Age Of Bronze - Ep: 4 | The World of Stonehenge | BBC Documentary

[Music] this is the story of home britain came to be of her alana and its people were forged over thousands of years of ancient history this Britain is a strange and alien world a world that contains the hidden story of our distant prehistoric past [Music] we began as hunters we followed the haves across Europe before Britain was an island it's fantastic after fourteen thousand years to get a glimpse of the way at least one individual was thinking [Music] then the first farmers came building monumental tombs to their ancestors nothing like this had ever been seen before in Britain before coming to the heavens and creating some of the greatest monuments of the ancient world oh no the Java continues with the next chapter in our epic story that is magic an age of bronze and a whole new way of living the rise of individuals controlling trade and wealth [Music] the beginnings of a practical domestic almost modern Britain [Music] [Applause] [Music] Breton 2,500 years BC this is the height of the Stone Age people live by farming the land growing crops keeping animals those little evidence of fixed villages permanent settlement instead the seeker fresh grazing land and fresh soil season-by-season everything they have clothes tools food is garlic from the world around them one material lay at the very heart of their world as it had done for thousands of years Flint and it was needed in vast quantities look at this it's a moonscape of deep hollows and depressions there are literally hundreds of them these are the product of ancient farming or ancient settlements all of this was created by ancient industry each one of these hollows is the remnant of an ancient mine shaft and there are four hundred and thirty three of them some of the main shafts have been excavated so it's possible to enter the very ground that was worked by our prehistoric ancestors spent deeper than a thought each shaft leads to a network of tunnels hacked from the chalk bedrock with basic tools this is red deer antler hunted or collected in the forest above and then it's been used just as the shape suggests as I pick you can see just a grunt the conditions are then here and some of them the tunnels are so small it's believed that as well as main working down here there must have been children because some of the spaces are just too small to believe it was grown-ups know yes what all the effort is in aid of this black stuff here this is Flint they would have phoned a complete floor like a black floor of Flint as if a black liquid had flowed in and solidified it's like glass or treacle toffee in any case this is what this mine was all about [Music] Flint the lifeblood of the Stone Age if you're going to fail a tree build a house shape would make a dugout canoe you needed an axe like this but Britain and its ancient dependence on Flint was about to change [Music] in 2500 BC are radical unimaginable new technology was about to hit Britain metal we take it for granted it's quite literally the scaffolding that holds up the modern world so much of what we have what we depend on is made of metal but four and a half thousand years ago no one in Britain had ever even seen it yet it was about to catapult us out of a stone age and into a whole new chapter the arrival of metal would bring us social as well as a technological revolution the beginning of community life and the world that begins to look increasingly like our own all of this change in an era that we call the Bronze Age [Music] the story of HO metal first came to britain begins much further west in the hills of Southwest Ireland because the rocks are in this stretch of water in County Kerry are rich in copper ore and it was copper from here that was used to make the first metal objects back home in Britain archaeologist Billy O'Brien has spent decades here discovering evidence of ancient copper workers look typical rock I'm seeing it's just less dark with a little white veins through it is that well that's what miners would call the country rock it's limestone with little pieces of calcite veining running truus but there's no copper minerals and that piece I'm afraid so when I think of corporate I'm thinking about green color should that big yeah you're right because absolutely the copper oxidizes on the surface so it becomes green and blue and it's bright colors like that you're looking for right look yeah that's got a lot of copper minerals you can see the green staining you can see the bright sparkly silver and gold of the copper sulfide minerals yeah where it is yeah you can see the green instantly and there's even there's even sparkling it's like glitter and it's the it's the glitter that's actually the copper it is declared become they called the copper minerals here against the limestone how on earth would you know what was there you know I mean took surely to the average person thousands a years ago I stood as a stone as I stored how does anyone realize there's a completely different material hidden in here we know that there was a history of Estonia's settlement in this area going back thousands of years and at some point they will notice that the limestone rocks on this part of the lake or streets with copper minerals and this knowledge they wouldn't have known what to make of it but at some point they came in contact with people from outside of Ireland who were metal prospectors and the tool would have come together and with that outside expertise they would have eventually started to mine here so it was a foreign expertise that I was acquired to trigger it all the very first copper mines were dug in the Balkans far to the south nearly 6,000 years ago by 3000 BC pockets of copper technology were appearing further west in northern Italy and along the Mediterranean coast [Music] but it wasn't until around 2500 BC that copper sped through northwest Europe and prospectors came looking for or further north still in Ireland and all of this was cut out by by human labor there's good scientific evidence from things like LED isotope analysis to indicate that the first copper from Ross Island came from this trench it's called blue hole mine and this is copper was was produced very early on and it circulated all over Ireland and then into Western Britain so when you find the earliest copper tools in Britain whatever you find them here the metal for them has come out of this hole well certainly the ones in Ireland and in Western Britain absolutely many of the ones in in places like Wales and Scotland some of the very earliest copper axes came out of this hole it's just extraordinary to be able to track a story like metalworking like copper all the way back to one hole in the ground it's like following a river right back - yep it's bring a source next to the mine workers would have begun to process the rock how do you know all of this how do you know that this is the process and it was done here we know that because of the tools we found in the Indus site the excavation of this war camp and the surrounding mine site produced thousands of these stone hammers you can see they've got grooves around the centre and that's because they were usually it handles put on them like this worked packed away and exactly the groove the purpose of the groove was to grip a handle like this so that you could use it with more force so they draw the most sophisticated tools and much more year much more sophisticated most sophisticated of all the secret of how to transform the rock into gleaming copper smelting copper or required cutting-edge technology bellows to create fire that was hotter than anything ever seen in Britain before I can see for the locals the new people who could create glowing metal from rock must have seemed like magicians that is magic Wow that's magic no what was that like for a thousand years ago like it's two actually turning green but you can see as well Howard we act straight away with the air as soon as it's out yeah you know imagine if someone had turned up in your village and said I'm gonna show you something yeah and then they go through all that process and then to see that to see that liquid leap in there and then turn into recognizable object ya know it's magic that's pure copper yeah so amazingly it's the raw materials in these hills and the technology that transformed into copper the are in many ways the foundations of our modern world the people who brought this technology also brought a new and very different culture that was to spread throughout Britain and transform society they made and used a distinctive kind of pottery this piece was actually phoned here before it was broken it was part of a vessel that looked a bit like this one we call these beakers and the people who made these used these and were often buried with them alongside them in their graves are called the beaker people around 2500 BC beaker people first arrived in Britain [Music] bringing the new metalworking skills and a whole new culture and we know that at least partly because of an early beaker man who is buried here on land between this school and that housing estate four and a half thousand years ago [Music] and here he is we've got beakers here real ones this time terrified at the prospect of even touching because these are some of the oldest the earliest beakers in Britain this fragile lovely as a beaker a classic no also in amongst this dazzling array of believed goods is metal but uh copper knives in here and this isn't just any metal look at this here's one of them it's copper knife it would have been enough I wouldn't handle maybe coming out to give you a grip on it and there's the cutting edge these are the oldest metal objects found so far in Britain and alongside the earliest copper I can't believe I'm about to touch this is the earliest gold this is the earliest gold jewellery been wrongly described previously as an earring but it's not it's a decoration for here you would put on the end of pleated here but a braid of here just for decoration look at that look at that how famous it feels as fragile as the foil on a Terry's chocolate orange and I feel as if with an uncontrolled nervous twitch I might crush it flood but look at it retained [Music] taking a tooth from the Amesbury archer scientists could discover queer this new metal worker had come from first time we've ever had a tooth that holds in our hands it's amazing be holding something that old from another human beings teeth contain traces of atomic elements strontium and oxygen and the pattern of these traces can reveal where someone's spent their childhood even after thousands of years absolutely overwhelming results it was absolutely amazing this guy didn't come from Brittany the Amesbury Archer wasn't just an early beaker man but one of the original pioneers born a thousand miles away in the Alps of Central Europe you just can't possibly think somebody walking all that that way I was amazed I was just totally nice and I was absolutely over the moon because he was different you know and you see so many individuals who were just like everybody else and then all of a sudden here's one guy who's just totally different after traveling a thousand miles the Amesbury Archer ended his days here in Wiltshire buried alongside the things that were important to him in life all of this so far makes him fascinating and compelling but as one last item in here that makes this individual crucial to our story it's this item here this is called a cushioned stool it's used for working and finishing metal-look areas seeing years of use because smooth as you would have used the smooth surface of this one to work to cold work metal and give it the finishing shape and the finishing touches so this individual this pioneer from Europe he didn't just own metal things he knew how to get metal how to make metal and how to work metal [Music] Stone Age Britain had reached its peak with the creation of massive cosmically aligned communal monuments [Music] even in death the ancestors share the world often buried or cremated in communal tombs but now just a few in commerce from Europe had brought very different ideas about how people fitted into society and the world around them the bigger people brought a whole new sense of self of individuality unlike most burials in the Stone Age the Amesbury Archer was laid to rest on his own he was also buried with possessions things that showed what he did who he was an acknowledgment of his status if you like for the bigger people all of this mattered but for British people in the Stone Age this was radical thinking metal was only one part of the new beaker culture but for all their individual skills and modern outlook the new metal workers had a problem copper might have looked good but it was so soft that it was barely better than Flint as a tool but the beaker people also knew about another even more astonishing metal the metal that was to open up a whole new age was unlocked from the rocks of the Cornish coast because to make it you needed to combine copper with ten bear with me apparently it's quite distinctive when you see it if you don't break an ankle on the way Luke the secret to all of this what those early metal workers were on the hunt for is in this ribbon of black and white rock it's very distinctive see it it's called cassiterite a rock that contains ten [Music] Britain had been a late comer to the Copper Age but the discovery of local Tim a much rarer metal than copper was to propel Britain to the very technological forefront of Europe and if you were very lucky you'd find something like this I wish you could feel it it looks like any ordinary pebble but trust me it's as heavy as a cannonball and when you extract the tin itself it's as beautiful a silver and this is an ingot of ten it's very lovely they say that if you bend it it crackles they call that the cry of ten but more importantly if you have copper and you add this you transform it into bronze they've even control the bellows speed it hold the perfect temperature for casting with just the right mixture of copper and tin metal workers could create an alloy that was hard enough to make useful tools and weapons okay anika bit low fine was it that's it well contents like amazing but blood better than blood okay that's good lift it up a little bit that's it right there best of all isn't it definitely the moment of truth old but it's amazing look at the color doll that you impress I'm very unbeatably deeply impressed I give up yeah even makes us a ring there's a very hard piece of runs just amazing crew liquid fire to a metal sword and a couple of minutes [Music] in the hands of master metalworkers bronze was leading britain into a whole new age not only technologically but socially as well look at these obviously lethal weapons but swords are quite elite development in the story of bronze in the story of metal if you're talking about early bronze then you have to look at axes these are some of the earliest bronze objects found so far in Britain these date from as early as 2200 years bc a carpenter would have coveted an item like this because it would enable to do a better faster job but bronze axis and about much more than the utility of the object they're about status and prestige no humble carpenter could possibly have dreamt of owning something so valuable in the early days of bronze much more than tools these are objects of desire there's a whole range of sizes styles low still early look at the size of that one that's what that was all about you're bigger is better it's showing off on this one which looks silvery your colour rather than the warm gold of bronze and that silvering has been achieved by flashing tin onto the surface of the bronze it doesn't make a better ax it just makes it what I catchin that's our shows in a whole new era because for the first time was a different way to get and to demonstrate wealth after the time of the priestly class we're status was conferred on people because of who they wear and what they knew no there's a different opportunity the bronze here has been brought together from many sources the copper from southwest Ireland the tin from Cornwall but these were found in the northeast of Scotland so the the materials are moving all over the country if you're someone who can control those trade routes if you can get your hands on this as it's moving through your territory and control it then you've got personal wealth and you've got the ability to demonstrate and to show the you are someone who matters no not everyone had to farm the land at least for a few of Britain's population of perhaps a quarter of a million people new opportunities were emerging specialist metal workers metal traders and in particular those who control the trade routes could become seriously rich this was a new self-made elite for whom the Stone Age must have seemed a quaint and distant memory [Music] in the Bronze Age it wasn't just the ancient sacred landscapes that were important but the practical landscapes of natural harbors and revolutes one of the most important trade routes was the western entrance to the Great Glen in Scotland a place studied by archaeologist Alison Sheridan this Glen is geographically in a great position to control the flow of metal that's coming from Ireland up the great Glen to Northeast Scotland so this this valley finds itself like that at the hub of a what is effectively a busy motorway yes absolutely those people who are able to control the flow of copper or tin or both we're going to make it rich the tombs of some of the new rich bronze elite of Kilmartin still survive within this huge kiln there was only ever one person buried this is no mass grave this is for a single high status individual this Kim was rebuilt around this modern chamber that was itself built to let people see this single grave the stone-lined kissed there was only ever one grave in this entire can so this was an important individual but the most interesting thing of all and here is the lid the capstone that was once laid on top of this cast to seal it but before that was put down it was upgraded reworked with these axe heads pegged and carved into the surface but all over the place here so the person whoever he or she was was laid to rest in here and they would spend eternity looking up at this stone because it was the axe the metal of the axis that was the basis for the wealth and the power of these people the new wealth fed a new demand for luxury goods [Music] Allisyn don't often find or see innocent quite as stunning as that they mm-hmm what is it made of it's made of jet from Whitby and Yorkshire this necklace had traveled over 300 miles to be worn by one special very rich woman it's actually semi fossilized wood of the monkey puzzle tree family isn't that fantastic it's great and you can actually see the the grain of the wood there and it fuels it doesn't feel as you would expect it to because it looks as if it ought to be much heavier than it is yes it's quite like handling varnished it's wonderful it's also warm uh-huh yeah I mean the jet is an amazing stone it's stone that is light it's stone that you can burn and it also has electrostatic properties this wasn't just precious bling this was supernatural power dressing if you like it's something which would have protected the woman in her dangerous journey to the world of the gods and the ancestors all did you see that was it's about 4,000 150 years old and fragile yes so this is a replica that's right yes it was made for Kilmartin house museum by a modern-day Whitby jet specialist worker would you like to try it oh I'd love to know does it feel different than other items of finery you've worn it yes it is just wonderful it's so comfortable so soft so beautiful it would have been originally very tightly strung so it's a solid black mass of precious magical material so four thousand one hundred and dot years ago this part of Britain was center stage absolutely yes so in fact at the time northern Britain and Ireland were the epicentre of cool you know they were the places where the fashion trends were being created so this is internationally significant and the person would have held her own among the elites across Europe right so Britain is at the center periphery yes absolutely if this Glen teaches us anything it's that by around 2000 BC Britain had a real presence in the world we had the natural resources and the technical skills that meant we couldn't be ignored in the Mediterranean and the rest of Europe they'd had trade and wealth for centuries now we had it too [Music] the waters around Britain can be some of the most treacherous in the world but to trade with Europe Bronze Age sailors had to brave them and a remarkable discovery made in Dover reveals the sophistication of the maritime Travis in 1992 while this underpass was being dug the evidence emerged from the mud [Music] [Applause] incredibly they found a boat a big wooden boat but it 20 feet underground down here it's hard to believe surrounded down here by all this concrete and these painted tales but three and a half thousand years ago the boat came to rest and was gradually buried under layers and layers of mud and here is this quite simply is the oldest surviving seagoing vessel in the world it's absolutely fantastic at first sight it's honestly one of the most impressive archaeological finds of ever laid eyes on originally up to 20 metres long the Dover boat would have carried cargo between Britain and mainland Europe scrap bronze and other metals perhaps also wool and fabrics a vessel the size would obviously have taken some skilled handling it must have been either paddled with several of these or the thinking more recently has been that it might have been rude like a pad like a rowing boat on a paddling pond on a much grander scale I've actually been given the privilege of going inside the case this is the magic handle that opens the door you don't get to do this in normal life there's a there's a real atmosphere in here I don't know if it's just the case but it's almost like being in here with someone rather than just something that's this is if so if the Bronze Age is and Bronze Age people are preserved in here the boots construction relied on the expert skills of carpenters using bronze axes its hull for enormous planks soon together these are twisted you branches that called with ease and have been used like thread or cords so the whole the pieces have been stitched together almost as though rather than wood it was made out of skin or cloth it's the same sort of technology it's been sewn together just a kind of a giant scale close up there's a detail that reveals how this boat ended its days it's it was in good Nick but at some point people have decided to fit it beyond use it's been scuttled if you like you can see at certain points where the with these those twisted you branches have been cut deliberately so for some reason it was thought appropriate to put this boot this perfectly functional boot beyond the use of man [Music] in ancient Britain the earth was alive and secret so anything taken from the earth whether wood or bronze was only borrowed and would one day have to be returned people in the past seem to acknowledge a relationship between themselves their belongings and the landscape and something unseen they accept that there's a relationship that there's an obligation that comes with ownership that death follows life and the debts have to be repaid so an axe is buried or thrown away a polished mace head goes into a tomb with the ancestors and a boat like the Dover boot even though it's still serviceable has to be returned to the world look at this beautiful rapier okay fine as you can imagine the use that was put to the handle here but it's been damaged to put it beyond the use of Maine so it's been bent over someone's knee and then the edge has been ruined by striking on a rock look before this was given back to the world it's been snapped great force has been used this was probably a valuable cherished object but the time came for it to go away so it was put out of reach it's destroying it bronze-age discoveries are revealing more than ancient lives but ancient beliefs as well in some ways the people of the Bronze Age were forging a new modern way of living but with the dover boat and with those damaged pieces of valuable bronze we're also seeing another say two Bronze Age life it's a glimpse of Bronze Age religion if you like and it's connected with water the only evidence we have is the gifts that were given to the gods rivers particularly those that flew east in England for special places where people brought treasured personal belongings like swords or cooking pots and threw the men and archeologists think that those things were offerings to appease the gods so living beside nature and trying to work out how to appease the gods how to keep them happy would presumably just them in part of everyday life in the thousand years since the pker people first brought metal to our shores a wealthy Bronze Age elite had emerged by 1500 BC Britain was a rich well-connected land but of course almost all those riches were the preserve of just a few those at the very top of society but one aspect of Britain had barely changed the way people lived their lives was pretty much the same as it had been in the Stone Age they farmed the land as they had done for centuries but they moved their own season-by-season apart for a few exceptions a scant evidence of permanent homes of permanent farms but all of this was about to change a Bronze Age site in East Anglia revealed the remains of something new a permanent farmstead with evidence of houses built to last a lifetime since the original discovery in the 1980s some of the buildings have been recreated to get a better idea of how you Bronze Age people lived you want to get inside one of the hoses so there's no way around reconstruction because a little stone foundation survived the Timbers of the roof they perish so there's no alternative but to use archeological evidence and best guesses to put together as close a replica of a bronzey choice as we can get an entire family would occupy a single room with a central hearth for heating and cooking it's quite interesting you don't need a you don't need a hole in the roof for the smoke the smoke just rises and sets above head height and then gradually seeps through the thatch the Bronze Age round hosts formed a template for domestic living that would last for over a thousand years Bronze Age specialists Francis Pryor discovered flag fame and he studied it ever since Francis what would have been like to live in the Bronze Age 1200 years BC people were very relaxed they knew their place in society they had well the archaeological evidence doesn't suggest that there was let's say an underclass the lower-class that wasn't properly nourished I mean whenever you dig up a Bronze Age burial nine times out of ten or ninety times out of a hundred the body is well nourished the bones of well formed so had plenty of calcium and they at a decent diet right one of the things there isn't much evidence for in the Bronze Age is actual strife I mean the population hadn't got so big that people were at each other's throats you know everyone knew what land they owned people lived in families you know your week was organized life I think in the Bronze Age would be pretty good as the Bronze Age matured settled life came with an even bigger change a change that was one of the greatest social transformations in the whole of our history a sort of set up these houses this winding road this is our classic view of rural Britain [Music] permanent houses led to the beginnings of the very first villages fields all around houses close together these are the neighbors and that fundamentally changed the way we related to a place and to one another it seems normal to us that all had to be invented the whole idea of getting used to living in the same house for your whole life the neighbors getting used to seeing the same faces day after day it seems obvious to us but until about 1500 years BC this was shockingly new the wild merlyn's of devon contain evidence of this new way of living if it's Bronze Age Britain you're looking for this is the place to come because beyond this patch of woodland is the finest relic we have of that ancient landscape [Music] Dartmoor has the best-preserved Bronze Age landscape not just in Britain but in the whole of Europe these rocky outcrops called tours unnatural but the landscape is also marked by the work of people who lived in these hills three and a half thousand years ago [Music] faint crisscross markings are relics of Bronze Age fueled systems that divide the land into plots found by families living in their own homes but really what's impressive about it is the scale within this landscape the remains of some of the very earliest Bronze Age around houses [Music] proper entrance there's nothing temporary or half-hearted about this this is permanent whoever built this wasn't moving on in a hurry archaeologist Neil Sharples has made an extensive study of the Dartmoor landscape and its buildings activity areas not rooms not divided up no walls separating the room but one big room but divided into areas where they're doing different things so you cook over here and then you make tools over here and then and the other side over here perhaps you're sleeping and storage perhaps a loom as well for weaving at the back of the house maybe you know those kind of activities going on when they start building these houses this is here for the adult lifetime their main social life will be carried out in this house and it's focused on this house for 20 to 30 years something like that so it's a permanent part landscape and so for the very first time in history people have a sense of place yeah yeah absolutely that's important most radical of all these houses aren't isolated farm States here on Dartmoor there's evidence of over 5,000 of them you know there's another house just over there that's the neighbors that would be would be really related kin of some sort there's another two houses over there five six seven or eight maybe up to twelve houses within this group of fields take a tour of the neighborhood now it does feel strangely familiar a layout like this you know families in their own homes dotted across the landscape but that within reach of each other you've got help at hand morning Neil is this rain ever going to stop I think I'll just stay in today your children would grow up with their children they would reach out who'd they would move into their own homes it's all exactly the same as the way we think about our communities and our neighbors those early settlements on Dartmoor though didn't last [Music] over just a few centuries possibly because of climate change and over farming the Moors and those first villages were abandoned forever [Music] but places like Dartmoor had set a pattern for the rest of Britain and for the future through thousands of years of prehistory the building blocks of the world we know had all been invented society and class religion and trade now by 1000 BC the first neighborhoods and settled villages were seats from which city life would eventually blossom from the strange and distant days of the first hunters a very recognizable Britain was beginning to emerge the ice finally retreated around 11 or 12,000 years ago people came there were shifts in technology and belief and all of that has molded the Britain we know today the very shape of the land as Britain became an island the coming of farming with ideas of work and productivity and community but it feels that with the end of the Stone Age and the coming of bronze that the distant strange world of our very LEP history finally came to an end thousands of years after the beginning of our journey Britain Noli on the brink of new changes that would continue to transform our land the coming chapters in our prehistory would seed age of iron the glories of Celtic warriors druids and kings and finally the Romans the building of towns the introduction of Righton and the end of prehistory for good all this was still to come and yet the late bronze age marked a massive turning point in itself It was as if we as a people had come of age we had the keys to the door and we could mold the world in our own image as individuals taking care of our own families but there was a price to pay that realization that thought three or four thousand years ago that we could impose our vision on the world brought with it a very grown-up responsibility because what kind of world did we want to shape what kind of Britain did we want to build and we're still living with the responsibility today because in the great scheme of time were still busy trying to find ways to relate to one another and we're going to pass the responsibility on to our descendants and when they look back what will they think how will they remember us [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: BBC Documentary

Views: 1,677,016

Rating: 4.7651763 out of 5

Keywords: bbc documentary, documentary bbc, bbc, world of stonehenge, world of stonehenge tv series, stonehenge documentary, neil oliver documentary, neil oliver history of scotland, neil oliver history of ancient britain, neil oliver scotland, neil oliver stonehenge, neil oliver

Id: FNtKMtCo534

Length: 51min 59sec (3119 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 11 2018