"Welcome to the flattest, most featureless field" "I've ever seen on Time Team." "But first appearances can be deceptive and this field has already got our archaeologists practically foaming at the mouth." "Look at this air photo." "It's absolutely full of crop marks." "Archaeologists reckon that shows around 3,000 years of human activity." "They think this could be Neolithic, that these could be Bronze Age barrows." "But it's this rectangle here they hope will take the field from the merely extraordinary to the potentially stunning." "Could it be one of the rarest features in British archaeology, a massive Anglo-Saxon hall?" "If so we've got not just one or two but three, four, five and we've only got three daysI" "Can our archaeologists take all that excitement?" "." "The village of Sutton Courtenay lies two miles south of the Thames in Oxfordshire." "In the 1920s, an amazing discovery was made in the surrounding fields." "The first Anglo-Saxon settlement ever to be identified in the British Isles." "Since then archaeologists have explored all over Sutton Courtenay but they've never been given permission to dig in this field where the crop marks suggest the most exciting archaeology lies." "Now we've been given the opportunity to investigate this archaeological holy grail." "Invited here by Doctor Helena Hamerow, who recently dug the field over the road." "This is a site of national importance." "There's no doubt about that." "Why do you say it's a site of national importance?" "There was a man called E T Leeds who was keeper of antiquities in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford." "And he identified pit-like features with Anglo-Saxon pottery in them and he concluded that these were" "Anglo-Saxon buildings, what we now call Grubenhauser." "What about the crop marks here?" "Did they come up with anything when they were excavated?" "Absolutely." "There was only one large building that intruded into this field and we excavated a bit of that building and showed that it was indeed an Anglo-Saxon hall." "If you've dug so successfully here, why dig over the road?" "This side of the road was really just around the edge of the heart of the site." "The real heart of the site, the core of the site is on that side of the road." "And with such high expectations the excitement seems to have got the better of the team as "geophys" get stuck in straight away keen to explore the field for the first time ever." "We've only just set foot in this field and already "geophys" are hard at work." "Mick, I don't understand." "Usually by this time the three of us are round a 4 x 4 in a field, we discuss the site and only then do you tell "geophys" where to go." "Well, they're already all over the site and you haven't even spoken to them yet." "Yeah, but that's because we've got this fantastic air picture with all these crop marks on it." "Already we can almost see where the archaeology is." "What can you see?" "There are a number of circles which may well be ploughed out barrows but then in amongst that, can you see these little rectangles?" "They look like Anglo-Saxon halls, which would be really exciting." "This is not like you." "You're normally the sceptical, Black Country man." "All we've got are circles and lines." "This has never been dug." "Why are you so confident that what we've got is what you say we've got?" "." "These type of marks on crop marks turn out to be sites of that period when they're excavated." "Most interesting of this is of course the Anglo-Saxon complex up in this area here." "Well, if it's Anglo-Saxon, it's Helen Geake isn't it?" "." "Yeah, Helen's a great expert on the Anglo-Saxon period." "I'm going to defer to Helen on this one, I'm going to hand over the responsibility to her." "Great expert Helen?" "Well, actually I did my first ever undergraduate essay on Anglo-Saxon settlement in this area so being given the chance to excavate in this field is the most exciting thing I can imagine." "And if the geophysics can give us more detail I think that we need to start in this area because that gives us the chance to look at what may be a Bronze Age barrow and an Anglo-Saxon hall so we kind of get a double bang for our buck so to speak." "We might be able to find out all sorts of things including is there any continuity between two periods which are so far apart?" "." "So that's where you want to put in the first trench?" "I think so, yeah." "And it wasn't your decision." "Nope, refreshing, isn't it?" "." "So we're targeting these crop marks first." "Hoping that a single trench will reveal whether this is a 3,500 year old burial mound, and, most excitingly, whether this is an Anglo-Saxon hall built 2,000 years later." "And Helen and Mick's enthusiasm seems to have rubbed off on the rest of the team." "Any chance of shifting a bit of muck?" "Where to, Phil?" "Well, from here over there." "You mark it out, I'll be there." "So it doesn't look as if we'll have to wait to see if our field deserves all the hype." "Though we better not be over-zealous, because this field is highly protected and we've got strict limits as to how much we can dig." "Try to cut it to the lineI" "It's nearly lunch time and we're putting in our first trench." "How big's this one going to be, Phil?" "It's about 13 x 8, something like that." "So what's that work out at?" "." "It's getting on towards..." "It's over a hundred... 100 metres." "About 100 square metres." "A hundred square metresI Yeah." "And how many square metres are we allowed to dig altogether?" "." "250." "I know, it's a lot, isn't it?" "." "12.30, day one and we've already committed to practically half our trenchage." "Yeah, but do you want to see results or don't you want to see results?" "I do want to see results, but it is a bit of a gamble, isn't it?" "." "It's a gamble worth taking and we're all agreed with it." "It's not a gamble." "We know what we're doing." "We've got to have a big area in order to see a building plan." "It's an enormous building." "It's a gamble worth taking and it's not a gamble." "Let's hope this non-gamble pays off." "We know what we're doing." "Careful with my shovelI" "Welcome back to Sutton Courtenay in Oxfordshire, and underneath the grass of this rather bland, featureless-looking field may be one of the rarest buildings that you'll ever find in British archaeology, an Anglo-Saxon hall." "How confident are we that there's anything in the ground that justifies this enormous amount of digging?" "Just look at the results, I mean, they speak for themselves." "You can see the ring clearly, you can see the rectangular enclosure that we think may be the Saxon building." "But then a lot more information, more ditches, more pits, a fantastic picture." "What do we need to find in the ground to identify an Anglo-Saxon hall?" "Obviously, pottery and stuff would help, but in terms of the construction thing, it's going to be built of timber." "It's going to have posts set in the ground to support the walls and the roof, so we would expect to find post holes which would be, I would guess, circular, brown holes where the posts have stood." "Or, because there were different building techniques, we might find trenches which held the timbers to support uprights." "It's variable, isn't it?" "." "These results suggest a timber slot, don't they?" "Yeah." "That's going to be important to find out whether we're dealing with a trench or individual post holes and then what's in those holes?" "Is it posts or planks?" "These constructional details... the date depends on those." "Building styles changed over time." "So it may be big, but our first trench has gone in over some great geophys." "To prove it's an Anglo-Saxon hall, we either need to find post holes, the remains of massive wooden uprights which supported the walls and roof, or beam slots, the remains of the alternative" "Anglo-Saxon building method, large planks of wood set in the ground." "As Phil gets stuck in to see if he can find either of these features, we've already made a reassuring discovery." "I'm as certain as you can be with a bit of pottery that big that that's probably early Saxon." "Could do with some bigger bits." "A lot of us would be amazed you could even pronounce it's pottery." "It's a matter of elimination of what it can't be." "I think you've got a bit of Saxon pottery here, Phil." "There's one probable and one maybe." "Well, one piece of pot in the topsoil doesn't equal a hall, but at least it proves the Anglo-Saxons were here." "And as we continue to survey the rest of the field, we've got some more geophys results, and Helen's already itching to dig another trench." "If you look at the data, there's a whole series of these black blobs scattered across the field." "But then, look at this really unusual anomaly." "So what size is that?" "." "That's about four, five metres across." "Right, that is quite big." "I suspect it's a deep, pit-like feature full of burnt material, maybe rubbish." "I'm thinking that, at four or five metres in each direction it's a pit, it's full of rubbish, it's perfect for an Anglo-Saxon building that's got a pit underneath it and it would be fantastic if we could put a trench over that and find out." "We're putting our second trench over this pit to see if it's an Anglo-Saxon building, because when Leeds dug similar pits in the 1920s, they turned out to be Anglo-Saxon buildings called grubenhauser, or grubhuts, and it was these small buildings, built over cellars," "that produced lots of finds." "The excavation of what is hopefully our Anglo-Saxon hall is well under way, but it rather begs the question, what is an Anglo-Saxon hall?" "Sam, what did one look like?" "Imagine a great barn-like structure, high-gabled, beautifully decorated, beautifully carved, great ceremonial doors, and one of the great re-presentations of those in modern times is in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, particularly the great feasting hall Meduseld" "in the kingdom of Rohan for King Theoden." "OK, so it's big and echoey." "Yes, yes." "What was it for?" "." "Well, lots of feasting, lots of drinking." "Mead halls, beer halls, wine halls, these are all synonymous terms for royal halls." "A number of our team are very well experienced in that kind of thing, although at the moment they're fairly silent." "What are you doing, Matt?" "." "This is an Anglo-Saxon board game, and it plays on your military tactics, a bit like chess." "So you'd got board games, you'd got poetry, you'd got blazing fires, you'd got feasting." "The blazing fire really comes out well in this wonderful quotation from Bede." "I quote the Old English " ""Sie fyr onaelaed, bin heall gewyrmed," ""and hit rine and sniwe and styrme ute."" "Which means?" "It hardly needs translating." ""The fire is kindled" ""and thine hall is warmed and it rains and snows and storms outside."" "But all is peace and happy within." "It's now mid-afternoon Day One, and back in the trenches, it seems that all is peace and happiness as well." "Although Raksha's still shifting mud, in trench one, things are looking promising, as Phil's finally got through the topsoil." "How are you getting on, then, Phil?" "Well, you just asked at a very crucial time." "I think we're just beginning to see the features poking through." "Right." "Here's the geophysics plot, here's our trench in there." "Now, we're sort of standing in this corner here." "So we should begin to see this big curving ditch coming through there." "And I reckon we've got it." "Yeah?" "When you get over here, I think you can actually begin to see the ditch." "Look, you've got gravel there and you can see there's a line there." "There you go into this dark, sandy stuff, and then you get back to gravel there." "Now, I reckon, our ditch, I reckon we're just on the top of it and I reckon it's swinging round there." "Is that bone I can see down there?" "That is bone down there, yeah." "With what looks like burning material?" "Absolutely." "But what you haven't seen is this." "Look, we've got one, two, three, looks like four..." "My goodness." "..bits of pottery actually broken in the top of the ditch." "Now, those bits, none of this material has been disturbed by the ploughing, that's the crucial thing about it." "So what date's that?" "." "At the moment, I wish..." "I haven't dug it up yetI" "Just the last thing I did was sweep it away with the digger and there were these bits of pottery." "It's so tempting to think that those two things might be related." "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" "I'm thinking Bronze-Age cremation." "Something like that." "But the point of it is that that pottery is going into that ditch, once the ditch is completely filled up, so that should actually give us an early indication of how old that ditch might be." "So the crop marks and geophys seem to be delivering on the prehistoric." "We might have our Bronze-Age barrow." "And as Matt joins the trench, we might even have a hint of our Anglo-Saxon hall." "Matt, have you seen this" "L-shaped feature here?" "Round here?" "It's coming round and going up here as well." "I mean, where are we relative to the Saxon hall?" "It should be about where you're standing, halfway up the trench." "That's like the corner of a building." "So it's all looking promising." "But if we really do have an Anglo-Saxon hall, 'what's it doing here in the middle of nowhere?" "'" "Do you think this site here was the original village of Sutton?" "I don't think this site is a village." "In any case, villages come along a bit later." "This is something else in here." "Like what?" "." "Well, the best way to describe it, I think, is an estate centre." "What does that mean?" "It's where the king's officials, the reeve and so on, would have administered the land round here." "The king might have come here occasionally and ate the place clean." "But you know, it's a group of buildings to do with running that estate." "This is what drives me mad about Anglo-Saxon history, about what we call the Dark Ages." "Suddenly, this word king floats into the conversation." "King of what?" "." "King of Sutton Courtenay?" "King of England?" "King of Mercia?" "The dynasty who lived here were called the Gewisse." "We've got this name in some early sources, not least our main source, the Venerable Bede." "And the Gewisse are none other than the people who became what we later call the West Saxons." "This is the heart of the old West Saxon kingdom." "Well, being right at the heart of the kingdom of Wessex would explain such a big Anglo-Saxon site, and not only that, it might even suggest a royal site." "But it's the end of Day One, and this all depends on what we've got in our trenches." "Well, it's certainly a beautiful, big trench, but what does it tell us?" "Well, you know, our gamble has really paid off." "I mean, just look at this fantastic prehistoric ditch." "It's so clear as it curves around." "I think, odds-on, it's a barrow." "So it's prehistoric, but Phil... nice prehistoric ditch, but where's Helen's Anglo-Saxon?" "I reckon we've got that as well, Tony." "We've got this great foundation trench." "The wall comes straight through here into the corner here." "It moves and it comes straight the way through there." "The beauty of it is that we can see that it cuts through the ditch here, so it must be later than the ditch." "But that's not all." "In front of you we've got a big row of post holes." "We might even have another building." "All right, a great, big box of delights, this trench, but what else are we going to do tomorrow?" "Well, have a look at this." "Here's our big hall, but look over here, a couple of smaller ones." "This one has got a grubenhaus or what seems to be a grubenhaus at one end." "If we put a trench in across that, we can look at the relationship of the grubenhaus to the hall." "We can look at the constructional details of this hall and see if it's contemporary with the big one here." "If it is, we're dealing with a complex of buildings, and that puts us up in status terms." "So we've got grubhuts, we've got prehistoric, we've got Anglo-Saxon halls coming out of our ears." "Well, actually, we haven't yet." "All we've got is little stains on the earth, but tomorrow, we're going to get right down into here." "Beginning of day two here at Sutton Courtenay in Oxfordshire, and look at that geophys." "Looks like there's archaeology all over the place, and it seems to be borne out in this trench." "You see all those different colours there?" "We reckon we may have prehistoric, Anglo-Saxon, even that rarest of all commodities in British archaeology, an Anglo-Saxon great hall." "So, this being Time Team, what are we going to do today?" "We're going to dig somewhere else." "We're not only putting in another little trench in the corner of the field where we're looking for an Anglo-Saxon grubhut," "Helen's left the field, and is on the far side of the fence." "That's because we really need to find out what the context of that building there is." "What do you mean by context?" "." "Did it stand on its own, or was it part of a complex?" "If you look on this photograph, you can see that we've got lots more of these rectangular buildings." "We're putting a trench in on the edge of this one up here, to see what its constructional details are like, to see if it's got a relationship to our big one here." "Were they standing at the same time?" "If they were, then we might have something really big, an estate or something." "Yeah, that's when you'd start using words like "royalty" or "kings"." "That's very romantic, let's hope that we find an enormous palaceI" "But, looking at the geophys, this is where you think the Anglo-Saxon hall is, right?" "." "this is where you think the Anglo-Saxon hall is, right?" "." "That's right." "We've got a blob here." "Is that another one of your grubhuts?" "Well, we're hoping it might be a Grubenhaus, yes, and we're hoping to get the relationship between the Grubenhaus and the hall, which could be on top of it, as one might have succeeded the other." "Then we might have a story of Anglo-Saxons coming here and living in relative poverty, and only later on, does this become a royal site." "Exactly, and then you have to ask why." "From rags to riches." "So, on Helen's orders, the team get stuck into our latest trench, because if the crop marks deliver, we're dealing with two more Anglo-Saxon buildings, another grubhut and another hall, two phases of occupation." "But most excitingly of all, we might have a huge royal estate." "In our first trench, we're already hoping we've got a massive great hall, and so far it's looking good." "We've got these walls, and this morning," "Phil's extending the trench to expose the other corner." "Paul?" "Yes, mate?" "Now, then." "I don't think that's pottery." "That's a bit of daub." "Ah, now thenI" "Where's it from?" "Well, it's bang on line with the wall trench." "That could be what the building's made out of." "Well, it's not unusual to find wattle and daub construction." "It's one of the classic timber building techniques." "You put your posts in, you put interwoven panels of withies, wattle, between them, then you get this mixture of sand, clay and cow dung, and you plaster it onto the outside, let it dry, and then whitewash it." "So, maybe we've got our first piece of structural evidence for this building, which is great, because while we've exposed lots of features in the trench, at the moment, they're stains in the ground." "We now need to dig down into each of them, to get some dates, and confirm whether these walls and post holes are the remains of one truly massive Anglo-Saxon hall, or several different buildings from different periods." "We're going to have to be patient, though patience seems to be a quality lost on some of the team." "Now, look, you promised me life in a Saxon hall, and the thing that really, really attracted me, was that there was going to be lashings of beer." "Where's the beer(?" ")" "Well, it's coming, but first you've got to earn it." "You've already competed with Matt on the board game." "One of the other great competitions in the hall was a sort of ritual exchange of insults known as flyting." "This will come naturally to you, Phil." "So, I've got to insult him?" "So, I've got to insult him?" "Yeah." "Matt, you're rubbish." "Now, can I have some beer?" "." "No, I'm not quite as easy as thatI" "You could provoke him like that, and he could come back with some dangerous response initially, like "Thine mudder hammeth mit wolvem", which means, "Thy mother sleeps with wolves."" "Yeah, but then I hit himI" "Ah, now, you're not allowed to be violent in the hall." "There were quite important rules about leaving weapons outside." "And I've written up a sort of simulated thing, which I'd like you to just try." "I say to you, "That thine shovel is nu unsharp"." "That thine shovel is nu unsharp." ""Your shovel is now blunt."" ""After yeara ungebootes."" "After yeara ungebootes." "After years of misuseI" "And you would then respond, "PhillipusI"" "PhillipusI" ""Unsharp is min shovel."" "Unsharp is min shovel." "Blunt may be my shovel, "Ac se mara is hay."" "Ac se mara is hay." "" But he is greater thonne thine."" "But he's greater than yours." "My shovel is bigger than yoursI" "So, up thine." "LAUGHTER" "Don't need a translation for thatI" "I declare you the winner." "No contest." "Now can I have my beer?" "." "Yes, you cani" "No, you can't, Phil, because we've got loads of work to do." "In our second trench, where we're trying to find an Anglo-Saxon grubhut," "Raksha's uncovered some kind of feature, but so far it's only produced one piece of pottery." "It's either Saxon or Iron Age, Raksha." "Best I can do, I'm afraid." "Do you want to make up your mind, then?" "Well, look at itI" "In trench three, they've only scratched the surface, but they're already having more success, finding animal bone, and more pot." "Yeah, that's Saxon, all right." "That's what we're looking for." "Can I push you to a slightly narrower date than just "Saxon"?" "Well, early middle, 450 to 850." "Brilliant." "Brilliant." "That works." ""Brilliant." "That works"?" "One scrap of loosely-dated pot hardly screams "royal estate" to me." "Mick, you get very, very few Anglo-Saxon finds." "All you get, really, is stains in the ground." "Yeah." "And yet there's at least half a dozen people here who are all dewy-eyed about Anglo-Saxon archaeology." "Why?" "Probably because we've got so little of it." "We haven't got really quite enough to explain everything, and therefore, that, in a way attracts people to try and..." "It's more difficulti" "..to make what you can of it, because it's more difficulti" "It is more difficulti" "That's the attraction for me, and it's very stimulating to work on." "Sam, it is mad." "You have got so few sources." "You're forced into relying on Tolkien and Lord of the RingsI" "We've got enough fragments to let us know there was a far greater wealth of literature that has not survived, and it ties in with..." "ExactlyI And this is my pointI" "Listen to that sentence. "we have a far greater wealth of literature..." ""That's not survived"I" "But we can reconstruct it." "It's like getting a glimpse of a lost continent, we can see a headland." "It's very stimulating to be in." "I'm absolutely persuaded." "I'm absolutely persuaded." "Really?" "It's the thinking man's Dungeons  Dragons." "YesI Absolutely." "Absolutely." "And apart from anything else, it's the beginning of the period of history that we now dwell in, the English." "I thought this conversation was over, and he's started all over againi" "Sometimes, I don't know whether to admire their enthusiasm or simply despair, because over in trench two, we're back to the reality of Anglo-Saxon archaeology." "So, so far we've only found that one piece of pottery here, and couldn't tell if it was Anglo-Saxon or prehistoric." "As far as you're concerned, does this look like a Grubenhaus?" "Unfortunately, I think it's starting to look as though it's not." "If it was a Grubenhaus," "I'd expect more clearly defined edges, quite nice, vertical edges." "They're very sloping, irregular." "It's almost like a sort of scoop in the ground." "Also, the fill's very stony, which you wouldn't expect, necessarily." "It's just the right shape, it's just the right size, but I don't think that's a Grubenhaus." "Now, surely they must admit this can't be good." "We've opened and closed a precious trench over a blob, which, thrillingly, turned out to be a blob, their best interpretation, a watering hole." "Yes, we might have a great hall, but it's still just stains in the ground." "And what are the archaeologists doing?" "They're opening another trench, because they think they've discovered the entrance." "Should be entrance there, and a pit there." "Even I could have guessed a hall would have had a doorway in it." "Look at this." "This is the example of a finds tray from our main trench, trench one." "One tiny piece of bone." "I was promised garishly painted halls, maybe mead horns, that kind of stuff." "This is what we've got." "You never do get an awful lot of finds from an Anglo-Saxon hall." "Almost the bigger they are, the less finds you find in them." "I think we've done quite well with that." "This is a policy of despairI" "Is this what it's going to be for the next one and a half days?" "No." "Look what John's got." "This is real hope, this is real excitement." "Basically, what we've done is, we've re-surveyed this east end of the long hall that we're looking at." "And you can see here, the extra detail has really paid off." "We can actually see what we think is an entrance at this end, and, outside of the entrance, we've got at least one pit, and then a pair even further beyond." "These are three blobs, aren't they?" "Yeah, but these are exciting blobs, aren't they?" "Yeah, I think the entrance is always of interest, and in two cases we've got either human burial or a cow burial, so who knows what that pit might contain?" "So, we could have something very interesting here?" "we could have, but it's not likely to be full of gold." "It's going to be interesting rather than rich." "I wouldn't mind if it was just something interestingI" "You don't know how to use 'emI" "In the hope of finding something interesting, we've moved Matt and Phil into our latest trench to find the entrance, though Phil seems more interested in playing the Anglo-Saxon than finding it." "My shovel's bigger than yours." "Your shovel's going rusty, too." "My hoe comes with a ten-year guaranteeI" "It's now mid-afternoon, day two, and it seems patience is a virtue, because, at last, we're beginning to get a more personal glimpse of the Anglo-Saxons." "That's lovely." "It's an antler comb, or a bit of an one." "They're made in bits and riveted together, and you can actually see the rivet hole there." "Oh, yeahI Cos I thought..." "It seemed to be a really clean break is what I was thinking." "Yeah." "No, it's been made separately." "And it's got fine teeth on one side, and coarse teeth on the other, which is lovely, and it's a brilliant, classic find for a sunken-featured building." "It seems like every one has got at least one antler comb in it." "It seems like everybody needed to comb their hair, or their beard." "Well, not everyone, Helen." "But, grooming aside, we might actually have our first Anglo-Saxon grubhut." "And, what's more, we're finally getting to grips with the hall." "That is amazingly deep, isn't it?" "." "Charlotte, have you got to the bottom of that yet?" "." "I think I'm just on the bottom now." "So it's half a metre deep or more, isn't it?" "." "That's just the side wall, Tracey, that we're looking at, isn't it?" "." "That's the foundations for the side wall of the hall." "Yeah, that's right." "That's the northern end wall that way." "It's a hell of a size." "I suppose you have to have something that is that deep, in order to support these mighty great timbers that are going up to support the roof." "I mean, the scale of that seems very different to these posts, which are presumably inside the building, aren't they, here?" "Yeah, these are internal posts that don't support the weight and structure that the external wall..." "So, that's pretty much confirmed that, that they definitely are internal posts." "Fantastic." "This trench gives a real sense of just how massive these walls would have been." "And since the post holes are internal, we know that we're dealing with just one building." "And in our latest trench at the other end of the hall, we've now uncovered the entrance, and one of the blobs is turning out to be quite interesting." "Paul?" "Paul?" "Yes, mate?" "I've got, finally, a bit of pottery here out of this feature." "OohI Lovely." "That's a bit more like it." "Let's have a little look." "That looks pretty Saxon to me, mate." "Yeah, that looks like Saxon." "That's the kind of stuff we'd expect to be getting round here." "Yep?" "So, where did this come from?" "It's just coming out of this pit here." "I think it might be a post hole, can you see?" "Like a post pipe, where the post went down the centre of it." "Wow, that's a big post hole." "Wow, that's a big post hole." "Yeah." "So, how far from the building are we?" "We must be about five metres, six metres." "We could be looking at a porch, I suppose." "If you look at Cheddar, they actually had these massive totem poles or flag staffs there, these massive post holes that didn't really form a building or anything, but they were near buildings, or entrances." "They may have been, I don't know what the Saxon equivalent of a totem pole would be, but something like that." "It's a big royal centre, you could be looking at something like that." "Yeah, nice." "Fabulous." "And Matt's not the only one with Anglo-Saxon finds." "Over in trench three, the potential Grubenhaus is now looking much more likely." "Well, this is more like it." "Clearly, a lot of material's been coming out of this trench." "Anglo-Saxon pottery from a little jar." "It's probably seventh century in date, and we've got a lot of it." "Lots of animal bone, too, maybe butchery waste, got a nice jawbone here." "Fantastic." "Have you seen this thing?" "Lovely little knife." "Isn't that beautiful?" "Oh it, is, it's great." "It's a nice little Anglo-Saxon knife, again in good shape." "Yeah." "Fantastic." "Faye?" "Yes?" "Could you give us a quick explanation of what's going on here?" "A quick tour of the trench?" "Yeah." "I'll start here." "This is our main wall, of what we think may be either a hall or some kind of building, which basically goes right up to here." "This is the corner of it." "And then we think it goes this way to our sunken-featured building, which is this huge, great big round thing I'm standing in." "So, can you tell what the relationship is between the hall and the sunken-featured building?" "No." "I can't tell which one's earlier or later yet, so what I'm going to have to do is stick in a slot here, and hopefully this section will tell me what's going on." "All very tantalising, but we've come to the end of day two, so it'll have to wait till tomorrow." "Ah, this is a bit more like it, isn't it?" "." "The old Saxon lifestyleI" "We didn't have to come 75 miles to watch you drinking." "It helps, though, don't it?" "." "Didn't you think today was good?" "I got really a bit down about halfway through, because we weren't coming up with any finds, but then we got this beautiful little knife, and hopefully... but then we got this beautiful little knife, and hopefully..." "Typical Anglo-Saxon find." "Yeah, yeah." "Hopefully, it's a promise of more to come." "Before we continue with the serious business of the evening, can I remind you that the archaeologist who discovered the original Anglo-Saxon stuff here was a great friend of JRR Tolkien, who wrote Lord of the Rings?" "So, I think it would be a very appropriate place and time, if right now we all raised our glasses to Professor Tolkien, and our own Bilbo Baggins, Professor Mick Aston." "LAUGHTER" "CheersI" "Beginning of day three here at Sutton Courtenay in Oxfordshire and we've got itI Our very first Anglo Saxon great hall and it's enormous." "But in addition to that, late yesterday afternoon," "Paul Blinkhorn, our pottery expert, came up with evidence of something just as rare and even more bizarre." "A pair of totem poles." "Paul, are you serious?" "I think we can make a good case for it, yeah." "If you look at excavations of some high status Saxon sites in the past, like Yeavering and Cheddar, they found one or two of these enormous post holes, and we're talking about things a metre deep." "They weren't structural, or part of a building." "They've got to be some sort of display thing." "I could certainly see a huge pillar covered in symbols relating to the social identity of the people there." "Couldn't they have another function?" "They could have functioned as gibbets of a sort." "If you look at the seventh-century documentary record, when King Oswyn was killed, his body was cut into quarters and displayed around the kingdom." "If you've overcome an enemy king and got a chunk of his body, are you going to hide it under a bush?" "You're going to nail it up outside your house to let everyone know how hard you areI" "Helen, your body language says you're not altogether convinced." "I'm not." "I do quite like the kind of pillar or obelisk theory, that you've got a pair of great big obelisks outside your front entrance." "It does look good." "But to go that extra mile and say that they could be a gallows..." "We do have evidence for gallows, but for much later, and from a completely... but for much later, and from a completely..." "I never said gallows, I said a gibbet displaying a dead body." "Paul, stop scoring points." "'Because Helen's the boss, and besides, we've still got 'loads to do by the end of the day." "'And as Matt continues to explore this enigmatic post hole," "'Phil's finally got to grips with the rest of the building.'" "Helena, have you looked at this section?" "I think it's absolutely cracking." "You actually see the outline of the post in there." "And the post - you can see more or less how big it would have been, something would fill the foundation trench." "It's an arrangement, a deliberate arrangement around these raking posts." "Look, you've got one here." "This one here now is not a vertical post." "It's actually slanting like that to support the wall plate." "So you've got a raking post and a raking post and then a big post in there in the middle and if I'm right we can start building that picture going all the way round." "I reckon there's another big post in there, and how do I know that?" "." "Because we've actually got bits of chalk, and everywhere else we've had chalk, we've had a post." "So you've got one in there and another raking post with a bit of a gap in here." "We've got chalk there." "Yep." "So I reckon we've got another post there, raking post, vertical post, raking post, upright post..." "'Let me guess, Phil, another post?" ".'" "..Upright post." "Masses of chalk." "I reckon that's the way they put this building together." "So how high do you reckon it would've been then?" "At Sutton Hoo, they found a cauldron with a cauldron chain and it would've hung from a ridge post of a great hall just like this." "The chain was 18 feet long, so you have to imagine 18 feet, plus the cauldron, plus it would've been suspended over a fire, so you're looking at a ridge post that's over 20 feet high, so a really tall building." "And Tony was getting really grumpy," ""Oh, I see, all I got is marks and stains in the ground."" "I tell you what, doesn't matter what stains you get in the ground, it's knowing what they mean?" "Absolutely, and we've got the evidence here for a truly magnificent building." "'All right, I take it back, you can tell a lot 'from stains in the ground." "'And since we know that the walls would have been covered 'in wattle and daub, the hall must have looked really impressive." "'But this isn't the only hall we think we've got on this site." "'The crop marks suggest there are four more." "'Yesterday, we opened a trench 'and it looked like these are halls, which could make this a royal site." "'But the archaeologists aren't satisfied yet.'" "Look, we've done the detailed survey now and I think what it clarifies is we don't have any entrances on the side walls of this building." "So that's not an entrance?" "So that's not an entrance?" "No, that's not." "It's our last day, and we've only got enough metres left to dig one more trench." "We know we want to put it in somewhere round here, but, frankly, we've had so little datable evidence so far that we want to make sure we put it in somewhere that's potentially really fruitful." "Question is, where?" "Helen?" "How far have we got?" "." "Well, I think what we're just saying is what we need to be able to see is more clarity on this end wall." "I think we need to extend the trench here to be able to give us the other corner so we can see the whole thing." "The trench is too small at the moment." "The trench is too small at the moment." "How many more metres can we dig, Mick?" "Well, we've got 209 metres accounted for, so we've got a 250 allowance so about 40 square metres maximum." "We're probably looking at something six by six metres or less, is all we've got left." "Provided Chris agrees, of course, because Chris is our English" "Heritage inspector and he's like our archaeological policeman, and he's already said today that we can't extend a trench which we wanted to extend." "So we've actually got to persuade you, haven't we, Chris?" "You have, but I can see the argument for this because I think we've got a clear question about this particular building and we're not going to answer it without going a bit further in this direction." "So I think there's a very good case for extending this trench." "So, the team begin to extend the trench to uncover more of the hall, hopefully find the entrance, and construct a picture of how it was builti" "But we're not only interested in the Anglo Saxon buildings." "We also want to find out about the people." "And luckily, we've just got our first really personal glimpse of one of them." "What have you got there then?" "Well, I just found that in the spoil." "OohI" "Oh, that is fantastic." "Isn't that nice?" "That is a ninth-century strap end." "They're a really characteristic shape with these kind of convex edges and they do often fall off because they're on the end of a really narrow belt or strap." "I mean, ninth century - it doesn't fit in really with the date we've been thinking for the rest of the site which is largely seventh century, but this could simply have come from somebody walking across the field 200 years later." "'So, nice find, but unfortunately Helen thinks the strap end was 'just a casual loss, so it won't date our buildings." "'And as Matt's got to the bottom of his post hole, 'it's not the only date which is slightly surprising.'" "What's this about Roman?" "Oh, that looks Roman, yeah." "'So not an Anglo Saxon totem pole then, Paul?" "'And heaven knows what the Roman's were doing here." "'But in the grubenhaus, the Anglo Saxons are beginning to make sense.'" "Is that a dog skull you've found there, Faye?" "Yes, it is." "Here, have a look." "Is that what we'd expect?" "We think that they might be part of some kind of closure ritual." "When the building went out of use, depositing a skulls - sometimes bits of animals, sometimes even bits of people - was part of the kind of ritual associated with a building going out of use, kind of ending its life in a way." "So you make an offering when the building's abandoned." "Right." "So the dog skull suggests that the grubhut didn't go out of use gradually, but was deliberately closed by the Anglo Saxons." "Which might suggest it was demolished in order to make way for the hall." "But it's now middle of day three and we need to find out more about this hall, so we've brought Matt and Phil into the trench to help - though I'm not sure it's the most productive combination." "Call that a brush, Phil?" "Yeah, it's a brush." "Why, what's that?" "." "I think you'll find this is a far superior brush." "I think you'll find this is a far superior brush." "Is it?" "Yours looks like a demented hedgehog." "Is that right?" "." "Well, yours looks like a very abbreviated moustache." "Be better off hanging off the side of my head, wouldn't they?" "We're now concentrating all our efforts on this hall because the archaeologists believe it's key to proving that we're dealing with a royal site." "Which still niggles me, cos let's be honest, whether we've got one hall or five, it's a huge leap from stains in the ground to a royal estate." "Helena, from the moment that you saw those air photos you went, "I really" ""think this is a royal site," and then when we dug that first trench you went, "Yes, yes, it's confirmedI"" "Why?" "I mean, that's very little evidence to go on, isn't it?" "." "Well, I've always been struck, from the moment I saw these photographs, by the similarities between Sutton Courtenay and a famous site, about which we know quite a lot, called Yeavering up in Northumbria." "We've got this "L" shaped arrangement of buildings." "Yeavering also has a series of great halls very similar to this, similar in size, similar in layout." "But why did you assume that it had royal connections?" "I don't have to assume it." "I've been told it by none other than Bede, the famous Anglo Saxon historian, who tells us that, in the 7th century, around the year 628, that the King of Northumbria, King Edwin, actually came, with his queen" "and his courtiers to a place called Adyeverin, Yeavering, and there dwelt six and 30 days." "And he says it was a royal ville, a villa regia." "'So, judging by the Yeavering comparison, our site certainly 'looks as though it could be royal, and, what's more, having surveyed 'the surrounding landscape, Stewart thinks he's got evidence 'which supports this idea.'" "The important thing in the Saxon landscape is the river." "We're standing just there where the site is." "You see this beautiful sweeping boundary going round here with the water in the bottom?" "This is the former edge of the River Thames." "It's right next to our site, virtually." "What we've got is the possibility of a river landing." "You could bring huge great boats up here." "With imports from anywhere you like?" "Absolutely." "It becomes a key focal point on the River Thames." "The other point to bring out on here as well is this old road which is way beyond where the cars are, this is also a parish boundary." "I think this is the road into the complex where the halls are." "Oh, wow, that's fantastic." "Now, I get it." "At first I couldn't understand why a royal centre would be in the middle of nowhere, but if this was a riverside site on the main road then I can see why it became so important." "And it's now nearly the end of our time at Sutton Courtenay, and I think the archaeologists finally have a handle on this site." "We are standing in the sunken feature building." "A grub to me." "A grubI" "And if we come over here, basically what they did was put a big hall over the top of it so we've got a wall here and it goes through where you're standing." "And then out and returning back through there." "Yeah, where you are now is our entrance way." "And then the building is running straight back through that way?" "Yeah, it is." "It's a line this way." "It's a line this way." "Yep." "So the doorway is again in the end and not in the side." "So, brilliantly, it does seem we've got two phases of Anglo Saxons, who first lived here in grubhuts as a small community, which then grew as they were replaced with a series of halls." "Since this hall is very much like the great hall, we think it's contemporary, proving that this was a royal site." "It's a pretty exciting piece of archaeology, isn't it?" "." "It is absolutely fantastic." "We've got the end of one wall there, the end of another wall there." "In between is this great big elaborate entrance and once you've come through the gable wall, you walk into the hall, we've got a wall there and a wall there - you've got to imagine them going right up, up to the ridge." "We've got maybe seven metres up there." "And look at the scale of it." "Can you imagine the size of fire you would need to heat this huge space?" "It would have been just absolutely, literally awesome." "Now, these are rough plans of hitherto the largest buildings from Anglo Saxon England, both from Yeavering in Northunberland." "Now, this one is ours, and look, it is substantially bigger." "And we dug it up." "And we dug it up." "We did." "What a result - three days and we've got a whole Anglo Saxon royal riverside complex." "And not just one hall, but possibly the biggest great hall the Anglo Saxons ever builti" "Whoever would have thought that at the end of day three we would be sitting inside an Anglo Saxon great hall?" "Well, I thought this was going to be a great site but honestly it's exceeded all my expectations." "Mick, Helen said to me earlier," ""This is why I went into archaeology in the first place."" "Oh, yeah, absolutely." "I mean, this is so important." "It's the point at which England starts." "Well, churls and thanes, as we've done so well, I think we all deserve to get stuck in with a bit of drinking, don't you?" "Hang on a minute, Tony." "They've got to earn it first." "(CLEARS HIS THROAT)" "(SPEAKS OLD ENGLISH):" "Mattaeus, ic pe onsecge paet pin scofl is nu unscearp." "ALL:" "OoohI" "Phillipus, unscearp is min scofl, ac se mara is he ponne pin." "ALL:" "OooohI" "Up thineI" "LAUGHTER" "He's the winner." "CHEERING" "So the drink will now be presented to the winner by the lady of the house." "And we will honour the winner with the traditional cheer, wassailI" "ALL:" "WassailI" "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd"