Discovery!

That sense of discovery, the excitement at seeing something revealed for the first time, is very much part of what it is to be an archaeologist. A fingerprint on a pot, a footprint in the sand, these are some of the things which bring us directly into contact with people from the past.

Watch archaeologist Richard Annis describe the discovery of two mass graves in Durham in 2013. At the time, the human remains had not yet been analysed in detail in the laboratory and it would take several years to find out all the answers to their true identity. The detective work had only just begun…