Day Three at The Highdown Big Dig, uncovering history at Highdown Hill in Worthing

SussexWorld

Delving deeper into history at the Highdown Big Dig! The team is hard at work, carefully excavating and documenting the artefacts that tell the story of this ancient site. Discover what treasures and historical insights are being brought to light.  What secrets will be uncovered next? Stay tuned to find out!  #Archaeology #HighdownHill #Worthing #BigDig

Transcript

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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