Secrets of Stonehenge FULL SPECIAL | NOVA | PBS America

NARRATOR: Every year, a million people descend on Stonehenge. They ask ancestral questions about this mysterious monument. Who built it? How was it builded? And because? To find out, archaeologists are studying Stonehenge with new tools and new eyes. COLIN RICHARDS: By building Stonehenge, these people were creating something that had never been created before. It's a bit like your own space program. NARRATOR: There is a new theory about the meaning of Stonehenge. MIKE PITTS: A lot of bone. MIKE PARKER PEARSON: It's about the nature of eternity, the meaning of life and death. JACQUELINE McKINLEY: It's a nice long piece of fibula.

I think we're going to have at least 50 people here. NARRATOR: An ancient world is coming back to life. MIKE PITTS: This is an extraordinary moment for Stonehenge. We're starting to understand it in a way we've never been able to before. NARRATOR: The

secrets

of Stonehenge, revealed right now in NOVA. Major NARRATOR:o NOVA is haunting and majestic, Stonehenge is an icon of prehistory. It dates back to a time before Egypt built its pyramids, to the Stone Age in Britain. Time has taken its toll, but this monument remains a marvel of ancient engineering. A circular ditch and bench surround the stones.

The standing stones rise more than 20 feet and weigh up to 45 tons. Horizontal slabs called lintels crown enormous pillars. All of these giants are made of sarsen, a local sandstone harder than granite. However, they were carved and assembled as if they were wood. The uprights were tapered and finished with knobs. These fit into recesses at the bottom of the lintels. The curved lintels, joined by tongue and groove, formed an almost perfect circle. And despite a slight slope, this ring of lintels was level within a few centimeters. The sarsens dominate Stonehenge. But among them there are smaller stones, no less notable.

Geologists determined that these are bluestones, transported here from Wales, at least 240 kilometers away. Who built Stonehenge? How was it builded? And because? For years, we could only wonder. Now a new era begins. An army of archaeologists is deployed around Stonehenge. Okay, everyone. NARRATOR: Led by Mike Parker Pearson, the Stonehenge Riverside Project has nearly 200 members, with scientists, students, and

special

ists in everything from astronomy to field studies. PARKER PEARSON: We've been on this archaeological project for six years. I think it's one of the largest in the world, so it's a great opportunity to uncover some of the key questions about Stonehenge.

We are on a mission, we are on a search. NARRATOR: It's a quest to rebuild the ancient world that gave rise to Stonehenge and resurrect the people who built it. The strategy is to excavate not only Stonehenge, but the entire surrounding landscape. Stonehenge itself was extensively excavated during the 20th century. Those excavations established that the monument was built in stages. Prehistoric people chose an undulating stretch of Salisbury Plain. And around the year 3000 BC. C. they dug a ditch, a slope and a ring of 56 wells in the underlying limestone of the plain. These pits probably contained bluestones, brought from Wales.

Then, about 500 years later, the colossal sarsen stones were installed. The blue stones were taken out of their outer ring and rearranged among the sarsens. Several other stones completed the monument. And later, parallel banks would define a processional avenue stretching from Stonehenge to the River Avon. 20th century excavations also uncovered the dead of Stonehenge. In the 1920s, nearly 60 human burials were excavated here, many of them in that outer ring of 56 graves known as Aubrey Holes. But the discoveries were hardly recognized because they were cremation burials. PITTS: These people had been cremated, so they didn't have pretty skulls with shiny teeth to display.

They had bundles of ash and pieces of broken burnt bones. Archaeologists were not interested in them as objects. At that time, it was firmly believed that nothing could be learned by looking at cremated bones. NARRATOR: No museum in Britain wanted the bones, so in 1935 they were reburied in Aubrey Hole number seven. PITTS: The idea that Stonehenge was actually one of the largest cremation cemeteries in early prehistoric Europe, if not the largest, simply disappeared underground at Aubrey Hole seven and was forgotten about. NARRATOR: The bones remained intact until today. Mike Parker Pearson has come to recover the dead from Stonehenge.

For him, they represent a treasure trove of information. PARKER PEARSON: With closer analysis of those remains, even though they are burned, we can estimate the approximate ages of the people, we may be able to determine whether they are male or female, we may even find out more about their standard of living. So, it's a really important opportunity to learn about the people of Stonehenge. NARRATOR: Records from 1935 indicate that the bones were placed in four burlap bags and buried with a commemorative plaque. PITTS: This is the first time anyone has seen a decent Aubrey Hole in 80 years.

It's pretty impressive. But it is what is below, below, that is what interests us most. And we are getting closer. JULIAN RICHARDS: Oh, look. PITTS: What is that? It is? NARRATOR: Suddenly they see a small piece of bone. PITTS: Yeah, it's burnt bone, yeah. There is more. It's everywhere. NARRATOR: The burlap bags containing the bones have rotted. I think we have to loosen the soil little by little very care

full

y. Is it desperately uncomfortable? Yes, it's enough. PARKER PEARSON: So we're going to do it in turns as long as each of us can stand up. JULIAN RICHARDS: Until the blood rushes to your head and you start to feel weak.

PARKER PEARSON: That already happened. (laughter) PARKER PEARSON: Oh, here we go, here we go. PITTS: Oh, look what I found. PARKER PEARSON: The plate. There is. Read it out loud to us. JULIAN RICHARDS: "Most of these bones were unearthed in the years 1921, 1922, 1923 and reburied in 1935." PITTS: It doesn't really tell us anything we don't already know, does it? But isn't it nice? PARKER PEARSON: We've finally reached the bone layer. The men who buried these bones for posterity would actually have put them in decent containers. But all we're really seeing is a very loose cremated bone. JULIAN RICHARDS: Oh, look at that.

I lifted the plate and what we saw below was a huge shock. It's just a complete jumble of bones from who knows how many people. The plate stopped falling dirt between them. It was completely clean. But it's going to be a serious puzzle in the lab. I was hoping it would be easy, but this is the worst case scenario. NARRATOR: Little remains of the people of Stonehenge. of your world? Around the year 3000 BC, the time of the pharaohs began in Egypt. In the Near East, the first cities with writing and wheeled vehicles flourish. The use of metal is spreading throughout Europe, but has not yet reached Britain.

Here the Stone Age is in its final phase: the Neolithic. The stone ax reigns supreme. With this tool, people cut down forests and shape the beams of their houses. Their settlements are small and dispersed. They raise livestock and move with their flocks. They grow barley and wheat. McKINLEY: People tend to have the impression that in the Neolithic, life was bleak and short. That's not necessarily the case at all. Overall, people seem to have probably been pretty well fed. They would have had access to fairly good food resources; They were obviously sophisticated and probably lived a pretty good lifestyle.

NARRATOR: Their stone tools and fine ceramics have survived the centuries. But objects made from wood, plant fibers or leather have mostly disappeared from Britain's climate and soil. The structure of their daily lives (their customs and beliefs) has long eluded us. But the remains of their dead are providing new clues. At Aubrey Hole number seven, Jacqueline McKinley joins the digging effort. An expert in ancient human remains, she quickly detects individual characteristics. McKINLEY: It's a nice long piece of fibula. Bright. Probably second or third molar. That's the back of the skull, she looks at it. In fact, that's a chap.

That's a male. Cheerful good. It is a very important collection. We are in a very important place. Although it may seem like a mess, by separating the different skeletal elements, we can calculate how many people were there and the sex and age of those individuals. And seeing the amount of material we have, I think we will bring at least 50 people here. NARRATOR: In total, 35 pounds of cremated bone are eventually sent to the University of Sheffield. Graduate student Christie Cox is slowly resurrecting Stonehenge's dead. There are thousands and thousands of pieces of bone. It's much more than we expected when we originally started the excavation.

McKINLEY: This should be joined here. That's just amazing. So we're looking at this part of the side here, where the jaw goes up... So that would be the TMJ joint. Yes. And that suggests we have an older individual. NARRATOR: The bones reveal that burial at Stonehenge was reserved for a select group. McKINLEY: In a normal domestic cemetery, you would expect to find a variety of ages and individuals of both sexes. But most of the cremated bones are from adults, and most of those adults appear to be men, and mostly in the 25 to 40 age group. COX: We're seeing only slight bone wear in this population.

So they were quite healthy, they were quite robust male individuals. McKINLEY: If there are mostly male cremations, that's a strange thing; That means certain people are being selected to be buried here. What was so

special

about them? PARKER PEARSON: I suspect they may well have been people of important political stature, quite possibly the men of one or more royal lineages whose authority made Stonehenge possible in the first place. PITTS: So what this might be indicating is that actually, at the time Stonehenge was built, we had a male-based aristocratic society. That's something we would never have known without these bones.

NARRATOR: Perhaps a royal family gathered the labor to create Stonehenge... and in the British Isles, other families or clans built their own stone circles. Nearly a thousand still stand today. Neolithic people also built wooden circles. Today, all that remains are traces of the post holes. But their size indicates that some were supporting tree trunks 15 feet high and weighing several tons. Huge pits were dug to contain these upright beams and stones. And many circles were surrounded by a circular ditch and bank, an earthwork known as a henge. How did people with Stone Age technology manage to build on such a large scale?

Near Stonehenge, Parker Pearson's team excavates a prehistoric ditch dug into the chalk of Salisbury Plain. Suddenly an ancient excavation tool comes to light. Oh! Oh, look at that! NARRATOR: It's a beak made from a deer's antler. MAN: Oh, yes. Antler picks were used as a means of excavating these features, ditches and wells during the Neolithic. You can imagine people using these picks to scoop out the large chunks of chalk, scooping them out and then putting them in baskets and removing them from the hole, a task that requires an enormous amount of labor. When they got to the bottom, when they were done, maybe it was broken and they just dropped it, or maybe they just left it there deliberately, almost like an offering.

NARRATOR: But how did people move the giant sarsens, up to 45 tons of solid rock? How did they raise lintels to the top of those door-like structures called trilithons? For archaeologist Mike Pitts, the process involved labor and myth. PITTS: We're about 20 miles north of Stonehenge and this area is probably where all the big stones, the sarsens, at Stonehenge came from. This landscape now looks much like what I think it would have looked like in the Neolithic. So we have the trees, we have the forests growing, expressing life, and we have the stones by the thousands that lie largely underground as bodies.

These are places that could be repositories of superstition, myths, fear and danger. NARRATOR: Finding a sarsen of the right size and shape for Stonehenge may have been a sacred quest for the most skilled stonemasons. PITTS: Like a Michelangelo, they examined the stone very care

full

y. These are guys who are used to making stone tools, they understand stone, and I think a stonemason at Stonehenge would have seen a stone like this as something they're used to making, like a stone ax or an arrowhead, but blown up. on an enormous scale. . NARRATOR: Masons may have roughly shaped the sarsens at the quarry site, using pounding stones.

But they left few clues as to how they moved and lifted giant stones. MAN: One, two, three... NARRATOR: So the researchers have experimented. Stone Age Britain did not have the wheel. But it is possible that people dragged large stoneson rollers made from tree trunks. Maybe they put in wooden tracks and smeared them with grease. ALL: Two, three, four. NARRATOR: A wooden sled with a keel would have kept the stone centered on the tracks. Lifting a giant stone somehow involved tilting it into a giant hole. One, two, three, pull! NARRATOR: The lintels may have been raised on ramps and pried into place.

All of these techniques are plausible. There is simply no evidence that they were actually used. Now there is a new theory. Andrew Young became obsessed with carved stone balls during his postgraduate work at the University of Exeter. Some of these prehistoric objects are elaborately engraved, but many are unadorned. Most have been found in the north-east of Scotland, an area known for its stone circles. These artifacts defy explanation. People had said they could be weapons or for throwing or possibly crushing vegetables, the sort of thing you can do with a portable stone object. Nothing anyone had really said about them satisfied my question: what are they for?

NARRATOR: Young learned for himself, heard aftershocks, and reflected on a strange fact. Many carved, engraved and smooth balls have exactly the same diameter. YOUNG: Large numbers are the same size as the millimeter. And why should they be identical in size? And that gave me that "Eureka!" moment. Well, if you are going to use them as a wheel, you need them to be the same size. NARRATOR: Andrew Young had a vision of Stone Age ball bearing technology. For his doctorate. thesis, he is testing his idea on a farm near Stonehenge. YOUNG MAN: So this one is tall.

NARRATOR: He is joined by a team of fellow students and his graduate advisor, Bruce Bradley, an authority on experimental archaeology. Alright, let's get them closer to each other again. BRUCE BRADLEY: Andy brought me this theory. I was amazed because it made sense. It is so obvious. Why didn't anyone think of this before? NARRATOR: Using Douglas fir rails they will build 80 feet of track. YOUNG MAN: Although he is not heterosexual. NARRATOR: Each rail has a channel cut to hold hand-finished granite balls to a precise 75 millimeter diameter. They will also use wooden balls. During the time of Stonehenge, people were skilled at carving stone and wood and could have produced all of these components.

That's much better. NARRATOR: Instead of one giant rock, the team has 25 tons of gravel. And Andrew Young has his worries. YOUNG: I'm really worried about the type of wood we use. They would probably have used oak in the Neolithic. We have not been able to use oak because of the cost. The wood we have may be too soft. NARRATOR: They build a platform, a cradle to ride on the rails and support the weight. BRADLEY: The worst fear would be that we only had a couple of tons there and we couldn't push it anywhere. There are a lot of unknowns right now, and that's what experiments are all about.

NARRATOR: They carry 3.3 tons, about the weight of a blue stone at Stonehenge. BRADLEY: One, two, three, come on! Keep it up, keep it up! Oh damn. NARRATOR: Almost immediately, they are trapped. Man, what happened? NARRATOR: The weight is crushing the Douglas fir. BRADLEY: This amount of weight seems to have compressed it enough that our gap, we're losing it. YOUNG MAN: It's less than a centimeter and that's not good. As soon as the crib touches the railing, friction arises. You've totally undermined everything we've done with balls. NARRATOR: Young's worst fear about softwood has come true. But there is a quick solution.

To compensate for the compression of the Douglas fir, wooden inserts are placed in the grooves. This, 23 thousand. NARRATOR: The gap is back, at least for now. They carry almost six tons, approximately the weight of two blue stones. Can they do it? Suddenly look at the division of labor. How did that happen? MAN: Hey, girls, the call will be "dizzying." BRADLEY: Okay. One two three. Go! It is moving! YOUNG MAN: Keep going, friends. Follow it! Let's get on those wooden balls! We are gaining speed! Oh! (applause) YOUNG MAN: We moved the blue stones, and once they were gone, we left.

Yes, we were having a hard time stopping. YOUNG: We are not as heavy as the sarsens at Stonehenge. But I am convinced that that is all; We can move the sarsens, no problem. NARRATOR: The largest sarsen at Stonehenge weighs about 45 tons. How much can this platform support? The team has one more day to find out. Moving the sarsens was just one of the challenges for Stonehenge's builders. They also had to carve these giants to fit. How did they achieve such precision? Just outside Stonehenge, Parker Pearson's team noticed small chunks of sarsen emerging from, no less, mole hills.

PARKER PEARSON: The little grains of sand allowed us to see that there were sarsen underground, those little fragments were dug up by these little furry creatures. NARRATOR: A small trench revealed an astonishing carpet of stone fragments, remains of giant stone carving. PARKER PEARSON: The stone trench coat has produced fantastic surprises. This is where the stones lay, their faces cut and crushed. And we were able to find 50 hammer stones in that tiny trench. COLIN RICHARDS: This is the hammer stone. Actually, it turns out that it fits quite well in the hand. And you can see all the pits on the outside where it's been hitting something.

The Neolithic builder would have literally stood next to the stone to carry out the work on a finer scale. It's going to take a long time to get that fine shape. Stonehenge is a large-scale labor expenditure. You know, it's easy for us to forget that these people were creating something that had never been created before. It's a bit like your own space program. NARRATOR: Stonehenge is a masterpiece of Stone Age technology. But what did it mean to the people who built it? Was it simply the cemetery of a royal family? Or was there something else at the monument?

One enduring theory about the meaning of Stonehenge dates back to an observation by 18th-century scholars. They noticed that the entrance to Stonehenge faces the rising sun on the longest day of the year, the summer solstice. By the 1960s, people had adopted the monument as an observatory used by ancient astronomers to track the sun and moon. Some astronomers even claimed that the mystery of Stonehenge had been solved. Well, let's make one thing clear: this was not some kind of astronomical instrument. NARRATOR: Clive Ruggles has written the book on ancient astronomy. Archaeologist and astronomer, he conducted his own studies of Stonehenge.

RUGGLES: Everyone thinks it's some kind of old observatory that incorporated a lot of alignments. In fact, we archaeologists only rely on one alignment in this monument, and that was the main axis that you see here. NARRATOR: This axis runs through the center of Stonehenge and down its avenue. In this direction it points to the dawn of the summer solstice, around June 21. RUGGLES: On those few days around the longest day of the year, just as the sun rises, you would have seen a beam of sunlight coming right into this. It would have been a very spectacular effect.

The point is that if the axis points this way at the summer dawn, then it also has another direction. We arrive at the site, we have to imagine a little here. We have these big trilithons, one and two, standing here; There was another one standing here. We only have one of the uprights left. So, in fact, the axis in this direction points to sunset on the shortest day of the year, sunset in the middle of winter. So the sun would be going down like this and putting this direction along the axis. NARRATOR: This extraordinary alignment sheds light on the beliefs and rituals of people in the ancient world.

RUGGLES: Stonehenge isn't the only place that has a built-in astronomical alignment. There are many ancient peoples around the world who have incorporated alignments with the sun, moon, and sometimes the stars. And what it is probably telling us is about a connection in people's minds between the sun and the seasonal cycle and how by having the right ceremonies at the right time, they could stay in harmony with the cosmos. NARRATOR: The alignment at Stonehenge suggests that the solstices were important times of year for the people who built the monument. Mike Parker Pearson has discovered evidence to support that idea, although he did not set out to study Stonehenge.

PARKER PEARSON: I never thought I'd be working here in a million years and I had a lot of other interesting things to do, so it was a series of accidents that really led to our project getting underway. NARRATOR: He had spent years in Madagascar studying traditional funeral practices. Here people build stone monuments for the dead. They believe that the stone belongs to the kingdom of the ancestors. The kingdom of the living is built with perishable materials such as wood. In 1998, Parker Pearson visited Stonehenge with an archaeologist from Madagascar. PARKER PEARSON: When my colleague Ramilisonina saw all this on a cold February morning, it was kind of a bombshell, because what he was going to say was to completely change archaeologists' understanding of this monument and lead to a huge new program of archaeological research. investigation.

RAMILISONINA: Alors là, je crois que c'est... TRANSLATOR: I think this is a meeting place to connect with the ancestors. I am completely convinced that the stones are linked to ancestors. PARKER PEARSON: And that was the moment when the light bulb went on in my mind and I thought, stone was associated with ancestors, the dead, and wooden buildings should be associated with the living. And this made me think a little more about what was happening in the landscape of Stonehenge. NARRATOR: I knew that Stonehenge was full of cremated remains: almost 60 burials excavated in the 20th century and perhaps 200 more in pristine areas of the monument.

If Stonehenge marked the realm of the dead, where was the realm of the living? Less than two miles north of Stonehenge is the giant Durrington Walls henge. In the 1960s, when a road was opened through this henge, archaeologists discovered the postholes of a wooden circle almost identical in size to Stonehenge. If Durrington Walls marked the realm of the living and Stonehenge the realm of the dead, perhaps the physical link between the two was the River Avon. PARKER PEARSON: We know from mythologies around the world that water is a very important part of that journey from the world of the living to the world of the dead.

NARRATOR: It was a clever theory, with little to back it up... Until excavations began at Durrington Walls. PARKER PEARSON: My interest in Durrington Walls was to discover two things. There should be an avenue that linked it to the river, in the same way that there was the famous Stonehenge avenue that led to the water. Secondly, there should be evidence of a settlement, of something to do with the living. NARRATOR: The team discovered an avenue about 30 feet wide, running directly from Durrington Walls to the River Avon. The excavation also revealed ample evidence of living things. PARKER PEARSON: We actually found the floor of a house.

Now, it's only four meters that way by four meters from here. It has stake holes along its sides, so the wooden facade is covered with chalk plaster. It is the first time we have found the floor layer of a Neolithic house anywhere in England. In fact, we can walk on the same surface that people walked on four and a half thousand years ago. NARRATOR: The floors of eight other houses came to light. They were built around 2500 BC. C., at the same time that the sarsens were installed at Stonehenge. Probably hundreds of other homes filled Durrington Walls, clustered around the wooden circle.

PARKER PEARSON: I think we might be seeing this whole area covered in houses, perhaps with an open central area forming the largest town in northern Europe at the time. NARRATOR: But people didn't live here all year round. They came for special occasions. Among the houses, the team found huge piles of pig and cattle bones. PARKER PEARSON: We found that many of them were still attached, so they must have been discarded while there was still soft tissue holding them together. What this tells us is that these are people who are celebrating. NARRATOR: A clue to the timing of these holidays appeared in the astronomical alignment of Durrington Walls.

On the morning of the winter solstice, the wooden circle pointed to the rising sun, and at the end of the day, Stonehenge framed the setting sun. Six months later, the direction was reversed. On the summer solstice, Stonehenge and its avenue aligned with the sunrise and the avenue of Durrington Walls aligned with the sunset. The two monuments were linked on the summer and winter solstices. On these days, crowds may have traveled along the river, moving between the realm of the living at Durrington Walls and the realm of the dead at Stonehenge. It is possible that some have thrown the ashes of their dead into the sacred waters, in a gesture of devotion.

Perhaps royal burials were held at Stonehenge during these holidaysseasonal. PARKER PEARSON: It may just be the feeling of an endless cycle that is being recreated by this flow back and forth between the living and the dead to allow society to move forward. NARRATOR: Parker Pearson had discovered traces of an ancient belief system etched into the landscape around Stonehenge. But a question still remained about the location of the monument. Why was Stonehenge built in such a nondescript rural area and not on a hill or hill? The answer may be hidden beneath the surface of Stonehenge Avenue, the grand processional route leading to the River Avon.

This feature was mapped by passing a small electrical current through the soil and measuring its resistance. The technique can detect structures below the surface. He picked up a series of mysterious grooves that ran under the avenue for more than 200 meters. Parker Pearson was convinced that these grooves were the remains of an artificial structure older than the avenue. His team opened a shallow trench to investigate. This happens there. PARKER PEARSON: I was convinced that we were going to find evidence of gullies containing upright wooden posts, something like that, and I was bitterly disappointed because they were completely natural.

NARRATOR: Soil specialists determined that these furrows formed between two natural ridges in the landscape. During the last Ice Age, these ridges channeled rainwater and snowmelt between them. The annual freezes and thaws caused the soil to crack, forming long, deep furrows. What makes the grooves extraordinary is that they are aligned with the solstices. On the winter solstice, they would have pointed directly to the place where the setting sun hits the horizon. Think about this coincidence in the landscape, the fact that you have these natural stripes in the landscape aligned with the direction in which the midwinter sun sets.

Yes, for us it is a coincidence of nature, but imagine how that seemed to people whose mentality was different. It would have made it a very sacred and powerful place. And that to me provides a very plausible reason why Stonehenge was built where it was. NARRATOR: Prehistoric people built Stonehenge just beyond where the furrows end. They later enhanced the natural ridges with huge banks and extended the avenue to the River Avon. Or so it was supposed. No one had ever excavated the river bank where the avenue should end, just behind a row of farms. So Parker Pearson brought his team in.

JIM RYLATT: We came here looking for the end of Stonehenge Avenue. And what we expected to find would have been pretty simple: just two benches and two ditches. But what we actually found was completely different. PARKER PEARSON: What we have here is a ditch that curves in a semicircle and most likely actually formed a complete circle. Perhaps it is marking out a revered space, perhaps there is even a monolith that once stood at this location. Maybe there are special things here that the avenue leads to along the river. NARRATOR: More research will be necessary to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Will that happen there? NARRATOR: Not far from the trench by the river, Andrew Young and his team continue testing their system for moving giant stones. They face the equivalent of a sarsen at Stonehenge. These range from seven to more than 40 tons. Take over! One two three! NARRATOR: The team leaves with a load of 8.3 tons. They give him everything they have. I'm not going no. We didn't even move it. It's that moment of inertia that has to be broken and, obviously, that was more than ten people. NARRATOR: Some theories claim that hundreds of people participated in the extraction of giant stones.

Young is convinced that the oxen did the heavy lifting. For now, he'll make do with a tractor. A meter will measure how much force is needed to make this load move. BRADLEY: There you go! Keep it up! BRADLEY: A little faster! (applause) (chatter and laughter) Yes! Hey! Alright! Let's take a look at that indicator. Little more than one point two. One point two... that's very good. NARRATOR: Young people, this would have been very easy for a dozen oxen. YOUNG: So what happened there? The insert is deleted. NARRATOR: The spacers are breaking. It's too soft. NARRATOR: But Young wants to try one last charge.

YOUNG MAN: What we could do is remove the first two, build the other crib and distribute the weight more, redistribute it. BRADLEY: I think that's the plan. Nice to finally meet you. Nice to see you. NARRATOR: Just then, Stonehenge expert Mike Pitts stops by. I've been reading your work for years and I've always been very impressed by it. Good thank you. Thank you for bringing the rain, I appreciate it. NARRATOR: Pitts receives instructions, while the team sets up a second crib. PITTS: What I'm thinking watching this, okay, assuming this happened, you should have a really smooth track, almost like a road.

BRADLEY: Absolutely. You almost need a route designed again, right? Basically, yes. It's quite sophisticated. PITTS: Yes, but I can't believe that in the Neolithic, when they moved these stones, the landscape was nice and clear and soft. But all kinds of things will happen, with swamps, forests, stones in the path and steep slopes that you will have to traverse. But that is the case with any system. That doesn't make it exclusive to this one. Absolutely. BRADLEY: Okay? NARRATOR: Now the platform is ready for a final run. Almost 13 tonnes, heavier than some Stonehenge sarsens, about a third the weight of the monument's largest stones.

BRADLEY: There you go! Keep it up! Keep it up! Keep it up! Uh oh. Arrest! YOUNG: What happened? Something just... just fell, and I think it fell... I don't know where it fell. YOUNG MAN: The wood is bent now. Yes. But it worked. I don't know about you, but that pleased me. I think we're done, because we can't stay here and freeze everyone out. NARRATOR: The sky clears for some further reflections. I'm not convinced at all. I think it's too sophisticated. We don't need that level of complexity to move Stonehenge. The more complex you make it, the more likely it is to go wrong.

BRADLEY: I think a lot of times we think about people who live in simple cultures, as we define them, that don't have a science because it's not written or it's not a formula. But these people's technology is their science. YOUNG: I'm satisfied that my initial idea seems to work on a large scale. So I'm happy that everything turned out the way it is, because you don't know until you try. NARRATOR: As far as we know, the builders of Stonehenge used techniques that no modern researcher has yet imagined. If only we could excavate the Neolithic mind. Back on the riverbank, Parker Pearson and his team expand their trenches and expose more of the strange circular structure.

It appears to be the ditch and eroded bank of a henge. Ben, we've got a huge triangular stone hole in that one. NARRATOR: At its center, they make a spectacular discovery: a ring of large holes. Recorded with a laser scanner, their shape and size point to one thing. They probably had blue stones, like those now found at Stonehenge. PARKER PEARSON: This place was selected as a special place to build a stone circle. And to do that with antler picks, they had to dig a circle of holes. And in the hole in front of me, they have created almost a nest of flint nodules to form a base to hold the stone coming in on top.

These stones would have formed almost a mini-Stonehenge without the lintels, close together, about three meters high in places. NARRATOR: The complete circle probably contained 25 stones. The team calls it "Blue

stonehenge

." PARKER PEARSON: So when was it placed? When was it removed? Where did the stones go? And we're starting to get some answers to those questions. NARRATOR: Found in the stone holes, a distinctive type of arrowhead suggests that Blue

stonehenge

may have been built around 3000 BC, at the same time Stonehenge was first built, as a ring of 56 blue stones. The two monuments may have been linked from the beginning.

PARKER PEARSON: It's quite possible that they were built together as two separate stone circles, one right next to the river and one at the special solstice site of Stonehenge, thus providing two ends of a ceremonial route for people to return to. and forward. NARRATOR: But what happened to the blue stones by the river? Parker Pearson believes they were moved to Stonehenge. This probably happened around 2500 BC. C., when giant sarsens were installed in the center of the monument. But the blue stones still mattered. They were removed from Aubrey Holes and the river bank and reorganized, perhaps enshrined, within the sarsens.

For the people who built and rebuilt Stonehenge, what did the blue stones mean? Why did dozens of them gather at these outcrops in Wales, at least 150 miles away? Some of the first British farmers put down roots in Wales a thousand years before Stonehenge was created. Parker Pearson believes that his descendants brought the bluestones to Salisbury Plain. PARKER PEARSON: When you actually move a stone, you are planting your identity, your own ancestry, in the ground. You're saying, "Yes, we used to come from there, "but this is our place, and these are the symbol that even our ancestors occupy this space." So what I think we're seeing is that sense of transferring the ancestors ​​and ancestry in the form of stones, and here we have this same expression of belonging NARRATOR: Around 2500 BC, Stonehenge became a monument like no other, a symbol of all that the Stone Age could do. achieve.

It is one of the last great monuments to be built in southern Britain. It is the end of an era rather than the flowering of a huge and powerful civilization. It is something of a swan song. heyday, something new is dripping. in Britain... Copper, gold and, later, bronze For people who define their existence in terms of stone and wood, metal changes almost everything. wealth and personal status. Now the dead rest. With their riches in individual burial mounds hundreds of them appear in the landscape around Stonehenge. And the era of great community monuments is coming to an end.

A symbol of eternity, Stonehenge was built to stand forever. But over time, the large stone circle was abandoned. His time was eclipsed by a new technology, a new way of being. And that's a story as old as the hills.