A History of Ancient Britain (BBC) (2011) s01e03 Episode Script
Episode 3
This is the story of how Britain came to be.
Of how our land, and its people, were forged over thousands of years of ancient history.
This Britain is a strange and alien world.
A world that contains the hidden story of our distant, prehistoric past.
We began as hunters who came from mainland Europe, before Britain was an island.
Instead of hunting mammoth and reindeer in the snow, he hunted red deer in the wild wood.
And continued into a new age, as the first farmers built monumental tombs to their ancestors.
Nothing like this had ever been seen before in Britain.
Now the journey continues, with the next chapter in our epic story.
Of course, what everybody's waiting for is the sunrise.
An age of cosmology, when our lives were ruled by the sun and the stars.
The birth of earthly power and social class, set against some of the greatest wonders of the ancient world.
I'm going back almost 6,000 years to a Britain in the throes of the Neolithic Revolution.
The first farmers were forging a whole new relationship with the land, a land that was alive with spiritual meaning.
The wild wood that bordered their fields, the boundary between land and sea, and mountains that touched the very sky.
Places like the Lake District, with its dramatic valleys and crags, held a special power.
If your understanding of the world was rooted in stone, then this landscape, which seems to shout the very word "stone," would've seemed especially important.
And here in the Central Fells, the shout is particularly clear.
Archaeologist Mark Edmonds has spent 30 years on the trail of the ancient people who came here in search of something very special Five or six thousand years ago, the chances are no one is actually living here full time.
They come here because the highest ground probably has good grazing.
But probably what drew them up here was not the chance of living here full time.
That would happen many years later.
It was the stone that brought them up, it was the stone that they came for.
Over 5,000 years ago, Neolithic people climbed these same precarious paths.
What they were heading for were high outcrops of volcanic rock called greenstone.
The crags that are worked the most are some of the highest, and some of the most difficult to get to.
And I think that's part of the attraction of the place, is that it involves risk, it involves danger.
- Okay.
So, nearly there.
Nearly there.
- Mmm-hmm.
The debris of ancient stone working still lies all around.
Hundreds of offcuts of very special stone axes.
And this is what we've climbed for.
- Look at this stuff.
This is amazing.
- I know.
It's ridiculous, isn't it? It's the volume of it.
So, every single bit of this is the result of people making tools? There was this stone to be had that could be worked and worked well to a fine finish.
So, this is a must have raw material.
It's an extraordinary raw material.
So, this whole area is an axe factory? Yeah.
You don't find many of the axes themselves up here.
But, fortunately, I've brought some with me.
And this is what we call in the trade a rough out.
So, that's halfway through the process of making? Yeah.
It's absolutely exquisite.
It's a thing of beauty, unfinished or not.
This is what they would've looked like when they left the crags, and then, pop that down there, once you get down into the lowlands, down into the areas where people traditionally would've been living, that's when the more glacial, slow process of grinding and polishing would be undertaken to get them down to something like that.
How long does it take to get from that to the finished article? Well, you can see in the two forms that already the idea of what it's gonna look like is there.
In accustomed hands, you can make one of these in about 45 minutes, flaking as you go.
This, at least several hundred hours.
Possibly even thousands of hours to get a really good lustre, a good polish which brings out the colour of the stone.
And why go to that offort? Because it doesn't make a better axe, does it? No, it doesn't.
It doesn't improve the effectiveness of the tool very much.
I think what's important about these things is not simply that they're tools, but they were also very important because they were tokens of identity.
They said something about the people who made them and used them.
It wasn't just the stone that made these axes special, but where it came from, the sky.
Although it's a mountain, what we're dealing with here is a monument.
A place that draws people up, draws people together, at which they can work the stone, to produce objects that matter to them, because they say something about who they are.
So, in a sense, the journey from the low country, up here probably takes several days.
Exposing yourself to danger, to the risks of falling, to come up into the clouds sometimes as well, is as much a rite of passage as anything else.
An activity that's as much ceremonial, possibly spiritual, as it is practical.
The Cumbrian axe factory reveals a relationship between people, their landscape, and stone itself.
This belief system would change over time.
It would develop into something much more complex.
And, for us, something fantastically enigmatic.
Something that represents the beginning of a whole new age in our history.
A time the experts refer to as the Age of Astronomy, when we moved away from this more earthly ancestor worship towards something much more cosmic.
What we see is a radical change in thinking that manifested itself in something staggering.
The construction of monuments in stone on an unprecedented and massive scale.
Some of them astronomically aligned.
What's becoming clear is that for the people living 5,000 years ago, this new age wasn't bringing a new way of thinking about the ancestors, rather, it was a new way of thinking about themselves as individuals within an increasingly complicated society, and an internationally connected world.
All of that, and the universe itself.
Where did we fit into time and into the cosmos? In a valley just beneath the greenstone axe factory, there's evidence of these new ideas.
Places like this, they have an atmosphere.
When you happen across one in the landscape, it makes you pause, and think, and wonder, you know, "What's going on?" Stone circles are almost unknown outside Britain and Ireland, but we have hundreds of them.
And they're often found in the most dramatic of locations.
First of all, this place, these stones, mattered.
This is quite a small stone circle, but still the effort involved suggests you don't go moving things this size just for fun.
And building monumental structures like this was part of a tradition that lasted for over 1,000 years.
Five thousand years ago, people living here in Cumbria, and all over Britain, were making spiritual connections that had never been made before.
Not just between their lives and the land, but between their lives and the sky, the cosmos, as well, perhaps, the very idea of Heaven.
This is a new Britain, the Neolithic reaching its very height.
And it's one of the most mysterious and glorious periods in all of prehistory.
Welcome to the Orkney Islands, off the northern tip of Scotland.
I've come here to explore a landscape that holds some of the best preserved Stone Age structures in the whole of Britain.
Here, there are relics of the lives and the beliefs of the people who lived here at the very height of the Neolithic.
Orkney's a wild place, whipped by North Atlantic winds.
Even from the air, there's not a tree to be seen.
But it's more than the wind that's responsible.
There were trees on Orkney once upon a time.
But it's thought that the first farmers cut them down to prepare fields for crops and keeping animals.
And given that Orkney's not a big place, it didn't take long to clear the lot.
Fortunately, though, Orkney was rich in another building material The whole island is made of this.
Horizontally bedded, fractured sandstone that splits very easily into useful slabs and sheets.
And around 3,300 BC, the people living here began to use this stuff to build some of the most enduring structures of the ancient world.
Magnificent stone tombs and vast stone circles give us a unique insight into an extraordinary moment in our history, when we first turned our spiritual gaze towards the heavens.
Here, even domestic houses have been preserved in stone, the very homes of the people who were pioneering this new age.
Some of the most special are perched on the far west coast of Orkney.
Here it is, Skara Brae.
It's an extraordinary place, and it lets us get as close as we could possibly hope to, to the way domestic life was lived on Orkney in the Stone Age.
The village was occupied for over 600 years, from around 3,100 BC.
What you've got are eight houses, arranged on either side of a long, winding passage.
And because the whole thing is semi-subterranean, it does a great job of keeping the wind out, cutting down the drafts.
And because there wasn't any wood available, it wasn't just the houses that were built of stone, but everything inside as well Right.
This is the inside of one of the houses.
What you notice straight away is the big, square hearth for a big, roaring fire.
These are bed recesses.
There are places where people would have laid out their bedding.
This arrangement here looks a bit like a dresser, because it is a dresser.
It's directly opposite the only entrance, so it's the first thing that guests see as they enter.
And in here, on these shelves, you'd put the things that mattered.
It's the equivalent of having somewhere to put the good wedding china.
Everything about this design, this house, is so clever, and it's so human.
But wonderful and evocative though this place undoubtedly is, it's all a bit too neat and tidy.
It's a bit sterile.
The grass is too mown.
The first time I came here, I heard a song in my head, and I've heard it every time since.
And it's Flintstones.
Meet The Flintstones.
Modern stone age family.
What you want here, in addition to the sights, are the sounds of conversation and lives being lived, the smells of all that human activity.
But we can get closer.
- You all right? - Yeah, lead on.
Okay.
Here we go.
Alison Sheridan, a specialist in prehistoric artefacts, is showing me one house that's so well preserved people aren't usually allowed inside.
Gosh, it's not the easiest place to get into, is it? No, but it's cosy.
So, what would life have been like for Skara Brae residents, do you think? It would've been pretty comfortable, by the standards of the age, because you've got this wonderful central hearth.
So, it may have been dark, because of the roof, - but it would have been warm.
- Okay.
They've also got convenience.
They have a toilet.
How do you know that's a toilet and not a storage space? Well, there's actually a drain underneath it.
And, actually, they did find poo.
- Oh, really? - Mmm.
- Oh, so the hard evidence is there? - Yes.
Remarkably, these houses also contained artefacts.
The precious possessions of the people who were living here 5,000 years ago.
I never found anything like this in my entire life.
Miserable bits of broken stone was all I ever found.
- So what have we got? - Anything but miserable bits of stone.
These are absolutely amazing.
What are they generally called if you were to group them as a class of find? - Enigmatic carved stone objects.
- Okay.
All right.
Only because archaeologists haven't worked out exactly what they are.
And in the absence of materials that we would consider precious, like gold and silver, I suppose, these have to be the equivalent of it.
Because of the time that they represent, and the skill that they represent.
That's right.
'Cause we're in an age that's well before the earliest metal.
So, the stone itself is not intrinsically valuable, but as an object, it meant a lot.
And what about the rest of them? These pieces of jewellery Yeah.
In fact, they found something like 8,000 beads in this structure.
- In this house? - Yes.
Right.
So, on a very practical level, it says that someone's got the time to do this, rather than being out growing, herding, whatever.
Someone is able to set aside part of their day, or maybe all of their time, to specialising.
Absolutely.
Yes.
And being provided with everything else they need - by the rest of the village.
- That's right.
These are just wonders.
Which one can I have? Take them all.
We know where you live.
But as well as jewellery and carved stones, this house also revealed a darker secret.
Intriguingly, two adult women skeletons were found underneath the bed.
Uniquely.
- You mean, below floor level? - Yes.
It's as if during the lifetime of the house, they lived here, they died here, they were buried here.
- Under the bed.
- Granny under the bed.
It was a house for the living, and it's also a house for the dead.
The precious artefacts and the presence of human remains might mean that these houses were special No one can be sure, but the people who lived here might not have been ordinary farmers, but some of the earliest priests of a new religion.
Within just a few miles of Skara Brae, built around the same time, is this.
A stone tomb constructed on a truly grand scale.
Fantastic.
Already you get the sense that you've left one world behind and come somewhere different.
And what you're rewarded with, after bending down and struggling through, is access to a masterpiece, in every sense of the word.
What you also see right away is the similarity between the interior of this tomb and the interiors of the houses in Skara Brae.
And, in fact, there was a house here once upon a time and a circle of standing stones, all before the tomb was ever built.
It's a classic example of somewhere domestic being altered, becoming something other, something ritual.
Over here, again, a shadow of something domestic.
It's a recess, similar to a bed.
But, of course, the people put away in there are having a much, much deeper sleep.
Maes Howe is a triumph of ancient architecture.
Not only in its stonework, but in the way it's been positioned in the landscape.
For a few days, each midwinter, the setting sun is framed by two distant hills on the neighbouring island of Hoy.
And as the sun drops onto the horizon, it shines through the passage, lighting up the inner chamber.
Maes Howe was aligned to the heavens, and to the dramatic features of the Orkadian landscape.
When you look around here, you realise that you're surrounded by hills and water.
It's a natural amphitheatre.
It's a stage set for drama.
And it's here, across the promontory from Maes Howe, that the Neolithic people of Orkney decided to build another extraordinary monument in stone.
The Ring of Brodgar is one of the biggest stone circles that we know about anywhere.
It's over 100 metres across.
And while there are 21 stones standing today, in its original form, there would have been as many as 60.
And that's not all This stone circle was also surrounded by a ditch.
Not just any ditch.
This is ten metres across, and over three metres deep.
And it's not just cut into the soil, it's been cut into the living bedrock.
It's been estimated that it would have taken 100 men six months just to cut the ditch.
This is on an epic scale.
The Ring of Brodgar is vast, but, incredibly, it actually forms part of something even bigger.
And here's a clue, the ditch isn't actually complete.
There's a causeway across it, right here.
And there's another one on the other side.
It's thought that these are an entrance and an exit.
Which means, perhaps, that the stone circle is itself a destination.
It's some kind of portal, maybe.
Something you pass through, on the way to somewhere else.
And that somowhere else is down there, just across the peninsula.
The Ring of Brodgar points you across a narrow land-bridge towards another even older stone circle, the Stones of Stenness.
Few of the original stones survive.
But those that do, reveal yet more connections to this monumental landscape.
What's striking here is the way some of the stones are positioned.
This pair here are aligned so that when you look through the gap, Maes Howe is perfectly framed against the hillside.
Originally, there would have been a complete ditch encircling the whole monument And the thinking is that that ditch would have held water, so that it would appear as a moat.
So, maybe what you've got 5,000 years ago is the builders, the architects of this monument, creating an island within an island.
A miniature, a microcosm of their world as they saw it.
The creation of monumental architecture around 5,000 years ago can be seen, in a sense, as an evolution of earlier Neolithic culture.
After all, these people had been building huge earthen enclosures and vast cursus monuments for generations.
It was the connections between the monuments and astronomical alignments that was new.
The earth, the landscape, was as important as it had always been.
But, now, it was being seen as part of a bigger picture.
The skies, the Sun and the Moon, the Heavens.
That's what this Age of Astronomy seems to have been all about.
Our human need to understand our place in the cosmos still resonates today.
This is mid-summer, just before dawn, at the most famous Stone Age monument of them all.
This place, Salisbury Plain, has been attracting people for millennia.
And it still does.
There are literally thousands of people here.
Some of them have come to worship ancient gods.
Some, to connect with Mother Earth.
Some have come in search of themselves.
But to be honest, I think a lot of them are here just because everyone else is.
Just for the spectacle.
Of course, what everybody's waiting for is the sunrise, which will be over there.
And, by my reckoning, will be in several minutes' time.
Can't wait.
Funny thing is, it's actually very hard to see the sunrise, because of all these stones and all these people.
Oh.
There she blows.
And, presumably, its arrival today means something different to every one of these people here.
And there're several thousand of them, so that's several thousand meanings.
You can take your pick.
But what did Stonehenge mean to the people who gathered here 5,000 years ago? To begin to answer that, you have to go back to the stones themselves.
And I don't mean the most obvious ones.
The Sarsen stones, and the huge trilithons, they weren't part of the original monument.
If you want to get back to the start of Stonehenge, you have to look at these smaller stones that are all around the interior.
Unlike the sarsens, which were dragged here from just 20 or so miles up the road, these are from much, much further away, off to the west.
The wild southwest of Wales, high in the Preseli Hills, the rolling landscape is broken by huge outcrops of a very distinctive stone.
Now, the thing is, studies have shown that this kind of stone is identical to the original boulders of Stonehenge, built over 200 miles away, in that direction.
Geologists call this a spotted dolerite.
And this is the only place in Britain where this particular type exists.
This has been amazing to me for more than half of my life.
I mean, why do it at all? What motivated them? Why these stones from here? Now, it does have to be said there are a couple of things about this rock that are unusual.
First of all, I'm going to don my Stone Age goggles, and hit this as hard as I can.
Now, on that fresh face there, if I wet that freshly broken face Look at that! Isn't that lovely? See how it changes colour? It goes to this soft blue shade.
Obviously, it's why this stuff is known as bluestone.
And it's speckled throughout with these little flecks of feldspar.
These properties, these unique freckles, would have made this rock seem very special.
It might even have seemed magical.
We might never know exactly why this place and these crags were chosen, but it reminds me of the Lake District axe makers on a much grander scale.
What we do know for certain though is that this place was important.
So important, that it filled the ancient people with an urge so powerful that they were able to find the strength and the will to move over 200 tonnes of this rock and use it to set up the first stone circle of Stonehenge.
Now, that takes some belief.
Five thousand years ago, the Stonehenge we see today simply didn't exist.
Instead, there was a much simpler circle.
After their long journey from Preseli, the bluestones were put up in a great big circle round the outside, on the inner edge of this bank.
So for 500 years or so, the bluestone circle was Stonehenge.
And then, for some reason, the people living around here decided to give themselves an even bigger challenge.
Around 2,500 BC, a new generation of builders created their ultimate monument Using massive blocks of local sandstone, they constructed something unprecedented, a ring of standing stones capped with lintels.
Inside, a horseshoe of yet more stones.
And at the same time, for good measure, they moved the original boulders of bluestone right into the centre.
Unlike the bluestones, these gigantic sarsens were only transported 20 miles or so from up the road.
But given that each one weighs anything up to 40 tonnes, well, the effort required to shift them was phenomenal.
This new Stonehenge marked special days in the cosmic calendar.
Spring and autumn, as well as the well-known alignment on the mid-summer sunrise.
But the mid-summer sunrise exactly matches another event, the setting sun at mid-winter.
The latest evidence suggests that our most famous prehistoric monument of all might not have been a celebration of summer and life, but a commemoration of winter and death.
Like the Orkney monuments, Stonehenge is not alone.
Nearby, this field contains all that remains of an ancient site of winter gathering.
Have a look at these.
Animal bones and teeth.
Just a sample, really, of the thousands of animal remains found scattered all across the site.
These are pig bones.
Piglets are usually born in the springtime.
And the vast majority of the pig remains at Durrington Walls show that the adult animals were slaughtered around nine months.
That's in mid-winter.
Also, the teeth reveal that the animals had been specifically fattened up prior to the feasting.
And we can tell this because the teeth are rotten.
What we have here isn't just casual feasting.
This is one final commemoration.
It's one big celebration of life before the ancestors commenced their journey to Stonehenge and the land of the dead.
It's thought that each winter people would come here from hundreds of miles around to commemorate the lives of their ancestors.
And to ensure the souls of the recently dead reached the safety of the afterlife, at Stonehenge itself.
I think it's fascinating that everyone believes they know Stonehenge.
It's like the Mona Lisa or the Pyramids.
It's so familiar, it's hard to see it with fresh eyes.
I think we've discovered something by coming here.
I think we've discovered a new Stonehenge.
And it's as far from the golden warmth of a mid-summer sunrise as it's possible to get.
It's somewhere that still carries a charge.
You can feel it.
And if you come here at mid-winter, you can feel that charge just a little bit more.
The coldness of the stones, the open landscape, it's not hard to believe that this place is somewhere that belongs to the dead.
When we look back to the time of the great monuments of the Neolithic, we see a whole new age dawning in belief, but also in society.
There's no doubt that the creation of these vast monuments was a religious act.
It's about finding and defining a place in the universe, in time, in life and in death.
The special objects found at Orkney, the arrangement of the temple complex, these things imply the existence of a priestly class that the farmers themselves were supporting.
And the sheer scale of these enterprises, the planning and engineering required by Stonehenge, by the Ring of Brodgar, suggests that some group was in charge, and they were out to impress.
Because these monuments themselves were connected.
And we know that people were moving between these great monuments because of this.
It's a style of pottery.
It's called groovedware because of the grooves that decorate the surface.
It was made first of all in Orkney.
It's also the first pottery we know of in Britain and Ireland with a proper flat base.
This style of pottery was subsequently found at Stonehenge, in the south of England.
And it's found at all points in between.
What experts are now imagining is a kind of elite world travel, if you like, where important people move between the great Neolithic monuments on a kind of grand tour.
Right, in on three, lads.
Haon, dó, trí! Five thousand years ago, there was only one way for a serious Neolithic traveller to get around.
So, is she doing what she's supposed to, Clive? She's doing exactly what she's meant to do.
- Yeah? - So, very impressed.
- And it's completely dry.
- She is.
I'm joining the crew of a sea-going currach built by Irish boat-builder Clive O'Gibny using 5,000-year-old technology.
A frame of hazel, covered with cow hide, and sealed with pitch.
It's as smooth as spreading a nice piece of butter on a bread, isn't it? Every now and again, I can persuade myself I'm in time with somebody.
That's it.
Aye, well, if it's with me, Neil, - then we're both out.
- We're in trouble.
Rowing is all very well.
All right, lads.
Give it a crack.
But Clive believes that longer voyages would have required some sort of sail.
Okay.
Now, I'm going to go overboard if we do this.
In the Neolithic, there was no cloth technology.
So Clive has used hazel rods and strips of cowhide.
No one has ever attempted anything remotely like this before.
So we just need everybody, sort of, to be calm.
Now, I'm going to move that way with this sail.
It's the moment of truth, Clive.
- Over towards you.
- Whoops! Yous are all right, lads.
Sit down.
Do you hear it? All the way.
- Let go.
- You got her? It's a heavy and cumbersome rig.
But, amazingly, it actually seems to work.
So how does it feel, Clive, seeing this for the first time? I feel thrilled and delighted with myself.
It's one thing imagining it, but actually feel it working I wanted to hear it, I wanted to feel it.
And that's exactly what we're getting now.
It's one of the best experiences I've had in my life.
It is definitely a sailing currach.
Definitely a sailing currach.
There you go, Neil.
Will we just go to England, Clive? Aye, c'mon.
Where will we go? I got the lunch.
I've got a dram of something in there.
It's easy to imagine boats like this sailing between the great sites of Neolithic Britain, carrying people, ideas, beliefs, and precious objects.
One remarkable find epitomises this age of elite travel It was discovered just north of Dublin, but it's thought it was made across the sea in Britain.
This is a ceremonial macehead.
It's 5,000 years old, there or thereabouts, and it's made from a single piece of beautifully worked flint.
In every possible way, it's an object of wonder.
Now, the person who made this wasn't just technically skilled, but also an artistic genius.
Do you see the way that spiral there suggests two eyes and then the hole to take the shaft of the mace could be the mouth.
The hole for the shaft has been drilled out.
Now this is from a time before any metal, so the drill bit was a piece of wood, and the abrasive action has been achieved by using sand or ground quartz.
Even saying that, you're still looking at countless hours and days, maybe even weeks, of painstaking effort to create that perfect smooth hole.
It's technically flawless.
But it also reveals a level of sophistication and refinement of design that you simply don't see in any other artefact of the period in Britain or in Ireland.
This new art speaks of power and prestige, of an emerging world of priests and chieftains, people whose status was displayed in the possession of rare and exquisite objects.
As well as Stonehenge and Orkney, it seems that these people also came to Ireland.
Five thousand years ago, travellers would have sailed or rowed up here, the River Boyne, to the most sacred landscape of them all.
The Brú na Bóinne, the "Palace of the Boyne.
" This is another sacred landscape constructed around 3,200 years BC, which means that it probably predates the bluestone phase at Stonehenge, and the stone circles of Orkney.
This could be where it all began.
And right at the centre, a mecca for tourists from all over the world, is this massive passage grave, Newgrange.
Of course, the mound as you see it today isn't original It was excavated in the 1960s and then reconstructed in this, well, very confident style.
I'm in two minds about it actually.
On the one hand, it's very striking and attracts a lot of people, maybe inspires a lot of people to find out more.
But, on the other hand, it's a bit brutal.
It's a bit overdone.
It's kind of like Stalin does the Stone Age.
Inside, though, its magic still rings out.
This is the very earliest building of the new Neolithic cosmology, created hundreds of years before even the Egyptian pyramids.
What strikes you immediately is how much this feels like Maes Howe on Orkney with this narrow, low passageway leading from the world of light into the dark world within.
And, in fact, this may have been the inspiration for Maes Howe, because this tomb was built first.
And again, like Maes Howe, there are three recesses that once upon a time would have held the remains of the dead.
But this one is altogether more rough hewn than Maes Howe.
It lacks the perfection.
It's more Stone Age, if you like.
Like Maes Howe and Orkney, Newgrange is carefully aligned on the movement of the Sun.
Avove the entrance, there's a stone frame that lets light into the passage, a roofbox.
If I get down here, you can see what I mean.
On a day like today, it doesn't let a lot of sunshine in.
But once a year, on the 21 st of December, the winter solstice, the Sun is directly in front of the entrance, and the roofbox lets the sunlight all the way up this passageway until it illuminates the entire chamber.
It lasts for about 17 minutes, and then the chamber is plunged into darkness for another year.
Now, that trick makes this place one of the earliest astronomically aligned buildings anywhere in the world.
Like the other monuments, Newgrange marks mid-winter.
But here, there's an additional clue to Neolithic belief.
That time flowsin a cycle.
And even in death, there is a promise of rebirth.
There was a reason for the alignment of the passageway.
It's to allow the Sun to illuminate this stone and to pick out this carving, the only carving in the recess.
It's something called a triple spiral, the very earliest example of a triple spiral.
It's one continuous carving with no beginning and no end.
It's a kind of perfect form.
The illumination of this carving once a year, in a piece of religious theatre, lay at the very heart of the beliefs of the people who designed and built this place.
The great sacred sites of Newgrange, Stonehenge, and those on Orkney, were magnets for elite travellers who, 5,000 years ago, took inspiration and ideas from one another.
What we're left with today are monuments that are unique in Europe, created by powerful and commonly-held religious beliefs.
From the Orkney Islands in Scotland to the Preseli mountains in Wales, from the Lake District in the north of England to Stonehenge in the south, and finally here in Ireland, it's all connected.
And all that time, there must have been some sort of priestly caste marshalling all that effort, the people who carried the maceheads.
And in some of the tombs surrounding Newgrange, there are clues to their sacred beliefs, and, in particular, to the treatment of one of the first elites of ancient society.
Within sight of Newgrange, lies yet another tomb, Knowth.
More than 400 of its stones are covered in swirling, abstract art.
Almost half of all the Megalithic art in the whole of Western Europe.
This is where the precious macehead was found.
And it wasn't the only spectacular discovery.
Archaeologist George Eogan has been studying Knowth for 50 years.
You could picture that you had a religious person, the equivalent of a priest, you see, who could stand here before the entrance, this is directly opposite the entrance, and in between, you have this splendid sandstone, six feet of so in height, with a vertical line which leads up the centre of the passage.
So, what would have happened inside? You know, who gets in there? I would think that only a very small number of people went inside, probably even an individual, who just took the remains and placed them in the tomb.
- And, we can have a look? - We can, indeed.
Good.
Lead on.
Back in 1968, George was the first person in modern times to break into the tomb.
- How long is the passage? - About 140 feet.
Are you winning? Oh, it'll take me a long time.
No hurry.
Right.
I see why you don't have this place open to the public, George.
- It's not the easiest place.
- No.
Oh, my.
- Oh, I say.
- Look up.
Now that's a bit good.
And this is as it was? This hasn't been reconstructed? Oh, no, not at all.
What was it like the very first time you came in here? How did you feel to be the first person in here for goodness knows how long? Well, I felt a bit Unbelievably exciting.
What George found were the untouched remnants of ancient sacred rites, a time capsule of Neolithic belief.
Magnificent! And scattered in and around this exquisitely carved basin was evidence of something new in Stone Age society, burnt human remains.
These are some of the earliest remains of ritual cremation ever found.
Well, the skull is the easiest to find because the skull is very distinctive.
It has an inner layer and an outer layer and a bit of spongy bone in between.
Although only fragments survive, under expert eyes, these remains reveal a wealth of information.
Some areas of the skull are more important than others.
And this part, in particular, is called the petrous portion of the temporal bone and it survives very well because it's thick.
And from this, I can identify which side of the skull it came from.
So it's useful in determining the number of individuals.
Because if I've got two left temporal bones, then I've got two different individuals.
Forensic science reveals that Knowth contained over 100 cremated bodies.
But those cremations were accumulated over centuries of use.
The radio carbon dates showed that that was over approximately 300-year time span.
And that works out at one cremation every two to three years.
So, therefore, cremation wasn't that common.
What Laureen Buckley's work shows is that the new practice of cremation was unusual This rarity, and the discovery of the Knowth macehead, suggests that it was an honour reserved for only the very highest levels of late Neolithic society.
The cremated remains at Knowth show that there was a hierarchy at play which determined how your mortal remains were treated.
Put simply, if you were important, your remains were burnt, cremated.
And, presumably, that meant that your spirit was being treated differently and was going to go somewhere different than the remains of those left behind on Earth, simply to be buried.
I'm going to have my own experimental cremation right here in the shadow of Knowth Tomb.
The thing is, cremating a body is about much more than just lighting a fire.
It's a technological challenge, which is why I've brought two Dublin firemen with me.
We need to get it between 1,500 to 1,700 degrees Celsius in order to totally cremate the body.
And how long does it have to sustain that kind of temperature to do away with something like a human body? About two to three hours.
But then the idea of building the pyre like this is that it holds its structure.
So, as it ignites, the structure remains intact and then it collapses inwards.
Lovely.
Since I can't find anyone to volunteer, we've taken a trip to the local butchers.
At around 70 kilos, a medium-sized pig makes a good substitute for an average adult man.
Right.
Almost a third of its weight is fat, and that's important, because although wood is needed to get things going, the main fuel in a cremation is the body itself.
Now we've ordained that our cremations are performed out of sight and out of mind, but this is really what it's all about.
Flesh and bone being consumed by the flames and turned into smoke.
I quite like it.
It's a process that takes hours, time enough to reflect upon a leader's life, and their journey to another world.
You have to try and imagine the impact of this on people 5,000 years ago when a chieftain or a priest died, their body would be consumed by fire and be reduced to virtually nothing.
And then to see the few earthbound remains, a handful of dust and crumbling bones, picked out of the embers and placed in a recess in that tomb forever, while all the rest of them had disappeared into the sky.
Who can imagine what impact that would have? The following morning, and only a few smoking embers remain.
As a first attempt to Neolithic cremation, I think that's quite good.
The flame has done away with most of the body.
So I've sent that pig into the afterlife, if you like.
The discoveries in Ireland show a new society emerging through the late Neolithic, a society where status mattered.
It determined the objects you possessed in life, and how your body was treated in death.
This was a society where ideas travelled, and where new beliefs were manifested in the greatest ancient monuments the world had ever seen.
And it's in those very monuments that today we're able to glimpse the very birth of a whole new concept of existence.
From around 3,000 to 2,500 BC, was a time when we became aware of our place, not just here on Earth, but within the cosmos.
The great tombs, the stone circles, they were an attempt to make sense of the movement of the Sun and the Moon, of an entire universe that shapes and governs our lives and our time.
Those forces went way beyond the reach of the ancestors.
So much so that, from now on, when some people died, they were to be sent to a new place, a different place.
Not down into the earth, but up into the sky.
It seems to me that it was in the Neolithic that people first conceived of an idea that endures to this day, that somewhere up here was Heaven.
Next time, my journey continues.
Look at that.
As I discover a new age.
That is magic! One forged in metal - Are you impressed? - I'm deeply, deeply impressed.
By a new people.
He knew how to get metal, how to make metal, and how to work metal.
A people inventing a whole new way of living.
As well as men working down here, there must have been children because some of the spaces are just too small.
Of how our land, and its people, were forged over thousands of years of ancient history.
This Britain is a strange and alien world.
A world that contains the hidden story of our distant, prehistoric past.
We began as hunters who came from mainland Europe, before Britain was an island.
Instead of hunting mammoth and reindeer in the snow, he hunted red deer in the wild wood.
And continued into a new age, as the first farmers built monumental tombs to their ancestors.
Nothing like this had ever been seen before in Britain.
Now the journey continues, with the next chapter in our epic story.
Of course, what everybody's waiting for is the sunrise.
An age of cosmology, when our lives were ruled by the sun and the stars.
The birth of earthly power and social class, set against some of the greatest wonders of the ancient world.
I'm going back almost 6,000 years to a Britain in the throes of the Neolithic Revolution.
The first farmers were forging a whole new relationship with the land, a land that was alive with spiritual meaning.
The wild wood that bordered their fields, the boundary between land and sea, and mountains that touched the very sky.
Places like the Lake District, with its dramatic valleys and crags, held a special power.
If your understanding of the world was rooted in stone, then this landscape, which seems to shout the very word "stone," would've seemed especially important.
And here in the Central Fells, the shout is particularly clear.
Archaeologist Mark Edmonds has spent 30 years on the trail of the ancient people who came here in search of something very special Five or six thousand years ago, the chances are no one is actually living here full time.
They come here because the highest ground probably has good grazing.
But probably what drew them up here was not the chance of living here full time.
That would happen many years later.
It was the stone that brought them up, it was the stone that they came for.
Over 5,000 years ago, Neolithic people climbed these same precarious paths.
What they were heading for were high outcrops of volcanic rock called greenstone.
The crags that are worked the most are some of the highest, and some of the most difficult to get to.
And I think that's part of the attraction of the place, is that it involves risk, it involves danger.
- Okay.
So, nearly there.
Nearly there.
- Mmm-hmm.
The debris of ancient stone working still lies all around.
Hundreds of offcuts of very special stone axes.
And this is what we've climbed for.
- Look at this stuff.
This is amazing.
- I know.
It's ridiculous, isn't it? It's the volume of it.
So, every single bit of this is the result of people making tools? There was this stone to be had that could be worked and worked well to a fine finish.
So, this is a must have raw material.
It's an extraordinary raw material.
So, this whole area is an axe factory? Yeah.
You don't find many of the axes themselves up here.
But, fortunately, I've brought some with me.
And this is what we call in the trade a rough out.
So, that's halfway through the process of making? Yeah.
It's absolutely exquisite.
It's a thing of beauty, unfinished or not.
This is what they would've looked like when they left the crags, and then, pop that down there, once you get down into the lowlands, down into the areas where people traditionally would've been living, that's when the more glacial, slow process of grinding and polishing would be undertaken to get them down to something like that.
How long does it take to get from that to the finished article? Well, you can see in the two forms that already the idea of what it's gonna look like is there.
In accustomed hands, you can make one of these in about 45 minutes, flaking as you go.
This, at least several hundred hours.
Possibly even thousands of hours to get a really good lustre, a good polish which brings out the colour of the stone.
And why go to that offort? Because it doesn't make a better axe, does it? No, it doesn't.
It doesn't improve the effectiveness of the tool very much.
I think what's important about these things is not simply that they're tools, but they were also very important because they were tokens of identity.
They said something about the people who made them and used them.
It wasn't just the stone that made these axes special, but where it came from, the sky.
Although it's a mountain, what we're dealing with here is a monument.
A place that draws people up, draws people together, at which they can work the stone, to produce objects that matter to them, because they say something about who they are.
So, in a sense, the journey from the low country, up here probably takes several days.
Exposing yourself to danger, to the risks of falling, to come up into the clouds sometimes as well, is as much a rite of passage as anything else.
An activity that's as much ceremonial, possibly spiritual, as it is practical.
The Cumbrian axe factory reveals a relationship between people, their landscape, and stone itself.
This belief system would change over time.
It would develop into something much more complex.
And, for us, something fantastically enigmatic.
Something that represents the beginning of a whole new age in our history.
A time the experts refer to as the Age of Astronomy, when we moved away from this more earthly ancestor worship towards something much more cosmic.
What we see is a radical change in thinking that manifested itself in something staggering.
The construction of monuments in stone on an unprecedented and massive scale.
Some of them astronomically aligned.
What's becoming clear is that for the people living 5,000 years ago, this new age wasn't bringing a new way of thinking about the ancestors, rather, it was a new way of thinking about themselves as individuals within an increasingly complicated society, and an internationally connected world.
All of that, and the universe itself.
Where did we fit into time and into the cosmos? In a valley just beneath the greenstone axe factory, there's evidence of these new ideas.
Places like this, they have an atmosphere.
When you happen across one in the landscape, it makes you pause, and think, and wonder, you know, "What's going on?" Stone circles are almost unknown outside Britain and Ireland, but we have hundreds of them.
And they're often found in the most dramatic of locations.
First of all, this place, these stones, mattered.
This is quite a small stone circle, but still the effort involved suggests you don't go moving things this size just for fun.
And building monumental structures like this was part of a tradition that lasted for over 1,000 years.
Five thousand years ago, people living here in Cumbria, and all over Britain, were making spiritual connections that had never been made before.
Not just between their lives and the land, but between their lives and the sky, the cosmos, as well, perhaps, the very idea of Heaven.
This is a new Britain, the Neolithic reaching its very height.
And it's one of the most mysterious and glorious periods in all of prehistory.
Welcome to the Orkney Islands, off the northern tip of Scotland.
I've come here to explore a landscape that holds some of the best preserved Stone Age structures in the whole of Britain.
Here, there are relics of the lives and the beliefs of the people who lived here at the very height of the Neolithic.
Orkney's a wild place, whipped by North Atlantic winds.
Even from the air, there's not a tree to be seen.
But it's more than the wind that's responsible.
There were trees on Orkney once upon a time.
But it's thought that the first farmers cut them down to prepare fields for crops and keeping animals.
And given that Orkney's not a big place, it didn't take long to clear the lot.
Fortunately, though, Orkney was rich in another building material The whole island is made of this.
Horizontally bedded, fractured sandstone that splits very easily into useful slabs and sheets.
And around 3,300 BC, the people living here began to use this stuff to build some of the most enduring structures of the ancient world.
Magnificent stone tombs and vast stone circles give us a unique insight into an extraordinary moment in our history, when we first turned our spiritual gaze towards the heavens.
Here, even domestic houses have been preserved in stone, the very homes of the people who were pioneering this new age.
Some of the most special are perched on the far west coast of Orkney.
Here it is, Skara Brae.
It's an extraordinary place, and it lets us get as close as we could possibly hope to, to the way domestic life was lived on Orkney in the Stone Age.
The village was occupied for over 600 years, from around 3,100 BC.
What you've got are eight houses, arranged on either side of a long, winding passage.
And because the whole thing is semi-subterranean, it does a great job of keeping the wind out, cutting down the drafts.
And because there wasn't any wood available, it wasn't just the houses that were built of stone, but everything inside as well Right.
This is the inside of one of the houses.
What you notice straight away is the big, square hearth for a big, roaring fire.
These are bed recesses.
There are places where people would have laid out their bedding.
This arrangement here looks a bit like a dresser, because it is a dresser.
It's directly opposite the only entrance, so it's the first thing that guests see as they enter.
And in here, on these shelves, you'd put the things that mattered.
It's the equivalent of having somewhere to put the good wedding china.
Everything about this design, this house, is so clever, and it's so human.
But wonderful and evocative though this place undoubtedly is, it's all a bit too neat and tidy.
It's a bit sterile.
The grass is too mown.
The first time I came here, I heard a song in my head, and I've heard it every time since.
And it's Flintstones.
Meet The Flintstones.
Modern stone age family.
What you want here, in addition to the sights, are the sounds of conversation and lives being lived, the smells of all that human activity.
But we can get closer.
- You all right? - Yeah, lead on.
Okay.
Here we go.
Alison Sheridan, a specialist in prehistoric artefacts, is showing me one house that's so well preserved people aren't usually allowed inside.
Gosh, it's not the easiest place to get into, is it? No, but it's cosy.
So, what would life have been like for Skara Brae residents, do you think? It would've been pretty comfortable, by the standards of the age, because you've got this wonderful central hearth.
So, it may have been dark, because of the roof, - but it would have been warm.
- Okay.
They've also got convenience.
They have a toilet.
How do you know that's a toilet and not a storage space? Well, there's actually a drain underneath it.
And, actually, they did find poo.
- Oh, really? - Mmm.
- Oh, so the hard evidence is there? - Yes.
Remarkably, these houses also contained artefacts.
The precious possessions of the people who were living here 5,000 years ago.
I never found anything like this in my entire life.
Miserable bits of broken stone was all I ever found.
- So what have we got? - Anything but miserable bits of stone.
These are absolutely amazing.
What are they generally called if you were to group them as a class of find? - Enigmatic carved stone objects.
- Okay.
All right.
Only because archaeologists haven't worked out exactly what they are.
And in the absence of materials that we would consider precious, like gold and silver, I suppose, these have to be the equivalent of it.
Because of the time that they represent, and the skill that they represent.
That's right.
'Cause we're in an age that's well before the earliest metal.
So, the stone itself is not intrinsically valuable, but as an object, it meant a lot.
And what about the rest of them? These pieces of jewellery Yeah.
In fact, they found something like 8,000 beads in this structure.
- In this house? - Yes.
Right.
So, on a very practical level, it says that someone's got the time to do this, rather than being out growing, herding, whatever.
Someone is able to set aside part of their day, or maybe all of their time, to specialising.
Absolutely.
Yes.
And being provided with everything else they need - by the rest of the village.
- That's right.
These are just wonders.
Which one can I have? Take them all.
We know where you live.
But as well as jewellery and carved stones, this house also revealed a darker secret.
Intriguingly, two adult women skeletons were found underneath the bed.
Uniquely.
- You mean, below floor level? - Yes.
It's as if during the lifetime of the house, they lived here, they died here, they were buried here.
- Under the bed.
- Granny under the bed.
It was a house for the living, and it's also a house for the dead.
The precious artefacts and the presence of human remains might mean that these houses were special No one can be sure, but the people who lived here might not have been ordinary farmers, but some of the earliest priests of a new religion.
Within just a few miles of Skara Brae, built around the same time, is this.
A stone tomb constructed on a truly grand scale.
Fantastic.
Already you get the sense that you've left one world behind and come somewhere different.
And what you're rewarded with, after bending down and struggling through, is access to a masterpiece, in every sense of the word.
What you also see right away is the similarity between the interior of this tomb and the interiors of the houses in Skara Brae.
And, in fact, there was a house here once upon a time and a circle of standing stones, all before the tomb was ever built.
It's a classic example of somewhere domestic being altered, becoming something other, something ritual.
Over here, again, a shadow of something domestic.
It's a recess, similar to a bed.
But, of course, the people put away in there are having a much, much deeper sleep.
Maes Howe is a triumph of ancient architecture.
Not only in its stonework, but in the way it's been positioned in the landscape.
For a few days, each midwinter, the setting sun is framed by two distant hills on the neighbouring island of Hoy.
And as the sun drops onto the horizon, it shines through the passage, lighting up the inner chamber.
Maes Howe was aligned to the heavens, and to the dramatic features of the Orkadian landscape.
When you look around here, you realise that you're surrounded by hills and water.
It's a natural amphitheatre.
It's a stage set for drama.
And it's here, across the promontory from Maes Howe, that the Neolithic people of Orkney decided to build another extraordinary monument in stone.
The Ring of Brodgar is one of the biggest stone circles that we know about anywhere.
It's over 100 metres across.
And while there are 21 stones standing today, in its original form, there would have been as many as 60.
And that's not all This stone circle was also surrounded by a ditch.
Not just any ditch.
This is ten metres across, and over three metres deep.
And it's not just cut into the soil, it's been cut into the living bedrock.
It's been estimated that it would have taken 100 men six months just to cut the ditch.
This is on an epic scale.
The Ring of Brodgar is vast, but, incredibly, it actually forms part of something even bigger.
And here's a clue, the ditch isn't actually complete.
There's a causeway across it, right here.
And there's another one on the other side.
It's thought that these are an entrance and an exit.
Which means, perhaps, that the stone circle is itself a destination.
It's some kind of portal, maybe.
Something you pass through, on the way to somewhere else.
And that somowhere else is down there, just across the peninsula.
The Ring of Brodgar points you across a narrow land-bridge towards another even older stone circle, the Stones of Stenness.
Few of the original stones survive.
But those that do, reveal yet more connections to this monumental landscape.
What's striking here is the way some of the stones are positioned.
This pair here are aligned so that when you look through the gap, Maes Howe is perfectly framed against the hillside.
Originally, there would have been a complete ditch encircling the whole monument And the thinking is that that ditch would have held water, so that it would appear as a moat.
So, maybe what you've got 5,000 years ago is the builders, the architects of this monument, creating an island within an island.
A miniature, a microcosm of their world as they saw it.
The creation of monumental architecture around 5,000 years ago can be seen, in a sense, as an evolution of earlier Neolithic culture.
After all, these people had been building huge earthen enclosures and vast cursus monuments for generations.
It was the connections between the monuments and astronomical alignments that was new.
The earth, the landscape, was as important as it had always been.
But, now, it was being seen as part of a bigger picture.
The skies, the Sun and the Moon, the Heavens.
That's what this Age of Astronomy seems to have been all about.
Our human need to understand our place in the cosmos still resonates today.
This is mid-summer, just before dawn, at the most famous Stone Age monument of them all.
This place, Salisbury Plain, has been attracting people for millennia.
And it still does.
There are literally thousands of people here.
Some of them have come to worship ancient gods.
Some, to connect with Mother Earth.
Some have come in search of themselves.
But to be honest, I think a lot of them are here just because everyone else is.
Just for the spectacle.
Of course, what everybody's waiting for is the sunrise, which will be over there.
And, by my reckoning, will be in several minutes' time.
Can't wait.
Funny thing is, it's actually very hard to see the sunrise, because of all these stones and all these people.
Oh.
There she blows.
And, presumably, its arrival today means something different to every one of these people here.
And there're several thousand of them, so that's several thousand meanings.
You can take your pick.
But what did Stonehenge mean to the people who gathered here 5,000 years ago? To begin to answer that, you have to go back to the stones themselves.
And I don't mean the most obvious ones.
The Sarsen stones, and the huge trilithons, they weren't part of the original monument.
If you want to get back to the start of Stonehenge, you have to look at these smaller stones that are all around the interior.
Unlike the sarsens, which were dragged here from just 20 or so miles up the road, these are from much, much further away, off to the west.
The wild southwest of Wales, high in the Preseli Hills, the rolling landscape is broken by huge outcrops of a very distinctive stone.
Now, the thing is, studies have shown that this kind of stone is identical to the original boulders of Stonehenge, built over 200 miles away, in that direction.
Geologists call this a spotted dolerite.
And this is the only place in Britain where this particular type exists.
This has been amazing to me for more than half of my life.
I mean, why do it at all? What motivated them? Why these stones from here? Now, it does have to be said there are a couple of things about this rock that are unusual.
First of all, I'm going to don my Stone Age goggles, and hit this as hard as I can.
Now, on that fresh face there, if I wet that freshly broken face Look at that! Isn't that lovely? See how it changes colour? It goes to this soft blue shade.
Obviously, it's why this stuff is known as bluestone.
And it's speckled throughout with these little flecks of feldspar.
These properties, these unique freckles, would have made this rock seem very special.
It might even have seemed magical.
We might never know exactly why this place and these crags were chosen, but it reminds me of the Lake District axe makers on a much grander scale.
What we do know for certain though is that this place was important.
So important, that it filled the ancient people with an urge so powerful that they were able to find the strength and the will to move over 200 tonnes of this rock and use it to set up the first stone circle of Stonehenge.
Now, that takes some belief.
Five thousand years ago, the Stonehenge we see today simply didn't exist.
Instead, there was a much simpler circle.
After their long journey from Preseli, the bluestones were put up in a great big circle round the outside, on the inner edge of this bank.
So for 500 years or so, the bluestone circle was Stonehenge.
And then, for some reason, the people living around here decided to give themselves an even bigger challenge.
Around 2,500 BC, a new generation of builders created their ultimate monument Using massive blocks of local sandstone, they constructed something unprecedented, a ring of standing stones capped with lintels.
Inside, a horseshoe of yet more stones.
And at the same time, for good measure, they moved the original boulders of bluestone right into the centre.
Unlike the bluestones, these gigantic sarsens were only transported 20 miles or so from up the road.
But given that each one weighs anything up to 40 tonnes, well, the effort required to shift them was phenomenal.
This new Stonehenge marked special days in the cosmic calendar.
Spring and autumn, as well as the well-known alignment on the mid-summer sunrise.
But the mid-summer sunrise exactly matches another event, the setting sun at mid-winter.
The latest evidence suggests that our most famous prehistoric monument of all might not have been a celebration of summer and life, but a commemoration of winter and death.
Like the Orkney monuments, Stonehenge is not alone.
Nearby, this field contains all that remains of an ancient site of winter gathering.
Have a look at these.
Animal bones and teeth.
Just a sample, really, of the thousands of animal remains found scattered all across the site.
These are pig bones.
Piglets are usually born in the springtime.
And the vast majority of the pig remains at Durrington Walls show that the adult animals were slaughtered around nine months.
That's in mid-winter.
Also, the teeth reveal that the animals had been specifically fattened up prior to the feasting.
And we can tell this because the teeth are rotten.
What we have here isn't just casual feasting.
This is one final commemoration.
It's one big celebration of life before the ancestors commenced their journey to Stonehenge and the land of the dead.
It's thought that each winter people would come here from hundreds of miles around to commemorate the lives of their ancestors.
And to ensure the souls of the recently dead reached the safety of the afterlife, at Stonehenge itself.
I think it's fascinating that everyone believes they know Stonehenge.
It's like the Mona Lisa or the Pyramids.
It's so familiar, it's hard to see it with fresh eyes.
I think we've discovered something by coming here.
I think we've discovered a new Stonehenge.
And it's as far from the golden warmth of a mid-summer sunrise as it's possible to get.
It's somewhere that still carries a charge.
You can feel it.
And if you come here at mid-winter, you can feel that charge just a little bit more.
The coldness of the stones, the open landscape, it's not hard to believe that this place is somewhere that belongs to the dead.
When we look back to the time of the great monuments of the Neolithic, we see a whole new age dawning in belief, but also in society.
There's no doubt that the creation of these vast monuments was a religious act.
It's about finding and defining a place in the universe, in time, in life and in death.
The special objects found at Orkney, the arrangement of the temple complex, these things imply the existence of a priestly class that the farmers themselves were supporting.
And the sheer scale of these enterprises, the planning and engineering required by Stonehenge, by the Ring of Brodgar, suggests that some group was in charge, and they were out to impress.
Because these monuments themselves were connected.
And we know that people were moving between these great monuments because of this.
It's a style of pottery.
It's called groovedware because of the grooves that decorate the surface.
It was made first of all in Orkney.
It's also the first pottery we know of in Britain and Ireland with a proper flat base.
This style of pottery was subsequently found at Stonehenge, in the south of England.
And it's found at all points in between.
What experts are now imagining is a kind of elite world travel, if you like, where important people move between the great Neolithic monuments on a kind of grand tour.
Right, in on three, lads.
Haon, dó, trí! Five thousand years ago, there was only one way for a serious Neolithic traveller to get around.
So, is she doing what she's supposed to, Clive? She's doing exactly what she's meant to do.
- Yeah? - So, very impressed.
- And it's completely dry.
- She is.
I'm joining the crew of a sea-going currach built by Irish boat-builder Clive O'Gibny using 5,000-year-old technology.
A frame of hazel, covered with cow hide, and sealed with pitch.
It's as smooth as spreading a nice piece of butter on a bread, isn't it? Every now and again, I can persuade myself I'm in time with somebody.
That's it.
Aye, well, if it's with me, Neil, - then we're both out.
- We're in trouble.
Rowing is all very well.
All right, lads.
Give it a crack.
But Clive believes that longer voyages would have required some sort of sail.
Okay.
Now, I'm going to go overboard if we do this.
In the Neolithic, there was no cloth technology.
So Clive has used hazel rods and strips of cowhide.
No one has ever attempted anything remotely like this before.
So we just need everybody, sort of, to be calm.
Now, I'm going to move that way with this sail.
It's the moment of truth, Clive.
- Over towards you.
- Whoops! Yous are all right, lads.
Sit down.
Do you hear it? All the way.
- Let go.
- You got her? It's a heavy and cumbersome rig.
But, amazingly, it actually seems to work.
So how does it feel, Clive, seeing this for the first time? I feel thrilled and delighted with myself.
It's one thing imagining it, but actually feel it working I wanted to hear it, I wanted to feel it.
And that's exactly what we're getting now.
It's one of the best experiences I've had in my life.
It is definitely a sailing currach.
Definitely a sailing currach.
There you go, Neil.
Will we just go to England, Clive? Aye, c'mon.
Where will we go? I got the lunch.
I've got a dram of something in there.
It's easy to imagine boats like this sailing between the great sites of Neolithic Britain, carrying people, ideas, beliefs, and precious objects.
One remarkable find epitomises this age of elite travel It was discovered just north of Dublin, but it's thought it was made across the sea in Britain.
This is a ceremonial macehead.
It's 5,000 years old, there or thereabouts, and it's made from a single piece of beautifully worked flint.
In every possible way, it's an object of wonder.
Now, the person who made this wasn't just technically skilled, but also an artistic genius.
Do you see the way that spiral there suggests two eyes and then the hole to take the shaft of the mace could be the mouth.
The hole for the shaft has been drilled out.
Now this is from a time before any metal, so the drill bit was a piece of wood, and the abrasive action has been achieved by using sand or ground quartz.
Even saying that, you're still looking at countless hours and days, maybe even weeks, of painstaking effort to create that perfect smooth hole.
It's technically flawless.
But it also reveals a level of sophistication and refinement of design that you simply don't see in any other artefact of the period in Britain or in Ireland.
This new art speaks of power and prestige, of an emerging world of priests and chieftains, people whose status was displayed in the possession of rare and exquisite objects.
As well as Stonehenge and Orkney, it seems that these people also came to Ireland.
Five thousand years ago, travellers would have sailed or rowed up here, the River Boyne, to the most sacred landscape of them all.
The Brú na Bóinne, the "Palace of the Boyne.
" This is another sacred landscape constructed around 3,200 years BC, which means that it probably predates the bluestone phase at Stonehenge, and the stone circles of Orkney.
This could be where it all began.
And right at the centre, a mecca for tourists from all over the world, is this massive passage grave, Newgrange.
Of course, the mound as you see it today isn't original It was excavated in the 1960s and then reconstructed in this, well, very confident style.
I'm in two minds about it actually.
On the one hand, it's very striking and attracts a lot of people, maybe inspires a lot of people to find out more.
But, on the other hand, it's a bit brutal.
It's a bit overdone.
It's kind of like Stalin does the Stone Age.
Inside, though, its magic still rings out.
This is the very earliest building of the new Neolithic cosmology, created hundreds of years before even the Egyptian pyramids.
What strikes you immediately is how much this feels like Maes Howe on Orkney with this narrow, low passageway leading from the world of light into the dark world within.
And, in fact, this may have been the inspiration for Maes Howe, because this tomb was built first.
And again, like Maes Howe, there are three recesses that once upon a time would have held the remains of the dead.
But this one is altogether more rough hewn than Maes Howe.
It lacks the perfection.
It's more Stone Age, if you like.
Like Maes Howe and Orkney, Newgrange is carefully aligned on the movement of the Sun.
Avove the entrance, there's a stone frame that lets light into the passage, a roofbox.
If I get down here, you can see what I mean.
On a day like today, it doesn't let a lot of sunshine in.
But once a year, on the 21 st of December, the winter solstice, the Sun is directly in front of the entrance, and the roofbox lets the sunlight all the way up this passageway until it illuminates the entire chamber.
It lasts for about 17 minutes, and then the chamber is plunged into darkness for another year.
Now, that trick makes this place one of the earliest astronomically aligned buildings anywhere in the world.
Like the other monuments, Newgrange marks mid-winter.
But here, there's an additional clue to Neolithic belief.
That time flowsin a cycle.
And even in death, there is a promise of rebirth.
There was a reason for the alignment of the passageway.
It's to allow the Sun to illuminate this stone and to pick out this carving, the only carving in the recess.
It's something called a triple spiral, the very earliest example of a triple spiral.
It's one continuous carving with no beginning and no end.
It's a kind of perfect form.
The illumination of this carving once a year, in a piece of religious theatre, lay at the very heart of the beliefs of the people who designed and built this place.
The great sacred sites of Newgrange, Stonehenge, and those on Orkney, were magnets for elite travellers who, 5,000 years ago, took inspiration and ideas from one another.
What we're left with today are monuments that are unique in Europe, created by powerful and commonly-held religious beliefs.
From the Orkney Islands in Scotland to the Preseli mountains in Wales, from the Lake District in the north of England to Stonehenge in the south, and finally here in Ireland, it's all connected.
And all that time, there must have been some sort of priestly caste marshalling all that effort, the people who carried the maceheads.
And in some of the tombs surrounding Newgrange, there are clues to their sacred beliefs, and, in particular, to the treatment of one of the first elites of ancient society.
Within sight of Newgrange, lies yet another tomb, Knowth.
More than 400 of its stones are covered in swirling, abstract art.
Almost half of all the Megalithic art in the whole of Western Europe.
This is where the precious macehead was found.
And it wasn't the only spectacular discovery.
Archaeologist George Eogan has been studying Knowth for 50 years.
You could picture that you had a religious person, the equivalent of a priest, you see, who could stand here before the entrance, this is directly opposite the entrance, and in between, you have this splendid sandstone, six feet of so in height, with a vertical line which leads up the centre of the passage.
So, what would have happened inside? You know, who gets in there? I would think that only a very small number of people went inside, probably even an individual, who just took the remains and placed them in the tomb.
- And, we can have a look? - We can, indeed.
Good.
Lead on.
Back in 1968, George was the first person in modern times to break into the tomb.
- How long is the passage? - About 140 feet.
Are you winning? Oh, it'll take me a long time.
No hurry.
Right.
I see why you don't have this place open to the public, George.
- It's not the easiest place.
- No.
Oh, my.
- Oh, I say.
- Look up.
Now that's a bit good.
And this is as it was? This hasn't been reconstructed? Oh, no, not at all.
What was it like the very first time you came in here? How did you feel to be the first person in here for goodness knows how long? Well, I felt a bit Unbelievably exciting.
What George found were the untouched remnants of ancient sacred rites, a time capsule of Neolithic belief.
Magnificent! And scattered in and around this exquisitely carved basin was evidence of something new in Stone Age society, burnt human remains.
These are some of the earliest remains of ritual cremation ever found.
Well, the skull is the easiest to find because the skull is very distinctive.
It has an inner layer and an outer layer and a bit of spongy bone in between.
Although only fragments survive, under expert eyes, these remains reveal a wealth of information.
Some areas of the skull are more important than others.
And this part, in particular, is called the petrous portion of the temporal bone and it survives very well because it's thick.
And from this, I can identify which side of the skull it came from.
So it's useful in determining the number of individuals.
Because if I've got two left temporal bones, then I've got two different individuals.
Forensic science reveals that Knowth contained over 100 cremated bodies.
But those cremations were accumulated over centuries of use.
The radio carbon dates showed that that was over approximately 300-year time span.
And that works out at one cremation every two to three years.
So, therefore, cremation wasn't that common.
What Laureen Buckley's work shows is that the new practice of cremation was unusual This rarity, and the discovery of the Knowth macehead, suggests that it was an honour reserved for only the very highest levels of late Neolithic society.
The cremated remains at Knowth show that there was a hierarchy at play which determined how your mortal remains were treated.
Put simply, if you were important, your remains were burnt, cremated.
And, presumably, that meant that your spirit was being treated differently and was going to go somewhere different than the remains of those left behind on Earth, simply to be buried.
I'm going to have my own experimental cremation right here in the shadow of Knowth Tomb.
The thing is, cremating a body is about much more than just lighting a fire.
It's a technological challenge, which is why I've brought two Dublin firemen with me.
We need to get it between 1,500 to 1,700 degrees Celsius in order to totally cremate the body.
And how long does it have to sustain that kind of temperature to do away with something like a human body? About two to three hours.
But then the idea of building the pyre like this is that it holds its structure.
So, as it ignites, the structure remains intact and then it collapses inwards.
Lovely.
Since I can't find anyone to volunteer, we've taken a trip to the local butchers.
At around 70 kilos, a medium-sized pig makes a good substitute for an average adult man.
Right.
Almost a third of its weight is fat, and that's important, because although wood is needed to get things going, the main fuel in a cremation is the body itself.
Now we've ordained that our cremations are performed out of sight and out of mind, but this is really what it's all about.
Flesh and bone being consumed by the flames and turned into smoke.
I quite like it.
It's a process that takes hours, time enough to reflect upon a leader's life, and their journey to another world.
You have to try and imagine the impact of this on people 5,000 years ago when a chieftain or a priest died, their body would be consumed by fire and be reduced to virtually nothing.
And then to see the few earthbound remains, a handful of dust and crumbling bones, picked out of the embers and placed in a recess in that tomb forever, while all the rest of them had disappeared into the sky.
Who can imagine what impact that would have? The following morning, and only a few smoking embers remain.
As a first attempt to Neolithic cremation, I think that's quite good.
The flame has done away with most of the body.
So I've sent that pig into the afterlife, if you like.
The discoveries in Ireland show a new society emerging through the late Neolithic, a society where status mattered.
It determined the objects you possessed in life, and how your body was treated in death.
This was a society where ideas travelled, and where new beliefs were manifested in the greatest ancient monuments the world had ever seen.
And it's in those very monuments that today we're able to glimpse the very birth of a whole new concept of existence.
From around 3,000 to 2,500 BC, was a time when we became aware of our place, not just here on Earth, but within the cosmos.
The great tombs, the stone circles, they were an attempt to make sense of the movement of the Sun and the Moon, of an entire universe that shapes and governs our lives and our time.
Those forces went way beyond the reach of the ancestors.
So much so that, from now on, when some people died, they were to be sent to a new place, a different place.
Not down into the earth, but up into the sky.
It seems to me that it was in the Neolithic that people first conceived of an idea that endures to this day, that somewhere up here was Heaven.
Next time, my journey continues.
Look at that.
As I discover a new age.
That is magic! One forged in metal - Are you impressed? - I'm deeply, deeply impressed.
By a new people.
He knew how to get metal, how to make metal, and how to work metal.
A people inventing a whole new way of living.
As well as men working down here, there must have been children because some of the spaces are just too small.