farm quarry,

in an area of southeast Britain

known as the fens.

The village buildings were made out of wood,

which normally rots away.

But the site is a boon to archaeologists,

because these wooden remains fell into the marshy fens,

where they remained protected until now.

Wood survives in any environment

where microbes and bacteria can't go to work on it, so,

in frozen environments, in very arid environments,

and in wet environments where eventually, the oxygen's

been taken out of the system.

Artifacts of this quantity and quality

are extremely rare.

The complete surviving structures of roundhouses,

perfectly preserved.

A British Pompeii.

The Pompeii analogy, it's as if

we've got a pristine settlement, a pristine image of

exactly what was going on within a settlement

3,000 years ago

of a series of households,

all of their worldly goods.

In... in 3-d.

It's one of the best examples in northern Europe

of bronze age people living in small villages,

the beginnings of civilization as we know it.

The fact that we're talking about

circular buildings, that's a good start, isn't it?

The excavation has uncovered a row of roundhouses,

once part of a bigger settlement.

Incredibly, millennia after these buildings collapsed,

the fallen timbers remain in the same spot,

their circular roofs still visible from above.

In front of me is an internal circle

or hexagon of posts,

and then a much broader circle

of about nearly 8 meters.

What defines that... That structure,

gives it the most sort of clarity is that

the spokes of the wheel, I suppose, the... the roof rafters

fanning out from the center,

giving that sense of a roof collapsing down

inside a circular structure.

The contents inside the building

were frozen in time when the roof collapsed.

Must farm promises to be one of the richest discoveries

from the period after Stonehenge.

Mark knight is leading the excavation.

We go up this ramp.

He hopes the site will answer some questions

about Britain in the bronze age

and provide a glimpse into the lives

of the people who lived during this mysterious period.

It's unbelievable, isn't it,

the dream of what you could do

within archeology and the sense

that there's height.

You feel like you have to sort of

dip a head slightly and we'll be

walking into those buildings and things.

Wood expert Mike Bamforth

has a once-in-a-lifetime chance

to investigate the structure

of a complete village.

For a wood specialist, this is about the best site

you could ever imagine to find.

Dr. Karl Harrison has joined the team

to find out how and why the village was destroyed.

The flaming energy that's gonna

come off this when it's lit

is gonna be sufficient to carry the fire up to the roof.

But there is no time to lose.

Now that the wood is exposed to oxygen,

it will begin to decompose.

The team must race to excavate every scrap of evidence.

Understanding what happened to the village

hinges on the fire investigation.

The fire was extensive,

and all the material culture is burnt,

or at least has some sense of that... of that burning.

Was the fire a terrible accident

or a deliberate act of violence?

If it's an accident, we would expect it

to be accident in one place,

and for it to spread across the site.

If it's intentional, then maybe we'll have

multiple fire points.

As a forensic archaeologist,

Harrison also works with police on modern crimes.

He'll be using 21st-century science

to try and solve this ancient mystery.

One of the interesting things about the fire is that

it already points to the fact that it wasn't all-consuming.

We have unburnt material surviving,

we have areas of protection on some burnt timbers

which are otherwise quite well charred.

Early evidence suggests the villagers

were taken by surprise.

The team has discovered bowls of half-eaten meals.

There's a real sense here that

things were all in situ, that the settlement

was going about its daily routine.

Hence, there's food inside the pots and things

and spoons and stuff like that, so, it's caught that.

One of the big questions

is whether European bronze age villages like this

were isolated, or if they had contact

with the wider world.

The site sits in a landscape

criss-crossed by a network of waterways.

In an earlier dig, mark knight and his team

made an extraordinary discovery...

8 pristine logboats,

the biggest single collection ever found in Europe.

Suggesting these villagers were travelers.

Wherever you go along this channel, there are boats,

and that is a... is a... If ever there was

a testament to the richness but also the scale of...

Of human activity along this channel,

then that's it's for me.

What would happen to us if, in this modern world,

we didn't have the Internet?

How... how connected would we be?

And you feel in a way that the logboats on the rivers

was that... that sort of network, really,

that sort of connection.

These people used rivers as highways

and boats were their means of transportation.

But what tools did they use to build these boats?

Ryan watts wants to find out.

We're working on building a dugout boat, or a logboat,

which is something that we find in the archeology

all the way from the stone age through to the bronze age,

iron age, and all the way to the medieval period.

It's a very simple type of boat, and as the name suggests,

it's created from a log,

but obviously, it needs lots of shaping and hollowing out.

Watts is testing a variety of different tools

that would've been available at this time.

Over the last couple of years,

I've been working on different ways

of how these boats might have been built,

testing out different methods, different tools.

At the moment, we're using wooden wedges

to remove the vast bulk,