Digging For Britain

Roman Britain gives up some of its mysteries as Professor Roberts investigates the remains of 97 babies found near the Thames River, visits a newly discovered town in rural Devon, and examines a cult figure that has been buried for more than one and a half millennia beneath a Roman fort.

Roberts travels back to Britain during the time of the Vikings: to their earliest settlements in the Outer Hebrides, to excavations underway at their capital of York, and to their final stronghold in the remote Orkney Islands. She takes a look at some of the most celebrated finds, including the carved-ivory Lewis Chessmen.

With no written history, only archaeology can tell us what Britain was like before the Romans. Roberts examines the clues: two Hebridean skeletons known as the Cladh Mummies; timber from a huge prehistoric monument hidden in the Norfolk mud; and an Iron Age settlement beneath the Roman town of Silchester, where two British chieftains may have taken a stand against the invaders.

Roberts comes face-to-face with the dark side of Britain’s Stone Age inhabitants, who left behind them evidence of cannibalism and the ritual use of human skulls. But have the Neanderthals been wrongly maligned? And why might the secrets of Stonehenge lie not on Salisbury Plain where it stands, but in the remote hills of Wales?