The Archaeological Hunt For An Anglo-Saxon Leper Cemetery

this is digging for Britain the program which brings you this year's most outstanding new archaeology all year in hundreds of digs across the UK teams have been uncovering new archaeological Clues which help us to tell our story [Applause] peace we'll be looking at highlights from all the digs with in-depth analysis from archaeologists who are going to extraordinary length to uncover our history in a way that only archaeology can and they've been out there filming themselves to make sure that we were there for every moment of discovery it's in perfect condition amazing and they'll be joining us back here at the Dorset County Museum to help us make sense of what the new finds actually mean tonight we're in the west of England as we meet army veterans on the hunt for Anglo-Saxon Warriors we investigate Britain's earliest leprosy Hospital changing what we know about how sufferers might have been treated and we reveal a lost Roman masterpiece [Music] we're in Dorchester home to the Dorset County Museum established in 1845 and famous for housing the study and notebooks of one of England's most well-loved writers Thomas [Music] Hardy but it's also home to some of our most important Treasures like the chial Rings these Bronze Age gold TS discovered by metal [Music] detectorists and the Langton Matra axes the largest horde of Bronze Age axes ever discovered in Britain and which some believe were made as a gift to the Gods in our first dig just 50 miles away from the museum more extraordinary Bronze Age remains are coming to light at Barrow Clump in the heart of Salsbury plain over the last three years archaeologists from the ministry of Defense who owns the land have been Excavating a Bronze Age burial site this ancient site dates back to over 5,000 years ago but archaeologists have been called in now because it's in danger Badgers are burrowing through the soil destroying the archaeology so the team must hurry to recover and record as much as possible and after only two days on site their work pays off with an important Discovery a Bronze Age burial earn say fragile that its temporary protection is a bucket [Music] there you go it's really really exciting this you can see the the the rim of the pot all coming around here and within it bits of collapse pot but all this burnt material which we presume is uh is burnt human bone and we'll we'll lift it out as a block and we'll excavate that back in the lab but it's it's a fantastic [Music] find having gently excavated to the ear Osteo archaeologist Jacqueline McKinley carefully lifts the collar well doing a sponge cake I lift that up can you see all that lovely cord decoration on the inside of the brilliant isn't it no sooner has the first NN been rescued but as the second vessel is found this much larger n has been buried upside down it is moving isn't it I'm just worried after a tense hour the N comes out in one piece carefully bandaged it's actually a food vessel Bronze Age food vessel which I know looks like a a bandaged head at the moment the the reason that bandage is there is because it's slightly elasticated so it gives support to the vessel and stops stops IT falling apart while I'm getting things from inside it and Jackie you're in the process of looking at this material I think from the first earn the ear with the cord marking on it that's right this is this was actually quite Dam badly damaged on site it was only about sort of 10 cmets left so I decided in this case to excavate what was inside it on site and today actually is the first time I've seen this now it's been washed and cleaned up again and at this point what can you tell about this bone well what I've done is i' I've pulled out some very useful piece of bone like for instance um this here which is part of the super orbit which goes about there yeah and there's a a few other pieces around here um like for instance this one which is from there yeah part of yeah part the zymatic arch um the skull is very useful one in that you have very identif if iable easily identifiable pieces of bone which you only have either have one or a pair of so they're very useful for doing minimum numbers of individuals but also a lot of the skull is very Diagnostic in terms of the sexing the individual the adult individual and what about the sex of this individual is this an adult male or female looking at the general size and robusticity I would say it's most likely to be male and do you think these were high status individuals that were treated in this way and buried in the barrows status well you know in the past the the antiquarians always thought that everybody was a chief it was always Chieftain it was always Chieftain always men always Chieftain who were buried in here so this would have been a king it would have been a king yes undoubtedly or a prince or something but when you actually look at the individuals you find in these in these places they they are a mix of individuals you could get males females children and one of the things that I have noticed when I've been looking at material from these barrows is that you have quite a large number of of females with infants or young children now if you think about your community and what matters to a community one of the important things there is the future and your future is your children so really the children and the mother the mother that produces the children could be seen as very important to the community so it's not really surprising that they're quite often chosen to be buried in these positions but these ears aren't the only things which make this dig special in a unique project known as operation Nightingale the mod archaeologists are working closely with injured soldiers for whom this is vital therapy this pioneering scheme is introducing veteran Armed Forces Personnel to the practice of archaeology operation nigh Andale is really a recovery opportunity some of them will we want to having had um maybe a tough operational tour we want to just come out and experience um a very benign atmosphere you can see how it's quite cathartic in in the broadest sense that you can come out here be with your friends and just get to understand a little bit about the the past Landscapes of which over which you've trained over many years for many men like former Rifleman Kenny Kendrick it's been a lifesaver what happened to me is I I suffered a mental breakdown while over in in Germany and he given me a whole new lece of Life a new career I left the Army and I've become an archaeologist fulltime and once I start digging it's very hard to stop if I'm not told when to take a break when to have a drink when to have a dinner then I I'll probably dig until it gets dark in fact the disciplines of the military and archaeology are not such strange bedfellows anyone who's watched the news footage from Afghanistan or Iraq has seen people military figures looking for IEDs and things like that um with with a metal detector critical skill in the military key skill on an archaeological site do that area again there's almost a symbiotic relationship in many ways there are so many crossover skills and it's quite an inspirational thing for the archaeologist amongst us um to see that and working together as as a team and it's a team thing that's crucial as its name suggests Barrow Clump is a barrow or burial mind so it's no surprise that the team uncovers skeletons see was a very large bloke these FAS are truly huge and his feet are the toe bones I've never seen anything so big as burial after burial appears they soon realize they're unearthing an Anglo-Saxon Cemetery dating from the 6th Century ad just a few meters away from the original Bronze Age burial site there huge progress on site we started off with a um one or two grave cuts that we could see and over the weeks we've now exposed at least 12 there we go like this spearhead and shield boss the metal center of a shield which would have protected the hand the original Shield could have been up to a meter in [Music] diameter these are warriors [Music] Graves but with so many on site the team are beginning to wonder why one of the theories that was put forward to me by one of the soldiers on the project was that the outside of the ditch seemed to have a quite a large concentration of males with shields and thought that this was perhaps something like a an equivalent in death of the Saxon Shield wall protecting those buried inside the monument which I think is a A really lovely idea so it is interesting to have all those Anglo-Saxon burials alongside the Bronze Age ones but is it unusual no there's quite there's quite a lot of evidence that Anglo-Saxons would choose what were obvious um important particularly Mory important landscape features in which to bury their own dead these would have been very obvious features at that time the Mounds would have been quite quite obvious there and people would have recognized that they were very important to people in the past and in a way the same way as in the Bronze Age they were probably almost staking a claim in that landscape by producing these these Mounds the Anglo-Saxons by coming in and burying their dead there may also been staking a claim to the same land well in spite of a growing number of warrior Graves at Barry Clump there's still one thing that's eluding the team chap in front of us has between his knees the remnants of an iron shield boss and that's one of several we've now had over the site to the left of the individual G poking out above the grave is the socket of a spear so all those things that you'd expect perhaps to find with a warrior what we're missing from that and something you see referred to throughout um Saxon Saxon poetry as a sword swords were prized by the Saxons but are extremely rare finds Richard's greatest hope is that they'll find one but despite unearthing 75 Graves the prize is proving elusive however the Badgers burrowing on this site have left a trail that leads the team right to this year's prize find as we were going down we had a lot of badger packing material so we weren't sure whether they would have Disturbed any remains that were there as it happens we do have a badger run that does run right along the side and has damaged to skeleton but the rest of it is very well preserved and we're very lucky in the fact that we've got a sword lying alongside it so this one's got the big three really and it's got the spearhead the shield boss and then a sword on side now all they have to do is get the sword out an extremely delicate task carried out by Lynn won conservator with wesix archaeology so a sword which is sitting right on the top arm bone um which is coming out in fragments I'm going to try and get the whole lot up in one go if the sword survives excavation the trick will be to find out if its pattern welded this was a complicated method of forging a blade to produce a top class sword a clue perhaps to the man who was buried with it we're thrilled to be joined by Richard and some of his colleagues from the medical Squadron here this evening and we're especially lucky because we're going to x-ray the sword in real time right here in the museum but before we do that Richard what can you tell us about it we're really excited about this because this was the only sword we had and it was found by one of the soldiers of the project so really really exciting and what we really want to know is to see whether it is one of those Fabulous High status weapons that's patent welded and um really part of the whole mythology of anglosaxon England of a the sword with its name and that sort of thing it's it's a powerful item and this came out of the ground in one piece didn't it it did and it was a nervous moment having this thing lifted Excalibur light from the ground somebody take it the two hands there you go it's not touching very well so o that'ss min some bad so yes a real thing of beauty and then the sword being such an important artifact in the 6th Century this was really quite a thrill to find it so what we've got I mean this is the handle end obviously and is there bits of copper along that's right you've got the remnants of the Scabbard and perhaps you can make out um little traces of mineralized wood which is the the fabric of the Scabbard and these are the Gilded copper alloy mounts at the side of the Scabbard same with the the top area might have some decorations x-ray will hopefully show us that and then perhaps you can see some elements of the horn handle that was was here in in its sixth Century guys so that's been mineralized so is there an is there an iron core running through the middle yeah that again will pick up on the X-ray and have you cleaned it up at all or is this just as it came out of the ground this is subject to immediate stabilization so it doesn't deteriorate and then the full conservation will happen after the event brilliant well I think we should probably let Sergeant mcdel and Sergeant Barnett um get them with the x-rays we need to clear while they do that yeah [Music] wow look at that that's come beautifully hasn't it Richard well this is fantastic because you can see all the things we really wanted to see of course the the thing that you really think of a sword in this period is whether it's patent welded or not that was the real question we wanted to answer and the answer is yes it is which is fantastic so how can you tell that then can you see all these little sort of zigzags in here can you see there's a sort of crisscross element right in the middle of the the the blade up here um that's really indicative of these these three bars of iron that have been twisted and twisted to form well it's a debate at the moment as whether that's for strength or for for decoration but it certainly would have been very beautiful a bit like um a herring you know one of these fish in beautiful decorated thing and we see that in samurai swords as well it's exactly the same thing because it's a strengthening thing and you can see how perhaps making out the white lines going down the sword can you all see that you see that that's the actual edge of the sword where this pattern welding goes on and then the steel edges are on the side there so that's when it starts to Bevel out towards the custom that's right and so you've got um a thing of beauty but a thing with a real purpose to it these aren't just prestigious objects for no reason they're also things that can actually kill that's great to be able to see all that without actually having to start taking that it's fabulous it's a non-intrusive way of finding an awful lot of um data and information about the artifact without without rendering it fragile and vulnerable really okay so who was the man who had this artifact then that's that's a very good question um he had not only this he had a shield with him he had a spear and he had a knife so he's got the more or less the panoply of arms going into the grave he's right in the most important part of the burial man so he must have been somebody with a degree of power and wealth um this isn't an everyday item as I said it's the only one we've had out of the 75 burials so he's an important man the soldiers believe that the owner of this sword might have been a local king or Warrior Chief who was buried surrounded by the burials of other Warriors and placed in the ground with his spear shield and sword this find close to a Bronze Age Cemetery contributes both to our understanding of anglo-saxon burials and shows how they reused earlier monuments for their cemeteries but there's another group of Warrior dead here at the Dorset Museum who are Central to a long running debate for years historians have argued whether the Romans invaded Britain or staged a peaceful takeover so Rebecca maen Castle is famous because it's a really beautiful hillford but also for the cemetery that's up there exactly there is what has become known as the War Cemetery at the Eastern end of the Hill Fort yeah and these are two of the skeletons from the cemetery yeah these two are very very special young chaps because they are the ones that contain the most unique evidence that we have that enables us to pin this Cemetery down to ad43 so let's have a look at these two then I mean I can immediately see something which looks a bit suspicious yes which is and it's got an arrow pointing to it as I it's very helpful which is this um this bolt here oh I'm just going to move this vertebrae out so that we can have a good look at it look at that well that's amazing it is I mean and it's actually embedded into the bones so it's passed through that individual and lodged yeah in in their vertebrae is that a typical Roman weapon there it is it's a classic uh Roman ballista bolt and that's how we can date these burials so then so we know that although the individuals um the pottery that they're buried with is late Iron Age that absolutely dates them to the Roman Invasion because none of those weapons are here before the Romans get here so it's coming in like this right through the guts through the kidney in fact and going grazing the the vertebra and coming right to the back here so that's enough to kill somebody yeah absolutely but there there is more so very obviously um this young chap here has got a rather large hole in his head so that's where he's been bashed on the head and then these lines you only get the fracture lines running off in these directions if it's something that's happened at the time of death and then it kind of gets worse for this guy because then this very Little Nick here and that's out of the back of his mandible and that's where someone with a sword then try to cut his head off right okay and then they've um had another go because he's then got this blow which is actually peeled off the um bone on his mandible here nasty yeah so they've tried to cut his head off twice it's really being hacked hasn't he I mean this is this is vicious this is violent and it's not yeah it's not just one piece of evidence of violence I mean you know you know shocking or at it at its worst it is very very shocking so the Roman army are going above and beyond what is necessary to kill someone but we know that when they are conquering new territories they really did go and decimate people these skeletons graphically reveal one side of the story of the Romans arrival in Britain but in 2011 I visited a site in North Dorset which told a different story the dur trigers big dig project for several years archaeologists have been digging at winterborn Kingston the Dig originally started as an Iron Age exploration looking back almost 2,000 years to when members of the durot trigz tribe lived and farmed here before the Romans arrived well this survey of the site which is a magnetic survey shows us the uh Iron Age ditched enclosure we call a banjo enclosure that's because it superficially resembles a banjo with the body and the neck and do you think this was a defensive enclosure not at all not not at all this is this is uh effectively an undefended Farmstead but as the team continued the Dig they started to turn up more and more signs of romanization influencing the lives of the local inhabitants so we've also got pieces of chicken and of course you know we're familiar with with chicken today but in the late Iron Age this is an exotic animal this is coming in from the Roman world presumbly they're selling their produce they're selling their grain and they're getting these kind of luxury food items in return this particular fragment is a handle of an amp a large sort of um storage vessel that would have stood up to the height of an adult uh and we can tell by the fabric and by the shape that it's from Spain and it would have probably held wine that's lovely it is so we can imagine you know they're eating chicken they're drinking wine they're they're sort of plugged into the Mediterranean world so for these Iron Age Farmers life with the Romans appears to have been a peaceful coexistence in stark contrast to the massacre at Maiden castle and you don't see evidence of a really abrupt transition at your side do you no I mean you can't really tell when the the Romans arve because there's small amounts of Roman material coming in um in the first century BC as we go on the first 2 third Century ad there's still equivalent amounts of of Roman Pottery it's all very lowlevel stuff there's no sudden break when the Romans arrive there's no change there's no dramatic increase in Roman artifacts and we're seeing that right the way across Dorset I think like Native American societies they're picking and choosing a few few things that help facilitate their lifestyle but there's no major change in settlement or religion going on it takes 300 years after the invasion before we start seeing real significant Roman material like villain and temples being created there's a big time lag between the arrival of Romans and their their final sort of evolution of Roman culture I think the main thing is is that the picture that we're used to is too simple isn't it it's much more complex it is you get this black and white idea the Romans arrive those who they don't kill end up living in Villas and towns straight away it it takes three centuries for that kind of um Roman culture to really take a hold in in this part of Britain so you've been digging at this site now Mars for quite a few seasons how's the picture been changing over the years it's been changing quite a lot because we started out with uh an Iron Age settlement we're looking at that transition from Iron Age to Roman and what we're finding is is evidence going on a good sort of three centuries afterwards so we're doing a geophysical survey around the whole area but we're finding more evidence of of later Roman material and I think a couple of your more Plucky students filmed this year's dig for us didn't they absolutely folded we're in day three in uh trench one at the top end of the site uh and the leaning back has revealed exactly what we're hoping to find really which is we've got this very sort of large it's about 15 M across Square inclosure um defined by a very sort of thin ditch uh and the interior of which there there's a whole series of small pits uh and other features it could be a shrine it could be a temple it could be none of the above it could be some kind of anal agricultural enclosure but until we start going down into it we're not going to know but it's a very nice distinct feature and it fits beautifully P trench and once again because it's dug down in chalk it it shows up fantastically miles and his students are hoping that this find will yield clues about the people who lived here were they farmers who adopted Roman ways or were they Romans from elsewhere in the [Music] Empire okay so the beginning of uh day seven and we're quite excited that inside the square enclosure in trench one there's four four rectangular cuts which um look extremely like Graves this is the team's first major clue as to who might have lived here so we just started cleaning up um these rectangular cuts and they have actually thankfully started turning up into into Graves we were wondering to begin with because these were East West aligned where they were going to turn out to be uh Christian burials but the heads are at the Eastern end if they were Christian you expect them to be at the other end so facing um sunrise um on the day of judgment we've got a skull coming up here and we've also got just part of a pottery vessel coming up at the other end so these are unlikely to be Christian Graves and neither do they appear to be Iron Age as in this area those tend to take the form of a crouched burial the expectation is that they are Roman because in 2013 just in the next field they excavated a l L fourth Century Roman villa after another day's digging the team begin to find strong evidence of a connection as more skeletons start to appear you can see just here in this particular grave we've got not only we got one coffin nail coming up here so we know that these individuals are all in coffins which is probably another indicator that they're not early Christian which tend to be buried in shrouds but we've also got a spindle World which is another little object they're taking with them into the Afterlife and quite a lot of um late Roman female burials have spindle worlds buried with them don't know whether that's an activity they would have done in life and one of the other Cuts that's been excavated we've had hob Nails coming up the little nails that are hammered into sandals and R Footwear suggesting that they're going into the grave wearing almost military style boots so at the moment we can say that these are Roman they're almost certainly late Roman and the provisional evidence at present suggests they are contemporary with the villa which is of course what we're hoping for uh to try and find a link with Villa occupants and the house they actually occupied just a day later miles and the team uncover three female and two male skeletons was the end of day nine uh things are are well go extremely well um um the square Barrow in trench one is turning out rapidly to become a what appears to be a family moel we've now got at least five graves in there what looks like one immature one sort of juvenile character and four adults uh none of which appear to be Christian all of which at the moment seem to have indication of grave Goods it was traditional for Romans to bury Goods with their dead like Footwear or Pottery like this bold they found in one of the female Graves hopefully we start to get all those out and get a better idea of their date still hoping that they are the occupiers of of the Villa that we excavated last year if they can get an accurate date for the pot it will give the team an even better idea of who these people [Music] were so Miles when do these burials that you've just been finding date to well that's that's the question the the pot that comes out with them um this particular vessel we know is made sometime about 370 380 ad but the question is how old is it at the time it's gone into the grave yeah that's lovely it's got imprinted pattern on it it's got this little rosette pattern all the way around but you can see it it's very worn the the slips worn off and it originally had a base it has had a a foot on it which is broken off and it's been worn smooth and given it may have taken 40 50 60 years before it's actually ended up in the grave so we're seeing people who have been buried in a Roman style tradition but they haven't got access to high status Roman Goods I suspect given that we've only got a few bit of spindle worlds we've got fragments of pottery there's not a lot of Roman status Goods going in with these Graves I think we're dealing with a a sub Roman population this is the people who are sort of traditionally grubbing around in the remains of of their Roman world so do you think this is after the collapse of the Roman Empire then I think it is I think we are dealing with the last people who are still have a a remembrance of a Roman world they're still Clinging On to one or two items that linked them back to that past but they've no longer working within a functioning Roman Administration so I think we're really dealing with people who are probably dying and being buried probably sometime in in the sort of mid um fifth century so we' probably got 450s uh ads it's probably our cutof point for the time that these people are going into the into their graves and there is a theory that the bodies at Castle are the natives who are taking one last stand against the Romans and is it possible that the bodies you've got and you're Excavating are their descendants hundreds of years later that would be fantastic if if if we could prove that obviously um but if we got good DNA samples from both then we might be able to say that these are the descendants from the irh inhabitants and that would be something rather spectacular because we still don't know yet whether is the people who live in the Villas are the descendants of the indigenous population or whether they are first generation or second generation migrants from another part of the the Roman Empire the Romano Britain who lived and died in The Villa offer Clues to the poverty of the Twilight world after the Roman army left in 410 AD but less than 100 miles away at chedworth another dig is unexpectedly revealing the glories of Roman Britain in its Heyday first discovered by the victorians 150 years ago chedworth is a late 4th Century Courtyard Villa complex in August a team of archaeologists from The National Trust started a twoe dig to find out more about the Villa layout Unfortunately they had very little recorded information to go on the last person to dig here was Sir Ian Richmond professor of archaeology at Oxford University whose notes were lost after his death in in 1965 All That Remains of his work are some Modern concrete path borders which the team believe Richmond laid down to outline a second century Roman bath house but they were in for a surprise as Martin pworth explains when we started our excavation here we really thought that Ian Richmond had dug everything includ the wall lines where he put his concrete and also um the bits in between which we call the islands so we were quite surprised when we lifted the turf and um we found bits of of tesser coming up it's a mosaic coming up and there were no records of any mosaics in any of these areas between the walls the Tessy or tile pieces are revealing what might be a border in red cream and blue but whether anything else survives of the central pattern is unclear there are areas that going to be big holes in it there's going to be areas where the Mosaic have been lost and cow's working over here she's got an edge against the wall but lots of loose Tessy there in A Worn area away from the wall so we just need to gradually uncover and show what lies within these walls there's also something else puzzling the team they had thought they were working on a series of bars in separate rooms the other strange thing is that we've taken the up and we've cleaned underneath the concrete and we're not finding walls yet which is quite peculiar pretty soon it becomes clear they're no longer dealing with a bath house we uh knew from the beginning when we first lifted the turf that there was going to be Mosaic underneath here but now we can see it's part of one great long Mosaic in fact uh we now believe it's part of the grand reception hall of the Villa so rather than having five or six little bits of different rooms of mosaic all this Mosaic joins up into one big pattern the team make other finds which give more of an idea of the decoration of the Villa we found bits of ball plaster on top of the top so and in that we've got patterns in red blue and white green and so we must think of this floor as being part of something really Grand emerging from the rubble an extraordinary huge artwork and an insight into the wealth and power of the Romano British so if we were looking at in terms of did this person consider themselves Roman were they presenting their life as being part of the Great Roman Empire and the whole link to Classic classical civilization well there surely must be someone really showing off their wealth and their link to Rome and really presenting themselves as Romans the team had started the Dig thinking they were looking for a second century bath house and they finished up with a showstopping grand reception hall I think it's amazing how much you can find by going back and revisiting existing archaeological sites where you think you know everything already yeah and find some incredible mosaics John how do those mosaics compare to these incredible mosaics that we're sitting on right here well we're very lucky in inors it that we have an awful lot of mosaics over 60 have been found in the county but in the County Museum here we have 12 that have been relocated from around the county including this one from derngate Street in the middle of Dorchester and what have we got here I mean is that a serpent over there yeah we've got serpents and we've got drinking vessels the the serpents represent rebirth and that's bass's drinking vessel so it's good luck and celebration so what can these mosaics tell us about the people who who owned them or who owned the Villas where they were well the complexity of them and their intricacy suggests they were extremely wealthy uh also there are things in them that tell us that they want to be part of the wider Roman culture their use of Mythology their their imagery for the Roman gods and legends all suggests that they are they really want to identify with Rome so were they locals made good or were they Roman officials who'd moved in well that's going to be the million dooll question isn't it I think it's my own Instinct would be it's going to be a combination of the local population who have done well from Roman occupation from Trading with the Romans and also those officials from Rome who have want very grand houses uh in in what was a very important part of Roman Britain so these beautiful and intricate mosaics tell us of a vanished Romano British world when at least some in the west enjoyed the riches of empire for the past seven years a team has been Excavating one of the earliest leprosy hospitals near Winchester dating back almost a thousand years and what they've been finding at St Mary mlin is really helping to change our ideas about leprosy in the Middle Ages just a mile from Winchester City Center St Mary M was once a busy complex of buildings but now nothing remains above ground the last recorded medieval building on this site was a late 15th Century Arms house but archaeologists from the University of Winchester have been slowly peeling back an extremely rare medical [Music] history as the Dig unfolds the team is filming it themselves and in charge is Chief investigator Simon Ry is the north wall of that infirmary running across the SES so I'm inside the medieval infirmary now and as I step outside um into this area here we have evidence of what we think may be the wall of a possible um cloer last year we found whole pots metal object evidence for per uh Medical Practice but more importantly the team have uncovered 20 Graves the condition of the skeletons leads them to believe that there was a leprosy hospital here dating back to 1070 it's the earliest excavated leprosy Hospital in Britain the cemetery holds about 85% of individuals with with Leprosy men um women children and babies it's the highest sample we have from any British site in the Middle Ages it was thought that those with Leprosy were unclean and sinful and that the disease was a punishment from God in 2011 I went to look at the skeletons they'd uncovered for myself and see the full shocking extent of the disease with osteologist Dr Katie Tucker now this is Extreme isn't it yeah this is um suppose you don't know if it's the wrong word to use the best example of leprosy that we have on the site yeah you can see the massive amounts of bone loss yeah I mean totally lost the front of the nose um you actually see these are the sockets here for the for the first MERS so all the bone has been lost back to the first MERS the first MERS that is just horrific isn't it I mean look at that you've lost all of the front of the upper jaw here and the bottom of the the nasal cavity and the hard pallet of course has gone as well yeah so it probably would have been quite difficult for this individual to eat without choking yeah it's quite a shocking disease isn't it I mean I find it shocking to look at it in a in a skeleton and I think uh it's not surprising that it was it carried such a stigma with it I mean they would have looked alien really um especially with probably with the facial lesions as well in the soft tissue and um probably would have needed help eating maybe because well they may have even had difficulty actually picking things up because they started to get loss of feeling in their hands yeah so I think they probably would have needed quite a lot of help um during the last few years of their life some accounts suggest that those suffering from leprosy would have been outcasts and not given the same treatment as ordinary citizens in life or in death but back at St Mary mlin the team believes that the graves themselves reveal a very different story what we can see here is um a grave that's been well cut cut into the chalk and for perori it's tapered down towards the feet end uh there's a head Niche there to hold the head of the individual and around the grave you can see the lip which would hold um a lid or a ledger on top of it you can see that all these graves are well separated they've been marked as well so what we're seeing here is a certain level of um care and attention that's gone into um into building these Graves it's clear that these were no Hasty burials in this religious Hospital people with Leprosy seem to have been treated with respect and buried with care the archaeologists also believe that one particular grave they uncovered back in 2011 supports this idea this skeleton of a man was discovered buried with a scollop shell a traditional Pilgrim badge that he may have carried back from one of the most famous pilgrimage sites in the world Santiago de compostella in Spain Simon believes that this man proves that medieval leprosy sufferers could be treated with respect and dignity and not always with revulsion this is the shell that we just saw in the VT the pilgrims shell that's right this this um I mean this wonderful artifact was from an individual of mature years he had early stage leprosy clearly took this with him to the grave as a sort of way of proving that he' done this arduous pilgrimage to Santiago the cistella but I think more widely this badge tells us about the state of the hospital I mean here is a man of religious sensitivity wealth perhaps and the means to go on a pilgrim pilgrimage and here he is buried uh in a community of leprosy sufferers so I this really challenges this view that we have that LE leprosy hospitals were um somehow excluded from society the community were were Outcast this sort of thing but do you think he could have been excluded when he developed the outward signs of leprosy I mean he's there in the hospital he's buried within the hospital cemetery and not not with his own Community I think when we when we look at the the archaeology as a whole what we have is from well appoint we think well appointed Timber buildings originally substantial post holes on the site we have a chapel we have a well-ordered cemetery we also got evidence for medical provision on one one example all this put together I think tells us that this site wasn't a site of of outcast there was these were people had a a certain level of or status I think because there is the traditional view the medieval view that leprosy was somehow a sinful disease but this doesn't appear to the case it's a very complex issue I think where we have this perhaps belief today that leprosy suffers were were sinful were were Outcast this has only recently been challenged by certain revisionist historians and and also our work at St Mary Morin in in Winchester so it's really important then because it's showing that these people were looked after certainly and leprosy is a disease that affects people today places such as India and Brazil among many other countries there there's only about a quarter of a million U new case of leprosy identified every year and leprosy is still stigmatized in these countries so part of what we're doing is really challenging this this this stigma [Music] for the Romans the Far West was Frontier Country and in the past we believ that they got no further than exitor but a dig at ipple pen in Devon is literally pushing the boundaries of Roman bretan in the west I visited this site three years ago when it was just a tiny collection of Graves and a Roman Road now it's turning into something much more intriguing it looks like it's an adult female and you can see it's got quite a High um straight forehead which is a feature on females and quite small arches you can feel on your self here you've got quite quite low ridges and superal ridge um so I think it's an adult female um got half of the mandible here which is this part we've got this side and all of her teeth and you can see they're very worn so all the enamel has actually come off and we've got the dentine exposed the team finds no evidence of the cause of death in this skeleton but this woman was probably about 30 years old when she died after some careful excavation the first ipple pen resident is off to the University of exitor for radiocarbon dating so it's the end of day eight and kind of quite an emotional moment lifting the first skull of the of the site and um always got to remember you got to be really respectful that these people were real human beings that it's just quite amazing to think that they lived here on this site uh 2,000 years ago and how different the world must have been [Music] then by day 12 the team have uncovered another nine burials and over 2,000 small fines all adding evidenced their theory that this was a Roman settlement although some of the objects are a bit of a mystery got quite an interesting find here um not sure exactly what it is but I've got a feeling that it might be a cosmetic case um with makeup inside we immediately wrapped it in bandages and packaged it up to be conserved and looked at so we'll know more um at a later date exactly precisely what it is but what's perhaps the team's biggest clue to a Roman presence is the position of the graves even though it's partially cut into the edge of the road it is still respecting generally the line of the road it's a roadside burial it's deliberately placed at the side of the road as burials were forbidden in Roman cities the dead were buried on the outskirts often along the roadside just as the team is finding here so it's day 18 on our excavations aten we've no a total of 16 skeletons so it's quite clear that what we're dealing with here is a Romano British Cemetery which is very [Music] exciting it's amazing to see the way this site is developing because when I visited and we stood on that hill in ipple pen all there was was a road and a couple of roadside burials and now you've got a whole Cemetery but what about the road itself where does it go don't know yet I suspect probably from exitor and out towards South Devon um but it's just really fascinating we really didn't expect to find um such a well preserved Roman Road so far west of exitor and we're still only scratching the surface but this year's excavations have been a real Revelation they really have and it was just a an example of some of the absolutely lovely stuff that we had this is what was being excavated um in the VT and is it a powder compact we don't know we still don't know come on um it this is a real mystery artifact actually um experts have looked at it at the British museum um and there's a possibility that it might be a lead weight that's been set into a case into a copper aloy case but I'm not sure why you would do that unless perhaps it was a weight that maybe belonged to your grandfather and it was a a kind of keepsake or something um so the Jew is still out on this mystery artifact we had hoped that it would be a ladies compact because it's really nice to actually see the the female Set Side of of Roman Britain and and a beautiful BR beautiful brooch and you can see here it's got amazing enamel set into the cells there and it's even intact with its catch plate and its pin and its spring I it's such a lovely example which dates from probably about 75 to 175 ad is that a tiny bead then yeah we've got beads we've got coins we've got hair pins we got mystery objects and Danny you came in to our studio here in Dy Museum incredibly exciting um you told us you've got a radiocarbon DAT yes and we took the latest burial which is dug into the roadside ditch of the of the Roman rods so it's the latest one that we we've excavated so far and the radiocarbon results that have come back as um 7th to eth Century really so it's a long running Cemetery then absolutely yeah yeah it's just absolutely stunning so we're we we're not just dealing with first century Roman stuff going going through to the 4th Century Roman um Romano British it's carrying on well into the post Roman period And this is so important for Devon and Cornwall that is fascinating and just remember that you heard it here first we are rewriting the history of the Romans and the Dark Ages in the southwest here on digging for Britain from the Anglo-Saxon sword to the cemetery rewriting the history of leprosy the West has provided us with a richly woven tapestry of our past [Music]