Knave Hill, Leicestershire
First screened 24 February 2008

What they found

Ambitious target
There are only eight fully excavated Anglo-Saxon settlements in the whole of Britain. So Time Team's hopes of uncovering another one, despite the evidence provided by more than 350 pieces of pottery found on the site during fieldwalking, were always somewhat ambitious.

Indeed, a number of previous attempts to locate Saxon structures had ended in ignominious failure. These included excavations at Llangorst, back in the 1995 series; at Hartlepool, in the 2000 series, where seven trenches in search of an Anglo-Saxon nunnery found no structures; and, most recently, at Eastry, in the 2006 series, where 14 trenches in search of a Kentish king produced no evidence of settlement.

Why are Anglo-Saxon settlements so difficult to find? As Mick Aston explains: 'At that time, there's not as much pottery around; in some parts of the country there's none at all. The whole material culture doesn't have as much metalwork. And of course the buildings are made of timber, so they rot away and disappear.'

Hall houses and grub huts
The Knave Hill site was to produce some mixed results. An alignment of post holes, dated by Saxon pottery finds, was uncovered early on day one in the first trench. Visible from dark stains in the ground, they formed part of a large number of post holes and would once have supported the structure of an Anglo-Saxon hall house, in which an extended family group within a settlement would have lived.

Later in the dig, Time Team digger Raksha Dave and helpers from the local archaeological society found a second hall house in another trench. Their excavations uncovered an area of burning, indicating the location of a possible hearth within the house. Other finds included more Saxon pottery, an Anglo-Saxon knife, such as would have been commonly carried for everyday use, and a large bone needle that may have been used in making fishing nets.

Less successful was the identification of a stain in the ground as a 'grub hut' (from the German grubbenhaus), a characteristic type of Saxon structure built over a pit, with a sunken floor or cellar. In fact, it turned out to be only about six inches deep, with a Roman ditch beneath. Whatever it was, it wasn't a grub hut.

Iron Age
Many of the other features on the site turned out to be Iron Age rather than Anglo-Saxon. These included an enclosure ditch, or similar, clearly visible from the geophysics survey results; a very large pottery storage vessel; and a bread oven excavated by Matt Williams and Helen Geake.

'Both the Anglo-Saxons and Iron-Age people were attracted to the same sorts of sites,' explains Mick Aston. 'This is because you had the same sort of subsistence economy in both the Iron Age and Saxon periods – in contrast with the Roman and medieval. So it's very common to make finds from the two periods on the same sites.'

Phil's DNA
The discovery from the Knave Hill programme that may have attracted the most interest, however, was that concerning Phil Harding's ancestors. Phil had a sample of his DNA taken, and Professor Bryan Sykes of Oxford Ancestors came along to explain what it revealed.

On his mother's side, Phil was found to be the descendant of a woman who lived 20,000 years ago in the Dordogne. These people moved north following the herds of big game, and Bryan Sykes told Phil that his maternal ancestors may well have been among the first people to come to Britain after the last ice age. On his father's side, his ancestry is part of what Bryan described as the 'Celtic bedrock' that makes up perhaps four fifths of the genetic inheritance of the British Isles.

Phil was delighted with the results, to put it mildly.

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