Britain BC Episode 1

this is where Julius Caesar made two unsuccessful attempts to invade Britain from 55 and 54 BC in both cases he met fierce opposition and was forced to leave within a year nearly a hundred years later the Romans finally arrived on these shores they discovered a society thousands of years older than their own why was this country so desirable that Roman emperors with so much to conquer it were these people so fiercely independent that they had held up the Roman army for a hundred years what was written be seen I've been studying the archeology of pre Roman Britain all of my life one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by the subject is that I wasn't taught it at school as a nation we reject our ancient past believing that our proper history started with the Romans but there's an unexplored story to tell the story of Britain BC but it's always said that the Romans did an enormous amount for Britain but did they I mean they gave us roads did they I don't think they did at all we had perfectly good roads before the Romans came they gave us language no it didn't we had a perfectly good language before the latin arrived they gave us mores know our laws weren't written down but we had them so they gave us civilization no they didn't give us civilization we were civilized before the Romans came here it was the Romans who started all this barbarian monsters their armies marched their way across Europe labeling everything they saw uncivilized Britain was considered to be particularly backward and strange to find out more about this I went to see my old friend and sparring partner guy de la better yeah a Roman supporter if ever I saw one I find it hard to believe that the SI actually came up there if you've been able to stand here and look that way Frances there on a clear day you could have seen France and the Roman soldiers in their ships coming across in the year 43 I see if you've been stupid enough to stand here waiting for them the real problem is is this the only place they landed they really land here on the first day or did they land in several places at once and the best clue we've got are the remains of a triumphal arch now that's the sort of thing the Romans would have put up to commemorate a really important event the symbolic gateway to Roman Britain why would the Romans interested in Britain Loras talks about Britain be such a home useless ruddy low remote location how wonderful the Roman Empire was to come here we're absolutely on the edge of the known world there's a huge box office sales potential in coming here and bragging about having been here there was used to brag quite a lot to know the Romans well I think they lot to be proud of you do well I don't know I I'd see that as a rather sad symbol myself I think the ordinary man in the street presented with a sort of stability and security and financial system the Romans offered if we think about the American system today or we might not like it but actually most people given push and shove we'll accept that more and they will having instability and insecurity and I think that means for ordinary people it's very easy to see why they might have sat there whinging about the good old days and how they'd love to be back where they were before while at the same time swinging Roman wine from a Roman cup in a nice Roman building with a nice Roman roof with a nice Roman central heating system having lost their independence well when he lost her self-esteem what the Romans wiped out was a ten thousand year old island culture quite unlike any other in the ancient world and for centuries the reality of ancient Britain has remained veiled in mystery and confusion Basheer energy of this culture is embodied for me by maiden castle in Dorset this hill fort was seen as a site of a battle between the Romans and the Britons in fact it tells a much older story Maiden castle has to be the most massive and spectacular pre-roman site in Britain and it's come to symbolize the vanished world of the Iron Age but it was never as simple as that this site was actually occupied for four thousand years before the Roman invasion this is a huge stretch of time which spans all the archaeological eras the great hill fort defenses were built in the Arnage which began 700 years for the Roman invasions in the Bronze Age which goes back to around 2,500 years BC to when the Pyramids of Egypt were built people were living here burying their dead in round barrows and we know for a fact that a ceremonial meeting place was constructed here around 4000 BC right back in the Stone Age the Stone Age is the longest archeological period and dates back to when humans first walked the earth some 2 million years ago when I became an archaeologist I wasn't interested in excavating the ancient sites of Egypt Greece or round I wanted to investigate the far more mysterious story of ancient Britain this story is not told in our history books it's not even in the national curriculum take the British Museum this vast imposing building still only has a tiny part of its floor space devoted to ancient Britain yes this is a great Roman gallery that really represents wonderful treasures from around Britain fabulous material all that glass and silver it says a great deal about Roman Britain this is back into barbarian brought home edition Caroline for me this has to be one of the glories of the British Museum it's absolutely stunning object how can we have got more British prehistoric stuff on display before about 1850 the world that's perceived by the British Museum collecting was one of Greek and Rome of the Bible lands of ancient Egypt and then the oriental and the native artifacts of Britain our own if you like dirty grubby native history simply wasn't considered to be important so this would be considered barbarian stuff and not worth displaying totally barbarian and in fact the Empire was busy we having conquests over people bearing shields like that of course it wasn't considered be very sophisticated for most people the idea of ancient Britain conjures up visions of romantic misty landscapes strange myths and legends and Braveheart meets Lord of the Rings type of thing and most of us have been led to believe that this land was once populated by a red haired group of rather artistic warriors known as the Celts these ideas are now proven to be fantasy what we think of as Celtic past is largely an invention and it's largely a fiction the term Celtic we can trace back to at least for 500 BC but it seems until about 1700 never to have been used about the people of Britain or Ireland is always just used of people living actually on the continent at that time people were started to understand that there were important connections between our prehistoric ancestors in Britain and those on the continent and in the first instance people came to understand that their languages had apparently been similar from that people started to use this linguistic as an ethnic label I remember when I was at college we learned that the Celts spread from Central Europe I think what we do see is the movement of our expansion from Central Europe of certain cultural traits particularly in the physical things people are using and so-called Celtic are cyclists day from the first the weapons of the Celts especially their swords were good enough to make them a strong fighting power you could see so-called Celtic sword as being rather the equivalent of a BMW car today yeah in fact they're lots of people in Britain drive around in BMW cars does not mean we've been invaded from Germany but that's just the mistake that some archaeologists have made about British prehistory we seem to be in some strange form of denial about our ancient past where everything good has to come from across the channel a little less than four thousand years ago the country was invaded by many warlike bands these invaders already used metal and they're coming encourage the growth of the bronze industry in this country this is now known to be false even with Stonehenge people used to believe that Stonehenge was introduced to Britain from either ancient Egypt or Crete these notions have been radically Overtown new developments in archeology are beginning to discover the real story of ancient Britain separated from the rest of Europe Britain developed in a unique and particular way it is this uniquely British culture unique in its beliefs and rituals in its houses and monuments in its technology agriculture and industry and in its emphasis on family and ancestry that I want people to rediscover so let's go back in time and uncovered the ancient culture we didn't know we had the Iron Age only lasted for 700 years before the Romans came at this time Britain was a country with a rapidly growing population communities came together to build defensive hill forts like Maiden Castle and to create some of the most beautiful works of art in the ancient world the British bronze-age goes back another two thousand years the invention of bronze had kicked started an industrial revolution on the massive scale bronze tools made it easier for Britons to construct complex wooden stone structures many built as strange religious monuments the Stone Age occupies the remaining years and takes us right back to when this country first became an island and it was in the Stone Age that Britain discovered something which was to transform life on this island forever the inventor of farming has to be the single most important development in human history once people have gained control of food production their lives change beyond recognition it became possible to settle down and construct fixed societies farming was the key to our prosperity it was an ancient British farming community that I discovered in East Anglia while I was looking at some aerial photos flag fan I noticed something very unusual two parallel crop marks caused by ancient ditches of some kind what I was to find here clashed with conventional ideas about the origins of farming to explain I must go right back to a time when Britain wasn't even an island it's ten thousand years ago and we are at the end of the Ice Age as the ice melts sea levels rise Britain is becoming an island isolated from the rest of Europe our isolation persuaded archaeologists that all new developments must have come from abroad this revolution the beginning of farming did not take place in Europe but in the near East in the river valleys and along the coastline share on this map these new farmers gradually migrated westwards across Europe when I was a student we were taught that farming arrived pretty well fully formed from the eastern Mediterranean and it had spread across Europe around 5000 BC we was running around in skins being sort of hunters and gatherers of savages if you like I mean suddenly this enormous improvement arrived and people even called it the Neolithic or farming revolution and things changed overnight and it was dramatic and wonderful this great revolution was the most important change in all human history but there was no such revolution because the origins of farming had been forming in this country for thousands of years new research now proves that right from the beginning we did things rather differently 9,000 years ago in the Vale of Pickering Yorkshire there was a hunting and living site on the edge of a huge post ice age lake stark on was inhabited by humans four thousand years before the pyramids were built what was found has made me even more certain for the origins of British farming lay on British soil Kim Sharla Hall has excavated here so we're in the middle of the lake are we yeah proving but I can prove it all sorts of ways but this is basically filled with peat you're standing there you can feel the beat because it's like being on jelly it's about three yeah that's one good it's about three meters of peat which is the whole history of the lake that's fantastic where does it stop stops just as the ground Rises and the site we're gonna look at is just beyond there right let's go for it huge numbers of animal bones were found here and amongst these with dozens of dog bones now correctly reaching the level of which all the occupations that star cars took place we're almost on the site was this a lot less bouncy BOSU bounce at all because it's hard ground you know we've got the lake behind yeah we would be coming into a sort of read swamp yeah and I knew route right through into open water open water you've got a perfect landscape you've got open water you've got lowland you've got potentially good grazing you've got wood you've got lots of areas where you can find wild animals and the lake never goes away they're burning the lake edges in order to encourage animals with money off read burning off read young shoots it's perfect for food it's good for hunting I'm very intrigued about the three dogs because we've got more dogs down in anywhere else they're all dated to about 7,000 BC there obviously is fonti all of which have been identified as being domesticated dogs rather than European wolves archaeologists have always believed that these dogs were only used for hunting to chase some retrieve prey but I believe they were doing quite a lot more than that it actually sounds like you're talking about extremely sophisticated society I rather think of them as people adopting the principle of least effort they're intelligent like us they do know more than they need to they have a larder around them and they're going to just go for it their population levels are low enough them to have a very pleasant life to exploit the environment and effectively in my view farm it I was delighted to find this out at Starke our years of working as a sheep farmer had already convinced me that these prehistoric dogs would have been used not only to hunt but also to herd prey just like sheepdogs do today I got into sheep farming mainly because I got fed up reading accounts prehistoric farmers written by archeologists who couldn't tell one end of a sheep from another I bought a small farm and started to use ancient techniques I soon found that it was no good without a dog I didn't have a dog four sheep were running all over the place but I read in all the textbooks that prehistoric sheep can't be worked by a dog but my ancient primitive she hadn't read the textbooks I find that primitive sheep can be worked by a dog my sheepdog jess is not very different from the dogs whose remains were found at Starke are they forget that Border Collies are actually descended from wolves like all other dogs what jess is doing now is she's rounding up the sheep to bring to me the top dog in her mind to kill I'll then kill the prey in her mind and then I'll throw it to the other wolves in the pack now there isn't a huge difference between what I do with Jess and what people at Starke are 9,000 years ago would have done with their hunting dogs but back not bad death essentially we are both manipulating animals for our own use they their so the difference in that case between hunting and farming is really remarkably slight the dog bones found at Stark are proved that the ancient Britons were managing animals 4000 years before the so called farming invasion with in Cheddar Gorge are some of the oldest caves in Britain it was here that scientists found something which was to shake the archaeological world this is where Arthur got discovered what is still the oldest complete skeleton in the British Isles he found it in 1903 and then in the 1980s the bones were radiocarbon dated and was shown to be a staggering nine thousand years old that's a few centuries after the Ice Age but the really exciting thing happened in 1997 when these bones which became known as cheddar man were analyzed for mitochondrial DNA by Boxford University unlike regular DNA that combines genetic matter from both male and female parents mitochondrial DNA is only inherited through the female line mitochondrial DNA only get from your mother so I got mine from my mother who got it from her mother who got it from her mother everybody from their mother so there's an unbroken line stretching way back into the past because this mitochondrial DNA changes very little over the generations it's an excellent way of tracing origins sites has used it to track the origins of the main populations of Europe mitochondrial DNA were once bacteria but were free living and then millions of years ago got into cells and then allowed cells to use oxygen and they're still there so they have a separate kind of history from the nuclear chromosomes and it's that which gives us this really good way of tracking back through the maternal line what astounded the archaeological world was that cheddar man's DNA was identical to that of a number of people living in the local area today they brought home the point that it was almost exactly the same as somebody living in the same village so the DNA from those really old specimens and cheddar man 9,000 years old is identical to the DNA and people living in Britain now this set the archaeological world pretory because a textbook said that the native ice age inhabitants had all been driven away by waves of people coming from the continent who bought with them farming if the hunter gathers had been swept away by the incoming farmers then you would expect the DNA from pre farming skeletons to be very different to the present day but we showed farmers hadn't replaced the population that was there previously we're caring if you like the history of our species around with us when we realize we've got the real stuff that they carry on their own bodies with us today I think that's an insight which I hadn't contemplated or expected if Sykes was right then the ice age people survived and their culture survived as well and it's that which fascinates me crops livestock and ideas were introduced to this country from the Near East but this wasn't a violent invasion the people of Britain had been managing animals in their own particular way for thousands of years it was the remains of their unique farming system which had appeared in those aerial photos of flag Fenn these dark marks are the remains of an ancient landscape now if you were driving along this road here and you look out of your car window you wouldn't see a thing because the ground would be completely flat what you see from the air are the roots of the crops going down and tapping into the water below the ground the plants grow more vigorously over the ancient ditches and show up as darker lines from the air one of the most interesting is a pair of ditches over here now those ditches in now realize went on either side of a drove way which is a highly sophisticated form of trackway for moving large numbers of animals from one part of the farm to the other this is essential for farming today we rely on barbed wire and electric fences but the ancient British farmers had designed something that did the work of all of this equipment this is a drove way and it's reconstructed exactly as it would have been in the Bronze Age with ditches and hedges on either side now it was intended to drive animals hundreds of them from one part of the farm to another and it was in use for about a thousand years so it must have worked really well there are fuel systems like this right across Britain but they are nowhere to be found on the continent it was a truly British invention the unique style of farming in Britain gives us a special opportunity to understand how society was organized now essentially everything was small-scale and based on cooperation between the different farming families it was in nobody's interest to have large-scale confrontation and until the six centuries or so before the coming of the Romans there were no Kings princes or powerful controlling elites those are the Great Orme Bronze Age Papa Mines this has to be the maddest way to view an archaeological site this railway was built in Victorian times the mine down there is from a far earlier Industrial Age it was discovered in North Wales on the peninsula of great all the introduction and use of bronze around 2500 BC had a colossal impact this was the first true age of metal bronze is strong but very malleable these new implements were capable of so much more than the tools for Stone Age this really was Britain's first Industrial Revolution people always thought that these huge mines were Roman in actual fact work began on this great open shaft nearly four thousand years ago it's mind-boggling to conceive of how these ancient Britons set about such a vast and complex task so Sean what exactly is it that you get out of a ground to get copper its malachite copper carbonate and that's what they find and I eventually have to smelt it in to make the pure copper there are about six stages that take it from the solid rock that you see here you have to finally create the finished product I've read they use bone tools as well this is a limb bone from a cow it's one of the 30,000 found throughout the whole mine you can see it's nicely shaped on the side used to chisel out the malachite and subservience one itself is probably about three and a half thousand years old obviously lots of the rock is so hard that you have to use stone hammers like the one here to actually break it up this would be a beach stone and it's granite and you can see very rough on the edges there where it actually has been used to chisel out the malachite this is the great opencast where they started their mining 1860 BC they got the easier copper on the surface and as it became more scarce were forced to dig further and further down and finally they cut into the side of the cliff making the tunnels it's quite or inspiring for the first archaeologist breaking into these new tunnels only think the last people to be here was three and a half thousand years ago oh that looks good bit dark and mysterious melt area there and see there's very straight white marking those there yes those the type of thing that is actually shows as evidence that bone tools were actually using crook in areas like this to be made yesterday connect three and a half thousand years ago for the one method of digging lifts and mining that they used means they just took out the malachite and therefore these tunnels are very regular insight on some of those tunnels are actually so small we can't even fit into them very this is the main passage is it yes what's deeply interesting in this area it's a tunnel up here it's one of the ones we believe dug out by five or six year old children so complete with two five or six year old size Aniston but I seem to have minded I yes they did their job well but you can see small pieces like the malachite up on there which give you an idea of how good the quality must have been if they left something like that it was looks like a solid jewel Moss doesn't it mixed in with the calcite crystals those are the no Valley runs each - four miles of tunnels have already been revealed at great all and it's estimated that there are 30 miles waiting to be discovered how long did the dawn fall straight through until over 500 BC good briefing about 2,000 tons of copper hmm tons of copper well how many actions would ever mate about 10 million roughly depending on size roof when you think the population of Britain at that oh no they have to be trading them out with the rest of the continent this is an incredible scale of production for a population that may never have exceeded a hundred thousand copper has to be mixed with tin to make bronze but the nearest tin mines are hundreds of miles away in Coleman transporting metal over such distances requires a well-organized transport system today so how on earth did they do it four thousand years ago ten years ago archaeologists in Dover came across a remarkable discovery they found a huge wooden boat which was built nearly 2,000 years before Christ was born this suggests that thousands of years ago Britain had an advanced transport system this road was being rebuilt to join the Port of Dover with the Channel Tunnel so it was during the course of works associated with the first land link with Europe we found the first evidence of sea link with Europe the timbre was darkened when we first found it was a very light golden brown color just like fresh oak beautiful thing huge logs trees like that just completely disappeared from Western Europe for all its complexity what you're really looking at here is basically four pieces of wood to bottom planks and to side planks but what they've done is taken a half log and then cleaved and hewed it down leaving these shapes standing out of the wood but to such tolerances they had to match up as mirror images of themselves so the whole thing can be fitted together if they don't match up the boat doesn't work this is a Bronze Age boat there is no metal whatsoever there were no nails or anything like that how did they join the various plants together there were two techniques the bottom clanks along the middle there are joined by Timbers hammered through those rails you see that were left up standing so that held together the bottom of the boat the sides of the boat what they've used here is twisted twigs of you and literally sewed the planks together just like you would sound two pieces of cloth together yes could it go to see the analysis of the hull suggests that this could travel in winds of force four or five my instinct tells me it's more likely that we're going along the coast about this period fint tools disappear from the archaeological record they imported enough bronze into this area that meant that they didn't have to use Flint which was lying all over the fields and all over the beaches it had so much bronze they didn't need to use it and that's a huge amount of problems that had to be brought in and I think it was both like this to pause the image of a Dover boat transporting goods around the coast of Britain shows a country unlike the primitive society we had once imagined this was not a misty island of disparate tribes living in isolation but a thriving maritime society with a network of trade routes which could also aid the spread of ideas an ancient Britain was a country with some intriguing ideas here we have little cache of stone hammers unused that they actually have placed as some sort of votive offerings 4000 years ago they believed that copper grew when something grows you need to keep feeding it to keep it growing in this area you sometimes find stashes of animal bones in nooks and crannies there leading a dangerous life so you need to have the gods on your side this has to be the largest man-made underground space anywhere in prehistoric Europe this was mining on a vast scale was this a Bronze Age gold rush now there was something else which gave these people the confidence to drive great shafts into the underworld many of the tools and implements made here were made as offerings the mine itself is not just the place of work and many of the corridors and passages here have offerings in them there's a great deal of evidence beginning to accumulate that people in the Bronze Age believed in a supernatural world below the ground to the people who sailed the Dover Boat this was more than just a timber vessel it had a higher more mystical power at some point during its life something very strange was done to it deliberately banded deliberately dismantled that dismantled in such a way that isn't easy to understand very specific actions took place with the boat that defy a logical explanation I'm more and more complying to believe that something very special is happening when this vote is abandoned I wonder if the place itself was somehow special but this was abandoned in this very dramatic place on the boundaries between sea and land when the Romans invaded in the year 43 they discovered a religion that was thousands of years old it's often believed that the Romans were not interested in the pagan rites of the ancient Britons but writing in his book on the Gallic walls Julius Caesar is clearly fascinated by a group of politically active priests known as the Druids Caesar is convinced that this group had its origins in Britain the Druids are engaged in things sacred conduct public and private sacrifices and interpret all matters of religion one of their leading tenets is that souls do not become extinct but pass after death from one body to another thus men are excited to valor the fear of death being disregarded the British Museum contains a strange relic from the period in which Caesar is writing a body found in a peat bog in Cheshire he was done to death in a terrible way he was first of all struck on the head with an arrow blade attacks yeah thats apparently didn't kill it because the edges of the wound were swollen so that he survived a little bit he was then garroted and they inserted a stick at the back of the neck and twisted it round and then they jerked it so that his spine was broken and that killed him they carried on and cut through the jugular vein and bled him also apart from an armband which is made of fox fur he is completely naked the elaborate killing over a naked man I think it's going to be ritual on thinks of the Druids I mean do you think it's we're looking at this sort of thing the Druids of course are associated with human sacrifice the other link with the Druids is that in the stomach there are also some mistletoe well now mistletoe means means drew the Druids were something that Roman historians and commentators have been flagging up for decades and decades they were the arch enemy the Taliban of the ancient world they're an elite priesthood they controlled all an order and it's they who lie behind the tribal resistance to the Roman invasion the Romans took measures to destroy Druidism ostensibly because they disapproved of the Druids involvement of human sacrifice but the Romans are being rather hypocritical the Romans themselves slaughter people for fun in the arena so I don't think he really was on moral grounds I was suppressing druids I think the real reason was political the druids are an alternative political structure after the conquest British resistance was pushed further and further west high into the mountains wait by 80s 60 the Druids had retreated across the many straights over there to Anglesey now the Romans had good reason to fear the Druids who could inspire fanatical loyalty and their followers there's a standoff at the many streams the Romans come face-to-face with the druid forces across the water the Roman author Tacitus described the scene on the opposite shore stood the Britons clothes embodied and prepared for action women were seen running through the ranks in wild disorder their apparel funeral the hair loose to the wind in the hands flaming torches and the whole appearance the frantic rage of the Furies it is the embodiment of terror the Romans stand frozen looking across the nen eyes straight absolutely petrified and gasps she Tonia's poor line as the Roman governor galvanizes them because he knows that if he can get them to invade angles he and beat them he will be a hero or and this is going to be one of the most brilliant offence because Britain will be secured this druid resistance this druid influence which has spread not only just across Britain but well into Gaul will be ended once and forever the shouts of their general gave the troops renewed vigour they rushed onto the attack with impetuous fury the island fell the religious groves dedicated to superstition and barbarous rites were leveled to the ground the Britons perished in their own flames but of course the Roman government made a huge political blunder because something else is going on behind him a few miles away what the Roman generals neglected in their eagerness to destroy the grades was the revolt of Boudicca the Furious warrior queen amassed an army and sacked The Times of Colchester in London this is the most terrible event in Rome in Britain's history and so the whole of southeastern Britain goes up in flames whilst Suetonius Paulinus with most of the Roman army is fighting a war in Northwest Wales a difficult place to get back from quickly today let alone in the year 60 why did the Romans risk such a humiliating defeat in the south in order to suppress a bunch of strange priests in Wales what pies did this religion whole this is see henge the remains of a circle of 55 wooden posts surrounding the trunk of an enormous oak tree cut down over four thousand years ago it was some distance inland when it was made the huge tree trunk at the center of his extraordinary shrine was turned completely upside down before it was placed into the ground I am certain that the people who did this believed in another world another dimension beneath the ground when the Romans invaded Britain was no barbaric outpost but a fertile industrious nation separated from the rest of Europe which flourished in a unique and spectacular way but the Romans also discovered something else these were people so brave in battle it was as if they had no fear of death the Romans dismissed this as the unthinking courage of savages but they were wrong the people of ancient Britain had a system of belief which had helped them come to terms with their own mortality you

Channel: docufans2

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Keywords: BC, B.C., Rome, watling, Watling, Boudicca, Roman, Caesar, Julius, Britain, medieval, middle, ages, Francis, Pryor, history, documentary, Anglo, Saxon, documentaries

Id: 3qZo0_YaBhc

Length: 46min 45sec (2805 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 19 2011