The Power of the Past Archaeology: A Secret History


The Power of the Past

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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 have always been fascinated

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by ancient remains and the stories they told.

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But over the past 100 years, the pace of archaeological discovery

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has changed, every bit as much as the world we live in.

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Like the rest of our lives, archaeology has been subject

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to incredible advances in science and technology, and has allowed us

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to see the past in ever more precise detail and has been used

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to provide objective truth

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for what was once just conjecture and opinion.

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I've been tracing the very history of archaeology itself

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from its very beginnings in religion,

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to the great discoveries of the 18th and 19th centuries.

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Now I'm going to enter the 20th century

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and the beginning of the modern age of archaeology,

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an age driven by a quest for scientific objectivity,

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but also by passions, the lust for fame and glory,

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and the lure of powerful forces.

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The new and sometimes extreme politics.

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Just over 100 years ago, an amateur archaeologist from Sussex

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made a surprise discovery that astounded the world.

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In the 19th century, archaeology had come of age

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with the first professors and professionals,

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opening up Egypt, the Middle East and the classical world.

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But there was still room for the gentleman amateur,

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and the most prolific of these was a country solicitor, Charles Dawson.

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Dawson had already found an astounding range of artefacts

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from the past, and had been dubbed the Wizard of Sussex.

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He had previously magicked up unknown examples

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of Roman pottery, statues and dinosaurs,

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and even an amazingly well-preserved ancient boat

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but in 1912 he topped the lot.

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Over several decades,

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the claims of archaeology had taken leaps forward,

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not only to discover the past but to explain it,

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the very roots of civilisation, empires and even humanity itself.

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Now this knowledge was being used by modern empires,

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all of whom wanted to be acknowledged as the birthplace

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of human culture, so the stakes had never been higher.

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Opportunity for personal fame ran hand in hand with national pride,

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and Dawson was perfectly placed to take advantage.

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His discovery - ancient fragments of human skull and an ape-like jaw.

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X marks the spot of the discovery, and the inscription reads,

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"Here in the old river gravel, Mr Charles Dawson FSA,

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Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries,

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found the fossil skull of Piltdown Man.

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In France they'd found traces of early man and in Germany,

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they'd found traces of even older Neanderthal man, and now here

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in Britain they had the earliest of all the so-called missing links.

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Dawson's discovery thrilled the Establishment.

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Britain, the greatest empire on earth,

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had evidence that it was also the cradle of mankind.

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This jawbone was found in 1912,

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and it was quite surprising

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because it was rather ape-like in its general shape,

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but the teeth had a flat wear, characteristic of human teeth.

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It was quite an assemblage of finds.

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They didn't fit together perfectly because they were broken,

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but nevertheless they were put together into reconstructions

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of a new kind of human which was known as Eoanthropus Dawsoni,

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the Dawn Man of Dawson,

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so named after Charles Dawson, who discovered most of the pieces.

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A big honour for Dawson, the country solicitor.

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Absolutely. For an amateur pre-historian, a great honour,

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but he had identified the site, he had found most of the pieces

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so he seemed to deserve that honour.

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The only trouble was that none of it was true.

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Every one of the finds had been forged.

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The ape and human bones were indeed ape and human bones

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that were modified, broken and artificially stained

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to match the colour of the other fossils,

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to match the colour of the gravels and apparently even painted

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with Van Dyke brown oil paint

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to make sure it's got that dark fossil colour.

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And in your view, was Dawson a fraudster or duped?

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I think Dawson has to be involved centrally in the whole thing

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because of course, you know, he's identified with all of the finds.

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You know it's a warning to us

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to be careful about our preconceived ideas, and letting them lead us on,

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and in a sense to beware that when something seems too good to be true,

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maybe it is too good to be true.

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Dawson was never found out. He lived on as the Wizard of Sussex

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and died, feted for his ground-breaking work.

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It wasn't until 1949 that the truth emerged,

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when new scientific tests revealed Piltdown Man to be a hoax.

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In the Natural History Museum, tests were carried out to estimate

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the nitrogen content of the Piltdown skull.

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Here is Mrs Jan Foster,

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measuring the amount of nitrogen in very tiny samples.

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Its chemical composition revealed Dawson's skull

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to be little more than 1,000 years old.

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So much for Eoanthropus Dawsoni,

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and its discoverer's posthumous reputation.

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For me, Piltdown Man is the perfect metaphor for the 20th century.

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You had the wonder of that initial discovery

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and then you have ideology, in this case nationalism,

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and then science working as the arbiter,

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the bestower of truth, or in this case with Piltdown Man, the fakery.

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But there's more to it than that

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because what Piltdown Man also shows is the fame and attention

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that came with something so personal

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and about how a face from the past connects us with our ancestors.

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The past held the promise of fame...and glory.

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And just a decade on from Piltdown Man, another face was found,

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and this time it was real, a discovery that would give

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archaeology its most iconic portrait from the ancient past.

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And I don't even need to say his name.

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In 1922, after a long campaign of fruitless digging in Egypt,

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archaeologist, Howard Carter, made the discovery of a lifetime.

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An untouched burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings,

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the tomb of Tutankhamun.

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The discovery caused a sensation.

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Many of Carter's personal belongings from the expedition are held here in Oxford.

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This is Carter's diary from 1922, the year of his famous discovery,

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and the first thing that struck me when I saw it is how empty it is.

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His style is laconic, sparse, just a few neat sentences.

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But that all changes on that fateful day,

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4th November, when of course he made

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his amazing discovery.

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And there's just one sentence scrawled,

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almost illegibly, across the page,

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and it says "First steps of tomb found."

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And the excitement of this rather correct man is almost...

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it's really palpable, just coming off the page at you.

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'What makes the diary so special is the way it documents a moment,

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'the biggest archaeological find of the 20th century.'

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Carter and the dig's funder, Lord Carnarvon,

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gave The Times newspaper exclusive rights

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to the archaeological scoop of the century.

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Immortalised in print, their legacy was assured.

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Carter was very much a 20th century archaeologist.

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He understood about the importance of the oxygen of publicity,

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the power of the sound bite, the power of the photo opportunity,

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and that really comes across when you look at this album of photographs from the excavation.

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And they're so mannered, they're so posed, so polished.

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And you get the same sense of something having been rehearsed

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when you look at Carter's second diary.

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So much fuller and so much more poetic.

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"It was some time before one could see the hot air escaping caused the candle to flicker.

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But as soon one's eyes became accustomed to the glimmer of light,

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the interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one.

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When Lord Carnarvon said to me "Can you see anything?",

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I replied to him, "Yes, it is wonderful".

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This is the most masterful piece of archaeological public relations ever.

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Carter hadn't found a pyramid, a statue or a monument,

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but a person...and not just anyone,

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but a boy king who had ruled Egypt nearly 3,000 years ago.

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Today Tutankhamun is still an archaeological rock star.

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And he turns up in some very unexpected places.

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In Dorchester, a small museum has carefully recreated

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Tutankhamun's tomb, just as Howard Carter found it.

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Even in replica, there's a real sense of wonder,

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a moment in time from the ancient past and the sheer human intimacy of it all.

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Obviously, it's pure theatre but it's rather wonderful theatre,

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a little piece of ancient Egypt in a Dorset market town.

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You still feel like you've stumbled upon buried treasure,

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and of course treasure's a great part of its allure.

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But this is also an intimate scene, with the dead Pharaoh being buried with all the accoutrements

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that he needs for the afterlife, furniture, weapons and jewellery.

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And this is a great part of his fascination because it transforms Tutankhamun

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from being a distant, historical figure to being a human being.

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The intimacy of the tomb didn't prompt questions of civilisation or empire,

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but the kind of life Tutankhamun once lived.

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Collections of classical statues and the discovery of ancient civilisations were fine.

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But this was about coming face-to-face with a real person, a king from an ancient past.

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Tutankhamun has been the most famous face in archaeology for nearly 100 years.

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It wasn't long after his discovery before new questions were being asked.

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Not of the lives of kings, but of our more common ancestors,

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the everyday folk of the ancient world.

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So much of archaeology, like history,

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had been directed towards warriors and leaders.

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But that was only a tiny part of the puzzle, just one small corner of a vast jigsaw.

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What about our past, our ancestors?

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From the 1920s onwards, a new generation of socialist archaeologists,

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weren't just interested in digging up kings and emperors, but finding out about

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ordinary lives, not in Egypt and the Mediterranean, but here in Britain.

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Following World War I, new Marxist sentiments were changing politics and society.

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That ideology was also shaping archaeology.

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The quest was on to find the ancient working man,

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but there was a problem.

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While kings and emperors built monuments and lavish tombs,

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evidence of the ancient farmers who once worked Britain's fields

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seemed to have disappeared.

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Sure, there were mysterious Neolithic remains,

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stone circles, passage tombs, even earthworks.

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But was it possible to see more?

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Was it possible to touch the invisible world of the land

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that had been tended generation after generation

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for thousands of years?

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In the 1920s, the answer was found

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not by digging down, but by climbing up.

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World War I had brought in a new era of aerial photography

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and in the 1920s, an archaeologist named Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford

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realised that from the air, you couldn't just see modern features

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but ancient ones too - undulations, scars, shadows of the past.

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Crawford wrote that he thought that aerial photography would be

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as important for archaeology as the telescope had been for astronomy.

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From the air, Britain's fields still bore traces

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of our ancient working ancestors.

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The homes and field boundaries of farmers

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who had laboured on the land over countless generations.

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Crawford's passion for uncovering the lives of ordinary men fitted well with his political views.

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He had strong Marxist sympathies.

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Crawford believed that at some point in the distant past,

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there had been a self-sufficient and classless society -

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until capitalism had come along and mucked it up.

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And he believed that in the faint traces that he found

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in the Wessex countryside,

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there were clues to that mysterious Utopia.

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But was it possible to know

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whether these farming communities really were classless, or not?

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Crawford's method of looking down from the air

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gave a tantalising glimpse of a lost world.

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But it would take an Australian archaeologist,

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Vere Gordon Childe, to take these ideas onto a completely new level.

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Childe came here to Edinburgh to teach archaeology in the 1920s.

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He was notable for his love of fast cars,

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pre-history and, especially, Marx.

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He was rarely seen without a red tie.

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And he was obsessed by an ancient settlement on Orkney

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called Skara Brae.

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Childe's first excavations in 1927

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uncovered what Crawford had only dreamed of -

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an almost perfectly preserved Neolithic community.

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And we're going to go down there.

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Most of his finds are now kept

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in the archives of the National Museums of Scotland.

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They reveal everyday lives - not of kings, but of ordinary farmers.

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Here are some other objects from the many thousands

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that were found at the site.

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Where shall we start? OK. It's made of whalebone.

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What do you reckon?

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It's not some sort of sewing thing? No.

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-It's thought to be a clothes pin, so if you...

-Ah!

-Yeah?

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If you imagine people are wearing very fine hide clothes -

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they obviously didn't have buttons -

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and you would have a piece of cord, or thong, so that you would

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put it through there and then the other end, so that it didn't slip off

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and it's the great-great-great- granddaddy of the safety pin.

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HE LAUGHS

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But what they did was to make exquisite jewellery,

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and lots of it. Loads and loads.

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This was strung together in the museum,

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so we have no idea how long the necklaces were originally.

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But we know for sure that they were making the beads on site.

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One thing we don't know is whether jewellery like this

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was worn just by women or by men.

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And Childe thought it was women and there's a wonderful passage

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where he describes finding a whole string of beads.

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As if the woman, when she was fleeing

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from the sandstorm that engulfed the site,

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her necklace broke and it scattered beads as she scampered away.

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Sometimes an object, they can feel quite impersonal.

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-I know that's heresy to say, but you know what I mean.

-Yeah.

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But with this, you get a sense of... That somebody has worn this

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with a great deal of pride, because it will have taken

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a great deal of effort to actually gather the materials

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-and to make this.

-Yeah.

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And I can imagine somebody walking around with this around their neck.

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But Skara Brae didn't just turn up incredible artefacts.

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For Childe and his excavators, the lay out represented

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a proto-communist community - evidence of a classless Utopia.

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Looking at the site as a whole,

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he made the point that there was no single dwelling structure

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that was significantly bigger than any others. So you can see here,

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I mean, they're roughly the same size and roughly the same design

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as dwelling houses.

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And if you look at his original version here,

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he's colour coded it and so...

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Very much this model of pastoralists where

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everybody shared everything and nobody was better than anyone else.

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So he wore his political views on his archaeological sleeve, didn't he?

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Very, very heavily, yes.

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What I love about this is that, of course, you know,

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-our Marxist - it's all in red.

-It's all in red!

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Childe's views might have been as coloured by his ideology

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as his maps and his tie, but his work was a watershed in archaeology.

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This was the first time that anyone had really studied

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how ordinary people had actually lived together in the ancient past.

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Between the very Edwardian world of the country solicitor Dawson

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and his desperate need to give Britain the missing link -

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Piltdown Man - by any means necessary,

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to Childe in the 1920s and '30s,

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filling in another very different kind of missing link,

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with the pure and natural social world of Neolithic communism,

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it seems like the world had gone through a seismic shift.

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And, of course, it had with the outbreak of World War I in 1914

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and the Russian Revolution in 1917.

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However much we might have reservations

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about their motivations and methodologies,

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Childe and Crawford had moved archaeology into a new era.

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Unlike Tutankhamun, this world, despite its distance in time,

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seemed far more like our own,

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a little more about how we fitted into the picture.

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Highgate Cemetery in London is the last resting place of Karl Marx...

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..Childe's great political idol.

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His tomb is something of a mecca

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for left-leaning visitors from right across the world.

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And his ideas, as we know from the work of Crawford and Childe,

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would have a profound effect on archaeology in the 20th century.

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But Marx was by no means the only great thinker

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who was shaking up the world, and archaeology along with it.

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Almost at every level, some very big brains were re-evaluating the world

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and our relationship with it,

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not just in terms of the present and future, but also the past.

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Now, at that top level of thinkers you'd also put this man,

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Albert Einstein, who with a group of scientists was leading

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the technological revolution that would have such a massive impact

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on archaeology in the 20th century.

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Einstein represents the scientific revolution

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that has given us powerful tools to analyse the things we find -

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carbon dating, chemical analysis

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and laser mapping, to name just a few.

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And I'd also place up there this man, Sigmund Freud.

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His theory of a universal set of emotions, loves, desires

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and fears amongst humankind

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would also have a major impact on archaeology,

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as we'd start to set out to try and work out

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what people from the past actually thought and felt.

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Freud represents our modern obsession with feelings and desires.

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The idea that archaeology could see beyond the remains

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of ancient worlds into the very minds of our ancestors themselves.

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So these three men, these three thinkers - Marx, Einstein and Freud -

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in many respects would set the agenda for archaeology in the 20th century.

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Ordinary man, science and the workings of the inner mind.

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But, if you want to understand archaeology in the 20th century,

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you also can't ignore this man, unfortunately -

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Adolf Hitler.

0:26:010:26:02

We tend to think of archaeology as a form of discovery.

0:26:110:26:14

But, for the Nazis, it was a powerful tool

0:26:140:26:18

that could be used to promote a very particular ideology.

0:26:180:26:22

Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's right-hand man,

0:26:290:26:33

saw an opportunity in archaeology, that the past could prove

0:26:330:26:37

that the Germans were not only a superior race,

0:26:370:26:40

but the oldest and greatest.

0:26:400:26:43

Of course, to please his master, it had to be just the right past.

0:26:470:26:51

Himmler didn't want to go out and discover anything which didn't fit.

0:26:510:26:55

He wanted to prove the Nazi message

0:26:550:26:57

and one place where he was very keen on digging was here, in Sweden.

0:26:570:27:02

Scandinavian blond hair and blue eyes

0:27:040:27:07

were the legacy of a pure Aryan people,

0:27:070:27:11

who supposedly represented the very foundations of all civilisation

0:27:110:27:16

and human culture.

0:27:160:27:18

Now, this is as barmy as it was dangerous,

0:27:210:27:23

but Himmler was sure that he could prove it.

0:27:230:27:26

To do that, he enlisted the help of a German archaeologist,

0:27:260:27:29

Herman Wirth.

0:27:290:27:31

Wirth shared the same fascination with European pre-history

0:27:310:27:35

as Childe and Crawford,

0:27:350:27:36

but, politically, he was on a totally different page.

0:27:360:27:40

In Scandinavia, Wirth went on the trail

0:27:500:27:53

of the ancient pure-blooded master race

0:27:530:27:55

that Himmler and Hitler desired.

0:27:550:27:59

So you can see everywhere here is full of rock carvings.

0:27:590:28:03

So what have we got here?

0:28:030:28:05

Well, you see the rock carving

0:28:050:28:08

and in the centre of the rock carving, there is a big figure

0:28:080:28:14

with a spear, and he regarded him as a god.

0:28:140:28:18

Today, we believe these carvings were made by Bronze Age people

0:28:230:28:28

around 3,000 years ago.

0:28:280:28:30

But back in the 1930s, Wirth took them as proof

0:28:300:28:34

of a great and previously mythical maritime civilisation.

0:28:340:28:39

In a bizarre piece of thinking, he decided that the Aryan race

0:28:400:28:45

were descended from the people from Atlantis

0:28:450:28:48

and what this meant was that Nazi Germany was the direct descendant

0:28:480:28:53

of the most advanced civilisation that humankind had ever known.

0:28:530:28:56

For the Nazis,

0:28:580:29:00

pinning their glorious past to the people of Atlantis gave them

0:29:000:29:04

the evolutionary edge that would secure a similarly glorious future.

0:29:040:29:09

Thankfully, it was a future that collapsed

0:29:120:29:16

just as quickly as Wirth's deluded theory.

0:29:160:29:20

As a modern archaeologist, I'm completely horrified

0:29:260:29:29

by the story of Himmler and Wirth.

0:29:290:29:32

Not just because of their odious philosophy,

0:29:320:29:35

but also because we're all a bit tainted by what they did.

0:29:350:29:38

There are many archaeologists who have pet theories

0:29:380:29:42

that they'd love to prove by digging up a piece of actual physical evidence.

0:29:420:29:47

And then there's the spin. Well, we're all at it,

0:29:470:29:50

because if you want to get a big research grant,

0:29:500:29:53

you need a big story to go along with it.

0:29:530:29:56

Spin and communication would be one of the greatest developments

0:29:560:29:59

of archaeology in the late 20th century

0:29:590:30:04

and they would go on to redefine our relationship with the past.

0:30:040:30:08

The modern world became all about getting your message out there.

0:30:150:30:19

In the years after the war, the speed of communication began to gather pace

0:30:190:30:24

and there were now many new ways to get that message heard.

0:30:240:30:28

In the second half of the 20th century,

0:30:330:30:36

by far the loudest of all was television,

0:30:360:30:38

the medium I'm using today.

0:30:380:30:40

In post-war Britain, television took comedians and singers off the stage

0:30:400:30:45

and put them on the screen, turning them into household names.

0:30:450:30:48

And that's exactly what happened to an unlikely, bewhiskered academic

0:30:480:30:52

named Sir Mortimer Wheeler - the first public face of archaeology.

0:30:520:30:57

As it happens, in ten days' time

0:30:590:31:01

I am going to show a slide in the city of Cheltenham

0:31:010:31:05

as an illustration of Celtic art.

0:31:050:31:07

Cheltenham has been warned!

0:31:070:31:09

And the other thing is this. This is one of the two best examples

0:31:090:31:13

that I know of illustrations of the way in which

0:31:130:31:16

an emphatic moustache

0:31:160:31:18

can redeem a somewhat intractable countenance.

0:31:180:31:21

LAUGHTER

0:31:210:31:22

Mortimer Wheeler was a ground-breaking archaeologist,

0:31:240:31:28

noted for huge digs in Roman St Albans and Iron Age Dorset.

0:31:280:31:32

Wheeler deserves his place in the annals of archaeology

0:31:380:31:42

just for his excavation work alone.

0:31:420:31:44

It was here, while digging the East Gate at Maiden Castle,

0:31:440:31:47

that he helped develop a system that would become known as the Wheeler system.

0:31:470:31:52

What he did was that he split the site into a grid

0:31:520:31:55

of equidistant and equal-sized trenches

0:31:550:31:58

with bolts running through them,

0:31:580:32:00

and this allowed him not only to accurately plot

0:32:000:32:03

where artefacts had been found, but at what depth,

0:32:030:32:06

which helped create a much more comprehensive system of dating.

0:32:060:32:10

But it's how Wheeler got people excited about archaeology

0:32:120:32:16

that's his biggest legacy,

0:32:160:32:18

turning him into one of the first TV celebrities.

0:32:180:32:22

Wheeler's spin was a million miles away from the distorted viewpoint of the Nazis.

0:32:230:32:29

He wanted to make the past relevant to the British public

0:32:290:32:32

and to do that, he used plenty of modern analogies.

0:32:320:32:35

Straight streets planned and paved to pattern,

0:32:360:32:40

equipped even with a Roman version of our zebra crossings.

0:32:400:32:43

And a standard of living so widespread

0:32:450:32:48

that no doubt on the very eve of destruction,

0:32:480:32:51

Pompeiians were saying to one another, "We've never had it so good."

0:32:510:32:55

Mortimer Wheeler was always very clear

0:32:570:33:00

that he wasn't digging up things, but people.

0:33:000:33:03

In other words, us.

0:33:030:33:06

In encouraging people to try and put themselves in the shoes of their ancestors,

0:33:060:33:10

Wheeler had moved archaeology ever further away

0:33:100:33:13

from just being the stories of kings and emperors.

0:33:130:33:16

Childe's Marxism had made him think about archaeology

0:33:160:33:19

in new, egalitarian, classless ways.

0:33:190:33:22

But it was Mortimer Wheeler that brought archaeology to the masses.

0:33:220:33:26

For all their fascination with the working lives of ordinary men,

0:33:360:33:40

modern archaeologists still faced a problem.

0:33:400:33:44

It was still the case that it was kings and princes

0:33:460:33:49

who provided the faces of the past.

0:33:490:33:51

Their idealised forms preserved

0:33:510:33:54

on finely crafted death masks and grand statues.

0:33:540:33:58

Archaeologists by this time were finding out more and more

0:33:580:34:02

about the lives of ordinary people, from Neolithic farmers

0:34:020:34:05

to Roman soldiers, but there was still no face.

0:34:050:34:09

But that all changed here in Scandinavia in 1950.

0:34:120:34:16

It was here at Tollund Fen in Denmark

0:34:180:34:20

that two brothers digging for peat

0:34:200:34:23

found something that made them stop dead in their tracks -

0:34:230:34:26

the grisly remains of a body.

0:34:260:34:28

The local police were baffled,

0:34:320:34:34

until it was pointed out that the wet peat was a perfect preservative.

0:34:340:34:38

If this was a murder scene,

0:34:400:34:42

it was from too long ago to catch the killer.

0:34:420:34:44

Today, the remains are preserved at Silkeborg Museum,

0:34:480:34:52

close to Tollund Fen.

0:34:520:34:53

This is Tollund Man,

0:35:030:35:06

an Iron Age farmer who died over 2,000 years ago.

0:35:060:35:10

Today, his body is displayed in replica,

0:35:130:35:16

but his head is absolutely real.

0:35:160:35:19

I've seen Tollund Man a lot in books and lectures

0:35:230:35:26

but I don't think anything quite prepares you

0:35:260:35:29

for seeing him - and can I say this? - in the flesh.

0:35:290:35:32

It's such a lived-in face. Such a lived-in face.

0:35:400:35:44

If this had been sculpted,

0:35:450:35:47

you'd almost accuse it of being too lifelike.

0:35:470:35:51

It's amazing.

0:35:520:35:54

He really does look like he's asleep on a bed of peat.

0:35:540:35:59

I feel incredibly moved looking at it.

0:35:590:36:01

Yes, yes. He looks as if he could...

0:36:010:36:03

At any moment, he could wake up

0:36:030:36:05

and say, "Hey, where was I?"

0:36:050:36:07

Obviously, I'm a Roman archaeologist more than anything else

0:36:090:36:12

and when I'm thinking about the people who lived up in this area,

0:36:120:36:15

in the time which I study, I think of big, great, hairy barbarians.

0:36:150:36:21

I very much have the sort of Roman stereotype in my mind -

0:36:210:36:24

that identikit picture of a northern barbarian.

0:36:240:36:29

And he sort of blows that out of the water,

0:36:290:36:31

because he is a rather skinny man

0:36:310:36:34

and with stubble.

0:36:340:36:36

Tollund Man brought us face to face with the common man for the first time.

0:36:390:36:44

Not a king or a warrior, but someone who was recognisably one of us.

0:36:460:36:52

The big question, though, was how he died.

0:36:530:36:56

An autopsy showed that he was hanged by his neck in this rope.

0:36:570:37:03

But the interesting thing is, of course, why was he hanged?

0:37:030:37:07

And, in general, there are two theories.

0:37:070:37:11

The one is that he was a criminal and he was punished

0:37:110:37:15

for an offence that he'd made.

0:37:150:37:17

The other one is that he was an offer for the gods.

0:37:170:37:21

So I rather support the later one.

0:37:210:37:23

Somebody cut him down before the rigor mortis.

0:37:230:37:28

They closed his eyes, his mouth,

0:37:280:37:30

laid him to rest, like in a sleeping position,

0:37:300:37:34

and that shows a lot of care.

0:37:340:37:37

Would you do that with a criminal that you would kill for his offence?

0:37:370:37:40

I don't think so.

0:37:400:37:42

Since his discovery 60 years ago, Tollund Man has been subjected

0:37:440:37:48

to all manner of scientific tests, but there are still mysteries.

0:37:480:37:53

One of the biggest questions still surrounds his death.

0:37:550:37:59

Was he buried almost naked, as his remains suggest,

0:38:000:38:04

part of a ritual sacrifice?

0:38:040:38:05

I always thought it was very peculiar that he was buried

0:38:100:38:14

with just a cap and a belt.

0:38:140:38:18

Why?

0:38:180:38:19

I mean, if he was offered to the gods,

0:38:190:38:22

it might be some special ritual.

0:38:220:38:24

But I would like, then, to rule out all possibilities

0:38:240:38:28

of him having worn clothes.

0:38:280:38:30

Today, the museum is planning to microscopically examine

0:38:310:38:35

Tollund Man's torso for clues and I've been invited to watch.

0:38:350:38:40

What we have here, that's basically a handheld microscope

0:38:410:38:45

that goes directly into the computer.

0:38:450:38:48

If you start here and then move up, then we can see.

0:38:480:38:52

Oh yes, look here. This is, this is a hair.

0:38:540:38:58

-Yeah, I can see it. That's amazing.

-Yes, here right, OK?

0:38:580:39:01

-And could you move it on up?

-Up?

0:39:030:39:06

Yeah.

0:39:060:39:08

Yeah, there, let me see that. Could you move on?

0:39:080:39:12

Oh, what's that? Look.

0:39:130:39:16

-Stop, stop, stop. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

-What is that?

0:39:160:39:18

Make it sharp. Look.

0:39:180:39:20

We need to have it sharp.

0:39:220:39:24

Yes, yes, beautiful, beautiful. Look!

0:39:250:39:27

This is... That's our smoking gun.

0:39:290:39:32

-Can you see that?

-Wow, that's a piece of fibre, isn't it?

0:39:320:39:35

It is a piece of fibre, yes. Yes, yes.

0:39:350:39:38

So this means that he was probably clothed

0:39:380:39:40

when he was buried in the peat bog?

0:39:400:39:43

This certainly indicates that he might have worn something.

0:39:430:39:47

So this is very interesting news and you're the first to see it.

0:39:470:39:50

Well, I am.

0:39:500:39:52

That's incredibly exciting. So you might be helping to solve

0:39:520:39:56

one of the big mysteries about Tollund Man.

0:39:560:39:58

Oh, that would be great.

0:39:580:39:59

Today, science is still advancing,

0:40:070:40:10

forcing us to rethink old finds.

0:40:100:40:13

This world of archaeology feels light years away

0:40:130:40:16

from Howard Carter and Tutankhamun, although no less thrilling.

0:40:160:40:22

Carter could only have dreamt of getting that kind of detailed archaeological analysis.

0:40:220:40:29

In the old days, gentlemen amateurs would dig

0:40:290:40:32

and then they would discover,

0:40:320:40:34

but now that's just the start of the process.

0:40:340:40:37

We can think up new questions and as we think these questions up,

0:40:370:40:40

and new problems, we can go back to the same material time and again

0:40:400:40:44

and devise new tests.

0:40:440:40:47

Archaeology really is work in progress.

0:40:470:40:50

In less than a century, archaeology had been through some extraordinary changes -

0:40:570:41:02

from speculation to science, from kings to ordinary men.

0:41:020:41:07

But the 20th century still had some surprises in store.

0:41:230:41:27

Here in America, one archaeologist would come up with a radical theory

0:41:300:41:35

that would once again reframe how we saw the past.

0:41:350:41:39

It started with a very simple question -

0:41:440:41:47

what about ancient women?

0:41:470:41:49

In the 1970s, when I was a kid,

0:41:520:41:54

archaeology was still very much a male-dominated world.

0:41:540:41:57

There were female archaeologists, the most famous of which was

0:41:570:42:00

Kathleen Kenyon, who had dug with Sir Mortimer Wheeler.

0:42:000:42:04

But she was the only household name

0:42:040:42:07

and she was very much a woman working in a man's world.

0:42:070:42:10

Archaeology had been looked at

0:42:100:42:12

through many, many different types of prisms -

0:42:120:42:14

Socialism, Marxism, Freudism, and Nazism -

0:42:140:42:17

but there was another very, very obvious one

0:42:170:42:20

and it was staring us in the face everywhere.

0:42:200:42:24

In the 1960s and '70s, America was at the forefront of a whole new revolution.

0:42:300:42:35

Women's rights, women's studies, equality

0:42:350:42:38

and emancipation all put the capital F in feminism.

0:42:380:42:43

Women, come and join us!

0:42:440:42:46

THEY CHANT: We want equality, we want equality!

0:42:460:42:49

It was a movement that soon spread across the world.

0:42:500:42:53

Women were proclaiming their place in society

0:42:530:42:56

and that didn't just mean in the present, but also in the past.

0:42:560:43:02

Crawford and Childe had taken archaeology from kings to the common man.

0:43:040:43:08

Now it was a female archaeologist here in the States

0:43:100:43:13

who was determined to shine a light on ancient women.

0:43:130:43:17

Her name was Marija Gimbutas and she argued that

0:43:190:43:22

women in ancient societies were the driving forces in these cultures.

0:43:220:43:27

And this brought about a whole new line of intellectual thought.

0:43:270:43:30

Her archive in California contains records of hundreds of artefacts

0:43:320:43:37

unearthed from many digs in Europe.

0:43:370:43:41

Gimbutas believed that an ancient civilisation she called Old Europe

0:43:430:43:49

was once firmly centred not upon strong men, but wise women.

0:43:490:43:54

At its heart was a recurring goddess figure.

0:43:560:43:58

There's no doubting the emphasis on fertility

0:44:000:44:03

and femininity in these figurines.

0:44:030:44:05

This one is one of the bird-faced goddesses

0:44:050:44:08

and you can see her pendulous breasts there.

0:44:080:44:10

And here in this larger figurine,

0:44:120:44:13

you can see the triangle of the pubis and the broad hips.

0:44:130:44:19

Gimbutas didn't use scientific data to further her theories.

0:44:210:44:26

Instead, what she wanted to do was get inside the heads

0:44:260:44:28

of the people of Old Europe,

0:44:280:44:30

find out what really made them tick.

0:44:300:44:32

For her, the key piece of evidence were these goddess figurines,

0:44:320:44:36

because she considered that, right across Old Europe,

0:44:360:44:39

people worshipped divinities associated with fertility.

0:44:390:44:44

And in their feminine, fertile forms, she saw evidence

0:44:440:44:48

of a far more peaceful age when the sexes had been far more equal.

0:44:480:44:53

Gimbutas was willing to take things one step further.

0:45:030:45:06

She was willing to formulate theories, not just in terms

0:45:060:45:10

of what archaeological evidence she did find,

0:45:100:45:12

but also what she didn't find.

0:45:120:45:14

On one of her digs in Old Europe,

0:45:140:45:16

she claimed there was an absence of weapons of war

0:45:160:45:19

and this she saw as a fundamental piece of evidence

0:45:190:45:22

for a peaceful epoch led by women -

0:45:220:45:26

that was until men had turned up with their weapons

0:45:260:45:29

and mucked everything up.

0:45:290:45:31

In a country shaken by the horrors of the Vietnam war,

0:45:360:45:39

it was a message waiting to be heard

0:45:390:45:42

by the liberal academics of the time.

0:45:420:45:44

Half a century on,

0:45:560:45:58

and many of Gimbutas's bold assertions have been found wanting.

0:45:580:46:02

But her willingness to ask such big new questions still,

0:46:040:46:09

for me, gives her a special place in history.

0:46:090:46:12

One of the accusations which is placed against her is that she used ideology,

0:46:130:46:17

particularly feminist ideology, as a weapon

0:46:170:46:19

and didn't pay sufficient attention to the actual archaeological material.

0:46:190:46:25

But I think that we need to laud Maria Gimbutas,

0:46:250:46:28

because she delivered a much-needed kick up the backside to archaeology.

0:46:280:46:33

An archaeology which had, for too long, ignored women,

0:46:330:46:37

who, after all, made up 50% of the population,

0:46:370:46:40

not only of the modern but of the ancient world, too.

0:46:400:46:42

For that, I think we owe her an enormous debt of gratitude.

0:46:420:46:47

If there's one thing the 20th century has taught us,

0:46:560:46:59

it's that archaeology could never be entirely free

0:46:590:47:02

of the modern social forces that influence our thinking.

0:47:020:47:06

And while science promises objective truths, it all depends on what questions you ask

0:47:090:47:16

and which answers you choose to listen to.

0:47:160:47:19

Take one very new scientific technique that could revolutionise

0:47:200:47:25

how we understand ancient societies - DNA.

0:47:250:47:29

Excuse me. This is going to be a bit disgusting,

0:47:320:47:34

because I'm now going to spit into this tube.

0:47:340:47:36

DNA is the new big thing.

0:47:410:47:43

Now, it's very controversial, but also very, very interesting.

0:47:430:47:48

Because what I have here is my own personal genetic code.

0:47:480:47:51

And not just that, also the genetic codes of my ancestors.

0:47:510:47:56

Now, think about it.

0:47:560:47:58

If we get the DNA of lots of different people,

0:47:580:48:01

then we have a potentially big story of inheritance,

0:48:010:48:03

of mass movements of people, of migration.

0:48:030:48:07

Well, perhaps.

0:48:070:48:08

Testing my own results, DNA expert Mark Thomas

0:48:110:48:15

is aware that even science can be used to provide stories.

0:48:150:48:19

So what sort of lines of ancestry can we pick up?

0:48:200:48:23

You can usually say whether somebody has some African ancestry,

0:48:230:48:26

or some East Asian ancestry,

0:48:260:48:28

or some Native American ancestry, or something like that.

0:48:280:48:31

Unfortunately, you don't have any of those things.

0:48:310:48:33

You're just 100% boring European.

0:48:330:48:36

Yours is very clearly found at high frequencies in Scandinavia.

0:48:360:48:41

Do you think...? I mean, we live in a world

0:48:410:48:43

where people are obsessed with themselves.

0:48:430:48:45

When people ask the question, "Who am I," can these sort of tests...

0:48:450:48:50

Can DNA answer the question they want answered?

0:48:500:48:54

In terms of ancestry, you're from a lot of places.

0:48:540:48:57

You have a lot of ancestors.

0:48:570:48:59

The number of ancestors you have almost doubles every generation you go back in time.

0:48:590:49:04

So that kind of individualised view of ancestry

0:49:040:49:08

is kind of a perversion, really, of what our relationship to our ancestors is,

0:49:080:49:15

because there are so many of them.

0:49:150:49:17

One of the other interesting things about this is that we've seen this time and again,

0:49:170:49:22

when we look at the way archaeology is used to science and technology,

0:49:220:49:26

is that what we do is that, instead of giving us precise answers, all we've done is we've broadened it.

0:49:260:49:31

Because what things like this do

0:49:310:49:33

is they give us more and more information and raw data and more possibilities.

0:49:330:49:38

And there is no one answer.

0:49:380:49:42

Right. That's absolutely true.

0:49:420:49:46

The problem is, if you present people with many, many histories,

0:49:460:49:50

all of which are probably true, then there's always going to be

0:49:500:49:54

the tendency to cherry pick.

0:49:540:49:56

So I'd say, "Well, OK, I want that one,

0:49:560:49:58

"I want the Viking war lord.

0:49:580:50:00

"I want the sexy ancestor and that's primarily where I come from."

0:50:000:50:04

Despite all those efforts to connect with the common people,

0:50:110:50:15

it's only human nature to be aspirational.

0:50:150:50:18

Who wouldn't prefer to have Tutankhamun as an ancestor

0:50:190:50:22

than some anonymous Neolithic farmer?

0:50:220:50:25

As science continues to advance,

0:50:390:50:41

our understanding of the past will continue to increase in leaps and bounds,

0:50:410:50:47

just as it has over the past 100 years.

0:50:470:50:50

But there will always be mysteries, debates and stories.

0:50:510:50:56

And as archaeologists, we need to balance what we know

0:51:010:51:05

with what we believe, and also a little bit of what we imagine.

0:51:050:51:09

Throughout this series, I've followed our human quest

0:51:120:51:16

over the last 2,000 years to discover and understand our ancient past.

0:51:160:51:22

It's also made me think about us and our own modern civilisations.

0:51:240:51:30

It's made me wonder about what the archaeologists of the future

0:51:310:51:35

will make of our world.

0:51:350:51:37

Come on, we haven't got all day. Come on!

0:51:420:51:46

6am and I'm out with the LA Bureau of Sanitation -

0:51:490:51:54

a very politically correct title for the local binmen.

0:51:540:52:00

We take everything that they want to get rid of.

0:52:000:52:02

The only thing we don't take in the black container will be dead animals.

0:52:020:52:06

Over the last 100 years, mankind has begun to change the planet for ever,

0:52:090:52:16

and it's all down to the materials we make and leave behind.

0:52:160:52:20

For the first time, we're leaving an indelible stain on the ground.

0:52:240:52:28

Right now, it seems that we're leaving a very new,

0:52:310:52:34

very particular and very permanent geological layer on the Earth.

0:52:340:52:40

And it's all about this stuff - the waste that we leave behind.

0:52:400:52:47

Armando, come through.

0:52:470:52:49

Once we pick up this side, we go to the landfill.

0:52:500:52:53

All our civilisations of the past, from Mesolithic man to Mozart,

0:52:550:53:00

have shared the same geological epoch

0:53:000:53:02

that's lasted more than 10,000 years.

0:53:020:53:06

But now, there's a new one, dubbed the Anthropocene.

0:53:060:53:10

The amount of waste that we generate is huge.

0:53:160:53:19

But it's not just the amount - it's also what it consists of.

0:53:190:53:23

When in thousands of years' time archaeologists dig down to discover our world,

0:53:230:53:27

they'll find traces of radioactive material, heavy metals

0:53:270:53:31

used for cars and electronics, and plenty of robust plastics.

0:53:310:53:36

I'm not trying to make some environmental plea here.

0:53:460:53:48

I merely want to explain what the boundaries of archaeology are.

0:53:480:53:52

Now, no-one would claim that all the rubbish that lies around me here

0:53:520:53:57

represents what's most important to human beings,

0:53:570:54:00

i.e. their thoughts and feelings.

0:54:000:54:03

But what it does represent and what it does possess

0:54:030:54:06

is a whole series of tiny clues to the way that we live.

0:54:060:54:09

We call it waste but, in archaeological terms,

0:54:110:54:15

this is a richer record than any previous age has left behind.

0:54:150:54:20

But what will the future make of it all?

0:54:200:54:22

How much will they get right about us from what they find?

0:54:260:54:29

And how much will they make up stories to fill in the gaps?

0:54:290:54:34

You can be sure of one thing -

0:54:340:54:36

that however they interpret our world

0:54:360:54:39

will be shaped by the religion,

0:54:390:54:41

politics and social mores of their own time.

0:54:410:54:44

But I bet it won't stop them looking,

0:54:450:54:48

because one trait constant across time,

0:54:480:54:51

is our human curiosity about the past.

0:54:510:54:54

We might be grasping at fragments,

0:54:590:55:01

but those fragments are our beginnings,

0:55:010:55:03

the story of humankind, where we came from.

0:55:030:55:07

It's been an extraordinary quest, over 2,000 years.

0:55:110:55:15

From Empress Helena of Constantinople

0:55:180:55:20

and her search for the relics of Christ.

0:55:200:55:22

Through the Renaissance

0:55:240:55:26

and the wonder of people like Pizzecoli,

0:55:260:55:28

who first recognised the value of monuments from the past.

0:55:280:55:32

In Britain, with the work of Henry VIII's librarian,

0:55:370:55:40

John Leland, and his inventory of England.

0:55:400:55:43

And William Camden.

0:55:480:55:49

Oh, my word!

0:55:510:55:52

'And the first recorded image of Stonehenge,

0:55:520:55:56

'with some people even digging.'

0:55:560:55:58

The realisation of the very depths of time in the 18th century

0:55:590:56:03

by the first geologists - people like John Hutton.

0:56:030:56:07

And the discoveries of John Frere,

0:56:070:56:10

who began to open up the mysteries of pre-history.

0:56:100:56:14

Then the great 19th-century discoveries

0:56:160:56:19

and the scale of finds in Egypt.

0:56:190:56:22

And the mysteries of civilisations that came before,

0:56:240:56:27

in the Middle East, and far beyond.

0:56:270:56:30

As intrepid archaeological explorers took on whole new continents.

0:56:320:56:36

Wow! This place is absolutely stupendous.

0:56:400:56:44

The application of scientific analysis to the ancient past

0:56:450:56:49

by the wealthy German archaeologist Schliemann in Troy and Mycenae.

0:56:490:56:54

And the rigorous methods of an even richer British counterpart,

0:56:560:57:00

Augustus Pitt Rivers.

0:57:000:57:03

Finally, the stunning discoveries of the 20th century -

0:57:040:57:09

of Tutankhamun.

0:57:090:57:10

And Tollund Man.

0:57:130:57:14

And the secrets that lay in the ground itself...

0:57:160:57:18

..from Dorset to Orkney

0:57:200:57:25

and the science that revealed them.

0:57:250:57:28

It's a journey that continues on in my own lifetime

0:57:310:57:34

and it will keep going on into the future.

0:57:340:57:38

For my money I can't think of a greater or nobler quest to pursue.

0:57:400:57:46

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

0:58:100:58:13

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