Digging for Britain

The United Kingdom has an epic history

and a wealth of secrets still to uncover.

Every year, hundreds of archaeologists dig,

dive,

and sieve to find clues...

...to add to the great historical jigsaw of our ancestors' lives.

You know when people say, "What's the best thing you've ever found?"

Guys, this.

I'm Professor Alice Roberts.

This year, we've uncovered some astonishing finds

and made some truly ground-breaking discoveries.

Wow, look at that!

Each team of archeologists has been armed with a dig diary camera

so they can record their discoveries as they happen.

That is brilliant.

Dave, I love you.

Our roving archaeologist, Dr Naoise Mac Sweeney,

is out on the digs.

Who are we looking at? It's royal.

And I'll be inviting the teams to bring in their finds

for closer analysis.

That is absolutely beautiful.

This time, we explore Britain's west.

I've come to the edge of Dartmoor,

where traces of the ancient past are all around,

from castles to rows and circles of Bronze Age standing stones.

In fact, all of the west is rich in archaeology.

Join us to delve into an Ice Age cave...

We have found this beautiful woolly rhinoceros tooth.

...follow up on reported sightings of unexpected human bones...

Across the top of the cliff,

we've got human remains eroding out of it.

...and bid an emotional farewell to a very long-running site.

It's unique to be able to tell this story of ourselves in one place.

Welcome to Digging for Britain.

Our first dig takes us to the Cotswolds,

an area with a rich seam of Anglo-Saxon archaeology,

and the name itself is thought to relate to an Anglo-Saxon chieftain

called Cod and his control of this territory of the high lands

or "wolds", so "Cod's wolds".

This dig takes us back to around the early sixth century.

The exact location has been kept secret to protect it.

A team of volunteers led by MoD archaeologist Richard Osgood

is following up on the discovery

of high-status Anglo-Saxon artefacts in a field.

There's a chap called Chris, who's a local metal detector.

He's got permission from the farmer

to come and have a look at this field.

No-one knew anything about this field.

There was nothing on the historic environment record.

He was pretty shocked to find, not only a lot of Roman material,

but he found two really, really beautiful Saxon items.

There was a sword pommel mount from the top of a Saxon blade,

which was made of silver gilt,

and then a silver buckle as well,

so these things are what are called treasure.

Treasure is legally classified

as any piece of metal over 300 years old

containing over 10% gold or silver,

and it has to be reported.

Tell about your thoughts when you got that out of the ground.

I was totally stunned cos I knew exactly what it was.

You've not had anything like that before?

No, no, no. It's a detectorist's dream, really, isn't it?

Chris made his finds in 2016

and reported them to Gloucestershire Council.

It soon became clear that he'd stumbled on

a sixth-century Anglo-Saxon burial ground.

This prompted a swift call to Richard and his team

to formally excavate the site.

So we've got what we believe to be a nice skeleton over here.

So we've got a nice skull coming through.

The cranium coming up in that way,

and then we've got the jaw here with the individual teeth

just poking through at this point, jaw bone just there.

As we come down, we've got what is the right arm here.

Just the top with just the humerus,

and then we come into where the rib section will be

once we clean those down.

The finds date to a time when history and material culture

show strong links with the Netherlands and Scandinavia.

Most Britons at this time are thought to have been pagan,

and their burial practices involved interring the dead

with plenty of grave goods.

And this cemetery is starting to yield some very intriguing finds.

It's a nice, massive, big piece of a rim of a bowl.

Oh, wow. Yeah.

What is it, Janine, pottery? Glass. Glass?! Nice piece of glass.

Just a few days into the dig

and they unearth a very rare artefact.

Oh, wow. Well done!

Oh, that is wonderful. Beautiful.

You know when people say what's the best thing you've ever found?

Guys, this.

The raw material for this bowl

may well have come from the eastern Mediterranean,

a major focus for glass production at this time.

This exciting archaeological find is unusual,

as glass is so fragile, it rarely survives.

A bowl like this would have been precious -

another indication of high status.

Brilliant.

What really amazes me is that this has been in the ground

since the sixth century.

It's really, really shallow up there.

There's not much topsoil.

It's been ploughed for hundreds and hundreds of years.

And yes, OK, it's broken,

but it still survived.

Elsewhere on site,

the archaeologists are making more extraordinary finds,

Imagine that you're holding a sword there. You've got the handle there.

That would sit on the handle right there, so that's your guard. Right.

Wow. That is fantastic.

It looks like a bead.

The Anglo-Saxons are well-known

for their incredibly intricate jewellery and decorative metalwork.

We're thinking it could be anything from a helmet to a drinking vessel

to part of a scabbard.

It is indicative of a high-status burial.

It's made of silver, but it's got this gild again,

which is why it looks like gold, and it shines beautifully.

After 1,500 years,

it's still shiny when you put it in the sun,

and that's a really magical item.

In early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries,

the dead were typically buried fully-dressed

with other objects included in the grave

that still speak to us of their identity and status.

What have you got now? We've got a knife!

Yeah, I think that we've got a knife,

which is just sat over the pelvis area here,

but it's just sat on what is the left hip,

so probably a dagger.

Looks too small to be a spear.

Yeah, it's certainly all happening here.

I think we've got a very, very high-status burial

with a lot going on.

This unassuming field has proven an extremely rewarding site.

Richard has joined me to delve deeper into a couple of the burials

which seem to challenge our expectations.

This is photogrammetry of this individual, is it?

That's right. Yeah.

The quality's that good

you can actually see some of the finds in the burial itself.

You've got the... See this circular item just here?

Yeah. Now, that's... that's this.

Ah, is that a spindle whorl? Yep, that's right.

It's really, really nice and tactile.

Big solid stone spindle whorl.

And then just further up... Yeah. That's this thing.

Ah, what's that? It looks like a toggle.

Yeah, it's what we call an antler prong,

but it's something we think probably used within textile working.

It's got a suspension loop... Yeah.

...for wearing just round your neck as part of the weaving process.

And then what about those? They're beautiful.

Are they beads? These are polished pieces of amethyst.

And then you can see they've also been pierced

all the way through the middle for incorporation in jewellery.

These are objects that you would associate with an Anglo-Saxon woman,

but I'm a bit dubious, actually,

whether this is a woman that we're looking at.

So the first thing is that the bones are quite robust.

There's chunky areas of muscle attachment,

And then the pelvis,

it's frustrating that it's so fragmentary,

but we are getting, at the very top of that great sciatic notch

at the back of the pelvis.

I'm saying kind of probable male with that.

This is what's really interesting is the jaw,

cos that's an incredibly prominent chin.

And then on the other side,

we've got the angle of the jaw, which is flared out.

That tends to push me more in the direction

of this being a male skeleton. That's right.

So, yeah, so the sort of drinking vessels,

swords, shields, spears,

things that give you this real kind of macho and machismo feel.

Yes, you expect them to be potentially male burials.

But this one, if it's a male burial with female grave goods,

really does sort of tip that on its head.

And this is the other burial that we saw quite clearly in your film.

I was really intrigued by particularly that.

Can I pick it up? Yeah, if you do it very carefully.

That's really light.

It's so thin and fine, isn't it?

We're wondering whether that is a Saxon dish or bowl

or, in fact, maybe a Roman piece of glass as an heirloom.

Really? Wow.

And what's this here?

This is an iron object, isn't it?

That's the knife that we were excavating.

It looked really good in the ground all intact,

but it was held together by the soil, so that is the knife,

and it had a leather belt,

which had a little bronze studs and fittings that went with it

round the waist of the individual.

So this is what's astonishing about these Saxon graves

is you're looking at somebody who's buried fully clothed,