- 5 days ago
Documentary, BBC Operation Stonehenge What Lies Beneath 1of2
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00:00:00For the last five years,
00:00:11archaeologists have been conducting the most far-reaching investigation of the Stonehenge site ever attempted.
00:00:20With state-of-the-art technology,
00:00:30they've investigated every monument, both visible and invisible, around the stone circle.
00:00:40It's an all-encompassing approach that could finally unlock the mystery of the enigmatic stones
00:00:48and the prehistoric culture that flourished around them.
00:00:56The groundbreaking work has already helped chart the first 6,000 years of the Stonehenge story.
00:01:04Now the focus has shifted to unlocking the secrets of the iconic monument itself.
00:01:13How was it designed?
00:01:17The Neolithic people had an architect, a surveyor and a builder.
00:01:22How did it look?
00:01:24Just imagine how amazing Stonehenge would have looked,
00:01:27with all of these cut surfaces glistening white in the sun.
00:01:31And what was it used for?
00:01:33To be buried in that ditch at Stonehenge suggests we have a sacrificial victim.
00:01:39An unprecedented level of new research, the latest remote sensing equipment, and fresh discoveries,
00:01:57has produced a more detailed and revealing picture of Stonehenge and its people than ever before.
00:02:07For hundreds of years, experts and amateurs alike have tried to solve the enigma.
00:02:12of Stonehenge
00:02:13of Stonehenge
00:02:17Stonehenge
00:02:18Some of its mysteries have been explained.
00:02:22But the whole picture remained elusive.
00:02:27Now a group of specialists,
00:02:33And amateurs alike have tried to solve the enigma of Stonehenge.
00:02:41Some of its mysteries have been explained, but the whole picture remained elusive.
00:02:55Now a group of specialists known as the Hidden Landscapes Project, led by Birmingham University
00:03:01and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute in Austria, have taken a purely scientific approach to
00:03:08solving how Stonehenge was built, and what it was used for.
00:03:16If you were to focus on excavation, you'd by necessity end up focusing on particular
00:03:22monuments and particular sites.
00:03:24By surveying nearly ten square kilometres, we can actually look at the entirety of that
00:03:29landscape.
00:03:36Using the data from their ground-penetrating equipment, the team have created a multi-layered
00:03:44digital map of a ten square kilometre area around Stonehenge.
00:03:51If you walk around this landscape, you see some unprotected monuments covered by grass.
00:03:58But if you're going to put your magnetic eyes on, you see much more details and also the
00:04:05inner structure of this monument.
00:04:08The archaeologists have already thrown fresh light on the key events that led to the raising
00:04:14of the stones.
00:04:15Evidence of a 9,000-year-old settlement and a newly discovered natural phenomenon has suggested
00:04:25why of all the places in Britain, Stonehenge was built where it was.
00:04:30This is the place where memories and traditions start.
00:04:36The Stonehenge isn't just a new build, it's in response to something.
00:04:42Traces of a communal tomb detected in a seemingly empty field have shown how the ritualistic use
00:04:49of the landscape began 1,000 years before the stone circle was raised.
00:04:55They covered the whole thing with a big mound, forming this long barrow, a house for the dead
00:05:00people.
00:05:03And the discovery of a myriad of hidden temples and shrines has shown that Stonehenge is not
00:05:08alone and never has been.
00:05:13Rather than seeing Stonehenge standing uniquely in the plain, we now start to see that there
00:05:19are a series of similar monuments.
00:05:23It begins to give us an insight into how the wider landscape was used at the time that Stonehenge
00:05:30was developing into the monument you see today.
00:05:35With the first 6,000 years mapped out, the rest of the Stonehenge story is now ready to be
00:05:42told.
00:05:48To better understand the period leading up to the raising of the Stonehenge circle, Dr Henry
00:05:57Chapman concentrated on one of the largest monuments surveyed by the Hidden Landscapes
00:06:01Project.
00:06:05Flying three kilometres to the north-east is Durrington Walls.
00:06:15Its 500 metre wide circular ditch and bank make it the largest monument of its type in Britain.
00:06:21Durrington Walls is a huge, huge henge.
00:06:33It's taken from the middle of the third millennium, round about the early stage of Stonehenge.
00:06:38Giant monuments like Durrington Walls were the product of emerging hierarchies who wanted
00:06:43to demonstrate their authority in the region.
00:06:47Clearly some very, very powerful people around at that time who were being able to control
00:06:52resources, control the labour force, to create some of the largest monuments we've ever seen.
00:06:58What Durrington, I think, is showing is that although it's just that one point which we
00:07:02understand it's got ramifications, I think, for the whole of the Stonehenge landscape.
00:07:08It was this drive to build ever more spectacular monuments that pushed the builders towards the
00:07:14ultimate expression of prehistoric building prowess.
00:07:18Stonehenge.
00:07:19It's possible to imagine a level of competition between different groups in Southern Britain.
00:07:26This might be related to increasing political centralisation and order and control.
00:07:31It might be related to a greater sense of identity amongst the different groups that occupy the
00:07:37wider landscape.
00:07:38In that context, the construction of this extraordinary building at Stonehenge marks an exponential increase
00:07:46in terms of the scale of the enterprise and from the point of view of competition, very
00:07:51difficult to compete with.
00:07:56The raising of Stonehenge's megaliths began around 4,600 years ago.
00:08:07Made of a dense sandstone known as sarsen, the biggest of the megaliths weighed almost 40 tons.
00:08:20No large deposits of sarsen have been found in the vicinity of Stonehenge, and it's widely
00:08:25accepted that the enormous building blocks came from the Marlborough Downs, 48 kilometres
00:08:31to the north.
00:08:38This is a sarsen field on the Marlborough Downs.
00:08:41The stones just lie on the surface.
00:08:43They don't have to be quarried, they're here naturally.
00:08:47And were they there.
00:08:48Experimental archaeologist Katie Whittaker believes the prehistoric architect's choice of building
00:08:57materials went beyond the merely practical.
00:09:01Just as now it's quite strange to come across these stones lying in the landscape.
00:09:08It must have been very odd in the late Neolithic to just discover them.
00:09:13Why are they there?
00:09:16Where have they come from?
00:09:19This combination of their positions in the landscape,
00:09:22their texture, their surface, their strangeness,
00:09:25these are all qualities that may well have been significant to people in the past
00:09:29and may have influenced their choices to take them all the way down to Stonehenge
00:09:34and use them in the monument itself.
00:09:38At the time Stonehenge was constructed,
00:09:41more than 500 square kilometres of this landscape
00:09:44was littered with thousands of huge sarsen stones,
00:09:49from which around 80 of the biggest were selected for the construction of Stonehenge.
00:09:55Well, this is a much better example of the sort of stone
00:09:57that the builders needed for Stonehenge.
00:10:00The next question then is how to move it from here on the Marlborough Downs,
00:10:0430 miles down to Salisbury Plain.
00:10:12Despite numerous theories,
00:10:14the route taken by the huge sarsens to Stonehenge is still disputed.
00:10:19But when Professor Wolfgang Neubauer studied the data from the survey,
00:10:28he saw a new solution.
00:10:30How the big sarsens stones have been brought to Stonehenge
00:10:34has been a striking question all over the centuries.
00:10:38And one of the theories comes up with the idea that they brought the stones down on the river Avon,
00:10:45which is a rather small river.
00:10:49This theory then envisages the stones being dragged overland
00:10:52for the last couple of kilometres to their final resting place.
00:10:57Findings from the survey highlighted a problem with that idea.
00:11:02In the topographic data, we have a dry valley,
00:11:04and this means that there is a really massive depression
00:11:07which they would have had to cross with these heavy stones.
00:11:12So I think this theory is rather unlikely.
00:11:16Instead, Professor Neubauer has spotted what he believes to be a much more likely path
00:11:21along which the stones were transported.
00:11:24Running from the stone circle to the river Avon
00:11:26are two parallel ditches that form the monument known as the Avenue.
00:11:31Within the section closest to Stonehenge,
00:11:37there are a number of striations in the ground formed by glacial action.
00:11:47The hidden landscape scans revealed that these marks extend far beyond the Avenue.
00:11:53This scratcher pattern is rather obvious in the area of the stone circle
00:12:04and gets even more striking close to the Curse's monument.
00:12:10They also appear on the other side where the geological situation is completely different.
00:12:15Then they go on in the direction of the Marlborough Downs.
00:12:18Professor Neubauer is convinced that such a distinctive feature in the landscape
00:12:24would have been the most logical course for the stones.
00:12:30It looks very obvious to me that they took the shortest way from the Marlborough area,
00:12:35where the Sarsen stones actually appear sometimes on the surface,
00:12:39and brought them down on the direct way to Stonehenge.
00:12:43Even taking this direct route,
00:12:49it's estimated that it would have taken almost ten years
00:12:52to drag all the stones to their final resting place.
00:13:02Yet remarkable as the transportation of the stones is,
00:13:05it's the precision of Stonehenge's design that sets it apart.
00:13:20Archaeological surveyor Tony Johnson has studied its unique layout for over a decade.
00:13:26The Neolithic people had, just as we have today with large buildings,
00:13:33an architect, a surveyor and a builder.
00:13:36And most people's idea of Stonehenge is that they just built it.
00:13:39Well, they didn't.
00:13:40And he couldn't build something like Stonehenge without a plan.
00:13:45Assisted by land artist Rob Irving,
00:13:48Johnson set out to demonstrate how the geometrical blueprint of Stonehenge
00:13:53was plotted using elementary surveying tools.
00:13:59The surveyors laid out the positions of the stones precisely,
00:14:03using ropes and pegs in the way that we hope to demonstrate today.
00:14:08An open expanse of sand provided enough space to sketch out the monument's floor plan.
00:14:14The beach acts as a convenient scratch pad
00:14:18where we can mark out lines that are easily visible
00:14:21to demonstrate the geometry of Stonehenge.
00:14:24The first step was to draw a circle with the same dimensions
00:14:29as Stonehenge's outer ring of megaliths.
00:14:36To match Stonehenge's orientation,
00:14:39a line was drawn bisecting the circle
00:14:41in the direction of the rising sun.
00:14:47Around this central axis,
00:14:49the symmetrical layout of the entire monument was plotted.
00:14:56Irving used elegant geometrical rules
00:15:00to map out the position of the stones.
00:15:02On the circle, we're going to mark a hexagon,
00:15:04each side of which is exactly the same length as the radius of the circle.
00:15:12And we're going to build out from there to mark those 30 points
00:15:16which relate to the stones at Stonehenge.
00:15:19In total, five hexagons were etched out,
00:15:22creating the coordinates of Stonehenge's 30 outer megaliths.
00:15:25So you get a better idea of where the centre of the stones were.
00:15:34What I'm doing is making a post-hole size imprint of where the stones would sit
00:15:39in the geometry of the whole thing.
00:15:40From the position of key stones,
00:15:44the inner horseshoe of megaliths known as the trilithons was also calculated.
00:16:01The axis of the rising sun was used as the fixed line of reference.
00:16:06What we're doing now is setting out the positions of the trilithons that form the horseshoe,
00:16:13which are the centre of the geometric array.
00:16:19On this evidence,
00:16:21Johnson concluded that the monument was planned as a whole from the outset.
00:16:30Of course, the trilithons had to be erected first,
00:16:31so it proves that the surveying method they used was done in one phase, one plan.
00:16:37Everything was marked out on the ground before the stones were brought in.
00:16:42The monument's innate symmetry has revealed that the architects of Stonehenge
00:16:48had a grasp of geometry two millennia before the Greeks defined the term mathematics.
00:16:534,600 years on, the remaining stones still stand as a powerful reminder of the skill and ambition of Stonehenge's creators.
00:17:11Obviously, a great deal of work went into the sizing of the stones to make sure you had the right lintels, lengths to bridge the gaps, for example.
00:17:32And above all, the attempt to create a perfectly horizontal top of the great sarsen lintels.
00:17:43The megaliths were not simply held in place by their own weight.
00:17:47They were interlocked using a series of elaborate precision joints.
00:17:52On top of each upright, protruding tenon joints were carved to fit into mortise sockets on the underside of the lintels.
00:18:05The lintels themselves were carved with a groove at one end and a tongue at the other.
00:18:11They too interlocked.
00:18:13It was a meticulous construction method, designed to make permanent the monument's primary function,
00:18:21to mark the passage of the sun.
00:18:26The sophistication and position where the rich Stonehenge was built around this solar axis is exceptional.
00:18:33It could be that Stonehenge is partly concerned with measuring and celebrating important points in the annual cycle.
00:18:49Midsummer, midwinter, changes in the year from winter to spring to summer and so forth.
00:18:54The complexity of the architecture cannot be parallel anywhere else.
00:19:03This does give Stonehenge an exceptional presence in the wider world at the time.
00:19:11There's nothing else quite like this.
00:19:12Today, only half of Stonehenge's outer circle has survived.
00:19:26With no clue as to what happened to the missing sarsens,
00:19:36it's believed by some that the monument was never finished.
00:19:41But in the summer of 2013, the rare phenomenon of a British heat wave revealed new evidence.
00:19:54In 2013, we had a very wet spring, followed by a hot, dry spell in June.
00:20:04And that put the grass here under great stress.
00:20:09Grass was fighting for moisture.
00:20:14When it does that, it begins to parch.
00:20:16And we got a series of parch marks which showed us the positions of some stones which we'd never seen before at Stonehenge.
00:20:29So, we had the position of Stone 17 here.
00:20:38Stone 18 here.
00:20:42Stone 19 here.
00:20:43Stone 20 here.
00:20:47Stone 20 here.
00:20:54The parch marks represented some of the most compelling evidence to date that Stonehenge was actually completed.
00:21:04To grasp how the stone circle would have looked in its heyday,
00:21:08Katie Whittaker recreated the masonry techniques used by its builders.
00:21:19When you look at Stonehenge today, you can see that the sarsens are really quite dark grays and browns in colour.
00:21:25A bit like this piece of sarsen here.
00:21:27And that's because of the weathering that they've undergone over thousands of years.
00:21:31Sarsen is so hard.
00:21:34The tools used would also have to have been made of sarsen.
00:21:38This hammerstone is made of the densest type of sarsen that you can collect.
00:21:43It's got a good shape.
00:21:45It's got a good edge here, which will help me pick away at the surface.
00:21:48Whittaker has replicated the techniques Neolithic stone masons used to produce the finished sarsens.
00:21:59It's been calculated that to shape all the megaliths like this would have taken 10 masons over a decade.
00:22:08One of the things that's really noticeable about this is just how little return you get for a lot of work.
00:22:22Underneath the dust that's been created, there's a really tiny area that started to change, revealing the white colour of the clean stone underneath.
00:22:30So just imagine how amazing Stonehenge would have looked with all of these standing stones, their cut surfaces glistening white in the sun as you approached up the slope towards the monument.
00:22:44Centuries of weathering have left Stonehenge's remaining megaliths dark and rough.
00:22:50But 4,600 years ago, with each stone freshly worked and set into place as its architects had planned.
00:23:02Worshippers of the day would have seen Stonehenge in all its intended glory.
00:23:14A stunning gleaming white monument.
00:23:20It's intricate construction, a testament to the sophistication and commitment of the people who built it.
00:23:33Stonehenge truly was the crowning glory of its age.
00:23:45But the story didn't stop with the raising of the stone circle.
00:23:48Alongside the sarsens, Stonehenge contains other megaliths known as the blue stones.
00:24:07Although the blue stones are dwarfed by the giant standing sarsens, the effort needed to transport them to the site was still enormous.
00:24:15Analysis of the rock has proved many of them were quarried from the Preseli Hills in Wales, over 200 kilometers to the west.
00:24:24Skeletal remains found close to Stonehenge have provided a glimpse into the life of one family, dating back to the period when the blue stones were raised.
00:24:42The remains we see here are those of an adult male, probably in his late 30s or his 40s.
00:24:51Along with the man, the remains of six other people, including children, were found in the grave.
00:25:01Observed similarities in the skulls suggested they belonged to the same family.
00:25:09The individuals who came from here predominantly date to the time at which the blue stones were erected at Stonehenge.
00:25:16We undertook strontium oxygen isotope analysis on the teeth from three of the adults.
00:25:28And what we found was that they were not local to the area in which they were buried.
00:25:33They had originated from about 150 to 200 kilometers west of Stonehenge.
00:25:42This would take them into Wales, which is also the area from which the blue stones come from.
00:25:49The coincidence of blue stones and people migrating from the same part of Britain to Stonehenge.
00:26:08Became more intriguing on closer inspection of the bones.
00:26:12Looking at this skeleton, you can see there was a massive traumatic injury to the left thigh bone.
00:26:27The contours have undergone a major change.
00:26:31If I compare this with a complete femur here, you can see just how dramatic those changes are.
00:26:40This is a major trauma. This is a very heavy, thick bone.
00:26:46It needs a pretty powerful force acting on it to break it the way it is.
00:26:54What causes this sort of thing in modern clinical cases is maybe a motorcyclist who is run into by a motorcar.
00:27:05It's that kind of level of force.
00:27:07What you've had is a major fracture, mid-shaft, which has ended up causing massive damage to that bone.
00:27:16This looks like it might have been a compound fracture that broke through the surface as well.
00:27:23But the amazing thing is, it mended.
00:27:26And he lived.
00:27:27Further archaeological investigations of the bluestones have shown that after their initial placement, they were repositioned a number of times.
00:27:49When Stonehenge was built around about 2600 BC, that wasn't the end of the story in terms of the architectural development of the monument.
00:28:02In the following centuries, on several occasions, the arrangement, particularly of the bluestones, was altered.
00:28:09It's likely that these reorganisations relate to changing ceremonial activities.
00:28:19If you need to reorganise your ceremonies, your rituals, you reorganise the stone settings.
00:28:25And I think that accounts for why the bluestones are being shifted and changed very significantly in the later life of the monument.
00:28:31To understand what motivated these changes, the Hidden Landscapes project has examined every monument in the end.
00:28:50Seeing Stonehenge from above, it does reinforce that sense of the importance of looking at all of the monuments together,
00:29:10looking at the whole landscape rather than just the site.
00:29:13And that's exactly what we've been doing with the project.
00:29:16Identify the importance of the other monuments which are going to add and enrich our understanding of this landscape.
00:29:24Situated just to the north, in clear sight of Stonehenge,
00:29:28a collection of tombs known as the Cursus Barrow Group were constructed after the completion of the Stone Circle.
00:29:35Their appearance marked the arrival of a culture that had a profound impact on the ritual use of the monument and its surrounding landscape.
00:29:43The Cursus Barrow Group is a beautiful arrangement of different styles of building, but in terms of the overall story of Stonehenge, these are quite a late addition.
00:29:54These things are coming in after Stonehenge has been completed.
00:29:59We're getting new styles of burial, new styles of material, pottery, grave goods.
00:30:05We're getting the beaker phenomenon.
00:30:14Recovered artefacts from tombs like these
00:30:16have given this era its distinctive name.
00:30:25The reason we call this period of time in prehistory the beaker period is because of these pottery vessels.
00:30:33They're bell-shaped and they're normally made from local clay.
00:30:36They're found in graves and they're really finely crafted with these horizontal bands of incised decoration.
00:30:49The origin of these objects showed that Stonehenge was becoming the focal point for a new wave of continental influences.
00:30:57Men, particularly, are buried with weapons and this burial comes with the typical male artefacts.
00:31:10He's known as the Roundway Archer because he was found with this really beautifully fashioned flint arrowhead.
00:31:19The shaft and the feathers would have rotted away and so would the bow, the bowstring and perhaps the quiver that would have held arrows.
00:31:33And alongside this arrowhead is the other element of the archer's kit, which is this.
00:31:43It's a wrist guard. It would have been attached with leather straps and it was found on the archer's arm bone.
00:31:55The really exciting thing about this is that it's made of jadeite and it's not from this country.
00:32:02This is probably from Spain.
00:32:04For it to be associated with this man in this burial indicates how widely he and his community were connected and how important he was to be buried with artefacts that are this precious and this rare.
00:32:23From assemblages like this, we can see that people and ideas are coming into Britain from the continent.
00:32:31And we can see that in the decoration of the pottery, we can see that in how far away these materials are being brought.
00:32:39And they're being brought to the area around Stonehenge.
00:32:44This is a place of great significance and influential people are coming here.
00:32:49As well as celebrating its dead in complex burial groups, the beaker culture also stamped its identity on the region.
00:33:03By constructing the two and a half kilometer long processional route known as the avenue.
00:33:09Like the rearrangement of the bluestones, the avenue's parallel ditches appear to have controlled the passage of worshippers around Stonehenge.
00:33:21When the hidden landscapes project surveyed an area close to the avenue, they detected traces of another structure built to influence the movement of people.
00:33:35A wooden barrier, nearly two kilometers long.
00:33:39One of the really weird things about Stonehenge landscape, and one of the things which not many people know about because it's not visible on the land surface, is what's known as a palisade.
00:33:53It's effectively a long fence, which runs from the western side of Stonehenge and curves around towards one of the gaps in the curses.
00:34:07Excavations of the southern end of this palisade have dated it later than the construction of Stonehenge.
00:34:16And predicted that some of its posts were as much as seven meters tall.
00:34:20The palisade bisected the entire landscape.
00:34:31If it was built all at the same time, then that's effectively a barrier to movement from the east and west, dividing this landscape.
00:34:39The palisade is one of those things which is incredibly significant to the landscape, but it's not widely understood.
00:34:50Along with the transformation of the land around Stonehenge.
00:34:55The Beaker period brought with it new ritualistic uses of the stone circle.
00:35:02Forensic investigations on a male skeleton.
00:35:04Have provided powerful evidence that three centuries after its construction.
00:35:24Stonehenge became a site of human sacrifice.
00:35:27This is a really nice looking skeleton. This is in very good condition.
00:35:41He was buried, very unusually, in a ditch at Stonehenge.
00:35:46This is a very highly ritualised site. So this is quite an unusual find.
00:35:51People often get the impression that in the distant past, life was nasty, brutish and short.
00:36:04We know that this man died when he was in his late twenties.
00:36:08But I wouldn't say his life had been nasty and brutish.
00:36:11You look at him, he was a robust, muscly man of about five foot ten.
00:36:20Tiny nicks on the man's bones show the cause of death.
00:36:27He was shot repeatedly with flint arrows.
00:36:33The location of the skeleton's burial showed this was no ordinary death.
00:36:38To be buried in that ditch at Stonehenge, with the injuries he has, suggests we have a sacrificial victim.
00:36:49To be buried in that ditch at Stonehenge, with the injuries he has, suggests we have a sacrificial victim.
00:36:52There are several injuries, all in the chest area, that show where those arrows went.
00:37:02And if we start off by looking at this bone here, the breast bone or the sternum,
00:37:07If I take this arrowhead, you can see the tip of the arrowhead, where it's come into his body, from the back and to the side, and is stuck into the back of his sternum.
00:37:20If I take this arrowhead, you can see the tip of the arrowhead, where it's come into his body, from the back and to the side, and is stuck into the back of his sternum.
00:37:34In addition, we have injuries in the right side of the ribs, you can see there are two little marks, one here, and although this is damaged, there is also another mark there.
00:37:50And these are where the arrowhead has passed through, between the ribs, and gone straight through into the body, where it is stuck within the soft tissues.
00:37:59Similar to on the right hand side, we have two of the ribs, on the left hand side, looking at the tenth and the eleventh, where again, an arrow has gone between the two ribs, and caught the top of one and the bottom of the other.
00:38:20And we know that this is one of the three that would have killed this young man.
00:38:27No other killings of this kind have been found in Stonehenge.
00:38:54Why the man was sacrificed may never be known, but his burial, so close to the stone circle, suggests his death was ritualistic.
00:39:06While one grave showed evidence of bloody sacrifice.
00:39:19Other excavated beaker graves in the Stonehenge landscape have also been remarkably well preserved.
00:39:24The artefacts they contained reflect the revolutionary technologies that arrived in Britain at the time.
00:39:37Burials from the Beaker period are the first time we see metal artefacts in Britain.
00:39:48This is a copper dagger.
00:39:51When it was new, this would have been absolutely bright and gleaming.
00:40:00This is not about cutting up your dinner or fighting with the neighbours.
00:40:06This is a ceremonial dagger.
00:40:09And it's probably from Central Europe.
00:40:13The people with the knowledge of the technology also arrive in Britain.
00:40:18And they share that technology amongst people here.
00:40:22And it changes their culture.
00:40:25This is the start of the age of metal.
00:40:31Soon after the introduction of copper, it appears that British smiths worked out the secret of making a superior metal, bronze.
00:40:44The rival of metal in Britain happens quite late compared to Europe.
00:40:49But the discovery of tin in South West England and Cornwall and Devon brings on the true bronze age very quickly.
00:40:57In Britain, the abundance of copper and the far rarer tin saw local metal workers lead the way in prehistoric bronze production.
00:41:07By alloying the copper with a little bit of tin, I'm going to make a 6% tin bronze.
00:41:13Thereabout, which is quite typical composition for the early bronze age.
00:41:23Bronze tools and weapons were far harder and more durable than anything made from copper or flint.
00:41:30It's good. It's gone in.
00:41:45So we should have a knife there.
00:41:48I'm going to lift the mould out, lay it on its side and then break it open.
00:41:52This is a moment of truth.
00:41:59So this is the end of the process of all our work.
00:42:08Just like the knives you find associated with burials in the area around Stonehenge.
00:42:15This is the proof of the big change with the advent of bronze.
00:42:19As Britain entered the Bronze Age, Stonehenge was already over 400 years old.
00:42:32An ancient monument in its own landscape.
00:42:37But as an explosion of tomb-building shows, its reputation was greater than ever.
00:42:42There are hundreds of early bronze age burial mounds in the area around Stonehenge.
00:42:51When first built, many of them would have been gleaming white, shining mounds.
00:42:58These would have been seen across very large distances across the landscape.
00:43:01Each of these circles shows the position of a Bronze Age burial tomb.
00:43:10The hidden landscapes project has thrown new light on their complex interconnections.
00:43:18The geographical survey work is allowing us to see for the first time
00:43:22how the obvious surviving monuments relate to others since we now can't see on the surface.
00:43:32Up till now we've only seen little snippets of the landscape.
00:43:36This allows us to put it all together in one big picture.
00:43:41The position and alignment of the tombs revealed a clear strategy behind their placement.
00:43:48The biggest mounds are almost certainly associated with an elite class within early bronze age society
00:43:54who are using Stonehenge and the other monuments around as focal points
00:43:58which they can refer to in relation to their own power and prestige in the early bronze age.
00:44:09Artifacts discovered in these graves show these generations of Stonehenge people
00:44:14were more connected than ever before with the wider world.
00:44:20We have Breton-style daggers, for example, turning up in British early bronze age graves.
00:44:26There are various other kinds of accoutrements, pins, certain kinds of whetstones,
00:44:30other kinds of objects which suggest continental connections.
00:44:35Two-way trade with the continental mainland had flourished,
00:44:41with Stonehenge seemingly a vital hub.
00:44:46In Stonehenge you do see an increase of the volume of material from firefield and from abroad.
00:44:51We find amber from the Baltic, copper axis from Spain and gold from Ireland,
00:44:57whilst in Holland you would find Cornish tin.
00:45:01The Bronze Age saw a huge increase in international trade.
00:45:07To better understand the practical challenges that made this boom possible,
00:45:12Professor van der Noort, along with shipwright Brian Cumby,
00:45:18set out to build the first full-scale replica of a Bronze Age boat.
00:45:23The innovative plank-built sea craft developed in Northern Europe at this time.
00:45:28I've been building classic wooden boats for nigh-on 40 years.
00:45:37When I was given this job, it was a complete new learning curve for me.
00:45:41I had to start to think like a Bronze Age man.
00:45:43They had to hand-carve everything and fit it and look at it, and that looks good, that looks bad.
00:45:54It's just a matter of building by eye all the time.
00:45:57The design was based on fragments of prehistoric boats discovered in Britain.
00:46:02The biggest challenge was how to build the craft's plank-constructed hull without nails or glue.
00:46:08We knew from the excavation that they used new branches from the yew tree, withies.
00:46:14And this is used to tie this plank to this frame and hold the whole boat together.
00:46:20And we're amazed at how strong she is.
00:46:23We thought that would be one of the weak points of the boat, but we've been proven wrong.
00:46:33To test the viability of their sewn plank hull,
00:46:35van der Noort and a crew of 19 took the replica on its maiden open-water voyage.
00:46:4616 metres long and weighing over 5 tonnes,
00:46:50these boats were bigger and had more cargo capacity than any craft built before.
00:46:55We're just measuring it using GPS, two and a half knots in cruising speed.
00:47:08So two and a half sea miles per hour.
00:47:11And when we push it hard, it goes just over three and a half knots.
00:47:16Travelling at this rate, a Bronze Age boat could have crossed the channel in less than a day.
00:47:21By mastering the use of planks instead of hollowed out tree trunks or animal hides,
00:47:31Bronze Age shipbuilders had made a huge leap forward.
00:47:34She could probably take about seven tonnes of cargo.
00:47:39But I think they'd carry livestock, people and tin ingots.
00:47:45Van der Noort's wider research on Bronze Age trade has identified prehistoric Britain's special role.
00:47:52How Britain fits in that picture of these Bronze Age networks is really access to tin,
00:48:02which is a rare metal, but you need it for making bronze objects.
00:48:07And I think that is the critical, valuable that Britain adds into this European network.
00:48:12At the heart of Britain's commerce was Stonehenge.
00:48:22Lots of archaeologists have come up with this idea that Stonehenge has become a kind of central place,
00:48:29a place of power.
00:48:30And it may well have been that if you were in Germany and you wanted gold and tin from Cornwall,
00:48:36that you had to go through the people who we now have found buried in Stonehenge.
00:48:41The increasingly ostentatious placement of tombs around Stonehenge during the Late Bronze Age
00:48:57confirmed its status as the place for the upper echelons to flaunt their power and influence.
00:49:06The burial mounds built in between about 2000 and 1700 BC
00:49:09appear to be in position not only for wider communities to see,
00:49:13but perhaps more importantly for competitor groups to see from other vantage points.
00:49:20We might imagine a kind of political landscape here
00:49:23where the elites are jockeying for prime position.
00:49:27Funeral events would have served as opportunities for expressing the power of the dead individuals,
00:49:32but also the power of the groups conducting the funerals.
00:49:35But they were not just expressing their power within the community.
00:49:46They were also celebrating their wealth,
00:49:48because excavated from some of these high-status tombs has come a remarkable amount of gold.
00:49:54This absolutely exquisite artefact was discovered in the Bush Barrow in 1808.
00:50:05The Bush Barrow is about half a mile away from Stonehenge
00:50:07and on a direct alignment with the most sacred central area of the monument.
00:50:12It's been dated to around 1950 BC.
00:50:18The piece itself is known as a lozenge.
00:50:21It's almost pure gold.
00:50:23And across the whole of it, there are geometrical designs of parallel lines and diagonal zigzags.
00:50:32And it's perfectly executed.
00:50:34The level of workmanship and the amount of gold in this lozenge indicate that this person was incredibly high status,
00:50:44perhaps a chief, perhaps a senior priest.
00:50:47And they think that it would have sat in the centre of the man's chest,
00:50:53perhaps holding together a garment or perhaps hung as a pendant of some description.
00:50:58But the most impressive item that was found in the Bush Barrow grave is actually in this tiny little dish.
00:51:09These are some of the estimated 140,000 tiny gold studs
00:51:17that were placed into the handle of a bronze dagger that was found in this Bush Barrow grave.
00:51:23At ultra-high levels of magnification, some of the intricately worked studs can still be seen embedded in fragments of wood from the handle.
00:51:45Artist Willard Wigan is uniquely qualified to understand what it took to achieve gold working on this microscopic scale.
00:51:51Artist Willard Wigan is the world's pre-eminent nano-sculptor, a niche market where smaller is better.
00:52:05I'm actually producing something that's smaller than a full stop in a newspaper.
00:52:12Artist Willard Wigan's completed works sit framed in the eye of a needle or on the head of a pin.
00:52:19Because I'm working on this molecular scale, you have to hold your breath.
00:52:25I'm actually working between the pulse beat.
00:52:32The process to actually finish one can take anything up to two months.
00:52:37Things are going to go wrong, you're going to lose pieces.
00:52:42Something will bend up and it will turn into a little catapult, and then what you've been working on for four weeks is gone.
00:52:54Based on his own skills, Willard has figured out the techniques the ancient gold workers must have used.
00:53:00I would say two fine pieces of gold twisted and rolled.
00:53:08If you look here, you can see where it's twisted and flattened off.
00:53:13I cannot see an adult doing that, because your eyesight starts to deteriorate even at 21.
00:53:19It would have to be a child that's done that.
00:53:25Even when aided with modern technology, Willard grasped the difficulties of making a gold stud on this scale.
00:53:31They probably found a way of slicing the gold into very fine fragments by perhaps using a piece of flint.
00:53:42And then you'd get these shavings of gold would come off.
00:53:45Your movements would have to be very, very fine, so I'm twisting one that way and one the opposite way.
00:54:04Once I've got the stage of where I think it's going to snap, I'll stop, cut them off at each end.
00:54:10And then squeezed at the end to give that pinhead look at the top.
00:54:20Back then there's no technology, there's no microscopes, nothing.
00:54:24This is a phenomenal achievement.
00:54:31More prehistoric gold objects have been found in the region surrounding Stonehenge than anywhere else in Britain.
00:54:38This golden age represented Stonehenge at the peak of its power and wealth.
00:54:50A discovery made by the Hidden Landscapes Project in a field to the east provided a glimpse of when the area's ritual importance began to decline.
00:54:59This is an amazing field.
00:55:02Just by driving over with my magnetometer, I did see on the screen a lot of pits and a lot of long edges, and in between a lot of smaller pits which are in the size of post holes.
00:55:15From the shape and distribution of the features, Professor Neubauer recognized the tell-tale footprints of prehistoric buildings.
00:55:30When I first saw it, it was of course, wow, now we have a settlement, what we have been looking for all the time.
00:55:42So there were so many empty areas without any settlement traces that it really was a great thing to have it now here in this large field.
00:55:49The evidence of everyday life encroaching into areas previously held sacred represented the beginning of the Stonehenge landscape's demise as a ceremonial site.
00:56:10By 1500 BCE, all monument building had stopped, and the area was broken up into farmlands.
00:56:27Over a thousand years old by then, the Stone Circle was, as it is today, an enigmatic reminder of a lost civilization.
00:56:4021st century technology, underpinned by hard archaeological evidence, has revolutionized the understanding of Stonehenge.
00:56:56As we start to see our results in relation to other people's results and so on, we've got as complete a picture as we can ever have, I think, of the entire landscape.
00:57:05We're reinventing Stonehenge for this generation.
00:57:13By peeling away the land, the archaeologists have rewritten the 10,000 year old story of the sacred site.
00:57:24From its origins as a hunting ground, to its rise as a ceremonial arena.
00:57:30Having this iconic landscape now really covered, we can now put the whole scene in a context, in space, but also in time.
00:57:47The vast array of data has provided new scientific insight into the pre-planning, construction, and use of the Stone Circle.
00:58:06Forever dispelling the myth of its seclusion.
00:58:08Just as significantly, the discoveries have placed Stonehenge at the very heart of a fast-evolving and dynamic culture.
00:58:23This is the story of Stonehenge.
00:58:26Next, here on BBC Two, they're moving animals with bite, like a six-foot ray shark called Boris, who's off to Blackpool.
00:58:43Over on BBC Four, now the 20th century through the eyes of Churchill and Orwell, in A History of Britain, with Simon Sharma.
00:58:49For the last five years, archaeologists have been conducting the most far-reaching investigation of the Stonehenge site ever attempted.
00:59:08With state-of-the-art technology, they've investigated every monument, both visible and invisible, around the world.
00:59:16For the last five years, archaeologists have been conducting the most far-reaching investigation of the Stonehenge site ever attempted.
00:59:27With state-of-the-art technology, they've investigated every monument, both visible and invisible, around the world.
00:59:38It's an all-encompassing approach that could finally unlock the mystery of the enigmatic stones, and the prehistoric culture that flourished around them.
00:59:56The groundbreaking work has already helped chart the first 6,000 years of the Stonehenge story.
01:00:01Now the focus has shifted to unlocking the secrets of the iconic monument itself.
01:00:12How was it designed?
01:00:14The Neolithic people had an architect, a surveyor and a builder.
01:00:20How did it look?
01:00:21Just imagine how amazing Stonehenge would have looked, with all of these cut surfaces, glistening white in the sun.
01:00:29And what was it used for?
01:00:31To be buried in that ditch at Stonehenge suggests we have a sacrificial victim.
01:00:36An unprecedented level of new research, the latest remote sensing equipment, and fresh discoveries, has produced a more detailed and revealing picture of Stonehenge, and its people, than ever before.
01:00:57The Neolithic people had a more detailed and revealing picture of Stonehenge, and its people, than ever before.
01:01:06The Neolithic people had a more detailed and revealing picture of Stonehenge, and its people, than ever before.
01:01:10For hundreds of years, experts and amateurs alike, have tried to solve the enigma of Stonehenge.
01:01:36Some of its mysteries have been explained, but the whole picture remained elusive.
01:01:53Now a group of specialists known as the Hidden Landscapes Project, led by Birmingham University and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute in Austria,
01:02:03have taken a purely scientific approach, to solving how Stonehenge was built, and what it was used for.
01:02:12If you were to focus on excavation, you would by necessity end up focusing on particular monuments and particular sites.
01:02:22By surveying nearly 10 square kilometres, we can actually look at the entirety of that landscape.
01:02:28Using the data from their ground penetrating equipment, the team have created a multi-layered digital map,
01:02:45of a 10 square kilometre area around Stonehenge.
01:02:48If you walk around this landscape, you see some unprotected monuments covered by grass.
01:02:57But if you're going to put your magnetic eyes on, you see much more details,
01:03:02and also the inner structure of this monument.
01:03:05The archaeologists have already thrown fresh light on the key events that led to the raising of the stones.
01:03:14Evidence of a 9,000-year-old settlement, and a newly discovered natural phenomenon,
01:03:21has suggested why, of all the places in Britain, Stonehenge was built where it was.
01:03:27This is the place where memories and traditions start.
01:03:33The Stonehenge isn't just a new build, it's in response to something.
01:03:38Traces of a communal tomb, detected in a seemingly empty field,
01:03:44have shown how the ritualistic use of the landscape began 1,000 years before the stone circle was raised.
01:03:51They covered the whole thing with a big mound, forming this long barrow, a house for the dead people.
01:04:00And the discovery of a myriad of hidden temples and shrines,
01:04:04has shown that Stonehenge is not alone, and never has been.
01:04:10Rather than seeing Stonehenge standing uniquely in the plain,
01:04:16we now start to see that there are a series of similar monuments.
01:04:20It begins to give us an insight into how the wider landscape was used
01:04:25at the time that Stonehenge was developing into the monument you see today.
01:04:33With the first 6,000 years mapped out,
01:04:36the rest of the Stonehenge story is now ready to be told.
01:04:41To better understand the period leading up to the raising of the Stonehenge circle,
01:04:54Dr Henry Chapman concentrated on one of the largest monuments surveyed by the Hidden Landscapes Project.
01:05:00Flying three kilometres to the north-east is Durrington Walls.
01:05:13Its 500-metre-wide circular ditch and bank make it the largest monument of its type in Britain.
01:05:19The Durrington Walls is a huge, huge henge.
01:05:31It's taken from the middle of the third millennium, round about the early stage of Stonehenge.
01:05:36Giant monuments like Durrington Walls were the product of emerging hierarchies
01:05:40who wanted to demonstrate their authority in the region.
01:05:45Clearly some very, very powerful people around at that time
01:05:47who were being able to control resources, control the labour force,
01:05:52to create some of the largest monuments we've ever seen.
01:05:56What Durrington, I think, is showing is that,
01:05:58although it's just that one point which we understand,
01:06:01it's got ramifications, I think, for the whole of the Stonehenge landscape.
01:06:04It was this drive to build ever more spectacular monuments
01:06:10that pushed the builders towards the ultimate expression
01:06:13of prehistoric building prowess, Stonehenge.
01:06:18It's possible to imagine a level of competition
01:06:21between different groups in southern Britain.
01:06:24This might be related to increasing political centralisation
01:06:28and order and control.
01:06:30It might be related to a greater sense of identity
01:06:33amongst the different groups that occupied the wider landscape.
01:06:38In that context, the construction of this extraordinary building
01:06:41at Stonehenge marks a kind of exponential increase
01:06:45in terms of the scale of the enterprise
01:06:48and, from the point of view of competition,
01:06:50very difficult to compete with.
01:06:55The raising of Stonehenge's megaliths began around 4,600 years ago.
01:07:04Made of a dense sandstone known as Sarsen,
01:07:09the biggest of the megaliths weighed almost 40 tonnes.
01:07:18No large deposits of Sarsen have been found in the vicinity of Stonehenge,
01:07:23and it's widely accepted that the enormous building blocks
01:07:26came from the Marlborough Downs, 48 kilometres to the north.
01:07:30This is a Sarsen field on the Marlborough Downs.
01:07:40The stones just lie on the surface.
01:07:43They don't have to be quarried. They're here naturally.
01:07:49Experimental archaeologist Katie Whittaker
01:07:51believes the prehistoric architect's choice of building materials
01:07:57went beyond the merely practical.
01:08:02Just as now it's quite strange to come across these stones lying in the landscape.
01:08:07It must have been very odd in the late Neolithic to just discover them.
01:08:12Why are they there? Where have they come from?
01:08:15This combination of their positions in the landscape, their texture, their surface, their strangeness,
01:08:22these are all qualities that may well have been significant to people in the past,
01:08:27and may have influenced their choices to take them all the way down to Stonehenge
01:08:32and use them in the monument itself.
01:08:33At the time Stonehenge was constructed, more than 500 square kilometres of this landscape
01:08:43was littered with thousands of huge Sarsen stones,
01:08:48from which around 80 of the biggest were selected for the construction of Stonehenge.
01:08:52Well, this is a much better example of the sort of stone that the builders needed for Stonehenge.
01:08:58The next question then is how to move it from here on the Marlborough Downs,
01:09:0330 miles down to Salisbury Plain.
01:09:11Despite numerous theories, the route taken by the huge Sarsens to Stonehenge is still disputed.
01:09:18But when Professor Wolfgang Neubauer studied the data from the survey, he saw a new solution.
01:09:29How the big Sarsens stones have been brought to Stonehenge has been a striking question all over the centuries.
01:09:37And one of the theories comes up with the idea that they brought the stones down on the River Avon,
01:09:45which is a rather small river.
01:09:47This theory then envisages the stones being dragged overland
01:09:52for the last couple of kilometres to their final resting place.
01:09:55Findings from the survey highlighted a problem with that idea.
01:10:00In the topographic data, we have a dry valley,
01:10:03and this means that there is a really massive depression,
01:10:07which they would have had to cross with these heavy stones.
01:10:10So, I think this theory is rather unlikely.
01:10:14Instead, Professor Neubauer has spotted what he believes to be a much more likely path,
01:10:20along which the stones were transported.
01:10:22Running from the stone circle to the River Avon
01:10:25are two parallel ditches that form the monument known as the Avenue.
01:10:34Within the section closest to Stonehenge,
01:10:37there are a number of striations in the ground formed by glacial action.
01:10:46The hidden landscape scans revealed that these marks extend far beyond the Avenue.
01:10:52This scratcher pattern is rather obvious in the area of the stone circle,
01:11:02and gets even more striking close to the Cursus monument.
01:11:08They also appear on the other side where the geological situation is completely different.
01:11:13Then they go on in the direction of the Marlborough Downs.
01:11:16Professor Neubauer is convinced that such a distinctive feature in the landscape would have been the most logical course for the stones.
01:11:29It looks very obvious to me that they took the shortest way from the Marlborough area,
01:11:35where the Sarsen stones actually appear sometimes on the surface,
01:11:38and brought them down on the direct way to Stonehenge.
01:11:41Even taking this direct route,
01:11:46it's estimated that it would have taken almost ten years to drag all the stones to their final resting place.
01:11:54Yet, remarkable as the transportation of the stones is,
01:11:59it's the precision of Stonehenge's design that sets it apart.
01:12:19Archaeological surveyor Tony Johnson has studied its unique layout for over a decade.
01:12:24The Neolithic people had, just as we have today with large buildings, an architect, a surveyor and a builder.
01:12:34And most people's idea of Stonehenge is that they just built it.
01:12:37Well, they didn't.
01:12:39And he couldn't build something like Stonehenge without a plan.
01:12:44Assisted by land artist Rob Irving,
01:12:46Johnson set out to demonstrate how the geometrical blueprint of Stonehenge was plotted using elementary surveying tools.
01:12:58The surveyors laid out the positions of the stones precisely using ropes and pegs in the way that we hope to demonstrate today.
01:13:06An open expanse of sand provided enough space to sketch out the monument's floor plan.
01:13:13The beach acts as a convenient scratch pad where we can mark out lines that are easily visible to demonstrate the geometry of Stonehenge.
01:13:22The first step was to draw a circle with the same dimensions as Stonehenge's outer ring of megaliths.
01:13:29To match Stonehenge's orientation, a line was drawn bisecting the circle in the direction of the rising sun.
01:13:45Around this central axis, the symmetrical layout of the entire monument was plotted.
01:13:50Irving used elegant geometrical rules to map out the position of the stones.
01:14:00On the circle, we're going to mark a hexagon.
01:14:05Each side of which is exactly the same length as the radius of the circle.
01:14:10And we're going to build out from there to mark those 30 points which relate to the stones at Stonehenge.
01:14:16In total, five hexagons were etched out, creating the coordinates of Stonehenge's 30 outer megaliths.
01:14:29So you get a better idea of where the centre of the stones were.
01:14:33What I'm doing is making a post-hole size imprint of where the stones would sit in the geometry of the whole thing.
01:14:39From the position of key stones, the inner horseshoe of megaliths known as the trilithans was also calculated.
01:15:00The axis of the rising sun was used as the fixed line of reference.
01:15:04What we're doing now is setting out the positions of the trilithans that form the horseshoe, which are the centre of the geometric array.
01:15:17On this evidence, Johnson concluded that the monument was planned as a whole from the outside.
01:15:23Of course, the trilithans had to be erected first, so it proves that the surveying method they used was done in one phase, one plan.
01:15:35Everything was marked out on the ground before the stones were brought in.
01:15:38The monument's innate symmetry has revealed that the architects of Stonehenge had a grasp of geometry two millennia before the Greeks defined the term mathematics.
01:15:524,600 years on, the remaining stones still stand as a powerful reminder of the skill and ambition of Stonehenge's creators.
01:16:10Obviously, a great deal of work went into the sizing of the stones to make sure you had the right lintels, lengths to bridge the gaps, for example.
01:16:31And above all, the attempt to create a perfectly horizontal top of the great sarsen lintels.
01:16:42The megaliths were not simply held in place by their own weight.
01:16:46They were interlocked using a series of elaborate precision joints.
01:16:50On top of each upright, protruding tenon joints were carved to fit into mortise sockets on the underside of the lintels.
01:17:03The lintels themselves were carved with a groove at one end and a tongue at the other.
01:17:09They, too, interlocked.
01:17:11It was a meticulous construction method designed to make permanent the monument's primary function, to mark the passage of the sun.
01:17:24The sophistication and position where the which Stonehenge was built around this solar axis is exceptional.
01:17:32It could be that Stonehenge is partly concerned with measuring and celebrating important points in the annual cycle.
01:17:48Midsummer, midwinter, changes in the year from winter to spring to summer and so forth.
01:17:53The complexity of the architecture cannot be parallel anywhere else.
01:18:04This does give Stonehenge an exceptional presence in the wider world at the time.
01:18:10There's nothing else quite like this.
01:18:11Today, only half of Stonehenge's outer circle has survived.
01:18:31With no clue as to what happened to the missing sarsens,
01:18:36it's believed by some that the monument was never finished.
01:18:39But in the summer of 2013, the rare phenomenon of a British heat wave revealed new evidence.
01:18:55In 2013, we had a very wet spring, followed by a hot, dry spell in June.
01:19:02And that put the grass here under great stress.
01:19:05Grass was fighting for moisture.
01:19:12When it does that, it begins to parch.
01:19:15And we got a series of parch marks which showed us the positions of some stones which we'd never seen before at Stonehenge.
01:19:22So, we had the position of stone 17 here, stone 18 here, stone 19 here, and stone 20 here.
01:19:47The parch marks represented some of the most compelling evidence to date that Stonehenge was actually completed.
01:19:59To grasp how the stone circle would have looked in its heyday, Katie Whittaker recreated the masonry techniques used by its builders.
01:20:12When you look at Stonehenge today, you can see that the sarsens are really quite dark greys and browns in colour, a bit like this piece of sarsen here.
01:20:25And that's because of the weathering that they've undergone over thousands of years.
01:20:29Sarsen is so hard, the tools used would also have to have been made of sarsen.
01:20:35This hammerstone is made of the densest type of sarsen that you can collect.
01:20:41It's got a good shape, it's got a good edge here, which will help me pick away at the surface.
01:20:46Whittaker has replicated the techniques Neolithic stone masons used to produce the finished sarsens.
01:20:59It's been calculated that to shape all the megaliths like this would have taken 10 masons over a decade.
01:21:07One of the things that's really noticeable about this is just how little return you get for a lot of work.
01:21:20Underneath the dust that's been created, there's a really tiny area that started to change, revealing the white colour of the clean stone underneath.
01:21:29So just imagine how amazing Stonehenge would have looked.
01:21:34With all of these standing stones, their cut surfaces glistening white in the sun as you approached up the slope towards the monument.
01:21:44Centuries of weathering have left Stonehenge's remaining megaliths dark and rough.
01:21:51But 4,600 years ago, with each stone freshly worked and set into place as its architects had planned,
01:22:00Worshippers of the day would have seen Stonehenge in all its intended glory.
01:22:05A stunning gleaming white monument.
01:22:15Its intricate construction, a testament to the sophistication and commitment of the people who built it.
01:22:27Stonehenge truly was the crowning glory of its age.
01:22:34But the story didn't stop with the raising of the stone circle.
01:22:46Alongside the sarsens, Stonehenge contains other megaliths known as the blue stones.
01:23:01Although the blue stones are dwarfed by the giant standing sarsens,
01:23:09the effort needed to transport them to the site was still enormous.
01:23:13Analysis of the rock has proved many of them were quarried from the Preseli Hills in Wales, over 200 kilometres to the west.
01:23:23Skeletal remains found close to Stonehenge have provided a glimpse into the life of one family,
01:23:38dating back to the period when the blue stones were raised.
01:23:43The remains we see here are those of an adult male, probably in his late 30s or his 40s.
01:23:52Along with the man, the remains of six other people, including children, were found in the grave.
01:24:00Observed similarities in the skulls suggested they belonged to the same family.
01:24:06The individuals who came from here predominantly date to the time at which the blue stones were erected at Stonehenge.
01:24:19We undertook strontium oxygen isotope analysis on the teeth from three of the adults.
01:24:26And what we found was that they were not local to the area in which they were buried.
01:24:31They had originated from about 150 to 200 kilometres west of Stonehenge.
01:24:41This would take them into Wales, which is also the area from which the blue stones come from.
01:24:48The coincidence of blue stones and people migrating from the same part of Britain to Stonehenge...
01:25:05...became more intriguing on closer inspection of the bones.
01:25:10Looking at this skeleton, you can see that there was a massive traumatic injury...
01:25:17...to the left thigh bone.
01:25:26The contours have undergone a major change.
01:25:30If I compare this with a complete femur here, you can see just how dramatic those changes are.
01:25:40This is a major trauma. This is a very heavy, thick bone.
01:25:44It needs a pretty powerful force acting on it to break it the way it is.
01:25:53What causes this sort of thing in modern clinical cases is maybe a motorcyclist who is run into by a motor car.
01:26:00It's that kind of level of force.
01:26:06What you've had is a major fracture mid-shaft, which has ended up causing massive damage to that bone.
01:26:15This looks like it might have been a compound fracture that broke through the surface as well.
01:26:19But the amazing thing is, it mended.
01:26:25And he lived.
01:26:26Further archaeological investigations of the Bluestones have shown that after their initial placement, they were repositioned a number of times.
01:26:47When Stonehenge was built, around about 2600 BC, that wasn't the end of the story in terms of the architectural development of the monument.
01:27:01In the following centuries, on several occasions, the arrangement, particularly of the Bluestones, was altered.
01:27:12It's likely that these reorganisations relate to changing ceremonial activities.
01:27:18If you need to reorganise your ceremonies, your rituals, you reorganise the stone settings.
01:27:23And I think that accounts for why the Bluestones are being shifted and changed very significantly in the later life of the monument.
01:27:39To understand what motivated these changes,
01:27:45the Hidden Landscapes Project has examined every monument in the end.
01:27:49The End
01:27:50The End
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