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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.
00:24And people have always been fascinated by ancient remains and the stories they told.
00:33But over the past 100 years, the pace of archaeological discovery has changed, every bit as much as the world we live in.
00:44Like the rest of our lives, archaeology has been subject to incredible advances in science and technology,
00:50and has allowed us to see the past in ever more precise detail.
00:55And it's been used to provide objective truth for what was once just conjecture and opinion.
01:02I've been tracing the very history of archaeology itself, from its very beginnings in religion,
01:10to the great discoveries of the 18th and 19th centuries.
01:15Now, I'm going to enter the 20th century, and the beginning of the modern age of archaeology.
01:24An age driven by a quest for scientific objectivity, but also by passions, the lust for fame and glory.
01:36And the lure of powerful forces, the new and sometimes extreme politics.
02:06Just over 100 years ago, an amateur archaeologist from Sussex made a surprise discovery that astounded the world.
02:16In the 19th century, archaeology had come of age, with the first professors and professionals opening up Egypt, the Middle East, and the classical world.
02:25But there was still room for the gentleman amateur, and the most prolific of these was the country solicitor, Charles Dawson.
02:33Dawson had already found an astounding range of artefacts from the past, and had been dubbed the Wizard of Sussex.
02:44He'd previously magicked up unknown examples of Roman pottery, statues and dinosaurs, and even an amazingly well-preserved ancient boat.
02:54But in 1912, he topped the lot.
02:59Over several decades, the claims of archaeology had taken leaps forward.
03:04Not only to discover the past, but to explain it.
03:08The very roots of empires, civilisation, and even humanity itself.
03:13Now this knowledge was being used by modern empires, all of whom wanted to be acknowledged as the birthplace of human culture.
03:28So the stakes had never been higher.
03:32Opportunity for personal fame ran hand in hand with national pride.
03:37And Dawson was perfectly placed to take advantage.
03:45His discovery? Ancient fragments of human skull and an ape-like jaw.
03:54X marks the spot of the discovery.
03:56And the inscription reads,
03:58Here in the old river gravel, Mr Charles Dawson, FSA, fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, found the fossil skull of Piltdown Man.
04:08In France, they'd found traces of early man.
04:11And in Germany, they'd found traces of the even older Neanderthal man.
04:15And now here in Britain, they had the earliest of all the so-called missing links.
04:20Dawson's discovery thrilled the establishment.
04:30Britain, the greatest empire on earth, had evidence that it was also the cradle of mankind.
04:37This jawbone was found in 1912.
04:49And it was quite surprising because it was rather ape-like in its general shape.
04:54But the teeth had a flat wear characteristic of human teeth.
04:59There was quite an assemblage of finds.
05:01They didn't fit together perfectly because they were broken.
05:04But nevertheless, they were put together into reconstructions of a new kind of human,
05:09which was known as Eoanthropus Dawsoni, the Dawn Man of Dawson.
05:14So named after Charles Dawson, who discovered most of the pieces.
05:17A big honour for Dawson, the country solicitor.
05:20Absolutely.
05:21For an amateur prehistorian, a great honour.
05:24But he had identified the site.
05:26He had found most of the pieces.
05:27So he seemed to deserve that honour.
05:30The only trouble was that none of it was true.
05:34Every one of the finds had been forged.
05:38The ape and human bones were indeed ape and human bones that were modified, broken and artificially stained to match the colour of the other fossils, to match the colour of the gravels.
05:51And apparently even painted with Van Dyke brown oil paint to make sure it's got that dark fossil colour.
05:58And in your view, was Dawson a fraudster or duped?
06:03I think Dawson has to be involved centrally in the whole thing because, of course, you know, he's identified with all of the finds.
06:11You know, it's a warning to us to be careful about our preconceived ideas and letting them lead us on.
06:17And in a sense, to beware that when something seems too good to be true, maybe it is too good to be true.
06:24Dawson was never found out.
06:31He lived on as the wizard of Sussex and died fated for his groundbreaking work.
06:42It wasn't until 1949 that the truth emerged, when new scientific tests revealed Piltdown Man to be a hoax.
06:53In the Natural History Museum, tests were carried out to estimate the nitrogen content of the Piltdown skull.
07:02Here is Mrs. Anne Foster measuring the amount of nitrogen in very tiny salt bubbles.
07:12Its chemical composition revealed Dawson's skull to be little more than a thousand years old.
07:18So much for Ioanthropus d'Orsoni and its discoverer's posthumous reputation.
07:31For me, Piltdown Man is a perfect metaphor for the 20th century.
07:36You have the wonder of that initial discovery.
07:39And then you have ideology, in this case nationalism.
07:42And then science working as the arbiter or bestower of truth, or in this case with Piltdown Man, the fakery.
07:48But there's more to it than that.
07:51Because what Piltdown Man also shows is the fame and attention that came with something so personal.
07:58And about how a face from the past connected us with our ancestors.
08:03The past held the promise of fame and glory.
08:10And just a decade on from Piltdown Man, another face was found.
08:16And this time, it was real.
08:17Discovery that would give archaeology its most iconic portrait from the ancient past.
08:26And I don't even need to say his name.
08:28In 1922, after a long campaign of fruitless digging in Egypt, archaeologist Howard Carter made the discovery of a lifetime.
08:45An untouched burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings.
08:50The tomb of Tutankhamun.
08:52The discovery caused a sensation.
08:59Many of Carter's personal belongings from the expedition are held here in Oxford.
09:05This is Carter's diary from 1922.
09:10The year of his famous discovery.
09:13And the first thing that struck me when I saw it, is how empty it is.
09:16His style is laconic, sparse, just a few neat sentences.
09:23But that all changes on that fateful day, the 4th of November.
09:29When, of course, he made his amazing discovery.
09:33And there's just one sentence scrawled, almost allegedly, across the page.
09:38And it says, first steps of tomb found.
09:43And the excitement of this rather correct man.
09:47It's almost, it's really palpable, just coming off the page at you.
09:51What makes the diary so special is the way it documents a moment.
09:56The biggest archaeological find of the 20th century.
09:59Carter and the digs funder, Lord Carnarvon, gave the Times newspaper exclusive rights to the archaeological scoop of the century.
10:19Immortalised in print, their legacy was assured.
10:22Carter was very much a 20th century archaeologist.
10:33He understood about the importance of the oxygen of publicity.
10:37The power of the sound bite.
10:39The power of the photo opportunity.
10:41And that really comes across when you look at this album of photographs from the excavation.
10:47And they're so mannered, they're so posed, so polished.
10:50And you get the same sense of something having been rehearsed.
10:56When you look at Carter's second diary.
11:00So much fuller.
11:02And so much more poetic.
11:05It was some time before one could see.
11:08The hot air escaping caused the candle to flicker.
11:12But as soon as one's eyes became accustomed to the glimmer of light,
11:15the interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one.
11:21When Lord Carnarvon said to me,
11:24Can you see anything?
11:26I replied to him, Yes.
11:29It is wonderful.
11:30This is the most marthful piece of archaeological public relations ever.
11:46Carter hadn't found a pyramid, a statue or a monument, but a person.
11:51And not just anyone, but a boy king, who had ruled Egypt nearly 3,000 years ago.
12:05Today, Tutankhamun is still an archaeological rock star.
12:09And he turns up in some very unexpected places.
12:24In Dorchester, a small museum has carefully recreated Tutankhamun's tomb,
12:29just as Howard Carter found it.
12:31Even in replica, there's a real sense of wonder.
12:42A moment in time from the ancient past.
12:45And the sheer human intimacy of it all.
12:50Obviously, it's pure theatre.
12:52But it's rather wonderful theatre.
12:54A little piece of ancient Egypt and a Dorset market town.
13:02You still feel like you've stumbled upon buried treasure.
13:09And, of course, treasure is a great part of its allure.
13:12But this is also an intimate scene.
13:15With the dead pharaoh being buried with all the accoutrement
13:18that he needs for the afterlife.
13:20Furniture, weapons and jewellery.
13:23And this is a great part of his fascination.
13:26Because it transforms Tutankhamun from being a distant historical figure
13:32to being a human being.
13:37The intimacy of the tomb didn't prompt questions of civilisation or empire.
13:44But the kind of life Tutankhamun once lived.
13:49Collections of classical statues
13:51and the discovery of ancient civilisations were fine.
13:53But this was about coming face to face with a real person.
13:58A king from an ancient past.
14:12Tutankhamun has been the most famous face in archaeology
14:16for nearly 100 years.
14:17But it wasn't long after his discovery
14:21before new questions were being asked.
14:24Not of the lives of kings,
14:27but of our more common ancestors.
14:30The everyday folk of the ancient world.
14:33So much of archaeology like history had been directed towards warriors and leaders.
14:44But that was only a tiny part of the puzzle.
14:47Just one small corner of a vast jigsaw.
14:50What about our past?
14:52Our ancestors?
14:53From the 1920s onwards, a new generation of socialist archaeologists
14:58weren't just interested in digging up kings and emperors,
15:01but finding out about ordinary lives.
15:04Not in Egypt and the Mediterranean,
15:06but here in Britain.
15:07Following World War I,
15:13new Marxist sentiments were changing politics and society.
15:21And that ideology was also shaping archaeology.
15:28The quest was on to find the ancient working man.
15:33But there was a problem.
15:34While kings and emperors built monuments and lavish tombs,
15:39evidence of the ancient farmers who once worked Britain's fields
15:44seemed to have disappeared.
15:49Sure, there were mysterious Neolithic remains,
15:52stone circles, passage tombs, even earthworks.
15:56But was it possible to see more?
15:59Was it possible to touch the invisible world of the land
16:01that had been tended generation after generation for thousands of years?
16:12In the 1920s, the answer was found not by digging down,
16:17but by climbing up.
16:20World War I had brought in a new era of aerial photography.
16:23And in the 1920s, an archaeologist named Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford
16:30realised that from the air,
16:33you couldn't just see modern features, but ancient ones too.
16:36Undulations, scars, shadows of the past.
16:39Crawford wrote that he thought that aerial photography would be as important for archaeology
16:45as the telescope had been for astronomy.
16:48From the air, Britain's fields still bore traces of our ancient working ancestors.
17:06The homes and field boundaries of farmers who had laboured on the land over countless generations.
17:20Crawford's passion for uncovering the lies of ordinary men fitted well with his political views.
17:39He had strong Marxist sympathies.
17:41Crawford believed that at some point in the distant past,
17:43there had been a self-sufficient and classless society until capitalism had come along and mucked it up.
17:55And he believed that in the faint traces that he found in the Wessex countryside,
17:59there were clues to that mysterious utopia.
18:01But was it possible to know whether these farming communities really were classless or not?
18:14Crawford's method of looking down from the air gave a tantalising glimpse of a lost world.
18:21But it would take an Australian archaeologist, Vere Gordon Childe,
18:24to take these ideas onto a completely new level.
18:36Childe came here to Edinburgh to teach archaeology in the 1920s.
18:41He was notable for his love of fast cars, free history and especially Marx.
18:46He was rarely seen without a red tie.
18:56And he was obsessed by an ancient settlement on Orkney called Skara Brae.
19:03Childe's first excavations in 1927 uncovered what Crawford had only dreamed of.
19:11An almost perfectly preserved Neolithic community.
19:14Most of his finds are now kept in the archives of the National Museums of Scotland.
19:29They reveal everyday lives, not of kings, but of ordinary farmers.
19:36And you see here are some other objects from the many thousands that are found at the site.
19:40Where should we start?
19:42OK. It's made of whale bone. What do you reckon?
19:47It's not some sort of sewing thing, is it? No.
19:50No. It's thought to be a clothes pin.
19:53Oh!
19:54Yeah.
19:55If you imagine people are wearing very fine hide clothes.
19:59It obviously didn't have buttons.
20:01And you would have a piece of cord or thong so that you would put it through there and then the other end so that it didn't slip off.
20:08And it's the great, great, great granddaddy of the safety pin.
20:10But what they did was to make exquisite jewellery and lots of it.
20:16Loads and loads.
20:17This was strung together in the museum so we have no idea how long the necklaces were originally.
20:23But we know for sure that they were making the beads on site.
20:27One thing we don't know is whether jewellery like this was worn just by women or by men.
20:32And Childe thought it was women.
20:34And there's a wonderful passage where he describes finding a whole string of beads.
20:39You know, as if the woman, when she was fleeing from the sandstorm that engulfed the site,
20:45her necklace broke and it scattered beads as she scampered away.
20:47Sometimes with objects, they can feel quite impersonal. I know that's heresy to say, but you know what I mean.
20:54Yeah.
20:55But with this, you get a sense that somebody would have worn this with a great deal of pride because it would have taken a great deal of effort.
21:02Well, that's right.
21:03To actually gather the materials and to make this.
21:06And I can imagine somebody walking around with this around their neck.
21:12But Skara Bray didn't just turn up incredible artefacts.
21:15For Childe and his excavators, the layout represented a proto-Commonist community, evidence of a classless utopia.
21:24Looking at the site as a whole, he made the point that there was no single dwelling structure that was significantly bigger than any others.
21:35So you can see here, I mean, they're roughly the same size and roughly the same design as dwelling houses.
21:41And if you look at his original version here, he's colour coded it.
21:47And so he, very much this model of pastoralists where everybody shared everything and nobody was better than anyone else.
21:55So he, so he, he wore his political views on his archaeological sleeve, didn't he?
22:00Very, very heavily, yes.
22:02What I love about this is that of course, you know, our Marxist, it's all in red.
22:07It's all in red.
22:08It's all in red.
22:12Childe's views might have been as coloured by his ideology as his maps and his tie.
22:18But his work was a watershed in archaeology.
22:21This was the first time that anyone had really studied how ordinary people had actually lived together in the ancient past.
22:29Between the very Edwardian world of the country solicitor Dawson and his desperate need to give Britain the missing link, pilt down man, by any means necessary.
22:46To Childe in the 1920s and 30s, filling in another very different kind of missing link with the pure and natural social world of Neolithic communism, seems like the world had gone through a seismic shift.
23:01And of course it had with the outbreak of World War One in 1914 and the Russian Revolution in 1917.
23:07Now however much we might have reservations about their motivations and methodologies, Childe and Crawford had moved archaeology into a new era.
23:18Unlike Tutankhamun, this world, despite its distance in time, seemed far more like our own.
23:26A little more about how we fitted into the picture.
23:37Highgate Cemetery in London is the last resting place of Karl Marx, Childe's great political idol.
23:51His tomb is something of a mecca for left-leaning visitors from right across the world.
23:56And his ideas, as we know from the work of Crawford and Childe, would have a profound effect on archaeology in the 20th century.
24:03But Marx was by no means the only great thinker who was shaking up the world, and archaeology along with it.
24:14Almost at every level, some very big brains were re-evaluating the world and our relationship with it.
24:21Not just in terms of the present and future, but also the past.
24:26Now at that top level of thinkers, you'd also put this man, Albert Einstein,
24:30who, with a group of scientists, was leading the technological revolution that would have such a massive impact on archaeology in the 20th century.
24:42Einstein represents the scientific revolution that has given us powerful tools to analyse the things we find.
24:50Carbon dating, chemical analysis and laser mapping, to name just a few.
24:55And I'd also place up there this man, Sigmund Freud.
25:01His theory of a universal set of emotions, loves, desires and fears amongst humankind,
25:08would also have a major impact on archaeology.
25:12As we'd start to set out to try and work out what people from the past actually thought and felt.
25:17Freud represents our modern obsession with feelings and desires.
25:24The idea that archaeology could see beyond the remains of ancient worlds, into the very minds of our ancestors themselves.
25:32So these three men, these three thinkers, Marx, Einstein and Freud, in many respects would set the agenda for archaeology in the 20th century.
25:46Ordinary man, science and the workings of the inner mind.
25:51But, if you want to understand archaeology in the 20th century, you also can't ignore this man, unfortunately. Adolf Hitler.
26:05We tend to think of archaeology as a form of discovery.
26:15But for the Nazis, it was a powerful tool that could be used to promote a very particular ideology.
26:22Heimlich Himmler, Hitler's right hand man, saw an opportunity in archaeology.
26:35That the past could prove that the Germans were not only a superior race, but the oldest and greatest.
26:47Of course, to please his master, it had to be just the right past.
26:50Himmler didn't want to go out and discover anything which didn't fit.
26:54He wanted to prove the Nazi message.
26:57And one place where he was very keen on digging was here, in Sweden.
27:03The Scandinavian blonde hair and blue eyes were the legacy of a pure Aryan people,
27:11who supposedly represented the very foundations of all civilisation and human culture.
27:20Now, this was as balmy as it was dangerous, but Himmler was sure that he could prove it.
27:26To do that, he enlisted the help of a German archaeologist, Hermann Wirt.
27:31Now, Wirt shared the same fascination with European prehistory as Child and Crawford,
27:36but politically, he was on a totally different page.
27:39In Scandinavia, Wirt went on the trail of the ancient pure-blooded master race that Himmler and Hitler desired.
27:57So, you can see everywhere here is full of rock carvings.
28:03So, what have we got here?
28:05Well, you see the rock carving of Litzlebö.
28:08And in the centre of the rock carving, there is a big figure with a spear.
28:14And he regarded him as a god.
28:22Today, we believe these carvings were made by Bronze Age people around 3,000 years ago.
28:30But back in the 1930s, Wirt took them as proof of a great and previously mythical maritime civilisation.
28:38In a bizarre piece of thinking, he decided that the Aryan race were descended from the people from Atlantis.
28:47And what this meant was that Nazi Germany was the direct descendant of the most advanced civilisation that humankind had ever known.
28:56For the Nazis, pinning their glorious past to the people of Atlantis gave them the evolutionary edge
29:04that would secure a similarly glorious future.
29:12Thankfully, it was a future that collapsed just as quickly as Wirt's deluded theory.
29:26As a modern archaeologist, I am completely horrified by the story of Himmler and Wirt.
29:30Not just because of their odious philosophy, but also because we're all a bit tainted by what they did.
29:38There are many archaeologists who have pet theories that they'd love to prove by digging up a piece of actual physical evidence.
29:46And then there's this spin.
29:49Well, we're all at it.
29:51Because if you want to get a big research grant, you need a big story to go along with it.
29:54Spin and communication would be one of the greatest developments of archaeology in the late 20th century.
30:03And they would go on to redefine our relationship with the past.
30:07The modern world became all about getting your message out there.
30:18In the years after the war, the speed of communication began to gather pace.
30:23And there were now many new ways to get that message heard.
30:32In the second half of the 20th century, by far the loudest of all was television, the medium I'm using today.
30:38In post-war Britain, television took comedians and singers off the stage and put them on the screen, turning them into household names.
30:48And that's exactly what happened to an unlikely bewhiskered academic named Sir Mortimer Wheeler, the first public face of archaeology.
30:56As it happens, in ten days' time, I'm going to show a slide of this in the city of Cheltenham as an illustration of Celtic art.
31:07Cheltenham has been warned.
31:09And the other thing is this, that this is one of the two best examples I know of illustrations of the way in which an emphatic moustache can redeem a somewhat intractable countenance.
31:20Mortimer Wheeler was a groundbreaking archaeologist, noted for huge digs in Roman St Albans and Iron Age Dorset.
31:38Wheeler deserves his place in the annals of archaeology, just for his excavation work alone.
31:43It was here, whilst digging the East Gate at Maiden Castle, that he helped develop a system that would become known as the Wheeler System.
31:52What he did was that he split the site into a grid of equidistant and equal-sized trenches, with bolts running through them.
32:00And this allowed him not only to accurately plot where artefacts had been found, but at what depth,
32:06which helped create a much more comprehensive system of dating.
32:09But it's how Wheeler got people excited about archaeology that's his biggest legacy.
32:17Turning him into one of the first TV celebrities.
32:22Wheeler's spin was a million miles away from the distorted viewpoint of the Nazis.
32:28He wanted to make the past relevant to the British public.
32:32And to do that, he used plenty of modern analogies.
32:34Straight streets planned and paved to pattern, equipped even with a Roman version of our zebra crossings.
32:45And a standard of living so widespread, that no doubt on the very eve of destruction,
32:51Pompeians were saying to one another, we've never had it so good.
32:54Mortimer Wheeler was always very clear that he wasn't digging up things, but people. In other words, us.
33:04In encouraging people to try and put themselves in the shoes of their ancestors,
33:09Wheeler had moved archaeology ever further away from just being the stories of kings and emperors.
33:14Child's Marxism had made him think about archaeology in new, egalitarian, classless ways.
33:21But it was Mortimer Wheeler that brought archaeology to the masses.
33:25For all their fascination with the working lives of ordinary men, modern archaeologists still faced a problem.
33:44It was still the case that it was kings and princes who provided the faces of the past.
33:49Their idealised forms preserved on finely crafted death masks and grand statues.
33:57Archaeologists by this time were finding out more and more about the lives of ordinary people,
34:03from Neolithic farmers to Roman soldiers.
34:06But there was still no face.
34:11But that all changed here in Scandinavia in 1950.
34:15It was here at Tolland Fenn in Denmark the two brothers digging for peat found something that made them stop dead in their tracks.
34:26The grisly remains of a body.
34:31The local police were baffled until it was pointed out that the wet peat was a perfect preservative.
34:38If this was a murder scene it was from too long ago to catch the killer.
34:43Today the remains are preserved at Silkeburg Museum close to Tolland Fenn.
34:52This is Tolland Man, an Iron Age farmer who died over 2,000 years ago.
35:13Today his body is displayed in replica, but his head is absolutely real.
35:18I've seen Tolland Man a lot in books and lectures, but I don't think anything quite prepares you for seeing him,
35:29and can I say this, in the flesh.
35:30It's such a lived in face, such a lived in face.
35:44I mean, if this had been sculpted, you'd almost accuse it of being too lifelike.
35:51It's amazing.
35:52He really does look like he's asleep on a bed of peat.
35:57I feel incredibly moved looking at him.
36:00Yes, yes.
36:01He looks as if he could, at any moment he could wake up and say, hey, where was I?
36:06Obviously I'm a Roman archaeologist more than anything else.
36:11When I'm thinking about the people who lived up in this area in the time which I study,
36:17I think of big, great, hairy barbarians.
36:19I very much have this sort of Roman stereotype in my mind, that identikit picture of a northern barbarian.
36:28And he sort of blows that out of the water because he is a rather skinny man and with stubble.
36:35Ptoleman brought us face to face with the common man for the first time.
36:45Not a king or a warrior, but someone who was recognisably one of us.
36:52The big question, though, was how he died.
36:57An autopsy showed that he was hanged by his neck in this robe.
37:02But the interesting thing is, of course, why was he hanged?
37:07And in general there are two theories.
37:11The one is that he was a criminal and he was punished for an offence that he'd made.
37:17And the other one is that he was an offer for the gods.
37:21I'd rather support the later one.
37:23Somebody cut him down before the rigor mortis.
37:26They closed his eyes, his mouth, laid him to rest like in a sleeping position.
37:33And that shows a lot of care.
37:36And would you do that with a criminal that you would kill for his offence?
37:40I don't think so.
37:43Since his discovery 60 years ago,
37:45Ptoleman has been subjected to all manner of scientific tests.
37:51But there are still mysteries.
37:55One of the biggest questions still surrounds his death.
37:59Was he buried almost naked, as his remains suggest?
38:03Part of a ritual sacrifice?
38:05I always thought it was very peculiar that he was buried with just a cap and a belt.
38:17Why?
38:19I mean, if he was offered to the gods, it might be some special ritual.
38:24But I would like then to rule out all possibilities of him having worn clothes.
38:30Today, the museum is planning to microscopically examine Ptoleman's torso for clues.
38:37And I've been invited to watch.
38:40What we have here, that's basically a handheld microscope that goes directly into the computer.
38:48And if you start here and then move up, then you can see.
38:54Oh, yes. Look here. This is a hair.
38:57Yeah, I can see it. It's amazing.
38:59Can you make it sharp? Yes. Here, right?
39:00Okay.
39:02And could you move it on, up?
39:06Up, yeah.
39:08Yeah, there. Let me see that.
39:11Could you move on?
39:13Oh, what's that? Look.
39:15Stop, stop, stop. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
39:18What is that?
39:19Can you make it sharp? Look.
39:22I need to have it sharp.
39:24Yes, yes. Beautiful, beautiful. Look.
39:27This is, that's our smoking gun.
39:31Can you see that?
39:33Wow, and that's a piece of fiber, isn't it?
39:34It is a piece of fiber, yes, yes, yes.
39:37So this means that he was probably clothed when he was buried in the peat bowl.
39:42This certainly indicates that he might have worn something.
39:45So this is very, very interesting news, and you're the first to see it.
39:50Well, I am.
39:51That's incredibly exciting.
39:52Yes.
39:53So you might be helping to solve one of the big mysteries about Toleroy.
39:57Oh, that would be great.
39:58Today, science is still advancing, forcing us to rethink old finds.
40:12This world of archaeology feels light years away from Howard Carter and Tutankhamun,
40:19although no less thrilling.
40:20Carter could only have dreamt of getting that kind of detailed archaeological analysis.
40:28In the old days, gentlemen amateurs would dig, and then they would discover.
40:33But now that's just the start of the process.
40:36We can think up new questions, and as we think these questions up and new problems,
40:41we can go back to the same material time and again and devise new tests.
40:45Archaeology really is a work in progress.
40:56In less than a century, archaeology have been through some extraordinary changes.
41:02From speculation to science, from kings to ordinary men.
41:15But the 20th century still had some surprises in store.
41:30Here in America, one archaeologist would come up with a radical theory
41:35that would once again reframe how we saw the past.
41:38It started with a very simple question.
41:46What about ancient women?
41:49In the 1970s, when I was a kid, archaeology was still very much a male-dominated world.
41:56There were female archaeologists, the most famous of which was Kathleen Kenyon,
42:01who had dug with some Mortimer Wheeler.
42:02But she was the only household name, and she was very much a woman working in a man's world.
42:09Archaeology had been looked through many, many different types of prisms.
42:14Socialism, Marxism, Freudism and Nazism.
42:17But there was another very, very obvious one.
42:20And it was staring us in the face everywhere.
42:23In the 1960s and 70s, America was at the forefront of a whole new revolution.
42:35Women's rights, women's studies, equality and emancipation, all put the capital F in feminism.
42:42It was a movement that soon spread across the world.
42:53Women were proclaiming their place in society.
42:57And that didn't just mean in the present, but also in the past.
43:03Crawford and Child had taken archaeology from kings to the common man.
43:08Now it was a female archaeologist, here in the States, who was determined to shine a light on ancient women.
43:17Her name was Maria Gimboutas.
43:21And she argued that women in ancient societies were the driving forces in these cultures.
43:26And this brought about a whole new line of intellectual thought.
43:29Her archive in California contains records of hundreds of artefacts unearthed from many digs in Europe.
43:39Gimboutas believed that an ancient civilisation she called Old Europe was once firmly centred, not upon strong men, but wise women.
43:53At its heart was a recurring goddess figure.
43:58There's no doubting the emphasis on fertility and femininity in these figurines.
44:04This one is one of the bird-faced goddesses and you can see her pendulous breasts there.
44:10And here in this larger figurine you can see the triangle, the pubis and the broad hips.
44:18Gimboutas didn't use scientific data to further her theories.
44:25Instead, what she wanted to do was get inside the heads of the people of Old Europe, find out what really made them tick.
44:32And for her, the key piece of evidence were these goddess figurines.
44:35Because she considered right across Old Europe that people worshipped divinities associated with fertility.
44:43And in their feminine, fertile forms, she saw evidence of a far more peaceful age when the sexes had been far more equal.
44:52Gimboutas was willing to take things one step further.
45:05She was willing to formulate theories, not just in terms of what archaeological evidence she did find, but also what she didn't find.
45:13On one of her digs in Old Europe, she claimed there was an absence of weapons of war.
45:19And this she saw as a fundamental piece of evidence for a peaceful epoch led by women.
45:26That was until men had turned up with their weapons and mucked everything up.
45:30In a country shaken by the horrors of the Vietnam War, there was a message waiting to be heard by the liberal academics of the time.
45:43Half a century on, and many of Gimboutas' bold assertions have been found wanting.
46:04But her willingness to ask such big new questions still, for me, gives her a special place in history.
46:11One of the accusations which was placed against her is that she used ideology, particularly feminist ideology, as a weapon,
46:19and didn't pay sufficient attention to the actual archaeological material.
46:24But I think that we need to lord Maria Gimboutas, because she delivered a much needed kick up the backside to archaeology.
46:33An archaeology which had for too long ignored women, who after all made up 50% of the population,
46:39not only of the modern, but of the ancient world too.
46:43And for that, I think we owe her an enormous debt of gratitude.
46:46If there's one thing the 20th century has taught us, it's that archaeology could never be entirely free of the modern social forces that influence our thinking.
47:04And while science promises objective truths, it all depends on what questions you ask, and which answers you choose to listen to.
47:18Take one very new scientific technique that could revolutionise how we understand ancient societies.
47:28DNA.
47:31Excuse me, this is going to be a bit disgusting, because I'm not going to spit into this tube.
47:35DNA is the new big thing.
47:42That's very controversial, but also very, very interesting.
47:46Because what I have here is my own personal genetic code.
47:51Not just that, also the genetic codes of my ancestors.
47:54Now think about it.
47:57If we get the DNA of lots of different people, then we have a potentially big story of inheritance, of mass movements of people, of migration.
48:06Well, perhaps.
48:10Testing my own results, DNA expert Mark Thomas is aware that even science can be used to provide stories.
48:18So what sort of lines of ancestry can we pick up?
48:23You can usually say whether somebody has some African ancestry, or some East Asian ancestry, or some Native American ancestry, or something like that.
48:30Unfortunately, you don't have any of those things, you're just 100% boring European.
48:36Yours is very clearly found at high frequencies in Scandinavia.
48:41Do you think, I mean, we live in a world where people are obsessed with themselves.
48:44When people ask the question, who am I, can these sort of tests, can DNA answer what the question they want answered?
48:54In terms of ancestry, you're from a lot of places, you have a lot of ancestors.
48:59The number of ancestors you have almost doubles every generation you go back in time.
49:03So that kind of individualised view of ancestry is kind of a perversion, really, of what our relationship to our ancestors is, because there are so many of them.
49:17And, I mean, one of the other interesting things about this is that we've seen this time and again when we look at the way that archaeology is used, science and technology,
49:24is that what we do is that instead of giving us precise answers, all we've done is we've broadened it, because actually what things like this do, is they give us more and more information on raw data, and more possibilities.
49:38And there is no one answer.
49:41Right. And that's absolutely true. The problem is, if you present people with many, many, many histories, all of which are probably true, then there's always going to be the tendency to cherry-pick.
49:55So I'd say, well, okay, I want that one. I want the, you know, I want the Viking warlord. I want the sexy ancestor, and that's primarily where I come from.
50:04Despite all those efforts to connect with the common people, it's only human nature to be aspirational.
50:18Who wouldn't prefer to have Tutankhamun as an ancestor, and some anonymous Neolithic farmer?
50:34The science continues to advance, our understanding of the past will continue to increase in leaps and bounds, just as it has over the past 100 years.
50:51But there will always be mysteries, debates, and stories.
50:56And as archaeologists, we need to balance what we know with what we believe, and also a little bit of what we imagine.
51:11Throughout this series, I've followed our human quest over the last 2,000 years to discover and understand our ancient past.
51:21It has also made me think about us, and our own modern civilisations.
51:30It's made me wonder about what the archaeologists of the future will make of our world.
51:41Come on, wait till we hung out all day, come on!
51:44Come on!
51:49It's 6am, and I'm out with the LA Bureau of Sanitation.
51:54A very politically correct title for the local bin men.
51:59We take everything that they want to get rid of.
52:02The only thing we don't take in the black container will be dead animals.
52:05Over the last 100 years, mankind has begun to change the planet forever.
52:14And it's all down to the materials we make and leave behind.
52:24The first time we're leaving an indelible stain in the ground.
52:27Right now, it seems like we're leaving a very new, very particular, and very permanent geological layer on the earth.
52:39And it's all about this stuff.
52:42The waste that we leave behind.
52:46Armando, come through.
52:47Well, once we pick up this half a side, we've got to build a landfill.
52:54All our civilisations of the past, from Mesolithic man to Mozart, have shared the same geological epoch that's lasted more than 10,000 years.
53:05But now there's a new one, dubbed the Anthropocene.
53:09The amount of waste that we generate is huge, but it's not just the amount, it's also what it consists of.
53:22When in thousands of years' time, archaeologists dig down to discover our world,
53:27they'll find traces of radioactive material, heavy metals used for cars and electronics,
53:33and plenty of robust plastics.
53:39I'm not trying to make some environmental plea here, I merely want to explain what the boundaries of archaeology are.
53:52Now, no one would claim that all the rubbish that lies around me here represents what's most important to human beings,
54:00i.e. their thoughts and feelings.
54:02But what it does represent, what it does possess, is a whole series of tiny clues to the way that we live.
54:09We call it waste, but in archaeological terms, this is a richer record than any previous age has left behind.
54:19But what will the future make of it all?
54:22How much will they get right about us from what they find?
54:28And how much will they make up stories to fill in the gaps?
54:33You can be sure of one thing, that however they interpret our world will be shaped by the religion, politics and social mores of their own time.
54:43But I bet it won't stop them looking, because one trait constant across time is our human curiosity about the past.
54:53We might be grasping our fragments, those fragments are our beginnings.
55:03The story of humankind, where we came from.
55:06It's been an extraordinary quest, over 2,000 years.
55:17From Empress Helena of Constantinople and her search for the relics of Christ.
55:21Through the Renaissance and the wonder of people like Pizzicoli, who first recognised the value of monuments from the past.
55:35In Britain, with the work of Henry VIII's librarian, John Leland, and his inventory of England.
55:47And William Camden.
55:50Oh my word!
55:52And the first recorded image of Stonehenge.
55:55There were some people even digging.
55:57The realisation of the very depths of time in the 18th century by the first geologists, people like John Hutton.
56:07And the discoveries of John Freer, who began to open up the mysteries of prehistory.
56:16Then, the great 19th century discoveries and the scale of vines in Egypt.
56:21And the mysteries of civilisations that came before, in the Middle East and far beyond.
56:30As intrepid archaeological explorers took on whole new continents.
56:40Wow! This place is absolutely stupendous.
56:45The application of scientific analysis to the ancient past,
56:48by the wealthy German archaeologist, Schliemann, in Troy and Mycenae.
56:55And the rigorous methods of an even richer British counterpart, Augustus Pitt Rivers.
57:03Finally, the stunning discoveries of the 20th century, of Tutankhamun.
57:09and Tolanmoor.
57:12And the secrets that lay in the ground itself.
57:18From Dorset, to Orkney.
57:23And the science that revealed them.
57:30It's a journey that continues on in my own lifetime.
57:34And it will keep going on into the future.
57:36For my money, I can't think of a greater or nobler quest to pursue.
57:45Pissing together a giant jigsaw puzzle here on BBC4 next tonight.
57:59As from horses and carts to frying ranges,
58:02Charlie Luxton and Dan Cruikshank are rebuilding the history of fish and chips, brick by brick.
58:06Brick by brick.
58:07Brick by brick.
58:17Brick by brick.
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