Dan Snow's History Hit - Digging for Britain with Professor Alice Roberts

Episode Date: January 11, 2022

2021 was a bumper year for archaeological discoveries across Britain. In this episode, we go on a whistlestop tour of some of the most notable finds — from an immaculately preserved Roman mosaic found on a working farm, to the puzzling ruin of a Norman church discovered by HS2 engineers.Dan is joined by author and broadcaster Professor Alice Roberts, who got to see many of these discoveries first hand and meet the people who found them during the filming of the latest series of Digging For Britain. If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got a national treasure on the podcast today, a great friend of mine, Alice Roberts. I went to China with her, we made a program about the terracotta warriors. She did some amazing science, like actual science, on some skeletons in terracotta warriors as I was running around just enthusing about them. That's the difference, folks, between expert and enthusiast. Anyway, it's great to have the expert on the podcast today. 2021 was a bumpy year for archaeological discoveries across Britain. And in this episode, we've got a whistle-stop tour around some of the most notable finds because she is presenting a wonderful TV show at the moment. She is presenting Digging for Britain on BBC Two. She's got Kat Jarman, one of the History Hit team,

as her co-presenter on there. So, you know, our tentacles are extending into the mainstream media as well. Anyway, and Alice Roberts is talking about that amazing mosaic that everyone was commenting on last year on social media, the Rome mosaic that was found, and the puzzling ruin of a Norman church discovered by HS2 engineers. Alice Roberts was there. She talked to the archaeologists first time. She's going to come on the podcast now and let us know what it was like. Awesome to have her on. Great to have us back on. This year, we've also got some HS2 related archaeology coming up on History Hit TV. So if you like this kind of stuff, please check it out. We're looking at a graveyard, a graveyard that was sliced through by HS2. And we've got lots of interesting information about just how dark the Dark Ages were. Don't at me, folks. I

know they're not called Dark Ages anymore, but just how dark the early Middle Ages were. Fifth century AD in Britain. How bad was it? What was it? Not as bad as people previously thought. You'll find out soon on History Hit TV. Fact. As ever, you can head over to the link

in the description to this podcast. Just tapping it with your little thumb as you're listening now. Go on, look your phone up and tap on it. Begin your journey. You'll also get to come to the Antarctic with me. Metaphorically.

In the meantime though, here's Alice Roberts. Enjoy. Alice, good to have you back on the podcast. Oh, it's lovely to be back, Dan. Thank you. I mean, if it's not talking

about some best-selling smash hit book, it's a smash hit series with you. So mean, if it's not talking about some best-selling smash hit book, it's a smash hit series with you. So never ending. There's no end to your talent. I'm so excited about the new Digging for Britain series. Are you back in your happy place now? I am. I am. We were off air for a year in 2020 because there wasn't much going on

in the way of university research archaeology. Other archaeology continued. All the pre-construction archaeology continued that year. But we had a year off and then we've come back this year and it's just superb and we've got fantastic six one hours on bbc2 absolutely packed full of amazing archaeology a history hit we keep getting your like uh i probably shouldn't say this on the podcast but anyway we keep getting archaeologists go listen we've got this really interesting project if we can't get digging for britain you guys can come and film it i'm like thanks that's so kind so you know we just go around we're like the animals that feed in the wake of a giant you know behemoth exactly exactly and what have you got so

you're it looks like quite a big spread this year right right? You're all over the place. Yeah, we've got a great spread up and down the country, north, south, east, west, and through the ages as well. So as is the tradition with Digging for Britain, what we do is divide it up regionally, and then we just look at fantastic, big archaeology stories in each of the areas of Britain. So the first programme is the east, and that is featuring a mosaic that many people may have

already heard about which is this fantastic roman mosaic from rutland that made global headlines when that was so cool when that was discovered that was great wasn't it it is amazing i mean it's one of those archaeological discoveries where i'm looking at it going i've never seen anything like this i think this is absolutely fantastic. And then asking the experts, and we had the consummate mosaic expert on site, David Neal of Historic England, who has painted pretty much every Roman mosaic in Britain. And I was quite nervous about asking him what he thought of it and worried that he might say, oh, you know, well, it's just, it's kind of pretty much a bog standard Roman mosaic. And he didn't at all he

said well this is the best thing i've seen in my career i think this is a once in a hundred years find so really it is amazing it's properly amazing and what is the context why were they digging there what's the deal ah so this is a fantastic just chance find by the farmer's son. So Jim Irvin, who is an engineer, was staying on the family farm during lockdown in 2020 and had his kids there as well. And it's a fantastic story of a whole series of events, a series of fortunate events that lead to his discovery of this incredible site. It's not just the mosaic, it's a bigger site around it. He was walking with his children. I think they'd walked down by the river that runs through the farm.

They got chased by some angry bees and ended up going off in a different direction. On a little curve in the river, there'd been a little bit of flooding and he saw some bare earth and he saw bits of pottery sticking out of the bare earth that he just hadn't noticed on the farm before. and obviously this is a farm and he's very familiar with that landscape he grew up in it and he'd never seen that kind of pottery before so that got him thinking about history in the landscape he went home that evening and had a look at google maps and they just uploaded the satellite images from i think it was 2018 when we had a dry summer it was 2017 or 2018 where we had that really really dry summer where lots of crop marks turned up and

he suddenly saw on Google Maps a crop mark he'd never seen before and he'd looked at aerials before but never seen that and it was a rectangular building with what looked like a semicircular end to it so an apse so he thought that you, they weren't going to the seaside that year. They were kind of stuck on the farm. So he and his children went to have a look at this crop mark. And being an engineer, he could very precisely survey it in. And they dug down and found a mosaic. And at that point, he got in touch with the local museum,

the local archaeologists, and everybody got very excited. You know, I'm, as you know, I spend a lot of time with my kids And at that point, he got in touch with the local museum and local archaeologists, and everybody got very excited. You know, as you know, I spend a lot of time with my kids wandering around looking for historic sites. And that doesn't happen to me. No. I'm so jealous. I know. Only today I was looking for an Iron Age hill fort feature

in the New Forest. My kids, we had morale issues. There were definitely morale issues with my kids you need chocolate i take an insufficient amount of chocolate that's true and um i did think to myself wouldn't it be cool to find something like that rutland mosaic but yeah what are our kids gonna say about us when they grow up because i do exactly the same with my children i mean basically we're always going off going for a walk looking at another monument. A walk has to have a monument. I can't do a walk without a monument.

Obviously. Yeah. I've seen no point. There's the OS. I was just looking at the OS map. I saw a little Iron Age sort of feature I hadn't seen before. I went to check it out on the ground. Yeah.

The kids were less excited than I was. But, Alice, people say, oh, we don't want to put them off. I'm like, in my family, we did that all the time. We hated it. We all got hypothermic. We lost it before GPS and everything. We all got lost. We sort of desperate snow family adventures in places, terrifying.

Dad running off into darkness to try and find help. No mobile phone. And there was no concern that it might put us off. It just turned us all into kind of keen history and outdoor people. You just, Stockholm syndrome. You give them no choice. It's generational trauma. I think they quite enjoy it. I mean, certainly they enjoy regaling their friends and relatives and outdoor people you just stockholm syndrome you give them no choice it's generation i think

they quite enjoy it i mean certainly they enjoy regaling their friends and relatives with the story of another of mum's walks that was promised to be an hour-long walk and turn into four yeah that's brilliant it's the standard so cool but yeah so i mean it's just it's such an amazing find and what's amazing about this particular mosaic is that i think a lot of mosaics are just decorative, a little bit of, you know, sort of fancy interlacing, fancy kind of plaited textures. And this one has got actual images on it and characters in it. And I think, again, you know, when you discover a mosaic that has a picture of a person, you're left thinking, who is this person? Is it some kind of Roman god? You know, who could it be? There's absolutely no shadow of a doubt with this mosaic because you've got three panels and it's like a cartoon strip

and it is part of the story of the Trojan War. So cool. It's just amazing. So you've got Hector and Achilles facing each other in chariots. Then the next panel up, Hector is dead and Achilles is dragging his body behind his chariot and it's all very graphic. There are wounds on his body and blood emerging from it. And then in the third and final panel, there is Priam, so Hector's father, the King of Troy, coming out from Troy and pleading with Achilles to give him his son's body back. And there's a man in the middle of the panel with huge weighing scales. And on one one pan priam is placing the gold he's going to have to pay for his son's body in its weight and gold and then on the other side is hector's body and i excavated the face of dead hector in that panel so i was very excited to do

that now i know why history hit was not allowed to come and film there when it was the announcement was made i got this i'm living in your i'm living in your shadow but we weren't allowed to know and it also it was completely under wraps so we had to work very closely obviously with the farm and with University of Leicester Archaeological Services Historic England the site is now scheduled but we weren't allowed to say anything about it while we were filming there so it's been a delight over over the last couple of weeks to, well, just the last week, actually, to be able to speak about it. I mean, I tweeted about it in the summer, but all I tweeted was that I was in a field of wheat looking at something very exciting that I wasn't allowed to tell anyone about. All right, you big tease. Okay, but what I like about your show and what I like about archaeology generally, I love hanging out with archaeologists, because you do industrial archaeology.

You're, like me, you're very promiscuous in your affection for all sorts of different periods. So talk to me about, I kind of like real railway stuff you were talking about. Yeah, the railway stuff's lovely. I mean, it is what's nice about archaeology, isn't it? And not sticking to one period. And that is what I love about digging for Britain is that we do range from the Paleolithic all the way almost up to the modern day. all the way almost up to the modern day. But we've got this fantastic story of a very, very early railway,

which is a story about industrial archaeology, about the dawning of the Industrial Age. And it is actually Scotland's first railway. And it's a fantastic story. It's a lovely dig led by a historian, Ed Bethune, who has brought together a team of archaeologists and other historians as well because it has a strong historical aspect to it but it's also a big community dig as well so it's about bringing heritage back into the community and giving that community ownership

of their own archaeology and heritage anyway so this wagonway was built in 1722 with wooden tracks. And it is to take wagons from the coal mine at Tranent down to Corkenzie on the coast, where there was effectively a salt factory. So the old Kirk salt pan. And obviously they needed the coal to fire the hearth underneath the salt pan. Yeah, so this wagonway is interesting because I think when you immediately say railway, you just think of steam, but this is pre-steam. Yeah, I love those pre-steam railways.

I've been to, yeah, I've seen a few of those around. They're amazing. So it's pre-steam. The wagons are pretty much under the influence of gravity getting down to the salt pans and then dragged back up by horses. So you've got to begin with wooden rails with cobbles in between for the horses to walk on to then draw the wagons all the way back up to the coalface.

They found a really fantastic sequence of archaeology. So not just bits and pieces. They had fantastic preservation, which I don't think they were anticipating. They got down to the lower layers and they had nice, quite waterlogged ground. So they had preservation of wood. And they had three different wooden railways effectively built on top of each other. So they can see these phases. And then what's wonderful is that they know those phases from the history. So they've been digging into the histories. They've been finding, for instance,

journals written by local woodworkers who've referred to working on this railway. And they can match up the archaeology with the history. And they know that, for instance, the middle phase of renovations was when the whole area was leased to the famous Scottish architect, William Adam. So he's in the story as well. So it's a great story. They were excavating on the wagonway itself, but also down at the salt pans too.

So that's really kind of interesting industrial archaeology. And again, layered, so you can see the difference between the 18th 19th century archaeology you listen to dan snow's history yet we're talking to alice roberts the legend more coming up hello if you're enjoying this podcast then i know you're going to be fascinated by the new episodes of the history hit warfare podcast from the polionic battles and cold war confrontations to the Normandy landings and 9-11 we reveal new perspectives on how war has shaped and changed our modern world I'm your host James Rogers and each week twice a week I team up with fellow historians military veterans journalists and experts from around the world to bring you inspiring leaders.

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that you're just like Mrs. HS, you're just crawling in the wake of it. As they cut a gigantic trench across the country, you're just there, hoovering it all up. Yeah. I mean, it is. It's extraordinary because, of course, you had those two great big cemetery excavations at St James's in London and then at Park Street in Birmingham, which are going to be the terminals of the first phase of HS2. And those were massive, massive cemeteries, tens of thousands of bodies, say, bodies, skeletons,

at each of those. And when they're analysed, I mean, we've already got a lot of information out of those, and I made a series for BBC Two called Britain's Biggest Dig, which it was, looking at the archaeology as it emerged out of the ground. But when those skeletal populations are analysed, we'll have a really interesting comparison between life and death in 18th, 19th century Birmingham and London.

And then, of course, what you've got in between is this, as you said, a transect through the country, so a massive trench running right through the country. And secretly, that's always what I was most interested in, which sounds odd, maybe, because as you know, I'm a bone bone specialist I'm an osteologist so you might have expected me to be most interested in the cemeteries but actually we knew about them and what I was most interested in was the things that we didn't know about so for instance along the way we've got a completely unknown iron age settlement which turns into a Roman town, you know, just not on the maps at all. And then one of the really fantastic sites is St. Mary's at Stoke

Mandeville. And this was a bit of a mystery. You've got this church, which is separated from the main settlement at Stoke Mandeville. And, you know, always had a few buildings around it, but not much really. And there's always been a question about why that church was there, why it was sited there. It's a Norman church. We knew that. It had been knocked over in the 1960s by the Royal Engineers, very careless of them. They did it on purpose. So it was falling to ruin.

It was knocked down to make it safer. And then a new church had been built in State Mandeville itself. knocked down to make it safer and then a new church had been built in state mandeville itself so you had this kind of strange monument which was a demolished church with some gravestones as part of the debris and it's right in the way of hs2 so that means there's a chance then to actually try and understand that church much better and i visited it before they started excavating and then went back this year when they'd got down just below the Norman foundations. And that was really exciting because actually on the day I turned up, one of the archaeologists, Shirley Mihalova, found a silver penny with the head of Ethelred II on it. I mean, it was a genuine moment.

We were filming something else and the kind of whispers start and it's like somebody's found something really important. And it was the first evidence of Anglo-Saxons. So getting us back into Anglo-Saxon archaeology pre-Norman on the site. they had a really significant foundation for a building, which may be an Anglo-Saxon tower, not a church. It's just a square footed foundation. And then they kept on digging and found underneath. I mean, I kind of joked with them, actually. I joked to them on site with Rachel Wood, who was the archaeologist running the site, and Guy Hunt and said, oh, you know, you just keep going underneath the Norman church. You've got Anglo-Saxon archaeology underneath that. There'll be a Roman temple. Anyway, I was right in some ways. I don't know whether it's a temple, but they found Roman archaeology. So that was incredibly exciting. And they found in a circular ditch around what we think was a tower and then a church, we've got the remains of several cremations,

five cremations, but then also some amazing sculptures. And these are very, very rare to find. So there's two busts, heads and shoulders, one of a woman that is just so well preserved. I mean, she's absolutely beautiful and got this amazing piled up plaited hair on the top of her head. So we don't know exactly what it is at the moment and that will require some more sleuthing in the post-execution phase but it could be a mausoleum it could be that those statues are statues of the people in the pots in the cremation urns or it could be some kind of temple and maybe that female is somebody like Demeter so that requires a bit more investigation but it's just amazing to find something like that i mean the good thing about what you do is it never runs out right because how do you break

it down there's the archaeology you've got to do before you build big things or as you're building big things yeah yeah and so even if academic departments which we do sadly hear about are suffering from budget cuts and oh some being shut down like sheffield i mean that's such a sad loss this year to have lost sheffield Archaeology. And I think it was one of the leading lights in Britain and internationally recognised. It's very sad. I mean, obviously that's a tragedy.

But the news for archaeology is that there are other kinds of archaeology that can continue. There are. Most of archaeology that happens in Britain is professional archaeology, commercial. I don't mean the academics aren't professional, but commercial archaeology linked to big construction projects or small construction projects. That is most of the archaeology that happens. And so we need archaeologists,

we need professional archaeologists. If all our university departments close, then we're really stuck because it means we're not actually creating the next generation of archaeologists to come through and do that work. But yes, as you say, so we have that construction-led archaeology, but we also then have university archaeology, which is often focused on particular research questions and also training digs for students as well. That's been one of the really lovely things this year, actually, about getting out and filming Digging for Britain. It's been lovely for me in many ways. I mean, getting out this year and travelling around the country was fantastic. And previously on Digging for Britain, we were on BBC4 for quite some time with a tiny, tiny budget. So I didn't actually get to visit

the sites. I just met with the archaeologists afterwards and they showed me some of the finds that they'd discovered. This year, I have been out on tour. I've been touring around the country, visiting all the sites. And going to these training digs has been really exciting because we obviously had a year in 2020 where there weren't really any university digs. There were certainly no students on training digs. So this year, we had the first years from this year and the second years who'd missed out on their training digs. And they were so excited to be out digging on site. It was just brilliant. So it's been a real joy, you know, getting out and seeing all those amazing sites, but also meeting these young archaeologists as well.

What is happening next year that you can tell us about? I think there'll be some sites that continue from this year. So I'm really hoping that there's more work done at Rutland. That's all being discussed at the moment. That site has obviously become a scheduled monument, but it may be that that then turns into a training dig for not only the University of Leicester, but hopefully for Historic England as well, for some of their apprenticeship programmes that they're now creating to create more professional archaeologists. And I will be desperate to go and see what else they find because it's not just the mosaic. There's a whole villa complex there. I always think of

these as being kind of big country estates. They're the houses of big country estates. They've got a lot around them. They would have had stables. They would have had places where animals have been butchered. They would have had various forms of industry on site as well. And we can see from the work that's already been done that it's much more than just that villa with the mosaic. So that's the kind of the star find, but there's loads to find there, I think. And with modern archaeology, we can also see how those villas develop over time. And then what happens, crucially, what happens to them at the end? You know, what happens when we get to the end of the Roman period are they still being used as we get into the 5th century it's such an interesting question. Oh continuity or change I love all that 5th century stuff yeah well I look forward to learning all about that do they have to cover them back up like how

does that all work because they're these big sprawling villa sites. So yes it's all covered back up and it was interesting going to see it this year because obviously it had been covered up in the interim it had been found and partially exposed a small part of it exposed in 2020 and then covered up and following the historic england guidelines what they've done is put very fine sand over it about 10 centimeters of fine sand then a membrane then the earth then a field of wheat was planted on top of it it was actually quite frustrating the day that I turned up on site this year, where I was expecting the wheat to have just been cut and the trenches to just be opened. And the combine harvester had broken down and was sitting there in the corner of the field with a broken axle. But eventually they fixed it

and they reaped the wheat and started opening up the trenches. So to begin with, we were able to just peel back the membrane. So dig the earth away, peel back the membrane, and then brush the sand off the mosaic, which kept it absolutely beautifully since last year, and then obviously start expanding that area of excavation. So this year, the same thing would have happened. So it would have been covered up with sand, covered up with a membrane, and just kept safely underground.

That's amazing. And so they won't lift that music they won't stick in the museum somewhere there'll be discussions about what to do with it ultimately i mean i tend to feel that leaving it there is probably the best thing rather than lifting it i mean it's a big mosaic you'd need quite a big museum with a lot of space to move it to i suppose the alternative is you have a museum on the site i think jim who found it would rather like to have a museum on the site i'm not sure what his father thinks about that i think he'd rather have the wheat bit fishborn palace oh i see you have the wheat well you know let's hope uh it's going to be some changes to single farm payments coming out of brexit so who

knows maybe a museum will be more economical when is this amazing series on that we can watch on the telly? It's on in the first two weeks of January. So it's going to be across two weeks in the first two weeks of January. So just keep an eye out for it. On BBC Two. On BBC Two, yeah. And I must also mention my book, Ancestors, which is doing really well,

flying off the shelves. And it has been on the podcast before and lots of listeners have bought it. Thank you, Dan. So go and get the paperback now everyone right it's out in paperback is it yeah paper is out in the new year and then i have literally just finished writing the follow-up and i have sent the draft the manuscript to my editor today can you tell us what it's about i can tell you a little bit about it so it's sticks with the theme of burial archaeology and it takes us into the historical era so we've got some fantastic Roman burials, odd Roman burials that are beheaded and then the skulls put back in the graves in strange places.

An interesting story of a villa which featured on Digging for Britain, actually, in the very first series back in 2010. We knew that there were many, many child burials on site. And I noticed that on one of the bones that there were cut marks. So that turned into a really interesting bit of research. I love it when that happens, when you get research on television, then turns into research again. And we looked at that cut marked femur of a baby and eventually decided that it probably was evidence of Roman obstetrics. So an operation maybe to save a mother's life in an obstructed labour. And then it goes through and I look at a bit of Anglo-Saxon archaeology and Vikings as

well. I dug for many summers on a site in Anglesey, which I think is still the only Viking style site, definitely in Wales. Plenty of Viking archaeology and very curious burials, which are not even really burials, bodies that have obviously been thrown into a ditch around the settlement and looking at what we can tell about those bodies from isotope analysis. And then eventually we'll have some ancient DNA results as well. Exciting. Well, I'm looking forward to reading that one even more than the first one. That's so cool.

And Dan, I'm on tour. So I did a little tour in November, which sold out. So I'm back on tour in March and April, and all the details are on my website. So if people want to come and hear me talk about ancestors and burials and the deep history of Britain in the landscape, come along and see me in March and April. Do it, folks.

Go and see Alice Roberts. She's brilliant no one better live thank you very much for coming on the pod thank you for having me thanks folks you've reached the end of another episode. Hope you're still awake. Appreciate your loyalty. Sticking through to the end. If you fancied doing us a favour here at History Hit, I would be incredibly grateful if you would go and wherever you get these pods,

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