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00:00Priceless treasures, ancient ruins, and the fragile remains of long-dead people.
00:17For archaeologists like me, the truth literally lies underneath the ground.
00:22And sometimes the stories that sleep underneath there are far more interesting than the ones that you find on the surface.
00:30Archaeology isn't like written history.
00:34It's the very stuff of the past.
00:38Well, that is absolutely extraordinary.
00:42And that is its magic.
00:46But this quest, this desire to discover the ancient world and possess its treasures, is hardly a new one.
00:54We've been at it for 2,000 years.
00:57One thing that fascinates me is that archaeology has its own history.
01:04Varied, controversial, and reaching to the very heart of our human beginnings.
01:12Oh, my word.
01:14Now I'm going to explore it.
01:16From the very earliest archaeological expeditions.
01:21This is meant to be one of the nails which Jesus Christ was crucified.
01:28To the exploits of the great 19th century treasure hunters.
01:32From the rise of scientific method and the quest for objective truth.
01:41To the temptations of fakery.
01:44And the race for fame and glory.
01:49Extraordinary stories of archaeological pioneers.
01:52And the breakthroughs that built our understanding of the ancient past.
02:11Archaeology first began with a quest to discover one truth above all others.
02:17Direct evidence of Christ himself.
02:26The weather's been absolutely disgusting today.
02:29It's been raining, it's been freezing.
02:31But still there's been a steady stream of visitors to the cathedral.
02:38Thousands of people have come here to commune with a simple piece of cloth.
02:43The holy tunic of Christ.
02:50Religious relics like this are some of the first archaeological discoveries ever made.
02:59The tunic has been preserved here for over 1500 years.
03:06Today it is so delicate that the cathedral only puts it on display every few decades.
03:13These pilgrims are drawn to its power as a very special ancient object.
03:23One that proclaims a divine truth.
03:26But the tunic isn't the only relic that they have here.
03:41One that proclaims a divine truth.
03:42Now that is absolutely extraordinary.
03:47This is meant to be one of the nails with which Jesus Christ was crucified.
03:52And I think you get a real sense of the power that these objects, these religious relics have.
04:02And I feel quite moved, even just helping it.
04:10Just a simple nail.
04:13There's no doubt for the people that flock here, that these relics have a special religious or emotional power.
04:29Now for me as an archaeologist, they're also precious.
04:31But for a slightly different reason.
04:35Because these objects, this nail, the tunic, are some of the first archaeological artefacts.
04:43And my calling, my profession if you like it, starts right here.
04:47And that's not all.
04:53Because in this cathedral is part of the very person who discovered them.
05:04This is the skull of the Empress Helena.
05:12Helena lived in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries AD.
05:15And it was her son, the Roman Emperor Constantine, who first legitimised Christianity.
05:23Today, Helena is known as the patron saint of archaeologists.
05:27So it's kind of ironic that she eventually ended up as a religious relic herself.
05:36It's said that in 326 AD, Constantine sent Helena off to find evidence of Rome's new official religion.
05:45It's said that she was a very old lady, but she was a very old lady, approaching 80 years of age.
05:52Helena dutifully set out for the Holy Land, with an entourage of stonemasons and bishops.
05:59So you could say that this was the very first archaeological expedition.
06:04Legend has it that coming into Jerusalem, Helena was guided by supposedly divine forces to the very place of Christ's crucifixion.
06:15And this is where it gets interesting, because on the site was a temple of Venus, but not for much longer.
06:24Helena had it torn down, and then she ordered her workmen to start digging.
06:29And eventually, they hit something.
06:32Three large wooden crosses.
06:33And one of those crosses was supposedly the cross of Jesus Christ himself, the cross on which he had been crucified.
06:44Helena left some of the precious cross in Jerusalem and sent some to Rome.
06:51Constantine himself received one of the sacred nails and is said to have used it in his horse's bridle as a kind of magical talisman.
07:00The tunic and another nail came to Trier, the headquarters of Roman Gaul, where they've been ever since.
07:11These were not only the first archaeological artefacts in history, but also, if you believe, like the crowds that come here to Trier, then they were also the most important.
07:23From the time of Helena, the world of material remains would never be the same again.
07:35Truth could lie in the most humble of objects.
07:38Truth could lie in the most humble of objects, so long as we could find them and understand what they were telling us.
07:47The artefacts that our forefathers and ancestors have left behind are like a trail of clues leading back in time.
07:54And that's essentially what archaeology is, remnants of a material culture that give us access to our history.
08:04They become our primary sources, witnesses to our past.
08:09And what we believe about the stories that they tell us make them very powerful indeed.
08:14What began with religion is a journey of discovery that has played out over centuries and continues today.
08:26Successions of archaeological pioneers, geniuses and mavericks, who have seen in simple objects the keys to unlocking some of mankind's deepest secrets.
08:40An evidence of the forces that have created and shaped us.
08:56Constantine's endorsement of Christianity set the foundations for an undisputable religious dogma and the power of the medieval church.
09:05It's very difficult to argue with a religion that deals in proof.
09:13And Christianity went from being an alternative religion, a bit wacky, a bit out there, to being the established religion of the Roman Empire.
09:21For the next 1,000 years, it held Europe in its vice-like grip.
09:26But it's the stories that we tell about these objects that give them their power.
09:30And a millennium after Helena, the past became far less certain than the church would have liked.
09:38And the stories that we became increasingly interested in were not Christian ones, but came from a very pagan past.
09:44What began in northern Italy, in the 14th century, in cities like Florence and Siena, was a new way of thinking.
10:08The Renaissance fused Christian beliefs with a wonder for the ancient past, and the art and religion of the classical world.
10:22A remote, exciting and dangerous pre-Christian past was out there to be discovered.
10:29And someone who did just that was one of my personal heroes, not an artist, but the greatest pioneer of Renaissance archaeology.
10:59I'm here in Ancona, a busy and not very pretty port in eastern Italy.
11:07It seems a million miles away from the glories of Siena.
11:11But this is an important place for our story.
11:14Because this was the hometown of Ciriaco Pizzicoli.
11:18A man absolutely obsessed with ancient buildings.
11:22And somebody who would become known as the father of archaeology.
11:29Pizzicoli was a merchant here, in Ancona, during the Renaissance.
11:36He's not a household name like Leonardo or Michelangelo, but at least he has a street named after him.
11:47Via Ciriaco Pizzicoli.
11:50Well, he's a bit of a forgotten hero of archaeology.
11:53But it's good to see his hometown haven't forgotten him.
11:55Right here in 1421, Pizzicoli was responsible for one of the great watersheds in our relationship with the ancient past.
12:07And it all began down here, in the port.
12:11One day, Pizzicoli walked home past this, a millennium-old Roman triumphal arch, which still dominates the port of Ancona, even today.
12:22Now, he must have walked past this arch thousands of times before.
12:26But that particular day, something caught his eye.
12:29Maybe the evening light drew attention to it, but he was suddenly overcome by its beauty.
12:42And coming closer, he was drawn to its ancient inscription.
12:49Pizzicoli didn't know any Latin, but he could make out one word.
12:53Pizzicoli, who was the Roman emperor Trajan.
12:58Now, that triggered a whole series of thoughts in his mind.
13:01Who was this Trajan?
13:03Why had this arch been built?
13:05It was as if the stones were whispering to him from the past, urging him to uncover its history and rescue it from oblivion.
13:12For Pizzicoli, this was an epiphany.
13:23He'd found his calling, and he eagerly ran off to learn Latin, so he could unravel this ancient past.
13:34It seems bizarre to us now, with all our museums, monuments and guidebooks, that the physical past hasn't always been important.
13:41It hasn't always needed to be interrogated.
13:45But in Pizzicoli's age, the past was just there, just all around you.
13:50And that's why what he tried to do was such a revelation.
14:02Pizzicoli set off on a mission to discover more of the ancient past, all across the Mediterranean.
14:11Pizzicoli had seen archers like the one of Ancona in Constantinople, Alexandria and Damascus, on his travels as a merchant.
14:21But there, they'd been like derelict dumps, ready to be used as builder's scrap.
14:26But he realised that they were vestiges of a lost civilisation, on the threshold of disappearing forever.
14:33Only one image remains of Pizzicoli, and it's here, in his hometown's museum.
14:44And here is the man himself, Pizzicoli.
14:56It's a beautiful relief.
14:58Wow.
14:59Bello.
15:01Local historian Professor Maurizio Landolfi is an even bigger fan than me.
15:06Maurizio, why do you admire Pizzicoli?
15:09Amava l'avventura, i viaggi, si colloca tra Marco Polo e Cristoforo Colombo.
15:20Però ha scoperto e ha comunicato la sua passione e le sue lettere, con le quali informava i vari studiosi.
15:29I suoi tacquini vengono divulgati e trasmettono l'amore e la conoscenza per l'antica cultura.
15:37Ed è uno che si preoccupa, perché a Roma vede che vengono distrutte le statue per realizzare calce.
15:47Il padre dell'archeologia.
15:48Sì.
15:50Grazie, Maurizio.
16:01Salve Giovanni.
16:03Pizzicoli's quest to save the physical remains of the ancient world took him all over Italy and then on to Greece, Turkey and Syria, recording as many ancient ruins as he could.
16:22One day a priest came across Pizzicoli sketching a temple in Italy and he asked him what he was doing, sketching that pagan nonsense.
16:41And Pizzicoli's answer was rather good.
16:43He said he was trying to wake the dead.
16:45He filled notebook after notebook with detailed sketches.
16:52What he did was look at the wonders of past civilisations, record what they looked like and try to get others passionate about the ancient world and its importance.
17:04During his lifetime, Pizzicoli became a bit of a celebrity and he was asked to speak about what he had seen everywhere he went.
17:14But unlike Helena, Pizzicoli wasn't looking for evidence to prove an absolute truth.
17:19For him, the past was a puzzle and ancient artefacts were clues.
17:25Just to realise that the past was out there was enough to give Pizzicoli a place in archaeological history.
17:34But Pizzicoli's way of thinking also challenged religious dogma.
17:39New evidence didn't prove a past, but it could rewrite it.
17:43And for the bishops and popes of Renaissance Italy, that kind of thinking was very dangerous indeed.
18:06Along with other Renaissance innovators, Pizzicoli's thinking changed the world.
18:13If new discoveries were questioning old ideas about everything from the human body to the cosmos,
18:20where did that leave something else that had always seemed fixed?
18:26History itself.
18:31The past has always exerted an incredibly powerful influence on the present.
18:37And that influence has taken many different forms.
18:40But Helena and many others like her, they thought they'd found the source of ultimate truth in the pages of the Bible.
18:48And by the time we get to the Renaissance, things were a bit different.
18:53The past was now a space where it's possible to seek out clues about where we had come from.
18:58And the truth, well, the truth was now far more hazy, far less certain, and much more difficult to get a grip on.
19:07And this brought up a fundamental question.
19:10Was the past something which was just out there, waiting to be discovered?
19:14Or was it a faint canvas on which we wrote down our own versions of our history?
19:20In other words, was the past something that controlled us, or did we control the past?
19:27Now, for one English monarch, this was a crucial question.
19:32Because if you could use the past, then it was an incredibly important propaganda tool.
19:37And it would allow him not only to map out England's history, but also its future.
19:51In 16th century Britain, our view of the past was something that went to the very heart of politics and religion.
20:00In 16th century Britain, especially if you were in the business of building a brand new national identity.
20:07Like Renaissance man, Henry VIII.
20:11In the 1530s, Henry famously broke with Rome.
20:16He wanted to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and Marianne Boleyn.
20:22But despite some very clever and very Renaissance rhetoric, the Pope was having none of it.
20:28Henry promptly set up his own English church, and the Pope retaliated by denouncing the English king as a heretic.
20:39Now, the English Reformation brought about the destruction of the monasteries and the pillaging of their treasures.
20:46But out of it was forged a new identity for Britain, and one in which archaeology would play a decisive role.
20:53Henry decided that, along with a new church, Britain needed a new past.
21:06If he could demonstrate England's ancient and independent history, it would help to legitimise his arguments.
21:14But the present papacy was a journey come lately compared to England's own connections with the original Church of Christ.
21:22To unearthed evidence, he turned to his Hampton Court librarian, John Leyland.
21:32Henry ordered Leyland to pilfer Britain's cathedrals and abbeys for their rarest books and manuscripts.
21:41And to use them to create a new inventory of Britain's ancient past.
21:46Leyland scoured the country with books and manuscripts for his king.
21:53But freed from his library, out on the open road, our bookworm soon went AWOL.
21:59Confronted by Britain's past, Leyland was taken with the same fervour that had struck Pizzicoli in Italy a century before.
22:10He wrote to the king that he was totally inflamed with a love to see thoroughly all those parts of this, your opulent and ample realm.
22:20Instead of just visiting dusty old monastic libraries, Leyland began to go to ancient sites across Britain.
22:34He soon began to realise that the English countryside was full of mysterious monuments of great antiquity.
22:41One place he came to was Badbury Rings in Dorset, a place we know today as the remains of an Iron Age hill fort, created nearly 3,000 years ago.
22:55Like the good bookworm that he was, whenever and wherever he came across anything interesting, Leyland recorded it.
23:03It's doubtful that Leyland really understood what he was looking at.
23:16He certainly didn't know very much about the Iron Age.
23:19But what he was, was an early pioneer of fieldwork.
23:24Putting up with whatever the weather throws at you, and setting down and describing what you see.
23:28For me, as an archaeologist, fieldwork is key.
23:35Every observation is like a new piece of the jigsaw of the past.
23:40In recording sites like Badbury Rings, Leyland was giving birth to British archaeology.
23:48And the more he travelled, the more he found.
23:52It all became too much for our pioneering librarian from London.
23:56Leyland never fulfilled his dream.
24:00In 1547, Henry VIII died.
24:03And the pressure of creating the definitive map of ancient England, coupled with the death of his royal master, sent the poor man mad.
24:12It was a case of too much information.
24:20Leyland had, however, opened a new window onto a very ancient Britain.
24:25The trouble was that he had simply no idea just how much of it there was.
24:36Even today, we're still discovering new monuments from our ancient past.
24:40And it wasn't as simple as creating a new story, because there's always something that comes along to change the picture.
24:51Something another pioneer realised just 30 years after Leyland's death.
24:56So, here we are in the hellos' room.
25:07In 1586, a historian called William Camden created a groundbreaking compendium of Britain's ancient past.
25:16So, Di, this is it.
25:20This is Camden's Britannia.
25:231586, first edition.
25:27Camden's Book of Britain listed every known ancient monument in the land.
25:32It starts off as one small, rather scruffy volume.
25:37It's work in progress.
25:40Camden invites people to add to it.
25:44It goes through at least six editions over 200 years.
25:49And you can feel the weight of that.
25:50That's one volume.
25:51That is a weighty time.
25:52Now, the comparison of the view, I mean, that is a weight of knowledge.
25:57Camden's Britannia shows a very special moment in archaeology.
26:03At our most famous ancient monument of all, Stonehenge.
26:101575.
26:11Oh, my word.
26:13This is a real landmark in the story of archaeology.
26:16If we look at the bottom left-hand corner of the prince, we've got two gentlemen with shovels digging a hole in the ground.
26:25On the side, a skull and some bones.
26:28And it actually says in the text, certain it is that human bones have frequently been dug up here.
26:35Now, what this shows are human beings interacting with the site of historical significance.
26:43And understanding that underneath the ground, they can find out even more about the history of that place and of their country.
26:53So here we see what we might grandly call the dawn of archaeological excavation.
27:00I don't think it's too grand to call it that. I think it's dead right.
27:02By the 17th century, the worlds of Helena, and even Pizzicoli, were starting to seem very distant.
27:15The past wasn't there to provide evidence of church dogma, but a whole new world that could be discovered and perhaps understood.
27:25At the forefront of this new, almost scientific quest, was a man called John Aubrey.
27:40Today, Aubrey is remembered for his life's work on the prehistoric site of Avebury in Wiltshire.
27:47Stonehenge is 30 miles that way, but this stone circle is every bit as important and enigmatic.
27:57Back in Aubrey's day, though, it presented a very different site.
28:02This place is pretty pristine now.
28:05But in the early 17th century, it was a bit of a dump.
28:10It's a collection of houses and fields.
28:12And these stones here were choked and covered with weeds.
28:17And the locals, well, they'd been knocking them down to build their own houses.
28:21That was until 1649, when John Aubrey, a local landowner and keen amateur scholar, came here and discovered it whilst hunting.
28:30And he was intrigued by this place.
28:35The problem for Aubrey was that the layout of the stones wasn't at all clear.
28:42It was impossible to simply record what he saw, because unlike today, the place was an overgrown mess.
28:51What he needed was to make an accurate survey, to understand it.
28:57To get a handle on how he achieved that using 17th century technology, I've roped in Mark Bowden from English Heritage.
29:06That's a lovely day for a bit of planning.
29:08Yes, certainly.
29:09So which one should we do?
29:10Let's set up round here, shall we?
29:15OK.
29:20Aubrey used scientific instruments, a plane table in Allidade, equipment more often used to lay out fashionable gardens for the 17th century gentry.
29:31And that is essentially the same as Aubrey's.
29:37Get ourselves on the line.
29:41Which bit of the stone am I going to?
29:43Going to that corner.
29:45Ready when you are.
29:4717 metres.
29:48The first thing we've got here is a plane table.
29:54It's completely level.
29:56And underneath it, we have our point, our zero point.
29:59And this is the point from which we will measure everything else on this site.
30:03And the Allidade is a device for measuring angles.
30:07If I look through this site here, from my zero point, I can look through the site and I can project forward and get the angle of the point that I want to measure.
30:19So, there.
30:21Now, we need to get the distance from our zero point over to the point that we want to measure.
30:28So, Mark, could you give me the distance, please?
30:3114.4.
30:34So, there is 14.4.
30:36And we've got our point.
30:37Now, what we would do with each of these stones is we'd take four or five different points.
30:43And that should give us an accurate depiction of what this place looks like.
30:47Can you move around a bit, Mark, and we'll get the other point, please?
30:50As he mapped the stones, Aubrey realised that a series of complex circles were emerging.
30:57Impossible to see from the overgrown ground, but revealed by scientific method.
31:03Well, we've done pretty well.
31:04We've got two down.
31:05How many to go?
31:07Rather a lot.
31:08Let's have a look at Aubrey's completed plan, shall we?
31:11So, we're here.
31:14And these are the two stones that we've just surveyed.
31:16And the great thing about this is, although it's not planimetrically accurate in the way that a modern survey would be that we might do with electronic instrumentation,
31:25nevertheless, it faithfully gives a character of the site that the stones are not evenly spaced.
31:32So, we're looking here at the beginnings of our archaeological survey.
31:35Oh, very much so, yeah.
31:37Yeah, yeah, it is.
31:38It's an amazing achievement for the time and something that actually wasn't equaled for probably the best part of two centuries in terms of the accuracy of the planning.
31:50Aubrey's work was groundbreaking, but left to his own devices, his map might never have happened.
31:59By all accounts, Aubrey was quite lazy, but luckily for us, he was also boastful, too.
32:08And he'd boasted to all of his friends that Avebury was as important as Stonehenge.
32:12And eventually, his boasting got to the ears of King Charles II up in London.
32:19And he invited Aubrey up there to give a lecture on the site.
32:24And Charles, well, Charles was so intrigued by it that he came down here two weeks later and was given a guided tour by Aubrey.
32:31Little more than a century separate the reigns of Henry VIII and Charles II, but they inhabited very different worlds.
32:41Henry breaking for medieval church traditions, Charles embracing an embryonic age of science.
32:51It was Charles himself who commissioned Aubrey's map of Avebury, which was presented to the newly established Royal Society.
33:03Aubrey's suggesting that Avebury was evidence of a culture predating even that of the Romans.
33:11It was a watershed in archaeology.
33:15Good morning.
33:16Good morning.
33:16Aubrey had observed and recorded in precise detail and put forward a theory to explain it.
33:26And that was scientific thought in action, a world away from the religious dogma of the church.
33:3917th century archaeology was making new discoveries and mapping ever more distant epochs of time.
33:46Just as explorers were mapping ever more distant lands.
33:51It raised new questions about our beginnings.
33:55We knew about the Romans from classical histories.
33:59But what of these mysterious cultures that came before?
34:03Just where did it all start?
34:05For the church, these questions were easy to answer.
34:16Adam, Eve and the tribes of Israel.
34:19Well, Aubrey was using modern scientific methods to ponder the ancient mysteries of Avebury.
34:28An Irish bishop was mathematically calculating the very age of the earth and humanity itself.
34:37His name was Bishop Usher.
34:42Like the scholars that preceded him, he tried to use scientific methodology.
34:46But as a churchman, he also had the arbiter of universal truth on his side.
34:52This, the Bible.
34:54For Usher and generations of Christians, this was the primary source of all primary sources.
35:01And its word could be trusted implicitly.
35:03Usher used events in the Bible to add up the entire chronology of the world.
35:16And he came up with a date.
35:18Mankind was created on the 23rd of October, 4004 B.C.
35:27Simple.
35:27Although we know now, it was really quite a long way out.
35:40What's so fascinating about the 17th century are the intellectual tensions that drove it.
35:46On the one hand, you have the Christian church saying,
35:49look, everything you need to know is here written down in the Bible.
35:53So if you want to find out about the beginnings of earth,
35:55then all you need to do is read Genesis.
35:59Then on the other side, you have the big men of science.
36:02It was still God-fearing.
36:04But they'd come to ask the big universal questions
36:07through their own natural human curiosity.
36:11What was man's place in the cosmos?
36:14How did it all fit together?
36:17They'd learnt from the big lessons of the Renaissance.
36:20Look around you.
36:22What can you discover from what you can see?
36:24Seek and follow the evidence.
36:33By the 18th century, archaeology and religion were on a collision course.
36:39If the Bible told you in no uncertain terms how old the world was,
36:46then to question it was heresy.
36:49But what was coming out of the ground was beginning to tell a very different story.
37:01And 18th century gentry all wanted to own a piece of the mystery.
37:07Collecting became all the rage.
37:09What better way to show how sophisticated, cosmopolitan and wealthy you were
37:14than by collecting objects from all over the world.
37:17Scientific objects, artistic objects, and even objects from the ancient world.
37:23This was the age of the Cabinet of Curiosities.
37:26This is Burton Constable Hall in East Yorkshire.
37:33The home of a landowner who had a passion for art, architecture, and natural history.
37:39William Constable, whose portrait's just up there, was one such collector.
37:44And he collected artefacts from throughout Europe and Britain.
37:47But he didn't collect because he was an expert, but because he was interested.
37:54The collection's curator is David Connell.
37:59So this is the Cabinet of Curiosities.
38:01Wow!
38:03This is absolutely amazing.
38:06So, this is a Bronze Age axe head.
38:10Oh, my word! Look at that.
38:13And here we have a toothbrush from Mecca.
38:16Fantastic.
38:18And here we have the dried leg of an elk.
38:22William's Cabinet of Curiosities is one of a very few to have remained largely intact
38:29in all its glorious diversity.
38:32And what is this?
38:34This is number 30, a brazen lance.
38:38Now, when I found this nearly 20 years ago in a box of rubbish in the attic,
38:44I had no idea what it was.
38:45In fact, it's from a Bronze Age burial that was unearthed in 1676
38:52at Broughton Hall near Skipton in Yorkshire.
38:56So, 1676, somebody is conducting what we would recognise as an archaeological excavation.
39:06Yes.
39:07That's amazing.
39:08This is a hugely important archaeological object.
39:11That's extraordinary.
39:11And you found this in a box in the attic?
39:13Yes.
39:17William also collected hundreds of fossils.
39:22So, what is this?
39:24It looks like some kind of fish.
39:26Yes, fossil fish.
39:27And it's in chalk.
39:30100 million years or something?
39:32My word.
39:33So, when William and others were looking at these fossils, what did they think they were?
39:39They knew that they were creatures, the remnants of which had been captured in stone.
39:43They did understand that, and we know that because there are labels written on them.
39:49At the time, objects like these were explained as evidence of the biblical flood.
39:55Creatures that had failed to make it onto Noah's Ark.
39:58Well, what's this?
40:00That's a fossilised bison horn.
40:04No word.
40:05It's just so extraordinarily eclectic.
40:08I love it for that reason.
40:10I love the fact that this person is living in an age of wonder, isn't he?
40:15That's true.
40:16But what it shows you is just the enormous breadth of his learning.
40:20Absolutely extraordinary.
40:24It's as if William was trying to create an encyclopedia of the world.
40:29All in one room.
40:31A microcosm, collected and displayed.
40:35And collections like these were beginning to pose some awkward questions
40:38about how the world and the past fitted together.
40:46Archaeology couldn't yet answer the mysteries that objects from the past posed.
41:00The biblical truth still presented the Western world's accepted story of the past.
41:06But the church's long-held dogma was beginning to be chipped away by science.
41:13Now, this amazing little contraption is called an orrery.
41:19It was the physical manifestation of a really radical idea.
41:23And it was an idea which the Roman Catholic Church absolutely hated.
41:28It was that the universe didn't rotate round the earth,
41:31but the earth rotated around the sun.
41:34So if I turn this, you can see at the centre, you can see this brass orb, and that's the sun.
41:41And then this huge globe, which is rotating here, is the earth.
41:45So it's completely out of scale.
41:47Now, this is using ideas which have been nutted out by Newton just up the road here in the 1680s.
41:52And it was the idea of movement through the force of gravity.
42:00And it wasn't only the heavens that were opening up to human explorations.
42:07Look at these absolutely beautiful early microscopes.
42:11They date to the mid-18th century.
42:12And they allowed people to view they have the two invisible world at a very small.
42:21Scientific inquiry, which began in the Renaissance, was finally flexing its muscles.
42:27Equally significant was who was now having access and indeed control to this information.
42:39It was no longer just emperors, kings and popes, but men of learning, men of science, men of medicine.
42:46And the curiosity that had prompted men like Pizzicoli and Leyland to describe what they had seen
42:51was no longer enough for men like Copernicus and Newton.
42:55They wanted to understand it and work out how it all fitted together.
43:01Once the biblical view of the cosmos had been overturned,
43:05it was only time before archaeology began to seriously challenge the biblical view of the past.
43:17Here in Suffolk in 1797, a discovery was made
43:21that would, in time, explode Bishop Usher's 6,000-year-old chronology of the world.
43:28This is the quiet, unassuming village of Hoxson.
43:32But for archaeologists like me, this place is really famous.
43:36Because it was here that one of the great breakthroughs in our understanding of prehistory happened.
43:40It was all down to an antiquarian called John Frere,
43:46who was intrigued by objects being discovered in the clay pit by local brickmakers.
43:52As well as the clay, Frere noticed that the men were turfing up triangular-shaped flints.
44:05And there was something about them that made him look more closely.
44:09And although he wasn't sure what they were,
44:11he instinctively knew they'd be made by human hands.
44:14Previously, objects like these had been explained away as meteorites
44:21or even thunderbolts from heaven.
44:24Frere knew there had to be a more earthly explanation.
44:32What Frere did know, and was intrigued by, was where these flints had come from.
44:38The workmen had dug down for 12 feet,
44:40and alongside these weird triangular-shaped flints
44:44had been the bones of an animal that no one could recognise.
44:48So they had figured out they must be from an animal that was long since extinct.
44:53Now Frere managed to join up the dots.
44:55If something had been buried that deep,
44:57something that looked like it had been made by humans,
45:01alongside the bones of an animal that no one could recognise,
45:04then they must have taken a lot longer than a few thousand years to get there.
45:10It was clear, then,
45:14that these handmade objects were very, very old indeed.
45:23Knowing what we know today, all this seems pretty obvious.
45:27But over 200 years ago,
45:29that idea was a stroke of genius.
45:33And a very unbiblical one to boot.
45:37And here we have one of Frere's axes.
45:39And it's absolutely beautiful.
45:45And also still very, very sharp.
45:49Now Frere wrote to the Society of Antiquaries here,
45:53telling them about his discoveries,
45:54and also putting forward a theory about them.
45:57He said that these were weapons of war,
46:00made by people who had no knowledge of metals.
46:02And we still have part of his letter in one of the minutes of the Society.
46:10Frere wrote,
46:10The situation in which these weapons were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed,
46:20and even beyond that of the present world.
46:23The idea that the history of Britain went way beyond the history of the Normans, the Saxons, the Romans, the Celts, and the Bible.
46:40But as with many radical ideas, at the time, it was completely ignored.
46:48But now, we think of John Frere as the father of British prehistory.
46:54Today, we know that these axes were created by our early human ancestors around 400,000 years ago.
47:09Conservative Christians from Helena to Usher would have turned in their graves.
47:14This might have been a watershed moment, but the church's reaction?
47:19Well, it was exactly the same as it had been under Bishop Usher.
47:23The world was 6,000 years old.
47:27End of story.
47:28But the tide was now beginning to turn against them,
47:32because out of the dark earth was coming a new, different, heretical story.
47:4418th century archaeology was digging ever deeper back in time,
47:53but it still faced a problem.
47:55No one knew exactly how old ancient things were.
48:02But a brand new science would provide the answer.
48:06Geology.
48:07It all started with a Scottish doctor, naturalist, chemical manufacturer, and farmer, James Hutton.
48:19He was looking at the rock faces, and he noticed how the sea interacted with the land,
48:23and how the rocks interacted with one another.
48:28Hutton started studying rocks in the 1750s around his native Scotland.
48:33But on Britain's south coast, in Dorset,
48:37there are some fabulous examples of the sort of features that fascinated him.
48:43By looking at layers of rock,
48:45Hutton worked out that the earth hadn't been created perfectly formed.
48:49It was in fact the product of billions of years,
48:52of time, the elements, and the odd earth tremor.
48:56Hutton realized that these bands were layers of sediment,
49:04and deduced that it must have taken millions of years for them to become solid rock.
49:10Then even longer to be tilted and contorted by the dynamic forces of the planet.
49:19Hutton's discoveries would have massive implications.
49:22If the world really was that old,
49:26then archaeology could now enter the new and exciting world of deep time.
49:32It was the irrefutable evidence of deep time
49:36that finally did for the chronology of the Bible,
49:40opening up a vastness of time
49:42into which archaeologists could explore the past.
49:46But if the biblical creation story was myth,
49:50what did that mean for Adam, Eve,
49:53and the beginnings of humanity?
49:562,000 years ago,
50:10Helena of Constantinople
50:12sought evidence from the earth
50:14to prove the truth of the Bible.
50:16But the earth had bitten back.
50:19I started my journey into the beginnings of archaeology
50:24with Helena's skull.
50:26Now I've come back to Germany.
50:29Because little more than 100 miles away from Trier,
50:33another skull was found
50:34that represents a very different landmark
50:37in our story of archaeology
50:39and its relationship with belief.
50:41It was here in the Neander Valley
50:45in western Germany
50:46that the skull was found.
50:49And it was here
50:49tens of thousands of years
50:51before anyone had even thought
50:53about writing a Bible
50:54that Neanderthal man walked the earth.
51:01Remains of bones were discovered here in 1857
51:04by quarry workers
51:06who were blasting these rocks.
51:08They thought they'd found the remains of a bear,
51:12but it soon became clear
51:13that they were far, far more important.
51:24The discovery of Neanderthal man created a storm.
51:29Not only was the earth and humanity more ancient
51:31than anyone had thought,
51:34but perhaps humanity hadn't been made
51:37in a moment of creation.
51:38But it had evolved.
51:41One more heresy
51:42to add to archaeology's long list
51:45of dangerous discoveries.
51:48The original Neanderthal
51:50is now in the care of Dr. Ralph Schmitz.
51:55Hello.
51:56Nice to meet you.
51:57Good to meet you.
51:57Thanks for seeing me.
51:58Wow, I'm so excited to see this.
52:05I remember talking about this
52:06with our lecturers
52:07in my first week at university.
52:10And here he is.
52:13So how old is this guy?
52:14His geological age is around 42,000 years.
52:20Normally it's very, very restricted
52:23and we will normally not open it.
52:25But for you, I will not open it.
52:27No!
52:27For you, I will open it.
52:31Oh, dear, the pressure.
52:33Oh, fantastic.
52:35So, here we are.
52:38Look at that.
52:39I never thought I'd get this close.
52:41This is, I think,
52:43the most iconic archaeological find ever.
52:49To get this close is a massive privilege.
52:56So this discovery was a bit like dropping a bomb
52:58on the whole idea of creationism.
53:01There wasn't just one species,
53:04one type of man like Adam.
53:06But actually we evolved
53:08from a number of different subspecies.
53:11It was clear a few weeks
53:13after the Neandertal was found
53:15that it is a human being.
53:18But this idea was heavily attacked
53:21by other scientists.
53:23And completely accepted was
53:26around 1900, 1902.
53:31And today it's clear,
53:33but at the early time
53:34it was very, very difficult.
53:38One moment.
53:39I will put my gloves.
53:44So.
53:48Look at that.
53:50My heart is actually beating for you.
53:57That's the inner surface
53:58of the skull.
54:01It shows very clearly
54:02arterial impressions
54:05of the brain.
54:06and it's unbelievable
54:08and it's unbelievable
54:09that the Neandertal brain
54:10sticks in here
54:12and all Neandertal thoughts
54:14and feelings
54:15have been created here.
54:17It's a different world,
54:21different thoughts,
54:22different feelings.
54:24It's a human being,
54:24but the distance of more than 40,000 here.
54:28It's truly amazing.
54:31Thank you so much.
54:33I really feel like
54:34I've come face to face
54:35with one of the great moments
54:37in archaeology.
54:39I mean, it's just amazing.
54:41You're very welcome.
54:48The development of early archaeology
54:50ever since Helena
54:51has been one of continual discovery
54:53and progress.
54:56But the onset of scientific method
54:58and reasoning from Aubrey
55:00to Hutton and Frere
55:01brought a new,
55:03very different
55:04and very modern
55:05way of thinking.
55:08Helena asserted the story
55:10that she believed to be true
55:11through using objects.
55:14But the Neandertal skull
55:15was a very different matter indeed.
55:18He had an object
55:19trying to tell its own story
55:21against the odds,
55:22against established belief
55:24and using evidence
55:25that contradicted
55:26what we believed at that time.
55:29But the Neandertal skull
55:30also helped us
55:31to a new understanding
55:33of our place
55:34in the great scheme of things,
55:36our place in time,
55:38our beginnings,
55:39not just as a people,
55:40but as a species.
55:44Archaeology had taken us
55:46through an age of wonder.
55:49The ideas and motivations
55:51of Helena
55:52and Pizzicoli.
55:54of Aubrey
55:58and John Frere.
56:03Their discoveries
56:05all endure today
56:06just as powerfully
56:08as when archaeology
56:09first unleashed them.
56:12And it's those discoveries
56:13that are the foundations
56:15upon which we've built
56:16our own relationship
56:18with the ancient past.
56:20Next time,
56:27archaeology sets its sights
56:28on some seriously
56:30big discoveries.
56:32So you're digging
56:32and you come down to this.
56:35Just imagine.
56:36That's completely
56:37freaked them out.
56:40And Victorian science
56:42and technology
56:42takes archaeology
56:44into a whole new age.
56:47Oh my word,
56:48look at that.
56:49As one question dominates.
56:52Just where
56:54and when
56:55did civilization begin?
56:57Wow,
56:58this place
56:58is absolutely stupendous.
57:00coming up next
57:13this evening,
57:14charting the future
57:14of the human race
57:16through the evidence
57:16of evolution,
57:18its horizon.
57:19Amen.
Recommended
58:19
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