All language subtitles for Britains.Pompeii.A.Village.Lost.in.Time.2016.1080p.WEBRip.x264-CBFM

This is Must Farm in
the fenlands of Cambridgeshire...

..an extraordinary site

that is revolutionising
what we know about our past.

This landscape was once part
of the largest wetland in Britain

and deep down, it is
the waterlogged conditions

that have guaranteed the survival

of a prehistoric farmstead
for 3,000 years.

It is an exceptional site
and I just can't wait to see it.

During the Bronze Age,

this settlement collapsed
into the marshy fens

where it was frozen in time,

perfectly preserved until
it was discovered by chance

and this major
excavation was launched.

This is the crown jewels
in terms of what it can tell us

about past humanities

and the way people lived
in this landscape 3,000 years ago.

The level of preservation
is so extraordinary,

this site has been dubbed
Britain's Pompeii.

For the first time,

we can step inside our Bronze Age
ancestors' homes

and discover uneaten meals,

pristine farming tools,

beautiful glass jewellery

and the biggest collection

of Bronze Age fabric
ever found in Britain -

evidence of the first complete
textile-making process.

This excavation is posing
new intriguing questions.

How were the houses built?

How did the people survive here?

And was their world peaceful

or violent?

The answers may unlock the mystery
of how our ancestors lived.

Over ten months,

the archaeologists are working to
unearth evidence which they hope

will help them to solve this puzzle.

But this excavation promises
to shed light

not only on this ancient settlement

but also on the very roots
of our modern world.

Deep in the marshes
of the Cambridgeshire fens,

Must Farm is wedged between
the M11 and the edge of a quarry.

'The village was built
in the Bronze Age,

'about 1,000 years before
the Romans invaded Britain.'

Oh, wow.

This has just sent a shiver
down my spine. This is amazing.

I cannot tell you
how unusual this is.

Most prehistoric sites,
you're looking at the sediment,

the soil and you've got to try
and imagine what was there

and it's so rare
to get wood preserved.

Look at this.
It's all there in situ, intact.

3,000 years old.

I'm blown away by this, I really am.

Just astonishing.

The surviving settlement is
made up of five wooden roundhouses,

built closely together.

I want to get down in there
and have a look.

'There is so much
domestic detail here,

'we'll be able to piece together

'how ancient Britons
arranged their homes...

'..from cooking, to storage,
to crafts.'

We can see quite clearly

the layout of the settlement
from up here.

You can make out the posts

that delineate these roundhouses

and you can see how
the roof timbers,

the radiating roof timbers

have fallen down almost in situ.

The Pompeii analogy, it's as if
we've got a pristine settlement,

a pristine image of exactly what
was going on within a settlement

3,000 years ago,
of a series of households,

all of their worldly goods,

um, in 3-D.

There's another house behind there
but we've only got a fragment of it.

'For site director Mark Knight,

'this is an unprecedented
opportunity to understand

'the intimate lives of
our Bronze Age ancestors...'

It's unbelievable, isn't it?

It's beyond any sort of dream of
what you can do within archaeology.

'..while wood expert Mike Bamforth
has a once-in-a-lifetime chance

'to investigate the structure
of a Bronze Age village.'

For a wood specialist,
this is about the best site

you could ever imagine to find.

Wood survives in any environment

where microbes and bacteria
can't go to work on it.

So in frozen environments,

in very arid environments
and in wet environments

where eventually all the oxygen
has been taken out of the system.

Excavation is a painstaking task

that can't be rushed.

Every find and piece of wood
is carefully cleaned of soil

as the layers
are slowly stripped away.

Exposed to the air
for the first time in 3,000 years,

the timber will begin to dry out
and decay, so it must be kept wet.

The team is discovering near-perfect
bowls containing half-eaten food,

giving the impression
that the villagers were interrupted

in the middle of a meal.

At the heart of this discovery
lies a mystery,

because this village was wiped out
by a sudden catastrophic event.

The settlement burned to the ground

and, for some reason,
the inhabitants never returned.

It took them by surprise,
it wasn't planned.

There's a real sense here
that things were all in situ,

that the settlement was going
about its daily routine,

hence there's food inside the pots

and things and spoons and stuff
like that, so it's caught that.

It's as though whoever lived
at Must Farm fled from that place,

leaving all their belongings behind

and those objects
were then preserved

almost in situ for three millennia

until the archaeologists arrived
in the 21st century.

'At every turn, the archaeologists

'are making ground-breaking
discoveries.'

So you can see it's got
this kind of ridge

running through the top of it

and it's quite... As you can see,
it's quite substantial.

The actual piece of wood itself, it
goes... It's running all the way,

all the way underneath,

so who knows how far it goes
that way or that way.

It seems to be going
that way as well.

This bit is quite weird as well.

I mean, it must be,
it's probably a post

like this one but the fact it's kind
of connected to this big piece

makes it seems as if it's
something different, I don't know.

'As the object is uncovered,

'it becomes clear that
it IS something different...

'..a find that demonstrates the
people living here had access

'to the most sophisticated
technology.

'This is the earliest complete wheel
ever found in Britain.'

This is the best preserved,

most complete one from this area.

That's all I need to say, really.
I mean, it just...

It's just bigger and better
than anything else.

And complete. It's the fact it's
complete, it's wonderful.

It's so important,

wood expert Maisie Taylor
has come to examine it

before it's fully excavated.

It's unbelievably compressed,

so it would've been quite a lot
thicker than this originally.

Evidence for the use of wheels in
Britain at this time is scarce.

This incredible discovery
suggests the team can look forward

to unearthing
a wealth of new evidence.

The Must Farm excavation promises
to answer one of the big questions

about the Bronze Age -

exactly how connected
was Britain to the rest of Europe?

Must Farm sat
in a wetland environment,

crisscrossed by waterways that,
to our ancestors 3,000 years ago,

formed a vital network
for communication and trade.

Water was simply the easiest way
to get around in this environment,

the easiest way
to transport materials

and to reach out and trade
with other communities.

It was water that connected
this ancient village

to the rest of the world.

In an earlier test dig,

Mark Knight made another
extraordinary discovery

in an ancient riverbed
right next to the site -

eight complete pristine logboats.

Wherever you go along this channel,

there are boats and that is a...

If ever there was a testament
to the richness

but also to the scale of human
activity along this channel,

then that's it for me, I think.

The unprecedented scale of this find

is conclusive evidence
that the villagers

were not living isolated lives.

What would happen to us if,
in this modern world,

we didn't have the internet?

How connected would we be?

You feel in a way that
the logboats and the rivers

was that sort of network, really,
that sort of connection.

We know there was some trade between

Britain and Europe at this time.

Hopefully Must Farm
can help us understand

how much trading went on

and how far Britain's
connections stretched.

'As the team dig deeper
into the villagers' homes,

'they notice the fire damage
to the wood

'occurs in a strange pattern.'

Karl, this has to be one
of my favourite pieces of wood.

You've actually got
the structure still intact

with this piece of wood
with the sockets in it

and these joints coming through,

these pieces coming through
from the other side -

lovely mortise and tenon joints.

They're beautiful.

This is what I would call
differential charring, so you've got

some moderate charring,
some cracking there of the wood

and some places where
there is no charring whatsoever,

no sign of any fire damage
whatsoever. This is just...

'Karl is puzzled as to why
timbers higher up in the house

'are damaged but those
lower down are not.'

What's that over there?
This is a wooden bowl.

So it's almost entirely charred
but it's right next to another

base plate like this, I think,

that's only just touched,

so I think what
you're looking at there

is a difference of height
within the structure,

so the bowl has been higher up
when it's been sat in life

in the structure. The base plate
is sat at a floor level,

like a skirting board
and most of the heat within a fire

is going to rise
through the structure,

so the bowl has suffered for longer
because of that convection heat,

whereas the base plate
has been quite protected.

So do you have any idea at the
moment, and this is a difficult

question cos there's so much more
data to come out of this site,

but do you have an idea
at the moment where this fire
might have started? No.

'As the fire investigation
continues,

'the team realise
that the roundhouses

'were constructed
in an unusual way.'

If we look at some of the bigger
uprights, so this upright here,

there's no signs
of any charring on it,

it's directly next to large timber
members that have charring.

So that level of protection
suggests that that's below flooring,

that our floor is somewhere
up here and all of

the damage of the fire is then
falling down to this level later on.

'This same feature repeats
across the village.'

So we're just sitting here on the
edge of roundhouse one and, as we're

peeling the roof timbers away,

we're starting to feel we've got
hints of a raised floor structure.

We know the raised floor structure
was here because we've got these

long lengths of support posts
that haven't been burnt at all.

This is an incredible discovery.

It turns out that the houses were
built on stilts over the water

and that's why the posts below
were protected from the fire.

No Bronze Age village
built in this style

has ever been found in Britain.

We can imagine the floor
might be up here and that dam

would actually be underwater.

OK, so what Dan is excavating
is the collapsed charred remnants

of a building that was above water
that's now below water.

So that's why what you see
is not particularly in order,

it's quite chaotic but in that chaos

there's lots of indications
or attributes

of what was going on up here,

so we're seeing timbers that are
worked and are charred

but we're also seeing
these sort of thatchy clumps

and matted-like materials and
things, as if we've got the flooring

as well as the thatch
above the roof as well,

so he's trying to disassemble that.

While a settlement like this
is new for Britain,

you can see something very similar

in mainland Europe.

700 miles away on the shores
of Lake Constance in Germany,

a prehistoric lake village

has been painstakingly
reconstructed.

Could this surprising connection

be the clue that sheds new light

on prehistoric European
immigration to Britain?

We know that in the Bronze Age,

rivers and lakes were thoroughfares
transporting people and goods.

That's why many villages around
the Alps were built over water.

Now, there are striking similarities

between the lake villages
on the Continent

and the newly discovered
pile dwellings at Must Farm.

So is it possible that the knowledge
of this way of construction and

indeed this way of life came
to England from mainland Europe?

There's already evidence
that a few individuals

came from the Continent
to live in Britain

but we don't know
the extent of this immigration.

This important new evidence
suggests that 3,000 years ago,

an entire community

may have migrated from
mainland Europe to the fens.

So we can imagine the pile dwellers
of Switzerland or the Alpine region

or the people that lived
on the rivers of Holland

being the very people
that came and occupied this space

because it was a space they were
already very adept at adapting to

or inhabiting,
so they already had the technology,

they didn't invent it because
of the change of the environment,

this was their texture.

As the team digs,

more intriguing evidence
of powerful European connections

keep turning up.

Tiny, beautifully made glass beads.

Well, this is something really
special, Mark, isn't it?

These are gorgeous glass beads
from the Bronze Age.

We used the word "exceptional"
a lot, I suppose,

in the project and things but these
things stand out completely,

don't they? In their delicate nature
but also in their colour.

They are such beautiful objects,
aren't they?

Lovely colour.

That is just fantastic, isn't it?

Did you have people saying to you,
"Are you sure this is Bronze Age?"

Yes. Because it's not later, is it?
Is it Iron Age? Yes.

When we first started recovering
so many beads from this context,

there were sort of raised eyebrows
about the fact we were

saying this is a late Bronze Age
settlement because beads
aren't found in this quantity.

Mark has sent the beads for analysis

to try to pinpoint
where they come from.

The indications were straightaway
that they were exotic,

they weren't from round here, and

we were given sort of indications
that they were central European

and things like that.

And I think that information
is being more refined now

and we're now starting to get
indications that it's even
further afield, sort of thing.

So, sort of Mediterranean
and those sorts of areas.

Finds like this are clear evidence

that the villagers imported
luxury goods from Europe.

But the archaeologists would like
to know how much they traded

and from how far away.

This is the River Po
in northern Italy

and close to the ancient
course of this river,

archaeologists found a vast
prehistoric trading centre,

an emporium dating
to the Bronze Age.

Raw materials were imported
from across the known world

and worked up into
finished objects for export.

It was production and commerce
on an industrial scale.

'The site is known as Frattesina.

'Professor Mark Pearce from
the University of Nottingham

'has come to interpret some of
the incredible finds for me.'

Mark, this is such a wonderful
collection of objects from
Frattesina.

What do they tell us in terms
of the connections of this place?

Amazing. This is a connection
that goes from the far end,

the eastern end of the Mediterranean
right up into Central Europe.

This is a centre of the world
in the Bronze Age. It's exciting.

So should we start with these?
What are these little beads?

It's a good way to start.

These are beads that are
made out of ostrich egg.

Do you want to grab them?

Got them there.
I'll be very careful.

Now, ostrich egg comes to Frattesina

up the Adriatic as a raw material

and it's transformed here
into beads.

So it hasn't arrived
as a finished object?

No, no, this isn't a place which
is bringing in finished objects,

this is a place that's bringing in
raw materials and transforming them.

And it is the Bronze Age
we're talking about,

so there is evidence
of metalworking here.

Yes, here's a mould for
making rings... Fantastic.

..and you can see how the copper
flows down the groove.

So there would have been another
half to this bowl.

There'd be another half. You
pour the copper in the top there.

And then you break off each ring
and you can see where it's been
broken off -

it's not been finished, this one.
Yeah, amazing.

'A vast range of raw materials
was shipped to Frattesina.

'Amber from the Baltic...

'..ivory from as far away as Asia.

'It's clear that
the Must Farm villagers

'weren't alone in their love
of exquisite things.'

I think we've come to the most
spectacular thing last.

Yes, well, these eye beads and
barrel beads are made here
in Frattesina.

Frattesina is the major centre
of glass-making that we know,

the biggest centre of glass-making
that we now in this period.

They are beautiful beads.
They're really wonderful.

So it's not just glass working,

it's also glass-making here at
Frattesina and here you can see

some ingots
of glass in various colours.

This one's really interesting

because can see the shape of
the ingot and you can see

where the pincers sank
into the semi-molten glass

as the glass worker picked it up.

That's absolutely amazing.

You've got the actual operations
of the glass-maker

preserved in this ingot.

That is fantastic, isn't it?

Preserved a moment in time, that
has. Yes, absolutely.

'Experts are developing
scientific techniques

'that may soon be able to map

'exactly how Frattesina glass and
those beads found at Must Farm

'travelled around Europe.'

More recently there's been an awful
lot of really interesting work on

using isotopes and other methods
to actually try to understand

where the raw materials
for that glass came from,

and that's really at its beginnings.

Sites like Frattesina are
fascinating in their own right -

it's amazing to think of people
3,000 years ago

manufacturing all those goods
and trading across the known world.

The fact that we've got amber from
the Baltic or the North Sea coming

here, ivory from Africa or Asia,

but I'm really intrigued
by the glass beads.

Might it be possible to find
a signature for a Frattesina bead,

so that if one turns up
in another archaeological site,

we'll be able to tell exactly
where it came from?

We're starting to map these
connections across the ancient world

in a way that's
never been possible before.

The Must Farm villagers possessed

not only locally made goods
but exotic luxury items.

But this was a world before money,

so what could they have
been exchanging in return?

We found this bladed object
which we think is a sickle.

It's interesting because you can
sort of see it's shiny still,

which is really the unique thing
about this site,

that stuff is so well preserved
that it comes out the ground shiny,

which is pretty amazing.

This is number six
in the number of sickles

that have come
out of the site so far

and it's the second from
roundhouse one.

Thank you.

So a little hand sickle,
still fairly sharp.

Yeah. That's amazing.

And this looks interesting
down here, Mark.

Yes, well again, there we go -
we've got a socketed axe.

It's one of several that's
come out of this roundhouse.

Oh, wow. And you can see, again,
like everything else,

it sort of comes out looking like
bronze and not green and things.

It's got that real sense
of being pristine.

It's heavy. Yeah.

I think... Lovely.

Maybe that's another aspect, another
attribute of this excavation,

is how fresh everything looks. Yeah.

You know, that's the fourth of that
type to come out of this house,

so that's four from one structure.

Metal started to be used in Britain
during the Bronze Age,

so tools that had once been flint

could now be reimagined
in this exciting new material.

The incredible quantity of the metal
tools found at Must Farm shows that

the villagers farmed
on a grand scale.

The discovery of bronze
was a technological revolution -

it would transform life
in so many ways.

People had been farming since
the beginning of the Neolithic,

but the advent of bronze
meant better tools,

changes in farming practice and
an intensification of agriculture.

Britain never looked back.

The team has also discovered
an abundance of animal bones,

alongside the tools for farming
and bowls of cereal.

The villagers were herding livestock
as well as cultivating crops.

In this fertile environment,

they may well have
produced more than enough

and Mark Knight believes
that this agricultural surplus

could have been used for trade.

We know that the Bronze Age
was marked

by a huge intensification
and expansion of agriculture.

But how did the Must Farm villagers

keep track of the seasons
and manage their crops?

An intriguing clue can be found
in the state of Saxony Anhalt,

central Germany,
in the modern city of Halle.

There, in the State Museum
is an object so extraordinary

it's recognised by UNESCO

as one of the most important
archaeological finds

of the 20th century.

It's known as the Nebra Sky Disc.

The disc was found in 1999

and it's the earliest known
depiction of the night sky.

It helps us understand
how Bronze Age farmers

knew when the time was right
to sow their crops.

This is the first picture

of the real heaven we've
had in world history.

Its surface shows a cluster of
stars known today as the Pleiades.

It's these stars that were
so important to farmers.

The picture is really simple.

We have here the seven stars
of the Pleiades

and we have here the moon

and the conjunction
of moon and Pleiades

showed us one special time
in the year, the early March.

The Pleiades are visible
in the northern hemisphere

throughout the winter

and disappear in the spring,

around the time
that crops should be sown.

The special thing
is not the metalworking,

the special thing is the knowledge

fixed into a really, really
simple, convincing picture.

Now, scientific analysis
has revealed

that the Nebra Sky Disc was made
from metal imported into Germany.

We analysed the copper.
The copper comes from the Alps,

from the Mitterberg region
near Salzburg.

Then we have analysed the tin.

The tin is coming definitely
from Cornwall

and also the analysis of the gold

shows us that it's
coming from Cornwall.

So it is a mixture
of Germany and of England.

This exciting evidence suggests that
the people of Britain and Germany

were linked not only by trade but by
sophisticated technological ideas.

Modern scientific techniques
like the chemical analysis of metal

are proving just how dynamic
and connected Europe was

3,000 years ago.

The demand for metals and for luxury
goods led to a system of exchange

that prefigured modern
international trade

and these connections would
have a profound impact

on the developing culture of Europe.

If water was the gateway to Europe,

it seems our ancestors at Must Farm

were determined
to take control of it.

So they are very much
stuck out here in the marshes.

They're away from the dry land,
they're away from their fields

and their farm animals.
Why have they put themselves here?

They recognise that by basically
moving out onto this wet space

and by sitting themselves
on top of the rivers,

they were able then to get
themselves to the North Sea,

get across to the Continent

or get themselves up into Middle
England and get themselves over

towards the copper and tin of
Wales and Cornwall and things.

Or even if they weren't
being that mobile,

the things that were passing
through this landscape,

just like they were passing up and
down the Thames and the Trent

and all the other major rivers,

they were in between those
movements and able to control it.

It's the sense of living
near the motorways, I suppose,

the main sort of arteries of life,

rather than plonking themselves
on the margins.

The Must Farm dig
is providing new answers

to some of the biggest questions
about Bronze Age Britain,

and now, inside one
of the villagers' homes,

Mark has found something
truly ground-breaking.

Evidence of the birth of one of
Britain's oldest industries -

cloth making.

We're in roundhouse one

and in amongst all
of the sort of burnt material,

we're actually seeing textiles

and we're also seeing
plant fibres.

These lovely sort of twists or
bundles of processed plant fibres

in preparation for making textiles.

It just looks like a little
bundle of raffia, tied round.

Yes, absolutely and you can see
things like this made from lime bast

with this little row
of knots going across it.

What's lime bast?

Lime bast is the fibres
behind the bark of a lime tree

which you can process

and really make quite
fine textiles from and things.

I mean, that there could be part
of a soft flexible basket,

it could be a mat, it could be
a cape. It's really frustrating,

but wonderful to have it. Yes.

'It is incredible that these
waterlogged conditions can preserve

'textiles for three millennia.'

The piece to your right there,
in close up,

it's very finely woven
plant textiles.

I don't know, there's
a magnifying glass if that helps.

It's fabric. It is fabric and,
to all intents and purposes,

it looks like the stuff that
my trousers are made out of,

you know what I mean?
It's that sort of finely woven.

Yeah, I feel ashamed to say it,
but I think I would have expected

any textiles that these people had
in their possession

to be more like sackcloth,
to be something fairly crude,

and this is far from crude.

That's absolutely beautiful.

How amazing to think that's
a piece of cloth

that's survived for
3,000 years. Absolutely.

Really wonderful.

'Such an extensive array
of delicate fabrics

'has never been found on a British
Bronze Age settlement before.

'To find out just
how important they are,

'Mark is calling in textile expert
Dr Susanna Harris.'

It is important
to have portable equipment.

You can't always take the finds
to your laboratory, so...

you want to have equipment
that you can move around.

The microscope reveals
the sophisticated techniques

used to produce these
ancient textiles.

What we have are these, what we
call these passive elements

and the active elements.

This is one of those active elements

and here you see
it tucks behind this one

and it comes out again here,
you can see it nicely coming out.

Susanna can see that the threads

used to make these fabrics were
spun out of natural plant fibres.

Spinning them must
have taken incredible skill.

So, I've just drawn a line
that's five millimetres long,

so what I want to do
is count those threads.

9, 10, 11, 12, 13.

So over five millimetres,

we've got 13 threads,

so over a centimetre
we'd have 26 threads,

and so the Must Farm textiles

are really...they're up there

with the other fine textiles
in Europe at this time.

They are also very similar to
the cloth we make and use today.

Like us, the villagers wanted
their clothes and their homes

to look beautiful.

Just because they look
black and brown now

doesn't mean that is
what they were like in the past

and indeed that's part
of our research,

is to try and understand them as
they were made in all their glorious

textures and colours.

Eventually, this cloth
will tell us a lot more

about Bronze Age lifestyles

but the question now is whether
the villagers were making cloth or

importing it from Europe.

In the pile dwellings
of Lake Constance in Germany,

textiles similar to those at
Must Farm have also been found.

Just like at Must Farm,

some of them appear
to be baskets and nets,

while others are much finer.

If there was extensive trading

between villages
like these around Europe

then cloth could well have been
one of the commodities

that was traded.

But, as work progresses
at Must Farm,

the team discovers something
never seen before in Britain -

a full set of the tools
needed for cloth making.

And there's this rather large
object here. What's that?

OK, so the sort of thing that
looks a bit like a cricket bat

is known as a cloth beater

and the idea is that this is
an object that you are hitting

the flax stems with in order
to turn it into plant fibres.

It's actually sitting in a groove

with the plant stems placed
across it and then this thing

is being sort of pivoted
and pounding down

until you start getting
the sorts of fibres

that we were seeing in the bundles
inside roundhouse one.

So you've got quite a few stages
in terms of production.

As you find one element,

you start to build the broader
picture of its production.

So, textiles were perhaps
the first thing we started finding

but now we've got things
like the cloth beater,

things like the bobbins
with the thread wound round them.

Absolutely beautiful. Look at that.

That's a wonderful, wonderful
tiny object

with it looks like
a piece of wood...

Yes. ..and then the thread
wound around it. Yeah.

Things like the loom weights that
also turned up in roundhouse one.

And like the textiles, they've
also suffered from the fire event,

so you can see they've
been burnt as well,

they're covered in soot and things.

You can see they're this
wonderful pyramid shape.

That is just fantastic.
What's it made of?

So it's just clay
that's just been sort of shaped

and then pierced
and then crudely fired.

We knew that some cloth was made
in Britain at this time

but we've never before discovered

the complete
technological process,

all the way from harvest
to manufacture to end product.

It is so rare, exceptional,

to find the whole sort of range
of sort of equipment in terms

of their production, right from the
plant stems themselves right through

to garments and things.

Our textile specialists will be
in a situation where they're going

to be overwhelmed with that detail.

Even at this early stage,

the team thinks that the villagers
were making cloth on a large scale.

It's such an intimate glimpse
into our ancestors' daily lives.

You can imagine them
using this technology

every day in their own homes.

But why were in these homes,

along with all those
valuable tools, abandoned?

The answer to that mystery could
be found in the charred timbers

of the roundhouses.

Forensic archaeologist
Dr Karl Harrison

is working to discover
how the fire spread

and whether it was an accident
or started deliberately.

We're getting very similar
charring patterns that you might

expect within a model structure
and if that's the case,

then we can make use of fire
investigation techniques

that we might normally associate
with crime scenes, fire scenes,

to work out hopefully
where it started

or how it spread through the
building. That might tell us more

about how the building is put
together in the first place.

So you're applying what
you know about how a building

would burn today and applying that
to a structure 3,000 years ago?

Yeah, that's the idea.
I'm not a fire investigator,

I'm a forensic archaeologist,

but the main area of interest that I
have is in adapting those techniques

to the archaeological record
and where we have an opportunity

where the preservation is so good,

it's so unusual
in a British environment

to actually work
with timbers like this,

then we can really start to use
those techniques to their utmost.

After such an extensive
initial examination,

Karl is now focusing down on where
and how the fire might have started.

I think as we investigate further

and we understand how
the fire developed,

we'll know a little bit more
then about whether

what we're looking at is
a fire that ignites and begins

and develops in this structure and
then spreads across to the other,

or whether we've got two separate
fires that both start

within the structures, in which
case that suggests much more

that there's an intentional
desire to burn.

If it's an accident,

we'd expect there to be
an accident in one place

and for it to spread
across the site.

If it's intentional then maybe
we'll have multiple fire points.

The archaeologists also want to
discover how fast the fire spread

and how long the villagers
had to escape.

The next stage in
the fire investigation

is the construction of
an experimental roundhouse.

The reed, the water reed is
definitely in the archaeology,

and the hazel rods are as well.

You've got to concentrate so
you don't fall off the roof.

Once it's complete, Karl
and his team will set it alight,

and track the intensity
and pattern of the flames.

This experimental roundhouse
retains the fundamental features

of the Must Farm houses.

All the key structural elements
are here.

There's a ring of supporting posts

and the principal rafters
are coming down from the roof apex,

balancing on those principal posts.

It's tied together in sort
of circular hoops, purlins.

These are in place to help hold
the thatch up.

If the fire was deliberate,
then what was the reason behind it?

As the team dig deeper,

they're beginning to believe

that there was
a darker side to life here.

They're discovering that
the inhabitants built a fence
around their village.

There's an ash palisade
running right around
the edge of the settlement.

These ash posts standing shoulder to
shoulder with occasional oak posts.

We don't know how high they stood,
but probably above head height.

Mark Knight suspects that
this fence wasn't just for show.

There is something about the fact
that they're in a landscape

where they've detached themselves
from the dry land,

they've put a barricade
around themselves,

so there is a sense of enclosure.

It has the sense of a potential
defensive nature about it.

We don't know much about
how Bronze Age villages like this

might have defended themselves.

If the fence was needed
for protection,

the team would hope
to find further evidence...

..so this find is intriguing.

Yesterday we found a bronze sword.

Normally when we find bronze
it's green and crusted over

but because of the excellent
preservation at the site,

this is sort of like the actual
bronze colour that you can see here.

The discovery
is immediately exciting

because it's in the Bronze Age
that swords first appear.

But what we don't know
is whether swords

were primarily prestige items,

commissioned by an elite
to show off their wealth,

or regularly used as weapons.

The sheer number of swords
found around Must Farm

forms really important evidence,

which might help the team
to answer this big question.

We pick this thing up.
That sharpness of the edge.

I think you should feel
that edge, actually,

cos it just feels like
it's just been made.

Ooh. Yeah. It's just super sharp.

I don't really want to run my
fingers on that, actually,

for fear of cutting them. Yeah.

And are these actual notches
from use along the sides, here?

Yeah, I don't know. They're
really delicate, aren't they?

So I didn't know.

I mean, they're less evident than,
for example, what's on this blade.

So, we've got a break

but equally we've got
these deep, deep notches.

You can see the little burrs going
back, where something just hit it

and that might be indicative
that the object itself

was actually used in conflict.

So, is this the evidence
we're looking for

that Bronze Age swords
were not just luxury goods

but needed as weapons
in everyday life?

And the fact that you've got swords
like this here at the settlement,

does that suggest
that they were fairly ubiquitous,

that they're not being carried by,

you know, a small, elite
group of warriors,

but that actually
you would expect, perhaps,

most men to be carrying a sword?

You know, people talk about them
as being disposable

but I don't know if that's quite
the case but there does seem to be

a lot of these weapons
in this environment.

Presumably this does speak of

a certain level of violence
in this society.

It's strange, isn't it? We get
ourselves into sort of a twist

in our interpretation
as archaeologists.

We start talking about the sort of
weapons being symbolic and things,

the idea that they don't
represent warfare,

they were status symbols,
that sort of thing,

and we get so far down that route,

the actual idea that they were ever
weapons seems to sort of disappear,
sort of thing.

And yet, you felt the edge of that,
you could see how they are made.

They are...they are weapons.

They are there for... They're not
for hunting, they are for killing.

To give us a better understanding
of how our ancestors made swords,

swordsmith Neil Burridge
is going to try to make one

using original
Bronze Age technology.

This is a nervous point for me.

The mould is parted at the top
but that's not too bad.

So I'm just going to
top it up a little bit.

But hopefully...

Very skilled.

I'm probably the most experienced

person in Europe at this

and I'd say I scratch a one
on the Bronze Age scale of ten.

So it is very difficult.

Just one sword takes nearly
a kilo of precious bronze.

Neil's experimental work
shows our ancestors

poured massive resources
into making them,

whether for prestige
or for battle.

So you can see there, the mould
fragments have broken off

and you can see the sword casting.

So it's not bad for a first attempt.

I think the mould parted
a little bit more than I expected,

so it's increased
the width of the sword.

So it's, in Bronze Age terms,
it's a bit heavy.

They would have gone,
"Nah, I don't fancy that one."

It's a case of working the surface
down on the blade

to bring it up to
something like this.

So they would work on it, polishing.

They'd use something
that is locally available.

The next, most important stage,

is forging the edges down
to a thin wafer.

This is very skilled and it's
done with anvils and hammers.

When we find them in excavations,

they're usually green and corroded
and not very attractive.

But probably in the Bronze Age
when a sword was finished,

it looked like this.

Beautifully polished, handle,

decorated blade,
and very sharp edges.

The notches on the swords
found at Must Farm

are being fed into
an ambitious new study

to analyse Bronze Age
fighting techniques,

run by Newcastle University.

This starts far apart
then immediately moves close.

There's not really much in between.

You're either unable to reach him,

or you're both
literally face-to-face.

And it's a very exciting way
to fight, certainly.

Dr Andrea Dolfini is studying

hundreds of British
Bronze Age weapons.

The problem I'm trying
to address is,

we know these weapons would have
been used for fighting, for combat,

for raiding in the Bronze Age,

but we don't know exactly how.

The weapon itself,
because it's so short,

effectively you're using what you
could consider to be a long knife.

Because of that you have
to get in so much closer,

so much more personal.

The marks left on
the swords as they clash

help Andrea to build an accurate
picture of Bronze Age battle.

We've seen very similar on
Bronze Age swords in that the dent

is opened up. Probably the two
blades met and then swing...

in that direction,
and open the dent.

It's a very brutal,
very visceral pursuit

but it requires a degree
of intelligence

and so it's all about learning
to read your opponent

and really, ultimately, it is to
impose your will upon your opponent.

It does now appear
that the Must Farm villagers

were warriors as well as farmers.

The team is unearthing lots
of well preserved spearheads.

And it's interesting that they're
all carrying along the inside
of the palisade.

So in your mind's eye,
what you start doing is...

You've got people stood there
with spears, keeping guard,

and things like that. So who knows?
It reminds us that this world

wasn't necessarily one of just
baskets and pots and roundhouses

but also was a world where
you felt it necessary

to have a sword and a spear.

The evidence from Must Farm
suggests that, 3,000 years ago,

Britain could have been
a violent place.

So is it likely that the fire
that destroyed the village

was started deliberately?

Forensic archaeologist
Karl Harrison has been building

a picture of what happened
when the village caught fire.

He's now being joined
by wood expert Mike Bamforth.

They're going to set fire
to the reconstructed roundhouse

to see exactly how the flames
might have behaved.

I've come with some
temperature monitors

and a monitor that will
give us an indication

of the amount of radiant heat

that's going to escape
from the building sideways.

That should help us understand how
fire might have spread at Must Farm.

And, Mike, what are you hoping
to get out of this experiment?

I think how much of the house
is standing at the end.

Something we don't
understand at Must Farm

is if the house went up in flames

and then came crashing down
as part of the fire

or if it burnt and was
still partially standing

and then later on
it's collapsed and fallen down.

It's going to be amazing.

'Karl believes that
the fire started inside a house,

'so that's what he's recreating.'

The flaming energy that's going
to come off this when it's lit

is going to be sufficient
to carry fire up to the roof.

'In discovering how fast
the fire spread,

'Karl can also build a picture

'of how long the villagers
had to escape.'

How long do you think
this fire is going to last?

Will it go up quickly or are we
going to be here all night?

I think it will
develop quite quickly.

I think within 6-7 minutes,

we'll start to see some
involvement in the roof space.

30 minutes and I'd expect the roof
to the totally involved,

and then starting to collapse.

There's the speed of ignition
up to the roof.

And you can already see the
yellowing smoke that's coming out

on this side in particular.

The fire takes hold much faster
than Karl expected.

That's so quick. Yeah.

Scary.

Wow.

That's a lot... Quite warm!

The heat that we can feel here

is all radiant heat,
spreading laterally.

So this is what's going to be
striking the other buildings

in our Bronze Age settlement.

'With houses so close together,

'the whole village would've
gone up incredibly fast.'

You can see the roundhouse shape
is making it a cyclone.

Cold air being drawn in...
I can see embers,

spiralling round inside there.

'You can imagine panic sweeping
through the settlement,

'the villagers running in terror,

'forced to leave
their precious homes behind.'

It's suddenly got really hot. The
roof's fallen in completely, Karl.

That has been quick. Do you know
what time we started the fire?

I think that can only be
ten minutes, really.

Yeah, it's not been long, has it?

'As the whole village went up, it
must have been a terrifying sight.'

And that wide, flat
landscape with big skies,

the spectacle of
the pall of smoke and flames.

It's just pouring off,
this huge quantity of smoke.

It'd be really visible
in the landscape.

'If this village was
torched by an enemy

'then it was a stark and
dramatic statement of power.'

The weight of evidence does seem
to point towards a violent attack.

Most compelling is the fact
that these people never returned

to resettle their village or to
reclaim their precious belongings.

Once the thing had burned down,

there's no real indication
they ever came back.

So there is also that feeling
that the force that drove them away

might have been more than the fire,

it might have actually been
someone else who'd set that fire

that didn't want these people
in this landscape.

The settlement at Must Farm
shows us that, 3,000 years ago,

there were people who were living
comfortably well-off lives

that we can still recognise today.

They were materially wealthy.

They had objects which they had
made themselves with great care,

and they had objects
which were exotic,

that had arrived with them

through those complex
Bronze Age exchange networks.

But because they were
settled in the landscape

and because they had this material
wealth, they had more to lose.

So perhaps it's not surprising
that during the Bronze Age,

we see an upsurge
in violence and conflict.

The excavation at Must Farm has
vastly expanded our knowledge

of Bronze Age Britain

and taken us closer than ever before
to the people who lived there.

We've discovered
the Must Farm villagers

had the creative and practical
skills to make fine textiles

that rivalled anything
found across Europe,

using tools that are at
the root of modern industry.

What they couldn't make,
they could acquire,

because this village was
connected to exchange routes

that stretched
across Europe and beyond.

3,000 years ago,

our ancestors used technology
and complex scientific ideas

to transform their world.

After the team finishes their work,

what's left of the village
will be buried once again.

But this isn't the end
of the Must Farm adventure.

The more intensive our
excavation programme becomes,

the more we're seeing. The more you
dig, the more questions come up,

the more detail comes out.

Every moment, another object
comes out with a new story.

So we're in the throes
of completion,

but in the knowledge that
a lot of the materials here

will go on to another stage.

They'll be under microscopes,
they'll be in laboratories,

they will be sliced
and examined and measured

and, if anything,

the story you've been given
so far today will be enriched.

There will be colour, there will
be texture that will come out and

transform elements
of our story as well.

This is the crown jewels in terms

of what it will tell
us about past humanities

and about the way people lived in
this landscape, 3,000 years ago.

The story of Must Farm has only
really just begun to be told

and there'll be a huge
amount of work left to do

after the excavation
has finished.

It will take years of
study and analysis

before Must Farm
reveals all of its secrets

but it's already changing our ideas

about the place of Britain
in Bronze Age Europe,

and the foundations
of our modern world.