The Search for Civilisation Archaeology: A Secret History

Priceless treasures.

Ancient ruins.

And the fragile remains of long dead people.

Archaeology isn't like written history.

It's the very stuff of the past.

And people throughout history have always been fascinated

by the ancient remains that survived under their very feet.

Ever since the Renaissance, the men of Europe

are becoming increasingly interested in

the glittering civilisations of Greece and Rome.

They saw in their mighty achievements

a mirror image of their own amazing accomplishments.

That fascination with civilisation was, however,

worlds away from archaeology's earliest beginnings.

In this series,

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

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

This is meant to be one of the nails

with which Jesus Christ was crucified.

But over hundreds of years, archaeologists revealed

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

The most iconic archaeological find ever.

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

Not only mere objects, or even monumental treasure,

but the very foundations of civilisation itself.

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

when archaeologists began to search

beyond the great monuments of antiquity

for new clues

which led them to dig deep underground.

In the shadow of Mount Vesuvius in 1738,

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

Classical scholars knew that the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD

had destroyed the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

So they must still exist,

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

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

His name was Rocque de Alcubierre,

and the excavation he began

was a watershed in the history of archaeology.

Nearly 300 years after Alcubierre's dig,

his original diaries are kept at

the National Archaeological Museum in Naples,

giving us a remarkable insight into his methods.

This is a really fascinating document

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

quite what his mission was.

All stones of utility...

..and greatness were immediately to be removed.

In other words, anything precious like statues,

or anything that could be re-used

for the multitude of building projects

which were going on in the area.

And if they didn't find anything like that,

then excavations were to be "abandone", abandoned.

There are things in this diary

which are truly horrifying to any archaeologist.

There's all sorts of references

to objects which they considered not to be of value,

little things, small things from everyday life,

which we consider to be incredibly precious.

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

'These documents reveal the sheer ambition of the excavation,

'hundreds of workers digging to a plan

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

'Handling Alcubierre's diaries was thrilling enough,

'but as an archaeologist,

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

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

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

You can see here, if you look here,

you can probably see all the marks

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

Wow, and look up here,

we get a sense of the extent of the structure.

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

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

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

'As Alcubierre's men dug down,

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

'Miraculously, and sometimes almost perfectly

'preserved for nearly 2,000 years.'

You can see what's on the outside.

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

and then just above it on the line there,

you've got a white.

The ancient world was certainly not all black and white,

and here, you get a sense of that.

'The excavators even left behind their own marks.'

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

This is Pascale, maybe Zeno.

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

Now, imagine working down here,

it must have been completely claustrophobic and awful.

This very dark, somewhat forbidding place,

he considered, perhaps ironically, to be his home.

See, look, look, where the excavators

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

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

because, of course, he wanted the good stuff,

he wanted all the statues and other valuable materials.

'All this digging was one giant treasure hunt.'

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

Obviously, the excavators have come along

and they've taken it out,

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

'The Roman statues were eagerly collected.

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

Ha-ha! Now, this is amazing.

'An entire Roman theatre.'

This is the stage.

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

This must have been like discovering a lost world.

You must have just been completely disorientated.

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

you've gone back in time

to somewhere which was completely mothballed.

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

'the theatre yielded more treasures.'

Here, in niches,

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

But also, statues of local dignitaries.

You can actually see the inscriptions

which they would have sat upon,

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

That's why they're still here.

It was the valuable statues they wanted.

Just imagine! It must have completely freaked them out.

Alcubierre's excavation was the first step in

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

The revelation of the entire Roman city of Herculaneum.

As each new generation of excavators set to work here

during the 19th and 20th centuries,

they discovered not only statues and houses,

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

frozen in time under lava and ash.

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

stop and think.

'It seems extraordinary that something as violent as a volcano

'could have preserved, as well as destroyed.'

This is Roman life,

still almost perfectly preserved after 2,000 years,

and Herculaneum is still one of the most important

archaeological discoveries ever made

and, for me, the most captivating.

'What Alcubierre had begun in 1738 changed archaeology.

'Herculaneum made it clear

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

'but hidden,

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

Alcubierre's work in the early 18th century

had shown that the secrets of ancient civilisations

could be discovered through excavation.

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

then what about ancient societies that came before?

Pushing back the boundaries of civilisation

meant looking beyond the familiar territories of Italy and Greece.

Attention turned to the Middle East

and, in particular, Egypt,

explored in 1798 by Napoleon,

France's most famous military commander.

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

he didn't just bring soldiers,

but academics, geographers, engineers, and also surveyors.

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

but a whole civilisation.

'Napoleon was no archaeologist, but he believed that

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

'he had to understand it.'

His men set about scrutinising Egypt in immense detail.

All of a sudden, the wonders of Greece and Rome

seemed, well, such old hat.

If you really wanted to find out about civilisation,

then Egypt was where it was at.

A contemporary record of Napoleon's expedition

is kept at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

This extraordinary book is one of 23

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

And they recorded virtually every aspect of Egyptian life.

Everything from religion to geography

was precisely measured and recorded.

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

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

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

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

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

what an epic journey of discovery this was.

And the excitement of the French

as they came across giant, colossal ancient buildings,

half-submerged in the desert sands.

Only a thousand copies of these volumes were ever created,

and at huge expense,

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

and fuelled a new mania

for Egyptology.

The systematic exploration of ancient Egypt

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

But the excavators had a problem

how to get such vast sculptures back home.

To the rescue

came one of the most extraordinary figures in archaeology,

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

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

before re-styling himself the Patagonian Samson.

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

He was also really interested in engineering.

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

but it wasn't wanted.

Unabashed, he switched attention to

a huge statue of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II.

The showman had turned archaeologist.

Dragged to the Nile by 160 workers,

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

The statue had been discovered by Napoleon,

but in 1818, it ended up in London,

and it still sits proudly in the British Museum.

At war in Egypt and elsewhere,

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

from empire to archaeology.

And this competition extended to their national museums,

as they strived to build

the very best collections in the entire world.

This was about national pride.

As well as owning the planet,

they wanted to own the past.

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

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

conducted fantastic research on the antiquities

and were very serious about selecting the best pieces,

so they weren't just picking up any old scraps

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

And then, of course, when Nelson defeated them

at the Battle of the Nile in 1798,

the British went, "We want that."

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

they had nowhere to put it.

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

This collection of material

draws millions of people from all over the world.

It was the first public collection of Egyptian antiquities

that was like a set to go on show,

so it had a massive impact on the public.

They'd never seen anything like it,

and I have seen some lovely early engravings

of people actually crawling on these sarcophagi...

-Oh, fantastic!

-..crawling into them, peering into them.

So to what extent was collecting

driven by this sort of geopolitical competition

between the Brits and the French?

People looked at these objects not as antiquities,

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

They loved them.

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

"Captured by the British Army."

The vast excavations of Herculaneum

and this shifting of giant monuments from Egypt

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

And archaeology was changing in other ways, too.

With the development of public institutions

such as the Louvre and the British Museum,

archaeology became increasingly democratised.

These beautiful artefacts were no longer just the preserve

and the playthings of a rich, aristocratic elite.

By the early 19th century, national museums held collections

that gave the public access to hitherto unseen treasures.

And with artefacts from far-flung ancient civilisations

now easily accessible,

they could also be much more easily studied.

BELLS RING

This is my old college in Cambridge, Trinity Hall,

on graduation day.

Nowadays, the place is full of academic archaeologists,

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

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

But before long,

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

academia began to take an interest.

Considering all the competition between France and Britain

for artefacts and glory,

it's perhaps surprising that the first Professor of Archaeology

didn't come from one of those countries.

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

was appointed at the University of Leiden, in Holland.

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

Now, 150 years later,

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

something that would have been inconceivable to the Victorian dons.

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

The entry of archaeology into academia

fundamentally changed the way we viewed the past

and the treasures of the ancient world.

At its heart was a new academic quest

not to own the past,

but to understand it,

to solve its mysteries.

And one of the first riddles

was posed by a stone tablet recovered from Egypt.

The Rosetta Stone.

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

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

Unlike the Egyptian statues,

it is important not because of its beauty or magnificence,

but because of the story of its written inscription,

its information.

Before being put on public display,

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

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

done here in 1801.

You might ask why this is so important.

Well, this is a real turning point for archaeology,

because archaeologists and their patrons began to realise

that the real glory in their profession

wasn't in the possession of objects,

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

And from this letter,

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

and distributed to four universities

Oxford,

Cambridge,

Edinburgh,

and Dublin.

Now, the Rosetta Stone and its prints,

literally hundreds of them were produced

and spread across Britain

and sent to both individuals and to institutions.

And the copying didn't stop there.

Direct copies were also made from the Rosetta Stone itself,

with ink being smeared over its surface,

before paper was laid down on it.

Even with academics poring over all the copies,

the Rosetta Stone took 20 years to decode.

It was a ground-breaking achievement,

and one that this time was won by the French.

The decoding of the Rosetta Stone was a massive advance,

because if you could read this document,

then you could read all documents

in which Egyptian hieroglyphs had been used.

For the first time,

scholars could now work out a chronology of Egyptian history,

and what they had long suspected now became crystal clear,

that Egyptian civilisation was far, far...

in fact, thousands of years older

than anything in Greece and Rome.

Academics had discovered a new age,

one in which clues to ever earlier civilisations

could not only be discovered,

but deciphered from their mysterious writings.

And this new age would be brought into focus

by a new technological breakthrough,

the invention of photography.

Some of the very first archaeological photographs

are held in the French National Archives,

and have been studied by historian Mirjam Brusius.

Oh, that's fantastic!

This is taken in ancient Mesopotamia,

in what is now Iraq.

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

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

so if you looked at the photographs

of my excavation in Carthage, in Tunisia,

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

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

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

as well as providing perfect reproductions for study...

..especially when finds themselves sometimes went astray.

Talking about reproduction and reproducibility,

it's rather important with this one,

because what we see here on the photograph

actually got lost on the way to France.

-Oh!

-Quite a few boxes,

I think we're talking about hundreds, actually,

got lost in the river.

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

And you can still see archaeologists

working with these photographs as proxies

and reproducing them,

and people can actually work with this material.

That's wonderful.

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

We also have photographs,

where you can actually see the script of the tablet.

And these photographs would be sent to scholars,

who were then about to decipher the script,

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

Thank you so much.

The Rosetta Stone had been meticulously copied,

but with photography, information could be recorded

and circulated more widely than ever before.

During excavations in Mesopotamia in 1855 to 1856,

thousands of photographs were taken

of cuneiform tablets which had been found there.

They were covered in a mysterious language

which nobody yet understood.

The photographs were distributed all over Europe,

and all of its finest scholars quickly got to work,

in a race to try and decipher this mysterious code.

It was these photographs which led to a breakthrough

in our quest to understand how civilisation began.

Sometimes, as a scholar,

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

without seeming to make any progress,

and then suddenly, you have a eureka moment.

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

One day, he was reading one of these cuneiform tablets

when he came across the word "Sumer".

And he realised that that must be the place

where this mysterious language had come from.

And, in fact, the Sumerians were the people

that had invented writing in the first place.

The discovery of the Sumerians

pushed back the dawn of civilisation by several thousand years.

It seemed that civilisation went back even further than Egypt,

deep into the Middle East

when people began to create the first written records.

But there was another question that remained unanswered.

Was Mesopotamia the single root of human civilisation,

or just one branch in something more complex?

For a few radical thinkers,

the answer to that lay not in the Old World,

but much, much further afield.

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

large areas of the world were still unmapped.

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

But all that was changing.

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

In this spirit, two mavericks

John Lloyd Stephens, an American writer,

and Frederick Catherwood, a British draughtsman,

who had both previously worked documenting the monuments of Egypt -

set off west and 7,000 miles away

to Central America.

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

'by reports of ancient abandoned cities.

'But they faced an immediate problem.

'Its deep, dense jungle.'

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

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

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

who had to do this day after day,

week after week, month after month.

Not only that,

but they also had to contend with the sweltering heat,

mosquitoes, malaria,

ticks, leeches,

as well as hostile indigenous people.

After weeks of trekking,

they began to get tantalising glimpses

of the work of ancient hands.

When you first look at this,

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

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

Look, they're cut...straight.

These have been prepared by human beings.

This is a wall of some kind.

This great mound is some kind of building.

What these remains led them to was so incredible and unexpected

that archaeology

and our understanding of ancient civilisation

would never be the same again.

Wow! This place is absolutely stupendous.

You're in the middle of the jungle,

and then you're suddenly confronted by this,

these towering edifices rising out of the trees.

You can only imagine the reaction of Catherwood and Stephens

when they came across this in the 1830s.

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

but this place blew his mind,

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

What Catherwood and Stephens had come across

was the ancient magnificent city of Palenque.

All this was the creation of a sophisticated

and previously unknown civilisation,

right in the heart of a Mexican jungle.

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

Their Indian guides

were too frightened to stay here after nightfall

and left them here, alone.

On the first night, they heard a loud crash

and thought somebody was trying to break in.

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

before blocking off the passageway and barricading themselves in.

Stephens later described

what this new world of extreme archaeology was like.

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

"The slightest part of the body,

"the tip end of a finger exposed was bitten.

"With the heads covered, the heat was suffocating

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

And that wasn't the worse thing.

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

and the only way of getting rid of them

was cutting them out with a knife.

Made of stern stuff, Catherwood and Stephens

spent weeks meticulously exploring their new discovery.

And there was one obvious mystery.

What were pyramids doing 7,000 miles from Egypt?

And who could have built them?

In this temple, Catherwood and Stephens discovered

what they thought was a cross.

You can see it running down here,

and then the horizontal line here.

The local Christian priests

argued this had to be something to do with Jesus Christ

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

Stephens and Catherwood were rightly sceptical of such a conclusion.

They thought it was entirely possible

that there was a New World civilisation here

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

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

The key were these

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

They noticed that they bore a strong resemblance

to the people that still lived in the area

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

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

nearly 2,000 years ago.

For those traditional archaeologists of the 19th century,

who saw civilisation as a torch

passed down from Egypt, Greece and Rome

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

well, they were beginning to realise

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

Archaeology had moved on massively,

and the more that was found,

the more there seemed yet to be discovered.

At a time when many scholars

were arguing for one single founding civilisation,

Catherwood and Stephens' findings seemed to suggest the possibility

of civilisations springing up all over the world

independently of one another.

They'd not only called into question

beliefs about the beginnings of civilisation,

they'd blown them apart.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries,

archaeology had seemed so simple.

The more you dug,

the more evidence of past civilisations you could find.

And with the insights of academia,

these discoveries were becoming better understood.

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

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

It had been an engineer who had revealed Herculaneum,

a circus strongman who had shifted Egyptian statues,

and a writer-illustrator duo

who had taken archaeology to the New World.

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

through science.

This new era of scientific archaeology

was pioneered in a ground-breaking excavation in Turkey.

An excavation organised by

one of archaeology's most notorious figures,

a hugely wealthy German entrepreneur.

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

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

One of the men who best embodied

the buccaneering spirit of the early treasure-hunters,

as well as this new rigorous scientific methodology,

was Heinrich Schliemann, a German business tycoon.

And here is a painting of him and his wife.

Schliemann used his fortune to follow his dream,

one of the most elusive prizes in archaeology,

the ancient city of Troy.

Today, Schliemann's discovery

is one of the most visited ancient sites in the world

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

The attraction even has a trademark Trojan horse.

140 years ago, though, most right-thinking academics

thought Troy was no more than fiction a myth.

Schliemann, with the romantic zeal of an amateur,

thought that they were wrong.

In 1871, when Schliemann first arrived here,

there were few surface clues to guide him.

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

He was the first archaeologist to dig test pits,

and he used a new technique pioneered by geologists

called stratigraphy.

He had to dig a series of trenches,

and the first one,

you can see down here.

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

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

and Schliemann immediately recognised

that this was Graeco-Roman,

and that if he wanted to find Homeric Troy,

then he needed to dig much deeper.

Schliemann employed hundreds of men,

using his considerable wealth to excavate on a massive scale.

And only stopping when he reached bedrock.

He was working on a wild hunch,

that there really was a factual basis

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

Now, Schliemann, as he dug down,

did try and take a scientific approach

and analyse what he had found.

When he reached this level, Troy II,

the second earliest settlement on the site of Troy,

he thought that he had hit pay dirt.

And the reason for that was because he found this,

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

And he knew from reading Homer's Iliad

that Troy had been burnt to the ground.

Schliemann had proved that Troy was real,

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

to an even earlier settlement.

In digging through a mound and finding an ancient city,

Schliemann had opened up the possibility

of excavating all the other thousands of mounds

that existed across the Near East.

Think about it for a moment.

In the search for the beginnings of civilisation,

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

but could start excavating anytime, anywhere.

Schliemann was pioneering a new scientific approach,

but he was still fascinated

by something that had always drawn archaeologists treasure.

Schliemann wrote that while working on a trench roughly here,

he first discovered a copper and then a gold object.

Not trusting his workmen, he called an early lunch

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

before smuggling them away in his wife's shawl.

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

jewellery and other artefacts

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

hidden when the city fell to the Greeks.

Schliemann even took pictures of his wife

modelling the precious jewellery.

To the modern archaeologist,

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

is absolutely shocking.

These days, many archaeologists suspect that

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

that Schliemann actually added to it

from material that he found elsewhere.

Schliemann smuggled Priam's treasure out of Turkey

and was promptly banned from ever coming back.

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

Mycenae, in Greece,

this time hoping to discover a connection

between Troy and their epic Greek enemies.

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

the so-called Mask of Agamemnon,

and it far surpassed anything that he found in Troy.

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

and it is said that in celebration,

he romped round the tomb afterwards with his young wife.

It was another incredible discovery,

but Schliemann still faced a challenge

to convince the world that his two sites were connected.

What he did next

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

because like any good 19th-century German,

Schliemann believed in the power of science,

and particularly, the power of analytical chemistry.

Schliemann sent samples back to metal experts in Britain

for scientific testing.

Here at Goldsmiths' Hall in London, analytical chemists

still use similar techniques to test precious metals.

By studying his ancient gold,

Schliemann hoped that he would discover compositions

that matched metal from Mycenae

to metal he had previously found at Troy.

This is exactly the same sort of process

that Schliemann's artefacts would have been through,

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

The Science Museum in London

holds some of Schliemann's original samples,

together with the all-important results.

This was gold leaf,

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

And what the analysis seemed to show

was a link between this gold leaf from Mycenae

and gold leaf that Schliemann had found in Troy.

So through scientific analysis, Schliemann thought he had found

that all-important connection between Mycenae and Troy.

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

but in the late 19th century,

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

a move away from vague theorising

to solid scientific results.

Now, Schliemann might have been a treasure-hunter,

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

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

Heinrich Schliemann

established archaeology as a scientific discipline,

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

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

General Pitt Rivers was the quintessential Victorian gentleman.

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

and was both intelligent and eccentric.

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

Whilst abroad,

he'd assembled a very impressive ethnographical collection,

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

he was able to devote himself to his passion archaeology.

Fortunately for Pitt Rivers, his retirement had coincided with

an inheritance of almost royal proportions.

This, Cranborne Chase,

30,000 acres of rolling Wessex countryside.

The old soldier now had the time, the money,

and the perfect place to pursue his passion.

It had once been a royal deer park,

so it had been protected from modern building,

but it was still crammed full of ancient settlements.

It was an archaeologist's dream.

Cranborne Chase became the General's personal archaeological laboratory.

Each day, come rain or shine,

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

And this photograph says it all.

Here, you've got the big man himself,

sitting in his horse and carriage,

with all of his workmen assembled,

standing to attention around the trench.

It was said that, to keep the spirits up,

he sometimes had a brass band playing whilst they worked.

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

the tools aren't stowed away very carefully.

Shame on you, Pitt Rivers!

Over a century after he dug here,

evidence of his excavations

at Cranborne Chase still exists.

Pitt Rivers

literally left his mark right across Cranborne Chase,

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

that he put down on one of his many excavations.

Now, it's quite overgrown...

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

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

So this looks like a ditch around an ancient settlement.

Let's have a look up here.

Ah! There we go.

It looks like a gravestone.

"This Roman well...

"..five feet in diameter."

This stone tells us a lot about Pitt Rivers

in his attitude towards the ancient past.

Firstly, it tells you about his precision.

He wanted to mark down, with this expensive stone,

exactly where ancient monuments were,

where he'd found them.

It was important to him to give people precise information.

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

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

But Pitt Rivers was interested in the everyday life

of the people that lived on Cranborne Chase

hundreds, thousands of years before.

Over 17 years,

Pitt Rivers excavated sites all over Cranborne Chase,

uncovering everything from Bronze Age barrows

to Roman farmhouses and Saxon burials.

Each site meticulously documented.

Evidence of Pitt Rivers' ground-breaking approach

to archaeology can be found in Salisbury Museum.

'Adrian Green is a Pitt Rivers expert.'

With Schliemann and other earlier collectors,

often, what we find is

a rather imprecise way of recording what you've found

and a rather cavalier way of presenting it.

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

Yeah, absolutely.

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

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

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

He wanted to be able to demonstrate

exactly where the objects came from on his excavations.

He would number that pit

and actually say at what depth an object was found,

because if that object was used

for dating that particular feature or that particular site,

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

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

This is a marvellous example of

technical drawing, isn't it?

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

I think that's what it is.

Each object is numbered and carefully drawn,

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

I mean, it's extraordinarily detailed.

I'm just looking here, and you can see

where the illustrator has painted in

so that we can see corrosion.

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

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

Yeah, they are almost like works of art.

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

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

So what's this?

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

It does, doesn't it? Yeah!

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

which were basically a series of models

that were made of the archaeological sites that he excavated.

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

-Yes!

'Pitt Rivers' care, his attention to detail,

'is simply astonishing.'

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

You are indeed, yes.

It's the site to scale,

showing the locations of the features from one particular area.

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

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

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

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

and the depth at which they were found.

How useful to the modern archaeologist

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

I think they're invaluable,

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

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

You can see that through the publications.

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

so these are very useful to modern archaeologists.

In Pitt Rivers and his meticulous records,

we're seeing the very birth of modern archaeology.

And more than a hundred years later,

everything Pitt Rivers found is still carefully stored.

Not only pottery and coins, but something else

that many archaeologists of earlier times would have cast aside.

Human remains.

In the 19th century,

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

and they often used to put them to one side.

Unless, of course, you were Pitt Rivers.

We now know that these are incredibly useful artefacts,

because you can tell what people died of,

what diseases they had,

and sometimes, even what their religious beliefs were.

Now, one of the reasons why

we see Pitt Rivers as being such a visionary

was that he understood that in the future,

archaeologists might have new scientific techniques

that would allow them to extract new types of data

from artefacts like this.

Just 150 years separates the work of Alcubierre in Herculaneum

and Pitt Rivers.

During that time, archaeology had been transformed.

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

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

..the first academics.

And on top of all of that,

Schliemann and his belief in the use of scientific analysis.

But for me, as an archaeologist,

it seems that modern archaeology begins with Pitt Rivers.

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

he feels like a 20th-century archaeologist,

and many of the developments in that century,

I'm sure, would have thrilled him.

'Next time...

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

Well, that is absolutely extraordinary.

'..from civilisation and kings...

'..to the common man...'

What I really like about this

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

-Of everyday life, lived by everyday people.

-Yeah.

'..as science creates ever more powerful tools

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

Oh, what's that? Yes, yes!

Beautiful, beautiful, look!

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

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