The Search for Civilisation Archaeology: A Secret History


The Search for Civilisation

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Priceless treasures.

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Ancient ruins.

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And the fragile remains of long dead people.

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Archaeology isn't like written history.

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It's the very stuff of the past.

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And people throughout history have always been fascinated

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by the ancient remains that survived under their very feet.

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Ever since the Renaissance, the men of Europe

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are becoming increasingly interested in

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the glittering civilisations of Greece and Rome.

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They saw in their mighty achievements

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a mirror image of their own amazing accomplishments.

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That fascination with civilisation was, however,

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worlds away from archaeology's earliest beginnings.

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In this series,

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I've been tracing the very history of archaeology itself,

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a story that began with a quest to discover Christian truth.

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This is meant to be one of the nails

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with which Jesus Christ was crucified.

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But over hundreds of years, archaeologists revealed

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the vast depth of time that went far beyond that of the Bible.

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The most iconic archaeological find ever.

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Now I'm going to follow another of the great archaeological quests.

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Not only mere objects, or even monumental treasure,

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but the very foundations of civilisation itself.

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It'll take me into the world of the 18th and 19th centuries,

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when archaeologists began to search

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beyond the great monuments of antiquity

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for new clues

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which led them to dig deep underground.

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In the shadow of Mount Vesuvius in 1738,

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the world's very first large-scale archaeological dig began.

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Classical scholars knew that the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD

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had destroyed the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

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So they must still exist,

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deep under its deadly layer of mud, lava and ash.

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But it took a Spanish engineer to find out for sure.

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His name was Rocque de Alcubierre,

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and the excavation he began

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was a watershed in the history of archaeology.

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Nearly 300 years after Alcubierre's dig,

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his original diaries are kept at

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the National Archaeological Museum in Naples,

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giving us a remarkable insight into his methods.

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This is a really fascinating document

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and, in Spanish, it sets out in really blunt and ruthless terms

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quite what his mission was.

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All stones of utility...

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..and greatness were immediately to be removed.

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In other words, anything precious like statues,

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or anything that could be re-used

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for the multitude of building projects

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which were going on in the area.

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And if they didn't find anything like that,

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then excavations were to be "abandone", abandoned.

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There are things in this diary

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which are truly horrifying to any archaeologist.

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There's all sorts of references

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to objects which they considered not to be of value,

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little things, small things from everyday life,

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which we consider to be incredibly precious.

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What did they do with them? They just chucked them away.

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'These documents reveal the sheer ambition of the excavation,

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'hundreds of workers digging to a plan

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'and on a scale that had never been seen before.

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'Handling Alcubierre's diaries was thrilling enough,

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'but as an archaeologist,

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'I've been given special access to his original excavations.'

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'To explore Herculaneum, just as he did in the early 18th century,

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'as he dug through the ancient volcanic lava of Vesuvius.'

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You can see here, if you look here,

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you can probably see all the marks

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where they've basically... they've picked through this.

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Wow, and look up here,

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we get a sense of the extent of the structure.

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You'd have to be very precise with your planning.

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I imagine it took an awful long time to chip away at all of this.

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So you'd want to dig this very, very strategically.

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'As Alcubierre's men dug down,

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'the remains of the Roman Empire began to appear in all its glory.

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'Miraculously, and sometimes almost perfectly

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'preserved for nearly 2,000 years.'

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You can see what's on the outside.

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You've got...beautiful red, a deep red-coloured plaster,

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and then just above it on the line there,

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you've got a white.

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The ancient world was certainly not all black and white,

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and here, you get a sense of that.

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'The excavators even left behind their own marks.'

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This is a really wonderful little piece of writing, graffiti.

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This is Pascale, maybe Zeno.

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This is a worker, and he's saying, "This is my house."

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Now, imagine working down here,

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it must have been completely claustrophobic and awful.

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This very dark, somewhat forbidding place,

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he considered, perhaps ironically, to be his home.

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See, look, look, where the excavators

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have just stacked all of the bits of stone and bits of mud

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and all the other material that they've dug through,

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because, of course, he wanted the good stuff,

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he wanted all the statues and other valuable materials.

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'All this digging was one giant treasure hunt.'

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My word, you can see, here, traces of a statue head.

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Obviously, the excavators have come along

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and they've taken it out,

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but he's still left his imprint, so he is still here.

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'The Roman statues were eagerly collected.

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'But within the tunnels, there was something even more extraordinary.'

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Ha-ha! Now, this is amazing.

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'An entire Roman theatre.'

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This is the stage.

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So you're digging, and you come down to this!

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This must have been like discovering a lost world.

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You must have just been completely disorientated.

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Just all of a sudden, you've entered somewhere completely different,

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you've gone back in time

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to somewhere which was completely mothballed.

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'Stuck in time, as if left after its last performance,

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'the theatre yielded more treasures.'

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Here, in niches,

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you'd have had statues of nymphs and gods and goddesses.

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But also, statues of local dignitaries.

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You can actually see the inscriptions

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which they would have sat upon,

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and those early excavators weren't interested in the inscriptions.

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That's why they're still here.

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It was the valuable statues they wanted.

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Just imagine! It must have completely freaked them out.

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Alcubierre's excavation was the first step in

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one of the most remarkable stories in the whole of archaeology.

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The revelation of the entire Roman city of Herculaneum.

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As each new generation of excavators set to work here

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during the 19th and 20th centuries,

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they discovered not only statues and houses,

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but whole streets, with all of their people and possessions intact,

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frozen in time under lava and ash.

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All of this must have made even the most hardened treasure-hunter

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stop and think.

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'It seems extraordinary that something as violent as a volcano

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'could have preserved, as well as destroyed.'

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This is Roman life,

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still almost perfectly preserved after 2,000 years,

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and Herculaneum is still one of the most important

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archaeological discoveries ever made

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and, for me, the most captivating.

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'What Alcubierre had begun in 1738 changed archaeology.

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'Herculaneum made it clear

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'that the past didn't only exist on the surface,

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'but hidden,

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'ready to be revealed from deep within the earth.'

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Alcubierre's work in the early 18th century

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had shown that the secrets of ancient civilisations

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could be discovered through excavation.

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And if the past of Athens and Rome could be revealed,

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then what about ancient societies that came before?

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Pushing back the boundaries of civilisation

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meant looking beyond the familiar territories of Italy and Greece.

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Attention turned to the Middle East

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and, in particular, Egypt,

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explored in 1798 by Napoleon,

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France's most famous military commander.

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When, in 1798, Napoleon marched into Egypt with his army,

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he didn't just bring soldiers,

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but academics, geographers, engineers, and also surveyors.

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And he wasn't just there to uncover one small city like Herculaneum,

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but a whole civilisation.

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'Napoleon was no archaeologist, but he believed that

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'to rule this foreign land as part of his growing empire,

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'he had to understand it.'

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His men set about scrutinising Egypt in immense detail.

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All of a sudden, the wonders of Greece and Rome

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seemed, well, such old hat.

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If you really wanted to find out about civilisation,

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then Egypt was where it was at.

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A contemporary record of Napoleon's expedition

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is kept at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

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This extraordinary book is one of 23

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created by the 160 academics that Napoleon took with him to Egypt.

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And they recorded virtually every aspect of Egyptian life.

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Everything from religion to geography

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was precisely measured and recorded.

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Europeans at this time didn't know much about Egypt.

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Sure, they'd heard about the pyramids at Giza,

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but they didn't know why they had been built,

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and as for the rest of Egypt well, that was a real mystery.

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If you look at this illustration, you get a real sense of

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what an epic journey of discovery this was.

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And the excitement of the French

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as they came across giant, colossal ancient buildings,

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half-submerged in the desert sands.

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Only a thousand copies of these volumes were ever created,

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and at huge expense,

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but they created an enormous stir amongst those that saw them,

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and fuelled a new mania

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for Egyptology.

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The systematic exploration of ancient Egypt

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was another sign of archaeology's ever-increasing ambition.

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But the excavators had a problem

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how to get such vast sculptures back home.

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To the rescue

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came one of the most extraordinary figures in archaeology,

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an unlikely, larger-than-life Italian called Giovanni Belzoni.

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The son of a barber, Belzoni came to Britain as a circus acrobat,

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before re-styling himself the Patagonian Samson.

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But there was more to Belzoni than just being a circus strongman.

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He was also really interested in engineering.

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Belzoni headed to Egypt to sell a new type of irrigation pump,

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but it wasn't wanted.

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Unabashed, he switched attention to

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a huge statue of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II.

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The showman had turned archaeologist.

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Dragged to the Nile by 160 workers,

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the 3,000-year-old statue was headed for Europe.

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The statue had been discovered by Napoleon,

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but in 1818, it ended up in London,

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and it still sits proudly in the British Museum.

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At war in Egypt and elsewhere,

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Britain and France were looking to outdo each other at every turn,

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from empire to archaeology.

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And this competition extended to their national museums,

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as they strived to build

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the very best collections in the entire world.

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This was about national pride.

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As well as owning the planet,

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they wanted to own the past.

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So why is there so much Egyptian art and artefacts in the British Museum?

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The French, who were there as part of a military campaign,

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conducted fantastic research on the antiquities

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and were very serious about selecting the best pieces,

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so they weren't just picking up any old scraps

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on their way through the... through the deserts.

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And then, of course, when Nelson defeated them

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at the Battle of the Nile in 1798,

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the British went, "We want that."

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It was booty, and when it arrived on the steps of the museum,

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they had nowhere to put it.

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It sat out in the rain and, you know, in the pollution of London.

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This collection of material

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draws millions of people from all over the world.

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It was the first public collection of Egyptian antiquities

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that was like a set to go on show,

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so it had a massive impact on the public.

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They'd never seen anything like it,

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and I have seen some lovely early engravings

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of people actually crawling on these sarcophagi...

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-Oh, fantastic!

-..crawling into them, peering into them.

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So to what extent was collecting

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driven by this sort of geopolitical competition

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between the Brits and the French?

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People looked at these objects not as antiquities,

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but as symbols of British might, British worth, British victory.

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They loved them.

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And one of the obelisks indeed has engraved down the side,

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"Captured by the British Army."

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The vast excavations of Herculaneum

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and this shifting of giant monuments from Egypt

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had moved archaeology into a new, almost industrial, age.

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And archaeology was changing in other ways, too.

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With the development of public institutions

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such as the Louvre and the British Museum,

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archaeology became increasingly democratised.

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These beautiful artefacts were no longer just the preserve

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and the playthings of a rich, aristocratic elite.

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By the early 19th century, national museums held collections

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that gave the public access to hitherto unseen treasures.

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And with artefacts from far-flung ancient civilisations

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now easily accessible,

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they could also be much more easily studied.

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BELLS RING

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This is my old college in Cambridge, Trinity Hall,

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on graduation day.

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Nowadays, the place is full of academic archaeologists,

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but in the early 19th century, it was a very different story.

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Back then, the word "archaeology" didn't even exist.

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But before long,

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as the quest to discover the roots of civilisation gathered pace,

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academia began to take an interest.

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Considering all the competition between France and Britain

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for artefacts and glory,

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it's perhaps surprising that the first Professor of Archaeology

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didn't come from one of those countries.

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In fact, the first Professor of Archaeology, in 1818,

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was appointed at the University of Leiden, in Holland.

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Here in Cambridge, archaeology began to be taught in 1851.

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Now, 150 years later,

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there are over 3,000 students of archaeology in Britain,

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something that would have been inconceivable to the Victorian dons.

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But the importance of this wasn't just ivory towers.

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The entry of archaeology into academia

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fundamentally changed the way we viewed the past

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and the treasures of the ancient world.

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At its heart was a new academic quest

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not to own the past,

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but to understand it,

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to solve its mysteries.

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And one of the first riddles

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was posed by a stone tablet recovered from Egypt.

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The Rosetta Stone.

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Today, the Rosetta Stone is one of the treasures of the British Museum.

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Millions of people come every year to visit an archaeological icon.

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Unlike the Egyptian statues,

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it is important not because of its beauty or magnificence,

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but because of the story of its written inscription,

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its information.

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Before being put on public display,

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it was sent to the Society of Antiquaries in London to be copied.

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This is a copy of an engraving of the Rosetta Stone,

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done here in 1801.

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You might ask why this is so important.

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Well, this is a real turning point for archaeology,

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because archaeologists and their patrons began to realise

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that the real glory in their profession

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wasn't in the possession of objects,

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but in the idea of deciphering the information that they contained.

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And from this letter,

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we know that four plaster-cast copies were made of the stone

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and distributed to four universities

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Oxford,

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Cambridge,

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Edinburgh,

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and Dublin.

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Now, the Rosetta Stone and its prints,

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literally hundreds of them were produced

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and spread across Britain

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and sent to both individuals and to institutions.

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And the copying didn't stop there.

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Direct copies were also made from the Rosetta Stone itself,

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with ink being smeared over its surface,

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before paper was laid down on it.

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Even with academics poring over all the copies,

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the Rosetta Stone took 20 years to decode.

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It was a ground-breaking achievement,

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and one that this time was won by the French.

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The decoding of the Rosetta Stone was a massive advance,

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because if you could read this document,

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then you could read all documents

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in which Egyptian hieroglyphs had been used.

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For the first time,

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scholars could now work out a chronology of Egyptian history,

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and what they had long suspected now became crystal clear,

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that Egyptian civilisation was far, far...

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in fact, thousands of years older

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than anything in Greece and Rome.

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Academics had discovered a new age,

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one in which clues to ever earlier civilisations

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could not only be discovered,

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but deciphered from their mysterious writings.

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And this new age would be brought into focus

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by a new technological breakthrough,

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the invention of photography.

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Some of the very first archaeological photographs

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are held in the French National Archives,

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and have been studied by historian Mirjam Brusius.

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Oh, that's fantastic!

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This is taken in ancient Mesopotamia,

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in what is now Iraq.

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What you have here was a French expedition in the early 1850s.

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And when you see this, you realise things haven't moved on that much,

0:24:420:24:46

so if you looked at the photographs

0:24:460:24:48

of my excavation in Carthage, in Tunisia,

0:24:480:24:51

they're using exactly the same picks, exactly the same tools.

0:24:510:24:54

I love this guy, kind of lounging nonchalantly against a trench wall.

0:24:560:25:00

Photography represented a whole new way to record finds in context,

0:25:010:25:06

as well as providing perfect reproductions for study...

0:25:060:25:10

..especially when finds themselves sometimes went astray.

0:25:110:25:15

Talking about reproduction and reproducibility,

0:25:170:25:21

it's rather important with this one,

0:25:210:25:23

because what we see here on the photograph

0:25:230:25:25

actually got lost on the way to France.

0:25:250:25:28

-Oh!

-Quite a few boxes,

0:25:280:25:31

I think we're talking about hundreds, actually,

0:25:310:25:34

got lost in the river.

0:25:340:25:36

And so all we have now is the photograph of some of these objects.

0:25:360:25:42

And you can still see archaeologists

0:25:420:25:44

working with these photographs as proxies

0:25:440:25:47

and reproducing them,

0:25:470:25:49

and people can actually work with this material.

0:25:490:25:52

That's wonderful.

0:25:520:25:53

Here's some...some cylinders and some tablets.

0:25:560:25:59

We also have photographs,

0:25:590:26:01

where you can actually see the script of the tablet.

0:26:010:26:05

And these photographs would be sent to scholars,

0:26:050:26:08

who were then about to decipher the script,

0:26:080:26:12

because nobody could actually read what was on the clay tablets.

0:26:120:26:16

Thank you so much.

0:26:240:26:26

The Rosetta Stone had been meticulously copied,

0:26:280:26:32

but with photography, information could be recorded

0:26:320:26:35

and circulated more widely than ever before.

0:26:350:26:38

During excavations in Mesopotamia in 1855 to 1856,

0:26:400:26:44

thousands of photographs were taken

0:26:440:26:47

of cuneiform tablets which had been found there.

0:26:470:26:50

They were covered in a mysterious language

0:26:520:26:54

which nobody yet understood.

0:26:540:26:56

The photographs were distributed all over Europe,

0:26:590:27:02

and all of its finest scholars quickly got to work,

0:27:020:27:05

in a race to try and decipher this mysterious code.

0:27:050:27:09

It was these photographs which led to a breakthrough

0:27:110:27:14

in our quest to understand how civilisation began.

0:27:140:27:18

Sometimes, as a scholar,

0:27:200:27:21

you can spend days, weeks, years working on the coalface,

0:27:210:27:25

without seeming to make any progress,

0:27:250:27:27

and then suddenly, you have a eureka moment.

0:27:270:27:31

And that's what happened to the German scholar Jules Oppert.

0:27:310:27:35

One day, he was reading one of these cuneiform tablets

0:27:370:27:39

when he came across the word "Sumer".

0:27:390:27:42

And he realised that that must be the place

0:27:460:27:49

where this mysterious language had come from.

0:27:490:27:52

And, in fact, the Sumerians were the people

0:27:520:27:54

that had invented writing in the first place.

0:27:540:27:56

The discovery of the Sumerians

0:28:000:28:02

pushed back the dawn of civilisation by several thousand years.

0:28:020:28:06

It seemed that civilisation went back even further than Egypt,

0:28:110:28:17

deep into the Middle East

0:28:170:28:19

when people began to create the first written records.

0:28:190:28:22

But there was another question that remained unanswered.

0:28:240:28:28

Was Mesopotamia the single root of human civilisation,

0:28:280:28:32

or just one branch in something more complex?

0:28:320:28:37

For a few radical thinkers,

0:28:370:28:39

the answer to that lay not in the Old World,

0:28:390:28:44

but much, much further afield.

0:28:440:28:47

It's hard to imagine that even by the middle of the 19th century,

0:29:010:29:05

large areas of the world were still unmapped.

0:29:050:29:08

Much of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australasia remained a mystery.

0:29:120:29:19

But all that was changing.

0:29:190:29:20

Archaeology was heading off to new, unexplored areas of the world.

0:29:240:29:28

In this spirit, two mavericks

0:29:310:29:33

John Lloyd Stephens, an American writer,

0:29:330:29:36

and Frederick Catherwood, a British draughtsman,

0:29:360:29:38

who had both previously worked documenting the monuments of Egypt -

0:29:380:29:43

set off west and 7,000 miles away

0:29:430:29:47

to Central America.

0:29:470:29:48

'Catherwood and Stephens were drawn to Mexico in the 1830s

0:30:070:30:11

'by reports of ancient abandoned cities.

0:30:110:30:15

'But they faced an immediate problem.

0:30:160:30:18

'Its deep, dense jungle.'

0:30:200:30:22

I've only been doing this for a short while,

0:30:490:30:51

but I'm already absolutely knackered, I feel drained of energy.

0:30:510:30:55

I can't imagine what it was like for Catherwood and Stephens,

0:30:580:31:02

who had to do this day after day,

0:31:020:31:05

week after week, month after month.

0:31:050:31:07

Not only that,

0:31:150:31:16

but they also had to contend with the sweltering heat,

0:31:160:31:19

mosquitoes, malaria,

0:31:190:31:22

ticks, leeches,

0:31:220:31:25

as well as hostile indigenous people.

0:31:250:31:27

After weeks of trekking,

0:31:300:31:32

they began to get tantalising glimpses

0:31:320:31:35

of the work of ancient hands.

0:31:350:31:37

When you first look at this,

0:31:390:31:40

it just looks like a mound of stones in the forest,

0:31:400:31:43

but, of course, there's something suspicious about these stones.

0:31:430:31:46

Look, they're cut...straight.

0:31:460:31:49

These have been prepared by human beings.

0:31:490:31:52

This is a wall of some kind.

0:31:520:31:54

This great mound is some kind of building.

0:31:540:31:56

What these remains led them to was so incredible and unexpected

0:32:020:32:06

that archaeology

0:32:060:32:08

and our understanding of ancient civilisation

0:32:080:32:11

would never be the same again.

0:32:110:32:13

Wow! This place is absolutely stupendous.

0:32:190:32:23

You're in the middle of the jungle,

0:32:290:32:30

and then you're suddenly confronted by this,

0:32:300:32:33

these towering edifices rising out of the trees.

0:32:330:32:36

You can only imagine the reaction of Catherwood and Stephens

0:32:360:32:40

when they came across this in the 1830s.

0:32:400:32:42

Now, Stephens admitted that he was a man who wasn't easily impressed,

0:32:430:32:47

but this place blew his mind,

0:32:470:32:50

and looking around here now, I'm not surprised.

0:32:500:32:53

What Catherwood and Stephens had come across

0:32:530:32:55

was the ancient magnificent city of Palenque.

0:32:550:32:58

All this was the creation of a sophisticated

0:33:090:33:13

and previously unknown civilisation,

0:33:130:33:15

right in the heart of a Mexican jungle.

0:33:150:33:19

They set up camp here, in a corridor in this palace.

0:33:210:33:24

Their Indian guides

0:33:280:33:29

were too frightened to stay here after nightfall

0:33:290:33:31

and left them here, alone.

0:33:310:33:33

On the first night, they heard a loud crash

0:33:390:33:41

and thought somebody was trying to break in.

0:33:410:33:45

Fearing for their lives, they let off a volley of shots,

0:33:450:33:49

before blocking off the passageway and barricading themselves in.

0:33:490:33:53

Stephens later described

0:33:580:34:00

what this new world of extreme archaeology was like.

0:34:000:34:04

"The next night, the mosquitoes were beyond all endurance.

0:34:040:34:07

"The slightest part of the body,

0:34:070:34:09

"the tip end of a finger exposed was bitten.

0:34:090:34:13

"With the heads covered, the heat was suffocating

0:34:130:34:16

"and in the morning, our faces were all in blotches."

0:34:160:34:19

And that wasn't the worse thing.

0:34:190:34:22

There were also flesh-eating insects that burrowed into one's body,

0:34:220:34:25

and the only way of getting rid of them

0:34:250:34:28

was cutting them out with a knife.

0:34:280:34:30

Made of stern stuff, Catherwood and Stephens

0:34:330:34:36

spent weeks meticulously exploring their new discovery.

0:34:360:34:39

And there was one obvious mystery.

0:34:420:34:44

What were pyramids doing 7,000 miles from Egypt?

0:34:460:34:50

And who could have built them?

0:34:510:34:52

In this temple, Catherwood and Stephens discovered

0:34:560:34:58

what they thought was a cross.

0:34:580:35:00

You can see it running down here,

0:35:000:35:02

and then the horizontal line here.

0:35:020:35:03

The local Christian priests

0:35:050:35:06

argued this had to be something to do with Jesus Christ

0:35:060:35:10

and this temple must be dated to around the 3rd Century AD.

0:35:100:35:14

Stephens and Catherwood were rightly sceptical of such a conclusion.

0:35:140:35:19

They thought it was entirely possible

0:35:190:35:21

that there was a New World civilisation here

0:35:210:35:24

that was not connected in any way to the Old World.

0:35:240:35:27

If this was true, where had this ancient culture come from?

0:35:330:35:37

The key were these

0:35:420:35:44

the faces on the stucco that covered many of the buildings here.

0:35:440:35:47

They noticed that they bore a strong resemblance

0:35:490:35:51

to the people that still lived in the area

0:35:510:35:54

and, from that, deduced that they must be their ancestors.

0:35:540:35:57

Today, we know that Palenque was built by local Mayan people

0:36:060:36:10

nearly 2,000 years ago.

0:36:100:36:12

For those traditional archaeologists of the 19th century,

0:36:140:36:18

who saw civilisation as a torch

0:36:180:36:21

passed down from Egypt, Greece and Rome

0:36:210:36:25

to Napoleon's France or Queen Victoria's Britain,

0:36:250:36:28

well, they were beginning to realise

0:36:280:36:30

that it didn't quite work like that at all.

0:36:300:36:33

Archaeology had moved on massively,

0:36:360:36:38

and the more that was found,

0:36:380:36:39

the more there seemed yet to be discovered.

0:36:390:36:42

At a time when many scholars

0:36:440:36:45

were arguing for one single founding civilisation,

0:36:450:36:49

Catherwood and Stephens' findings seemed to suggest the possibility

0:36:490:36:53

of civilisations springing up all over the world

0:36:530:36:56

independently of one another.

0:36:560:36:58

They'd not only called into question

0:37:010:37:03

beliefs about the beginnings of civilisation,

0:37:030:37:07

they'd blown them apart.

0:37:070:37:08

In the 18th and early 19th centuries,

0:37:190:37:21

archaeology had seemed so simple.

0:37:210:37:24

The more you dug,

0:37:250:37:26

the more evidence of past civilisations you could find.

0:37:260:37:29

And with the insights of academia,

0:37:330:37:35

these discoveries were becoming better understood.

0:37:350:37:39

But by the mid-19th century, Catherwood and Stephens had shown

0:37:390:37:44

that things were far more complex than anyone had previously thought.

0:37:440:37:48

It had been an engineer who had revealed Herculaneum,

0:37:500:37:54

a circus strongman who had shifted Egyptian statues,

0:37:540:37:59

and a writer-illustrator duo

0:37:590:38:01

who had taken archaeology to the New World.

0:38:010:38:05

But now there was about to be a new way of revealing the past,

0:38:050:38:11

through science.

0:38:110:38:13

This new era of scientific archaeology

0:38:260:38:29

was pioneered in a ground-breaking excavation in Turkey.

0:38:290:38:33

An excavation organised by

0:38:360:38:38

one of archaeology's most notorious figures,

0:38:380:38:41

a hugely wealthy German entrepreneur.

0:38:410:38:44

Someone who wasn't out to discover something bigger or earlier,

0:38:470:38:53

but something many people didn't believe existed at all.

0:38:530:38:56

One of the men who best embodied

0:39:050:39:06

the buccaneering spirit of the early treasure-hunters,

0:39:060:39:10

as well as this new rigorous scientific methodology,

0:39:100:39:13

was Heinrich Schliemann, a German business tycoon.

0:39:130:39:17

And here is a painting of him and his wife.

0:39:170:39:21

Schliemann used his fortune to follow his dream,

0:39:210:39:24

one of the most elusive prizes in archaeology,

0:39:240:39:27

the ancient city of Troy.

0:39:270:39:29

Today, Schliemann's discovery

0:39:360:39:39

is one of the most visited ancient sites in the world

0:39:390:39:43

A magnet for many of Turkey's millions of tourists.

0:39:450:39:48

The attraction even has a trademark Trojan horse.

0:39:500:39:54

140 years ago, though, most right-thinking academics

0:39:560:40:00

thought Troy was no more than fiction a myth.

0:40:000:40:04

Schliemann, with the romantic zeal of an amateur,

0:40:060:40:10

thought that they were wrong.

0:40:100:40:12

In 1871, when Schliemann first arrived here,

0:40:170:40:21

there were few surface clues to guide him.

0:40:210:40:23

But as a man of science, Schliemann had a method.

0:40:260:40:30

He was the first archaeologist to dig test pits,

0:40:300:40:33

and he used a new technique pioneered by geologists

0:40:330:40:37

called stratigraphy.

0:40:370:40:39

He had to dig a series of trenches,

0:40:410:40:43

and the first one,

0:40:430:40:45

you can see down here.

0:40:450:40:47

And almost immediately, he started to find evidence of an ancient city.

0:40:470:40:51

This was what Schliemann first found, part of the temple of Athena,

0:40:550:40:59

and Schliemann immediately recognised

0:40:590:41:01

that this was Graeco-Roman,

0:41:010:41:03

and that if he wanted to find Homeric Troy,

0:41:030:41:06

then he needed to dig much deeper.

0:41:060:41:08

Schliemann employed hundreds of men,

0:41:130:41:17

using his considerable wealth to excavate on a massive scale.

0:41:170:41:21

And only stopping when he reached bedrock.

0:41:230:41:26

He was working on a wild hunch,

0:41:300:41:32

that there really was a factual basis

0:41:320:41:35

to Homer's epic references to the great city of Troy.

0:41:350:41:39

Now, Schliemann, as he dug down,

0:41:420:41:44

did try and take a scientific approach

0:41:440:41:46

and analyse what he had found.

0:41:460:41:48

When he reached this level, Troy II,

0:41:480:41:51

the second earliest settlement on the site of Troy,

0:41:510:41:53

he thought that he had hit pay dirt.

0:41:530:41:56

And the reason for that was because he found this,

0:41:560:42:00

which is a destruction layer made up of burnt objects and charcoal.

0:42:000:42:04

And he knew from reading Homer's Iliad

0:42:040:42:07

that Troy had been burnt to the ground.

0:42:070:42:09

Schliemann had proved that Troy was real,

0:42:130:42:16

although in his enthusiasm, he'd unknowingly dug straight through it

0:42:160:42:21

to an even earlier settlement.

0:42:210:42:23

In digging through a mound and finding an ancient city,

0:42:250:42:28

Schliemann had opened up the possibility

0:42:280:42:30

of excavating all the other thousands of mounds

0:42:300:42:33

that existed across the Near East.

0:42:330:42:35

Think about it for a moment.

0:42:350:42:37

In the search for the beginnings of civilisation,

0:42:370:42:40

you no longer needed to wait for clues to appear spontaneously,

0:42:400:42:44

but could start excavating anytime, anywhere.

0:42:440:42:48

Schliemann was pioneering a new scientific approach,

0:42:510:42:55

but he was still fascinated

0:42:550:42:57

by something that had always drawn archaeologists treasure.

0:42:570:43:02

Schliemann wrote that while working on a trench roughly here,

0:43:050:43:08

he first discovered a copper and then a gold object.

0:43:080:43:12

Not trusting his workmen, he called an early lunch

0:43:120:43:15

and then cut the artefacts out of the ground using a knife,

0:43:150:43:19

before smuggling them away in his wife's shawl.

0:43:190:43:22

Now, he'd claim this was a massive horde of weapons,

0:43:220:43:25

jewellery and other artefacts

0:43:250:43:27

that must be the treasure of Priam, King of Troy,

0:43:270:43:31

hidden when the city fell to the Greeks.

0:43:310:43:33

Schliemann even took pictures of his wife

0:43:350:43:38

modelling the precious jewellery.

0:43:380:43:40

To the modern archaeologist,

0:43:400:43:42

the idea of putting on ancient artefacts that you've found

0:43:420:43:47

is absolutely shocking.

0:43:470:43:48

These days, many archaeologists suspect that

0:43:500:43:53

although some of this jewellery did come from the find site,

0:43:530:43:56

that Schliemann actually added to it

0:43:560:43:59

from material that he found elsewhere.

0:43:590:44:01

Schliemann smuggled Priam's treasure out of Turkey

0:44:050:44:09

and was promptly banned from ever coming back.

0:44:090:44:12

Unperturbed, he turned his attention to another of Homer's cities -

0:44:150:44:20

Mycenae, in Greece,

0:44:200:44:22

this time hoping to discover a connection

0:44:220:44:25

between Troy and their epic Greek enemies.

0:44:250:44:28

This is a copy of Schliemann's most famous find,

0:44:320:44:36

the so-called Mask of Agamemnon,

0:44:360:44:38

and it far surpassed anything that he found in Troy.

0:44:380:44:41

He found it in a tomb inside the city of Mycenae,

0:44:410:44:45

and it is said that in celebration,

0:44:450:44:47

he romped round the tomb afterwards with his young wife.

0:44:470:44:50

It was another incredible discovery,

0:44:540:44:57

but Schliemann still faced a challenge

0:44:570:44:59

to convince the world that his two sites were connected.

0:44:590:45:04

What he did next

0:45:040:45:06

showed just how far ahead of the game Schliemann really was,

0:45:060:45:09

because like any good 19th-century German,

0:45:090:45:12

Schliemann believed in the power of science,

0:45:120:45:15

and particularly, the power of analytical chemistry.

0:45:150:45:19

Schliemann sent samples back to metal experts in Britain

0:45:220:45:26

for scientific testing.

0:45:260:45:27

Here at Goldsmiths' Hall in London, analytical chemists

0:45:300:45:34

still use similar techniques to test precious metals.

0:45:340:45:37

By studying his ancient gold,

0:45:460:45:48

Schliemann hoped that he would discover compositions

0:45:480:45:51

that matched metal from Mycenae

0:45:510:45:54

to metal he had previously found at Troy.

0:45:540:45:57

This is exactly the same sort of process

0:45:590:46:02

that Schliemann's artefacts would have been through,

0:46:020:46:04

and you can imagine him anxiously waiting for the test results.

0:46:040:46:08

The Science Museum in London

0:46:100:46:12

holds some of Schliemann's original samples,

0:46:120:46:15

together with the all-important results.

0:46:150:46:18

This was gold leaf,

0:46:190:46:20

taken from the wrappings around the bodies in the tomb of Mycenae.

0:46:200:46:24

And what the analysis seemed to show

0:46:250:46:28

was a link between this gold leaf from Mycenae

0:46:280:46:31

and gold leaf that Schliemann had found in Troy.

0:46:310:46:34

So through scientific analysis, Schliemann thought he had found

0:46:350:46:39

that all-important connection between Mycenae and Troy.

0:46:390:46:43

Nowadays, it's impossible to imagine archaeology without science,

0:46:470:46:51

but in the late 19th century,

0:46:510:46:53

these new advances seemed to promise a new way of doing archaeology,

0:46:530:46:58

a move away from vague theorising

0:46:580:47:01

to solid scientific results.

0:47:010:47:05

Now, Schliemann might have been a treasure-hunter,

0:47:050:47:08

but he was also a man who believed in the power of science,

0:47:080:47:12

and that's what makes him such a giant in the history of archaeology.

0:47:120:47:16

Heinrich Schliemann

0:47:290:47:30

established archaeology as a scientific discipline,

0:47:300:47:33

but it took the man that lived here to take it to new heights.

0:47:330:47:37

His name was General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers.

0:47:370:47:43

General Pitt Rivers was the quintessential Victorian gentleman.

0:47:450:47:49

A career soldier, he'd had a distinguished military record

0:47:490:47:53

and was both intelligent and eccentric.

0:47:530:47:57

But there was more to Pitt Rivers than just military matters.

0:47:590:48:02

Whilst abroad,

0:48:020:48:03

he'd assembled a very impressive ethnographical collection,

0:48:030:48:06

and when ill health prompted an early retirement from the army,

0:48:060:48:10

he was able to devote himself to his passion archaeology.

0:48:100:48:14

Fortunately for Pitt Rivers, his retirement had coincided with

0:48:190:48:24

an inheritance of almost royal proportions.

0:48:240:48:28

This, Cranborne Chase,

0:48:280:48:30

30,000 acres of rolling Wessex countryside.

0:48:300:48:34

The old soldier now had the time, the money,

0:48:360:48:39

and the perfect place to pursue his passion.

0:48:390:48:42

It had once been a royal deer park,

0:48:440:48:46

so it had been protected from modern building,

0:48:460:48:48

but it was still crammed full of ancient settlements.

0:48:480:48:51

It was an archaeologist's dream.

0:48:510:48:53

Cranborne Chase became the General's personal archaeological laboratory.

0:49:000:49:05

Each day, come rain or shine,

0:49:050:49:06

he'd go out with a group of draughtsmen and excavators.

0:49:060:49:10

And this photograph says it all.

0:49:100:49:12

Here, you've got the big man himself,

0:49:120:49:14

sitting in his horse and carriage,

0:49:140:49:17

with all of his workmen assembled,

0:49:170:49:19

standing to attention around the trench.

0:49:190:49:21

It was said that, to keep the spirits up,

0:49:210:49:23

he sometimes had a brass band playing whilst they worked.

0:49:230:49:28

But I have to say if you look at this photograph,

0:49:280:49:30

the tools aren't stowed away very carefully.

0:49:300:49:32

Shame on you, Pitt Rivers!

0:49:320:49:34

Over a century after he dug here,

0:49:360:49:38

evidence of his excavations

0:49:380:49:40

at Cranborne Chase still exists.

0:49:400:49:42

Pitt Rivers

0:49:430:49:45

literally left his mark right across Cranborne Chase,

0:49:450:49:48

and down here, we're going to try and find one of his stone markers

0:49:480:49:52

that he put down on one of his many excavations.

0:49:520:49:55

Now, it's quite overgrown...

0:49:570:49:59

..so we're going to have to look quite carefully.

0:50:010:50:03

'The estate manager has told me one still exists close to here.'

0:50:050:50:09

So this looks like a ditch around an ancient settlement.

0:50:090:50:12

Let's have a look up here.

0:50:120:50:14

Ah! There we go.

0:50:220:50:23

It looks like a gravestone.

0:50:290:50:31

"This Roman well...

0:50:320:50:33

"..five feet in diameter."

0:50:350:50:39

This stone tells us a lot about Pitt Rivers

0:50:390:50:42

in his attitude towards the ancient past.

0:50:420:50:45

Firstly, it tells you about his precision.

0:50:450:50:47

He wanted to mark down, with this expensive stone,

0:50:470:50:52

exactly where ancient monuments were,

0:50:520:50:55

where he'd found them.

0:50:550:50:56

It was important to him to give people precise information.

0:50:560:51:00

And the second thing is that this is just a well.

0:51:010:51:04

You know, it's not a temple, or some other fine building.

0:51:050:51:09

But Pitt Rivers was interested in the everyday life

0:51:090:51:12

of the people that lived on Cranborne Chase

0:51:120:51:15

hundreds, thousands of years before.

0:51:150:51:17

Over 17 years,

0:51:220:51:24

Pitt Rivers excavated sites all over Cranborne Chase,

0:51:240:51:29

uncovering everything from Bronze Age barrows

0:51:290:51:32

to Roman farmhouses and Saxon burials.

0:51:320:51:35

Each site meticulously documented.

0:51:370:51:40

Evidence of Pitt Rivers' ground-breaking approach

0:51:420:51:45

to archaeology can be found in Salisbury Museum.

0:51:450:51:48

'Adrian Green is a Pitt Rivers expert.'

0:51:510:51:55

With Schliemann and other earlier collectors,

0:51:550:51:58

often, what we find is

0:51:580:51:59

a rather imprecise way of recording what you've found

0:51:590:52:02

and a rather cavalier way of presenting it.

0:52:020:52:05

With Pitt Rivers, was he more scrupulous in a way?

0:52:050:52:08

Yeah, absolutely.

0:52:080:52:09

He's often referred to as "the Father of modern scientific archaeology,"

0:52:090:52:13

because he had such a precise approach to recording his evidence.

0:52:130:52:16

So it wasn't enough for him to just say it came from a particular site.

0:52:160:52:19

He wanted to be able to demonstrate

0:52:190:52:21

exactly where the objects came from on his excavations.

0:52:210:52:25

He would number that pit

0:52:250:52:26

and actually say at what depth an object was found,

0:52:260:52:28

because if that object was used

0:52:280:52:30

for dating that particular feature or that particular site,

0:52:300:52:33

he wanted absolute proof there in the record, for posterity, basically,

0:52:330:52:37

as well as his contemporaries, to prove what he had found.

0:52:370:52:40

This is a marvellous example of

0:52:400:52:42

technical drawing, isn't it?

0:52:420:52:45

It is, absolutely, and it's a catalogue.

0:52:450:52:47

I think that's what it is.

0:52:470:52:48

Each object is numbered and carefully drawn,

0:52:480:52:51

then coloured, to give you an idea of what it may have looked like.

0:52:510:52:54

I mean, it's extraordinarily detailed.

0:52:540:52:57

I'm just looking here, and you can see

0:52:570:52:59

where the illustrator has painted in

0:52:590:53:01

so that we can see corrosion.

0:53:010:53:03

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a real labour of love, this, actually,

0:53:030:53:06

the work and the effort that's been put into it.

0:53:060:53:08

Yeah, they are almost like works of art.

0:53:080:53:10

In fact, they ARE works of art, aren't they?

0:53:100:53:13

'For Pitt Rivers, though, even these exquisite drawings weren't enough.'

0:53:140:53:19

So what's this?

0:53:190:53:21

This looks almost like a sort of board game or something.

0:53:210:53:24

It does, doesn't it? Yeah!

0:53:240:53:25

It's actually one of the General's contour plans,

0:53:250:53:28

which were basically a series of models

0:53:280:53:31

that were made of the archaeological sites that he excavated.

0:53:310:53:37

-I love the skeleton, relaxing, a very relaxed pose.

-Yes!

0:53:370:53:42

'Pitt Rivers' care, his attention to detail,

0:53:420:53:45

'is simply astonishing.'

0:53:450:53:48

So am I looking here at an early example of 3D modelling?

0:53:480:53:51

You are indeed, yes.

0:53:510:53:52

It's the site to scale,

0:53:520:53:54

showing the locations of the features from one particular area.

0:53:540:53:57

He wants to show the context, that's what he's doing,

0:53:570:53:59

and that's one of the things you see in this model.

0:53:590:54:01

The pits and things are all shown, but also he's painted on labels

0:54:010:54:05

showing where the objects in the pits were found, too,

0:54:050:54:07

and the depth at which they were found.

0:54:070:54:10

How useful to the modern archaeologist

0:54:100:54:14

do you think the, erm... references that he's left are?

0:54:140:54:19

I think they're invaluable,

0:54:190:54:20

because I think you can tell precisely where the features were.

0:54:200:54:25

You can see where some of the major finds were recovered.

0:54:250:54:28

You can see that through the publications.

0:54:280:54:31

You can see that also through the models that he produced as well,

0:54:310:54:35

so these are very useful to modern archaeologists.

0:54:350:54:37

In Pitt Rivers and his meticulous records,

0:54:390:54:42

we're seeing the very birth of modern archaeology.

0:54:420:54:46

And more than a hundred years later,

0:54:460:54:49

everything Pitt Rivers found is still carefully stored.

0:54:490:54:53

Not only pottery and coins, but something else

0:54:550:54:58

that many archaeologists of earlier times would have cast aside.

0:54:580:55:03

Human remains.

0:55:040:55:06

In the 19th century,

0:55:080:55:09

all of those treasure-hunters didn't see any use for these skulls,

0:55:090:55:12

and they often used to put them to one side.

0:55:120:55:15

Unless, of course, you were Pitt Rivers.

0:55:150:55:18

We now know that these are incredibly useful artefacts,

0:55:180:55:22

because you can tell what people died of,

0:55:220:55:24

what diseases they had,

0:55:240:55:25

and sometimes, even what their religious beliefs were.

0:55:250:55:28

Now, one of the reasons why

0:55:280:55:30

we see Pitt Rivers as being such a visionary

0:55:300:55:33

was that he understood that in the future,

0:55:330:55:35

archaeologists might have new scientific techniques

0:55:350:55:38

that would allow them to extract new types of data

0:55:380:55:41

from artefacts like this.

0:55:410:55:43

Just 150 years separates the work of Alcubierre in Herculaneum

0:55:460:55:51

and Pitt Rivers.

0:55:510:55:53

During that time, archaeology had been transformed.

0:55:530:55:57

We've seen the first massive excavations in Herculaneum...

0:55:590:56:02

..the first great state-backed enterprises in Egypt...

0:56:050:56:08

..the first academics.

0:56:110:56:12

And on top of all of that,

0:56:140:56:15

Schliemann and his belief in the use of scientific analysis.

0:56:150:56:20

But for me, as an archaeologist,

0:56:210:56:23

it seems that modern archaeology begins with Pitt Rivers.

0:56:230:56:27

Although most of his work was conducted in the 1880s,

0:56:290:56:32

he feels like a 20th-century archaeologist,

0:56:320:56:36

and many of the developments in that century,

0:56:360:56:38

I'm sure, would have thrilled him.

0:56:380:56:40

'Next time...

0:56:430:56:44

'..archaeology moves into the 20th century...'

0:56:470:56:50

Well, that is absolutely extraordinary.

0:56:510:56:54

'..from civilisation and kings...

0:56:540:56:57

'..to the common man...'

0:57:000:57:01

What I really like about this

0:57:010:57:03

is that it's a very, very different snapshot of our past, isn't it?

0:57:030:57:07

-Of everyday life, lived by everyday people.

-Yeah.

0:57:070:57:10

'..as science creates ever more powerful tools

0:57:120:57:15

'to get even closer to our most ancient ancestors...'

0:57:150:57:18

Oh, what's that? Yes, yes!

0:57:190:57:21

Beautiful, beautiful, look!

0:57:210:57:23

'..but, in the process, becomes tinged by politics and ideology.'

0:57:240:57:29

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0:57:530:57:56

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