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00:00Priceless treasures, ancient ruins, and the fragile remains of long-dead people.
00:19Archaeology isn't like written history. It's the very stuff of the past.
00:25And people throughout history have always been fascinated by the ancient remains that survived under their very feet.
00:34Ever since the Renaissance, the men of Europe have become increasingly interested in the glittering civilizations of Greece and Rome.
00:42They saw in their mighty achievements a mirror image of their own amazing accomplishments.
00:48That fascination with civilization was, however, worlds away from archaeology's earliest beginnings.
00:57In this series, I've been tracing the very history of archaeology itself.
01:04A story that began with a quest to discover Christian truth.
01:09This is meant to be one of the nails which Jesus Christ was crucified.
01:16But over hundreds of years, archaeologists revealed the vast depth of time that went far beyond that of the Bible.
01:24The most iconic archaeological find ever.
01:28Ever.
01:31Now I'm going to follow another of the great archaeological quests.
01:38Not only mere objects, or even monumental treasure, but the very foundations of civilization itself.
01:46It'll take me into the world of the 18th and 19th centuries, when archaeologists began to search beyond the great monuments of antiquity for new clues.
02:01Which led them to dig deep underground.
02:04In the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, in 1738, the world's very first large-scale archaeological dig began.
02:22Classical scholars knew that the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD had destroyed the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
02:31So they must still exist.
02:35Deep under its deadly layer of mud, lava and ash.
02:39But it took a Spanish engineer to find out for sure.
02:44His name was Roque de Alcubiere.
02:48And the excavation he began was a watershed in the history of archaeology.
02:53Nearly 300 years after Alcubiere's dig, his original diaries are kept at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, giving us a remarkable insight into his methods.
03:10This is a really fascinating document.
03:13And in Spanish, it sets out in really blunt and ruthless terms quite what his mission was.
03:21All stones of utility and brevicho, greatness, were immediately to be removed.
03:28In other words, anything precious, like statues, or anything that could be reused for the multitude of building projects which were going on in the area.
03:39And if they didn't find anything like that, then excavations were to be abandoned.
03:46There are things in this diary which are truly horrifying to any archaeologist.
03:52There's all sorts of references to objects which they considered not to be value.
03:57Little things, small things from everyday life, which we consider to be incredibly precious.
04:03What did they do with them? They just chucked them away.
04:05These documents reveal the sheer ambition of the excavation.
04:13Hundreds of workers digging to a plan, and on a scale that had never been seen before.
04:19Handling Alcubierre's diaries was thrilling enough.
04:35But as an archaeologist, I've been given special access to his original excavations.
04:43To explore Herculaneum just as he did in the early 18th century
04:46as he dug through the ancient volcanic lava of Vesuvius.
04:52You see here, if you look here, you can probably see all the marks where they've basically picked through this.
05:02Wow, and look, there we get a sense of the extent and structure.
05:09You'd have to be very precise with your planning,
05:11as I imagine it took an awful long time to chip away at all of this.
05:14So you'd want to dig this very, very strategically.
05:23As Alcubierre's men dug down, the remains of the Roman Empire began to appear in all its glory.
05:32Miraculously, and sometimes almost perfectly, preserved for nearly 2,000 years.
05:38You see, on the outside, you've got beautiful red, a deep red coloured plaster, and then just above it, on the line there, you've got a white.
05:51And the ancient world was certainly not all black and white.
05:57And here, you get a sense of that.
05:59The excavators even left behind their own marks.
06:06This is a really wonderful little piece of writing, the graffiti.
06:11This is Pascali, maybe Zeno.
06:15This is the worker, and he's saying, this is my house.
06:20Now imagine working down here, it must have been completely claustrophobic and awful.
06:24This chap, this very dark, somewhat forbidding place, he considered, perhaps ironically, to be his home.
06:34You see, look, look, where the excavators have just stacked all of the bits of stone and bits of mud and all the other material that they've dug through.
06:52Because, of course, you wanted the good stuff, you wanted all the statues and all the valuable materials.
06:58All this digging was one giant treasure hunt.
07:04I'm worried you can see, here, traces of a statue head.
07:14Obviously, the excavators have come along and they've taken it out, but he still left his imprint.
07:20So, he is still here.
07:25The Roman statues were eagerly collected.
07:27But within the tunnels, there was something even more extraordinary.
07:36Aha! Now this is amazing.
07:40An entire Roman theatre.
07:43This is the stage.
07:45So, you're digging it and you come down to this.
07:47This must have been like discovering a lost world.
07:52You must have just been completely disorientated.
07:54Just all of a sudden you've entered somewhere completely different.
07:57You've gone back in time to somewhere which is completely mothballed.
08:01Stuck in time as if left after its last performance, the theatre yielded more treasures.
08:22Here, in niches, you'd have had statues of nymphs and gods and goddesses.
08:35But also, statues of local dignitaries.
08:40You can actually see the inscriptions which they would have sat upon.
08:44Now, those early excavators weren't interested in the inscriptions.
08:48That's why they're still here.
08:49It was the valuable statues they wanted.
08:52Just imagine.
08:54It has completely freaked them out.
08:59Alcubierre's excavation was the first step in one of the most remarkable stories in the whole of archaeology.
09:06The revelation of the entire Roman city of Herculaneum.
09:16As each new generation of excavators set to work here during the 19th and 20th centuries,
09:37they discovered not only statues and houses but whole streets
09:41with all of their people and possessions intact, frozen in time under lava and ash.
09:48All of this must have made even the most hardened treasure hunters stop and think.
09:56It seems extraordinary that something as violent as a volcano
10:00could have preserved as well as destroyed.
10:03This is Roman life, still almost perfectly preserved after 2,000 years.
10:14And Herculaneum is still one of the most important archaeological discoveries ever made.
10:20And for me, the most captivating.
10:25What Alcubierre had begun in 1738 changed archaeology.
10:29Herculaneum made it clear that the past didn't only exist on the surface,
10:35but hidden.
10:37Ready to be revealed from deep within the earth.
10:46Alcubierre's work in the early 18th century
10:49had shown that the secrets of ancient civilizations
10:52could be discovered through excavation.
10:55And if the past of Athens and Rome could be revealed,
11:01then what about ancient societies that came before?
11:10Pushing back the boundaries of civilization
11:13meant looking beyond the familiar territories of Italy and Greece.
11:17A tension turned to the Middle East,
11:28and in particular, Egypt,
11:31explored in 1798 by Napoleon,
11:34France's most famous military commander.
11:36When in 1798 Napoleon marched into Egypt with his army,
11:50he didn't just bring soldiers,
11:52but academics, geographers, engineers,
11:55and also surveyors.
11:56And he wasn't just there to uncover one small city like Herculaneum,
12:01but a whole civilization.
12:05Napoleon was no archaeologist,
12:08but he believed to rule this foreign land
12:11as part of his growing empire,
12:13he had to understand it.
12:15His men set about scrutinizing Egypt in immense detail.
12:23All of a sudden, the wonders of Greece and Rome
12:26seemed, well, such an old hat.
12:30If you really wanted to find out about civilization,
12:33then Egypt was where it was at.
12:35A contemporary record of Napoleon's expedition
12:41is kept at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.
12:47This extraordinary book is one of 23 created by the 160 academics
12:54that Napoleon took with him to Egypt.
12:57And they recorded virtually every aspect of Egyptian life.
13:02Everything from religion to geography
13:06was precisely measured and recorded.
13:09Europeans at this time didn't know much about Egypt.
13:13Sure, they'd heard about the pyramids at Giza,
13:16but they didn't know why they'd been built.
13:18And as for the rest of Egypt,
13:20well, that was a real mystery.
13:26If you look at this illustration,
13:27you get a real sense of what an epic journey of discovery this was.
13:34And the excitement of the French
13:37as they came across giant colossal ancient buildings,
13:41half submerged in the desert sands.
13:51Only a thousand copies of these volumes were ever created
13:54and at huge expense.
13:56But they created an enormous stir amongst those that saw them
14:00and fuelled a new mania for Egyptology.
14:13The systematic exploration of ancient Egypt
14:16was another sign of archaeology's ever-increasing ambition.
14:20But the excavators had a problem.
14:24How to get such vast sculptures back home?
14:27To the rescue came one of the most extraordinary figures in archaeology,
14:33an unlikely, larger-than-life Italian called Giovanni Belzoni.
14:39The son of a barber,
14:43Belzoni came to Britain as a circus acrobat
14:46before restyling himself the Patagonian Samson.
14:51There was more to Belzoni than just being a circus strongman.
14:55He was also really interested in engineering.
14:57Belzoni headed to Egypt to sell a new type of irrigation pump,
15:07but it wasn't wanted.
15:09Unabashed, he switched attention to a huge statue
15:14of the Egyptian pharaoh Rameses II.
15:17The showman had turned archaeologist.
15:20Dragged to the Nile by 160 workers,
15:24the 3,000-year-old statue was headed for Europe.
15:30The statue had been discovered by Napoleon,
15:36but in 1818 it ended up in London.
15:38And it still sits proudly in the British Museum.
15:48At war in Egypt and elsewhere,
15:50Britain and France were looking to outdo each other at every turn,
15:55from empire to archaeology.
16:00And this competition extended to their national museums
16:04as they strived to build the very best collections
16:06in the entire world.
16:12This was about national pride.
16:15As well as owning the planet,
16:19they wanted to own the past.
16:29So why is there so much Egyptian art
16:32and artefacts in the British Museum?
16:34The French who were there as part of a military campaign
16:38conducted fantastic research on the antiquities
16:41and were very serious about selecting the best pieces.
16:44So they weren't just picking up any old scraps
16:47on their way through the deserts.
16:49And then, of course, when Nelson defeated them
16:52at the Battle of the Nile in 1798,
16:56the British went, we want that.
16:58It was booty.
16:59And when it arrived on the steps of the museum,
17:02they had nowhere to put it.
17:03It sat out in the rain and, you know, in the pollution of London.
17:09This collection of material draws millions of people from all over the world.
17:13It was the first public collection of Egyptian antiquities that was like a set to go on show.
17:18So it had a massive impact on the public.
17:22They'd never seen anything like it.
17:24And I have seen some lovely early engravings of people actually crawling on these sarcophagi,
17:31crawling into them, peering into them.
17:33So to what extent was collecting, driven by this sort of geopolitical competition between the Brits and the French?
17:41People looked at these objects not as antiquities, but as symbols of British might, British worth, British victory.
17:48They loved them.
17:49And one of the obelisks indeed has engraved down the side, captured by the British Army.
17:55The vast excavations of Herculaneum and the shifting of giant monuments from Egypt had moved archaeology into a new, almost industrial age.
18:09And archaeology was changing in other ways too.
18:14With the development of public institutions such as the Louvre and the British Museum,
18:19archaeology became increasingly democratised.
18:21These beautiful artefacts were no longer just the preserved and the playthings of a rich aristocratic elite.
18:35By the early 19th century, national museums held collections that gave the public access to hitherto unseen treasures.
18:44And with artefacts from far flung ancient civilisations, now easily accessible, they could also be much more easily studied.
18:56This is my old college in Cambridge, Trinity Hall, on graduation day.
19:14Nowadays the place is full of academic archaeologists.
19:18But in the early 19th century, it was a very different story.
19:25Back then, the word archaeology didn't even exist.
19:30But before long as the quest to discover the roots of civilisation gathered pace,
19:36academia began to take an interest.
19:38Considering all the competition between France and Britain for artefacts and glory,
19:51it's perhaps surprising that the first professor of archaeology didn't come from one of those countries.
19:56In fact, the first professor of archaeology in 1818 was appointed at the University of Leiden in Holland.
20:02Here in Cambridge, archaeology began to be taught in 1851.
20:17Now, 150 years later, there are over 3,000 students of archaeology in Britain.
20:24Something that would have been inconceivable to the Victorian dons.
20:29But the importance of this wasn't just ivory towers.
20:35The entry of archaeology into academia fundamentally changed the way we viewed the past
20:41and the treasures of the ancient world.
20:50At its heart was a new academic quest.
20:55Not to own the past, but to understand it.
20:59To solve its mysteries.
21:02And one of the first riddles was posed by a stone tablet recovered from Egypt.
21:11The Rosetta Stone.
21:14Today, the Rosetta Stone is one of the treasures of the British Museum.
21:18Millions of people come every year to visit an archaeological icon.
21:26Unlike the Egyptian statues, it's important not because of its beauty or magnificence,
21:34but because of the story of its written inscription.
21:38Its information.
21:39Before being put on public display, it was sent to the Society of Antiquaries in London to be copied.
21:54This is a copy of an engraving of the Rosetta Stone, done here in 1801.
22:02You might ask why this is so important.
22:04Well, this is a real turning point for archaeology.
22:06Because archaeologists and their patrons began to realize that the real glory in their profession
22:14wasn't in the possession of objects, but in the idea of deciphering the information that they contained.
22:20And from this letter, we know that four plaster cast copies were made of the stone,
22:28and distributed to four universities.
22:31Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Dublin.
22:36Now, the Rosetta Stone and its prints, literally hundreds of them were produced and spread across Britain,
22:46and sent to both individuals and to institutions.
22:50And the copying didn't stop there.
22:53Direct copies were also made from Rosetta Stone itself,
22:56with ink being smeared over its surface before paper was laid down on it.
23:02Even with academics poring over all the copies,
23:06the Rosetta Stone took 20 years to decode.
23:10It was a ground-breaking achievement,
23:13and one that this time was won by the French.
23:17The decoding of the Rosetta Stone was a massive advance,
23:21because if you could read this document,
23:23then you could read all documents in which Egyptian hieroglyphs had been used.
23:28For the first time, scholars could now work out a chronology of Egyptian history.
23:33And what they had long suspected now became crystal clear,
23:38that Egyptian civilisation was far, far, in fact thousands of years older than anything in Greece and Rome.
23:46Academics had discovered a new age, one of which clues to ever-earlier civilisations could not only be discovered,
23:58but deciphered from their mysterious writings.
24:01And this new age would be brought into focus by a new technological breakthrough,
24:11the invention of photography.
24:16Some of the very first archaeological photographs are held in the French National Archives,
24:21and have been studied by historian Miriam Broussias.
24:27Oh, that's fantastic.
24:30This is taken in ancient Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq.
24:36What you have here was a French expedition in the early 1850s.
24:39When you see this, you realise things haven't moved on that much.
24:45So if you looked at the photographs of my excavation in Carthage in Tunisia,
24:50they're using exactly the same picks, exactly the same tools.
24:54I love this guy kind of lounging nonchalantly against a trench wall.
24:58Photography represented a whole new way to record finds in context,
25:05as well as providing perfect reproductions for study,
25:10especially when finds themselves sometimes went astray.
25:15Talking about reproduction and reproducibility,
25:20it's rather important with this one because what we see here on the photograph
25:24actually got lost on the way to France.
25:26Quite a few boxes, I think we're talking about hundreds actually, got lost in the river.
25:36And so all we have now is the photograph of some of these objects.
25:42And you can still see archaeologists working with these photographs as proxies and reproducing them.
25:48And people can actually work with this material.
25:51That's wonderful. There are any more there?
25:53There are some cylinders and some tablets.
25:59We also have photographs where you can actually see the script of the tablet.
26:05And these photographs would be sent to scholars who were then about to decipher the script,
26:12because nobody could actually read what was on the clay tablets.
26:15The Rosetta Stone had been meticulously copied, but with photography information could be recorded and circulated more widely than ever before.
26:37During excavations in Mesopotamia in 1855 to 1856, thousands of photographs were taken of cuneiform tablets which had been found there.
26:49They were covered in a mysterious language which nobody yet understood.
26:58The photographs were distributed all over Europe, and all of its finest scholars quickly got to work in a race to try and decipher this mysterious code.
27:07It was these photographs which led to a breakthrough in our quest to understand how civilization began.
27:18Sometimes as a scholar, you can spend days, weeks, years working on the coalface without seeming to make any progress.
27:25And then suddenly, you have a eureka moment.
27:30And that's what happened to the German scholar, Jules Hopper.
27:36One day he was reading one of these cuneiform tablets when he came across the word Sumer.
27:41And he realized that that must be the place where this mysterious language had come from.
27:51And in fact, the Sumerians were the people that had invented writing in the first place.
27:59The discovery of the Sumerians pushed back the dawn of civilization by several thousand years.
28:11It seemed that civilization went back even further than Egypt, deep into the Middle East, when people began to create the first written records.
28:23But there was another question that remained unanswered.
28:27Was Mesopotamia the single root of human civilization?
28:32Or just one branch in something more complex?
28:35For a few radical thinkers, the answer to that lay not in the old world, but much, much further afield.
28:46It's hard to imagine that even by the middle of the 19th century, large areas of the world were still unmatched.
29:07Much of Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australasia remained a mystery.
29:18But all that was changing.
29:23Archaeology was heading off to new unexplored areas of the world.
29:27In the spirit, two mavericks, John Lloyd Stevens, an American writer, and Frederick Catherwood, a British draftsman,
29:38who had both previously worked documenting the monuments of Egypt, set off west and 7,000 miles away to Central America.
29:47Catherwood and Stevens were drawn to Mexico in the 1830s by reports of ancient abandoned cities.
30:13But they faced an immediate problem.
30:18It's deep, dense jungle.
30:30Amigo, para abrir brecha, para pasar nomás es asÃ.
30:34Abres brecha, tap, tap, tap.
30:37Amigo, para abrir brecha, para pasar nomás es asÃ.
30:40I've only been doing this for a short while, but I'm already absolutely knackered.
30:52I feel a drain of energy.
30:55I can't imagine what it was like for Catherwood and Stevens, who had to do this day after day, week after week, month after month.
31:06Not only that, but they also had to contend with the sweltering heat.
31:18Mosquitoes, malaria, ticks, leeches, as well as hostile indigenous people.
31:25After weeks of trekking, they began to get tantalizing glimpses of the work of ancient hands.
31:37When we first look at this, it just looks like a mound of stones in the forest.
31:43But of course, there's something suspicious about these stones.
31:46Look, they're cut straight.
31:48These have been prepared by human beings.
31:50This is the wall of some kind.
31:53This great mound is some kind of building.
32:01What these remains led them to was so incredible and unexpected that archaeology and our understanding of ancient civilization would never be the same again.
32:12Wow! This place is absolutely stupendous.
32:28You're in the middle of the jungle and then you're suddenly confronted by this.
32:32These towering edifices rising out of the trees.
32:35You can only imagine the reaction of Catherwood and Stevens when they came across this in the 1830s.
32:42Now, Stevens admitted that he was a man who wasn't easily impressed.
32:46But this place blew his mind.
32:49And looking around here now, I'm not surprised.
32:52What Catherwood and Stevens had come across was the ancient, magnificent city of Palenque.
33:05All this was the creation of a sophisticated and previously unknown civilization.
33:16Right in the heart of a Mexican jungle.
33:21They set up camp here in a corridor in this palace.
33:27Their Indian guides were too frightened to stay here after nightfall and left them here alone.
33:35And the first night they had a loud crash and thought somebody was trying to break in.
33:45Fearing for their lives, they let off a volley of shots.
33:49Before blocking off the passageway and barricading themselves in.
33:57Stevens later described what this new world of extreme archaeology was like.
34:02The next night, the mosquitoes were beyond all endurance.
34:07The slightest part of the body, the tip end of a finger exposed, was bitten.
34:12With the heads covered, the heat was suffocating.
34:15And in the morning, our faces were all in blotches.
34:19And that wasn't the worst thing.
34:21They were also flesh-eating insects that burrowed into one's body.
34:24And the only way of getting rid of them was cutting them out with a knife.
34:32Made of stern stuff, Catherwood and Stevens spent weeks meticulously exploring their new discovery.
34:38And there was one obvious mystery.
34:44What were pyramids doing 7,000 miles from Egypt?
34:49And who could have built them?
34:52In this temple, Catherwood and Stevens discovered what they thought was a cross.
34:57You can see it running down here, and then the horizontal line here.
35:03And the local Christian priests argued this had to be something to do with Jesus Christ.
35:09And this temple must be dated to around the 3rd century AD.
35:13Stevens and Catherwood were rightly sceptical of such a conclusion.
35:17They thought it was entirely possible that there was a new world civilisation here that was not connected in any way to the old world.
35:32If this was true, where had this ancient culture come from?
35:42The key were these, the faces on the stucco that covered many of the buildings here.
35:48They noticed that they bore a strong resemblance of the people that still lived in the area.
35:53And from that, deduced that they must be their ancestors.
36:05Today we know that Palenque was built by local Mayan people nearly 2,000 years ago.
36:11For those traditional archaeologists of the 19th century, who saw civilisation as a torch passed down from Egypt, Greece and Rome to Napoleon's France or Queen Victoria's Britain.
36:27Well, they were beginning to realise that it didn't quite work like that at all.
36:32Archaeology had moved on massively, but the more there was found, the more there seemed yet to be discovered.
36:41At a time when many scholars were arguing for one single founding civilisation,
36:47Catherwood and Stephen's findings seem to suggest the possibility of civilisation springing up all over the world independently of one another.
36:56They had not only called into question beliefs about the beginnings of civilisation, they had blown them apart.
37:07In the 18th and early 19th centuries, archaeology had seemed so simple.
37:23The more you dug, the more evidence of past civilisations you could find.
37:32And with the insights of academia, these discoveries were becoming better understood.
37:38But by the mid-19th century, Catherwood and Stephen's had shown that things were far more complex than anyone had previously thought.
37:47It had been an engineer who had revealed Herculaneum.
37:53A circus strongman who had shifted Egyptian statues.
37:58And a writer-illustrator duo who had taken archaeology to the new world.
38:04But now, there was about to be a new way of revealing the past.
38:10Through science.
38:17This new era of scientific archaeology was pioneered in a ground-breaking excavation in Turkey.
38:35An excavation organised by one of archaeology's most notorious figures.
38:41A hugely wealthy German entrepreneur.
38:44Someone who wasn't out to discover something bigger or earlier.
38:51But something many people didn't believe existed at all.
38:56One of the men who best embodied the buccaneering spirit of the early treasure hunters.
39:08As well as this new rigorous scientific methodology was Heinrich Schliemann, a German business tycoon.
39:17And here's a painting of him and his wife.
39:20Schliemann used his fortune to follow his dream.
39:24One of the most elusive prizes in archaeology.
39:27The ancient city of Troy.
39:28Today, Schliemann's discovery is one of the most visited ancient sites in the world.
39:41A magnet for many of Turkey's millions of tourists.
39:47The attraction even has a trademark Trojan horse.
39:56140 years ago, though, most right-thinking academics thought Troy was no more than fiction.
40:03A myth.
40:06Schliemann, with the romantic zeal of an amateur, thought that they were wrong.
40:11In 1871, when Schliemann first arrived here, there were few surface clues to guide him.
40:25But as a man of science, Schliemann had a method.
40:29He was the first archaeologist to dig test pits.
40:33And he used a new technique pioneered by geologists, called stratigraphy.
40:39He had to dig a series of trenches.
40:44And the first one, you can see down here.
40:47And almost immediately, he started to find evidence of an ancient city.
40:55This is what Schliemann first found. It's part of a temple of Athena.
40:59And Schliemann immediately recognised that this was Grico-Roman.
41:03And that if he wanted to find Homeric Troy, then he needed to dig much deeper.
41:09It's part of a temple.
41:13Schliemann employed hundreds of men.
41:16Using his considerable wealth to excavate on a massive scale.
41:23And only stopping when he reached bedrock.
41:25He was working on a wild hunch that there really was a factual basis to Homer's epic references to the great city of Troy.
41:38Now, Schliemann, as he dug down, did try and take a scientific approach and analyse what he had found.
41:48And when he reached this level, Troy II, the second earliest settlement on the site of Troy, he thought that he'd hit pay dirt.
41:54And the reason for that was because he found this, which is a destruction layer made up of burnt objects and charcoal.
42:04And he knew from reading Homer's Iliad that Troy had been burnt to the ground.
42:08Schliemann had proved that Troy was real, although in his enthusiasm, he had unknowingly dug straight through it to an even earlier settlement.
42:23In digging through a mound and finding an ancient city, Schliemann had opened up the possibility of excavating all the other thousands of mounds that existed across the Near East.
42:35Think about it for a moment.
42:37In the search for the beginnings of civilisation, you no longer needed to wait for clues to appear spontaneously,
42:43but could start excavating any time, anywhere.
42:50Schliemann was pioneering a new scientific approach,
42:55but he was still fascinated by something that had always drawn archaeologists.
43:01Treasure.
43:04Schliemann wrote that while working on a trench roughly here,
43:08he first discovered a copper and then a gold object.
43:11Not trusting his workmen, he called an early lunch and then cut the artefacts out of the ground using a knife,
43:18before smuggling them away in his wife's shawl.
43:21Now, he claimed this was a massive hoard of weapons, jewellery and other artefacts.
43:27There must be the treasure of Priam, King of Troy, hidden when the city fell to the Greeks.
43:33Schliemann even took pictures of his wife modelling the precious jewellery.
43:38To the modern archaeologist, the idea of putting on ancient artefacts that you found is absolutely shocking.
43:48These days, many archaeologists suspect that although some of this jewellery did come from the fine site,
43:55that Schliemann actually added to it from material that he found elsewhere.
43:59Schliemann smuggled Priam's treasure out of Turkey and was promptly banned from ever coming back.
44:11Unperturbed, he turned his attention to another of Homer's cities, Mycenaean Greece.
44:21This time, hoping to discover a connection between Troy and their epic Greek enemies.
44:27This is a copy of Schliemann's most famous find, the so-called Mask of Agamemnon.
44:37And it far surpassed anything that he found in Troy.
44:41He found it in a tomb inside the city of Mycenae.
44:45And it's said that in celebration, he romped round the tomb afterwards with his young wife.
44:49It was another incredible discovery, but Schliemann still faced the challenge to convince the world that his two sites were connected.
45:03What he did next showed just how far ahead of the game Schliemann really was.
45:07Because like any good 19th century German, Schliemann believed in the power of science.
45:15And particularly, the power of analytical chemistry.
45:22Schliemann sent samples back to metal experts in Britain for scientific testing.
45:30Here, at Goldsmiths Hall in London, analytical chemists still use similar techniques
45:35to test precious metals.
45:46By studying his ancient gold, Schliemann hoped that he would discover compositions
45:51that matched metal from Mycenae to metal he'd previously found at Troy.
45:59This is exactly the same sort of process that Schliemann's artefacts would have been through.
46:03And you can imagine him anxiously waiting for the test results.
46:09The Science Museum in London holds some of Schliemann's original samples, together with the all-important results.
46:18This was gold leaf taken from the wrappings around the bodies in the tomb of Mycenae.
46:23And what analysis seemed to show was a link between this gold leaf from Mycenae and the gold leaf that Schliemann had found in Troy.
46:34So through scientific analysis, Schliemann thought that he'd found that all-important connection between Mycenae and Troy.
46:42Nowadays, it's impossible to imagine archaeology without science, but in the late 19th century, these new advances seemed to promise a new way of doing archaeology.
46:57A move away from vague theorising to solid scientific results.
47:02Now, Schliemann might have been a treasure hunter, but he was also a man who believed in the power of science.
47:12And that's what makes him such a giant in the history of archaeology.
47:15Heimrich Schliemann established archaeology as a scientific discipline.
47:33But it took the man that lived here to take it to new heights.
47:37His name was General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers.
47:42General Pitt Rivers was the quintessential Victorian gentleman.
47:49A career soldier, he'd had a distinguished military record and was both intelligent and eccentric.
47:57But there was more to Pitt Rivers than just military matters.
48:02Whilst abroad, he'd assembled a very impressive ethnographical collection.
48:06And when ill health prompted an early retirement from the army,
48:09he was able to devote himself to his passion, archaeology.
48:18Fortunately for Pitt Rivers, his retirement had coincided with an inheritance of almost royal proportions.
48:26This, Cranbourne Chase, 30,000 acres of rolling Wessex countryside.
48:35The old soldier now had the time, the money and the perfect place to pursue his passion.
48:42It had once been a Royal Deer Park, so it had been protected from modern building.
48:47But it was still crammed full of ancient settlements.
48:51It was an archaeologist's dream.
48:52Cranbourne Chase became the general's personal archaeological laboratory.
49:04Each day come rain or shine, he'd go out with a group of draftsmen and excavators.
49:08And this photograph says it all.
49:12Here you've got the big man himself sitting in his horse and carriage.
49:16With all of his workmen assembled, standing to attention around the trench.
49:20It was said that to keep the spirits up, he sometimes had a brass band playing whilst they worked.
49:26But I have to say, if you look at this photograph, the tools aren't stowed away very carefully.
49:30Shame on you, Pitt Rivers.
49:34Over a century after he dug here, evidence of his excavations at Cranbourne Chase still exists.
49:42Pitt Rivers literally left his mark right across Cranbourne Chase.
49:47And down here, we're going to try and find one of his stone markers that he put down on one of his many excavations.
49:55Now, it's quite overgrown.
49:58So we're going to have to look quite carefully.
50:03The estate manager has told me one still exists close to here.
50:08So this looks like a ditch around an ancient settlement.
50:12Let's have a look up here.
50:21Ah, there we go.
50:28Looks like a grave stone.
50:31This Roman well, five feet in diameter.
50:39This stone tells us a lot about Pitt Rivers and his attitude towards the ancient past.
50:44Firstly, it tells you about its precision.
50:47He wanted to mark down with this expensive stone exactly where ancient monuments were, where he'd found them.
50:56It was important to him to give people precise information.
50:59And the second thing is that this is just a well.
51:04You know, it's not a temple or some other fine building.
51:08But Pitt Rivers was interested in the everyday life of the people that lived on Cranbourne Chase hundreds, thousands of years before.
51:16Over 17 years, Pitt Rivers excavated sites all over Cranbourne Chase, uncovering everything from Bronze Age barrows to Roman farmhouses and Saxon burials.
51:34Each site meticulously documented.
51:39Evidence of Pitt Rivers' groundbreaking approach to archaeology can be found in Salisbury Museum.
51:48Adrian Green is a Pitt Rivers expert.
51:52With Schliemann and other earlier collectors, often what we find is a rather imprecise way of recording what you found and a rather cavalier way of presenting it.
52:05With Pitt Rivers, was he more scrupulous in that way?
52:08Yeah, absolutely. He's often referred to as the father of modern scientific archaeology because he had such a precise approach to recording his evidence.
52:15So it wasn't enough for him to just say it came from a particular site. He wanted to be able to demonstrate exactly where the objects came from on his excavations.
52:24He would number that piece and actually say at what depth an object was found because if that object was used for dating that particular feature or that particular site,
52:33he wanted absolute proof there in the record for posterity, basically, as well as his contemporaries, to prove what he had found.
52:40It's a marvellous example of technical drawing, isn't it?
52:44It is, absolutely. And it's a catalogue. I think that's what it is. Each object is numbered and carefully drawn and then coloured to give you an idea of what it may have looked like.
52:54I mean, it's extraordinarily detailed. I'm just looking here and you can see where the illustrator has painted in so that we can see corrosion.
53:03Yeah, I mean, it's a real labour of love, this, actually, the work and the effort that's been put into it.
53:07Yeah, they are almost like works of art. In fact, they are works of art, aren't they?
53:14For Pitt Rivers, though, even these exquisite drawings weren't enough.
53:18So what's this? This looks almost like a sort of board game or something.
53:23It does, doesn't it? Yeah, it's actually one of the General's contour plans, which were basically a series of models that were made of the archaeological site that he excavated.
53:35I love the skeleton, relaxing in a very relaxed pose. Yes.
53:41Pitt Rivers' care, his attention to detail, is simply astonishing.
53:47So am I looking here at an early example of 3D modelling?
53:50You are indeed, yes. It's the site to scale, showing the locations of some of the features from one particular area.
53:56And he wants to show the context, that's what he's doing, and that's one of the things you can see in this model,
54:01with the pits and things that are all shown, but also he's painted onto here labels showing where the objects in the pits were found too,
54:07and the depth at which they were found.
54:10How useful to a modern archaeologist do you think the references that he's left are?
54:18I think they're invaluable, because I think you can tell precisely where the features were.
54:25You can see where some of the major finds recovered were.
54:28You can see that through the publications.
54:31You can see that also through the models that he produced as well.
54:34So these are very useful to modern archaeologists.
54:37In Pitt Rivers and his meticulous records, we're seeing the very birth of modern archaeology.
54:44And more than a hundred years later, everything Pitt Rivers found is still carefully stored.
54:53Not only pottery and coins, but something else that many archaeologists of earlier times would have cast aside.
55:03Human remains.
55:04In the 19th century, all of those treasure hunters didn't see any use for these skulls, and they often used to put them to one side.
55:14Unless, of course, you were Pitt Rivers.
55:16We now know that these are incredibly useful artifacts, because you can tell what people died of, what diseases they had, and sometimes even what their religious beliefs were.
55:28Now, one of the reasons why we see Pitt Rivers as being such a visionary was that he understood that in the future, archaeologists might have new scientific techniques that would allow them to extract new types of data from artifacts like this.
55:42Just 150 years separates the work of Alcubiare and Herculaneum and Pitt Rivers.
55:53During that time, archaeology had been transformed.
55:57We've seen the first massive excavations in Herculaneum, the first great state-backed enterprises in Egypt, the first academics, and on top of all of that, Schliemann and his belief in the use of scientific analysis.
56:19But for me, as an archaeologist, it seems that modern archaeology begins the Pitt Rivers.
56:28Although most of his work was conducted in the 1880s, he feels like a 20th century archaeologist.
56:35And many of the developments in that century, I'm sure, would have thrilled him.
56:39Next time, archaeology moves into the 20th century.
56:50Well, that is absolutely extraordinary.
56:54From civilisation and kings, to the common man.
56:59To the common man.
57:00What I really like about this is that it's a very, very different snapshot of our past, isn't it?
57:07Of everyday life lived by everyday people.
57:09Yes.
57:11The science creates ever more powerful tools to get even closer to our most ancient ancestors.
57:17Oh, what's that?
57:18Yes.
57:19Yes.
57:20Beautiful.
57:21Beautiful.
57:22Look.
57:24But in the process, it becomes tinged by politics and ideology.
57:36And there's an archaeology collection available on the BBC4 website, with programmes handpicked by Robin Lane Fox from the BBC Archive, including all six episodes of St Mortimer and Magnus.
57:45Go online to find out more.
57:47Next tonight, here on BBC4 though, a totalitarian regime in retreat.
57:52As capitalism looms large on the horizon, Simon Reeve heads to a rapidly changing Cuba.
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