Digging Up Britain

Ten discoveries, a million years of history

Mike Pitts

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780500774816
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Britain has long been obsessed with its own history and identity, as an island nation besieged by invaders from beyond the seas: the Romans, Vikings and Normans. The long saga of prehistory is often forgotten. But our understanding of our past is changing. In the last decade, astounding archaeological discoveries have shed new light on those who have gone before us, radically altering the way we think about our history. This book presents ten of the most exciting and surprising of these discoveries. Mike Pitts leads us on a journey through time from the more recent and familiar to the most remote and bizarre, just as archaeologists delving into the earth find themselves moving backwards through the years until they reach the very oldest remnants of the past. At each of these sites we hear from the people who found and recovered these ancient remains, and follow their efforts to understand them. Some are major digs, carried out to record sites before they are covered over by new developments. Others are chance finds, leading to revelations out of proportion to the scale of the original projects. All are extraordinary tales of luck and cutting-edge archaeological science that have produced profound, and often unexpected, insights into peoples lives on these islands between a thousand and a million years ago.

Chapter 1

A Viking Massacre

Weymouth, AD 1000

The 2012 Summer Olympics were often called the London Olympics, but not everything happened in the capital. Sailing took place off the coast of Dorset. Among local development projects that the attention made possible was the long-awaited construction of a bypass, taking traffic out of the seaside resort of Weymouth and north to Dorchester.

Following standard practice, archaeologists were among those who worked on the road at an early stage, advising on routes less damaging to heritage. They found previously unknown prehistoric villages and graves, common fare. But at one point they came across something that none of them had ever experienced before.¹

Above Weymouth is a protected landscape known as the Dorset Ridgeway, where green hills wander for miles more or less parallel to the coast. There was a narrow strip of ground where the new, deeper route, cutting through the ridge, was to merge with the old road. For health and safety reasons the archaeologists were unable to excavate there in advance, and instead, when works were in place that controlled the traffic, they stepped in to record anything of interest that could be seen as heavy-wheeled machinery removed the soil.

A thick hedge stood between the old road and the new works. As it was being dug out with a mechanical excavator, the alert operator noticed something in his great toothed yellow bucket: bone. He might have ignored it and got on with the job, and something extraordinary that had been unknown would also have become unknowable. But Skanska, the contractor, and the people at Oxford Archaeology had a good working relationship, and the driver did as instructed. He phoned for help.

The bone in the bucket was not alone. It would be six months before the archaeologists had finished. They exposed the top of a large filled pit, its soil showing dark against the white chalk into which it had been dug like a small pond. It was May. Conditions were good: dry and not so warm that the ground turned to dust before you could see what was there. The site was in a sag in the top of the ridge, a draw for a succession of old tracks and roads. The hollow restricts views along the ridge to either side. But to the north you can see the sprawling ramparts of Maiden Castle, one of the great wonders of ancient Britain, and to the south Weymouth, the small, cliff-edged Isle of Portland – a limestone outcrop that hangs like a drip of ice-cream from the Dorset coast – and the sea.

The mechanical excavator had scattered and crushed bones. But it became apparent that most of the remains were still in the ground. In one corner of the pit, which was squarish in shape, a tightly packed group of nearly fifty human skulls was revealed, looking like a nest of dinosaur eggs. Lower jaws were more or less in place, as if still attached: it was not bones that had been buried, but heads, with hair and flesh. Not skulls, but faces. Judging from the skulls that could be seen, they might all have been men. And deeper across the rest of the pit were the bodies.

Who were these people? It’s common for graves to contain artefacts as well as human remains – sometimes objects are all that survive. Such things can be the best guide to identity, who the people were and when they died. The pit above Weymouth, however, was not a normal grave.

The archaeologists found only a few pieces of broken pottery to hint at when it might have been dug or who the men were. The sherds seemed to be Iron Age or Roman, from pots made between 100 BC and AD 100. But they were accidental rubbish rather than goods placed in the grave. The only certain thing that could be said was that the deaths had not occurred much before 3,000 years ago. There were deep, clean cutmarks on some of the bones where heads had been removed, which could only have been made with metal blades. The first swords in Britain were cast in bronze around 1300 BC.

Excavating the Weymouth burials in 2009, with skulls piled on the southern edge of the pit.

Nonetheless it was tempting to think the men were Roman. The road that was now being rebuilt followed a Roman road that connected a small port in what is now Weymouth with Dorchester. On the way it passed Maiden Castle, where excavation in the 1930s revealed a cluster of over fifty graves. The archaeologist, Mortimer Wheeler, dubbed the site a War Cemetery. Many of the people had died violently. In one famous case a man was buried with an iron bolt from a Roman spear embedded in his spine. Here, said Wheeler, was evidence for an assault by an invading Roman army on one of Britain’s great tribal centres. This was no mass burial, however: mourners had had time to dig separate graves for each of the dead, and lay them down with pots and joints of meat. So perhaps the pit on Ridgeway Hill was witness to an even more brutal confrontation between Roman and native.²

Dorset County Council was thrilled, and in June it issued a press release describing the find. The burials dated from late Iron Age or early Roman times, said the statement, but how they got there was a mystery. ‘It seems highly likely’, said Oxford Archaeology, ‘that some kind of catastrophic event such as war, disease or execution has occurred.’ The council asked the public to keep away. The site was dangerous, and under 24-hour security. This was a wise precaution: shortly after the skulls had been surveyed, one went walkabout, never to be seen again.³

With the research tools available to Mortimer Wheeler, that would have been pretty much the end of it. But now we have a battery of forensic sciences. Oxford Archaeology sent a sample of bone to a radiocarbon dating lab in Glasgow.

The result came back in July. It showed the executed men not to be so ancient: they were alive in Anglo-Saxon times, when, as the council’s new press release put it, there was ‘considerable conflict between the resident Saxon population and invading Danes’. So were they residents or invaders? One’s immediate reaction was to imagine a Viking massacre: here was the grave of men slaughtered as they defended their homes and families against marauders from across the sea. The shocking details revealed over the following two years of lab work, however, brought a further twist to the story.

Excavation continued. The bodies were entangled, their legs and arms overlapping. Ribs concealed feet. The hands of one man spread unfeeling fingers over the curved spine of another. There was such a confusion of bone, it was difficult to make sense of what was there. The archaeologists poked and scraped and brushed with little hand tools, to expose as much as they could without disturbing the remains. This way they could identify individual bodies and determine how one lay over another – the order in which they had been buried. Careful recording should allow each individual to be identified.

Louise Loe, head of burials at Oxford Archaeology (archaeological work can be as boring and bureaucratic as any other kind, but you get good job titles),⁴ was at that very moment also overseeing an excavation on a First World War battlefield, at Fromelles in northern France. By September the archaeologists would have exhumed the remains and possessions of 250 men. They were Allied troops, buried by German soldiers in large communal pits holding a small proportion of the thousands who died there, one night in July 1916.

Louise ensured that the same recording techniques were used in Weymouth as at Fromelles. Every skull and skeleton was given a unique number, and drawn as it lay before being removed. Many photographs were taken. Osteologists noted down what could be seen, looking for indications of age and gender, missing bones and disease, and, especially, wounds. For every skeleton, the positions of forty-four points were precisely recorded with digital surveying equipment, so that the way the bodies lay could be recreated in the lab.

Then the archaeologists lifted and bagged the bones, one by one, to take to Oxford.

With the bones gone, the archaeologists could look more closely at the pit. It transpired that the burials had not lain on its base: 75–85 centimetres (2 or 3 feet) of silt had already accumulated before the bodies were thrown in. It was a wide pit, about 7 metres (23 feet) across and originally about the depth of a standing person. So when the executioners had looked for a place to dispose of their victims, they had chosen a grown-over hollow rather than face the effort of digging a mass grave; perhaps the pit itself had determined the precise location of the atrocity. The bones had not been disturbed by animals, so the bodies must have been covered over rapidly with a layer of shovelled chalk and earth.

For some years after, the grass would have grown thicker and greener. Then everything that ever happened there was forgotten.

In the clean stillness of the lab in Oxford, away from the noise of machinery and road traffic, the dirt of excavation and the interruptions of visiting film crews, the question had to be faced. Who on earth were these people?

It was the same question that had motivated the excavation at Fromelles. There, Oxford Archaeology had set up forensic labs beside the pits in which they had found the soldiers’ remains. These were reburied in a military cemetery, and by 2014, when an identification committee met for the last time, an unexpected number of men had been named. Archaeologists and scientists built up a picture of each individual from their physical remains and possessions. The latter were often just scraps of boots and uniform, the insignia of soldiery, but some were more poignant. A leather heart contained a lock of hair; a second-class return train ticket from Freemantle to Perth had been secreted inside a gas mask, unused. With such information pointing to known casualties, DNA was collected from bones and from living descendants. Eventually 144 men were identified, all Australian, and their names were engraved on stones in the cemetery. Of the others, seventy-five had also served in the Australian Army, and two for Britain. Just twenty-nine remained, alone, ‘known unto God’.⁵

None of the men in the Weymouth pit could be named, and any descendants would forever remain unidentified. They had died too long ago. But there was another problem, resulting from their manner of death.

Much bone had been damaged by the mechanical excavator, including most of the skulls. Many other pieces had been separated from the bodies, so that there was a substantial collection of disarticulated bone that could not be allocated to any one person. As a result, after months of study the archaeologists were unable to say exactly how many people had been buried. There are various ways of calculating from excavated remains what archaeologists call the ‘minimum number of individuals’. Each method came up with a slightly different result: the one the archaeologists preferred suggested fifty-two skeletons – and forty-seven skulls. If fifty-two men had been executed that day on the hill, five of their heads had not been buried in the pit.

The pit above Weymouth as excavated, with all human remains plotted, showing bodies in the centre and heads to the south. All pit plans adapted from Loe et al. 2014.

By the end of the project, only one skull had been linked to its skeleton. We shall see that this particular man was quite significant. But for the rest of the victims, identity remains a nebulous concept. Thus it is in the ancient past. Without written records, not only can we not name anyone, but we cannot see personalities. The individual minds, voices and experiences of people who made up prehistoric and the great bulk of early historic communities are all irretrievably lost. On the other hand, the Weymouth remains represent a narrow range of humanity. It makes sense to consider them as a group, alive, as they died, together. In this way we can hope to approach some form of communal identity. And more widely, by studying both human remains and the debris that people left behind, we can follow the changes in culture and identity that have occurred through the hundreds of thousands of years in which people have lived in these islands.

Of the fifty-two Dorset skeletons, it proved possible to judge the sex of thirty-six, most of them ‘strongly male’. Of the skulls, forty-three were definitely male, and the remaining four young heads, still growing, were judged probably so. Without a single female suggested, it’s a strong bet that all fifty-two individuals were men.

The age range was limited, too. While by and large it’s possible to say if a skeleton is male or female, age can only be estimated along a continuum. Archaeologists talk of age categories, such as young adult (eighteen to twenty-five years) or older adult (over forty-five – osteology can be cruel). The heads in the Weymouth pit had rested on young shoulders. Nearly half were under twenty-five, and of these, seven might have been adolescent. No more than two were over forty-five. The bodies tell the same story: half were adolescents or young adults, and just three were over forty-five.

So these were fit men, a gang of young warriors perhaps, but they were not the stuff of romantic fiction. They had misshapen toes, broken bones and missing teeth. On the one hand, they were well exercised, with a relatively high occurrence of small injuries commonly caused by physical stress. This was supported by the appearance of muscle attachment sites. Bone grows and strengthens to the extent that connected muscles are used: twelve of the skeletons showed strong changes of this type, some of them of young or adolescent age. Overall, the osteologists describe them as a group of athletic men, averaging 1.72 metres tall – 5 feet 8 inches – who had been performing repetitive strenuous activities from a young age.

On the other hand, life seems not to have treated them with equal generosity. One man suffered from a bad case of osteomyelitis, with an inflamed thigh bone caused by an infection that began in childhood, and which would have oozed foul-smelling pus – to say nothing of the discomfort and impaired mobility it would have caused. Another had a sizeable stone in his kidney, bladder or gallbladder. About a third of the men had at least one healed fracture, most commonly in their legs and feet. In one instance a broken thigh bone had shortened by 4 or 5 centimetres as it healed – about 2 inches – leaving a man with a limp. Eight men suffer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Other Titles of Interest
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. A Viking Massacre
• 2. The Staffordshire Hoard
• 3. Roman Occupation
• 4. Living in Round Houses
• 5. Paths of the Dead
• 6. Shaped by Beliefs
• 7. Deer Hunters
• 8. Cannibals
• 9. Elephant Hunters
• 10. Journeys
• Notes
• Further Reading and Places to See
• Acknowledgments
• Sources of Illustrations
• Index
• Copyright