"This bungalow doesn't seem unusual, but when its owners wanted to build a garage, they found their driveway full of ancient burials." "The bungalow lies at the edge of the village of Winterbourne Gunner - near Salisbury in Wiltshire - an area steeped in history." "This bungalow belongs to Mr and Mrs Bushnell." "When it was being built, they found it was on a Anglo-Saxon cemetery." "I helped with the excavation." "Now they want to build a garage, so I'm back." "Just taking off the top." "There won't be any burials at this level, because it's all disturbed." "It's only when we get to the surface of the chalk that we'll know if there are any burials here." "In 1992, Jill and Brian Bushnell started to build their bungalow." "A surprising discovery meant that this was no ordinary building plot." "I thought you might like to look at this album, Julian, to refresh your memory." "We had no idea at this point what we were going to find." "This was it as you bought it?" "Yes." "'When the foundations were dug, a well-preserved sword appeared.'" "I wasn't here when it came out of the ground." "When I came back, they said, "Look what we've found."" "We realised it was significant, so work had to stop." "It's amazing, isn't it?" "Yes." "The photograph doesn't show how big it is." "It's hard to imagine that underneath this crusty surface there was once a beautiful shiny iron blade, that no doubt the person who had it was terribly proud of." "'The sword was the first clue to what lay here." "Weapons are found in the graves of pagan Saxon warriors." "'There were graves under the bungalow.'" "How many were there?" "There were 23 in total." "There's a diagram." "So there were 23 underneath the bungalow?" "Yes." "Are some of them still here?" "Yes." "They only excavated the ones in the way of the main footings." "Which room are we in now?" "We're in the dining room." "So there's one in the corner there." "There." "Possibly." "And one between the dining room and the sitting room." "Jill has burials under most rooms in her house." "How does she feel about living so close to the ancestors?" "It doesn't worry me at all." "It did initially." "When I realised the significance, I got a bit panic-stricken." "I rang the local vicar, and said I was rather upset." "He said, "Don't worry." "It is just their remains." "Their souls have gone elsewhere."" "As soon as Alan Graham from AC Archaeology turned up, we could get on with the dig." "How are you?" "All right?" "Yes." "Let's see what we can find." "It wouldn't take long to get down to the solid chalk, but would we find any burials?" "Wetting the surface of the chalk should, we hope, reveal dark patches marking graves." "This one here is now really clear, the one that goes just up to the fence." "This comes right from here, down here right up here." "It's been chopped through by quite a shallow pipe at some stage." "There's the end of another one coming round here." "The site's cleaned up and we know how many burials are under the garage." "I'm about to break the good news to Mrs Bushnell." "Jill?" "Yes?" "You know I was teasing you last night, saying there were 13?" "Yes." "Well, there aren't quite that many." "But we have got one, two... three, four... and we think five and six." "Really?" "Yes." "Fortunately, only two of the graves would need to be excavated - they'd be destroyed by foundations." "Did Jill mind more burials being disturbed?" "No." "I feel we can't be blase about it." "Somebody is buried here." "They lived probably further down the village and decided this was a special place to bury their dead." "We have to treat it with respect and remember that it is somebody - somebody's father or mother." "We don't know yet." "I quite agree." "After two days of digging," "Alan and I reached the level where the bones should start to appear." "Have you seen this, Julian?" "No." "We're getting the top of the skull." "The top of the skull is appearing." "There's the brow ridge." "You can see the other brow ridge." "The nose bone is beneath the point of the brush." "In the grave that I was digging, the skeleton was in terrible condition." "It's a shame we haven't got a complete burial here." "The service pipe has taken off the legs here." "But what is left at the head end is very interesting." "I think because the head has fallen back and the jaw has dropped that this burial had been placed in some sort of a void, maybe a coffin." "There are other indications." "This dark charcoaly stain here may be the remains of something that's decayed in that coffin." "Alan had made good progress with his grave." "The skeleton was better preserved than mine and looked like a male." "Jill asked what we'd found." "Did you find any grave goods?" "No." "Nothing with either of them." "It's strange, but interesting as well because it begs the question, who was the person?" "Was it a Saxon, or a Briton living here during the Saxon invasion?" "That's a question we'll try and answer as we find out what we can." "The next day, bone specialist Margaret Cox arrived." "What are these?" "We think, in our ignorance, that's a male that Alan's digging and this is a female." "I think you're right." "The pelvis, although it's damaged, looks female, because it has a wide sciatic notch." "Which bit's that?" "That's the two right-angled notches." "It determines the size of the pelvic outlet, which is crucial for delivering a child." "So you think this is female." "What about this one?" "You said you think he's a hulking great chap." "Yes, it is almost certainly a male." "The main criteria are the super orbital ridges." "The ridges?" "The eyebrow ridges." "They reflect the size of the sinuses underneath them." "Males have fairly large ones." "This curving of the spine - is that just the way it's laid in the grave?" "It might be, but there is a pathological condition called scoliosis, which results in sideways curves of the spine, which can result from many different things." "Without taking it up and looking at the bones, it's impossible to say." "Sometimes it's just the way they've fallen in the ground." "That's probably so, but not necessarily." "Is there any indication as to what age the person is?" "This particular bone is the clavicle." "The clavicle is actually, in terms of years, the latest bone in the body to finish its growth." "You can see when it's finished." "A little plate of bone on the end fuses to the rest of the bone." "That usually happens in the late 20s." "In this individual, we can say quite confidently that that bone has fused," "So this person was over 28 or 30 when they died." "When all the bones are removed, Margaret will look at them in her lab at Bournemouth University." "It's nerve-racking when you get to this stage of taking the skeleton apart." "especially when the bones are so fragmentary." "You don't know if the bone will crumble into a thousand pieces as you lift it." "This is why we're recording as much as we can while the bones are in the ground." "You feel like apologising to the person as you're doing it, but we're being as gentle as we can." "In her pathology report, Margaret stated there were no clues to the cause of our man's death." "His joints were in very good condition, with no sign of disease." "The same could not be said for his skull, which had collapsed completely and would need expert attention." "You're not going to like this one!" "'I was hoping Richard Neave at Manchester University could do something with the shattered skull 'or we wouldn't have a face to rebuild.'" "It's a question of opinion as to whether you can do anything with this one or not." "Oh, yes." "You see, in the ground it looked not too bad." "It's all there." "The frontal bone's there." "The nasal bone is there, amongst all this rubble." "Yes, that can be put together." "That definitely is a task for Caroline." "She's very skilled at piecing these things together." "She likes a challenge." "Richard gave the job of rebuilding our Saxon to Caroline Wilkinson, who soon noticed he had some interesting facial features." "You can really see..." "The eye sockets are different heights." "This one's higher than that one." "He's got a little tilt to the face all over, and in the edges of the nose." "The nose aperture is off centre." "It's heading off towards the right." "The whole face heads that direction." "You'll probably see it a bit in the smile." "You'd notice it with the teeth." "At Salisbury Museum, I met up with Saxon expert Mark Cormey." "I wanted to know more about the cemetery in Winterbourne Gunner." "That's Jill and Brian's bungalow." "There are burials underneath that." "But I didn't know it was such a big cemetery." "Yes." "We know of about 85 burials, making it the second largest Saxon cemetery in Wiltshire." "It originates on this side in terms of its discovery in the early 1960s." "Subsequent discoveries have come over in this direction." "It's interesting the way the core of this cemetery seems to focus on these earlier prehistoric burial features - the pond barrow and the bowl barrow, defined by the ring ditch here." "This occurs in pagan Saxon cemeteries - focusing on earlier monuments in the landscape." "That pond barrow must lie in the back garden next door." "That is in the field just behind Jill and Brian's house, isn't it?" "Yes." "How do you know that these people are Saxons?" "We don't know for sure that they're all Saxons." "However, some of the graves have produced goods with the burials." "This object, for instance - this iron axe head." "It's not an axe for chopping wood." "This is a weapon for throwing." "This is the mineralised wood of the haft, and the iron rivet that held it in place." "It's from a type of axe called a francisca." "It was used exclusively by the Franks, who settled in Belgium and France at the end of the Roman period." "What's it doing in Winterbourne Gunner?" "Interesting question." "We are looking at a Frank buried in Winterbourne Gunner." "Why was someone like that here?" "The middle of the 5th century is a fascinating period - the collapse of Roman rule in the western Roman Empire, there's a lot of political and social turmoil." "It's probably fairly insecure." "We know from sources elsewhere in the Roman Empire that communities were employing barbarian federates, or mercenaries, to protect their territories." "It's conceivable that this axe represents this activity going on in the Salisbury area." "What about the graves without goods?" "Who are they?" "This is the fascinating aspect of cemeteries of this period." "More and more people think these cemeteries include a strong local Romano-British population along with a few graves of the new political and military force coming into the country with them." "So the man we're looking at, who's not buried with anything - is he more likely to be a Briton than a Saxon?" "I can't be definitive, but it's highly likely it is a local." "The question is, how can we tell if our man is a Saxon or a native Briton?" "Near Stroud in Gloucestershire, I found someone who could help." "Phyllis Jackson was a chiropodist for 50 years, so she's seen plenty of feet." "How can she tell the difference?" "By the structure of the different bones." "They are very different." "When you look at the British foot, and you compare it with the Saxon foot, you can see that the whole structure of the British foot is strong, it's broader." "The toe bones midfoot have got a much greater strength." "With the Saxon foot, because of the strength of a tendon which runs under here, there's always a very steep groove." "Frequently, the outer part of the toe bones curls over." "I think it is in order to keep that tendon within its groove." "And this one..." "Yes, that's much less of a groove in there." "I'm most intrigued." "I want to know, if you can tell this difference, can you tell me whether our man from Winterbourne Gunner is Saxon or a native Briton?" "Can we look?" "Yes, we'll have a look at the bones." "'In order to study the foot," "'Phyllis arranges the bones in their correct anatomical order.'" "Now..." "I feel sure that's not a Saxon foot." "You have a short protrusion from the back of the ankle bone to the end of the heel, with both feet." "The actual bone structure is robust." "Well, I'm really pleased, in some ways." "I shouldn't have preconceived ideas, but I was convinced he wasn't Saxon." "It's nice that you've confirmed that." "We ought to shake hands over him." "Do feet tell the whole story?" "Are there other ways of finding out where he came from?" "Knowing when he died would be useful and here science COULD help." "In Oxford, Paul Pettitt has been carbon dating a tiny fragment of our man's bone." "Has he come up with an age?" "Indeed." "And you'll find it's good news." "The results indicate that he died somewhere between 340 and 550 AD." "Well, that's what we expected, but can you narrow it down more?" "We can't very much." "But there's a fairly significant peak in the earlier range." "I would say, if I had to narrow it down, it's most likely our individual dates from the first half of the 5th century AD." "Much earlier than I would have expected." "That's really just after the lights have gone out on the Roman Empire." "It's sub-Roman, yes." "Yes." "So, our man was buried during what's often called the Dark Ages." "We know little about that time, but I do know lots of new people came to this country - the Saxons." "'Back at Winterbourne Gunner, I met Jane Brayne, our illustrator, 'up a crane!" "'Jane will recreate the landscape of Saxon times and wanted to see the village." "'But it's a little windy today.'" "I wish it wasn't quite so windy." "I don't like this at all." "It's swaying." "But I think this is just the place because, where the caravan is, that's where that Bronze Age round barrow was." "Right." "You can't see it any more." "But it's a reference point for the barrow." "There's a pond barrow which obviously was a hollow." "That goes into the garden, does it?" "Just beyond the apple tree." "I see." "I think the cemetery is along this ridge." "It's using those prehistoric barrows as a reference point." "Yes, it seems to be." "Yes." "If Jane's going to depict the man's village, she needs to know what it would have looked like." "We went to the West Stow Country Park, near Bury St Edmunds, where a complete Saxon-period village has been built." "'Park ranger Lance Alexander was on hand to greet us.'" "Hi, Jane." "Hello." "We want to know what a Saxon village looked like." "You've come to the right place." "You've got a new house as well." "It's a good one to see first." "So, this is the most recent house?" "Yes, this has taken the last four years to make." "We take our time." "So they were built on the site of houses that were excavated?" "Yes." "This is a family group." "Each house stands where it once did." "We used many building methods." "Because of the lack of evidence, we tried different versions." "We'll never know exactly what they were like." "While Jane got on with her drawing," "I found out about the building techniques the Saxons introduced." "A Saxon house starts with a tree trunk, but as the Saxon carpenters didn't have saws, how did they cut it?" "So the idea is that you're going to split this trunk from end to end just using wood wedges?" "That's right - wooden wedges and a wooden mallet, no metal tools." "I'd have thought that was terribly fragile." "They have sharp edges." "I'm waiting to see this whole trunk just split right across this end." "That was brilliant!" "The only cutting tools Saxons used were axes, but their woodworking skills were amazing." "This seems a remarkably small axe for the job you're doing." "I think it is, from my point of view." "My experience is with large, modern axes." "They slice quickly." "This is more like a hatchet." "But it's what the Saxons are supposed to have used on large timbers." "They have been found on digs, so I believe." "Axes were used to make floors... ..walls, doors..." "..and even wooden nails." "But which of these various types of houses would our man have lived in?" "Now, this house is very spacious." "There's room for an entire family to sleep, to work, to cook and eat, and live together." "If I lived in this village, this is the house I'd like to live in." "In Manchester, Caroline was making progress with the face." "We're very nearly at the finished muscle stage, all over the face." "Have you seen how lopsided he is?" "You can see the nose heads off to the right of his face." "That would be the tip of the nose there." "And the mouth is wider on this side of the face than on this side of the face." "It's slightly off-centre." "Back at the Bushnells', the garage was nearly finished." "I'd brought the reconstructions and wanted to see Jill and Brian's reaction." "I can't wait!" "It's nearly Christmas, so this is an early present." "Just for you." "OK." "He's made of terracotta, so he's a pinky colour." "Here he is." "Gosh!" "There you go, Brian." "He's not a bit like I expected!" "I thought he'd be a rugged, warrior-type sort of a person." "No." "He's not." "He's quite a gentle looking person, isn't he?" "Now, we questioned whether he was a Saxon or a Briton." "Somebody looked at his foot bones and suggested that he was a Briton." "Then we had carbon dating done..." "Do you mean to tell me that he was a Briton and not a Saxon?" "Yes." "We'll have to call him Arthur then, and not Egbert." "Call him what?" "!" "Arthur not Egbert." "He was going to be called Egbert if he was a Saxon, was he?" "Yes." "You said you had a strong image of what it looked like at the time the burial ground was in use." "Yes - a little party of very sad people walking up the lane." "Is this what you thought?" "Yes!" "Absolutely." "Isn't that incredible?" "These are burials." "This is the one that lay underneath the garage." "The mourners have walked from the village." "There's the pond barrow and the bowl barrow that were found." "The village is at the bottom of the valley, near the river." "Brilliant!" "It is." "It's just what I thought." "She captured it very well." "So who was he?" "A Saxon mercenary or a British farmer?" "He's slightly built and had no weapons to take to the next world." "But he and his companions chose their burial place with great care, next to ancient burial mounds that symbolised ancestral claims to the land." "Jill and Brian chose this spot too, but little did they realise that they too would end up living with the ancestors."