大象传媒

Tom Holland is joined by Professor Sir Barry Cunliffe on a day trip to Sark in the Channel Islands during which the pair catch up on the latest archaeological research and dig into the new histories that are being revealed by it.

Sir Barry has been woking on the island for the past 7 years and he takes Tom to a site in a field on the central plateau where he thinks people were 'worshipping the ancestors' 2,000 years BC. The archaeological team have found coins and axe heads and Sir Barry believes that these confirm his ideas that the island was a scared place in the years before the Roman Empire. Nearby, is the spot where the Sark hoard was discovered in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Philip de Jersey, the archaeologist for Guernsey, explains that by the 1730's the hoard was lost but he has pictures of it and coins that date it to around 32BC. Included in the hoard was material from the Danube which shows how 'connected' the island was then to the rest of Europe.

In the years after the fall of Rome, monks made a home for themselves on the island and in 1066 it became English as it was territory owned by the Duchy of Normandy. Over the next few centuries the island was home to pirates and was caught between the conflicting territorial interests of England and France but the population was all but wiped out by the Black Death. In Elizabethan times efforts were made to re-colonise the island and local historian Richard Axton explained how this came about and how the island's famous feudal system developed.

Producer: Nick Patrick
A Pier Production for 大象传媒 Radio 4.