Meet the Ancestors episode 5
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00:45When developer Edward Ware bought a building plot
00:47in the middle of a West Country village,
00:49he thought he was going to make a killing.
00:51But his plans to build six luxury homes
00:53were brought to a dramatic halt
00:55when archaeologists uncovered an ancient burial ground.
00:58♪♪
01:11This sounds like a really exciting site.
01:13It has to be at least 2,000 to 3,000 years old,
01:16but the big unknown is just how many people were buried there
01:19and who were they?
01:21♪♪
01:26The site lies in the centre of an old farmyard
01:28in the small village of Bleeden, near Western Supermare.
01:31Before permission to build was granted,
01:33the planners insisted that the developer
01:35had an archaeological survey carried out.
01:37By chance, one of the first trenches
01:39uncovered a ring of six strange pits,
01:42two of which contained human remains.
01:48Andrew Young, the archaeologist in charge of the excavation,
01:50showed me the burials,
01:52but the bones in the first one
01:54were in a very poor state of preservation.
01:56At this stage, as you can see,
01:58there are a number of long bones,
02:00two parallel here and the end of a socket,
02:02a femur, possibly, down in front of us.
02:04It doesn't look as if it's a person
02:06who's laid in here as a body, does it?
02:09It doesn't, no.
02:11I mean, the bits are all over the place.
02:15In the second pit, the burial looked far more promising,
02:18and with the skull and the leg bones starting to appear,
02:21it looked like a male.
02:25I suppose we're used to the idea of graves being elongated
02:29because we're used to people being buried laid out.
02:32This pit here, I suppose, is a more appropriate grave
02:35for somebody who's buried in this crouched position,
02:38a position that maybe has ideas of being asleep
02:42or a slightly submissive position,
02:44or maybe even reflects the way
02:46in which a baby lies in the foetal position.
02:52The discovery of the burials has caused quite a stir in the village,
02:56and county archaeologist Vince Russett
02:58has his hands full giving guided tours.
03:00Right, what you can actually see here
03:02is the excavation of human remains of late Bronze Age date.
03:07That's probably about 1,000 BC.
03:09They're very important because of their date.
03:11It's most unusual to find late Bronze Age skeletons.
03:14One of the important things about this
03:16is that they are human remains.
03:18We have to treat these people with dignity.
03:20They are our ancestors, after all.
03:22They're not just...
03:23They're not an archaeological feature
03:25in the same way, say, a potsherd would be or a grain.
03:28They are actually dead people,
03:30and obviously we have to bear that in mind all the time.
03:34With the burials getting so much media attention,
03:37how could Andy and Vince be sure
03:39that they dated from the Bronze Age nearly 3,000 years ago?
03:44When we opened the trenches, we exposed a series of the pits,
03:47and some of them were looked at, partly excavated,
03:50and from those pits we recovered...
03:52In his office, Andy had the evidence,
03:54fragments of pottery from one of the burial pits.
03:57Well, we could only say late prehistoric
03:59because it's plain and it's black and it's horrible
04:02and it's clearly not Roman or later.
04:04We had to send it off to a specialist
04:06to get some definition on that.
04:08What have they confirmed?
04:09They've said that it's late Bronze Age,
04:11so let's say around about 1,000 BC.
04:15Back at the site, the better-preserved burial
04:17was slowly coming out of the ground, piece by piece.
04:20Every part of the skeleton has to be carefully labelled and bagged
04:24before going off to the bone specialist.
04:32Records show that the village of Bleedon
04:34dates back to Saxon times,
04:36and I wanted to know what the area would have looked like
04:38back in the Bronze Age.
04:41Our illustrator, Jane Brain, is an expert at recreating the past,
04:45but she needs to start from today's landscape,
04:47and you get a wonderful view of this
04:49from the tower of the parish church.
04:53So you've got the main sort of landforms in, haven't you,
04:56with the ridge behind?
04:57Yes, the ridge.
04:58And then the Celtic fields here, which are those bits up there?
05:02And the edge of them seems to come just behind those houses there,
05:05coming down.
05:06And the site is obviously right at the edge of the dry area,
05:09and then beyond it,
05:10where all those drainage ditches are out in the fields there,
05:13presumably that would have been very wet,
05:16a sort of soggy, marshy environment.
05:18So it gives it a very enclosed, safe sense somehow, doesn't it?
05:21Yes, it does.
05:22Presumably that's why the medieval village is here as well.
05:25So we're going to have to add in the detail of the environment,
05:28I suppose, when we get the information, aren't we?
05:30Yes, once we've got something to go on about tree cover and so on.
05:34OK, that's great.
05:35It's a hot day up here.
05:36Oh, yeah.
05:42Much of the information Jane needs will come from the site itself.
05:46Every bucket of excavated soil is painstakingly sieved,
05:50revealing tiny carbonised seeds
05:52and the bones of fish and small animals.
05:58Samples of soil are also taken,
06:00which will tell us about the vegetation
06:02which once covered and surrounded the site.
06:11And in the grassy fields below the village,
06:14deep cores are borne from the soil
06:16to find out how long ago it stopped being a marsh.
06:23I hope I've got a good head for heights,
06:25cos there's a treat today.
06:26I'm going up to have a look at the site from above.
06:33What you really get from up here, about 60 feet above the site,
06:37is a tremendous idea of its layout.
06:39I think for the first time I can see clearly
06:42that there's a cluster of six pits in a circle,
06:46two of which we now know have got complete burials in them.
06:50Another one has got fragments of human bone in it
06:53and the other two haven't been looked at yet.
06:55And then further on from that,
06:57they've been carefully burying animals,
06:59sheep, possibly some bits of pig.
07:01So there are all sorts of strange,
07:03probably ritual activities going on on this site.
07:10Back at the burial, there were anxious moments.
07:12It was time to remove the skull, but it just wouldn't budge.
07:16I don't honestly think there's a great deal else we can do.
07:19Is that going to keep going in the right place?
07:22It's a bit long.
07:23Because it's still stuck here, we're going to have to pull.
07:26Well, let's try and free it out of there.
07:29We have been, but it's because of the gravels on the side.
07:32You can't get a great deal down this side.
07:37Just see if you can give them a gentle rock now,
07:40see whether or not you get any movement at all.
07:43Just a gentle rock.
07:45Nothing. Nothing at all.
07:49Doesn't matter.
07:50You know it's going to break anyway, up to a point, so...
07:53Oh, yes.
07:54You'll be beautiful. Hold on tight.
07:57Excellent.
07:59I'm quite surprised that he came out in one piece, really.
08:03I was expecting him to just collapse.
08:06But he's good.
08:13Several weeks later, I caught up with the man from Bleedon
08:16in the English Heritage Laboratory in London,
08:18where he's been examined by human bone specialist Simon Mayes.
08:22Crikey, it seems like a long time since I've seen this person.
08:26Looks very different as well.
08:28I mean, I suppose it was the last time I saw the burial.
08:32It was all crouched.
08:34Oh, no, what happened to the skull?
08:37The last time I saw that, it was in one piece.
08:40I mean, it was cracked a bit, but it's fallen to bits completely.
08:44Yeah, yeah, it was only really held together by the soil that it was in,
08:48and once it was cleaned up, the pieces all fell apart.
08:51Oh, dear.
08:53Well, if we accept the fact that that's a bit of a disaster,
08:56I mean, what else have you been able to find out about the person?
09:00Well, first of all, it's a man.
09:02And how old was he?
09:04Well, it's the teeth that really tell us about that.
09:07This is a piece of his upper jaw,
09:09and you can see this molar here,
09:11the white enamel crown that's been completely worn away.
09:14And that sort of thing is characteristic, probably,
09:17of a man, say, in his 50s when he died.
09:20Something like that.
09:22His dental health was dreadful.
09:24Several nasty abscesses.
09:26But it was the shape of his lower jaw which really surprised me.
09:30The jaws of people sort of from the medieval period and before that
09:35are much more robust, much more strongly built
09:38than our jaws of modern people.
09:40Is that because they had harder stuff to chew?
09:42Exactly, yes.
09:43I mean, they've got a coarse diet, a diet that includes a lot of grit,
09:46whereas we sort of eat factory-made paps,
09:48which, you know...
09:49So does this mean we're all becoming weak-jawed?
09:52Well, I think it does.
09:53Would our jaws look very different to that?
09:55I think they would.
09:56I mean, if we could bring this person to life,
09:59or any other person from the medieval period or earlier,
10:02they would look very lantern-jawed, I think, compared with us.
10:05What else can you tell, though?
10:07As if the abscesses weren't enough,
10:09he also seemed to have fairly bad arthritis.
10:11..is the arthritis, really.
10:13I don't know whether you can see, but the light is catching that.
10:17Exactly.
10:18Normally, that would be a dull surface.
10:21That shine is a sign of advanced arthritis.
10:24And does that mean one bone's rubbing on another?
10:27Exactly.
10:28And wearing it away? Exactly.
10:30By the end of my session with Simon,
10:32I was beginning to build up a picture of bleeding man,
10:355'6 tall and muscular.
10:37But did all that arthritis suggest a hard life?
10:40We know he was 50 when he died, but when?
10:43To find that out,
10:44Simon will send a section of leg bone away for carbon dating.
10:51The discovery of one of Bleedon's earliest inhabitants
10:54led me to wonder whether he has any relatives
10:57living in the village today.
10:59To try and answer that question,
11:01we called a meeting in the village hall
11:03and asked for volunteers to take part in a DNA survey.
11:08Everyone was asked to give details of their forebears
11:11and donate a small blood sample for analysis.
11:14By comparing the DNA from the modern blood samples
11:17and from a sample of the ancient bones of Bleedon man,
11:20we might find a match.
11:24Did any of them think they were related?
11:27I don't really know. You don't, do you?
11:30I suppose we've got to wait for you people to sort it out.
11:35I should be very surprised.
11:37There's a pretty good chance
11:39we are all interrelated one way or the other, isn't it?
11:41There's just a couple of villages of hunter-gatherers
11:44wandering around here, interbreeding.
11:50The blood samples will be sent to Erica Hegelberg
11:53at Cambridge University,
11:55who specialises in comparing DNA from different populations.
11:59Anthropologists are always rushing off to faraway places
12:03and trying to get DNA samples from people all over the world.
12:09We don't really know that much
12:11about the background of British people.
12:14British people are a real mixture
12:16of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon and Viking
12:19and relatively few studies have been done on British populations.
12:23So it's a real challenge to go to an English village
12:27and find out from scratch
12:29just how many DNA sequences will we detect among these villagers.
12:35From Cambridge, it was off to Manchester University
12:38and a meeting with facial reconstruction specialist Richard Neve.
12:42I was very anxious to know if he could rebuild the shattered skull.
12:46Oh, good heavens, yes.
12:48It's almost as though somebody's just broken it into bits
12:51to give me hours of amusement, putting it back together again.
12:55But all the indications are
12:57that it's going to be possible to put it back together again.
13:01Over the next two days, Richard painstakingly reassembled the skull.
13:05Ha-ha!
13:07Oh!
13:09Ha-ha!
13:10Oh!
13:12Ah!
13:13It's part of the nasal bone.
13:15Oh, brilliant.
13:17Now, are we lucky or what?
13:20Not a desperately pre-possessing-looking fellow.
13:24There's our lower jaw.
13:27Pretty wild, eh?
13:29Mm.
13:33Now the skull is complete, a plaster cast is made,
13:36and this becomes the foundation for the facial reconstruction.
13:43Richard's assistant, Caroline,
13:45has to drill and insert over 20 pegs into the cast,
13:48each one representing the depth of facial tissue at that precise point.
13:52It gets more frightening as time goes on, doesn't it?
13:56I mean, the pegs were bad enough,
13:58but when you put the eyeballs in as well...
14:03The next stage involves adding the layers of muscle,
14:06and soft tissue and skin.
14:10It's a bit of a pain, isn't it?
14:12It's a bit of a pain, isn't it?
14:14It's a bit of a pain, isn't it?
14:16It's a bit of a pain, isn't it?
14:18It's a bit of a pain, isn't it?
14:20And skin.
14:25Looks like a strange hat at the moment, doesn't it?
14:36While I was away from the site,
14:38the excavation of the second burial had been completed.
14:41This turns out to be a woman about 35 years old
14:44who was buried with something very unexpected.
14:47It's typical isn't it? The one day that we weren't on site, look what came up with one of the burials.
14:54I've got a feeling that this little object is going to change the whole way we think about the site.
15:01At the conservation centre in Salisbury I met up with Mark Corney.
15:05I wanted his expert opinion on this new find, which had now been x-rayed.
15:12Right, now ignore all these other bits, this is the one I want you to have a look at.
15:16The one you're interested in, yes, right, it's a brooch, it's what's called a penannular brooch.
15:22Now, we've understood that it's late Bronze Age.
15:25Oh, sorry to disappoint you, no.
15:29Why not?
15:30This is Iron Age, it's a type that is not known before about 300 BC.
15:37And there's also one other problem about a Bronze Age totem, this is made of iron and you don't get that in the Bronze Age.
15:43So that means that we've got to revise our whole idea about the date of the burial then?
15:47I think so, quite considerably.
15:48But it's still quite interesting because this type of brooch in iron is relatively unusual.
15:54Yeah, it's just that it's about six or seven hundred years later than we thought it was.
15:58I'm afraid so.
16:00It's funny the way such a small find can change all your ideas.
16:04But is there any other evidence to suggest that the burials might be Iron Age?
16:08At Bristol University I went to see environmentalist Vanessa Straker, who's been busy analysing seeds from the site.
16:16So did all that sieving on site pay off?
16:18Yes, it did.
16:20We found a nice collection of the remains of the crops that were being consumed by the people who lived in the area.
16:27And what were they growing?
16:28They were growing wheat and barley.
16:30These are the two sorts of wheat that we found in the samples from Bleeden.
16:34Yeah, which one's which?
16:35This is a modern ear of emmer wheat here on the left, and on the right is spelt wheat.
16:41Neither emmer nor spelt wheat's been grown in Britain for hundreds of years.
16:45It's much harder to extract the grain from these kinds of wheats, which are called hulled wheats,
16:50than it is from modern wheats, which are known as free-threshing wheat.
16:54So it would have been a much more complicated procedure to extract the grain for consumption from these wheats.
17:01Right, so harder work for the farmers.
17:03Harder work for the farmers.
17:05If you didn't know what date this site was, and you'd looked at all the seeds, what would you suggest?
17:14I would think it was later, late prehistoric, most probably Iron Age.
17:22From Vanessa it was off to Southampton University,
17:25where animal bone specialist Dale Sargentson had just received a huge pile of bones from the site.
17:31My image of this man from Bleedon is that he's a farmer.
17:35I mean, does your first look at the animal bones bear this out?
17:39Yes, yes. Lots and lots of sheep, including a lot of young sheep,
17:44a certain amount of cattle, and very, very few pigs, or possibly even none at all.
17:51If they had all these sheep, did they have sheepdogs as well?
17:54They certainly had dogs to guard the sheep and to guard the cattle.
17:58And we found just a little bit of evidence for them in the site.
18:01That's a tooth, and we can get an idea from that of the sort of size of dog it was.
18:10We compared it with the dogs in our reference collection,
18:13and you can see that it's more or less the same size and shape as the modern collie, perhaps a little bit smaller.
18:20Right. That's one man and part of his dog.
18:23Part of his dog, yes, yes, yes.
18:25What else is there then?
18:26Well, there are some other animals.
18:28Again, not unexpectedly, there's evidence for horse from the Iron Age.
18:33But what is interesting is that the most obvious finds of horse are two skulls from two different pits.
18:41And though this is one of them, you can see we've arranged the teeth in a row,
18:46but you can see the state in which it was found is very, very fragmentary.
18:50So just the skulls?
18:52Yes, just the skulls.
18:54Yes, just the skulls.
18:56Isn't that rather strange?
18:58Well, the rest of the animal was eaten, just as the cows and the sheep were,
19:02because it was perfectly normal.
19:04People ate their horses in the Iron Age.
19:06Nothing was wasted.
19:08They ate every animal that died on the site.
19:11And in fact, that's a cow's tibia,
19:14and it's been butchered to be put into a cooking pot and stewed
19:19so that the lovely, nutritious marrow can come out of the bone to be eaten.
19:24And so I think we've probably got a fairly typical Iron Age assemblage here for the area.
19:34Some of these ancient breeds are very different from today's,
19:37as I found out at the Cotswold Countryside Park.
19:40These are soways.
19:42They're small, slender, their wool can be plucked, it doesn't need to be shorn,
19:47and both sexes have horns.
19:53These are full-grown Dexter cattle,
19:55the sort that our Iron Age man at Bleeden would have had.
19:58He would have milked them and used them for pulling his plough in the fields as well.
20:03They're lovely, aren't they?
20:09Everyone gathered in Vanessa's lab to help Jane decide
20:12what her drawing of the ancient landscape should look like.
20:16Andy was still convinced that the site was Bronze Age.
20:19What you can say is that there's no Middle Bronze Age material on the site.
20:24The cultural material, there's no later Iron Age material on the site,
20:27excluding the possibility of that.
20:30And you have to work from that starting point.
20:33Right.
20:34Well, I mean, this is interesting because, I mean...
20:37Well, I didn't know that this iron brooch had been found.
20:40But the evidence for a later date seemed to be mounting,
20:43and only the radiocarbon dates would finally resolve this.
20:50Well, this is the drawing that I made on site,
20:52just to get a good sense of the landscape, of its topography,
20:55and the feel of the place generally.
20:57Back in her studio, Jane could now get on
20:59with incorporating all the latest archaeological evidence into her landscape.
21:03I made a much more detailed drawing.
21:07We've included an Iron Age settlement here which is entirely conjectural,
21:11we've no idea whether there was a settlement there or not,
21:14but it seems reasonable to suppose that people were living there and farming.
21:19This is going to be the final drawing, still in an unfinished state.
21:24I'm still a little undecided about what to do with the excavation site itself,
21:28how to make it seem special.
21:30At the moment, we've just got little mounds
21:32showing where the burial pits were in the woods.
21:35We know now that, in fact, the whole area was much more wooded
21:39than was supposed initially,
21:41and so I brought the trees forwards and hopefully given a sense
21:44of the settlement being surrounded by trees, by quite dense woodland.
21:50And the sort of species that you would find today
21:53in this kind of environment, where it's really quite wet.
21:57Willows, the Somerset levels are covered with willows,
22:01and a lot of alder growing, but also oak,
22:04and a lot of ash, there's a lot of ash.
22:08We know from the faunal remains that these people had horses.
22:12There were three horse skulls found on site,
22:16and they would have been quite small ponies,
22:19something like an Exmoor pony and a dog.
22:22We know that people in the Iron Age had dogs.
22:25So a drawing like this is very much a coming together
22:28of a lot of different information.
22:31In Jane's final illustration, we can see a landscape of fields and farms,
22:36and just downhill from the settlement,
22:38lying in a secluded woodland clearing at the edge of the salt marsh,
22:42is the burial site.
22:51In Manchester, Richard was putting the finishing touches to Bleedon Man.
22:57That's what they do in the barbers, isn't it?
23:00What he's kind of fidgeting about.
23:19He doesn't look anything like I thought he was going to look like.
23:22No, I'm sure he doesn't.
23:24It really is odd, because this isn't the face that I expected I was going to see.
23:30I feel as if I've almost got to know this person
23:33from having seen them in the ground as a skeleton
23:36and then seeing Richard rebuilding the skull and the face gradually emerging.
23:40But it's still a surprise.
23:43I think it's a very strong face.
23:46It's almost got a touch of authority or nobility to it.
23:52And yet it's a person who you suspect has had a hard life.
23:55I mean, life must have been hard in the Iron Age.
23:58I think all I can say is that I'd love to have met him in real life
24:03and be able to talk to him,
24:05but that's one thing archaeology will never let us do.
24:12Right, meet Bleedon Man.
24:17I took the cast of Bleedon Man to show Andy and Vince.
24:21What do you reckon?
24:23Very striking, I think.
24:25But I'd just had news that Bleedon Man was 2,000 years old, not three.
24:30He was Iron Age after all.
24:32So if I said that the radiocarbon dates suggested about 100 BC...
24:37I'd be very disappointed.
24:39Oh, that's what they are.
24:42I'll put it down gently.
24:44Yeah.
24:46Somebody has to explain it.
24:49I mean, you said that you were disappointed.
24:53Why disappointed?
24:55That's an interesting question.
24:57I think I'm disappointed primarily because the archaeological evidence
25:01that we gathered, quite meticulously,
25:03doesn't correlate to the fact that the radiocarbon dates
25:09doesn't correlate with this instrumental data that we've got.
25:13And it's nice, when you look at a site in that detail,
25:16you expect to be able to smooth out,
25:19to correlate the finds, the pottery with the instrumental data
25:23reasonably, reasonably tightly.
25:25And what we have here is a huge difference.
25:27But that, I mean, the unpredictability is the very reason
25:31why Andrew and I actually do this.
25:35Now what we've got is a great challenge to explain
25:38how we fit all this together again.
25:40We've had one idea about what the site was like and what age it was.
25:44Now we've got some more complicating factors here with a later date.
25:49So fine, so we go back and we ask new questions from the data
25:53and hopefully then we'll be able to come up with an explanation
25:56of where all this fits in.
25:59Back in Bleeden, the burial site has sadly disappeared under the new houses.
26:04I'm Julian Richards.
26:06I'm the archaeologist who's working on the series.
26:10But in the village hall, nine months after he was discovered,
26:13it was time to introduce the villagers to their ancient ancestor.
26:17And so the question is now, do any of you recognise this person?
26:25There's somebody in the village that looks like this, is there?
26:37Well, that was quite interesting.
26:39That seemed to be a fairly unanimous decision.
26:41There was certainly a shout from several people as to who it might be.
26:46Actually, the profile might be a bit of a giveaway.
26:48Another surprise was the result of a survey
26:51Although we can say for sure that you're direct descendants from this man,
26:55it's quite clear that you do trace back to a common origin with this man.
27:01And I think that's very nice indeed.
27:03Out of the 48 people who gave blood,
27:06Erica found five whose DNA sequence matched that of Bleeden Man.
27:10But who were they?
27:12Lean right into it.
27:14I can tip the head down so I can see the head.
27:16Right, can you lean right in close together?
27:18That's it, really, really, really close.
27:20Head as close as you possibly can.
27:22It's warm.
27:24At the end of the meeting, it was time for a photo call.
27:26And we gave each of Bleeden Man's five descendants a special certificate
27:30to commemorate the occasion.
27:32Now you've seen him, now you've got your certificates,
27:34what do you think about being related to him?
27:36I don't know.
27:38I don't know.
27:40Now you've seen him, now you've got your certificates,
27:42what do you think about being related to him?
27:44I'm not very keen on him.
27:46You're not!
27:48Do you think he looks a bit miserable?
27:50I don't.
27:52He's got a horrible nose.
27:54Yeah.
27:56Hang on, let's have a look.
27:58What do you reckon?
28:02I don't know.
28:04There's something there, I think.
28:06There is, isn't there?
28:10I don't know.
28:20Famous faces digging into the roots of their family tree
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