The Power of the Past 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 have always been fascinated

by ancient remains and the stories they told.

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

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

Like the rest of our lives, archaeology has been subject

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

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

to provide objective truth

for what was once just conjecture and opinion.

I've been tracing the very history of archaeology itself

from its very beginnings in religion,

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

Now I'm going to enter the 20th century

and the beginning of the modern age of archaeology,

an age driven by a quest for scientific objectivity,

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

and the lure of powerful forces.

The new and sometimes extreme politics.

Just over 100 years ago, an amateur archaeologist from Sussex

made a surprise discovery that astounded the world.

In the 19th century, archaeology had come of age

with the first professors and professionals,

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

But there was still room for the gentleman amateur,

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

Dawson had already found an astounding range of artefacts

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

He had previously magicked up unknown examples

of Roman pottery, statues and dinosaurs,

and even an amazingly well-preserved ancient boat

but in 1912 he topped the lot.

Over several decades,

the claims of archaeology had taken leaps forward,

not only to discover the past but to explain it,

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

Now this knowledge was being used by modern empires,

all of whom wanted to be acknowledged as the birthplace

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

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

and Dawson was perfectly placed to take advantage.

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

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

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

Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries,

found the fossil skull of Piltdown Man.

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

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

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

Dawson's discovery thrilled the Establishment.

Britain, the greatest empire on earth,

had evidence that it was also the cradle of mankind.

This jawbone was found in 1912,

and it was quite surprising

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

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

It was quite an assemblage of finds.

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

but nevertheless they were put together into reconstructions

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

the Dawn Man of Dawson,

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

A big honour for Dawson, the country solicitor.

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

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

so he seemed to deserve that honour.

The only trouble was that none of it was true.

Every one of the finds had been forged.

The ape and human bones were indeed ape and human bones

that were modified, broken and artificially stained

to match the colour of the other fossils,

to match the colour of the gravels and apparently even painted

with Van Dyke brown oil paint

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

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

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

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

You know it's a warning to us

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

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

maybe it is too good to be true.

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

and died, feted for his ground-breaking work.

It wasn't until 1949 that the truth emerged,

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

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

the nitrogen content of the Piltdown skull.

Here is Mrs Jan Foster,

measuring the amount of nitrogen in very tiny samples.

Its chemical composition revealed Dawson's skull

to be little more than 1,000 years old.

So much for Eoanthropus Dawsoni,

and its discoverer's posthumous reputation.

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

You had the wonder of that initial discovery

and then you have ideology, in this case nationalism,

and then science working as the arbiter,

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

But there's more to it than that

because what Piltdown Man also shows is the fame and attention

that came with something so personal

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

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

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

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

archaeology its most iconic portrait from the ancient past.

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

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

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

An untouched burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings,

the tomb of Tutankhamun.

The discovery caused a sensation.

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

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

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

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

But that all changes on that fateful day,

4th November, when of course he made

his amazing discovery.

And there's just one sentence scrawled,

almost illegibly, across the page,

and it says "First steps of tomb found."

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

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

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

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

Carter and the dig's funder, Lord Carnarvon,

gave The Times newspaper exclusive rights

to the archaeological scoop of the century.

Immortalised in print, their legacy was assured.

Carter was very much a 20th century archaeologist.

He understood about the importance of the oxygen of publicity,

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

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

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

And you get the same sense of something having been rehearsed

when you look at Carter's second diary.

So much fuller and so much more poetic.

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

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

the interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one.

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

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

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

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

but a person...and not just anyone,

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

Today Tutankhamun is still an archaeological rock star.

And he turns up in some very unexpected places.

In Dorchester, a small museum has carefully recreated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

but the kind of life Tutankhamun once lived.

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

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

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

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

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

the everyday folk of the ancient world.

So much of archaeology, like history,

had been directed towards warriors and leaders.

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

What about our past, our ancestors?

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

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

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

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

That ideology was also shaping archaeology.

The quest was on to find the ancient working man,

but there was a problem.

While kings and emperors built monuments and lavish tombs,

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

seemed to have disappeared.

Sure, there were mysterious Neolithic remains,

stone circles, passage tombs, even earthworks.

But was it possible to see more?

Was it possible to touch the invisible world of the land

that had been tended generation after generation

for thousands of years?

In the 1920s, the answer was found

not by digging down, but by climbing up.

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

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

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

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

Crawford wrote that he thought that aerial photography would be

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

From the air, Britain's fields still bore traces

of our ancient working ancestors.

The homes and field boundaries of farmers

who had laboured on the land over countless generations.

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

He had strong Marxist sympathies.

Crawford believed that at some point in the distant past,

there had been a self-sufficient and classless society -

until capitalism had come along and mucked it up.

And he believed that in the faint traces that he found

in the Wessex countryside,

there were clues to that mysterious Utopia.

But was it possible to know

whether these farming communities really were classless, or not?

Crawford's method of looking down from the air

gave a tantalising glimpse of a lost world.

But it would take an Australian archaeologist,

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

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

He was notable for his love of fast cars,

pre-history and, especially, Marx.

He was rarely seen without a red tie.

And he was obsessed by an ancient settlement on Orkney

called Skara Brae.

Childe's first excavations in 1927

uncovered what Crawford had only dreamed of -

an almost perfectly preserved Neolithic community.

And we're going to go down there.

Most of his finds are now kept

in the archives of the National Museums of Scotland.

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

Here are some other objects from the many thousands

that were found at the site.

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

What do you reckon?

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

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

-Ah!

-Yeah?

If you imagine people are wearing very fine hide clothes -

they obviously didn't have buttons -

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

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

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

HE LAUGHS

But what they did was to make exquisite jewellery,

and lots of it. Loads and loads.

This was strung together in the museum,

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

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

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

was worn just by women or by men.

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

where he describes finding a whole string of beads.

As if the woman, when she was fleeing

from the sandstorm that engulfed the site,

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

Sometimes an object, they can feel quite impersonal.

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

-Yeah.

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

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

a great deal of effort to actually gather the materials

-and to make this.

-Yeah.

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

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

For Childe and his excavators, the lay out represented

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

Looking at the site as a whole,

he made the point that there was no single dwelling structure

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

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

as dwelling houses.

And if you look at his original version here,

he's colour coded it and so...

Very much this model of pastoralists where

everybody shared everything and nobody was better than anyone else.

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

Very, very heavily, yes.

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

-our Marxist - it's all in red.

-It's all in red!

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

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

This was the first time that anyone had really studied

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

Between the very Edwardian world of the country solicitor Dawson

and his desperate need to give Britain the missing link -

Piltdown Man - by any means necessary,

to Childe in the 1920s and '30s,

filling in another very different kind of missing link,

with the pure and natural social world of Neolithic communism,

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

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

and the Russian Revolution in 1917.

However much we might have reservations

about their motivations and methodologies,

Childe and Crawford had moved archaeology into a new era.

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

seemed far more like our own,

a little more about how we fitted into the picture.

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

..Childe's great political idol.

His tomb is something of a mecca

for left-leaning visitors from right across the world.

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

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

But Marx was by no means the only great thinker

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

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

and our relationship with it,

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

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

Albert Einstein, who with a group of scientists was leading

the technological revolution that would have such a massive impact

on archaeology in the 20th century.

Einstein represents the scientific revolution

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

carbon dating, chemical analysis

and laser mapping, to name just a few.

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

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

and fears amongst humankind

would also have a major impact on archaeology,

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

what people from the past actually thought and felt.

Freud represents our modern obsession with feelings and desires.

The idea that archaeology could see beyond the remains

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

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

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

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

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

you also can't ignore this man, unfortunately -

Adolf Hitler.

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

But, for the Nazis, it was a powerful tool

that could be used to promote a very particular ideology.

Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's right-hand man,

saw an opportunity in archaeology, that the past could prove

that the Germans were not only a superior race,

but the oldest and greatest.

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

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

He wanted to prove the Nazi message

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

Scandinavian blond hair and blue eyes

were the legacy of a pure Aryan people,

who supposedly represented the very foundations of all civilisation

and human culture.

Now, this is as barmy as it was dangerous,

but Himmler was sure that he could prove it.

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

Herman Wirth.

Wirth shared the same fascination with European pre-history

as Childe and Crawford,

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

In Scandinavia, Wirth went on the trail

of the ancient pure-blooded master race

that Himmler and Hitler desired.

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

So what have we got here?

Well, you see the rock carving

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

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

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

around 3,000 years ago.

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

of a great and previously mythical maritime civilisation.

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

were descended from the people from Atlantis

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

of the most advanced civilisation that humankind had ever known.

For the Nazis,

pinning their glorious past to the people of Atlantis gave them

the evolutionary edge that would secure a similarly glorious future.

Thankfully, it was a future that collapsed

just as quickly as Wirth's deluded theory.

As a modern archaeologist, I'm completely horrified

by the story of Himmler and Wirth.

Not just because of their odious philosophy,

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

There are many archaeologists who have pet theories

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

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

because if you want to get a big research grant,

you need a big story to go along with it.

Spin and communication would be one of the greatest developments

of archaeology in the late 20th century

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

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

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

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

In the second half of the 20th century,

by far the loudest of all was television,

the medium I'm using today.

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

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

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

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

As it happens, in ten days' time

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

as an illustration of Celtic art.

Cheltenham has been warned!

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

that I know of illustrations of the way in which

an emphatic moustache

can redeem a somewhat intractable countenance.

LAUGHTER

Mortimer Wheeler was a ground-breaking archaeologist,

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

Wheeler deserves his place in the annals of archaeology

just for his excavation work alone.

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

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

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

of equidistant and equal-sized trenches

with bolts running through them,

and this allowed him not only to accurately plot

where artefacts had been found, but at what depth,

which helped create a much more comprehensive system of dating.

But it's how Wheeler got people excited about archaeology

that's his biggest legacy,

turning him into one of the first TV celebrities.

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

He wanted to make the past relevant to the British public

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

Straight streets planned and paved to pattern,

equipped even with a Roman version of our zebra crossings.

And a standard of living so widespread

that no doubt on the very eve of destruction,

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

Mortimer Wheeler was always very clear

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

In other words, us.

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

Wheeler had moved archaeology ever further away

from just being the stories of kings and emperors.

Childe's Marxism had made him think about archaeology

in new, egalitarian, classless ways.

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

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

modern archaeologists still faced a problem.

It was still the case that it was kings and princes

who provided the faces of the past.

Their idealised forms preserved

on finely crafted death masks and grand statues.

Archaeologists by this time were finding out more and more

about the lives of ordinary people, from Neolithic farmers

to Roman soldiers, but there was still no face.

But that all changed here in Scandinavia in 1950.

It was here at Tollund Fen in Denmark

that two brothers digging for peat

found something that made them stop dead in their tracks -

the grisly remains of a body.

The local police were baffled,

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

If this was a murder scene,

it was from too long ago to catch the killer.

Today, the remains are preserved at Silkeborg Museum,

close to Tollund Fen.

This is Tollund Man,

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

Today, his body is displayed in replica,

but his head is absolutely real.

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

but I don't think anything quite prepares you

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

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

If this had been sculpted,

you'd almost accuse it of being too lifelike.

It's amazing.

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

I feel incredibly moved looking at it.

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

At any moment, he could wake up

and say, "Hey, where was I?"

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

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

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

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

that identikit picture of a northern barbarian.

And he sort of blows that out of the water,

because he is a rather skinny man

and with stubble.

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

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

The big question, though, was how he died.

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

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

And, in general, there are two theories.

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

for an offence that he'd made.

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

So I rather support the later one.

Somebody cut him down before the rigor mortis.

They closed his eyes, his mouth,

laid him to rest, like in a sleeping position,

and that shows a lot of care.

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

I don't think so.

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

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

One of the biggest questions still surrounds his death.

Was he buried almost naked, as his remains suggest,

part of a ritual sacrifice?

I always thought it was very peculiar that he was buried

with just a cap and a belt.

Why?

I mean, if he was offered to the gods,

it might be some special ritual.

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

of him having worn clothes.

Today, the museum is planning to microscopically examine

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

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

that goes directly into the computer.

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

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

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

-Yes, here right, OK?

-And could you move it on up?

-Up?

Yeah.

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

Oh, what's that? Look.

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

-What is that?

Make it sharp. Look.

We need to have it sharp.

Yes, yes, beautiful, beautiful. Look!

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

-Can you see that?

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

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

So this means that he was probably clothed

when he was buried in the peat bog?

This certainly indicates that he might have worn something.

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

Well, I am.

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

one of the big mysteries about Tollund Man.

Oh, that would be great.

Today, science is still advancing,

forcing us to rethink old finds.

This world of archaeology feels light years away

from Howard Carter and Tutankhamun, although no less thrilling.

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

In the old days, gentlemen amateurs would dig

and then they would discover,

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

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

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

and devise new tests.

Archaeology really is work in progress.

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

from speculation to science, from kings to ordinary men.

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

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

that would once again reframe how we saw the past.

It started with a very simple question -

what about ancient women?

In the 1970s, when I was a kid,

archaeology was still very much a male-dominated world.

There were female archaeologists, the most famous of which was

Kathleen Kenyon, who had dug with Sir Mortimer Wheeler.

But she was the only household name

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

Archaeology had been looked at

through many, many different types of prisms -

Socialism, Marxism, Freudism, and Nazism -

but there was another very, very obvious one

and it was staring us in the face everywhere.

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

Women's rights, women's studies, equality

and emancipation all put the capital F in feminism.

Women, come and join us!

THEY CHANT: We want equality, we want equality!

It was a movement that soon spread across the world.

Women were proclaiming their place in society

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

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

Now it was a female archaeologist here in the States

who was determined to shine a light on ancient women.

Her name was Marija Gimbutas and she argued that

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

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

Her archive in California contains records of hundreds of artefacts

unearthed from many digs in Europe.

Gimbutas believed that an ancient civilisation she called Old Europe

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

At its heart was a recurring goddess figure.

There's no doubting the emphasis on fertility

and femininity in these figurines.

This one is one of the bird-faced goddesses

and you can see her pendulous breasts there.

And here in this larger figurine,

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

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

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

of the people of Old Europe,

find out what really made them tick.

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

because she considered that, right across Old Europe,

people worshipped divinities associated with fertility.

And in their feminine, fertile forms, she saw evidence

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

Gimbutas was willing to take things one step further.

She was willing to formulate theories, not just in terms

of what archaeological evidence she did find,

but also what she didn't find.

On one of her digs in Old Europe,

she claimed there was an absence of weapons of war

and this she saw as a fundamental piece of evidence

for a peaceful epoch led by women -

that was until men had turned up with their weapons

and mucked everything up.

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

it was a message waiting to be heard

by the liberal academics of the time.

Half a century on,

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

But her willingness to ask such big new questions still,

for me, gives her a special place in history.

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

particularly feminist ideology, as a weapon

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

But I think that we need to laud Maria Gimbutas,

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

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

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

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

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

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

it's that archaeology could never be entirely free

of the modern social forces that influence our thinking.

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

and which answers you choose to listen to.

Take one very new scientific technique that could revolutionise

how we understand ancient societies - DNA.

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

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

DNA is the new big thing.

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

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

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

Now, think about it.

If we get the DNA of lots of different people,

then we have a potentially big story of inheritance,

of mass movements of people, of migration.

Well, perhaps.

Testing my own results, DNA expert Mark Thomas

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

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

You can usually say whether somebody has some African ancestry,

or some East Asian ancestry,

or some Native American ancestry, or something like that.

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

You're just 100% boring European.

Yours is very clearly found at high frequencies in Scandinavia.

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

where people are obsessed with themselves.

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

Can DNA answer the question they want answered?

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

You have a lot of ancestors.

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

So that kind of individualised view of ancestry

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

because there are so many of them.

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

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

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

Because what things like this do

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

And there is no one answer.

Right. That's absolutely true.

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

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

the tendency to cherry pick.

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

"I want the Viking war lord.

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

Despite all those efforts to connect with the common people,

it's only human nature to be aspirational.

Who wouldn't prefer to have Tutankhamun as an ancestor

than some anonymous Neolithic farmer?

As science continues to advance,

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

just as it has over the past 100 years.

But there will always be mysteries, debates and stories.

And as archaeologists, we need to balance what we know

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

Throughout this series, I've followed our human quest

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

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

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

will make of our world.

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

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

a very politically correct title for the local binmen.

We take everything that they want to get rid of.

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

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

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

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

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

very particular and very permanent geological layer on the Earth.

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

Armando, come through.

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

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

have shared the same geological epoch

that's lasted more than 10,000 years.

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

The amount of waste that we generate is huge.

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

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

they'll find traces of radioactive material, heavy metals

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

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

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

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

represents what's most important to human beings,

i.e. their thoughts and feelings.

But what it does represent and what it does possess

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

We call it waste but, in archaeological terms,

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

But what will the future make of it all?

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

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

You can be sure of one thing -

that however they interpret our world

will be shaped by the religion,

politics and social mores of their own time.

But I bet it won't stop them looking,

because one trait constant across time,

is our human curiosity about the past.

We might be grasping at fragments,

but those fragments are our beginnings,

the story of humankind, where we came from.

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

From Empress Helena of Constantinople

and her search for the relics of Christ.

Through the Renaissance

and the wonder of people like Pizzecoli,

who first recognised the value of monuments from the past.

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

John Leland, and his inventory of England.

And William Camden.

Oh, my word!

'And the first recorded image of Stonehenge,

'with some people even digging.'

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

by the first geologists - people like John Hutton.

And the discoveries of John Frere,

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

Then the great 19th-century discoveries

and the scale of finds in Egypt.

And the mysteries of civilisations that came before,

in the Middle East, and far beyond.

As intrepid archaeological explorers took on whole new continents.

Wow! This place is absolutely stupendous.

The application of scientific analysis to the ancient past

by the wealthy German archaeologist Schliemann in Troy and Mycenae.

And the rigorous methods of an even richer British counterpart,

Augustus Pitt Rivers.

Finally, the stunning discoveries of the 20th century -

of Tutankhamun.

And Tollund Man.

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

..from Dorset to Orkney

and the science that revealed them.

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

and it will keep going on into the future.

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

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