Digging for Britain Catch up, Series 12: 6. Lost Mansions and Impaled Prisoners on BBC 4

Digging for Britain

Series 12: 6. Lost Mansions and Impaled Prisoners

This episode showcases the best archaeology found in the south of the UK. \n\nFirst, we travel to the Killerton estate in Devon, where the National Trust are hunting for remains of a manor house buried somewhere on the grounds. The house played a pivotal part in the English Civil War and even hosted parliamentarian leader Oliver Cromwell as he laid siege to the city of Exeter. Historian Yasmin Khan takes a deep dive into the records of its former owners, the Aclands, to understand the lasting impact the civil war had on those that joined the losing side. \n\nAhead of an office development in central London, on the banks of a now underground river, the Fleet, archaeologists find one of the best-preserved Roman cemeteries ever discovered. Whole wooden coffins and even a rare wooden funeral bed have survived, allowing them to reconstruct Roman funerary practices like never before. \n\nThen, in a groundbreaking UK first, Romani archaeologist John Henry Phillips leads a team investigating the site of a 'camping compound' in the New Forest, a 20th-century attempt by local government to force travelling communities to settle down. The Roma may be one of the most persecuted groups in history, but this dig uncovers a rich, unique culture that remained alive and well, despite trying times, from the pottery they used to the music they listened to. \n\nOn the Arne peninsula beside Poole Harbour, archaeologists discover the mass production site for black-burnished ware, a pottery type so popular in Britain in the first three centuries that it has been dubbed 'Roman Tupperware'. \n\nStuart Prior, Digging for Britain’s resident experimental archaeologist, puts the evidence from the Arne Moor site into practice as he attempts to unlock the secrets of making this pottery for the very first time. \n\nAnd finally, MOD archaeologist Richard Osgood returns to Rat Island as yet more bones from its packed cemetery site erode out of the cliff face and into the sea. \n\nThe remains give Richard and his team a unique opportunity to investigate the lives and deaths of those unfortunate to end up on Georgian prison hulks, the 18th-century solution to the prison overcrowding made famous in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. \n\nThis time, the team make a grisly discovery that reveals an even darker side to this already brutal punishment system.

Source: BBC 4

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