00:00All the hillforts were abandoned in any kind of defensive sense, but ironically it's then
00:04re-fortified by the Romano-Britons as the empire starts to collapse around the 3rd century,
00:08maybe early 4th century or so around 300 AD. They re-fortify this so it's a refuge because
00:13of Saxon raiders, Irish raiders, general chaos. And then at some point, from about 400 to 600,
00:19you get so-called Saxons being buried in the top, and that's two of those graves we're going for.
00:24Most of them excavated in the 1890s, and though some incredible grave goods were recovered,
00:30mostly glassware, we've got the unique high-down goblet in Worthing Museum's collection,
00:34for example we had spearheads, shield bosses, which is the metal piece there,
00:38but it's a mixture of male, female, and juvenile burials, so it's a whole community,
00:43they begin to be buried within this old hillfort. So what we see today really is a much genudied
00:51and worn down version of the Iron Age come later Roman defences, but there would have been people
00:56living in there originally, and there has been evidence of that, these big postholes and roundhouses,
01:01you can get up to 15, 20 people living in each one. But the last real human activity,
01:06except for the windmill, John Oliver's time, is the burial of these so-called Saxons.
01:12We've done quite a lot of genetic work on them in the lead up to this over the last six years
01:15with the Francis Cricket Institute in London. We now know, based on some of the grave goods
01:19and the genetics from a handful of individuals, we're slowly getting the results back as part
01:23of a wider 1,000 skeletal research project from across Britain. Actually most of them seem to be
01:29Frankish, which is another Germanic tribe, but they have the exact same glassware from here is found
01:35in Normandy, in cemeteries on the coast there, and in Kent, so it seems to be a connection with Kent.
01:40So if you hark back to your school days and think Angles, Saxons and Dukes, well this might be
01:44more of a Jewtish cemetery than a Saxon one per se. It's just because it was found in the 1890s,
01:51Saxons were all the rage, because our King and Queen were German, so of course the Saxons were
01:55the, you know, they're the good guys. But we're hopefully going to try and find out a bit more
02:00about that in the years to come.
02:02And this is the kind of thing we're finding, because it is a plough site, this here is a lovely
02:06example of early Iron Age pottery. They didn't have the wheel, so they're actually putting
02:11tiny inclusions of broken flint and shell in there to hold it together when they're tempering.
02:15This is medieval, you can see the glaze on there. And oyster shells, which you often associate
02:19with the Romans, well they were very popular in the Victorian period, because a massive oyster bed
02:23was found off Worthing in the 1850s and it crashed the oyster prices for about three years
02:27and then they were stripped out. So this could be Roman, it could be medieval, you do not find
02:31seafood being eaten in the Iron Age or the Bronze Age. For whatever reason, it might have been
02:35some kind of taboo, and these smaller pieces are probably Roman.
02:38Turns out he's not Iron Age, he is late Saxon, he's from 750 AD. So 150 years after this
02:43stopped being used, because people were Christianised and they began to be buried at Angmering and
02:47Ferry and Gory Cemetery. He's buried 150 years later, he's got a first cousin, buried at King's
02:53North Cemetery in Kent, which is a link up, and he died of the plague. So there's a question,
02:58was he a pagan, like a pagan holdout, and his wishes after death were granted and he was buried
03:04up with his ancestors on the hill rather than the churchyard? Is it because he had the plague
03:09and people were like, you're not being buried in the churchyard? Or was he a deviant burial,
03:14which means he had done a crime, and so he wasn't allowed to be buried in the churchyard
03:17and he just happened to have a plague?
03:18So we had to get special permission from English Heritage to excavate here. This is our original
03:25geophys results. Those red boxes are those trees behind you, and that line of trees behind
03:31the trees. Now it's difficult to see, there's a couple of rectangular dark marks there, which
03:36are these two here. So all of the graves here are facing east-west, so even though they are
03:41supposed to be Saxons, and pagans, they do have graves, they're buried in the west, and they're
03:46facing east, or they're heading to the west. So we think, based on, when it's very noisy
03:51means World War II radar station, previous excavations. This isn't very noisy at all.
03:56So we're in this small pocket here today, trying to get down to the point where, you know,
04:01with chalk archaeology, it's easy because they're white, and they're bedrock, and then around
04:06that is the nice rectum, which is what we hope turns up, which all, you know, is great. So
04:11we're not quite there yet. As I say, we've got our osteoarchia just coming tomorrow, so
04:15we're hoping we can get this stripped back at least down to another level. No pressure,
04:19guys, no pressure. And we did find a vertical encounter, perhaps a mild encounter, we're
04:26finding it's articulated through the range, it's a counter. And we do expect to come down,
04:32this is why we're kind of from both ends of this point, because there's probably that
04:35longer grave there, which is probably in this side of the trench, the scubbier one, might
04:40just be outside it, but we only have the capacity to dig away.
04:44He's excavated either side of the wall. He wasn't just finding Roman activity or later on
04:48the 50th century, he was also finding sacks and burials in this outer bank. So there's
04:53the potential he might find more of that here. The guys in this trench have been finding
04:59weeds, mostly for a fairer poppies, which is a very soft-friendly poppies that circulate
05:04and actually been drilled through. And that could be anything from late stone-age fruit
05:08in the early age. So we need to analyse a bit more. Have you had any more finds coming
05:12out, any pottery, anything like that? Pottery, we had a big slab of that, which is big for
05:17us here. What, with gritty? Yes, yes. So that would probably be early iron age. So that could
05:22link into the original occupation or the real occupation of this. I don't think we have any features yet,
05:27and we might not be down to that level. So this was a trench just to see what we might
05:34do. And we've had some last slides. We've only been at some sides of the
05:39side of the front. We still don't have any sign of the ditch, do we? No, there's something
05:42slightly different here, maybe, but I'm not sure. Yeah, so we might not.
05:46We're also trying to have to work out why there's no defensive ditch behind that. So this
05:55ditch has been seen and filled, probably by medieval farming, possibly. And that's why
05:59we're finding things, you know, broken. As you can see, from the fines here, we've got
06:02bits of debris, which is that large a little bit, looks Roman underneath. And you do have
06:06a barf house like the server down the hill, and we've seen Romans with some trench food.
06:10So they're either robbing out from that trench, at that barf house, and we were out of use
06:14from our food MCAD, or there are other Roman buildings here that we're just not aware of.
06:17We have to require a metal-adjecting survey, which has seen people in the high-vis slowly
06:21making their way up the hill over the next few weeks. We had a Roman, broken, and a Roman
06:26ring as well. And we've had lots of horrible clues to it.
06:30So that's what we feed as a bronze eight barrow. So 2,500 B.C.
06:36there would be someone who would be cremated, and then buried inside that mountain.
06:42Then later on, you might have extra burial being inserted into the side, and you think
06:46that's going to get in the finger bones. The finger bones came from just over here.
06:50And what we need to find to prove it to barrow, not just to cut the finger bones,
06:54we need to find the ditch. And there should be a search for the ditch going round it.
06:57When that was originally dug out, all of that soil had got on the mountain.
07:01So the ditch has obviously become infilled every time, and the mound has been damaged by farming.
07:06Well, if you have a look at the documentation of World War II,
07:08and the mound has been caught behind this down here.
07:11It's very likely to drive the sand.
07:13So it's not the kind of feature you'd normally associate to find,
07:24because people aren't living on the bank.
07:26But we're going to be looking as we get down to this area here.
07:29Just before we get down to the chalk, on Friday, we're going to see that
07:34we're going to be doing something called OSL analysis.
07:39It's a pretty new kind of technology.
07:41They will cover themselves in a large blacktop all in, and get a tube out,
07:45and push it into the chalk, and take it off to the lab,
07:48and then they can work out the last time the sun touched that chalk.
07:53So that's how we can date the bottom of the ditch for the lynch ship.
07:56So we've got to be careful as we get into there,
07:59because we don't want to get through the chalk chalk.
08:01No.
08:02Yeah.
08:03Nice vines?
08:04Yeah, we've found about 70 today.
08:06About 140 years ago, I think.
08:08A good mixture of pottery, flakes, vapents.
08:13That's pretty good.
08:14Let's take it.
08:15Let's take it.
08:16Let's take it.
08:17Let's take it.
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