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I'm exploring one of the most
mysterious and misunderstood
periods in British history.

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For 200 years after the Romans left
our islands in 410 AD,

our country was plunged into what
became known as the Dark Ages.

The turmoil transformed the nation,

but we know almost nothing about it.

The legends tell of a lawless land,
warring tribes and a legendary
leader -

King Arthur.

But how much truth is there in the
stories?

And what was Dark Age Britain really
like?

Now, new discoveries promise to
transform our understanding of the
Dark Ages.

That is Tintagel,

an island sticking out on this wild
remote Atlantic coast of Cornwall.

Archaeologists are now finding
evidence that up on the top of
Tintagel,

there was not just a settlement
during the Dark Ages, but a seat of
power.

I'm going to discover what we really
know about Dark Age Britain.

I've got exclusive access to the
Tintagel excavations, combined with

the latest scientific analysis,

including pioneering landscape
archaeology...

It's just absolutely phenomenal.

We've got continuous occupation all
along this strip, which is immense.

..genetics...

It was one of those total wow
moments that was really exciting.

...and even a spin-off from
particle physics...

And that, of course, is
the power of archaeology.

..revealing just how pivotal the
fifth and sixth centuries were

in creating the Britain that we know
today.

We're not looking at an abandoned
landscape of desperate poverty.

It's not necessarily the truth.

It's about as far removed from
history as you can get.

Modern archaeology is finally
writing the true history of King
Arthur's Britain.

This is what we think we know.

In 410 AD, Britain suffered a
cataclysm.

After nearly 400 years of Roman
rule, the aristocracy,

troops and bureaucrats simply upped
and left.

Dies tenebrosa sicut nox.

It's a brilliant, evocative way

of saying,
"Welcome to the Dark Ages".

Without Roman money, the economy
collapsed.

The roads and towns of Roman
civilisation were abandoned.

That's a massively dramatic change
in the British landscape.

Politically, economically -
everything.

Native Britons who had lived to
serve the Empire for four centuries

now had to fend for themselves.

There is a real sense that there is
no one state authority

controlling everything.

And that's about it.

The period is called the Dark Ages
because, after the Romans left,

recorded history stopped.

Records of who lived in Britain are
blank.

For the period 400-600, that's 200
years,

that's eight, ten generations,

we know the names of...

You can kind of count them on two
hands.

And the written records we do have
are badly damaged and hard to read.

For the whole of the period 400 to
600, in the British Isles we have

two or three people whose writing we
have fragments of.

According to the fragments, within a
decade, Germanic invaders -

the Angles, Saxons and Jutes -

swept into our islands
from Northern Europe,

destroying everything in their path.

When the Romans go,
it is just chaos.

There's plagues, there's civil war -

the Saxons are just slaughtering
everybody.

So it's real blood
and thunder stuff.

SCREAMING

CLASHING METAL

In those early writings, a British
hero, the great King Arthur,

emerges to unify his people and
repel the invaders.

But the challenge for historians is
how to know if there's any truth to

the written evidence.

The written histories are patchy
and unreliable. Instead,

it's archaeology which is uncovering
the hidden secrets in our

landscape and revealing the story of
Britain in the Dark Ages.

On the dramatic Cornish island of
Tintagel,

a new excavation looks like it
will provide important answers -

perhaps even a breakthrough.

This rocky outcrop also happens to
be the very place where King Arthur

is supposed to have been conceived.

Over the centuries, the stories of
King Arthur's Britain

have filled the gap in our Dark Ages
history.

But no physical evidence
for him has ever been found.

Now, discoveries being made here
might finally help to separate

hard facts from the fragments of
fiction

to reveal the truth about Dark Age
Britain.

Win Scutt is the curator of this
iconic site.

So, Win, introduce me to Tintagel
from the air, then.

What are we looking at?
It's fantastic.

You can already see one of the
rectangular buildings dates to the
fifth,

sixth century. So this is the period
you're specifically interested in
here? Absolutely, yes.

There are at least 100 stone
buildings.

They've left simple rectangular
footprints.

Is that more? Some more over there,
absolutely.

They must have had to have occupied
the whole island.

So it's a settlement of hundreds of
people. Yeah.

These simple buildings were first
excavated in the 1930s but, last
summer,

the archaeologists were surprised to
uncover what looks like a much
grander complex.

We're excavating behind these cliffs
on... These are the southern cliffs,

and there we are. It's coming
into view.

Oh, there are the trenches. There
are the trenches.

Fantastic. Fantastic, yes.
And they're at work.

We can spy on them. That's
brilliant. It's really exciting.

What a stunning location,

perched here high above the crashing
Atlantic waves, buffeted by the
wind.

And this is where the archaeologists
are at work on the southern slopes
of Tintagel,

so they can look at those
buildings in detail,

try to understand why they were
built here,

how they were built - and,
crucially, what they were used for.

The archaeologists will dig for five
weeks,

gathering the evidence to make a
detailed reconstruction of life

on this site.

We're going to build a virtual 3D
model of this citadel back in the

fifth century. We're going to bring
Tintagel out of the Dark Ages,
back to life.

Jackie Nowakowski is the excavation
director.

Once we started taking off the turf,

the stone walls started to appear
quite quickly.

So it's been buried over 1,400
years ago,

and now we're uncovering it for the
first time.

So are these buildings different
from the ones that have been found
elsewhere?

Absolutely. On the island, they're
completely different in terms of
build, character,

and the amount of sheer investment
that's gone into their build.

And they're substantial, well-built
walls, aren't they?

Yeah, they're extraordinary.
They're over a metre wide,

and you can see that they're made
of large blocks of slate.

Yeah. Very blocky material, and
you've got them laid horizontally,

forming a really nice coursed wall.

These buildings were built to
impress, I think.

Right, yeah. And they're part of
this larger complex of other
buildings

that go off in that direction,
and in that direction,

so you can see we've got our work
cut out.

The buildings occupy a natural
terrace with a stunning vista,

and the layout and style of
construction strongly suggest

that the inhabitants were not
ordinary people.

They do look like they're high
status.

This isn't people eking out an
existence up here on top of
Tintagel.

This is people living well.

This is people living very well,
I think.

It's all got the feel of an
extraordinary large, densely
populated

settlement which is maybe the place
where the most powerful person who's

living in this area was resident at
the time.

This eroded piece of rock known
as Arthur's chair gives me a
fantastic view

of these excavations, showing
that there was a large,

high-status settlement here.

This was a seat of power back in the
Dark Ages.

Someone important lived here.

But it's a huge leap to say that
this person was King Arthur.

There's no actual proof
that he lived at Tintagel.

But he's become synonymous with the
site because of one important
legend.

According to the story, in the fifth
century AD,

Tintagel was the castle of the Duke
of Cornwall, Gorlois, and his wife,
Igraine.

But Igraine had another admirer -

a local warlord named
Uther Pendragon.

And such was Uther's desire for
Igraine that he enlisted the help of

Merlin to gain access to Tintagel
and to Igraine's bedchamber.

The result of that night of
deception was a child,

and the child's name was Arthur.

I've come to the British Library
in London

to examine the written sources
we have for the period,

including the first-ever reference
to a king called Arthur.

Julian Harrison is the Curator of
Medieval Manuscripts.

Here we have one of the earliest
copies

of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History
of the Kings of Britain.

That's amazing.

There's something quite powerful
about the kind of physicality of
these books.

Oh, they're beautiful, aren't they?

I just love the fact that every
element of this page is handmade.

Yeah. That's lovely.

Absolutely gorgeous, isn't it?

It's a copy of a 12th-century
bestseller.

The writing on the tough animal skin
parchment is still crystal clear.

The script is so beautiful,
it's so regular.

That's fantastic.

900 years ago,

the Welsh monk Geoffrey of Monmouth
set out to write a comprehensive

history of Britain, including
the reign of a King Arthur,

600 years before his own time.

Here we are. Here's the page I want
to show you.

It's on the top line there.

That looks like "deci" to me.

It says "day", and then there's a
new word. "Tintagel".

Tintagel. Exactly.

Is this the first association of
Tintagel as a place with Arthur?

It is indeed.

I can recognise the odd word here.

My kind of schoolgirl Latin.

I can see "concepts".

And then "eadum nocte".
"Eadum nocte".

So this is the...it tells you that
on this night, on that night,

the celebrated King Arthur,
Arturum, was conceived there.

That moment as those words appear on
the page,

that's the beginning of King Arthur
as we know him.

According to Geoffrey, then,

Tintagel is where the legend
of King Arthur begins.

This is the reason so many people
believe he comes from Cornwall.

Geoffrey tells us that Arthur is
conceived when his father,

Uther Pendragon, seduces Igraine,
the wife of Gorlois,
Duke of Cornwall.

Full of sex and violence,

Geoffrey's account plays out like a
Hollywood action movie.

It's full of excitement,
it's full of horror,

it's full of lots of things
that an audience would love.

Every great story needs a villain,
and Geoffrey has the perfect bad
guys.

The Romans leave a power vacuum,

and Britain faces a grave threat
from a new wave of invaders.

Anglo-Saxons swarm in from across
the North Sea...

..ready to kill everything in their
path.

CLAMOURING AND SHOUTING

But Arthur comes out of the west,

unites the Britons and leads the
resistance.

The result is a country divided.

Embattled Britons in the west,
the new Anglo-Saxon overlords
in the east.

This is King Arthur's Britain.

You get this sort of frontier line.

This is some kind of demilitarised
zone between these two constantly
warring factions.

It is us against them.

It is Britons against
the Anglo-Saxons.

The Britons are the ones who are
defending everything that is right
and good.

The Anglo-Saxons are the forces of
evil that need to be destroyed.

Britons and Saxons are killing one
another, and that's Arthur's world.

That is where he existed.

Here it talks about his sword,
"gladio optimo".

The best sword. And that was called
Caliburno.

Caliburno. Is that Excalibur?

This is Excalibur. Yes! But in the
original, it was called Caliburn.

Arthur's sword is a weapon of mass
destruction.

It tells you that with Caliburn
alone,

Arthur killed some 470 men
single-handedly.

He went berserk, essentially.

470 victims in a single rush.

I mean, that is... It's too
extraordinary to believe, obviously.

I mean, he's being portrayed here
as...

He's superhero, essentially.
Yeah, yeah.

Geoffrey of Monmouth's Arthur isn't
the Arthur that we know and love
today.

There is no sword in the stone,
there's no round table,

there's no Holy Grail.

I mean, all that really gets added
to the Arthur story later

in the sort of 14th, 15th centuries
to make Arthur a more likeable
person.

Geoffrey was the first to make that
connection between Arthur and

Tintagel, but the story of the
Anglo-Saxon invasion goes back even

further. The earliest account was by
a monk called Gildas,

and a few fragments are still
legible.

He's writing in the sixth century,

and he isn't writing so much a work
of history,

it's more a polemical text
criticising the Britons and blaming
their evil ways,

their bad ways of living with...
That's why they were conquered by
the Saxons.

So the Saxons are a punishment
from God?

Precisely. That's how Gildas
portrayed it.

Although Gildas makes no mention of
anyone called Arthur,

he does talk about Britons versus
Saxons.

But it's all very political,

and we just don't know how accurate
these written historical sources
are.

It's not necessarily the truth.

It's not necessarily the objective
history,

and it didn't have the sort of
academic approach that we would now.

I had hoped to find something
dependable,

especially in those earlier sources.

But it turns out there are problems
with all of these accounts.

They are ALL just so subjective.

But I think that there is a better,

more objective way of getting to the
truth of the Dark Ages -

and that is archaeology.

So I'm going to use archaeology to
test these early historical sources.

Geoffrey of Monmouth describes a
frontier between King Arthur's
Britons

and the invading Anglo-Saxon armies.

If great wars were fought,

then surely we should find some
archaeological evidence of them

along this line that runs from the
south-west up to East Yorkshire.

Archaeologist Dominic Powlesland has
been flying,

digging and mapping
a vast area around the
East Yorkshire end of the line

near the village of West Heslerton
for the last 40 years.

Clear prop.

OK, ready, Dominic? Yeah, I'm ready.

Hold on tight, here we go.

North Romeo, Romeo rolling.

Does his work provide any evidence
of an invasion?

These fields underneath us are
entirely filled with archaeology.

There is archaeology
in every single one.

Dominic saw, in a big landscape, you
needed big technological solutions.

You needed geophysics,
you needed air photography,

you needed a totally different
approach.

Dominic's vision was to use modern
technology to map the Anglo-Saxon

landscape over 70 square kilometres.

It took 40 years.

But with an army of volunteers,

Dominic was able to reveal the
ancient secrets hidden in this
landscape.

His own little private air force
handled reconnaissance.

Geophysicists surveyed
and scanned the fields

while ground troops dug into the
detail.

We've surveyed all these fields.

The surveyors have walked the
equivalent from Land's End to John
O'Groats.

Over the years, West Heslerton
became the training ground for an
army of archaeologists.

They're on every corner.

Many people started their
archaeological careers there.

I started my archaeological career
there.

I first came to West Heslerton in
1978.

Everybody quite enjoyed it, I think,
all these weird hippy students

suddenly descending on the village

and camping in a field next to the
sand quarry.

The dig changed my life completely.

I met my wife here
and moved into the village.

My children were both born here in
Yorkshire.

I came here 27 years ago.

I think I was about 15.

I came here for three days and ended
up staying six weeks.

Ended up falling in love with
archaeology,

and now I'm a professor of
archaeology at York.

Dominic's idea of mapping an entire
landscape through time,

the idea that you would individually
3D-locate every single artefact...

..it's almost madness,
but it's brilliant madness!

Key to the process was geophysical
survey using techniques

like ground-penetrating radar to
map traces of buried structures.

So every single spot here
is a feature?

Yeah, so all those dots are
individual features.

You can zoom into this area here,
click on that - we get all the
finds, information.

Oh, wow. That's the plan.

This is the distribution of finds
within it.

Oh, it just goes on and on.

So you've got thousands of finds
coming out of every single one of

these features, and hundreds of
these features.

I mean, that's a phenomenal amount
of data.

Yeah. About a million finds
altogether.

Dominic has been across this
landscape with a fine-tooth comb.

What he's found is extraordinary.

But even more amazing is what he
hasn't found.

There are no graves of defeated
warriors.

No signs of a battle or conquest.

In the idyllic rural landscape in
the Vale of Pickering,

life just seemed to carry on without
a break.

I have never seen any evidence of an
invasion.

Dominic's findings seem to be at
odds with the traditional view

that the Britons were routed by an
Anglo-Saxon invasion force.

Once you start killing people in
large numbers,

they leave themselves lying around.
You can't avoid them.

So we don't see lots of Anglo-Saxons
with massive injuries.

When you look at their bones,
you find a very,

very low incidence of weapon
injuries, sword cuts.

This is a society that is playing
with the idea of a military world,

but doesn't actually seem to be
engaging with physical conflict to a
huge degree.

It's such a departure from the
written history which gives us

this idea of an epic battle between
native Britons and invading Saxons,

and the results from West Heslerton
are echoed elsewhere.

Here's a very, very good piece of
science -

of all the dead bodies dug up that
may belong to the period 400-600,

and we have thousands of them - men
and women, children, old people,

young people - of all those
thousands of bodies,

if you ask the number of those
bodies that have sharp-edge weapon

injuries, it's less than 2%.

Where do battles fit into that?

First of all, we don't know how many
people were involved.

Are there 30 blokes and their mates

against 30 other blokes
and their mates?

So some local argy-bargy,
but the archaeology brings into

question any idea of a countrywide
conflict.

The data comes together in what
Dominic calls the wallpaper...

..and it shows exactly what people
were doing here in West Heslerton

during the Anglo-Saxon period.

It's just phenomenal,

because all of that work comes
together to give you a picture of a

landscape which is
so densely settled.

Yeah. Whoever lived here in
the fifth and sixth centuries,

they weren't rampaging warriors.

They were farmers.

We've got settlements here, there's
one here, there's one here.

Then, of course, there's this large
one at West Heslerton.

We've identified 14, probably now 15
settlements.

And a completely new style of
building appears in the landscape.

They're very different to
the buildings at Tintagel -

not made of stone.

These grubenhause, or grub huts,
were thatched wooden buildings,

and they're a style of construction
that's seen right across northern
Europe at this time.

So these blobs here
were the grubenhause.

All of these little blobs?

You see big houses there, big houses
here, lots of these grubenhause.

You also see this hamlet here,
a hamlet there.

A load of buildings there.

A load here. You see, it's all
joined up. There's stuff everywhere.

We know that in the Anglo-Saxon
period, this was densely settled.

Dominic tells me there were 60 to 70
buildings just here,

another 270 over there,

14 settlements within 11km
of where I'm standing.

Stand by to land.

I think that might
be Alice down there.

Dominic's research suggests a very
different story to the violent

Anglo-Saxon conquest described in
the histories.

Oh, a bit of a bumpy landing there.

That's OK. Are you all right?
Yeah, I'm fine.

So we've got this version of events
from the histories,

but it just doesn't match up with
what we find on and in the ground.

In the east, then,

there's not much evidence of an
invasion and any conflict,

but what about the west?

Jackie Nowakowski and the team
are now four weeks into
their five-week dig.

In this remote corner of south-west
England,

the team are also unearthing a
peaceful lifestyle,

but one that's far more extravagant
than in the east.

Ah, that's a good piece.

Oh, nice.

That is a nice, high-quality piece
of tableware, I'd guess.

The rim on the bottom, that sat on
the table - beautiful.

We've been finding a lot of the fine
tablewares,

and even some of the dinner plates
and the storage vessels containing

the wine and olive oil are being
broken and just discarded around
here.

Whoever they were, the people who
lived here were rich.

This is the largest quantity of
high-quality pottery found at any

Dark Age site.

That is really beautiful.

This was certainly not a backwater.

The culture here is clearly
different from that in the
Anglo-Saxon east.

This new excavation is really adding
to what we already know about

Tintagel, and it's showing us that
there was indeed a huge settlement

here, a high-status settlement,

and it's something that seems to be
very different from what's happening

right across the rest of Britain at
this time.

It seems to be the case that those
settlements and burials that we

associate with
Germanic culture occur

primarily to the south-east
of that line,

but there are always pockets and
patchworks within that zone,

and that west of that stays
largely British-speaking.

Archaeologically, fifth-century
Britain looks like a divided
country,

but if the Anglo-Saxons didn't
arrive en masse and kill the locals
in the east, what did happen?

Why did the culture change?

Surprisingly, new evidence is
emerging from research being
conducted here.

This is Diamond Light Source in
Oxfordshire,

the UK national facility for
synchrotron radiation.

This looks like a very strange place
to be doing archaeology, and it is.

Beneath me, and shielded from me by
two metres of concrete,

a beam of electrons is travelling
at almost the speed of light,

and as they spin around here,
they're throwing off X-rays,

and I'm particularly interested in
the beam of X-rays that exits here
at beamline 18.

This is where physics
and archaeology collide.

Here, scientists are penetrating
deep into the structure of
archaeological

finds using X-rays focused to a
sixth of the width of a human hair.

The evidence under scrutiny is grave
goods from an Anglo-Saxon cemetery

first excavated in 1926,

in the village of Oakington in
Cambridgeshire on the east side of
the Dark Age divide.

Over 100 skeletons were discovered
under a primary school playground,

including one woman's grave,
which had been disturbed,

but miraculously not entirely
destroyed, by a modern power cable.

Duncan Sayer has been leading
the most recent investigation.

These are all the photographs from
the excavations.

His team found what looked like
distinctive Anglo-Saxon objects in
many of the graves.

So we've got an adult in the
middle... Yeah. ..with two brooches
on her shoulder...

Yeah. ..and a load of amber beads.

And next to it is an adolescent.
Yeah. And we have a child.
Yes, a small child.

A small child, yeah, yeah. Makes you
wonder what happened that they ended
up in the same grave.

Well, it does, doesn't it?

And we've got round brooches,
and we've got long brooches,

we've got cruciform brooches -
we've got all the works, really.

All what you'd expect from an
Anglo-Saxon cemetery -
no surprises there?

No surprises, absolutely
typical in every way.

But archaeological evidence,
just like written history,

is open to misinterpretation.

Duncan was reluctant to jump to an
obvious conclusion.

One of the problems that archaeology
does have is when we find people

buried, we have tended to associate
the artefacts with them.

We read those things as a sort of
biography of that person.

Even your typical Anglo-Saxon
brooch, the cruciform brooch,

you can't just take an item of
material culture

and assume that
you know what it means.

Duncan decided to analyse the
brooches using the synchrotron.

The high-energy X-ray beam is
focused on a tiny but unusual
feature

that he's spotted on the classic
Anglo-Saxon cross.

So, do the blue areas and green
areas represent different elements?

Exactly. The green bits highlight
iron, and the blue bits highlight
lead.

The lead tells us that this is
glass.

And this is a very particular type
of glass working.

It's not typically Anglo-Saxon.

It's British. What you're doing is
you're taking out

the glass, grinding it up and
grinding into it the scrapings from
the inside of a crucible,

and then you bake it into the holes,
into the object, and it makes
enamel.

Enamel, like this,
was a local technique,

not something normally found in
continental Angle and Saxon culture.

So this is fascinating, because it
means that this is not an import

from the continent -
it's an imported idea,

it's an imported style, but it's
a locally made object. Exactly.

So the archaeology is telling us
that what looks typically
Anglo-Saxon

is actually much less
straightforward.

It means we can't just assume that
these skeletons belong to
Anglo-Saxon incomers.

Something more complicated
is going on.

Duncan wanted to understand where
the skeletons came from,

so he turned to another modern
technology - ancient DNA analysis.

Skeleton 82 turned out to be a close
match with Dutch and Danish genomes.

Her DNA fits the traditional idea of
what an Anglo-Saxon should be.

But skeleton one is genetically
closer to earlier Iron Age Britons.

Skeleton 96 is an even bigger
surprise,

with mixed Northern European
and native British ancestry.

The cemetery at Oakington shows that
there were some incomers then,

but they didn't suddenly replace
the Britons in the east -

they mixed with them over time.

This is not a period when people
would have known that they were

members of a particular
nation state.

Nation states didn't exist.

People didn't have passports -

they weren't citizens of one country
or another.

People would probably not have
thought of themselves as Britons or

Anglo-Saxons. They would probably
have thought of themselves in a much

more local way than that.

Jeffrey's account of Arthur
defending the ancient Britons

against an invading army
needs a rewrite.

The archaeology is telling us that
there wasn't a sudden huge influx of

Anglo-Saxons resulting in mass
conflict.

Instead, there was always contact
and migration.

So not invasion,
but settling and farming.

There are people coming across the
North Sea,

but they're not entirely replacing
the group that are here.

They're bringing new styles,
new ideas,

new ways of talking, new religions,

which are adding to the mix that's
already here.

It's not a full-scale, you know,
replacement of one culture by
another.

People are trading, intermarrying,
even swapping fashions.

We're seeing Britons adopting
Saxon-style brooches,

we're seeing Saxons adopting
Roman-style brooches.

These things wouldn't have been
these very clear-cut identities
that we ascribe to today.

It would have been much, much
more complex than that.

Eastern Britain is trading
with the Germanic world,
with the Saxon world,

with Scandinavia.
That's where their fashions,

that's where their trade
is being connected to.

In a time of great change, new
settlers were perhaps welcomed,

not seen as a threat.

People live in settlements -

whether you want to call them
villages or hamlets or farms -

going about their business,

collecting eggs from their chickens,
telling their children off,

trying to keep the pigs away from
the fields, and look after their
cattle,

doing the things that people do,

finding appropriate marriages
for their children.

This is a radically different view
of life after the Romans left
Britain

from that painted by the historical
sources.

Far from being conquered
or driven out,

the native Britons in the eastern
half of the country seem to have

absorbed the northern
European incomers,

as they'd been doing for centuries,
integrating over time.

I suppose if you think of a sense
like - take America, as an example,

you've got African-Americans,
Italian-Americans,

people are adding things to the
various pot that is America.

That's what's happening in Britain
in the fifth and sixth centuries.

And evidence of that melting pot can
still be detected in Britain today

in our modern DNA.

Researchers at the University of
Oxford collected DNA samples from

thousands of people across Britain
whose families had a long-standing

connection to their local area.

We tried to focus on individuals,

all of whose grandparents were born
in the same area, so in that sense,

their DNA had been there at least
for two generations,

and probably quite a long time
before that.

Peter's team mapped regional
variations in our 21st-century

genomes in greater detail
than ever before.

So what do we see on this map, then?

What do the different colours
and different shapes represent?

So each circle or square or triangle
represents one of the 2,000

individuals we sampled,

and then the combination of colour
and shape represent a genetic group.

What you see is there's one group in
Cornwall,

there's another group in Devon,

there's a large group across much
of central and southern England,

groups in South Wales, North Wales,

and so on as we look through the
country.

And what I find utterly
extraordinary about it is

that you've got all of these
different-coloured clusters,

which do seem to be quite localised,

and I would just have expected the
whole thing to be much more
homogenous.

It was one of those total wow
moments that we don't have too often

in our career, but it was really
exciting.

So why is there this great mass,
this great swathe across England,

of these red squares?
What does that represent?

I think the main thing it represents
is homogeneity.

That's fascinating, so we're looking
at a well-mixed area of Britain,

compared with not-so-well mixed,
historically?

Yes, these are areas that have
stayed relatively isolated,

and here, there's been rather more
movement.

Peter even has an explanation for
why this area has such well-mixed
DNA.

So when the Romans were here,
they were largely concentrated
in this area of England,

and one of the things they did was
to improve transportation -

Roman roads and so on.

So we think what probably happened
is that the Romans put down the

infrastructure, which meant that
in the 1,500 or 1,600
or 1,700 years since,

there's been rather more
movement of people in this area,
which homogenises the differences.

So these groups have remained
relatively intact and coherent,

whereas here, there's been so much
movement that it's mixed all those
genes up?

That's absolutely right.

But has Peter identified any genetic
evidence of the arrival of newcomers

in this big red area in the east of
the country?

Do you think this pattern of red
squares is explained by a massive

Anglo-Saxon invasion replacing
everything that was there before?

That's absolutely not the case.

What's interesting is that if you
take a typical person in central
and southern England,

that accounts for about 10%
of their DNA,

so we do see evidence of
the Anglo-Saxon migration -

I think clear evidence of that -

but it certainly wasn't the case
that they replaced existing
populations.

They contributed to the DNA of
modern English people,

but in a minority of the DNA that's
there now.

The genetic picture complements
the archaeology.

We're not looking at an Anglo-Saxon
invasion and takeover,

but ongoing migration.

They're coming in and mingling.

Correct, they're mingling,

and they probably didn't mingle
immediately. They probably came
in and had their own communities,

and then, over hundreds of years,
intermingled, and that DNA got
spread.

So we've got a clearer picture of
life in the east of Britain

during the Dark Ages, but what about
the west?

Why does Tintagel seem so special,

and why is King Arthur so strongly
connected with the place?

This is Fort Cumberland.

Built in the 18th century
to protect Portsmouth Docks,

it's now the home of Historic
England's archaeology labs.

Many of the finds from Tintagel
will end up here to be analysed.

As with all archaeology, the
excavation itself is
really just the start,

and it's the post-excavation
analysis when we really start to get
some answers.

There's a huge wealth of finds.

Here, we've got the pottery,
the glass, the animal bones,

the plant remains, and all the
specialists who can unlock their
secrets.

The fort is a scientific production
line,

turning the spoils of excavation
into information.

From the new excavations
at Tintagel,

over 500 litres of soil will be
filtered through flotation tanks.

And now, perhaps we have a chance of
filtering out the Arthur legend

from the archaeological facts.

Pottery specialist Maria Duggan
is one of the experts who's been

looking at clues hidden in the most
basic of items - pots and plates.

So this is our really characteristic
fineware form for that late fifth

century, early sixth century,
and we've got about

14 vessels of the same form,
all slightly different.

So that's a bowl, is it?
Yeah, it's a big dish,

so it's actually quite big.
It's probably about 30 centimetres.

The distinctive shape tells Maria
that this bowl is far from local.

So that's coming from Turkey?
Sort of western Turkey, yeah.

Yeah. It's come a long way.

This fragment of pot is connecting
Tintagel to what would then have

been the Eastern Roman or Byzantine
Empire.

And there are many hundreds more
pieces to examine.

The vast majority of the finds
are amphorae,

so they're storage vessels for
transport of wine or olive oil,

things like that. Yeah.

Also, other fineware, so we've got
some North African material,

and also from South West France,
so from the Bordeaux region.

Right. So it's coming in from all
over the place? Yep.

When you find a blooming great sherd
of Roman amphora -

and not just one sherd of amphora,
but buckets of the stuff -

that tells you that there is trade
and diplomacy and interaction,

and people are moving across the
European landscape and seascape.

The picture emerging shows that
Tintagel was well connected with

communities all over
the Mediterranean,
and along the Atlantic coasts.

It's a dangerous coastline,
but when it wasn't too stormy,

seagoing vessels could have come
into this bay,

bringing goods from the Eastern
Mediterranean, from North Africa,

from France and Spain, here to
Tintagel in the fifth and sixth

centuries, and going on beyond that.

The Tintagel that is being unearthed
was clearly an international port of
call.

So what would it have looked like in
its heyday?

Co-director of the site
James Gossip

has been making a detailed
survey of the dig.

OK, can we have a spot height on the
hearth, Martin?

Combining these measurements with
thousands of photographs creates a

perfect record of the new site.

So this is... This is
towards the sea, isn't it?

Yep, you can really see how

the buildings are part of a planned
design, with shared spaces.

The complex is laid out over
upper and lower terraces.

The other building has a
ten-metre-long room,

with a five-metre annexe.

There's a smaller building next
door, and a large open courtyard...

..all connected by a central
trackway.

This new data is used to create the
first 3D model

of the whole Tintagel site.

The complex may not look that
opulent to our eyes,

but it's among the most substantial
set of buildings

that's been found so far in
post-Roman south-west Britain.

But people weren't just sailing to
Tintagel to sell exotic goods.

Tintagel must have had
something worth buying.

For the people who were coming
up the Atlantic seaboard,

they would see Tintagel
in the distance -

that is the place they are aiming
for, that is their destination.

It's an important harbour that will

give them the resources
that they want.

Whoever controlled Tintagel
had access to a rare commodity,

in high demand across Europe.

This feels like a rural idyll,
a quiet country lane,

winding its way through beautiful,
ancient woods.

But, in fact, just over this bank
and hedge lies the secret

to Cornwall's wealth and power
in the Dark Ages.

This was a major production centre,
just 15 miles from Tintagel.

Exploited by the Romans,

it was still in business at the
beginning of the 20th century.

The secret to Cornwall's
success was tin.

What looks like a natural gorge
was actually once the massive

Mulberry Hill mine, 120 feet deep,
130 feet wide, and 900 feet long.

Cornwall's unique geology meant that
it was one of only three sources of

tin in Western Europe.

It's one of the reasons the Romans
came to Britain in the first place.

Whoever's been mining that stuff for
hundreds of years is going to get

rich, because the Mediterranean
needs those resources -

they will come to you to get them.

The Roman Empire needed
tin to make bronze...

..and even after the Romans left
Britain,

Europe still needed Cornish tin.

Whoever controls Tintagel is the
head of a large financial empire,

and Tintagel is one of the big
political players.

We mustn't think of them as being
on the margins of anything -

they are at the centre of a very
sort of dominant,

successful political world.

Trade in the west doesn't collapse
after the Romans leave.

The connections to the continent
remain strong,

but there's another astonishing side
to life at Dark Ages Tintagel.

The evidence emerges on the very
last day of the dig.

Jackie Nowakowski's team make the
most exciting discovery of all.

It's a stone used to make a
windowsill in building 94,

and someone's been writing on it.

There's at least three lines.
See there, an "a" with a hat on.

I think it's OK, actually.

I'll wrap it up as this.

It's very heavy, yeah.

This is an incredibly rare
and precious piece of evidence.

So this is it? This is it.

It's really clear. Yeah.

That's amazing.

The letters are scratched with a
sharp tool -

roughly, as if for practice.

It's not in its original position.

Probably only ever a trial piece,
anyway.

Just somebody practising
their inscription. Yeah.

So, presumably, once this was
created as a trial piece,

it wasn't that important any more,

and was incorporated into this wall
where we found it.

James deciphers the text.

There's a distinct flavour of Latin.

So the top line is here, possibly
"Tito", which could refer to Titus.

So that's a Roman name.

That's a Roman name. Yeah, popular
in the Roman and post-Roman world.

What does this say here?

We think this is perhaps "Budic".

B-U-D-I-C.

There's a word that's common in
Welsh, Breton and Cornish contexts.

So this isn't Latin?
That is not Latin, no.

That's Bretonic, or, you know, it's
the Cornish word form, basically.

It's something like, "From Titus to
Viridius, the son of Budic Tudor."

It looks like the inscription
for a monument.

This is a lovely A.
That's a really nice style.

This is the style of lettering that
they're using in manuscript at the

time. It might even have been
designed to be a deliberate
biblical connotation.

While it might look like a stylistic
flourish,

the design of the A suggests that
the writer may have been Christian.

And this coming out
of the Dark Ages,

when we used to think people were
living in hovels, scratching around,
illiterate.

Yeah, but actually created by a
literate Christian elite at
Tintagel.

I wonder who did it. I want to know.

Perhaps Titus.

That stone is just incredible,

and it has this almost mythical
origin story of its own.

They only discovered it on the last
day of excavating,

and it so nearly could have been
left in the ground.

And what we've got on it,
even though it's fragmentary,
is Latin words,

British words, people who are
literate, in the Dark Ages.

This new archaeology has revealed so
much about Tintagel and the people

who lived here.

And this evidence may also help
to explain another mystery -

a connection to Geoffrey of
Monmouth's King Arthur.

Geoffrey of Monmouth chose Tintagel
for a reason, and I suspect that was

because even by his time, it was
remembered as a site of critical

importance. This is where an
important individual lived -

a powerful individual lived.

So I think that's a reflection
of the importance of that site.

Its political dominance in the fifth
and sixth centuries AD is what

Geoffrey of Monmouth is tying into.

And that, in a way,

is what we're talking about
when we're discussing Arthur.

He is the literary creation based
on that kind of primary evidence.

Geoffrey's Arthur was a myth -

a construct created from fragments
of a half-remembered past.

Basically, I think we have to say
that Geoffrey of Monmouth is making
it up.

You can think about it as being
essentially the creation

of origin myths
for the English people.

He doesn't exist.

He's a literary invention,

a romantic hero who embodies the
ideal of kingship and not a real

historical figure.

But I think I've found something
much more interesting -

and that's what archaeology is
showing us -

the real Britain of the fifth
and sixth centuries.

Whether or not he was real,
I think, is irrelevant.

It's the period itself that is
essential.

That's what draws archaeologists
and historians to it.

It's so important for understanding
what made Britain and what makes us

what we are today.

The biggest revolution in Dark Age
archaeology has been this
recognition

that Britain is fully connected to
the continent all the way through.

One of the things that we've always
struggled with in thinking about the

past is this concept that we're
divided by water rather than united
by it.

The archaeology forces us
to change perspective.

The maritime connections are
absolutely crucial here.

Tintagel is connected down to France
and Spain and up to Wales,

Scotland and Ireland.

It's right at the centre of this
Atlantic trading network.

But in the east of the country, the
connections are to Northern Europe.

All the archaeological evidence
points to a divided Britain.

Not fighting on a frontier,

but with distinct cultures in the
west and the east that reflect their

connections across the seas.

It's an economic divide
between two halves of Britain,

two distinct trade outlooks.

It's not a picture of conflict.

The two halves of Britain are
looking in different directions -

going outwards rather than clashing
in the middle.

I think if you look at the sea
instead of the land,

and the rivers instead of the land,

I think you have a much better
chance of understanding where people
are coming from.

At Tintagel, the excavations are
complete.

I came here to understand what
really happened in Dark Ages
Britain,

and somewhere amongst the
archaeology and genetics,
history and myth,

a new truth is emerging.

We can't treat archaeology
as being completely factual,

neither can we treat history as
being completely fantastical.

There are elements in there that all
feed into one another and will help

us to understand the past,

and you've got to try and master all
these things to really get a clear

understanding of what's going on,

especially something like
the fifth or sixth century.

But the myth of King
Arthur lives on.

Arthur is a fairy story who might
have been a real person.

It's a myth.
But it's such a wonderful myth.

It's still something that resonates
today, because we all sort of need

an heroic character to defend
what we think is right and good,

and it's Arthur who
sort of fills that void.