(suspenseful music) ♪ (Tori) Human bones can hide the most shocking of secrets.

(Carla, gasping) Oh my God!

She's been killed.

(Jackie) She's been killed violently, with a sword.

(Tori) Stories of slaughter, sacrifice, and disease.

(woman) Success was built on the broken bodies of children like these.

♪ (Tori) Crimes covered up for hundreds or even thousands of years.

Somebody could have committed this murder the jumped ship and never brought to justice.

(Tori) I'm Dr. Tori Herridge, and I'm leading a team examining some of the U.K.'s most mysterious archaeological burial sites.

There are so many unanswered questions.

Let's cut to the chase.

Is it a fertility ritual?

With bones as our only witnesses, mortuary technician Carla Valentine will help identify what happened to the bodies.

To me, this is the most fascinating find.

(Tori) While archaeologist Raksha Dave gathers crucial evidence from key experts.

(Raksha) A line of small children's heads, that's... that's absolutely bonkers.

(Tori) Across the length and breadth of the U.K., we'll reveal the way our forebears lived, loved, and died.

(Carla) What was in her head?

What were her thoughts and her dreams and her plans for the future?

-People long forgotten... -Makes you wonder -what brought her here.

-...until now.

♪ (eerie music) ♪ Cliffsend.

The Isle of Thanet.

Hard to believe, but beneath this estate lies one of Britain's most exciting historical discoveries.

Back in 2004, when these houses were still drawings on an architect's plan, and this whole area was a farmer's field, archaeologists were called in.

What they found was an extraordinary complex of structures, a deep, oval-shaped pit, and a disturbing collection of bones.

Human bones.

But who were these people and what happened to them?

♪ (Carla) So, where exactly was the excavation?

(Tori) Well, they were excavating in Kent, specifically this northeastern corner here, on a place called the Isle of Thanet.

But not an island today, I hasten to add.

They were around here, between Ramsgate and Sandwich, at a place called Cliffsend.

That's where they were excavating.

(electronic music) Joining the team is osteoarchaeologist Jackie McKinley.

-Okay.

-Okay?

(Tori) An expert in bone analysis, she was part of the original excavation.

(Tori) Looking at this, I'm thinking, what on earth did you find?

(chuckling) The task in front of her was colossal.

(Carla) So what sort of time period are we actually -looking at here?

-This is the Late Bronze Age, so it's 9th to 11th century B.C.

-3,000 years ago.

-It is about 3,000 years ago, basically.

We have 23 individuals in total from the site.

Most of them were adults.

We had rather more females than males.

Overall, there were 12 females to 8 males.

The really interesting ones were the six in situ ones we had associated with the pit, five of which were in the base, and this is one of those.

(suspenseful music) ♪ -Who is she?

-Well, this is the eldest of the individuals that we had.

She was the primary deposit, the first to be deposited in the base of this pit -and buried there.

-And when you say she's the eldest, you mean by age.

-By age, yeah.

-How old was she, roughly?

(Jackie) She was certainly over 55 years of age.

It's actually quite difficult to age people when they get to my kind of age, because you're going on degenerative processes.

-Arthritis, that sort of thing.

-Exactly, exactly.

If you look at that one, this is a neck vertebra, you can see the breakdown in the surface there.

You've got pitting.

(Carla) These holes, are they pitting?

(Jackie) You've got little holes in there, you've got new bone around the edges, but-- (Carla) That's quite ragged, isn't it?

It looks like it would sort of grate against itself.

(Jackie) This level of wear really is a very old individual that this has happened to.

A classic thing to look at would be tooth wear, and if you look up here, you can see there's an incredible amount of wear to these teeth.

Particularly these front teeth.

Can you see?

All the enamel is worn away.

So those give me an idea.

(Carla) So we've got these indications of old age.

Are we saying she died of old age, then?

(Jackie) Usually, we can't tell what people die of.

There aren't many acute diseases that affect the bone.

-Right.

-But in this instance, I know exactly how she died.

And for that, we need to look at the skull.

(Carla, gasping) Oh my God!

(sinister music) -She's been killed.

-She's been killed quite violently with a sword.

♪ (Tori) Why, then, does this happen?

Why is she killed?

Could the scene of the crime be relevant?

Can we even assume the woman died where she's found, on the Isle of Thanet?

♪ -Hi, Nick.

-Hi, Raksha, good to meet you!

-Good to meet you too.

-One of my favorite locations in the world, The British Library.

(Raksha) Do you spend a lot of time in here?

(Nick) I've always loved being surrounded by books.

(electronic music) (Raksha) Nick, I can see on the map here it says Isle of Thanet, but to me, it's obviously -part of the mainland.

-Your site is in one of the most fascinating parts of the British coast.

It's had extreme change since the ice melted 12,000 years ago and sea levels rose.

It was probably cut off from the mainland 6,000 years ago, perhaps.

(Raksha) So how far back do we have to go to actually see the Isle of Thanet on a map?

(mysterious music) Wow!

Look at that!

It's absolutely stunning.

-It's like a work of art.

-It's a work of art, and also a work of extraordinary cartography.

This is from the 1570s, Saxton's Tudor map of Kent.

So this is one of the last maps that you actually get to see the Isle of Thanet here completely separate from the mainland there, and what's so fascinating about it is that you can see the Wantsum Channel as a navigable waterway.

At its widest, it was probably about 4,000 meters, so that's pretty huge, and it was about 20 meters deep.

So, easily big enough for seagoing ships to pass through.

And its significance came about because, once you'd got the North Sea up here and the English Channel down here meeting, you had ferocious tidal currents passing around North Foreland here, and the swells off here could be enormous.

(Raksha) Oh, right, so that part's -not navigable.

-Very dangerous.

So if you're in a small open boat, as you would have been in the Bronze Age, and you were caught by an onshore wind and a swell here, you'd had it.

So this channel here was a very sneaky shortcut.

It allowed you to coast up here, cut inland, away from these dangerous swells, and emerge in the safety of the Thames Estuary.

It was a back door to interior Britain.

♪ These white chalk cliffs would have been immensely significant to your Late Bronze Age seafarers, because as you were approaching land from the Channel, you'd be looking across the horizon for the sight of this splash of white chalk that told you where the entrance to the Channel was.

(Raksha) I can almost imagine.

You're on this tiny boat, and you can just see these beacons of white.

♪ (Nick) White chalk was always very significant, and it had been for thousands of years.

In the Late Bronze Age, it would have been a way mark, a sea mark, to guide you in bad weather into this channel.

♪ (Raksha) I'd like to think that Thanet is -a really special place.

-Well, perhaps you can read something into the name, Thanet.

The Romans certainly thought that the island was important, and they knew it as Thanatos, and perhaps they inherited that from the Greeks, -the Greek... -Oh!

So Thanatos, -the Greek god of death.

-Exactly, yeah.

So perhaps this river, the Wantsum Channel, was a kind of River Styx, and you took your departed across the water to Thanet.

♪ (Tori) But is our elderly woman taken there after her death, or is she killed on the island?

-Are we talking murder?

-No, "murder" is a loaded term, because it suggests certain things.

But it was a third party who dispatched this individual.

I suspect she might have been kneeling, with her assailant behind her, 'cause these clear cut marks in the back of the skull-- there's one there, there's another one going across there.

You've got a third one here, and there is actually a fourth one across here.

It's just coming from behind, from the left, coming down onto the skull.

These two here first, then I think this one.

If you look at the way both the cut and the shockwaves have gone, that looks to be the third cut.

This blow here, it's almost like they did a final one -just as she was going... -So actually, fall forward, and then miss between blows, maybe, so you've got sort of (exclaiming).

Maybe she sort of slumps or turns sideways, and then, as she's going down, final one just finished her off.

But that would have killed her regardless.

(Jackie) Yes.

So with that first blow, she wouldn't have really been that aware of what was going on.

(dark music) The use of a sword is really quite intriguing, on an elderly woman.

These were really very elite weapons.

In fact, there are some arguments that they were actually just for show.

-They were so high-status.

-Ceremonial.

-Ceremonial things.

-So you might say ceremonial weapons if this was some kind of... -ceremonial killing?

-Exactly.

Particularly when you look at the kind of wounds she's got.

She's not defended herself, she's not gone like this to try and defend herself.

-You know that because...?

-There's no marks on the arms.

But this--this is a very ritualistic type of death.

-So, a sacrifice.

-I think that is likely, that this is-- this is a sacrificial victim.

-Voluntary?

-Likely to be, I think.

Not necessarily.

I feel that she probably-- I mean, it's my personal feeling that she probably was a willing victim to give herself for the good of her community.

(electronic music) (Carla) Why wasn't she decapitated?

I mean, wouldn't that be a much more efficient way to dispatch someone for a sacrifice?

(Jackie) It's an act of desecration to take a head off.

If this was supposed to be somebody who was mediating with the afterworld or the ancestors or the gods, you're not going to separate the body.

You want them to go into the ground whole so that they can fulfill that purpose that you're giving to them.

(Carla) And when you say "go into the ground," we're all seeing a skeleton, but presumably, she was a fleshy human being when she went in, -is that right?

-Yeah.

To do that, to get them arranged in the position they had, it would either have to be done before rigor mortis sets in or after rigor mortis has gone off.

So the chances are this individual went in quite soon after death.

-Maybe still warm.

-They may well have still been warm.

(eerie music) The intriguing feature of this burial was that in this area here, around the pelvic area, that's where we found the remains of these two neonatal lambs.

-Newborn lambs.

-Newborn lambs, that appear to have been placed in this woman's lap.

-That's unusual, then.

-It certainly unusual in my experience.

I've never come across this before.

So this wasn't somebody who was just thrown casually in.

It's not like an execution where somebody's thrown into a pit and that's it.

This is an arrangement, a deliberate arrangement of this body.

(Tori) What is going on with this arm?

Because to me, it looks like she's pointing.

(Jackie) That index finger is fully extended right down to the tip of the finger, to her fingernail, pointing at something.

♪ -What's that?

-Now, that is the most intriguing and interesting thing about--I mean, talk about weird.

It's a piece of chalk that she is holding up to her face.

♪ I'm still not sure what is going on here at all.

But what we do is, we take the evidence and then we try and deduce things from that evidence.

The deliberation in this.

This was meant to say something.

♪ (Tori) It's got to be a few years -since you were last here.

-It's about 13 years-- yes, it is.

(Tori) I'm visiting Thanet and the housing estate where a group of bodies was discovered, dating back almost 3,000 years.

This is where our elderly woman was found.

♪ This tree, that's more than -13 years old.

-It is, yes.

That's the single thing that was here--still here from the time that we did the excavation.

-That's gotta be helpful.

-It is, yeah.

-You can use that to work out-- -Where everything was, yes, exactly.

-What was here?

-Well, where we're standing now was part of an Early Bronze Age barrow cemetery.

(Tori) So when you say barrows, I think of burial mounds, is that right?

-Yes, exactly.

-Early Bronze Age burial.

-About 2000 B.C.

-2000 B.C., so 4,000 years ago.

What would that have looked like?

(Matt) Well, there was a line of three of them.

They were about 20 meters in diameter.

Each of them about 20 meters in diameter.

-On high ground.

-Yes.

-Some of them in a line.

-Yes.

You'd have been able to see them from quite a distance.

It would have looked odd.

Located on this ridgetop for precisely that reason.

♪ (Tori) Four thousand years ago, these huge earthwork barrows were used to house and commune with the dead.

Then, 1,000 years later, the people who dug the pit arrive, and they build new structures in amongst the old.

-Where is it, roughly?

-Basically, we're standing in the central enclosure about now.

(Tori) When you say "central enclosure," we've fast-forwarded a thousand years from the Early Bronze Age barrows-- -We have.

-But they're still here.

-Yes.

-We'd still get to see them, right, wouldn't we?

That line there of three of them, and one over there and one behind us, one over there.

We're standing slap-bang -in the center.

-That's right.

In what we call the central enclosure.

(Tori) What were they using the enclosure for?

Were they living here?

Was it a place to have -houses within?

-No.

What they seemed to be is gathering places.

-How do you know that?

-They're full of rubbish, for want of a better word.

♪ Inside both of the central enclosure and the northern enclosure, there were really large quantities of broken pottery with food residues burnt on them, butchered animal bones, quern-stones from the preparation of... (Tori) Grinding flour and things to make bread.

Lots and lots of rubbish associated with the preparation and consumption of food.

(Tori) Sounds like the remnants of a great big feast.

-Exactly.

-Food stuff, yeah?

Central enclosure was, like, how big, would you have said?

Oh...30 meters?

(Tori) A 30-meter-wide enclosure could hold -quite a lot of people.

-Indeed, quite a lot of people, and these things were happening over a period of decades, people coming back here time and again to have these ceremonies.

(Tori) What do you think the ceremonies were for?

(Matt) They're to do with the dead.

♪ People are coming here to carry out whatever kind of spiritual observances they did in association with the disposal of dead people.

(Tori) About 50 meters to the northeast is the place where our sacrificed woman is laid to rest: the pit.

♪ When that woman was buried in that pit, what would this area have looked like?

(Matt) Looking back over that way, you'd see the enclosures, you'd see the bank of the central enclosure, beyond them, the mounds of the Early Bronze Age barrows, if they were big enough.

You wouldn't be able to see what was going on inside those enclosures, because they'd be too far upslope from you.

But from up there, you'd be able to see what was happening down here.

(suspenseful music) ♪ (Tori) It sends proper shudders through me, because you just picture her, her body, and she's pointing.

She's at the bottom of this slope, but she's pointing up.

You just get this overwhelming feeling that you are slap-bang in the center of this landscape -of the dead.

-Absolutely you are, yeah.

(Tori shudders, Matt chuckles) (tense electronic music) (Tori) Matt said that she was pointing towards a barrow.

(Jackie) If we look at the plan and actually draw a line, we're roughly going from there to there.

♪ (Tori) So she was pointing down here, clipping through that central enclosure, and ending up here, -on the Early Bronze Age barrow.

-That's what it looks like.

There would have been a connection between those people who were buried here before and the choice of this as a place of burial.

Late Bronze Age activity is here because somebody else was here first, and what they are trying to do is connect with the people that were here before.

(Tori) But are these people simply looking back to the past, or are they equally concerned about the future?

(Jackie) Does this start of this development, of the idea of spring, fertility-- -How do you know it's spring?

-Spring because of your lambs.

-Ah!

Spring lambs.

-We've already got a pair of lambs that we've got with the elderly lady.

-They were in her lap, right?

-They were in her lap.

But they aren't the only pair.

Before she was buried in that pit, there were a few deposits made in the base of it, which included a pair of neonatal lambs.

And that could have been made about a year before she even went in there.

And possibly every single spring, there were lambs sacrificed as a sort of offering, maybe.

(Jackie) Potentially, but there's something different about this year, when that woman went in there with those lambs.

(suspenseful music) ♪ (Tori) What we can say about life in Late Bronze Age Britain is of course limited.

We do know that people lived in roundhouses with their cattle, enclosed by banks and ditches.

We also know it was a very superstitious age, and that people who came to Britain were struck by the strangeness of the country.

Can we learn anything from what they saw and what they thought?

♪ (Raksha) So, John, Thanet.

It'd be really interesting to know what the perceptions were of people who actually saw this mysterious isle.

(John) There's a record by a writer called Procopius in the 6th century A.D. who refers to an island of Brittia off the continental coast, where the ghosts of the dead assemble on the shore and are taken across to an island of dead.

Now, this seems to be taking on board earlier traditions associated with Britain.

(waves crashing) ♪ When Caesar invades Britain in 55 and 54 B.C., there's a perception in Roman eyes of Britain as this kind of otherworldly, strange, mystical location.

(flames roaring) There's a sense that Britain is a sacred island, associated with the other world and with death.

♪ There's a kind of aura surrounding Britain that would have been in the minds of anyone who was crossing the Channel.

(Raksha) So it's kind of like almost seen as this otherworldly place at the end of the known world, -I suppose.

-It is, yeah.

The island, in Roman eyes, is associated especially with the Druidic priesthood and their bloody sacrifices.

♪ And you would see it shining white.

The White Cliffs of Dover extend all the way to Thanet, and white was associated with sort of otherworldly powers in ancient myths.

So the shining white of the cliffs almost emphasizes the kind of deathly aspect of the island, and the fact that the woman is holding this in front of her face, part of these chalk cliffs, is clearly not coincidental.

It is all posed and it all has meaning.

We just have to unpick that meaning.

♪ (Tori) The elderly woman isn't the only person buried in the pit.

There are four other bodies.

(Carla) So what about the other individuals?

-Were these all sacrificed?

-That's an interesting question.

There's no direct evidence that they were deliberately killed.

But of course, there are many ways that you could kill somebody without leaving any marks on the bone.

For instance, you could suffocate them, you could strangle them.

-Poison.

-You could poison them.

-Damage the soft tissue.

-Yeah.

If you were to stab somebody in the stomach, you know, you didn't go all the way through, then you wouldn't necessarily hit any of the bones.

So it's only things that would affect the bone that I would be able to pick up the evidence for.

And in this case, there isn't anything.

-Who is this individual?

-It was a child, probably between the ages of 9 and 11 years of age.

(Carla) So we could be looking at a natural death, as opposed to a sacrifice, just going by -the visual evidence, really.

-And yet, the fact that he or she was in the pit with the elderly woman, that also seems to be evidence that this was a special burial.

♪ He or she was positioned right next to the old woman.

There's clearly a connection between the two.

Possibly, they are the same sacrificial event.

Well, you certainly can't discount that, and there is strong, like they say, circumstantial evidence suggests that that is the case.

But it's all very odd, it is a very unusual deposit.

(Tori) It really does seem like the more we learn about Thanet, the stranger it becomes.

♪ What do we know so far?

We have a Late Bronze Age site, so probably between 1000 and 800 B.C.

An elderly female, and it looks like she was sacrificed.

There is a juvenile, possibly female.

(mysterious music) ♪ But who else is in this pit?

(Jackie) Over here, we've got our elderly lady.

You can see she's laying there, her legs going up this way.

That's the child we've just looked at that's laid crouched, placed over her arm.

These are the remains of a teenage girl, about 17 to 18 years of age.

And the other child we have is actually over here.

About the same age, about 9 to 11 years old.

Slightly displaced from the rest of the group.

♪ (Tori) What is that?

-That there?

-Right, okay.

That is a very large piece of Bronze Age pottery with the rim here and the base here.

(Tori) It does look like she's looking at it, right?

(Jackie) You are quite right, you are quite right.

I don't think that's accidental.

You can see this child was laid quite tightly crouched on that side, like that.

That means their head would have been facing this way.

(Carla) So somebody has deliberately pointed that skull to face that bowl.

♪ More likely when the soft tissues have actually decomposed a bit.

(Jackie) Yeah.

I think you would have to have had a certain amount of decomposition, because it just would not have moved that far.

(Tori) So that's four of the five individuals in the pit identified.

But what about the fifth?

(Jackie) That is our one adult male.

♪ And what we've got here are body parts.

So you've got the skull and the neck vertebra with the left thorax, the left set of ribs still attached, and it looks like a bundle, it looks like it was either tied together or possibly in a bag before it was deposited.

♪ We've got an animal's skull.

It looks like a cow skull.

(Jackie) It is.

Well, it's not just the skull.

If you look, we've actually got the first cervical-- the first neck vertebra and the mandible, so this went in as a head, it wasn't just dry bone.

And that individual there was resting up against that cattle head.

♪ This sacrificial deposit was made to be seen.

♪ (Tori) Just to add to the confusion, higher up in the pit, in the soil used to fill it in, other bones are found.

Separate skulls and thigh bones, disarticulated bones, as archaeologists call them.

What's the story with them?

(Jackie) What we're seeing here is the next stage in a sequence, a breakdown of the body.

♪ (Tori) Jackie has sent away samples of these bones for DNA testing.

We await the results.

Meanwhile, Raksha has traveled to Salisbury to meet Peter Marshall, a specialist in radiocarbon dating.

Are the bones from higher up in the pit also Late Bronze Age?

(suspenseful music) (Peter) So the two individuals that we have on the table here beside us... (Raksha) This is the disarticulated bits of bone that we found -at the top of the pit.

-That's right.

Those people died considerably earlier than the people who are buried beneath them.

(Raksha) Hang on.

How can you have people who've died earlier on top and people who died later on the bottom?

The further you dig down, the older things are supposed to get, -aren't they?

-Well, that normally would hold true.

But for the disarticulated people, they look as though they were buried somewhere else, were dug up and brought here-- and obviously, one of the things we don't know is how far that was-- and then laid to rest on top.

♪ (Tori) Did the results shock you?

(Jackie) I was particularly surprised at the date we got from this skull here, which is that of a mature adult female of about 35 to 45 years of age, which turned out to be earlier than that of the elderly female buried at the bottom of the pit.

♪ (Tori) Just to get this straight in my head, at some point in the past, before our old lady died, this woman, this individual here, she died, and then, the bones here, like her skull, have been deliberately selected and deliberately placed where they were after, maybe a long time after, -the individual originally died.

-Yeah.

It's been kept over time.

Where it's been kept is a different issue, but it's been kept over time.

And the other thing about this one is, can you see here-- if I can turn it around, you can see it-- a slight area of polishing?

It's almost like somebody's been rubbing it, feeling it, and has just slightly polished that surface.

So that suggests to me that there's been handling.

(Tori) This is a weird idea.

♪ We think this skull is brought to Thanet from somewhere else.

And Raksha's heard about the site in North East Scotland where there's evidence of bodies and bones being moved around in the Late Bronze Age.

(jet roars) ♪ (Raksha) The coastline here -is just spectacular.

-It is an amazing part of the world to come to.

(Raksha) Wait, wait, wait.

You want me to go down there?

(Lindsey) This is how we get onto the beach.

I'll show you how to do it, but we just have to be very careful.

-Follow me.

-Cor blimey, Lindsey!

(Lindsey) It's quite a tricky place to get to.

(chuckling) (Raksha) So my first...hello.

-You go down on the rope.

-I have, actually.

(Lindsey) We often refer to the dead in later prehistoric Britain as being elusive.

(Raksha) Ah!

Yes!

You down?

We're down, we're down, we're down!

(Lindsey) We knew that there were lots of people living in settlements, but once they die, they become virtually invisible to us.

And so, to find sites like this is really significant and really unusual.

(eerie music) ♪ (Raksha) Well, look at this!

(Lindsey) It's pretty spectacular, isn't it?

(Raksha) It's like a cathedral in here.

(Lindsey) It is much bigger than you'd expect.

(Raksha) It's really interesting, isn't it, because the name is spelled "Covesea," but you say it's pronounced "Cowsee," is that right?

(Lindsey) We think that actually the origins of that word come from the fact that this stretch of land would have been considered very much a causeway in the past.

And during prehistory, it was actually a huge sea loch called the Loch of Spynie.

So you'd have to have sailed or waded through bog and fenland just to get here.

(Raksha) Just us walking down this morning was really difficult, so I can't really imagine carrying dead people on your back.

That's gotta be quite arduous, really, hasn't it?

(Lindsey) It certainly doesn't suggest any practical reason for bringing the dead here, and certainly points to something a lot more symbolic or spiritually significant about this exact location.

♪ (Tori) Covesea's a good fit for comparison with Thanet.

Both isolated, both cut off by the sea.

But can the bones they found here help us understand the Thanet bones?

(Raksha) So what did you find?

(Lindsey) Many, many fragments of human bones, over 1600 fragments all together, strewn all over the cave, no whole bodies being deposited and buried in the ground, like we might imagine in a normal cemetery.

And the age range?

-Are they, like, a mixed bag?

-We seem to predominantly have children, so, sub-adults, we would call them.

So, people under the age of 18, probably, and frequently much younger than that.

I've been having a look around the cave, and these here, -they're postholes, aren't they?

-They are indeed, yeah.

What they seem to be doing is forming lines, fence lines or the lines of structures, timber structures, which essentially cut off the entrance passage from the cave interior.

♪ What's even more significant is, around this area, they found cranial fragments, so, fragments of the skull, and mandibles, the jawbone, along with some very, very nice personal ornaments, including gold-covered hair rings, which we thought were adorning these children.

What we think is happening is that, actually, body parts, particularly children's heads, were being displayed, and I use the word "heads" specifically, rather than "skulls."

Because we have hair rings, we know that these heads had hair attached, and therefore, presumably flesh as well.

I'm just trying to imagine that you walk into this cave and all you see are a line of... of--of small children's heads!

That's-- that's absolutely bonkers!

♪ (Lindsey) That does seem quite shocking to our minds, but actually, displaying body parts in this way, tending them, coming back to feed them, perhaps.

We have evidence for cooking here, we have evidence of hearths, of pottery.

During prehistory, we see many examples of curation and display of the dead, and intimate interaction between the dead and the living as quite a respectful process and part of normal funerary rites.

When you say "curation," what do you actually mean?

(Lindsey) When someone dies, their body is not buried and put away out of sight, but that certain bones are selected and used in the world of the living, and then, at some point, brought here and displayed on these racks in a place which is very, very much between worlds.

♪ (Raksha) There's this notion of things being curated, where you could have bits and pieces of your ancestors that you carry around with you, and then you then go and deposit them at a later date.

And that's evident as well in Thanet.

So it's very different from how we would perceive death and how we would treat death today.

-Completely alien to us.

-Yeah, it is alien, isn't it?

And that makes you sort of stop in your tracks, because when you realize you're dealing with a culture that is so different to, say, the one that you and I might be used to, everything's up for grabs in terms of understanding why that woman was killed and then put into that pit in Cliffsend.

We need to get into the mind of the person who killed her.

And if you're talking about a culture that is so different to ours, how do we go about that?

What can we say about them as individuals?

Where are they from?

Were they connected in some way to each other?

Are they related?

What are the sex of the children?

Are they geographically from the same place?

-Are they not?

-Are they even from Thanet?

And they don't seem to have any evidence of settlements.

-No.

-If you're not living on Thanet, then you've gotta bring those bodies, all those people, -in from somewhere.

-Well, it's the same for the caves.

You're in the middle of nowhere.

You have to physically take these dead people or people to this island to be sacrificed, or the human remains to be placed purposefully.

In that deliberate, purposeful act, there has to be a meaning.

♪ Our site in Thanet is tricky to understand.

You've got this evidence of feasting for quite a long period of time.

These five individuals represent, it seems, like a moment towards the end of that period where something different was happening.

(Jackie) The fact that they've all been placed in this orchestrated fashion and laid out as they are is really quite unusual.

♪ (Tori) So what is really going on here?

Who are these people?

Are they even locals?

Or are they from somewhere else entirely?

Raksha is at the University of Durham, where they carry out isotope analysis.

(Andrew) Welcome to the laboratory.

(Tori) She's hoping experts here can shed some light on where the bodies came from.

(Raksha) Andrew, how do you do isotope analysis?

-What's the process?

-Well, first of all, we have to take a piece of enamel off of the tooth, which is what we do with this drill.

(drill whirring) (Raksha) So you're literally sawing off the end of that tooth.

-Yes.

-Well, I'm not gonna lie: That noise is very reminiscent of sitting in a dentist's waiting room!

(Andrew) So we just have a tiny piece of enamel.

-That's extremely tiny.

-Yes.

It's all we need.

(Raksha) And then what happens next?

We need to split it into two for two different chemical processes.

(crushing crack) (Raksha) So you've got two samples there, one to look at the oxygen content and one to look at the strontium, -is that correct?

-Yes.

They both tell us about movement The strontium comes from rocks into the soils and plants and into the people that eat them, and because it varies with the geology, and people ate local food in the past, their local geology is reflected in their teeth.

♪ The oxygen comes mostly from drinking water, and that varies east to west across Britain, 'cause most of our weather comes from the west, off the Atlantic.

I'm absolutely dying to hear the results.

-Where did they come from?

-Well, we have some results.

So the woman who's the first burial.

-The elderly lady.

-The elderly lady is solidly inside the local box.

So when you say "local," what do you actually mean?

The strontium would mean within a few dozen miles of the site, and the oxygen means probably somewhere -in Eastern England.

-And what about the others?

(Andrew) There's the teenager, who has mostly a local signal, and one of the other juveniles who's in the local range -as well.

-So we have two other individuals that are outstanding, so we have the adult male, where is he from?

(Andrew) We analyzed two teeth, and both of them look as though he was growing up in a place that was more northerly or colder than Britain.

So it could be Scandinavia, somewhere further east.

♪ That's absolutely incredible!

So that individual, he's come from that far away to Thanet.

-Yes.

-That's quite unusual, isn't it?

(Andrew) Yes.

And even more unusual is the other juvenile has come in the opposite direction, from somewhere warmer, probably Iberia or the Mediterranean.

I think at this site, it's certainly the case that this is a mortuary site that's dominated by immigrants.

(Tori) The isotope data's giving us some really, really interesting glimpses into the childhood of our individuals in the pit.

So our elderly female, she was local to Thanet.

♪ But that juvenile that was overlying her, he or she came from the south.

-Mediterranean?

-Mediterranean.

Our adult male, he seems to come from some northern, wetter climate, so Scandinavia, possibly.

And our adolescent female and our other juvenile, they were both local to Thanet.

Now, we're getting a snapshot of these people's lives, how they moved around, but we're still lacking some pretty fundamental information about the individuals themselves.

We don't know whether or not our juveniles are male or female.

Have you had any results yet on that, Jackie?

Very interesting.

We've had two lots of analysis done.

We've had DNA analysis done and also on the peptides in the tooth enamel, which is a really new technique, and it turns out that both our juveniles are female.

(suspenseful music) Which really is very interesting, 'cause it means the whole of that group are female.

♪ (Carla) So is there some significance, then, with the fact that they are female?

Do they represent something?

Well, looking at the composition, I think they probably do, particularly when you look at the ages of those individuals.

I mean, I've said this elderly female was over 55, but I think she was probably quite a lot older than that.

For somebody to live that long at this time, she really would have been seen as a very, I suspect, wise old woman.

And she's got those youngsters with her, so we've got this combination of old, new, young.

♪ (Tori) You've also got those newborn lambs lying on her lap, which seem to be representing the beginning of life.

Let's cut to the chase: Is it a fertility ritual?

(Jackie) We are talking about fertility here, because the newborn lambs, they would grow up, help produce the food that's gonna feed the community.

You've got young girls here, who are going to be the next set of mothers for that community.

That's how the community continues.

This is why women and children are so important -within a community.

-So you're talking about these are valuable resources.

-Exactly.

-It's not just the fact that you've got-- you're killing off maybe an elderly or sickly individual.

You'll killing off a valuable member of a community because of the knowledge they hold, and you're also killing off hope for the future.

♪ (Carla) So if this was a very old woman, and she was special to this community, for example, like a kind of godmother figure, is there some kind of crisis that may call for such a big sacrifice?

(Jackie) She definitely was sacrificed.

Whether the others were or not, we don't know, but the fact that you've got them going together with her almost suggests that you've got this elderly lady almost leading the others.

What they've done here is, "We need somebody to act on our behalf with the ancestors, with the gods."

And it's also interesting that we've got individuals from different places.

I mean, the location of this is not accidental: right next to the sea.

The sea is so important, and the links that sea gives you to other places.

♪ (Tori) Have we been thinking too narrowly, then?

Does the answer to our investigation lie in the position of the island itself, how the Isle of Thanet once related to the continent?

Lovely to meet you.

So this is a Bronze Age round barrow?

(Stuart) Yes, we're on one of the magnificent barrows in the Petersfield Heath cemetery, a very large cemetery, one of the finest in this part of the world.

You can see we're at the heart of it, and there are barrows dotted all around -the cricket green here.

-All of these mounds are -Early Bronze Age barrows?

-That's correct, -quite a number.

-There's one here, two, three, four, five... (Stuart) One behind there.

(Tori) Thanet seems like a special place, an unusual place.

What was it about Thanet that was special?

If--if you look at a map, you can see that it's at a fulcrum.

So in the one direction, we've got the English Channel opening up -to the Atlantic approaches.

-So you've got Thanet, like, there, on the edge of the cliff, -if you like, yeah?

-Absolutely, and then, in the other direction, we've got the North Sea and, beyond that, the Baltic.

(spare, ambient music) ♪ By this stage of the Bronze Age, the seaways have become centrally important to trade and communication.

♪ We've got established networks in seaways all around Europe.

What they seem to have done in the sacrificial pit is almost compose a group of people who somehow represent that network.

This is a constructed group for a particular purpose.

♪ (Tori) I can get into the mindset of that, but I struggle to get from that to killing somebody -to be a human sacrifice.

-The mere fact that, you know, this is, so far, a one-off, we really have no other context like it, suggests strongly that this is not everyday behavior, not even every-year behavior.

So we have to, I think, consider that that particular event is in response to some specific problem.

(suspenseful music) We're talking about the early 9th century B.C.

A few decades later, the whole Bronze Age system across a large part of Europe just collapses.

(flames roar) And we don't really understand why it collapses.

(dramatic music) The Cliffsend sacrificial event is a little bit too early to relate directly to that, but you have to wonder whether that system-- -Was something brewing?

-Was something brewing?

You know, maybe that system was coming under strain, for some reason.

There were temporary perturbations, wobbles, and it could easily have been one such wobble that caused the community on Thanet, who were concerned about the system and their key position in it, to the degree that they felt they needed to go to these extraordinary lengths of sacrifice.

For them, um, they saw no other way.

(dark music) ♪ (Tori) Our old woman was deliberately and violently killed at a time when her community was facing a crisis.

I think there was something fairly major going on here that required this kind of communal sacrifice, not just of people from here, but from a much wider area.

We've got individuals from different places here.

(Tori) It's really remarkable, 'cause actually, in that one pit, you have a microcosm of the Late Bronze Age world as viewed from Thanet, capturing this idea, potentially, of this hub, a fulcrum of Late Bronze Age activity, and that Late Bronze Age period was about to hit a really, really rough patch.

(softly meditative music) (Carla) She's pointing, isn't she, to her ancestors.

She's imploring them, really, for help, -to put things right.

-Yeah.

And to do that, she had to make the ultimate sacrifice.

♪ Five bodies.

A sacrifice.

This woman, the two children, and two others.

Together, they represent a system of trade and communication that extends from Northern Europe to the Mediterranean, with Thanet in the middle.

They are brought together in a sacrificial ritual 3,000 years ago when their community faces a crisis they are asking their ancestors, the other world, to solve.

♪ (bright music)