Original subtitles

Every year, a million people descend on Stonehenge.

They ask the age -old questions about this mysterious monument.

Who built it? How was it built? And why?

To find out, archaeologists are studying Stonehenge with new tools and new eyes.

By constructing Stonehenge, these people were creating something which had never

been created before. It's a bit like their own space program.

There's a new theory about the meaning of Stonehenge.

It's about the nature of eternity, the meaning of life and death.

That's a nice long piece of fibula. I would think we're going to get at least

individuals in here.

An ancient world is coming back to life.

This is an extraordinary time for Stonehenge. We're beginning to

in a way we've never been able to do before.

The Secrets of Stonehenge, revealed right now on NOVA.

Winter funding for NOVA is provided by the following.

ExxonMobil, taking on the world's toughest energy challenges.

And by David H. Koch.

And Discovering New Knowledge.

HHMI.

And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to

station from viewers like you. Thank you.

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 bank surround the stones.

Upright stones tower over 20 feet.

and weigh up to 45 tons.

Horizontal slabs called lintels crown huge pillars.

All these giants are made of sarsen, a local sandstone harder than granite.

Yet they were carved and fitted like woodwork.

Uprights were tapered and topped with knobs.

These fit hollows on the bottoms of lintels.

Curved lintels, joined by tongue and groove, formed a nearly perfect circle.

And despite a slight slope, this ring of lintels was level to within inches.

The sarsens dominate Stonehenge, but nestled among them are smaller stones,

no less remarkable.

Geologists determined these are bluestones.

transported here from Wales, at least 150 miles away.

Who built Stonehenge?

How was it built? And why?

For ages, we could only wonder.

Now, a new age is beginning.

An army of archaeologists deploys around Stonehenge.

Hey, everybody.

Led by Mike Parker Pearson, the Stonehenge Riverside Project is nearly

strong, with scientists, students, and specialists in everything from astronomy

to field survey.

We're six years into this archaeological project.

It's one of the biggest in the world, I reckon.

So it's a really...

Big chance to find out some of the key questions about Stonehenge. We're on a

mission. We're on a quest.

It's a quest to reconstruct the ancient world that gave rise to Stonehenge and

resurrect the people who built it.

The strategy is to dig not just at Stonehenge, but throughout the

landscape.

Stonehenge itself was extensively excavated during the 20th century.

Those digs established that the monument was built in stages.

Prehistoric people chose a rolling stretch of Salisbury Plain.

At around 3000 BC, they dug a ditch, a bank, and a ring of

56 pits into the underlying chalk of the plain.

These pits probably held the bluestones, brought all the way from Wales.

Then, some 500 years later, the colossal sarsen stones were installed.

The bluestones were pulled from their outer ring and rearranged among the

sarsens.

Several other stones completed the monument.

And later, Parallel banks would define a processional avenue that stretched all

the way 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 in that outer ring of 56 pits known as the Aubrey holes.

But the discoveries were hardly acknowledged, because these were

burials. These people had been cremated, but they didn't have nice skulls with

gleaming teeth to display.

They had bundles of ash and bits of broken, burnt bone.

The archaeologists weren't interested in those as objects.

At that time, it was firmly believed... that there was nothing you could learn

from looking at cremated bones.

Not a single museum in Britain wanted the bones.

So in 1935, they were reburied in Aubrey Hall No.

7. The idea that Stonehenge was actually one of, if not the biggest cremation

cemetery in early prehistoric Europe, just disappeared into the ground, into

Aubrey Hall 7, and was forgotten about.

The bones were left undisturbed.

Until today.

Mike Parker Pearson has come to retrieve the dead of Stonehenge.

To him, they represent a treasure trove of information.

With closer analysis of those remains, even though they're burnt, we can work

out people's approximate ages.

We may be able to work out if they're male or female. We may even be able to

find out more about their standard of life.

So it's a really important opportunity to learn about the Stonehenge people.

Records from 1935 state the bones were placed in four burlap bags and buried

with a commemorative plaque.

It's the first time anybody has seen...

It's quite impressive, but it's what's underneath it, lower down, that's what

we're most interested in.

And we're getting close.

Oh, look.

What's that?

Is it?

Suddenly, they spot a tiny piece of bone.

Yep.

There's more.

It's all over the place.

The burlap bags that contained the bones have rotted away.

I think we've just got to very carefully loosen the soil bit by bit. Is it

uncomfortable?

Yeah, it is quite.

Yeah.

So we're just going to take it in turns until as long as each of us can stand.

Until the blood rushes to your head and you start to feel faint.

That's already happened.

There we go, here we go.

Oh, look what I found.

Most of these bones were dug up in the years 1921, 1922,

1923, reburied 1935.

Yeah, but actually it doesn't tell us anything we don't know, does it?

I know, but isn't it nice?

We've finally reached the bone layer.

I think we were all hoping.

that the two men who buried these bones for posterity would actually put them in

decent containers but all we're really looking at is very loose cremated bone

crikey a lot of bone we've lifted the plaque and what we saw underneath was

quite a shock just a complete jumbled mass of bone from who knows how many

people the plaque has stopped soil

falling down in amongst them. So as the fat rotted, the bones were left

completely clean.

But it's going to be a serious jiggle puzzle in the lab.

I was hoping it was going to be easy, but this is the worst -case scenario.

Little remains of the people of Stonehenge.

What do we know of their world?

Around 3000 BC, the age of the pharaohs begins in Egypt.

The first cities are flourishing in the Near East with writing and wheeled

vehicles. The use of metal is spreading across Europe, but has yet to reach

Britain.

Here, the Stone Age is in its final phase, the Neolithic.

The stone axe reigns supreme.

With this tool, people clear forests and shape the timbers of their homes.

Their settlements are small and scattered.

They keep livestock and move with their herds.

They raise barley and wheat.

People tend to get the impression that in the Neolithic, life was grim and

short. That's not necessarily the case at all.

People generally seem to be probably very well nourished. They would have had

access to quite good food resources.

They were obviously sophisticated and they're probably having a fairly good

lifestyle.

Their stone tools and fine pottery have survived the ages.

But objects crafted of wood, plant fibers or leather have mostly vanished

Britain's climate and soil.

The fabric of their daily lives, their customs and their beliefs, have long

eluded us.

But the remains of their dead are providing new clues.

At Aubrey Hole No. 7, Jacqueline McKinley joins the excavation effort.

An expert on ancient human remains, she quickly spots individual features.

That's a nice long piece of fibula.

Brilliant. Probably second or third molar.

That's the back of the skull, look. In fact, that's a chap. That's a male. Very

good.

It's a very important collection. We're in a very important place.

Although it looks like a mass, by separating out the different skeletal

elements... We can work out how many people there were in there and the age

those individuals.

Looking at the amount of material we've got, I would think we're going to get at

least 50 individuals in here.

In all, 35 pounds of cremated bone are eventually sent to the University

of Sheffield.

Graduate student Christy Cox is resurrecting the dead of Stonehenge, bit

There's thousands and thousands of bone pieces.

It's far more than we ever anticipated when we originally started the

excavation.

This should join here.

That is just amazing.

So we're looking at this bit down the side here, where the mandible goes up.

That would be the TMGA joint. Yeah.

And that suggests that we've got an older individual.

The bones reveal that burial at Stonehenge was reserved for a select

With a normal domestic cemetery, you'd expect to find a range of ages and

individuals from both sex.

But most of the cremated bones are from adults, and the majority of those adults

appear to be male.

And most in the 25 to 40 -year age group.

We're seeing just a slight wear and tear on the bones in this population.

So they were fairly healthy, they were fairly robust male individuals.

If you've mostly got male cremations in that, that's something odd. That means

that certain people are being selected for burial here. What was special about

them?

I suspect they may well have been people of important political stature.

Quite possibly the men in one or more royal lineages

whose authority made Stonehenge possible in the first place.

So what this could be indicating is actually at the time Stonehenge was

we have an aristocratic, male -based society.

Now that's something we would never have known without these bones.

Perhaps one royal family marshalled the manpower to create Stonehenge.

And across the British Isles, other families or clans built their own stone

circles.

Nearly a thousand still stand today.

Neolithic people also raised timber circles.

Today, all that remains are traces of post holes.

But their size indicates some held tree trunks 15 feet high, weighing several

tons.

Enormous pits were dug to hold these timbers and standing stones.

And many circles were enclosed by a circular ditch and bank, an earthwork

as a henge.

How did people with Stone Age technology manage to build on such a vast scale?

Near Stonehenge, Parker Pearson's team excavates a prehistoric ditch carved

the chalk of Salisbury Plain.

Suddenly, an ancient digging tool comes to light.

Oh!

Oh, look at that.

It's a pick made from the antler of a red deer.

Oh, yeah.

Antler picks were used as the means of excavating these features, ditches and

pits, during the Neolithic.

You can imagine people using these picks to lever out the great chunks of chalk,

prizing it out, and then putting it into baskets and pulling it out of the

holes. an enormously labor -intensive task.

When they got to the bottom and when they finished, maybe it was broken and

just dropped it, or maybe they just deliberately left it there, almost as an

offering.

But how did people move the giant sarsens up to 45 tons of solid rock?

How did they raise lintels to the tops of those gate -like structures called

trilithons?

To archaeologist Mike Pitts, the process involved manpower and myth.

We're about 20 miles north of Stonehenge, and this area is probably

the big stones, the sarsens of Stonehenge, came from.

This landscape now looks very much as I think it would have been in the

Neolithic.

We have the trees, we have the forests growing.

expressing life. We have the stones in thousands lying largely under the ground

like bodies.

These are places that could be repositories of superstition, of myth

and danger.

To find a sarsen of the right size and shape for Stonehenge may have been a

sacred quest.

for the most skilled stone masons.

Like a Michelangelo, they examine the stone very carefully.

These are guys that are used to making stone tools. They understand stone.

And I think a Stonehenge mason would have looked at a stone like this as

something that he's used to making, like a stone axe or an arrowhead, but

enlarged into a huge scale.

Masons may have roughly shaped the sarsens at the quarry site using

stones.

But they left few clues to how they moved and raised giant stones.

So researchers have experimented.

Stone Age Britain did not have the wheel, but people may have pulled large

stones over rollers made of tree trunks.

Perhaps they laid timber tracks and slathered them with grease.

A wooden sled with a keel would have kept the stones centered over the

Raising a giant stone involved somehow tipping it into a giant hole.

Lintels may have been pulled up ramps and levered into place.

All these techniques are plausible.

There's just no evidence they were actually used.

Now, there's a new theory.

Andrew Young became obsessed with carved stone balls during graduate work at the

University of Exeter.

Some of these prehistoric objects are elaborately engraved, but many are

unadorned.

Most have been found in northeast Scotland, an area known for its stone

These artifacts defy explanation.

People had said they might be weapons or for throwing or possibly pounding

vegetables, kinds of things that you could do with a portable stone object.

Nothing that anybody had really said about them satisfied my question, what

they for?

Young taught himself to carve replicas and pondered one strange fact.

Many carved balls, engraved and plain, have exactly the same diameter.

Large numbers that are identical in size to the millimetre. And why would they

need to be identical in size?

And that just gave him that eureka moment. Well, if you're going to use

a wheel, you need them to be the same size.

Andrew Young had a vision of Stone Age ball -bearing technology.

For his Ph .D. thesis, he's testing his idea at a farm near Stonehenge.

So this one's high.

He's joined by a team of fellow students and his graduate advisor, Bruce

Bradley, an authority on experimental archaeology.

All right, let's move them back towards each other.

Andy brought this theory to me. I was astounded because it just made sense.

just so obvious. Why didn't somebody think of this before?

With rails made of Douglas fir, they'll build 80 feet of track.

It's not straight, though.

Each rail has a channel cut into it to hold granite balls hand -finished to a

precise 75 millimeter diameter.

They'll also use wooden balls.

During the time of Stonehenge, people were skilled at carving stone and wood

could have produced all these components.

That's a lot better.

Instead of a giant stone, the team has 25 tons of gravel.

And Andrew Young has his concerns.

I'm really worried about the type of wood we used.

They would probably have used oak.

In the Neolithic, we haven't been able to use oak because of the cost.

The wood we've got is perhaps too soft.

They build a platform, a crib, to straddle the rails and carry the weight.

The worst fear would be that we'd get just a couple tons on there and we

couldn't push it anywhere.

There's a lot of unknowns right now, and that's what experiments are all about.

They load 3 .3 tons, roughly the weight of a bluestone at Stonehenge.

One, two, three, go.

Keep it going. Keep it going.

Oh, darn.

Almost immediately, they're stuck.

Man, what happened?

The weight is crushing the Douglas fir.

You know, this amount of weight seems to have...

compressed it enough that our gap we're losing our gap it's less than a

centimeter and that is not good as soon as you've got that crib touching the

rail you just got friction you've totally undermined everything we've done

the balls young's worst fear about the soft wood has come true

but there's a quick fix to offset the compression of the douglas fur

They place wooden inserts in the grooves.

Eastern 23 mil.

The gap is back, at least for now.

They load up nearly six tons, roughly the weight of two bluestones.

Can they do it?

Look at the division of labor all of a sudden.

How'd that happen?

Hey, you girls, the call will be giddy up. All right.

One, two, three, four.

It's moving.

Come on. Watch yourself.

Keep going, folks.

Keep at it. Let's get on those wooden balls.

We're gaining speed.

Whoa.

Hey.

We've moved the bluestone.

And once it was going, we were going.

Yeah, we were having a hard time stopping.

We're not as heavy as the sarsen at Stonehenge, but I'm convinced that

it. We can move the sarsens, no problem.

The largest sarsen at Stonehenge weighs some 45 tons.

How much can this rig handle?

The team has one more day to find out.

Moving the sarsens was just one challenge for the builders of

They also had to carve these giants to fit together.

How did they achieve such precision?

Just outside Stonehenge, Parker Pearson's team noticed small pieces of

emerging from, of all things, molehills.

The little molehills allowed us to see that there was sarsen under the ground

little chips were dug up by these little furry creatures.

A small trench revealed an astonishing carpet of stone fragments, debris from

the dressing of giant stones.

The stone dressing trench has produced fantastic surprises.

This is where the stones were lying and having their faces trimmed and bashed.

And we've been able to find in that tiny trench 50 hammer stones.

This is a hammer stone. It actually fits quite nicely in the hand, as it turns

out. And you can see all the pitting around the outside where it's been

against something.

The Neolithic builder would literally have...

stood alongside the stone to do the more fine -scale work.

It's going to take ages just to get that fine, fine shape.

Stonehenge is an expenditure of labor on a grand scale.

You know, it's easy for us to forget that these people were creating

which had never been created before.

It's a bit like their own space program.

Stonehenge is a masterpiece of Stone Age technology.

But what did it mean to the people who built it?

Was it simply the burial ground of a royal family? Or was there more to the

monument?

An enduring theory about the meaning of Stonehenge dates back to an observation

made 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 embraced the monument as an observatory, used by

ancient astronomers to track the sun and moon.

Some astronomers even claimed the mystery of Stonehenge had been solved.

Let's get one thing clear. This wasn't some sort of astronomical instrument.

Clive Ruggles has written the book on ancient astronomy.

An archaeologist and astronomer, he ran his own studies of Stonehenge.

Everyone thinks that it's some sort of ancient observatory that incorporated

lots of alignment.

In fact, we archaeologists are only confident in one alignment of this

and that was the main axis that you see here.

This axis runs right through the center of Stonehenge and down its avenue.

In this direction, it points at sunrise on the summer solstice around June 21st.

On those few days around the longest day of the year, just as the sun rises, you

would have seen a shaft of sunlight coming right into this. It would have

very spectacular effect.

The thing is, if the axis is pointing at midsummer sunrise this way, then it

also has another direction.

We come round the site.

You have to do a bit of imagining here. We've got these big trilithons, one and

two, standing here. There was another one standing here. We've only got one of

the uprights left.

Then, in fact, the axis in this direction points at the sunset on the

day of the year, midwinter sunset.

So the sun will be coming down like this and setting in this direction along the

axis.

This extraordinary alignment sheds light on the beliefs and rituals of people in

the ancient world.

Stonehenge isn't the only place that has an astronomical alignment built into

it. There are many ancient peoples all over the world who have incorporated

alignments on the sun, the moon, sometimes the stars.

And what it's probably telling us is about the connections in people's minds

between the sun and the seasonal cycle.

and how, by having the right ceremonials at the right time, they could keep in

harmony with the cosmos.

The alignment at Stonehenge suggests the solstices were important times of year

for the people who built the monument.

Mike Parker Pearson has unearthed evidence supporting that idea, though he

didn't set out to study Stonehenge.

I never thought I'd be doing any work here in a million years, and I had many

other interesting things to do. So it was a series of accidents that really

to our project getting up and running.

He had spent years in Madagascar, studying traditional burial practices.

Here, people build stone monuments for the dead.

They believe stone belongs to the realm of the ancestors.

The realm of the living is built of perishable materials, like wood.

In 1998, Parker Pearson happened to visit Stonehenge with an archaeologist

Madagascar.

When my colleague Ramil San saw all of this, on a cold February morning...

It was something of a bombshell because what he was to say was to change

archaeologists' understanding of this monument completely and to lead to a

new program of archaeological research.

I believe this is a meeting place to connect with the ancestors.

I am utterly convinced the stones are linked to the ancestors.

And that's the moment the light bulb went on in my mind, and I thought stone

associated with the ancestors, the dead, and constructions in timber should be

associated with the living.

And this made me think a little more about what was happening in the

landscape.

He knew Stonehenge was full of cremated remains, nearly 60 burials excavated in

the 20th century.

and perhaps 200 more in untouched 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 sits the giant henge of Durrington

Walls.

In the 1960s, when a road was cut through this henge, archaeologists

the postholes of a timber circle, nearly 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.

We know from mythologies all 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.

It was a clever theory, with little to back it up, until

excavations began at Durrington Walls.

My interest in Durrington Walls was to find out two things.

There should be an avenue linking it to the river.

just as there was Stonehenge's famous avenue leading to the water.

Secondly, there should be evidence of settlement, of something to do with the

living. The team did uncover an avenue, some 30 feet wide, running straight

from Durrington Walls to the River Avon.

The dig also revealed ample evidence of the living.

We've actually found the floor.

of a house now it's only four meters that way by four meters this way it has

stake holes along its side so timber facade covered with chalk plaster

it's the first time we have found the floor layer for a neolithic house

anywhere in england we can actually walk on the very surface that people walked

on four and a half thousand years ago

The floors of eight other houses came to light.

They were built around 2500 BC, the same time the Sarsons were

put up at Stonehenge.

Hundreds of other dwellings, probably filled Durrington walls, clustered

the timber circle.

I think we could be looking at this entire area covered in houses, perhaps

a central open area.

forming the largest village in Northern Europe at that time.

But people didn't live here year -round.

They came for special occasions.

In between the houses, the team found huge piles of pig and cattle bones.

We find a lot of them still joined together, so they must have been thrown

while there was still soft tissue holding them together.

What this is telling us... is that these are people who are feasting.

A clue to the timing of these feasts turned up in the astronomical alignment

of Durrington Walls.

On the morning of the winter solstice, the timber circle pointed at 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 sunrise, and

the avenue at Durrington Walls aligned with 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.

Some may have cast the ashes of their dead into the sacred waters, a gesture

devotion.

Perhaps royal burials were held at Stonehenge during these seasonal feasts.

It may just be the sense of an unending cycle that is being reenacted by this

flow back and forward between the living and the dead to enable society to keep

going.

Parker Pearson had discovered traces of an ancient belief system etched into the

landscape around Stonehenge.

But one question still lingered about the monument's location.

Why was Stonehenge built on such an unremarkable patch of countryside, not

ridge or hilltop?

The answer may lie hidden beneath the surface of the Stonehenge Avenue, the

great processional route leading to the River Avon.

This feature was mapped by running a small electric current through the soil

measuring its resistance.

The technique can detect structures under the surface.

It picked up a series of mysterious grooves running beneath the avenue for

than 200 yards.

Parker Pearson was convinced these grooves were the remains of a man -made

structure. older than the avenue.

His team opened a shallow trench to investigate.

It runs over there.

I was convinced we were going to find evidence for gullies that contained

vertical timber posts, something like that, and I was bitterly disappointed

because they were entirely natural.

Soil specialists determined that these grooves were formed between two natural

ridges in the landscape.

During the last ice age, these ridges funneled rainwater and snowmelt between

them.

Yearly freezing and thawing caused the ground to crack into long, deep grooves.

What makes the grooves extraordinary is that they are aligned with the

solstices. On the winter solstice, they would have pointed directly at the spot

where the setting sun touches the horizon.

Think about this coincidence in the landscape, the fact that you've got

natural stripes in the landscape actually aligning with the direction

midwinter sun goes down. Yes, to us it's a coincidence of nature, but imagine

how that seemed to people whose mindset was different.

It would have made it a very sacred and powerful spot.

And that, for me, provides a very plausible reason why Stonehenge was

constructed where it was.

Prehistoric people built Stonehenge just beyond where the grooves end.

Later, they enhanced the natural ridges with massive banks and extended the

avenue all the way to the River Avon, or so it was assumed.

No one had ever excavated the riverbank where the avenue ought to end.

just beyond a row of country estates.

So Parker Pearson brought his team.

When we came down here looking for the end of the Stonehenge Avenue, and what

were expecting to find would have been fairly straightforward, just two banks

and two ditches.

What we actually found was completely different.

What we have here is a ditch that is curving round in a semicircle, and

most likely...

It's actually formed a complete circle.

Maybe it's marking off a venerated space.

Maybe there's even a standing stone that once stood in this spot.

Maybe there are special things here that the avenue is actually leading to by

the river.

It will take more digging to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Will that go through there?

Not far from the Riverside Trench, Andrew Young and his team continue to

his system for moving giant stones.

They tackle the equivalent of a sarsen at Stonehenge.

These range from 7 to more than 40 tons.

One,

two, three.

The team starts with a load of 8 .3 tons.

They give it everything they've got.

No, not going.

We didn't even budge it. It's that moment of inertia that you've got to

and obviously that was beyond ten people.

Some theories claim hundreds of people were involved in pulling giant stones.

Young is convinced Oxen did the heavy work.

For now, he'll settle for a tractor.

A gauge will measure how much force it takes to get this load moving.

There it goes.

Keep it going.

A little faster.

Woo! Yeah!

Yeah!

All right.

Let's have a look at that gauge.

It's just over 1 .2. 1 .2.

That's very good.

Young figures this would have been a snap for about a dozen oxen.

So what's happened there?

The insert is obliterated.

The spacers are breaking down.

It's too soft.

But Young wants to try one last load.

What we could do is take off the top two, build over crib and spread the

out more.

Redistribute it. I think that's the plan. Yeah.

Pleased to meet you finally. Lovely to see you. Just then, Stonehenge expert

Mike Pitts drops by.

I've been reading your work for years and always been very impressed. Well,

thank you, Alan.

Thanks for bringing the rain. Appreciate it. Pitts is briefed while the team

sets up a second crib.

I'm thinking as I look at this, okay, supposing this did happen.

You've got to have a really smooth track, almost like a road.

Absolutely. You need an engineered route again almost, don't you? Basically,

yeah. It's pretty sophisticated.

Yeah. But I can't believe that in the Neolithic, when they're moving these

stones, that the landscape is going to be nice and clear and smooth like this,

but there's going to be all sorts of things going on, like swamp and forest

stones getting in the way and the steep slopes that you've got to get through.

But that's the case with any system. That doesn't make it unique to this one.

Absolutely.

OK? Now the rig is ready for a final run.

Nearly 13 tonnes.

Heavier than some sarsens at Stonehenge.

about a third the weight of the monument's largest stones.

There it goes.

Keep it going.

Keep it going. Keep it going.

Uh -oh.

Stop.

What happened? It just sort of went down, and I think it went down. I don't

where it went down.

The woods bent now. Yeah, but it worked. I don't know about you, but I was

pleased with that. I think we're done because we can't stay out here and get

everybody frozen.

The sky's clear for a few afterthoughts.

I'm not at all convinced. 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.

I think a lot of times we think of people that live in simple cultures as

define them don't have a science because it's not written down or it's not

formulaic, but these people's technology is their science.

I'm satisfied that my initial idea seems to work on a big scale.

So I'm just happy it's all gone the way it has because...

You don't know until you try.

For all we know, the builders of Stonehenge used techniques no modern

has yet imagined.

If only we could excavate the Neolithic mind.

Back at the riverside, Parker Pearson and his team expand their trenches.

and expose more of that 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.

In its center, they make a spectacular discovery.

A ring of large holes.

Recorded in a laser scan, their shape and size point to one thing.

They probably held bluestones, just like the ones now standing at Stonehenge.

This place was selected out as a special spot to build a stone circle.

And to do that, with antler picks, they had to dig a circle of holes.

And the hole in front of me, they've created almost a nest of flint nodules

form a base to support the stone coming in on top of it.

These stones would have formed almost a mini stonehenge without the lintels,

very close together, standing some three metres high in places.

The complete circle probably held 25 stones.

The team names it.

Blue Stonehenge.

So, when was it put up?

When was it taken down?

Where did the stones go?

And we're starting to get some answers for those questions.

Found in the stone holes, a distinctive type of arrowhead suggests 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 start.

It may well be that these were set up together as two separate stone circles.

One right by the river, one up at the special solstice place of Stonehenge

itself. So providing the two ends of a ceremonial route for people to move back

and forwards.

But what happened to the bluestones by the river?

Parker Pearson believes they were moved to Stonehenge.

This probably happened around 2500 BC, when the giant sarsas were installed

in the center of the monument.

But the bluestones still mattered.

They were pulled from the Aubrey holes and the riverside and rearranged.

perhaps enshrined inside the sarsens.

To the people who built and rebuilt Stonehenge, what did the blue stones

Why were dozens gathered from these outcrops in Wales, at least 150 miles

Some of Britain's first farmers put down roots in Wales 1 ,000 years before

Stonehenge was created.

Parker Pearson believes their descendants brought the bluestones to

Plain.

When you actually move a stone, you're planting your identity,

your very ancestry into the ground. You're saying...

Yes, we used to come from over there, but this is our place.

And these are the symbols that even our ancestors occupy this space.

So what I think we're seeing is that sense of transferring one's ancestors

ancestry in the form of stones.

And here we have this very expression of belonging.

Around 2500 BC, Stonehenge became a monument like no other,

a symbol of everything the Stone Age could achieve.

But this is one of the last great monuments to be built in southern

It's the end of an era, rather than the flowering of a huge, powerful

civilization. It's something of a swan song.

As Stonehenge reaches its peak, something new is trickling into Britain.

Copper, gold, and later bronze.

For people who define their existence in terms of stone and wood, metal

changes nearly everything.

With metal comes a focus on personal wealth and status.

Now the dead are laid to rest with their riches in individual burial mounds.

Hundreds appear in the landscape around Stonehenge.

And the age of grand communal monuments comes to an end.

A symbol of eternity, Stonehenge was built to stand forever.

But in time, the great stone circle was abandoned.

Its age was eclipsed by a new technology, a new way of being.

And that is a story as old as the hills.

Major funding for NOVA is provided by the following.

ExxonMobil, taking on the world's toughest energy challenges.

And by David H. Koch.

And Discovering New Knowledge

HHMI And by

the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to your PBS

station from viewers like you. Thank you.