Age Of Cosmology - Ep: 3 | The World of Stonehenge | BBC Documentary

this is the story of home britain keen to be of hope our land and its people were forged over thousands of years of ancient history [Music] 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 who came from mainland Europe before Britain was an island instead of hunting mammoths and reindeer in the snow he hunted red deer in the Wildwood and continued into a new age as the first farmers built monumental tombs to their ancestors nothing like this had ever been seen before in Britain know that Johnny continues with the next chapter in our epic story of course what everybody's waiting for is the sunrise an age of cosmology when our lives were ruled by the Sun and the stars the birth of athlete power and social class set against some of the greatest wonders of the ancient world [Music] I'm going back almost six thousand years to a Britain in the throes of the Neolithic Revolution the first farmers were forging a whole new relationship with the land a land that was alive with spiritual meaning the wild wood that bought up the fields the boundary between land and sea and mountains that touched the very sky places like the leek district with its dramatic valleys and crags held a special power if your understanding of the world was rooted in stone and s landscape that seems to show the very word storm who have seemed especially important and here in the central fails the show is particularly clear archaeologist mark Edmonds has spent 30 years on the trail of the ancient people who came here in search of something very special five six thousand years ago the chances are no one is actually living here full-time they come here because the highest ground probably has good grazing but probably what drew them up here was not the chance of living here full-time that would happen many years later it was the stone that brought them up it was the stone that they came for over five thousand years ago Neolithic people claimed these same precarious paths what they were heading for what Hyeok crops of volcanic rock called green stone the crags that have worked the most are some of the highest and so the most difficult to get to and I think that's part of the attraction of the place is that it involves risk it involves danger okay so nearly there nearly that the debris of ancient stone working still lies all around hundreds of offcuts of very special stone axes and this is what we've climbed for stuff this is amazing I know it's ridiculous isn't it the volume of it every single bit of this is the result of people making tools there was this don't we had that could be worked and worked well to a fine finish so this is I must have a raw material it's an extraordinary old material so this this whole area is an axe Factory yeah you don't find many of the axes themselves up here but fortunately I brought some with me and this is what we call in the trade a rough out so that's halfway through the process of making yeah it's absolutely exquisite it's a thing of beauty unfinished or not well this is this is what they would have looked like when they left the crags and then pop that down there once you get down into the lowlands down into the areas where people traditionally would have been living that's when the more glacial slow process of grinding and polishing will be undertaken to get them down to something like that how long does it take to get from that to the finish dollar you can see in the in the two forms that already the idea of what its gonna look like is they're in a custom hands you can make one of these in about 45 minutes flaking as you go this at least several hundred hours possibly even thousands of hours to get a really good luster a good polish which brings out the color of the stone I mean and why go to that effort because it doesn't make it a better axe does it no it doesn't it doesn't improve the effectiveness of the tool very much I think what's important about these things is not simply that they're tools but they were also very important because they were tokens of identity they said something about the people who made and used them it wasn't just the stone that made these axes special but where it came from the sky although it's a mountain what with it what we're dealing with here is a monument a place that draws people up draws people together at which they can work the stone to produce objects that matter to them because they say something about who they are so in a sense the journey from the Lowcountry up here probably takes several days exposing yourself to danger to the risks of falling to come up into the clouds sometimes as well he's as much a rite of passage as anything else an activity that's as much ceremonial possibly spiritual as it is practical [Music] the Cumbrian axe Factory reveals a relationship between people the landscape and stone itself this belief system would change over time it would develop into something much more complex and for us something fantastically enigmatic something that represents the beginning of a whole new age in our history attained the experts refer to as the age of astronomy when we moved away from this more earthly ancestor worship towards something much more cosmic [Music] [Music] [Music] what we see is a radical change in thinking that manifested itself in something staggering the construction of monuments in stone on an unprecedented and massive scale some of them astronomically aligned [Music] what's becoming clear is that for the people living 5000 years ago this new age wasn't bringing a new way of thinking about the ancestors rather it was a new way of thinking about themselves as individuals within an increasingly complicated society and an internationally connected world all of that and the universe itself where did we fit into time and into the cosmos in a valley just beneath the green stone axe factory there's evidence of these new ideas places like this they have an atmosphere when you're hoping across one in the landscape it makes you pause and think and wonder you know what's going on stone circles are almost unknown outside Britain and Ireland but we have hundreds of them and are often found in the most dramatic of locations first of all this place these stones mattered this is quite a small stone circle but still the effort involved suggests you don't go moving things this size just for fun and building monumental structures like this was part of a tradition that lasted for over a thousand years [Music] 5,000 years ago people living here in Cumbria and all over Britain were making spiritual connections that had never been made before not just between the leaves and the land but between their lives and the sky the cosmos as well [Music] perhaps the very idea of heaven this is a new britain the neolithic reaching its very height and it's one of the most mysterious and glorious periods in all of prehistory [Applause] welcome to the Orkney Islands of the northern tip of Scotland I've come here to explore a landscape that holds some of the best preserved Stone Age structures in the whole of Britain here there are relics of the lives and the beliefs of the people who lived here at the very height of the Neolithic or please a wild place equipped by North Atlantic winds even from the air was not a tree to be seen but it's more than the wind that's responsible [Music] then where trees are not Lea once upon a time but it's thought that the first farmers cut them down to prepare fuels for crops and keeping animals and given the Otton it's not a big place it didn't take long to clear the lot fortunately the Orkney was rich in another building material whole island is made of this horizontally bedded fractured sandstone that splits very easily into useful slabs and sheets and around 3300 BC the people living here they're going to use this stuff to build some of the most enduring structures of the ancient world magnificent stone tombs and vast stone circles give us a unique insight into an extraordinary moment in our history when we first turned our spiritual gaze towards the heavens [Music] here even domestic houses have been preserved in stone the very homes of the people who were pioneering this new age some of the most special approached on the far west coast of Orkney as skara brae it's an extraordinary place and it lets us get as close as we could possibly hope to to the way domestic life was lived on acne in the Stone Age [Music] the village was occupied for over 600 years from around 3100 BC what you've got are eight houses arranged on either side of a long winding passage and because the whole thing is semi-subterranean and does a great job of keeping the window cutting down the drafts and because there wasn't any wood available it wasn't just the houses that were built of stone but everything inside as well right this is the inside of one of the hoses what you notice right away is a big square half for a big roaring fire these are bad recesses these are places where people would have laid out their bedding this arrangement here looks a bit like a dresser because it is a dresser it's directly opposite the only entrance so it's the first thing that guests see as the enter and in here on these shelves you would put the things that mattered it's their cousin having somewhere to put the good wedding China everything about this design this house is so clever and it's so human but we can get closer right yeah lead on Alison Sheridan a specialist and prehistoric artifice assuring me one host that's all well preserved people aren't usually allowed inside it's not the easiest place to get into is it no but it's cozy so what would life have been like for skara brae residents do you think it would've been pretty comfortable by the standards of the age because you've got this wonderful central half yeah so it may have been dark because of the roof but it would have been warm okay they've also got convenience they have a toilet oh how do you know that's a toilet and not a storage space well there's actually a drain underneath it and actually they did find poop oh really most of the hard evidence says there yes remarkably these houses also contained artifacts the precious possessions of the people who were living here 5,000 years ago never find anything like this in my miserable bits of broken stone was all I ever forgetting so what have we got anything but miserable bits of stone these are absolutely amazing what are they generally called if you've got to group them as a class of find any graphic carved stone objects only because archaeologists haven't worked out exactly what there are and in the absence of materials that we would consider precious like gold and silver I suppose these have to be the equivalent over because of the time that they represent and the skill that they're represented that's right because we're in an age that's well before the earliest metal so the stone itself is not intrinsically valuable but as an object it meant a lot I thought about the rest of them these pieces of jewelry oh yeah in fact they found something like 8,000 beads in this structure in this house yes right so on a very practical level it says that someone's got the time to do this rather than being a growing herring whatever someone is able to said part of the deal would be all of our time to specializing absolutely and they've been provided with everything else they need by the rest of the village right these are just wonders which one can I have we know where you live but as well as jewelry and carved stones this house also revealed a darker secret intriguingly to adults women skeletons were found underneath the bed uniquely I mean on below floor level yes right yeah it's it's as if during the lifetime of the house they lived here they died here they were buried here under the birth it's like granny granny under the bed it was a house for the living and it's also a house for the dead the precious artifacts and the presence of human remains might mean that these houses were special no one can be sure but the people who lived here might not have been ordinary farmers but some of the earliest priests of a new religion [Music] within just a few miles of skara brae built around the same time is this [Music] a stone - constructed on a truly grand scale [Music] fantastic already you get the sense that you've left one world behind and come somewhere different and what you're rewarded with after bending down and struggling through is access to a masterpiece in every sense of the word what you also see right away is the similarity between the interior of this tomb and the interiors of the houses in skara brae and in fact there was a house here once upon a time and a circle standing stones all before the tomb was ever built it's a classic example of somewhere domestic being altered becoming something other something ritual over here again a shadow of something domestic it's a recess similar to our bed but of course the people put away in there by having a much much deeper sleep [Music] mieze how is a triumph of ancient architecture not only in its stonework but in the way it's been positioned in the landscape for a few days each midwinter the Setting Sun is framed by two distant hills on the neighboring Island of Hawaii and as the Sun drops onto the horizon it shines through the passage lighting up the inner chamber nice how you was aligned to the heavens and to the dramatic features of the Arcadian landscape when you look around here you realize that you're surrounded by hills and water it's a natural amphitheater it's a stage set for drama and it's here across the promontory from me so that the Neolithic people of Orkney decided to build another extraordinary monument in stone [Music] the ring of brodgar is one of the biggest stone circles that we knew about anywhere it's over a hundred metres across and well there are 21 stones standing today in its original form there would have been as many as 60 and that's not all the ring of brodgar points you across a narrow land bridge towards another even older stone circle the stones of Stenness [Music] few of the original stones survived but those that do reveal yet more connections to this monumental landscape [Music] what's striking here is the way some of the stones are positioned this pair here are aligned so that when you look through the gap means how is perfectly framed against the hillside originally there would have been a complete ditch encircling the whole monument and the thinking is that that ditch would have held water so that will appear as a moat so maybe what you've got 5,000 years ago is the the builders the architects of this monument creating an island within an island a miniature a microcosm of their world as they saw it [Music] the creation of monumental architecture around 5,000 years ago can be seen in a sense as an evolution of earlier Neolithic culture after all these people had been building huge earthen enclosures and vast cautious monuments for generations it was the connections between the monuments and astronomical alignments that was new the earth the landscape was as important as it had always been but no it was being seen as part of a bigger picture the skies the Sun in the moon the heavens that's what this age of astronomy seems to be all about our human need to understand our place in the cosmos still resonates today this is midsummer just before dawn and the most famous Stone Age monument of them all this place Salisbury Plain has been attracting people from millennia and it still does there are literally thousands of people here some of them have come to wash up ancient gods some to connect with Mother Earth some of common search of themselves but to be honest I think a lot them are here just because everyone else is just for the spectacle of course what everybody's waiting for is the sunrise which will be over there by my reckoning will be in Oh several minutes time can't wait funny thing is it's actually very hard to see the sunrise because of all these spoons all these people [Music] [Applause] you should leave [Applause] [Music] and presumably its arrival today means well something different every one of these people here there's several thousand of them so that's several thousand meanings but what did Stonehenge mean to the people who gathered here five thousand years ago to begin to answer that you have to go back to the stones themselves and I don't mean the most obvious ones the sarsen stones and the huge trial of thorns they weren't part of the original monument if you want to get back to the start of Stonehenge you have to look at these smaller stones that are all around the interior unlike the sarsens which were dragged here from just 20 or so miles up the road these are from much much farther away off to the west [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the wild southwest of wheels hi in the Preseli Hills the rolling landscape is broken by huge outcrops of a very distinctive stool [Music] now the thing is studies have shown that this kind of stone is identical to the original builders of Stonehenge built over 200 miles away in that direction geologists call this a spotted dollar item and this is the only place in Britain where this particular tape exists this has been amazing to me for more than half of my life I mean if I do at all what motivated them why these stones from here now it does have to be said there are a couple of things about this rock that are unusual first of all I'm good to dawn my Stone Age goggles and hit this as hard as I can know on that fresh face there if I if I wet that freshly broken face look at that it's not lovely see how it changes color it goes this soft blue shade obviously it's why this stuff is known as blue stone and it's speckled throughout these little flecks of feldspar these properties these unique freckles would have made this rock seem very special it might even have seemed magical we might never know exactly why this place and these crags were chosen but it reminds me of the Lake District axe makers on a much grander scale what we do know for Sentinel is that this place was important so important that it fell the ancient people with an arch so powerful that they were able to find the strength and the will to move over 200 tons of this rock and use it to set up the first stone circle of Stonehenge now that takes some belief [Music] 5,000 years ago the Stonehenge we see today simply didn't exist instead there was a much simpler circle [Music] after live long Johnny from Preseli the bluestones were put up in a great big circle round the outside on the inner edge of this Bank so for five hundred years or so the blue stone circle was Stonehenge and then for some reason the people living around here decided to give themselves an even bigger challenge around 2500 BC a new generation of builders created their ultimate Monument using massive blocks of local sandstone they constructed something unprecedented a ring of standing stones capped with lentils inside a horseshoe of yet more stones and at the same time for good measure they moved the original boulders of bluestone right into the center unlike the blue stones these gigantic sarsens were only transported 20 miles or so from up the road but given the each one who is anything up to 40 tons well the effort required to shift them was phenomenal [Music] this new Stonehenge marked special days in the cosmic calendar spring and autumn as well as the well-known alignment on the midsummer sunrise [Music] but the midsummer sunrise exactly matches another event the Setting Sun at midwinter the latest evidence suggests that our most famous prehistoric monument of all might not have been a celebration of summer and life but a commemoration of winter and death like the Orkney monuments stonehenge is not alone nearby this field contains all that remains of an ancient site of winter gathering have a look at these animal bones and teeth just a sample really of the thousands of animal remains found scattered all across the site these are pig bones piglets are usually born in the springtime and the vast majority of the pig remains at Darlington walls show that the adult animals were slaughtered during nine months that's in midwinter also the teeth reveal that the animals had been specifically fattened up prior to the feasting and we can tell this because the teeth are rotten what we have here isn't just casual feasting this is one final commemoration it's one big celebration of life before the ancestors commenced their journey to Stonehenge and the land of the dead it's thought that each winter people would come here from hundreds of miles around to commemorate the lives of their ancestors and to ensure the souls of the recently dead reached the safety of the afterlife at Stonehenge itself [Music] I think it's fascinating that everyone believes the new Stonehenge it's like the Mona Lisa or the pyramids it's so familiar it's hard to see it with fresh eyes I think we've discovered something by coming here I think we've discovered a new Stonehenge and it's as far from the golden warmth of a midsummer sunrise as it's possible to get it's somewhere that still carries a charge you can feel it if you come here at midwinter you can feel like charge just a little bit more the coldness of the stones the open landscape it's not hard to believe that this place is somewhere that belongs to the dead [Music] when will it back to the time of the great monuments of the Neolithic we see a whole new age dawning in belief but also in society was no doubt that the creation of these vast monuments was a religious pact it's about finding and defining a place in the universe in time in life and in death the special objects found at Orkney the arrangement of the temple complex these things imply the existence of a priestly class that the farmers themselves were supporting and the sheer scale of these enterprises the planning and engineering required by Stonehenge by the Ring of Brodgar suggests that some group was in charge and they were out to impress because these monuments themselves were connected and we know that people were moving between these great monuments because of this it's a style of pottery it's called grooved ware because of the grooves that decorate the surface it was made first of all in Orkney it's also the first Porter we know of in Britain and Ireland with a proper flat base this style of pottery was subsequently found at Stonehenge in the south of England and it's phone to all points in between what the experts are now imagining is a kind of elite what all travel if you like we're important people moved between the great Neolithic monuments when a kind of Grand Tour [Music] one remarkable find epitomizes this age of elite travel it was discovered just north of Dublin but it's thought it was made across the sea in Britain this is a ceremonial nice head it's 5,000 years old they are of their boats and it's made from a single piece of beautifully worked Flint in every possible way it's an object of wonder now the person who made this wasn't just technically skilled but also an artistic genius do you see the way that that spiral there suggests two eyes and then the whole to take the shaft of the nice could be the mouth the hole for the shaft has been drilled out now this is from a time before any metal so the bet the drill bit was a piece of wood and the abrasive action has been achieved by using sand or ground quartz but even seeing that you're still looking at countless hours and days maybe even weeks of painstaking effort to create that perfect smooth all it's technically flawless but it also reveals a level of sophistication and refinement of design that you simply don't see in any other artifact of the period in Britain or in Ireland this new art speaks of power and prestige of an emerging world of priests and chieftains people whose status was displayed in the possession of rare and exquisite objects [Music] as well as Stonehenge and Orkney it seems that these people also came to Ireland 5,000 years ago travelers would have sailed a road up here the river born to the most sacred landscape of them all the Bruna banja the palace of the boy [Music] this is another secret landscape constructed around 3200 years BC which means that it probably predates the Bluestone phase at Stonehenge and the stone circles of Orkney this could be where it all began and right at the center a mecca for tourists from all over the world is this massive passage grave new range [Music] of course the moment as you see it today isn't original it was excavated in 1960s and then reconstructed in this well very confident style I'm in two minds about actually on the one hand it's very striking and it attracts a lot of people maybe inspires a lot of people to find out more but on the other hand it's a bit brutal it's a bit overdone it's kind of like Stalin does the Stone Age [Music] inside though it's magic still rings out this is the very earliest building of the new Neolithic cosmology created hundreds of years before even the Egyptian pyramids what strikes you immediately is how much this feels like knees ho on Orkney with this not a little passageway leading from the world of light into the dark world within and in fact this may have been the inspiration for me so because this tomb was built first [Music] and again light mace how there are three recesses but once upon a time would have held the remains of the dead but this one is altogether more rough-hewn than mace how it likes the the perfection its most ornate if you like like Mae's house on Orkney Newgrange is carefully aligned on the movement of the Sun above the entrance that a stone frame that lets late into the passage a roof box if I get down here you can see what I mean on a day like today it doesn't let a lot of sunshine in but once a year on the 21st of December the winter solstice the Sun is directly in front of the entrance and the roof box lets the sunlight all the way up this passageway until it illuminates the entire chamber it lasts for about 17 minutes and then the chamber is plunged into darkness for another year now that trick makes this place one of the earliest astronomically aligned buildings anywhere in the world like the other monuments Newgrange marks midwinter but here there's an additional clue to Neolithic belief that time flows in a cycle and even in death there is a promise of rebirth there's a reason for the alignment of the passageway it's to allow the Sun to illuminate this stool and tobeco this carving the only carving in the recess it's something called a triple spiral the very earliest example of a triple spiral it's one continuous carving with no beginning and no end it's a kind of perfect form the illumination of this carving once a year in a piece of religious theater Lee at the very heart of the beliefs of the people who designed and built this place the great sacred sites of Newgrange Stonehenge and those on oourtney were magnets for elite travelers who five thousand years ago took inspiration and ideas from one another what we're left with today are monuments that are unique in Europe created by powerful and commonly held religious beliefs from your islands and Scotland to the Preseli mountains and Wales from the Lake District in the north of England to Stonehenge in the South and finally here in Ireland it's all connected and all that time there must have been some sort of priestly caste marshaling all that effort the people who carried the mace heads and in some of the tombs surrounding Newgrange that are clues to the sacred beliefs and in particular to the treatment of one of the first elites of ancient society with insight of Newgrange lies yet another tomb knows more than 400 of its stones are covered in swirling abstract art almost half of all the megalithic art in the whole of Western Europe this is where the precious Meis head was found and it wasn't the only spectacular discovery archeologist George organ has been studying noth for 50 years you could picture that you had a religious person the equivalent of a priest you see who could stand here before the entrance this is directly opposite the entrance and in between you have this splendid sandstone six feet or so in height with the vertical line which leads up the center of the passage back in 1968 George was the first person in modern times to break into the tomb how long is the passage around 40 feet are you winning harder take me a long time no hurry right I see why your daughter this place open to the public Java it's not the easiest place no no no that's a bit good and this is as it as it was this hasn't been reconstructed hold on roses home what was it like the very first time like that you came in here but how did you feel to be the first person in this news how long well I have it was unbelievably exciting [Music] what George found for the untouched remnants of ancient sacred rites a time capsule of Neolithic belief and scattered in and around this exquisitely carved Basin was evidence of something new in Stone Age Society burnt human remains these are some of the earliest remains of ritual cremation ever found well the skull is the easiest to find because the scholar is very distinctive it has an inner layer and outer layer and a bit of spongy bone in between although only fragments survived under expert eyes these remains reveal a wealth of information some areas of the skull are more important than others and this part in particular is called Petrus portion of the temporal bone and it survives very well because it's thick and from this I can identify which side of the skull it came from so it's useful in determine the number of individuals because I've got two left temporal bones then I've got two different individuals forensic science reveals that noth contained over a hundred cremated bodies [Music] but those Commission's were accumulated over centuries of use the radiocarbon dates showed that that was over as approximately 300 year timespan and that works out on one commission to be two to three years so therefore information wasn't that common what Laureen Buckley's work shows is that the new practice of commission was unusual this reality and the discovery of the Noth Meis head suggests that it was an honor reserved for only the very highest levels of late Neolithic Society the cremated remains at noth sure that the rosa a hierarchy at play which determined how your mortal remains were treated but simply if you were important your remains were burnt cremated and presumably that meant that you spirit was being treated differently and was going to go somewhere different than the remains of those left behind on earth simply to be buried [Applause] [Music] you have to try and imagine the impact of this on people 5,000 years ago when a chieftain or a priest died their body would be consumed by fire and be reduced to virtually nothing and then to see a few earthbound remains a handful of dust and crumbling bones pecked out of the embers and and placed in a recess in that tomb forever while all the rest of them had disappeared into the sky you can imagine what impact that would have [Music] the discoveries in Ireland show a new society emerging through the late Neolithic a society were status mattered it determined the objects you possessed in life and how your body was treated in death [Music] this was a society who have ideas traveled and where new beliefs were manifested in the greatest ancient monuments the world had ever seen and it's in those very monuments that today were able to glimpse the very birth of a whole new concept of existence from around 3,000 to 2500 BC was Italian when we became aware of our place not just here on earth but within the cosmos the great tombs the stone circles they would an attempt to make sense of the movement of the Sun and the moon of an entire universe that shapes and governs our lives and our time [Music] those forces went way beyond the reach of their ancestors so much so that from now on when some people died they ought to be sent to a new place a different place not down into the earth but up into the sky it seems to me there was an Ania lithic that people first conceived an idea that endures to this day that somewhere up here was heaven [Music] next time my journey continues as I discover a new age that is magic one forged in metal impressed my very own liquid deeply impressed by a new people he knew how to get metal how to meet metal go to work metal are people inventing a whole new way of living as well as Maine working down here it must have been children because some of the spaces are just too small [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: BBC Documentary

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Rating: 4.7718277 out of 5

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

Id: aDss6QRRG-c

Length: 51min 47sec (3107 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 11 2018