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00:00Stonehenge, Britain's wonder of the world, surely the most iconic and mysterious structure
00:11ever constructed in the British Isles. For generations people have argued over its origin,
00:19its meaning and its purpose. But now a team of dedicated archaeologists have made an astonishing
00:27discovery, one that really is going to have us re-writing the pre-history books.
00:34We've been following an extraordinary archaeological investigation in West Wales that's been ongoing
00:41for the last decade. Using the latest science and good old-fashioned grit, they've unearthed
00:51the remains of another immense stone circle, dismantled just before Stonehenge was created.
01:02They may have uncovered the true origins of Britain's most famous monument. This is the
01:08story of the lost circle of Stonehenge.
01:27On the high plateau of Salisbury Plain stands Stonehenge, the most iconic prehistoric monument
01:36in Europe, built thousands of years ago by Stonehenge people, whose story is now long forgotten.
01:58Standing here in the shadow of these huge stones, these mega-liths,
02:04buildings, you can't help but be in awe of those ancient builders.
02:12Like so many people, I've long been entranced by the magic and the mystery of Stonehenge.
02:20I remember coming here as a child and wondering what it was, what it was for, and thinking that somebody
02:28must have the answer and then realising that actually that mystery has carried on and on and archaeologists have spent whole lifetimes
02:40a lot of time trying to get to the bottom of it.
02:53But all that is changing. Archaeologist Mike Parker-Pearson leads a team that has been transforming our understanding of these ancient stones.
03:02Mike Parker- Although my work involves many different aspects, many different countries,
03:10Stonehenge, I think, really got its hooks into me. As an archaeologist, you can't not be interested in Stonehenge.
03:17Mike's interest is centred not on the huge sarsen stones that dominate the structure, but on the often overlooked bluestones.
03:29The bluestones are much smaller than the great big stones of Stonehenge. They're generally not much bigger than the human frame.
03:38Despite their size, Mike's excavations in the early 2000s revealed that they are central to the Stonehenge story.
03:48When Stonehenge started out, it looked very different to how it looks now.
03:57The monument we see today dates to around 2500 BC.
04:03Mike Parker- But Mike's team confirmed the existence of numerous empty stone holes,
04:11evidence that the stones have been rearranged multiple times.
04:17The original configuration, dating from around 3000 BC, was an enormous circle made entirely of bluestones.
04:28Mike Parker- So this was a major surprise. We'd always thought that the first Stonehenge
04:37was just a monument of earth, a ditch and a bank, but it had actually been a stone monument right from the beginning.
04:45The bluestones were the original Stonehenge. For Mike, this revelation was the start of a new quest.
04:52Mike Parker- To understand Stonehenge, the secret is in the bluestones.
04:56Mike Parker- To find out where they came from and why.
05:04There is an ancient myth about Stonehenge, first recorded in the Middle Ages.
05:11Mike Parker- It tells of the wizard Merlin, who led men far to the west, to Ireland, to the land of giants,
05:24where he found the stones, and using his magical powers, transported them to England.
05:33Mike Parker- The Merlin myth is clearly fantastical, but myths can contain within them a grain of truth,
05:45Mike Parker- A fact that's been passed down through generations and become embroidered and embellished over time.
05:53Mike Parker- So within this tale of wizards and giants and magical stones,
05:59Mike Parker- Could there be a foundation in actual history?
06:05Mike Parker- There is something about the bluestones that sets them apart.
06:12Mike Parker- Because these bluestones are different to their larger companions, the sarsens,
06:20Mike Parker- And the reason for that difference is that they are not from round here.
06:27Mike Parker- The bluestones actually come from the far west.
06:34Mike Parker- It's not Ireland, but it's almost there. It's West Wales.
06:39A century ago, archaeologists realised that the bluestone rock originated in the Presley Hills of Pembrokeshire,
06:47almost 150 miles west of Salisbury Plain.
06:53To understand why Stonehenge was built with stones from so far away, Mike headed to the Presley Hills on a search for their birthplace.
07:04Mike Parker- Little did he know that he would discover something even more extraordinary.
07:11Mike Parker- That the bluestones of Stonehenge originally formed an even more ancient, long-lost monument.
07:18Mike Parker- And that their secret history would revolutionise our understanding of the origins of Stonehenge.
07:34Mike Parker- In 2010, Mike began his Welsh investigations.
07:40To get the answers he was looking for, Mike wanted to pinpoint the precise origin of the bluestones,
07:47Mike Parker- The exact quarry where they were hewn from the rock.
07:51Mike Parker- And that was going to be an enormous challenge because the Presley Hills cover a vast area.
07:57Mike Parker- The hills are peppered with countless outcrops of volcanic rock,
08:08any one of which could be the source of the Stonehenge bluestones.
08:14In the 20th century, based on visual similarities in the rocks, archaeologists had made a crude match with a couple of southern outcrops.
08:23Mike Parker- But Mike wasn't convinced.
08:28To be sure he dug in the right place, he decided to call on the latest scientific techniques.
08:38Geologist Richard Bevins has mapped and sampled hundreds of Presley outcrops.
08:43Each one is unique.
08:45Geologist Richard Bevins has mapped and sampled hundreds of Presley outcrops.
08:48Mike Parker- Examining the rocks of this area, there are subtle differences.
08:57You have to experience a lot of exposure to spot the minor differences which become critical.
09:06Richard's database would be crucial, but it alone was not enough.
09:11Mike and Richard would turn to the latest advances in geochemistry, aided by Jane Evans.
09:23The idea that we might be able to use these methods to pin down the absolute origin, possibly,
09:29of some of these rocks was a fascinating challenge.
09:31I don't think that it's ever been used in the archaeological context before, so I think this was a first.
09:40Bluestone samples from both Stonehenge and the Presley outcrops were pulverised,
09:48transformed into the finest sand, then panned like gold to separate out the minerals.
09:55Richard Bevins- We can look at the chemical compositions of small crystals for lots of
10:01different elements, and then we can do a matching of those elements, almost like a fingerprint.
10:07A key fingerprint marker was zircon, nature's geological clock.
10:12Zircon is a very robust mineral that never gets affected by geological processes,
10:18and is therefore very good for dating rocks.
10:21Richard Bevins- From the moment zircon is formed,
10:24the radioactive uranium atoms inside it decay at a steady rate into lead.
10:30By measuring the ratio of uranium to lead in a sample of rock,
10:34you can calculate its precise age, creating a unique signature.
10:39Richard Bevins- The results were game-changing.
10:45Using zircon and other markers, the previously identified southern outcrops were discounted,
10:52and two new outcrops took their place.
10:55Richard Bevins- That was a really exciting moment.
11:01What the geologists had discovered was not just that archaeologists and geologists had been looking
11:06in the wrong place for the best part of a hundred years, but that here was somewhere where we could
11:11actually find the quarry where monoliths were extracted.
11:18The team had discovered the source of Stonehenge's bluestones. Reality was replacing myth.
11:26Richard Bevins- The archaeologists were getting closer to the true story of the original Stonehenge,
11:34and its ancient builders.
11:43Richard Bevins- Mike and his team had taken a huge step forward.
11:46Richard Bevins- They'd found the precise locations that the bluestones originated from.
11:52Richard Bevins- They'd found their X on the treasure map, and in fact more than one X,
11:57and now it was time to dig.
12:05In 2014, the archaeologists started excavating in earnest at the outcrops of Kraig-Rosser-Vallen
12:13Richard Bevins- And the imposing Khan Goidog.
12:24Mike had put together a team of professional archaeologists, students and volunteers.
12:31And our camera team was there to document the highs and lows of this archaeological odyssey.
12:38Richard Bevins- We've got a date for 153, and it's everything above that.
12:47It wasn't long before they started to turn up evidence to confirm
12:52what the geology had indicated – clear signs of quarrying out of bluestone pillars.
12:58In fact, some of the evidence was there, in plain sight.
13:01Richard Bevins- What we've got here are pillars that have actually been detached, ready to go.
13:07Richard Bevins- One here, one there, one there.
13:10Richard Bevins- And they're really like a pack of cards that have slipped.
13:13Richard Bevins- One, two, three.
13:15Richard Bevins- Just here, we have a wedge mark where somebody has
13:23Richard Bevins- Chiseled just at that point, when these two were at the same height,
13:28Richard Bevins- To actually split them off.
13:29Richard Bevins- And that must have been the moment when that fissure opened right up,
13:34Richard Bevins- That this stone slid downwards.
13:37Richard Bevins- At the base of the outcrop, the team uncovered strangely positioned stones,
13:45Richard Bevins- Looking very much like a bluestone pillar production line.
13:50Richard Bevins- These provide lots of pivot points, so that you can actually swing
13:56Richard Bevins- And tip the pillar, so the bluestone can then be balanced onto here.
14:02Richard Bevins- And then we've got one end on this trestle,
14:07Richard Bevins- And another one on this one, and then you're poised to get the bluestone away and down to the valley.
14:16Richard Bevins- So how did the stones get to Salisbury Plain?
14:22Richard Bevins- The archaeologists who had placed the quarries on the southern slopes of
14:27the Priscelli Hills thought that to avoid a trek over the high peaks, a sea route seemed most logical,
14:34Richard Bevins- With the stones travelling by boat for the majority of their journey east.
14:39Richard Bevins- There's been a lot of support for the sea transport theory.
14:44Richard Bevins- The difficulty is that at 3000 BC, we don't think that they had particularly sturdy boats
14:52Richard Bevins- that could hold these multi-tonne stones, two or three tonnes.
15:00Richard Bevins- It's a very risky prospect indeed to manoeuvre a large megalith over water.
15:08Richard Bevins- It was tried in 2000, a millennium project,
15:12Richard Bevins- And the stones sank within half a mile of leaving land.
15:17Richard Bevins- But Mike's new quarries were on the northern slopes of the hills,
15:23Richard Bevins- reigniting support for an alternative theory.
15:26Richard Bevins- I think that there's a much more plausible possibility
15:30Richard Bevins- that they took those stones as far as they could by land.
15:33Richard Bevins- There's a much more feasible land route from the north side,
15:40Richard Bevins- Going around the Preselis and then picking up the natural routeways
15:47Richard Bevins- that have been formed by the system of valleys in South Wales.
15:50Richard Bevins- It's actually the route taken by the modern A40 today.
15:56Richard Bevins- Dragging these stones, each the size and weight of a small car,
16:02Richard Bevins- Almost 150 miles seems a staggering feat for Stone Age people.
16:08Richard Bevins- So how did they do it?
16:15Richard Bevins- James Dilley and Luke Winter are experimental archaeologists.
16:20Luke Winter- The Neolithic period has a very small amount of fragmentary evidence,
16:26Richard Bevins- And what we can do with experimental archaeology is to start filling those gaps.
16:30Richard Bevins- They create and construct using materials and techniques
16:37available to Stone Age people.
16:39Richard Bevins- So the tools that we found in archaeology may appear simple,
16:45they're just rocks, some are sharp, some are pointy, but actually they've been very carefully made,
16:51they've selected raw materials that lend their characteristics to work really well.
17:01Richard Bevins- So the stone blade is actually housed inside this piece of red deer antler here.
17:08Richard Bevins- And the protein that makes up this antler is so tough and strong
17:13that it's not going to break. I would have to put this under huge force to actually break this.
17:18Richard Bevins- So it's really such a great material to be using as carpentry.
17:22Richard Bevins- Here at the Ancient Technology Center,
17:34they're experimenting with whether the bluestones could have been transported on a wooden sled.
17:40Richard Bevins- The Neolithic we think of as the Stone Age,
17:44Richard Bevins- Which it is classified from the stone tools we find, but of course the majority
17:49of the things that were being made and built in that period were actually made from wood and from organic materials.
17:56Richard Bevins- The stone we're fitting the cradle around today is about 1.2 tons
18:01and the bluestones that came from Preseli, they range in size from around 1.2 to about 3.2 tons.
18:08Richard Bevins- So this is the smaller end of the scale for the bluestones.
18:13Richard Bevins- So this is called a tusk tenon joint.
18:15Richard Bevins- We have clear, really solid evidence for this type of joint from the Neolithic.
18:19Richard Bevins- When it goes together, it's still reasonably loose.
18:23Richard Bevins- And the thing that tightens it is the peg that drives through the hole.
18:31Richard Bevins- And then that becomes a solid unit.
18:34Richard Bevins- And that's how it works.
18:35Richard Bevins- Experimental archaeology has demonstrated just how effective a wooden sled can be.
18:47Richard Bevins- You can see we've got two ends of the rope running up the field.
18:50Richard Bevins- We're going to split you down 15 on each side.
18:52Richard Bevins- Today we're going to attempt to pull this with school children.
18:55Richard Bevins- Obviously we doubt whether the Preseli stones were moved by children,
18:58we don't know that, but we assume teams of adults, muscular, strong, fit people.
19:04Richard Bevins- So it's a real test.
19:07Richard Bevins- So everyone's got a good firm grip on the rope?
19:09Richard Bevins- Yep, no half measures, good firm grip.
19:12Richard Bevins- Three, two, one, pull!
19:19Richard Bevins- Go, go, go!
19:25Richard Bevins- Go, go, go!
19:26Richard Bevins- Say one, tell us where to stop!
19:29Richard Bevins- Go, go, go!
19:30Richard Bevins- Go, go, go!
19:32Richard Bevins- Stop!
19:38Richard Bevins- Okay, drop the rope and give yourselves a big round of applause.
19:46Richard Bevins- I thought that was fantastic.
19:47Richard Bevins- So that was just pulled.
19:48Richard Bevins- So that's nearly one and a half tons with the timber frame
19:51Richard Bevins- And that was pulled by 30 13-year-olds.
19:55Richard Bevins- We probably did 35, 40 meters up the slope,
19:58Richard Bevins- It's up an incline and I think once again it really,
20:02Richard Bevins- It sort of shows that this theory works.
20:05Richard Bevins- You can pull a heavy weight on a sled on raw ground without the need for
20:11Richard Bevins- Huge timber arrangements and sleeper trackways or rollers.
20:16Richard Bevins- And actually it was really surprising how efficient it became.
20:18Richard Bevins- Half the team didn't even seem to be pulling much,
20:20Richard Bevins- But fantastically successful.
20:22Richard Bevins- The quarry excavations have revealed the techniques and ingenuity
20:37of these Neolithic people and experimental archaeology has shown how the multi-tonne bluestones
20:43could have been transported over land. But back at the quarries, the archaeologists also unearthed a puzzle.
20:52Richard Bevins- Sparked by the charred remains of a Neolithic snack.
21:00Richard Bevins- At the Crygrosivellin quarry,
21:02the team excavated hazelnut shells from around a Stone Age fire pit.
21:12Richard Bevins- More than 5,000 years ago, somebody was sitting just around here,
21:19Richard Bevins- Eating some hazelnuts for their lunch just as I am,
21:24Richard Bevins- Throwing the shells into the fire.
21:26Richard Bevins- It's an astonishing detail of Neolithic life,
21:30Richard Bevins- And I love those beautiful moments frozen in time.
21:34Richard Bevins- But these hazelnuts introduced such a twist into our story.
21:40Richard Bevins- The charred hazelnut shells were gathered up and radiocarbon dated and the results
21:48caused a stir. The hazelnuts had been burned around 3300 BC, suggesting the bluestones had been quarried
21:57almost four centuries before Stonehenge was constructed.
22:01Richard Bevins- That leaves us with a mystery.
22:05Richard Bevins- Because where did they go?
22:07Richard Bevins- Did it take them 400 years
22:10Richard Bevins- To haul those stones to Stonehenge? I suspect not.
22:15Richard Bevins- I think that there's another place,
22:18maybe close by, that these stones were initially destined for.
22:22Richard Bevins- Could the Stonehenge bluestone circle have originally stood in Wales?
22:31Richard Bevins- The Merlin myth tells not just of stones,
22:34Richard Bevins- But of an existing stone circle in the West.
22:38Richard Bevins- A monument called the Giant's Dance.
22:42Richard Bevins- Perhaps there is more than one grain of truth in the legend.
22:49Richard Bevins- Did the Giant's Dance once stand in the Priscelli Hills?
22:55Richard Bevins- After all, this is a land of giants.
22:59Richard Bevins- A land of megaliths.
23:01Richard Bevins- This is a dolmen, the Pentra-Ivan dolmen.
23:09Richard Bevins- It's all that remains of what was once a tomb.
23:15Richard Bevins- And at the heart of it is this enormous capstone
23:20that I'm slightly nervous about standing underneath because that is 16 tons of stone
23:25Richard Bevins- Balanced on three uprights.
23:29Richard Bevins- They're narrow at the top.
23:32Richard Bevins- You've got that huge weight of stone lifted up
23:36Richard Bevins- And then just held up there in this beautifully simplistic way
23:41Richard Bevins- At those three points of contact.
23:43Richard Bevins- And this is very early.
23:44Richard Bevins- This dates to centuries before Stonehenge.
23:47Richard Bevins- And what we can see is that the people here in Priscelli, the Neolithic people here,
23:53Richard Bevins- had some engineering skills.
23:56Richard Bevins- I mean, this is impressive even by modern standards, isn't it?
23:59Richard Bevins- This is the most impressive dolmen, but it's not the only one.
24:11Richard Bevins- This is a landscape of monumental megalithic architecture.
24:20Richard Bevins- There have long been signs that the Neolithic people of the West were skilled stonemasons.
24:30Richard Bevins- Farming originated at the beginning of the Neolithic in the Near East.
24:36Richard Bevins- Archaeological and now genetic studies show how farmers
24:40Richard Bevins- spread west across Europe, around the coasts and along major rivers.
24:46Richard Bevins- These two routes are reflected in the DNA of the first farmers arriving in Britain
24:51Richard Bevins- around 4000 BC.
25:01Richard Bevins- The farmers in the western Atlantic edge of Europe, maybe influenced by the rocky
25:06landscapes they inhabited, developed a distinct culture marked by building huge stone monuments.
25:16Richard Bevins- From Spain and France up through Cornwall and Wales to Ireland and Cumbria,
25:22there are the remains of large numbers of huge dolmens and other stone tombs built by those early Neolithic
25:30communities. Monuments largely absent in the less rocky east of Britain.
25:41Richard Bevins- A stone circle in West Wales fits the pattern.
25:47Richard Bevins- As well as the obvious dolmens, the landscape around the quarries
25:51Richard Bevins- is scattered with standing stones, most of unknown age.
26:02Richard Bevins- But there was no obvious place for Mike to start his new search.
26:06Mike- Mike- How on earth would we find not just a stone circle, but a stone circle that had been taken down?
26:15Richard Bevins- In other words, we were looking for something that would no longer exist above ground.
26:20Richard Bevins- And that's a big ask. That's a real needle in a haystack.
26:26Richard Bevins- And for a long time, I thought,
26:29Richard Bevins- What are the chances? Very, very slim.
26:31Richard Bevins- To see the invisible, Mike once again turned to the latest technology.
26:38Richard Bevins- Aerial photographs were studied,
26:41Richard Bevins- And aerial photogrammetry was employed to map sites of interest.
26:47Richard Bevins- From the photos, 3D models could be created,
26:50Richard Bevins- revealing hidden features in the Preseli landscape.
26:55Richard Bevins- Promising sites could then be investigated by the geophysics team.
27:00Richard Bevins- They employed ground-penetrating radar alongside magnetometry,
27:04Richard Bevins- picking up tiny magnetic traces in the soil left by the heat of ancient hearths.
27:10Richard Bevins- It's a fantastic technique because it enables us to cover these very large areas
27:16quite quickly and it can identify if there are actually monuments or maybe houses, ditches,
27:27pits, etc. that are often associated with the prehistoric archaeology we're looking for.
27:32Richard Bevins- Among the scattered standing stones,
27:36Richard Bevins- They were looking hard for traces of a circular monument,
27:40Richard Bevins- Something that could have been the original bluestone circle.
27:45Richard Bevins- The data suggested many promising sites,
27:49Richard Bevins- But one stood out in a field called Pensarn.
27:53Richard Bevins- It's a low mound, but it could be a prehistoric monument.
28:03Richard Bevins- And from that period of the Neolithic,
28:06Richard Bevins- We know that some of these mounds had surrounds of standing stones.
28:11Richard Bevins- Now, of course, we're a stone's throw in that direction from the main bluestone quarry.
28:16Richard Bevins- We're a stone's throw from the smaller one.
28:19Richard Bevins- So this is the perfect position.
28:21Richard Bevins- So who knows what we're about to find there.
28:25Richard Bevins- Encouraged by the scans,
28:29Richard Bevins- The search for the lost circle began.
28:32Richard Bevins- Stone circles are generally quite easy to find.
28:36Richard Bevins- They've got whacking great stones in them.
28:38Richard Bevins- What we're looking for is the depressions and the hollows
28:42Richard Bevins- That were left by the removal of the stones.
28:45Richard Bevins- But also, don't just find a hole in the ground.
28:47Richard Bevins- You have to find a hole with evidence of a stone being removed.
28:52Richard Bevins- So we're looking for
28:54Richard Bevins- pits of a certain sort of size,
28:57Richard Bevins- in a certain formation with certain characteristics.
29:00Richard Bevins- And it's not easy.
29:02Richard Bevins- I think this could work,
29:08Richard Bevins- Isn't it?
29:09Richard Bevins- Yeah.
29:10Richard Bevins- But it seemed the luck was in,
29:13just below the surface, stone holes.
29:16Richard Bevins- We're looking at features.
29:19Richard Bevins- They're the size of the blue stone holes at Stonehenge.
29:24Richard Bevins- And then there was more.
29:29Richard Bevins- So what Lisa's just uncovered is that we have a
29:35Richard Bevins- a pit for a stone, a standing stone.
29:37Richard Bevins- It's got a packing in it, but totally unexpected.
29:41Richard Bevins- It's got the broken off stump of the blue stone sitting in it.
29:46Richard Bevins- So this is the first direct evidence
29:48Richard Bevins- that these really are stone holes marvelous.
29:52Richard Bevins- We may have done it.
29:53Richard Bevins- And that wasn't all
29:58Richard Bevins- In a nearby field, the geophysics team made a new discovery.
30:03Richard Bevins- What we found here is something very exciting.
30:06Richard Bevins- We've got these big rings within the data set.
30:10Richard Bevins- And what we think they might be related to are circular enclosures,
30:14some of which are quite large, up to 40 meters across.
30:18Richard Bevins- This could be not just one,
30:21Richard Bevins- But a whole complex of small stone circles.
30:30Richard Bevins- All the activities sparked the interest of the locals.
30:33Richard Bevins- Mike's talks at the neighborhood microbrewery were packed.
30:37Richard Bevins- I think that is where the stone that ended up at Stonehenge was taken from.
30:42Richard Bevins- The dig is very popular.
30:45Richard Bevins- We have gate posts that are huge standing stones or were once standing stones.
30:49Richard Bevins- We've got standing stones in our fields that we mow around in tractors.
30:54Richard Bevins- And you know, they are everywhere.
30:57Richard Bevins- And you can't help but wonder why.
31:00Richard Bevins- And what was it about this area?
31:02Richard Bevins- The late 3000s.
31:03Richard Bevins- It's what we do this for.
31:04Richard Bevins- Just to tell the story.
31:07Richard Bevins- They're really engaged.
31:08Richard Bevins- It's their landscape.
31:09Richard Bevins- It's where they live.
31:10Richard Bevins- You know, it's what happened under their feet 5,000 years ago.
31:14Richard Bevins- You know, where they walk.
31:15Richard Bevins- We came up with a new IPA, which is now one of our core beers.
31:22Richard Bevins- We thought we would call it Hammerstone IPA.
31:25Richard Bevins- So, could you guess who the image is based on?
31:28Richard Bevins- The team were on a high.
31:33Richard Bevins- But were they any closer to solving the mystery?
31:44Richard Bevins- It was now 2017.
31:48Richard Bevins- Mike had been investigating the Procelli landscape for seven years.
31:53Richard Bevins- But as the new season began, the mood was sombre.
31:57Richard Bevins- The digs were going badly.
32:01Richard Bevins- One by one, those new promising sites were turning out to be duds.
32:08Richard Bevins- The elation of the previous year had been replaced by doubt.
32:12Radio carbon dating had revealed the Pentzarn Circle was in fact
32:16bluestone surrounds for a Bronze Age tomb.
32:20Richard Bevins- One thousand years too late for Stonehenge.
32:25Richard Bevins- Their hopes now lay in the excavations
32:28of the new circles detected by Kate's geophysics team.
32:32Richard Bevins- But as the dig progressed,
32:33the likelihood that they were Neolithic was fading fast.
32:39Richard Bevins- The stone artifacts they found were uninspiring.
32:43Richard Bevins- Someone's thought I can make that into an axe.
32:46Richard Bevins- Because the shape was already…
32:49Richard Bevins- Basically got what you might call trimming flakes taken off
32:54both directions to give it the crudest of edges.
32:58Richard Bevins- This is really scraping the barrel.
33:06The team realized this was not a Neolithic circle, but an Iron Age settlement.
33:13Richard Bevins- Once again, they were thousands of years off.
33:16Richard Bevins- You think that that has to be it.
33:21Richard Bevins- It has to be it.
33:22Richard Bevins- Perfect prehistoric circular monuments.
33:25Richard Bevins- And you think, yes, this is it.
33:27Richard Bevins- And even though it's tremendous archaeology,
33:30Richard Bevins- And anybody would be privileged to dig it,
33:33Richard Bevins- It's not what you're looking for.
33:35Richard Bevins- Whether we're ever going to find
33:38Richard Bevins- That stone circle, that former stone circle,
33:42Richard Bevins- That first stonehenge, I am now, I'm afraid, doubtful.
33:46Richard Bevins- At that point, I was disappointed.
33:50Richard Bevins- I thought that maybe we're not going to find whatever it is.
33:55Richard Bevins- Maybe it never really existed.
33:56Richard Bevins- The season was almost over.
34:02Richard Bevins- And they'd now exhausted every site on their list, except one.
34:17Richard Bevins- The team's last hope was an unpromising collection of four
34:22bluestones at a site called Wine Mound.
34:28Richard Bevins- Government archaeologists had surveyed this place
34:31Richard Bevins- A century ago and said it was very small and unremarkable.
34:37Richard Bevins- And they weren't wrong.
34:43Richard Bevins- We'd have given up really on Wine Mound because
34:48Richard Bevins- The geophysics hadn't really produced very much.
34:51Richard Bevins- Didn't pick up anything.
34:53Richard Bevins- No sign of other holes where stones might have once stood.
34:57Richard Bevins- But there's nowhere else to look.
35:00Richard Bevins- The team decided to give it one last go,
35:06with spades and shovels, working blind.
35:10Richard Bevins- And the weather didn't help.
35:12Richard Bevins- It is very extreme archaeology.
35:18Richard Bevins- The weather isn't fantastic.
35:22Richard Bevins- We are bailing water out of holes,
35:23Richard Bevins- which will eventually again fill with rain.
35:25Richard Bevins- I got sent to Wine Mound
35:29Richard Bevins- As a bit of a forlorn hope.
35:33Richard Bevins- It's wet.
35:34Richard Bevins- It's exposed.
35:36Richard Bevins- The wind never stops up there.
35:37Richard Bevins- The students were rebellious.
35:40Richard Bevins- And we were all very tired.
35:44Richard Bevins- We didn't expect to find anything.
35:45Richard Bevins- But you can't just chuck the job in.
35:48Richard Bevins- This is terrible.
35:49Richard Bevins- The weather's bad.
35:49Richard Bevins- Let's go home.
35:50Richard Bevins- You have to excavate it.
35:52Richard Bevins- Sending Dave up the top of the hill to Wine Mound
35:57Richard Bevins- Was the last throw of the dice.
36:00Richard Bevins- It was last chance saloon.
36:02Richard Bevins- But I'm glad we did because it changed everything.
36:13Richard Bevins- What's this?
36:13Richard Bevins- It's definitely a fill.
36:17Richard Bevins- That looks fantastic.
36:21Richard Bevins- We found this potential stone hole.
36:25Richard Bevins- As well as the colour, which is darker,
36:29Richard Bevins- It's also a completely different texture.
36:32Richard Bevins- It's softer, it's more organic,
36:36Richard Bevins- And it's clearly been disturbed.
36:39Richard Bevins- So you look for more.
36:41Richard Bevins- And we found another one at the other end of the arc.
36:45Richard Bevins- When you start finding multiple stone holes
36:47Richard Bevins- With machine stones, that's the time to start getting excited.
36:55Richard Bevins- Mike's madcap idea actually had legs.
36:57Richard Bevins- Where technology had failed, hard graft had led to a breakthrough.
37:06Richard Bevins- But there was more to be done.
37:16Richard Bevins- The following year, the team concentrated all their resources at Wine Mound.
37:21Richard Bevins- With the geophysical techniques useless in this marshy ground,
37:25Richard Bevins- Finding the holes relied on experienced eyes and ears.
37:30Richard Bevins- It's the texture that's really crucial and the sound that it makes.
37:35Richard Bevins- When you tap the natural and you tap the fill,
37:38there's a much hollower sound, an element of a drum to it, it echoes a bit.
37:42Richard Bevins- They are not easy to find,
37:45but once you find them, you very definitely know they're there.
37:49Richard Bevins- As one hole after another was unearthed,
37:55Richard Bevins- The shape of the circle was revealed.
38:03Richard Bevins- And its dimensions got the team excited.
38:06Richard Bevins- Its diameter, 110 meters,
38:11was exactly the same as the outer perimeter around Stonehenge.
38:19Richard Bevins- The chances of the two having exactly the same dimensions
38:23Richard Bevins- Are really very slim.
38:26Richard Bevins- Wine Mound could be the predecessor for Stonehenge.
38:31Richard Bevins- But they needed more proof.
38:35Richard Bevins- Could they find evidence of a direct connection between the two monuments?
38:41Richard Bevins- An odd-shaped stone hole provided an opportunity
38:44Richard Bevins- To once again use photogrammetry.
38:47Richard Bevins- We could see the exact shape of the base of each stone that had stood in them,
38:53and one of them was very unusual because it had a slightly kind of pentagonal cross-section.
39:00Richard Bevins- And what was interesting was that there was one at Stonehenge which had a very similar form.
39:07Richard Bevins- Could they match the shape of the wine mound hole to the stone at Stonehenge?
39:23Richard Bevins- It fitted like a key in a lock.
39:28Richard Bevins- But this evidence alone was not conclusive.
39:31Richard Bevins- They still didn't know when the circle was constructed.
39:37Richard Bevins- Was it really neolithic?
39:40Richard Bevins- Built before Stonehenge?
39:43Richard Bevins- The acidic soil had destroyed almost all organic matter
39:47Richard Bevins- that could otherwise have been radiocarbon dated.
39:56Richard Bevins- So Mike called on the specialist services of Tim Kinnaird.
40:01Richard Bevins- So we've got the section covered now.
40:16Richard Bevins- So I've covered it in the black cover.
40:17Richard Bevins- So I'm going to go back under now.
40:19Richard Bevins- I'm going to clean back an additional 10 centimetres
40:22Richard Bevins- So that I can go in and start to sample.
40:24Richard Bevins- Tim digs not for physical objects but for soil itself containing memories
40:35of ancient sunlight.
40:37Tim Kinnaird- You can actually date sediments by measuring the remnant energy in the grains of
40:43quartz in that sediment since they were last exposed to light.
40:47Richard Bevins- And it's a technique normally used by geologists,
40:51optically stimulated luminescence, OSL we call it for short.
40:58Richard Bevins- He has to collect the samples under darkness
41:02so he can be absolutely sure that the quartz grains within his block of soil have not been affected by light.
41:11Richard Bevins- They hoped these samples of ancient soil would reveal when the stones were originally set in place.
41:19Richard Bevins- When bombarded by lasers in a lab, trapped electrons are released,
41:23revealing when the sample was last lit by ancient sunlight.
41:28Richard Bevins- But the analysis would take months.
41:30Richard Bevins- Until then, the team had to wait.
41:32Richard Bevins- The previous digs had all looked promising until the dates came in and they were way out.
41:40Richard Bevins- So with the same fate before the team's last chance, everything hinged on that OSL result.
41:50Richard Bevins- Finally, the results came through.
41:59Richard Bevins- The OSL data gave a likely construction date of around 3300 BC.
42:07Richard Bevins- It was perfect.
42:09Richard Bevins- Well, that was a pretty good moment.
42:13Richard Bevins- We had dated the thing and we knew that it was shortly before Stonehenge.
42:20Richard Bevins- Fantastic news.
42:23Richard Bevins- Absolutely fantastic.
42:24Richard Bevins- I am over the moon.
42:26Richard Bevins- Not just for myself and the team, but for Mike.
42:28Richard Bevins- It must have been a great way off his mind that here he is.
42:32Richard Bevins- He's done it.
42:33Richard Bevins- His theory's right.
42:34Richard Bevins- He's bang on the money.
42:35Richard Bevins- Stonehenge's secret history had been revealed.
42:43Richard Bevins- The lost circle had been found.
42:50Richard Bevins- This brand new discovery by Mike and his team is phenomenal.
42:55Richard Bevins- Against the odds, they've managed to unearth a 5,000-year-old
43:00stone circle, one of the largest in Britain.
43:04Richard Bevins- And what it shows us is that the origins of Stonehenge
43:08are more intriguing and complex than we've ever imagined.
43:20Richard Bevins- Mike's new discovery shows that Stonehenge was first built not on Salisbury Plain,
43:31but in the Welsh hills centuries earlier by people who were steeped in a culture of megalithic architecture.
43:42Richard Bevins- But what was it for?
43:44Richard Bevins- We can only speculate.
43:48Richard Bevins- Mike's theory is that it was a place to venerate the dead.
43:52Richard Bevins- Everything we've been learning about the megalithic monuments
43:57is that they represented, or even were considered to be, the ancestors.
44:04Richard Bevins- Whether they were components of tombs,
44:07Richard Bevins- Whether they were single standing stones or stone circles.
44:13Richard Bevins- Stone is permanent, like the ancestors.
44:16Richard Bevins- Mike believes it was not just a site for remembering the dead,
44:25but a marker of time.
44:30Richard Bevins- He calls in archaeoastronomer Clive Ruggles to examine the site.
44:37Richard Bevins- Well, this is a total station,
44:41but what I'm using it for here is for measuring the azimuth of the sun,
44:46the bearing of the sun in the sky.
44:50Richard Bevins- We can work out where all the astronomical bodies,
44:53the sun or the moon or whatever we're interested in,
44:55rise and set and would have risen and set in the past.
44:58Richard Bevins- Mike's theory is that Neolithic people aligned the circle
45:03to key times of the year linked to the position of the sun, the solstices.
45:09Richard Bevins- They are the turning points of the year.
45:14So from the deep gloom of midwinter, the knowledge that actually the land will become
45:21warm and fertile again. And equally, midsummer is the peak of that fertility,
45:28and that that it too is about to change as the days become shorter.
45:33So it's actually the movement of the sun. It's something that is utterly permanent and eternal,
45:40like the ancestors themselves.
45:42Richard Bevins- Where the sun rises will have changed over the last 5,000 years,
45:48by about the diameter of the sun. So if we're looking at where the sun rose on the longest day then,
45:55would be about a sun's diameter further to the north than it does now.
46:00And when it rises midwinter, about the same further to the south. So we can make that correction.
46:12Clive has found that Wine Mound stones do indeed show a solstice alignment.
46:19MICHAEL puta-
46:20Two stones twisted at right angles, a line with the midsummer sun,
46:24LORiko Zevnis-
46:25schon said as it would have risen 5,000 years ago.
46:32Clip has eyes on the face of the first light, 25th anniversary,
46:35as the light light of the year, J getấc, 16th anniversary,
46:38close to Friday, back to oktober.
46:39DR began to turn 2 years.
46:40CLIEN WHITEALE
46:41CLUCK
46:43THE상
46:44CHANGE
46:45LIQU But the discovery of this monument throws up a new question…
46:47Why were those stones uprooted and moved more than 140 miles away?
46:58In the Merlin myth, the stone circle was stolen.
47:05Merlin came west with a large army. Could the people of the east and the stone builders of the
47:12west really have been at war? A war that would lead the easterners to steal the Wein-Mauern circle.
47:21But here the myth breaks down. Evidence for large-scale warfare at the time
47:28is as insubstantial as evidence for Merlin himself.
47:32Instead, Wein-Mauern may have been part of a new revolution that was bringing communities together.
47:54Stone circles only started appearing around 3300 BC.
48:00A new fashion taking off on the west coast of Britain.
48:07Wein-Mauern was in the forefront of this new monumental style,
48:13which Mike believes forms part of a greater cultural intertwining.
48:18What's interesting was that differences were beginning to be erased.
48:23That actually people were using the same pottery east and west.
48:27They were building the same kinds of monuments, new circular forms like henges
48:32and stone circles in east and west.
48:37The later eastern circles appear to have been inspired by their western counterparts.
48:43But the Stonehenge Blue Stone Circle was unique, not just inspired by the west, but built from western stones.
48:55So, if the Wein-Mauern monument wasn't stolen, how did it end up on Salisbury Plain?
49:01There are clues that it was a different group of people that moved the stones.
49:07Clues that were once buried right here beneath my feet.
49:11Human bones.
49:18When Mike's team had excavated Stonehenge's out a circle,
49:22they'd unearthed thousands of pieces of cremated bone.
49:26These were burials from the very earliest stage of Stonehenge.
49:34But who were they?
49:38By analysing the strontium in human bones, archaeologists can determine where someone was living.
49:45People talk about you are what you eat.
49:48Basically, the strontium isotope composition that you pick up
49:52is related to the composition of the food you eat.
49:55And the composition of the food you eat is related to the soil and the underlying geology.
49:59When a team at Oxford University analysed the Stonehenge bones,
50:07they came up with a surprising result.
50:10A number of individuals from the earliest burials were not local.
50:16Jane Evans illustrates their results.
50:20So, you can see that here's Salisbury.
50:22We've now put in what would be a local value,
50:25and it highlights basically the areas that are chalk in southern England.
50:29So, anybody with a value like that was probably certainly living there when that bone formed.
50:35However, some of them had higher values.
50:40The areas where those slightly higher values come from are typical of Wales.
50:45Those individuals could well have come from in and around southwest Wales.
50:50This looks to me like a migration signal.
50:55This is the beginning of a group moving in, settling themselves on Salisbury Plain,
51:01and then their descendants continuing to live in that area.
51:12The bones at Stonehenge suggest that these stones weren't stolen,
51:18but may have been brought by a group of people who themselves were moving east.
51:29But why would the people of the Presley Hills move their precious stone circle to Salisbury Plain?
51:38What was special about this place before Stonehenge was here?
51:47I'm standing on the avenue, which is a Neolithic trackway,
51:54and it's long been recognised as such.
51:56So, this is not a new archaeological discovery,
52:00but what's underneath it is.
52:02Because the archaeologists have found a natural feature
52:06that they believe held great significance for those prehistoric people.
52:11A series of glacial channels in the chalk stretching hundreds of metres.
52:235,000 years ago, they would have been visible and perfectly lined up with the solstice sun.
52:29Today's Stonehenge is clearly aligned with this natural feature,
52:38an orientation it inherited in turn from the original bluestone circle.
52:43So, my guess is what we're looking at is people actually bringing their very identity,
52:52their ancestral identity with them, to reposition themselves at one of the most important
52:59ceremonial complexes within Neolithic Britain.
53:03Around 3000 BC, people from the Procelli Hills may have been drawn to the Salisbury Plain sacred site
53:13because of its natural solstice alignments.
53:17Bringing their stone monument with them, perhaps again to remember their own ancestors
53:22and to mark the yearly cycle of the sun.
53:24After the construction of the bluestone circle, this gathering place here on Salisbury Plain
53:35really took off and over the next few hundred years we enter the golden age of Stonehenge.
53:42The erection of the bluestone circle may have inspired others who saw it,
53:57becoming the seed for the creation of even larger monuments.
54:03Two miles from Stonehenge lies Durrington Walls,
54:08the largest Neolithic site ever discovered in Britain.
54:12At a time when settlements were rarely more than a house or two,
54:18it was a temporary home for thousands.
54:22A pop-up town full of builders.
54:26Around 2500 BC, they constructed a huge wooden circle, Woodhenge.
54:36The bluestone circle was repositioned,
54:40and the huge sarsen stones that now define it were added.
54:44Salisbury Plain now had two complementary sacred monuments.
54:49The stone circle of Stonehenge was a place associated with the dead.
54:55Woodhenge was actually a place associated with the living.
54:58We can only imagine how Neolithic people used these sites,
55:08gathering here for feasts, for rituals, perhaps for contemplation.
55:17Beside a monument that would stand the test of time,
55:21with Welsh bluestones at its heart.
55:36But we now know Stonehenge began with that lost stone circle in the Welsh hills.
55:43Now rediscovered thanks to Mike's determination.
55:50It's time for me to brave the weather and visit the birthplace of Stonehenge.
55:57Oh, Mike, it's amazing to be here at Wine Mound, and this is it.
56:07You've found the origin of Stonehenge.
56:10We have indeed.
56:11After all these years, you've been vindicated.
56:13Congratulations to you and all the team.
56:16Thanks.
56:16And as you can guess from the weather conditions,
56:19some of it's been quite hard work.
56:20Yeah, yeah.
56:21It is a real breakthrough.
56:23This is the most interesting new information about Stonehenge
56:28that I think has emerged during my lifetime.
56:30I think this is really a new view of Stonehenge that we can take
56:35to understand that it's actually a second-hand monument in one way,
56:41but it's also the sense of bringing a monument and putting it somewhere else.
56:48Not just collecting a few haphazard stones.
56:51And I think it does point to a really important moment in British prehistory,
56:56when you've got some kind of linkage, maybe unification,
57:01that's actually forging permanent links between these different regions.
57:06Like all archaeological discoveries, you've found something, you've solved a puzzle,
57:12but actually you've opened up many, many more questions at the same time.
57:18What's been discovered here on this hillside in West Wales
57:31has transformed our understanding of a distant age.
57:36We've seen evidence for a complex belief system
57:41and of connections between communities widely separated in the landscape.
57:48And then those beliefs and those connections are expressed in the creation of a stone circle,
57:54which is then dismantled and recreated.
57:58We knew the bluestones came from Pembrokeshire, but we never knew why they were so special.
58:06We've gained an entirely new understanding of the inception of Stonehenge.
58:17They're fine.
58:19They have a golden age in this way.
58:20They have rallied back and raided by a stone circle.
58:21They have a ton of pythage and a long tooth.
58:23Like a skull circle, they are not in a small tooth.
58:26Sometimes they have an island.
58:27They have an island.
58:28You have to add an island to its species.
58:30But this kind of thing, you've given an island is not in a desert.
58:32And then the most generous finding are not on the island.
58:34They will find very soft and confusing things.
58:36You have to be on a island will and say,
58:37if you don't mind, they will find any of that.
58:38But this is what you've seen from the countryside.
58:40How do you think?

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