Gone Medieval - HS2: Uncovering An Anglo-Saxon Burial Site

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

An extraordinary discovery has been unearthed by archaeologists working alongside the HS2 rail project. The find, made at an undisclosed location near Wendover in the Chilterns, consists of a 5th-6th century burial site that has been described as one of the most important post-Roman, early medieval discoveries of our lifetime.It offers the chance to see more clearly a part of British history that has been hidden from us until now. If there was a real, historical King Arthur, this is the part of history he's hiding within.In this special episode, join our very own Dan Snow and Gone Medieval host Matt Lewis as they chat to the team behind the dig about some of their revelatory finds, and begin to see the people behind them, and the way they may have lived their lives.A special thanks to HS2, INFRA and Fusion for giving History Hit special access behind the scenes!The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. The Producer was Rob Weinberg. It was edited and mixed by Aidan Lonergan.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. HS2 is a controversial rail project to provide high-speed links from London to the Midlands. As part of its work, HS2, alongside archaeologists at Infra and Fusion, have to perform archaeology all along that route. One part in the Chilterns has thrown up something absolutely incredible. This is huge.

I was fortunate enough to join Dan at a secret location in Cardiff to find out more on one of the most important post-Roman early medieval discoveries of our lifetime. You'll hear about some of the astonishing things we saw in this episode and you can see them in Dan's documentary on History Hit TV. All of this has been under an embargo until the 16th of June, but history hit is the place to find out more about these potentially revolutionary finds. We're going to hear first from Dan speaking to Professor Helena Hamero at the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford. They chatted about the historical

context of these finds. The 200 years after the Romans leave, the 5th and 6th century, so, they have a pretty terrible reputation. And I often think, God, if I could be born any time, it would be not in that sort of 200-year period. If you asked me, I'd say it was the worst possible time to be alive in the Isles in Britain in the last 2,000 years. Is that fair? I think the terrible reputation is based on a very small number of written sources that describe those centuries as absolutely apocalyptic,

the end of everything, the end of the Roman world, and disaster afterwards. But what we're seeing from the archaeology, which is really quite abundant now and growing all the time, is that, you know, there's a much more gradual transformation that's taking place. And that in some parts of the country, Roman ways of doing things actually continued up to a point, you know, right through the 5th century. Sometimes even Roman ways of burying the dead, Roman pottery industries, all that sort of stuff. You know, there is an element of continuity.

So we shouldn't think of it in terms of this catastrophic collapse of everything in the first half of the 5th century. So we're starting to realize that it really wasn't like that, whatever authors like Gildas might suggest. The lack of written sources, people have perhaps unfairly called the Dark Ages, because that would... But their lack does presumably mean something, doesn't it? Like, why do so few sources, written sources survive from that period? Yes, well, I guess you have to think about who was producing those sources. And once Britain was kind of decoupled from the Western Empire, it was sort of on its own, the bureaucrats who might have left those records, the religious people who might have written records,

they're not producing that stuff anymore. So it does sort of go from being, in some sense, a historic period to being kind of proto-historic with very few written sources, very few people around whose job it was to record things. Fewer priests and bureaucrats, maybe it's not the end of the world. I mean, that's not necessarily reflection of complete terminal decline. Yeah, it's not necessarily terminal decline. It's certainly not going to be bad for everyone. But it's clear that some groups and some parts of the country did struggle if you were living in a city or a town and you were dependent on going to a market and buying all your food stuff or paying some specialists to come and

repair your house and all that sort of stuff suddenly, you can't do it anymore. There are no markets anymore. There's no longer a functioning system of currency. All these sorts of things are going to be pretty tough for people in that position. But then there will have been other parts of what we now call England where, you know, people probably carried on living much as they did before. And what about the politics or what about these new arrivals from across the channel of the North Sea? Well, of course, we used to call this the migration period, and I think with good cause, and again, it's the written sources in the first instance that tell us that there were large-scale

migrations. That rather went out of favour for a while, this idea that we should explain the big changes in southern and eastern England as being the result of migrations. But what ancient DNA especially is showing us is that people from across the North Sea did make a major genetic contribution to this country around that sort of time. And, you know, things did change. Ways of doing did change in the fifth and especially the sixth centuries. So migration clearly played a role, but it cannot explain everything. And it's, I think we can be quite confident that the majority of the people living in, let's call it Loland Britain in the fifth and six centuries, were descendants of the people who'd always lived here. But amongst them was a substantial,

a substantial minority of people whose forbearers did come from the other side of the North Sea. So we're talking about perhaps sort of elite replacement rather than sort of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Yeah, I don't think we've got evidence for ethnic cleansing. I think what we see is, as I say, a substantial influx of people over quite a long period, you know, probably a couple hundred years, maybe more. It probably didn't stop in the 7th century. Coming in especially to the eastern parts of the country, so East Anglia almost certainly. saw really large-scale migration, and then a degree of integration and a degree, I think, of

people reinventing themselves, as they often do, and reinventing their origin. So if suddenly it becomes dangerous or difficult to be a Britain, to be identified as a Britain, and we know from the law codes that Britons were in a less good social position than the rest, then you might well want to reinvent your identity and say, well, actually, I'm not a Britain anymore, I'm something else. And why are burial is important for archaeologists and for all of us in understanding what's going on around here? Burials, of course, you know, the decision of where you bury your dead ancestors and how you bury them is incredibly important. It's incredibly important to social cohesion, community identity, family identity, all that sort of thing. So the decision of where you're going to bury your ancestor and how and with what is really important. And when that changes, that's saying something really quite significant. So when we do start seeing those changes in the 5th and 6th centuries, we really have to try and understand what's being communicated here. Why are these new cemeteries being established, because with very few exceptions, that's what's happening. You'd be hard-pressed to find many Roman cemeteries that just carried on in use, unbroken use. There are a few, but not many,

and that's significant, I think. And obviously, we're biased towards burials, because that's often what we find, I guess. But tell me about the methods of burial, the things that people are buried with that can, well, help us gain an insight. Well, in the 5th and 6th centuries, the majority of people were buried clothes, so they're buried with any durable kind of dress fittings that they might have been wearing at the time. And then in addition to any dress fittings, you've got grave goods. So it might be a pot, might be some weaponry, might be a glass drinking vessel, all sorts of things, associated with the kinds of activities that people regard just really important. You know, being equipped for warfare if you were an adult male. Feasting, drinking,

all those sorts of things if you were, you know, at the top of the tree. That kind of thing, having access to rare imported goods, gold, glass, you know, garnets, those sorts of things that came from far away and showed that your family was well connected. Those kinds of objects were incredibly important in communicating the position of a particular family or kin group within the wider community. And I guess this cemetery shows us that there was a society that had achieved some longevity in this particular place. We think of this period as being anarchic of borders shifting around, sort of tribal borders, if you like.

This suggests that there was some longevity? Absolutely. So this looks very much like an ancestral cemetery, established in the 5th century, maybe even the first half of the 5th century. Some of the finds are very early. And it carried on a use potentially right through into the 7th. So it is an ancestral cemetery, and that's quite, it's relatively common in England in this period. So you have these quite large ancestral semifference. cemeteries, which then in the conversion period, in many cases, not always, but in many cases

are then replaced. They're abandoned and replaced often by somewhat smaller cemeteries elsewhere. So this looks as though it probably went out of use round about the early 7th century. And what's important about that? Is that, can we overlay that with our understanding of the kind of political geography of Lolan Britain at the time? Well, I think it does tell us that thinking about where it was appropriate, to bury your dead ancestors was changing. So you wouldn't anymore want to be associated with those pre-Christian burials, those pagan burial grounds that had been used for centuries. But there then was a period where people seemed to have been a little bit uncertain about where was the best place

to bury or dead. So we have far fewer burials from the 7th and 8th centuries than we have in the 5th to early 7th. They're harder to date because they don't have so many grave goods. And they just seem to be fewer of them. You don't have these big cemeteries. And instead, you get little groups of burials here and there, which again suggests that either there was a degree of uncertainty or an increased choice about what you do with your dead ancestors until eventually by the 10th century, pretty much everybody is being buried in Christian cemeteries associated with churches in churchyards. So Helena has given us some really useful historical context as background for these finds, but what did they actually uncons?

cover. Louis Stafford was the senior project manager, and he told me all about the moment they realised they really had found something special here. So we're here in this factory unit in Cardiff, and downstairs, you know, there's lots and lots of fines in Tupperware boxes and things like that, probably not what most people think when they think of an archaeological storage dig site. Why are these finds in Cardiff, and where did they originally come from? Well, originally they were part of an excavation that we conducted. for HS2 in Wendover. So HS2, are they required to do lots of archaeology everywhere that they're going to be

laying train tracks for the HS2 project? We have something called sort of preliminary works. So normally they do historical background or a desk-based assessment and then they work out whether there's possibilities of historical significance along the route. And then if they've isolated a few areas or suggested that there are hotspots, then they'll go in there and do geophysics, which basically looks into the ground, see what's there. and then we come through and normally the geofiz will pinpoint a few areas that we want to have further investigation on. And we'll do something called evaluation trenching.

So long trenches pulled with a machine and we have a look in the ground and we see if there's any features there, we dig them. Then after that, again, next stage is if it's particularly nice or we find sites like we've got downstairs, we'll go into an open area excavation, which is what you would normally sort of see on the news and TV, which is large open areas. And we get to see everything in its glory. And so how long into this dig did you realise you were looking at something that wasn't what you had originally thought you were going to find? I had a brilliant supervisor of mine, Crystal,

and he came running up going, I think I've got some graves. So archaeologically features are very dark things. Pits or ditches or sherper's dark features against what's undisturbed natural. And some of these were very oblong shaped and about the size fit a person in. So we knew potentially there might be something up. So I then went and had a little look and did some trial holes to see whether there was human remains in them or not. Because there are protocols we have to follow when we find human remains. So first thing we did was to try and identify them.

So little trial holes were dug them by myself. And then behold, we found human remains. But we did find a few other unusual things in those little trial holes as well. How many bodies did you end up finding in this one location? Well, when we went to the excavation space, we found 100, 141 in 139 graves. And what did the burials tell you about potentially who these people might have been or when they lived? Were they Christian burials? Were you able to identify the type of burial that they had?

It came very quickly apparent that they were Anglo-Saxon at that point, mainly because a big indicator for that, for anyone who's even a layman or looking at it is Anglo-Saxon glass beads, and they're very identifiable. And they had an awful lot of vessels with them as well, which were clearly Anglo-Saxon. So at that point we knew the date at least for the cemetery, but again we're sort of digging at that point and sort of exposing it. So we can't cast too many expersions until we do the assessment phase and get the specialist input on it. But that must have lurched your thinking sort of 500 years or 1,000 years further forward. So we've gone from the Iron Age to suddenly being post-Roman early Anglo-Saxon. Yeah, my money was definitely on it being Iron Age. Actually, when I saw the spearhead because it was quite a large spearhead and quite sort of a broad leaf type.

And I was thinking, well, that could be Iron Age. For some reason I didn't in Cox it might, I said potentially Anglo-Saxon, but I was seeing sort of little copper bracelets around somebody's arm before I quickly covered it up. I just thought it potentially might be ionish because we had so much iron age presence there. So obviously that's a, you know, it's not uncommon for Anglo-Saxon barrier sites to be nowhere near where they're actually based or, you know, their settlement focus. So what time period are you thinking this site really dates to now with the ANOXAXA. Anglo-Saxon finds that were in there.

It's dated at moment, but it's quite solidly in the 5th and 6th century. But there are curated finds that are earlier, which I think are more very interesting, to be honest. So we found Roman coins with some of the burials. But we think, again, they were curated and sort of kept in circulation, and then they've gone in during the 5th and 6th century. Does it seem like the site was a site that was in continuous use, you say there's hints of iron age activity there?

Does it seem like it was a site that was in constant use, or do you think perhaps it was a site that was used in the iron age, perhaps a ban, perhaps a ban, into the Roman times and used as a cemetery in the Anglo-Saxon period? Yeah, definitely the Iron Age point, there's a massive settlement there. There's lots of iron age, well, roundhouses are definitely there, but there's an awful lot of domestic occupations. So there's pits and pits and pits and post-olds and post-lots, and it's quite hard to determine whether they're structures

or whether it's just round-housand-hous and round-house and round-house. And a lot of the pottery, and there was kilos and kilos of it was all iron-age. And then in the Roman period, it seems that that occupation sort of stops, and the Roman period, they potentially moved southward or further away. but they're still moving along this sort of holloway that's very indentured into, cemented into the landscape. And then from that point onwards, it seems to sort of go out of use. They're still using it as a through route, but any kind of graveyard site, occupation site, domestic site, whatever you want to call it, it seems to sort of return to almost an agricultural setting before the Anglo-Saxons just turn up.

And there's no rhyme or reason for it. Apart from it's on the bluff of a hill and its overlooking wendover. and visually it would have stood out quite a lot. It would have had good viewpoints across the Chilterns, both that into the Chilterns valleys and down into the plain. So there's perhaps the possibility that this was somewhere important to a local community who wanted to be able to see it from where they were. So they may not have been living on the site,

but they would have wanted to see where their ancestors were resting. Yeah, yeah. And there's some evidence for these graves potentially being marked, potentially with little kittens of Flint. So there is some evidence that we've seen when we were excavating that that might be in the case. So they would have had not all of them necessarily, but they were definitely marked. And I think the other interesting thing that you mentioned was the continuity in the use of items that were there. So there's some Roman coins and things like that that are sort of repurposed and reused.

So I think we quite often have this idea of history as being sort of these hard stops. The Romans leave and everything Roman stops. And then at some point later the Anglo-Saxons begin. And this seems to fall somewhere in the bit in the middle. So there are Roman things that are still being used by the local population that have sort of been repurposed as jewellery or are still used as currency or something valuable or important. Does that suggest a kind of cultural continuity? Because I think we're, fifth and sixth century, we're hearing a gap in our knowledge and our understanding of what was going on in England at the time. Does this site tell us anything about that period?

It has an awful lot that can come out of that site to tell us about it. Not only, you know, there's a lot of contention about whether there was a mass population that. came over from Europe and basically invaded Britain or whether it was sort of a slow influx or it might have been more along the lines of the local populace or taken on European ideals. With the amount of skeletons we've got and how preserved they are, we can start to look at stuff like DNA analysis and strontium analysis and we can actually start to identify whether these people are moving around or whether they are actually a local populace until we get more assessment and analysis.

It's a bit of conjectural debate, but it has the potential to give it so much insight to this local population, who it was, where they came from, or whether they were there and adopted new ideals that had pulled over. Certain things, obviously, the Roman curated finds, they're quite interesting. There's a lot of, so the Tweedas sets and the toiletry sets

are a Roman ideal or something that was started in the Roman period. But obviously the Romans were in Europe as well So it doesn't necessarily suggest Great continuity, it's just the ideas are still continuing on But the curated Roman finds, coins at least You can't say whether they were kept because they were Roman Or kept because they were just purely silver Because obviously that denomination had gone out of use for a hundred years or so

Yeah, whether they were just valuable enough to hang on to for some reason The ideals are completely different And you don't know, you know, it might not have been the individuals It might have been their family members or the community when they buried them. They wanted them to have these particular finds. And grave goods don't necessarily reflect the person buried. They reflect the community burying them and their ideals of that person. I think it's interesting that some of those, particularly those late Roman finds,

are potentially, you know, 100, 200 years old by this point. And must have been something like a family heirloom that's being put in a grave with someone. So that must be a process of the community burying this person to put something incredibly, valuable and meaningful for the family in there and to lose it forever to this grave? Yeah, definitely. A lot of the items they've got. So I think especially the militaria items like your swords. I mean, in theory, they're an awful lot of money.

And some of the glass vessels as well. They are showing at least status within the community, if not themselves. And you do lose them out of circulation. So it is showing that there are high status individuals, but not all of them had burial items with them. And so why is this site? quite so important. What other discoveries could we compare it to? How important is it to our understanding of this period? For me, specifically, it's an amazing site for the spectrum of the population that

it encompasses. So we have a lot of male and female. We have Marshall. We have ladies with fine wear and toiletry sets like we said. And we've got children and children are quite often absent in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries. But it's unusual that those children have also got grave goods with them. But we've also got people without grave goods. So what we've got is it looks like a very good cross-reference of the local community, both poor, rich, martial, non-martial, young and old. For an archaeologist, that's your dream. That's giving you a complete snapshot of the population during that period. So last question, I guess, if I could pop you in a TARDIS and send you back 1,500 years, what would you want to know about that site? Or would you want to find out? What they did with the buckets? There's an awful lot of buckets there.

whether they were using them as something other than what we use buckets for, because they're quite small. I wonder whether they were drinking out of them or whether they just carried their nicest finds in them. It just seems to be that that's one of those items that's quite enigmatic, and nobody really knows exactly what they were using them for. To understand more about what we can learn from these human remains, I spoke to osteologist Rose Callis. So we've got 141 sets of human remains that have come out of this site. Were you able to sex them all? Are they fairly evenly spread? between men and women? Are there some that you couldn't identify? Do we have lots of age ranges?

Is there a variety of people in this site? So at assessment stage, we don't try and age, do age estimations to the sex determinations of all the individuals, because that takes a lot of time, and that's part of the analysis process. So we took a sub-sample of 28, and I did a slightly more in-depth analysis, and you can only determine sex of adults, but you can determine age, or estimate age from any skeleton. So, yeah, so I took 28. And from that, there was a mix of both male and female, and there was a mix of juvenile and infant.

But yeah, there was a wide range. And if there was 141 bodies in 139 graves, there was two sort of shared graves, is that right? Was that a man and a woman potentially in the same grave? No, these were infants with adults. So we had one very interesting one. it was an adult, I'm not going to determine the sex, that had an infant in the crook of their arm. Quite nice, also quite tragic, so.

Yeah, so it might have looked like it was perhaps their child or they died at the same time as their child. Yeah, well, exactly. So that's what, so with scientific analysis, further on down the line, we can do DNA analysis to work out if there is a hereditary link there. And we can try and do ice topic analysis as well to try and work out their diet and their origin or mobility. So yeah, we can do lots of amazing scientific things down the line where we can try and answer that question. And is there lots of evidence that tells us about what some of these people may have died for? I think there's one that sticks out as a fairly obvious cause of death. So if you could tell us a little bit about that, that's fantastic.

But then beyond that, is there much evidence of how these people died? Well, it's very tricky because we're only given the bones, literally the bones. So unless there's actual trauma on the bones, or we can look at the pathology and see, if there's any infectious diseases or, yeah, basically you're looking at the paleo pathology. So some illnesses, diseases and trauma will live traces within the bones and others won't. So we have one in particular where we found an iron sharp blade that had been embedded into the base of the spine, so one of the lumbar vertebra, and we could work out by the positioning and where it was embedded in that particular bone, it was embedded in the body.

We can hypothesise that this particular individual was stabbed from the leg, left-hand side from the front. So rather than being stabbed in the back. And we don't know why or who, you know, did that. But we can certainly say that that's a cause of death because it was, a blade was left in the individual when they were buried. And I guess that plays very much into our view of this period as being a warrior culture. But is it strange to leave that blade in some, so this person must have been buried with this spearhead or blade left inside their body? Why would it not have been removed, do you think? I mean, it was embedded very deep into this particular individual because it penetrated the bone. But also in terms of warrior culture, this is the only individual that has

evidence for a sharp force trauma, and we don't have any blunt force trauma evidenced on the bones either. So there doesn't seem to have been a lot of conflict that we can, you know, judging by the bones, this kind of idea of a warrior culture within this particular community, particularly cemetery, there isn't a lot of evidence for that that we can see in the bones. But why they left it in the body is unknown. I mean, they could have died innocently from it. And then instead of extracting, they buried this individual kind of soon after. So what can these graves and the contents of them and these bodies tell us about the status of these people?

How they lived, what they did. Were they high status or were they ordinary people? A majority of the burials from the site contained artefacts that are, what we figure of higher status. So this is a higher status in death, which is likely going to be a status in life as well. So that helps us infer kind of a status of these people. But then also from the bones,

we can have a look at paleo pathology of the bones. So what do we mean when we say paleopathology, sorry? So any kind of signature that is left on the bones by disease or trauma or dental, dental disease, anything that is left on the bone that isn't naturally part of the bone. So anything that the person might have suffered within life that might show up on their skeletal remains that you can still find today? Absolutely, like arthritis, you might have bony growth from arthritis, dental disease. I think I mentioned calculus, ginger vitus where you can see the gums receding, so the bone recedes, or any trauma, like I mentioned earlier, about the sharp horse trauma.

So you might be able to work out who had Anglo-Saxon bad breath? In this population, actually, yes, because there was a lot, a high degree. of a lot of calculus. So yes, there would have been some smelly breath. What tests are the bones likely to go through next? What more can we learn from them? How would we assess sort of DNA, isotope analysis? Can we work out where these people might have come from,

whether they are indigenous English people or whether they were sort of remnants of the Romans or whether they are incoming sort of Saxon population from somewhere else? Yes. So we use stable isotope analysis, which is most widely available, but also ancient DNA analysis

is becoming far more accessible and cheaper. So lots of people are doing that as well. But through analysing carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, strontium, these stable isotopes, yeah, we can work out people's mobility and places of origin and also their diet in their use to adulthood.

So from that, we can try and work out where these people came from. Interesting. So we can tell what they ate and where they must have eaten that to work out whether they... A broad understanding of it, yeah. So not specifics, but yes, so stable isotope analysis can help us understand

where these people originated from, if they migrated from somewhere, which isn't indigenous, as you say, whether from the continent or even other places in the UK, it gives us an idea. Certainly we can assess that. It's fascinating how this site is filling in a gap in history for us.

So this is a part of history that we really don't know anything about and these 141 individuals may well be able to tell us a lot more than we already know and start to fill in some of those gaps. I guess for my last question then, if I could pop you in the TARDIS, I'm asking everybody this. If I could pop you in the TARDIS and send you back 1,500 years to that site when it's alive, what would you most want to see there? What would you most like to understand from that day? Well, I would really like to know what happened to the individual who had the sharp force trauma. I'd like to know who did it. Why?

that kind of narrative around there because it's very enticing. Tell us a lot about you, I think. I know, yeah. I'm like a murder of history. Hello, everyone, James Rogers here, the host of the warfare podcast by History Hit. I'm a war historian who works with the UN, NATO and governments around the world. Twice a week, every week, we bring you the defining wars of history and learn about the history of emerging wars.

The passengers and crew of 149 were trapped. trapped and delivered into the hands of Saddam Hussein. We hear from the veterans who served. Guards there would grab a machine gun and fire had us as we went over and could see the splinter flying in all directions. Through to world-leading historians providing context to understand current conflicts. Finland obviously couldn't join NATO, which makes the two Finnish leaders' statements about Finland deciding for itself whether it will join NATO.

That makes those statements even more important. warfare from history hits on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, and join us on the front lines of military history. As controversial as it may be, the work for HS2 has made this discovery possible. I spoke to Dr Rachel Wood, who told me a bit more about their involvement. For some people, HS2 is still quite a controversial subject, but is it fair to say that we would never have found this site or other sites like it if it wasn't for the fact that HS2 was happening? Absolutely. So when the route was designed, there were a few key sites along the way that we did know of. Fleetmaster Roman town, St Mary's Old Church, near Stoke Mandeville. We knew they were there.

They've still held their own surprises. But there are patches of the countryside where we just had no idea what it was there. It was a green field or, you know, a plowed field. And this site is certainly one of those. We were just not anticipating. And there was no indication there of what we were going to find when we started the work. So it must have been a pleasant surprise when you suddenly found some interest in that field that, I think, as Louis mentioned, started off thinking it might have been Iron Age, but turns out to be from actually a very significant period of history. How do you go about working on that site and developing that site? What's the process for taking that green field and turning it into this cemetery that we can learn a lot about? So HS2 have a slightly different approach and that the aim is not to dig everything because you're not necessarily learning something new from a lot. excavating yet another field system. So the entire route has been subjected to geophysical survey and that's essentially like x-raying the ground. And from that we can see, as Louis said, hotspots or key areas where they have potential. So that goes on to the next stage which is

called trial trenching and they're long, thin strips that are opened by a machine in the ground and they cover a percentage of the field and that is a bit like keyhole surgery. You get to have a little sneak peek. Is it actually archaeology? Are there any objects there? What kind of archaeology are we talking about? Is it industry? Is it occupation? Is it burials? And from that, we then decide whether or not we need to move it on to the more open area, final phase mitigation, we call it, where a large area is opened. All the topsoil and subsawl comes off and we excavate all of the archaeology there. With this site, the geophysics showed up what looked like a square enclosure. We thought there was a missing medieval.

hospital in the area somewhere. We've not found any evidence of that. And there was hints of sort of a trackway, maybe a bit of pits and things. And that's what showed up in the trial trenching as well. But we did have a hint of a few burials, as Louis was saying, from the trial trenching. But even then, we could not have anticipated that it was going to be 141 people. And we certainly could not have anticipated the amazing objects that they were buried with either. So what do those tracks and trenches and the roundhouse evidence that was there. What does that tell us about the site before it was a cemetery? Does it seem to have been in use for a long time?

Can we tell what it might have been used for? So the first thing that appears on the site seems to be this trackway. And we're in an area that's near something called the Icknealed Way, which is a well-known prehistoric routeway kind of running across the country. And there's obviously lots of little offshoots and trackways that come off that main through fare. It's possibly one of those offshoots. It's in a natural dip in the Chiltern, so a natural kind of routeway through those hills.

And then you get the Iron Age pitting and occupation that goes alongside it. So there appears to be some people living on this hillside, just down from the brow of the hill, you know, a little bit sheltered from the wind maybe, but with a great view over the Chilterns and the Aylesbury Vale. And then that goes out of use and we move into this period where nothing else is happening there other than the cemetery. But again, that cemetery also has that.

that fantastic view over Aylesbury Vale. So it seems quite deliberately chosen in its proximity to the routeways, but also the view across the land as well. I think it's interesting to think about people citing that house there. And as you say, you can imagine it being a little bit out of the wind, but with a great view. That's a very human thing, isn't it? It's the way we would choose where we want to live today. It feels like a decision we would make today. It's very human. Absolutely. And that's one of the things I really like about this site is that a lot of the elements, It's amazing and fantastic and pretty astounding on the face of it. But actually, a lot of the elements are all really human.

So we have things like tweezers and personal grooming equipment, combs, but also decisions, and that's for the Anglo-Saxon people from the cemetery. But even in the non-burial archaeology, we're still seeing those quite human decisions been made. And it's no different to what we think today. And what do you think the finds that were with the people tell us about these people? We've heard mention that they were potentially quite high status. As you've just said then, some of them are quite personal things that people have taken with them.

What do you think these finds tell us about the kind of people that were buried there and the people who buried them? So you can see the kind of monetary cost that goes into these objects. They take a lot of skill and a lot of craft, like craftmanship to make. They're not quick, you know, easy pots that are thrown together. They're highly decorated and shaped in very specific ways. There's all the weaponry, which would have had quite a big value as well. But the most interesting thing for me with all burial grounds and things like that is to think that the objects people are buried with actually reflect more about the mourners themselves. So the people who are still alive attending the funeral, they are the ones ultimately who choose what goes into the grave with that person, even if that person has expressed a wish to be buried with their shield or something like that.

it's ultimately the people left alive who make that decision at the point of burial. So the objects tell us a lot about how these people were thought of by their community and their families and their friends around them. Is that reflected in the fact that some of them have shield bosses with them so they may well have been thought of a martial figure within the community, but also that some people have, and what does tweezers tell us? Someone like their eyebrows to look nice all the time? I'm not too sure what the tweezers tell is about that person, if I'm honest. But the shields are also quite an interesting one to pick up on because, yes, that person, you know, you can assume that person knew how to use the shield and probably lives quite a martial lifestyle.

That's all an assumption. But equally, the purpose of a shield is for protection. So they can be a bit of a weapon as well in that you can barge people out of the way, but they're primarily to protect you. So it could be that the act of putting the shield in the grave also carried some protection for the deceased. through into whatever afterlife was believed in and it could have some sort of protective element to it as well. What more is being done at this site? In terms of HS2's process now, what happens to all of these great finds that we have here? Will any more work be done at the site? Will any more work be done with these remains? So all of the site work is complete,

but the work does not stop there. We have been doing the first stage kind of assessment of all of the objects. Our first job is to stabilise everything, so nothing deteriorates. Obviously, it's spent a lot of time in the ground. It's now out of the ground exposed to light and oxygen. We have to make sure everything is safe. And we do sort of a first level assessment. So what do we have? How much of it do we have? And what, as a whole, assemblage, can this tell us? So what research questions might we be able to ask about it? What techniques, the objects and the bones and things would be suited? to be subjected to, so things like C-14 or isotope analysis. So we're doing that first stage assessment now, and then there is a further stage of HS2

analysis where everything from up and down the route will go through a much more detailed specialist analysis phase where all those extra tests and scientific dating and things like that can be done, and that will only add to the picture that we have now. I think it's fascinating to think that this modern technology progress of HS2 could answer a lot of our questions about the past that we so far know very little about. It's kind of a weird juxtaposition, isn't it, to think that looking to the future is actually telling us a lot more about the past than we knew before. Absolutely. And HS2, it's obviously a controversial scheme, but for archaeologists, it's a fantastic opportunity to get a great look. at a large kind of sway through the countryside and it's born out of the construction industry and the laws around them requiring archaeological work to be done without the work on HS2,

this site and many others up and down the route wouldn't have necessarily have been found. And it's also providing the opportunity to do all of that further work and to put it through all of those further scientific testing and things like that. And ultimately it's HS2's intention that all of the objects from everywhere along the route will end up in all the various local museums up and down the route as well. That's something very much to look forward to. And so how important do you think this site and these finds are in the grand scale of kind of Anglo-Saxon archaeology? People talk about Sutton Who and the Staffordshire Horde.

Where would you rate these discoveries alongside those? So Sutton Who is kind of, you know, 7th, 8th, 9th centuries. and we're the fifth, sixth century here at this site. But you could say that this site is possibly one of the most important Anglo-Saxon discoveries since Sutton Who and the Staffordshire Horde. Because of the wealth of information, we are going to be able to learn about the culture, you know, the economy, the trade, but also the people. Where have they come from?

How has that helped change culture in this part? of Britain from, you know, moving from the Roman period through this kind of intermediary couple of centuries between the Roman period and the more sort of defined Anglo-Saxon culture that you see at places like Sutton Who. I think it's so exciting to think that this could prove to be a missing piece of a jigsaw in our understanding of that timeline of British history. It could just slot something into place and radically change our understanding. You know, if there was a real historical King Arthur, this is the period he's in, because we don't know anything about it. It's that post-Roman period and we don't know how the Romans left.

Who filled the space between how and when did the Saxons arrive? And to think that this site could help to fill that gap for us is incredibly exciting. Absolutely. We have quite a wealthy population here, a high status one, as we've talked about. And the Roman administration leaving Britain left, obviously, the power vacuum. So we'll be looking at these people are the ones who maybe started to fill that power vacuum, starting to learn whether or not they came over from somewhere on the continent maybe, or whether they were, you know, British people or people who were already here, filling those roles and taking on those responsibilities.

And yeah, it's going to be a really interesting site to take forward through all of that further research that we can do. And there are so many questions that we can ask and at least start to get. the answers for, from this amazing site. And so I guess my last question, I'm asking everybody, if I could pop you in the TARDIS and we could spin back 1,500 years to this site, what would you most like to know from when this was a live site? What would you most like to see or understand? I'm most fascinated by the processes that went into the burials. So, you know, you attend a funeral. These days, you know what to expect. There's certain things that happen and certain things that you and the mourners and the family do and certain things that are said,

I'd be really interested to sort of almost attend an Anglo-Saxon funeral and see what that meant to the people involved, but also to just sort of take someone aside and ask about all these Roman objects where they got them from and what did they, were they just useful things found on the ground, or did they ascribe, you know, further meaning to them beyond that? And lastly, we had to get our hands on the cool stuff, right? I mean, I'm going to have to describe it to you. You can see all of this fantastic stuff in Dan's documentary on History Hit TV.

But here's me with Owen McCarthy, the fine specialist, to tell us all about those items that came out of the grave as we do our best to describe them to you while I completely lose my mind touching 1,500-year-old artifacts. Hi, Owen, thank you for joining us. We're standing here in a factory unit in Cardiff on an industrial estate, surrounding. by Tupperware boxes full of some of the most interesting things I've ever seen. What's your part in all of this wonderful dig and finds? Okay, so I'm a project assistant here at Red River Archaeology and my specialism is in early Anglo-Saxon archaeology. So I was lucky enough to be privileged to work on a lot of the finds we have from Wendover. And yeah, it's been a real pleasure. So this has all fallen right into your sweet spot. It has indeed, yeah. Fantastic. And one of the

most interesting finds that we've talked about is this skeleton that was found with a spear lodged in his vertebrae. So what do we know about other weapons and military aspects to some of these burials? What other objects have come out of the ground? Weaponry is often a key aspect of early Anglo-Saxon furnished inhumations. By far, the most common kind of weapon that we have in early Anglo-Saxon graves are spears. And just over here, We have two very, very nice spears that were discovered in graves here at Wendover, and you can see they're beautifully preserved. The one I'm currently holding has a kind of leaf shape to its blade,

which it looks very nice, but it's actually designed to open some pretty nasty wounds when it's used. I was going to say, that's got to be, what, 40 centimetres long? Yeah, yeah. It's the largest spear we had as well in length. Having that thrust that, you would be a fairly scary experience. Yes, yes, indeed. And of course, the one next to it as well is also quite long and very pointy, but significantly narrower.

And that's another kind of spear that we do find in Anglo-Saxon contexts. And do we know why they're different? Are they designed to cause different wounds or to perform different functions? There is a little bit of that going on. I mean, obviously a narrower spearhead is going to be better at getting in between certain types of armour. but armour wasn't that prevalent in this early Anglo-Saxon period anyway. So much more leaf-bladed ones like this could easily get through weaker armour and cause much more severe injuries. There is an issue of evolution that's going on here as well.

So often these blades start coming out wider and then develop flanges, if you will, or wings, either side of the blade, which eventually move into the centre of the blade. and the blade itself becomes almost diamond-shaped towards the end of the sixth century. So there is also a pattern of evolution of the form of these spearheads as well. Interesting, so. We're sort of looking at weapon development here. Yeah, yeah, a little bit, yeah. And there, I mean, I won't to say they look crusty because they've been in the ground for 1,500 years, but they look a kind of bit of rusty.

Is this just the natural perishing of the metal? Yeah, it's concretion, is what we would say. What we've got here is a mix of oxidised rust, along with the natural geology of siding. You've got a mixture of clay and the metal. chalk really there that unfortunately cakes its way onto the material, especially with these iron objects. And it can be quite difficult to remove without damaging the iron object itself has to be very clear. I will stop saying crusty and start saying concretion because it does look like

concrete. It does. And it feels like it too. There is that to consider as well, though, is that these are the weapons that went in the grave. And there is a bit of disagreement amongst archaeologists whether the weapons we actually find in Anglo-Saxon graves actually represent that. the same kind of sets that they would actually use in war or whether it's more of a symbolic or how they want to remember this individual rather than necessarily the weapons they might have used in a fight. So there is that to consider at the same time. We can't just presume. Could be something a bit more ceremonial about this rather than it being practical. Indeed, indeed. And we'll discuss that with our next object. So we're going to talk next

about this fantastic object, which is a large Anglo-Saxon sword. Oh wow. And it is, I mean, how long is that do we know? It's around about a metre, I think. Pretty thick blade as well. Again, it looks like, you know, it still comes to a fair bit of a point. Yeah, yeah. It seems incredibly well preserved. Yeah, and you can see actually here, in the concretion,

we actually may have bits of the scabbard of the sword actually preserved. You can see it here and also these parts by here. And would that have been leather or wood? It's something to that effect, yes. It needs more detailed analysis to tell for, what's going on there, but... And it's missing its handle and pommel or anything like that as well. Would that have been something that would have perished?

Possibly. If the handle was made out of wood or bone or something like that, then yes. Also, there's some instances where we've seen the fittings of anglo-saxon swords, the really nice bits, especially if they were gilt or particularly shiny bronze or something like that, had been stripped away. So that's a possibility as well. But in this case, I'd be more inclined to say it's probably like a wooden handle that's rotted away. It seems a bit off to send someone to the afterlife with a sword that's missing its handle because that was a bit too posh to let you take. But coming back to what we were just saying about, the fact that the dead don't bury themselves, the mourners do. And this is something that archaeologists often talk about, the agency of mourners and how they want to remember somebody,

what things were important to that person and what's important to remember about that person. How do you create that image of them in the afterlife by what you deposit with them in the grave? And swords are particularly interesting from this point of view because obviously they would have been expensive artifacts to own and maintain. And it's thought that a lot of sword wielding individuals may not have actually bought or commissioned a sword themselves. They may have actually been given it as a gift. And we know from Anglo-Saxon literature, like Beowulf, for example, that gift giving was extremely important to. Anglo-Saxon society. And expensive objects like fine jewelry and really nice swords might have been given as gifts from a lord to their retainer. It's a mark of a social bond that is at the same time

political, economic and ritualized. So perhaps if a person is buried with a sword like this, it may represent something to do with that specific social bond or how important that was to that deceased person. And we've got the next two boxes, we've got a collection of things which I hesitate to say look like something Madonna might have worn in the 1990s. What are these two things here? So what we have here is we have two shield bosses. And these are the central elements of an Anglo-Saxon shield. Obviously, it would go in the center of the shield and your hand would go inside the shield boss holding a handle. And you can actually see next to these, we have small pieces of corroded iron, which are actually the remains of the handle, which would have gone behind the shield boss.

And the shield boss, as you can see, one of them in particular, has a large spike coming out at the top of it. Now, the shield isn't just a defensive object. It's also a weapon. It can be an offensive object too. And if you bashed somebody with the spike on this, it could quite easily do the monastic. So this is about 10 centimetres across. and it probably stands up about 10 centimetres high altogether. So we've got a sort of flat round disc

and then this raised boss on top of it that comes to a spike. And I guess the rest of the shield would probably have been, again, wood or perhaps covered in leather that would have perished and not survived. So these are just the bits that... Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly. These are the bits which the sole conditions are allowed to be preserved. And the other one we have here is a bit flatter, but larger in area. And you can see it's being decorated with...

silvered discs around the outside of the boss as well. And we know that the Anglo-Saxons really did like decorating their shields quite a bit. And it's thought that the Anglo-Saxons may have thought they were somehow adding to the protective qualities of the shield by decorating it. And they're sort of, are they coins maybe? They look the size of maybe, you know, a 10-0-10-0-0-10-0. They do look like coins, but they are not. They're just discs. And their sole purpose there is really to be shiny and to,

If you're facing your opponent across the battlefield and they've got nice shiny shield, then perhaps your opponent is going to think, oh, that person's got nice gear and quite wealthy. He's probably killed a few guys in a battle before. Maybe I won't, maybe I won't tangle with him. He could be literally terrifyingly rich. So rich that you can terrify your enemy into not wanting to fight you. So aside from all of these examples of military goods that came out of the graves,

what else was discovered at this site? Well, of course, the kind of martial goods, very nice, but they're not the main story, really. I mean, we do have that one skeleton with sharp force trauma, but that's the only skeleton with sharp force trauma at Wendover. The main story, I think, from a lot of the finds that we're getting is one of a prosperous, dynamic community that's establishing itself in a new landscape. They're living in different ways and speaking different languages and having different religious beliefs, very different to the way they were even 100 years prior.

These weren't Christian burials, were they? No, no, these are pre-Christian burials. The Anglo-Saxons had their own pre-Christian religion with a similar pantheon to what you would recognize of the Old Norse religion in the later Viking Age. And much like those Viking Age burials, they like to send them off to the afterlife with lots of goodies. And we've got quite a few of them here in front of us.

This is one of my favourites here. This is what we would call an accessory vessel. Now, these type of ceramic urns might be used to contain cremations, but there's a general trend away from cremations to inhumations, to burials, across the course of the 5th and 6th centuries. And a lot of communities who previously practiced cremation continued placing urns in the grave of the deceased after moving to... inhumation as a practice. And do you think that was maybe part of a tradition or a concern that there ought to be an urn there? Or uncertainty about whether burial or cremation is the right thing to do? It's hard to say for sure, but there's definitely a feeling of a continuing tradition there. And as you can see with this one I'm holding, it's highly decorated. It's a very beautiful part. It has both stamped and incised decorations on it. It's got these lovely incised lines, some going vertical, others diagonal, and these are lovely little stamps that look like little hot cross.

buns and in fact that's what we actually technically call these type of stamps we call them hot cross bun stamps the urn itself is footed and it's got three horns we call them these appendages that sort of stick out from the sides and this one is very interesting as well for another reason it has a twin which is actually in salisbury museum and the decoration on that pot is so similar to this one we think they were probably made by the same potter we don't actually know whether the size Salisbury one is from either because it turned up in an antiquarian's collection in the 19th century and eventually made its way to Salisbury Museum, whereas this one was found on site at Wendover. So perhaps this one can tell us some more information about the Salisbury pot.

Fascinating, joining dots up, but it's so well preserved as well, so beautifully decorated and well preserved, considering it went into the ground 1500 years ago. Indeed, and it came out almost whole. Must be an archaeologist's dream. Yeah, indeed, indeed. We have various other things as well from the site, which give us a more intimate. insight into Anglo-Saxon life. Among my favourite, really, are the cosmetic products we have. So we're looking right here at an antler comb, very beautiful. It's got a body with little

needle-like, what do you call, teeth for a comb, don't you? With needle-like teeth extending from a central plate. It's recognised, I mean, it looks something like a modern knit comb. Yes, yes, it does sort of. And so you have that, you know, use it on your nice hair or your big scraggly beard. Less straggly if you're combing it. Yes, indeed. What we have here is a pair of highly decorated copper alloy tweezers. So you can see, I mean, they look exactly.

Absolutely recognizable as tweezers you would go and buy from the shop today. And I actually have little doubt that if you did clean out some of the mud that's currently stuck in between the tweezers, that you could probably actually still use them to tweez stuff. I mean, they wouldn't be very effective, but they'd work. But they still look quite decorated as well. Yes, they have these lovely ring and dot ornament going up the side of the tweezers, and that's very, very pretty. We also have a toiletry set.

And these, the Romans were also very fond of these two, but the Anglo-Saxons used them also, and here we have one. There's a small copper alloy suspension ring with two sharp pick-like implements coming off the ring and one that ends in a small spoon-like appendage. That's actually an earwax spoon so you put it in your ear

and use the dirt to clean out your ears. Is that better or worse than cotton bud? We're not supposed to use cotton. No, it's not very good for you in case you do yourself some damage but you know I suppose it depends how dirt your ears are and would the picks be something like tooth picks? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something like that. And lastly, amongst

the cosmetic implements we have what is essentially a makeup tube. So this This is what we call a cosmetic tube and what you'd have inside here is a substance. Usually we call it coal, so it's K-O-H-L. It's a substance from, usually from North Africa that's quite dark and powdery. It's used in Mon Cosmetic products as well. It would be in this small copper alloy tube and in the tube would be a tiny little wooden stick which you then pull out and it would be like a almost like a modern mascara wand or

eye-line a pencil or something like that, you could then use to apply the coal or other dark substance to your face. Fantastic. So amongst all of these, we can see a military aspect to it, but we can also see the very everyday, the way the Anglo-Saxon, the early Anglo-Saxons thought about themselves. They took care in their appearance and they took care in items that had potentially been in their family for some period if they existed from the Roman time. Indeed. So this really gives us a window on their whole approach, their whole outlook, their whole society, hopefully. Yeah, and it's fascinating really. Geographically, looking at this area we're talking about, Buckinghamshire, East

Knoxfordshire, I mean, this is the home turf of a sort of entity, political entity that exists in this area during the 5th and 6th centuries, a sort of tribal unit called the Yewise. And the Uwese will later expand south and west across the Thames into places like Wiltshire and Hampshire and basically become the foundation for the kingdom of Wessex, and by extension, the kingdom of England. So in a way, looking at stuff like this is really looking at some of the foundation stones of England as a nation. I find that fascinating. It's absolutely incredible to be surrounded by these items. And so last question, I'm asking everybody this,

if I could pop you in a TARDIS and spin you back 1,500 years to this site when it was a live, active site, what would you most like to see or discover or be able to understand? Oh, that's a very difficult question. I think I probably like to go into the purse of one individual that had these lovely silver discs in and to see whether they were actually, in fact, a necklace or whether they were free-hanging shield-shaped discs because as you can see, these silver discs look like a shield.

And that actually could be quite important. If they're part of a necklace, then that's very important too because it means that these are quite old. If they're not part of a necklace, it could mean that these shield disc, scooter form discs, we call them, could have some religious meaning potentially, like a protective amulet or something.

And I'm so curious to mind out which, and I guess I'll probably never know the answer, but if I could travel back in time, I definitely would. Thank you so much for sharing all of this with us, and it's fantastic to be surrounded by these and to, I think, just be beginning to understand this site a bit better and what it can tell us about, the missing story of England's past.

Oh indeed, there's a lot more work to be done and this site is so significant, it really deserves all the attention it gets. It's been so exciting to be able to bring you this breaking news today and for History Hit to be right at the forefront of this kind of groundbreaking discovery. If you need any more reason to sign up to History Hit streaming service, then there's a full documentary with Dan there

so you can see all these incredible things that we've been trying to explain for you. I can't emphasise enough how exciting it was to be part of this and how much it might revolutionise our understanding of a period in British history we just know next to nothing about.