Britain BC - Part 2: Neolithic & Bronze Age henges, tombs and dwellings

in AD 60 Queen Boudicca led a violent revolt against the Roman invaders the Romans were unable to defend themselves they were preoccupied hundreds of miles away on the island of Anglesey the last term of the trades these mysterious priests were the inheritors of a religion which had been at the center of British lives for thousands of years in one battle the Romans killed them all why were the Romans more interested in suppressing as bunch of priests and defending their heartland what secrets did this religion home and what threat could it possibly have posed to the mighty Roman I'm an archeology and I've spent the last thirty years studying our prehistoric path this is a massively undervalued part of our nation's history contrary to the traditional view of ancient Britons a land of barbaric savages civilized by the railroad I have discovered a country isolated from the rest of Europe which developed a hugely successful and uniquely British agriculture and Industry but the world of ancient Britain was about far more than technical achievement people also had a rich spiritual life these monuments are a mysterious part of our ancient path which we have never fully understood but we are directly descended from the people who built these strange places and I believe understanding will shed light on who we are today it won't be easy this was a religion without a Bible their priests valued memory over the written word when the Romans killed off four druids they cut the only direct link we had to our ancient paths the British countryside is strewn with the remains of this ancient religion it's just a question of knowing where to look throughout my archaeological career I have found evidence that the people of ancient Britain believed in supernatural worlds it was at flag thin in East Anglia where I was directing excavations but I first discovered traces of this other world this is the place where I made the discovery I was having a look at a Roman Road which crossed the dike so I took my people down here and we started examining the edge of the die well we barely started when I caught my foot on a large lump of cup wood which lay in the mud on the top of the dike it had been sharpened with a narrow bladed acts and it was made out of oak now oak simply won't grow in wet fen so I was very suspicious my slid down the side of the dike and found more wood which is about a metre below the bottom of the Roman Road and that told me that this new wood was about a thousand years earlier than the Roman Trek and this is what it was one piece of an ancient trackway these posts were driven into the ground nearly three-and-a-half thousand years ago but this is just a tiny fragment of the entire site it extends in that direction for about 200 meters and in that direction for upwards of a kilometer so it was a massive undertaking now it has to be a causeway but at certain key times of the year it had a special role we have found over 300 pieces of bronze metalwork here swords daggers Spears now these weren't objects that were lost they were carefully placed in the ground for a specific reason this is a scale replica of what you'd have seen here at flag Fenn around 1300 BC I'm standing on an artificial island that was made out of timber and brushwood and running up to me across the water if n is a causeway constructed from massive oak timber it was amongst these Timbers that we found hundreds of valuable items that have been carefully and reverently placed in the water virtually unused prehistoric objects like these are found all over Britain people have tried to explain by suggesting that objects were deliberately destroyed in order to keep their market value high I don't think so these objects were being passed through the water or the earth into another world every time somebody decides to build a road or a housing estate or in the case of sea henge here takes a stroll along the beach something turns up in 1998 coastal erosion revealed something very strange indeed on a beach in Norfolk the trunk of a huge oak tree emerge from the sea surrounded by a circle of 55 wooden posts the trunk had been deliberately placed upside down in the ground it's circular shape was as important to the ancient Britons as a cross is to Christian it was a symbol of a religion which had a very particular perception of life and the afterlife 4000 years ago this monument stood on dry land I think that the strange inverted tree trunk is being offered to another world which lies beneath the ground I still find the memory of that huge upside-down tree strangely eerie and compelling it was cut down in the spring in the full flash of life and it was transferring its life forces deep into the ground to an underworld it was the prehistoric heaven to Christians heaven is up there in the sky but in the past it was down there one of the things that the Romans couldn't believe when they arrived in Britain was however native people seemed to have no fear of death so brave with a warrior such bravery was armor no weapon good energy was it these strange beliefs which had helped the ancient Britons to conquer the fear of death using wood stone and earth structures across the British landscape these circular monuments are unlike anything else found in the ancient world and they have mystified archaeologists for decades intriguing new evidence has begun to reveal how these places might been used on South Uist and Western Isles of Scotland archaeologist mike Parker Pearson has just uncovered the remains of an ancient village where he's made some very macabre discoveries it's basically a little community who living in the sand about 1300 BC three thousand years ago it actually starts not as a settlement but as a cemetery they're living on top of a cremation ground hold on hold on I'm pretty certain it's deliberate because it's not simply that the house is built on top of the cemetery it's central half is right on top of one of the cremation burials when that house went out of use somebody came along and actually dug a little hole down and quarried into the side to get up underneath the cremation burial they must have known it was there and they were either looking for something or trying to contact somebody in the beyond really quite strained Mike has excavated three houses here interestingly all three was circular and then we have the Northeast what's extraordinary is that in the northeast corner of each house there was a strange human burial where we found a skeleton lying on its side in a crouched position the big surprise was over there where we had a dead woman don't hide women buried in a pit holding to her teeth strangely enough the association with death doesn't stop there just here in the top of a posthole yeah there was a newborn baby first down on its face looking out the doorway and then just a capital this house outside has a cremation platform where they actually burnt the dead were these gruesome burials murdered where they trophies sacrifices these bodies were a clue to understanding the meaning of this strange religion in order to find out more I traveled to another outpost of the British Isles to Orkney the Roman invaders never got as far north as opening they'd been led to believe that this remote spot was occupied by primitive bog people they were quite wrong this rock is amazing stuff it naturally splits into handy brick sized lumps like this or you can have it in huge slabs to put on your roof the wind here is so severe but trees simply can't fried so you have to build your entire buildings out of stone like this and that's why ancient buildings and tombs in orbit survived better than almost anywhere else in Europe in the 1930s harsh storms uncovered the oldest stone houses in North Western Europe these two houses were built nearly six thousand years ago that's thirteen centuries before the pyramids there was a little corridor here to keep the wind out now the walls were divided up by these slabs known as stalls there's a hearth in the middle here this was actually where the food was prepared the end room here was probably a storage room with lots of cupboard space for a fitted kitchen idea early houses were oblong in shape but over time the design becomes circle round heresies like these at skara brae would have existed all over Britain but being built in wood they vanished within the circular shape of these buildings a formal pattern is clear an elaborate dresser faces the entrance there are beds on either side and in the center there's a half the round shape of the living space is reflected on a much larger scale in the landscape this awesome stone circle is the ring of brodgar it originally consisted of sixty stones arranged in a ring about a hundred and three meters in diameter so what lay behind the growing British obsession with circles and solar alignments I think the simplest way to answer that question is to take things that structured lives then and now take a clock now the hour hand of a clock mimics the daily action of the Sun and nowadays we're obsessed with hours and minutes because work dominates our life you could say that work is part of our fundamental cosmology but in prehistory societies were rather more fragmented the worst certain unifying themes they were all farmers and farmers I know are profoundly concerned with the passage of the seasons I'm very much aware in Orkney but the weather must really have controlled their lives they must have feared and respected the elements and they believed that the ancestors could intercede on their behalf not just with weather such as storms and floods but other things disease birth death and even the harvest so that magnificent stone clock isn't a timepiece at all it's one piece of a vast panorama of sacred structure a monumental jigsaw puzzle which needs to be pieced together to be understood the key is that the monuments are interconnected the Ring of Brodgar is the beginning of a huge sacred procession a processional way traveled a mile across the narrow peninsula to meet a second stone sir the stones of Stenness to the east lies the Magnificent tomb of maize how buried below a huge circular mark the precision of maize ha is as impressive as any of the ancient monuments of Egypt its narrow entrance is aligned with the Setting Sun on the winter solstice the darkest point of winter madness absolutely stored in it now that the Sun would have come streaming down here we're not midwinter sunset that's the dying Sun and yes it's at that very cold dark time in this place which is associated with death that you suddenly have the light coming in that's the time when we're moving into the season where things are going to start growing again this is sort of symbol of life yes and of regeneration yeah the cycle of the seasons meant something to the people of ancient Britain did they believe that human life too was cyclical how did the living in the dead interrelate obviously with people coming in and out of the tombs there was a lot of interaction between the living and the dead and some people have taken this as far as to say this is a house for the dead many have houses for the living some elements of the layout of the tomb are similar to the layout of the house we have the passage and if you can imagine I'm walking into either house or to what do I see in front of me quite a large open area ahead of me in a house I would see a dresser here I see a chamber on either side I'd see a bed and here there's a chamber and a chamber but the thing of course that's missing is the hearth which is the heart of the life it's absolutely and deliberately absolutely the circular shape of all the structures in Orkney is no coincidence these similarities are part of the pattern a round maze harm Jane has discovered the remains of pits for standing stones and how many I mean the how many others were there just one well it's possible that there was a ring of stones surrounding maze how or standing before maze how was actually built so it makes you wonder just how much they were moving standing stones around the landscape these four stones here actually performing any useful purpose are they I mean they don't seem to go back now let me they're not tied into that masonry they really are just standing stones only but they're very striking yes and they would have been freestanding and then the tomb built around them right extraordinary Thornton just as a stone circle appears to predate Mays harm Colin Richards believes a building or house may lie within the stones of Stenness they actually picked up the stones and moved them over there so this is the path that they found when they dug hidden yeah yeah Square hath just like the houses single entrance same spatial organization but I mean I'm tempted to ask if you got a great heart like that is there a house or big building actually within these stones it's just possible that there is actually a structure underneath here what if that sensation XID yeah you've got a building what in effect you're doing then is you're sort of sort of monumental izing a building are to a house yes and it's the heart stones which are always selected paths were excavated out of houses and reused linking the earliest inhabitants with later inhabitants to the house so sort of linking back to your ancestor yes the tombs have actually grown out of stone circles which themselves have been built around the remains of heritage what did all this mean let's begin to fit the jigsaw puzzle together when individuals or families died it's likely that their houses were left to disintegrate the house leaves a scar on the ground a memory of the people who once lived there in time descendants built memorials to their ancestor massive stones were quarried transported and arranged in circles recalling the round houses in which the dead had once lived still later huge tombs replaced the stone circle incorporating individual stones all on the exact spot that once housed for living tools and stone circles did not just resemble houses they were actually built on top of them unlike today where we separate life and death confining our dead to cemeteries the ancient Britons wanted to be close to their ancestors who were thought to protect the living I think what's going on here is we must concede the stone circles the way in which we conceive of these things as a remnant of old reasoning if you chipped the object of study to people's lives people lived it barn house they go through a series of rites of passage that involved these monuments and maybe end up being buried or burying people in maze how so you know if you start to think about people's lives and less about the material type of monument as archaeologists you can see how they all operate together I'd say at a push you probably are dealing with the commemoration of perhaps individuals simply by dragging a stone in moving it past other stones you're almost reciting your kin by virtue of your movement around them you're reciting a family history genealogy I think that's absolutely fascinating I think it really does bring these stones to life immortalized in stone the dead ancestors of Orkney are constantly visible on the landscape and in the homes these people celebrated the presence of the dead and the lives of the living moving through these monuments was an act of memory and of respect understanding this mighty procession through the sacred landscape will help us to reconsider the most elusive of all ancient British monuments Stonehenge a huge advance in archeology was made possible by the introduction of aerial photography after the first world war Squadron Leader Gilbert incent a pilot fascinated by archaeology spotted something strange in a field just three kilometers from stone him it was December 1925 excavations revealed 168 post holes Mike Pitts showed me around this is one of the bazzara sites in British archaeology I think it is a fantastically important site although it looks old these concrete stumps represent six enormous circles of wooden posts some of which stood over seven meters high known as woodhenge this structure has been a vital crew in unlocking the enigma of Stonehenge this structure is contemporary with Stonehenge it's very similar in scale and this concept concentric rings is of course the same like Stonehenge it's precisely aligned on the midsummer sunrise so there's that very direct symbolic link with Stonehenge but here there were people holding ceremonies and feasting it looks as if they were feasting and killing in very large numbers young pigs so here there are ceremonies involving large numbers of people whereas at Stonehenge there are very few by comparison very few artifacts and if you go out of the entrance straight down the slope you get the River Raven which snakes way to start to sight over the ridge there yeah and you can follow that River down south for a few hundred yards and then pick up the Avenue earthwork we straight into Stonehenge the journey is possible to trace in the landscape close to woodhenge the procession meets the river Aven which snakes round turns sack it meets the beginning of a ceremonial Avenue leading to stone hen in the direction of the Rising Sun this ceremonial Avenue has almost been plowed out by modern farming but early aerial photographs reveal it clearly it has to be one of the really dramatic entrances for any ancient site I think this extraordinary arrangement of stones when it was built for the people who saw this going up was completely unique nothing like it anywhere in the world and then when you come through it's fantastic isn't it it's astounding the sense of enclosure and the different scale of the stones these little blue stone sort of crowding around us there are people from the from the past these really were seen as ancestors and that they've been brought over and then this asin's would around them to protect them to enclose them both in Orkney at Stonehenge the circles are deliberately lined up with the rising in the setting of the Sun these little blue stones come from the horizon over there to the west which is where the Sun sets and the timber henge here the big one woodhenge is over there in the direction of the sunrise you wonder if there is a connection between sunrise and sunset between birth and death and the stones are associated with death and the ancestors and the wooden henge is associated with life and so you have ceremonies at woodhenge where a lot of people a lot of noise people who recently died are involved in ceremonies that are beginning to take them into the world of the ancestors and they travel from woodhenge across the landscape down the river and up the avenue into the center of the circle here where they join the stones with the ancestors and they enter the world of the ancestors so this is like a like a doorway from life into death and then the procession presumably was a key part of that this concept of procession and movement is written into the landscape with this long avenue earthwork if this idea works it has some truth in it then what happens is by the time the people actually reach the stone circle they are no longer of this world so we're not looking for physical remains indeed no human remains have been found at the center of Stonehenge the passage from sunrise to sunset is a journey from birth to death the transition from wood to stone represents the way in which our soft bodies eventually turn to hard white both although the Avenue that link for living in the Dead Stonehenge has been almost erased there is one still standing at Avebury which can give us a good idea of how the procession might have looked quite something after being at Stonehenge just now where we know the avenues there but you walk along it you can't see it the thing that strikes me is the avenue marked by these socking great stone the Stonehenge Avenue isn't is it apparently not although William stutely claimed at Stonehenge that he could see in the ground where stones like these have been removed from the avenue and that's never been tested by excavation so it's just possible there was something like this it's been changed somehow you feel that these stones are actually enclosing a space that is special it is sacred in some way perhaps there were sessions here or perhaps these procession roots are actually enclosing spaces that were keeping people out yes can almost imagine this thing being lined by people but Stonehenge and Avebury did not stand alone like churches today stone circles were dotted all over the landscape archeologists are currently looking for the names of one right next to the Avery Avenue mr. Faulkner mid 19th century antiquary claimed when he was riding a horse in this area that he spotted the remains of a stone circle there was one stone which remains standing now Faulkner thought that he saw two further stones which were lying flat in a series of hollows that mark the positions of other stones which had been removed or been broken up and taken away these are the remains of a stone which have actually been deliberately smashed up it's in the right place but of course two stones don't make a circle so we've got to look for more if we're really going to demonstrate the mr. Faulkner was right these may be small family finds if you like places where 20 or 30 people might congregate there but you have centers like FB which are the focus for really massive communal gatherings involving people coming in from well outside the region Josh did find his circle which is hardly surprising since in 2000 BC Britain was covered with these monuments to the ancestors this was the heyday of a religion which venerated the ancestors and celebrated the inevitable journey from life to death that we are all in the process of making but why were the dead ancestors so important to these people why did they believe that they could walk the souls of a dead Jew to the afterlife what lay behind me is Macar rehearsal for death so why were the ancestors so important to these people but they were prepared to worship them as gods to understand the origins of these beliefs we have to go back to a time long long before the construction of a great henges trying to understand a religion without knowing its origins is rather like attempting to explain the meaning of the Christian cross without knowing the story of the crucifixion in search of origins we must travel back 6,000 years to the time when the first religious monuments began to appear this was also over time when people began a new agricultural way of life and it's not a coincidence this is Knapp Hill near its summit is a causeway ting closure they appear at the birth of Britain's prehistoric religion these are circular ditches dug into the earth a radical new idea about what they mean has come from archaeologist Richard Bradley for fairly steep old Bank in there well I Finland so that's the bitch of it that's the ditch Richard believes that these ditches represent a completely new relationship between humans and the land where it's very dark green yeah because the grass is taking advantage of the moisture is growing better it's done with year than the area around it runs for what about 10 meters probably about 2 meters deep yeah and the spoil they dig out from it is the bank were standing on right probably 3,500 BC you could make an argument make a case for these being the first ceremonial sites yes I think they are what do you think lay behind them in here we are in a fantastic location halfway to the sky I mean what what do you think was going on we blew adopting a totally different way of life often seek security in an origin myth a belief about how things came to be and I think we can understand the monuments in this country in terms of a real or imagined origin in distant places and in a different sort of world so what caused this huge change I think there's a very big change when people start using crops and animals they have a different relation to the land than from hunter-gatherers hunter-gatherers tend to take from nature to act in partnership with a nature it sends to operate in harmony with nature they don't impose and generally they don't own resources farmers own sources and have to plan for the future this implies a particular conception of time it involves the work of generation upon generation to be viable and that's very very different it's really ultimately about owning the land that you're farming and in a way you claim that your great-grandfather was there and that is your claim to the land this was the first time that the people of Britain had owned organized and controlled the land there was a new desire to create boundaries between different holding to determine who owned what and when you share out the land there is always neutral territory no-man's land it was in these special spaces but the causeway enclosures were built is that significant the fact it's on the edge some of the things that happen the places like this are dangerous they're where you deal with the dead with strangers they're places to sit apart from the normal pattern of daily low in this new farming landscape the cult of the ancestors is born their influence was necessary for the continued fertility of the land for the ancient Britons for discovery of crops something which when you cut it down can be regrown from the seeds of the dead must have been a kind of magic and it's possible that they believe that these ceremonial enclosures were fields for the dead a place where the ancestors souls could like the crops grow to life again these fields for the dead were everywhere in the landscape and they remained special places for thousands of year maiden castle in Dorset is a magnificent hill fort which started life as a causeway enclosure 6,000 years ago okay well we're standing on this big lump here yeah it is an artificial bank but this bank itself is built on top of a very much earlier one that was built about just after 4000 BC yeah and that monument is the earliest thing that we know on this hilltop probably things were going on here even before the first camp was built before 4000 BC like Knapp Hill this was a special place in the landscape because it belonged to everyone and no one in the Bronze Age or the westernmost rampart running up there probably incorporates a boundary ditch these boundary ditches ran up to important central meeting places there must have been pressure on land there needed to divide one community from another but then there was also need for these groups from time to time to come together to agree things to have ceremonies and so on what it looks like then is that these central places developed in neutral spots on the boundaries I mean presumably they were the safe places where people could miss a common a common area keeping people part but people still have to come together for day tall and a special activity went on within that defined area this was a place where things happened where communities met land had acquired a new meaning for the ancient Britain and these patches of common land packed with ancestral bones became magic what began as a celebration of a new relationship with the land became a way of life the people who constructed the hill fort thousands of years later knew that they were building on a sacred place but maiden castle as a sad epilogue its story was taken up by archaeologist sir Mortimer wheeler most dramatic thing that I've ever been concerned with he find what he believed were the remains of a vicious battle between the Romans and the ancient Britons I've got a clear vision almost of what happened hide happen they came into a rush the only way they could do it they got in amongst these chaps they cut down the defenders or in mass mass formation almost one of these Britons was cut down with no less than seven cuts on his skull he was a massacre it was a piece of litter with corpses no time we found 40 of them all with fatal wounds it won't be living Brett Wheeler was a military man as you know this fantastic graphic description of the natives being beaten up by the the Roman army but only a certain number of the burials only 14 of the burials I actually had evidence of injuries and wounds I seem to remember from the very recent excavations but some of the bodies there the cuts had actually healed over in the bone yeah that's absolutely right and clearly you know that takes quite some time so it's not as wheeler had perhaps portrayed it it's no surprise so Mortimer wheeler find so many bodies we now know that Maiden Castle had been an important burial ground for thousands of years wheeler didn't acknowledge them because he was so captivated by the military success of the Romans it is typical of a short-sighted view we British half of our own prehistory look at our building our hero the way we work ourselves into the ground the dark history of our imperialism and we look like the sons and daughters of Rome but we are not being invaded by the Romans had a terrible effect not just on how we view our own history but on how we developed as a nation we've come to believe that Roman colonization of his country was a civilizing act when in fact it was a brutal suppression it's hardly surprising that we did the same thing to countries in Africa and Asia 2,000 years later it's time to let go of our Roman inheritance and embrace our real heritage at Maidan castle the only sign that the Romans were ever here is a rather insignificant temple which barely scratches the surface of this great monument our true ancestors are the people who built these vast imposing hill forts on land which had been secret for thousands of years the tools and standing stones of Orkney the circles of Stonehenge and Avery and the hundreds of monuments which lie across our hills and fields today are all part of a belief system which lies at the heart of our ancient heritage these people were not afraid to die protecting their land because their bond with it was deep-rooted and strong they believed that their souls would continue to own and nourish it long after their bodies had gone of course the Romans tried to take all this away and replace it with their own civilization but it depends what you mean by civilization to me it's just a word dare I say it rather like democracy today which can be used as an excuse to impose foreign ideals on another country Tacitus understood the situation well writing shortly after the conquest of Roman Britain he penned some lines which still bring a lump to my throat and so the population was gradually led into the demoralizing temptations of our caves baths and sumptuous banquets the unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as civilization when in fact they were a feature of their enslavement was Tacitus right in our admiration for the Romans have we lost our real identity over the past 20 years I've grown increasingly convinced that the ancient Britons played a significant role in the early development of modern British culture underneath our rational and civilized exterior there are more deep-seated beliefs in community and ancestry and a firm faith in individual freedom freedom of the individual is of fundamental importance and it's something that we've handed on to the Commonwealth and to the United States where it's sometimes seen as an anglo-saxon virtue but the anglo-saxons never penetrated Scotland Ireland or Wales where individual freedoms are taken even more seriously than in England so I think these are ideas that have very deep roots indeed and maybe who knows they extend back to pre Roman times so if you've got a glass of something suitable within comfortable reach may I suggest you raise it with me to the memory of those most remarkable people the ancient Britons

Channel: marsharent

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Keywords: Neolithic, Bronze Age, Prehistoric Britain, Stonehenge (Structure), Stonehenge Avebury And Associated Sites (Listed Site), Flag Fen (Tourist Attraction), Skara Brae (Tourist Attraction), seahenge, Maeshowe (Listed Site), Ring Of Brodgar (Tourist Attraction), Woodhenge (Location), Avebury (Tourist Attraction), knap hill, Maiden Castle Dorset (Building), francis pryor, megaliths, Britain B.C, Henge, Tomb (Building Function)

Id: N1X4hCC-ZSU

Length: 48min 5sec (2885 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 21 2014