News and Projects
STONEHENGE wins award in Brussels
SECRETS OF STONEHENGE was selected by KINEON, the International Festival of Archaeological Film, held Nov. 4-6, 2011 in Brussels, Belgium. Our show was screened to a full house at the beautiful Royal Museums of Art and History, and was honored with one of the 6 awards handed out: Prize for the Popularization of Science.
SECRETS OF STONEHENGE – first awards!
We’ve just learned that SECRETS OF STONEHENGE was honored at the Archaeology Channel International Film and Video Festival with two awards: Best Narration and Best Cinematography.
SECRETS OF STONEHENGE
www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/secrets-stonehenge/
Gail’s blogs about the production of SECRETS OF STONEHENGE
www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/insidenova/
If you plan to visit the prehistoric sites featured in the show, consider taking a tour with SALISBURY AND STONEHENGE GUIDED TOURS. Guide Pat Shelley has worked with the Stonehenge Riverside Project and knows the landscape intimately.
http://www.salisburyguidedtours.com/
GALAPAGOS
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/galapagos/
THE MUMMY WHO WOULD BE KING
- www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mummy/
- www.kineon.be/
7th International Festival of Archaeological Films - www.archaeologychannel.org/content/TACfestival.shtml
The Archaeology Channel’s International Film and Video Festival
BLACK SKY: THE RACE FOR SPACE
http://www.xprizefoundation.com
LOST WORLD OF THE HOLY LAND
www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/holyland
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com
THE EVOLUTIONARY ARMS RACE
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/
OTHER LINKS
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova
http://www.emmys.org
http://www.emmyonline.org
PBS PREMIERE “SECRETS OF STONEHENGE” – NOV. 16, 2010
Dig the mystery!!
Tune in to NOVA on Tuesday, November 16, 2010 for the PBS premiere of our latest production, SECRETS OF STONEHENGE. (Show will air at 8 pm on most PBS stations; please check your local listings.)
To watch a preview of the show, go to NOVA’s website: www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/.
STONE AGE BIKE AGE
(This is one in a series of Gail’s blogs for the Inside NOVA website at www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/insidenova/)
“When I was a boy, my family lived in a house in the forest with no modern conveniences. We made bows and arrows and flint arrowheads, and we tanned animal skins. At the time I wondered if I was missing out on modern-day life. Now I see I was living an incredible childhood adventure –which I’m still living.”
I heard that from Will Lord, professional flint-knapper. He and his parents, John and Valerie Lord have spent the last thirty-odd years mastering prehistoric technologies and teaching these skills in classrooms and museums across Britain. This family looks the part (long hair all round) and dresses the part (leather leggings, pelt ponchos and furry boots.) But this is no gimmick: the Lords see themselves as keepers of the “skills and art” of their distant ancestors.
In August 2009, Jill (Shinefield, my co-producer) and I enlist John and Will to help us conjure up the people who lived during the heyday of Stonehenge. On a hazy afternoon, father and son join us, in full regalia, at West Woods, about 20 miles from Stonehenge. It’s a densely wooded area where massive sarsen stones (like those standing at Stonehenge) lie strewn about the forest floor.
We send Will and John about 200 yards from camera, then film them trekking across the landscape, dwarfed by beech trees thirty feet high. There’s a walkie-talkie jammed into Will’s bent-wood back-pack, so he can hear my directions. On cue the men stop, shoot arrows, inspect sarsens. They look so authentic, for a moment we’re transported back in time.
Next we stage a scene to evoke the arrival of metal in Britain. Will tucks an exquisite bronze axe into his belt: my fantasy is that the sun will glint off the metal as Will emerges from the dark woods into a bright clearing. Camera and sound are ready, and Will has ducked out of view among the trees. I yell “Action!” once… twice… and again. At last, Will appears, but he’s accompanied by a young man hand-walking a bicycle. Bronze Age meets Bike Age: Will in his leather and fur, and the cyclist in color-splashed spandex shorts and those shoes that clip into bike pedals.
There’s been an accident. The cyclist’s buddy has fallen from his bike and sprained (or broken?) his ankle, just there inside the woods. Can we help carry his friend, call an ambulance, retrieve his bike, drive the cyclist to his car? Of course we can; we’re a production team. We mobilize.
Minutes later, supported by his friend on one side and Will on the other, the injured man hobbles into the clearing using Will’s hand-carved walking stick as a crutch. Suddenly, the ambulance appears and medical technicians take over –to my selfish relief. It’s late in the day, we’re losing light, and we need that shot.
Just then, John walks out of the woods wheeling the injured man’s bike. John wears a deerskin cap and a bear-claw pendant. He has a quiver of arrows slung over his shoulder, and a flint axe in his belt. He’s every inch a Stone Age Man, and his eyes crinkle with glee as he rings the bell on the bike’s handlebars. “Looky here, everyone! I’ve just invented the wheel!”
THE DEAD OF STONEHENGE
Archaeologists excavate the dead of Stonehenge. When I started researching our Stonehenge show, I was surprised to learn that at least 50 human burials were discovered there in the early 20th century. But that’s the tip of the iceberg: considering all the unexcavated areas of the monument, experts figure at least 240 people were buried at Stonehenge, if not many more. There has been no shortage of theories about the purpose of Stonehenge -Druid temple, astronomical observatory, landing pad for UFO’s. But one thing is certain: Stonehenge was used as a cemetery. In fact it’s the largest cemetery ever discovered in Britain for its time period (roughly 3000 to 2500 BC -the last gasp of the Stone Age.)
So why have the guidebooks rarely mentioned this? I wonder if it’s because nearly all the burials excavated so far have been cremations -small clusters of bone fragments placed directly in the ground (possibly in now-vanished leather pouches or baskets), with virtually no grave goods. Finding such modest burials can’t have the same impact on archaeologists as the unearthing of full skeletons -or mummies!- decked out with jewelry, weaponry, and household items.
To complicate matters, the archaeologists who excavated most of the burials at Stonehenge did so in the 1920’s and 1930’s, at at time when burnt bone was considered useless for scientific study. Not a single museum in Britain would accept the cremations from Stonehenge, so they were dumped into four burlap bags, and stored in an attic for a decade. Then in 1935, archaeologists reburied the bones in a hole at Stonehenge, and largely forgot about them.
What if, instead of 50 cremation burials, archaeologists had discovered 50 complete skeletons at Stonehenge? What if the dead had been laid to rest in neat rows, or oriented to face the east, with grave goods tucked around them? What if archaeologists had been able to gaze into the empty eye-sockets of intact skulls? I asked these questions of Mike Pitts, an archaeologist and Stonehenge expert, during an interview in September. He paused, smiled and mused: “It’s a very good point, that. I like that. Imagine how different the history of our understanding of Stonehenge would now be.”
(PS: In 2008, Mike Parker Pearson and his team retrieved those reburied cremations. We’ll feature that excavation and the analysis of the bones of the “Stonehenge Dead” in our show.)
STONEHENGE AT DAWN
(This is one in a series of Gail’s blogs for the Inside NOVA website http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/insidenova/)
The guards are mostly young strapping men. They wear fluorescent yellow rain jackets that almost glow in the dark, but the rest of their gear is black -trousers, sweaters, gloves, knit caps, and massive flashlights that look a lot like billy clubs. I wonder how spooky or lonely it might be to patrol Stonehenge all night, and I ask one of the guards. He chuckles and says he much prefers night shifts to working days. Why? He smacks his flashlight rhythmically into the palm of his left hand. “Because at night you get jumpers.” Jumpers? “People who jump the fence. They think no one’s looking, that they’re gonna get in and touch the stones. But no jumper has ever got to the stones on my watch. Keeps it interesting. Keeps me fit.”
Around 5:42 am, a smudge of dawn appears on the horizon and the guards let us in. Laden with equipment, we sprint through the turnstiles, past the shuttered snack bar and gift shop, into the tunnel that runs under the A344 roadway, out the other side and up a steep ramp. Finally, there it is, a study in somber: the black mass of Stonehenge framed against a slate sky. Unfortunately, there’s no time to drink it in. We rush to set up the camera, just in case the cloud cover miraculously parts and grants us a shot of sunrise through the megaliths. Besides, we need to be ready to roll for Clive Ruggles, archaeoastronomer extraordinaire who’s scheduled to arrive in 25 minutes. Jill (Shinefield, my co-producer) and I check our watches compulsively. Exclusive access at Stonehenge is difficult to secure and does not come cheap -so every minute counts.
The clouds stubbornly stay put, but at least it’s not raining -yet. Clive shows up, more energized at dawn than most people at any hour. By the time he finishes answering my first interview question, he’s so warmed up he doffs his jacket. So we shoot ‘Take 2′, and he does the rest of the interview in shirt sleeves. Archaeoastronomy once enjoyed a shady reputation, straying too often into weird science. Almost singlehandedly, Clive rehabilitated the field with his rigorous study of the alignments at Stonehenge and other Neolithic monuments in Britain and Ireland. He has since worked at sites around the world. To be an archaeologist is one thing; to be an astronomer is another; but to be both… My theory about Clive is that his brain fires twice as fast as everyone else’s, and he can pack twice as many ideas in his head.
The interview is over, and we’re shooting ‘B-roll’ of Clive when the clouds let loose on us. It’s a mad scramble to open umbrellas and drag the equipment into the shelter of the tunnel. We dash back and forth, and I nearly slip on the slick grass. Then just before I head back down the ramp for the last time, I look back. And finally I feel it -that shiver of awe. I let the rain and the mystery wash over me, and it’s like I’m seeing Stonehenge for the first time.
BLUESTONEHENGE
For starters, the stones are long gone. For another, the monument is located on the lush banks of the River Avon, prime real estate where most traces of prehistory have been overlaid by lavish country estates. (Apparently Sting owns one.) Luckily, the owners of one idyllic stretch of riverbank (ideally suited for gin-and-tonics on summer afternoons) allowed archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson and his team to dig there. Mike”s goal had been to pinpoint the end of the Stonehenge Avenue, a processional pathway that begins outside the entrance to Stonehenge, curves for about 2 miles across the landscape, and dead-ends somewhere near the river. Mike never dreamed he’d find “Stonehenge’s Little Sister.”
In September 2009, we show up to film the site on the morning after a torrential thunderstorm has swept across the Salisbury Plain. By 9 am, archaeologists and student diggers have bailed rainwater out of the deepest trenches, and everyone is back at work -boots muddied, jeans soggy, spirits intact. I spot Mike Parker Pearson kneeling in the bottom of a ditch, trowel in hand, scraping up clods of sticky clay. He digs with gusto yet great delicacy, parsing out the subtle nuances of color and texture that distinguish signs of human activity in the soil from old rabbit holes. This man can read dirt. He is so clearly in his element that I feel guilty disturbing him. But gracious as always, he gives us a tour of “Bluestonehenge”, as his latest discovery has been christened.
Mike’s team has exposed a large wedge of the henge -a circular ditch and external bank about 33 feet in diameter. In the center, Mike points out an arc of several large holes that (based on their size and shape) must have held standing stones. To my eye, it looks like a gigantic slab of chocolate cake, with holes where huge birthday candles were pulled out. Extrapolating from this ’slice’, Mike reckons the intact circle probably numbered about 25 closely-spaced standing stones. And these were almost certainly bluestones, a type of stone that that’s indigenous to Wales, over 150 miles away. Stonehenge also contains many of these ‘foreign’ bluestones.
So what’s it all mean? Mike cautions that he’s still waiting on radiocarbon dates, but even now it seems clear that Bluestonehenge was an integral part of Stonehenge. Mike suspects the bluestones that once stood here by the river were eventually dragged up the Avenue and installed in Stonehenge, during a later phase of ‘remodeling’. As for the purpose of Bluestonehenge? Mike digs his toe into the ground: “This soil is full of charcoal. Maybe people were cremated here by the river and then their ashes were buried at Stonehenge itself. Not many people realize that Stonehenge was Britain’s largest burial ground at that time.”
According to Mike’s theory, prehistoric people dedicated the area around Stonehenge to their ancestors. We are standing in the sacred realm of the dead. But somehow it just doesn’t feel that way this morning, with the sun sparkling on wet grass and the Avon glinting through the trees. And with Sting just up the road.
Cutting Stonehenge
Gemini Does Stonehenge
Gail, Jill and archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson.
Recent Posts
- STONEHENGE wins award in Brussels
- SECRETS OF STONEHENGE – first awards!
- PBS PREMIERE “SECRETS OF STONEHENGE” – NOV. 16, 2010
- STONE AGE BIKE AGE
- THE DEAD OF STONEHENGE
- STONEHENGE AT DAWN
- BLUESTONEHENGE
- Cutting Stonehenge
- Gemini Does Stonehenge
- MUMMY selected for Archaeology Channel Intn’l Film Festival – May 2008
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