NOVA

NARRATOR

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.

COLIN RICHARDS

By constructing Stonehenge, these people were creating something which had never been created before. It's a bit like their own space program.

NARRATOR

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

MIKE PITTS

A lot of bone.

MIKE PARKER PEARSON

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

JACQUELINE McKINLEY

That's a nice, long piece of fibula. I would think we're going to get at least 50 individuals in here.

NARRATOR

An ancient world is coming back to life.

MIKE PITTS

This is an extraordinary time for Stonehenge. We're beginning to understand it in a way we've never been able to do before.

NARRATOR

The secrets of Stonehenge, revealed right now on NOVA.

NARRATOR

Brooding and majestic, Stonehenge is an icon of prehistory. It dates back to a time before Egypt built its pyramids, to the Stone Age in Britain. Time has taken its toll, but this monument remains a marvel of ancient engineering. A circular ditch and 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. Okay, everybody. Led by Mike Parker Pearson, the Stonehenge Riverside Project is nearly 200 strong, with scientists, students and specialists in everything from astronomy to field survey.

PARKER PEARSON

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.

NARRATOR

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 surrounding 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. And 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 cremation burials.

PITTS

These people had been cremated, so 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 bone.

NARRATOR

Not a single museum in Britain wanted the bones, so in 1935 they were reburied in Aubrey Hole number seven.

PITTS

The idea that Stonehenge was actually one of if not the biggest cremation cemetery in early prehistoric Europe, just disappeared into the ground into Aubrey Hole seven and was forgotten about.

NARRATOR

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.

PARKER PEARSON

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.

NARRATOR

Records from 1935 state the bones were placed in four burlap bags and buried with a commemorative plaque.

PITTS

It's the first time anybody has seen a decent Aubrey Hole for a good 80 years. 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.

JULIAN RICHARDS

Oh, look.

PITTS

What's that? Is it?

NARRATOR

Suddenly they spot a tiny piece of bone.

PITTS

Yep, it's burnt bone, yeah. There's more. It's all over the place.

NARRATOR

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 desperately uncomfortable? Yes, it is quite.

PARKER PEARSON

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

JULIAN RICHARDS

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

PARKER PEARSON

That's already happened. (laughter) Oh, here we go, here we go.

PITTS

Oh, look what I found.

PARKER PEARSON

The plaque. There it is. Read it out for us.

JULIAN RICHARDS

"Most of these bones were dug up in the years 1921, 1922, 1923, reburied 1935."

PITTS

Actually it doesn't tell us anything we don't know, does it? I know! But isn't it nice?

PARKER PEARSON

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 have put them in decent containers. But all we're really looking at is very loose cremated bone.

JULIAN RICHARDS

Oh crikey, look at that.

PITTS

Looks like a lot of bone. We've lifted the plaque and what we saw underneath was quite a shock. It's just a complete jumbled mess of bone from who knows how many people. The plaque has stopped soil falling down in amongst them. So as the sack rotted, the bones were left completely clean. But it's going to be a serious jigsaw puzzle in the lab. I was hoping it was going to be easy, but this is the worst-case scenario.

NARRATOR

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 ax 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.

McKINLEY

People tend to get the impression that in the Neolithic, life is grim and short. That's not necessarily the case at all. People generally seem to have been probably fairly 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.

NARRATOR

Their stone tools and fine pottery have survived the ages. But objects crafted of wood, plant fibers or leather have mostly vanished in 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 number seven, Jacqueline McKinley joins the excavation effort. An expert on ancient human remains, she quickly spots individual features.

McKINLEY

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. Jolly good. It's a very important collection. We're in a very important place. Although it looks like a mess, by separating out the different skeletal elements, we can work out how many people there were in there and the sex and the age of those individuals. And looking at the amount of material we've got, I would think we're going to get at least 50 individuals in here.

NARRATOR

In all, 35 pounds of cremated bone are eventually sent to the University of Sheffield. Graduate student Christie Cox is resurrecting the dead of Stonehenge bit by bit. There's thousands and thousands of bone pieces. It's far more than we ever anticipated when we originally started the excavation.

McKINLEY

This should join here. That is just amazing. So we're looking at this bit down the side here, where the mandible goes up... So it would be the TMJ joint. Yeah. And that suggests that we've got an older individual.

NARRATOR

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

McKINLEY

With a normal domestic cemetery, you'd expect to find a range of ages and individuals of both sex. But most of the cremated bones are from adults, and the majority of those adults appear to be male, and mostly in the 25-to-40 year age group.

COX

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.

McKINLEY

If you've mostly got male cremations in there, that's something odd; that means that certain people are being selected for burial here. What was special about them?

PARKER PEARSON

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.

PITTS

So what this could be indicating is actually at the time that Stonehenge was built, we have an aristocratic, male-based society. Now, that's something we would never have known without these bones.

NARRATOR

Perhaps one royal family marshaled 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 known 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 into 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.

MAN

Oh, yeah. Antler picks were used as the means of excavating these features, ditches, 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 hole, an enormously labor-intensive task. When they got to the bottom, when they finished, maybe it was broken and they just dropped it, or maybe they just deliberately left it there, almost as an offering.

NARRATOR

But how did people move the giant sarsens, up to 45 tons of solid rock? How did they raise lintels to the tops of those gate-like structures called trilithons? To archaeologist Mike Pitts, the process involved manpower and myth.

PITTS

We're about 20 miles north of Stonehenge and this area is probably where all the big stones, the sarsens at Stonehenge, came from. This landscape now looks very much as I think it would have been in the Neolithic. So we have the trees, we have the forests growing, expressing life, and 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 fear and danger.

NARRATOR

To find a sarsen of the right size and shape for Stonehenge may have been a sacred quest for the most skilled stone masons.

PITTS

Like a Michelangelo, they'd 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 ax or an arrowhead, but enlarged into a huge scale.

NARRATOR

Masons may have roughly shaped the sarsens at the quarry site, using pounding stones. But they left few clues to how they moved and raised giant stones.

MAN

One, two, three...

NARRATOR

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.

ALL

Two, three, four.

NARRATOR

A wooden sled with a keel would have kept the stone centered over the tracks. Raising a giant stone involved somehow tipping it into a giant hole. One, two, three, pull! 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 circles. 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 are they for?

NARRATOR

Young taught himself to carve replicas and pondered one strange fact. Many carved balls, engraved and plain, have exactly the same diameter.

YOUNG

Large numbers are identical in size to the millimeter. And why would they need to be identical in size? And that just gave me that "Eureka!"moment. Well, if you're going to use them as a wheel, you need them to be the same size.

NARRATOR

Andrew Young had a vision of Stone Age ball bearing technology. For his Ph.D. thesis, he's testing his idea at a farm near Stonehenge.

YOUNG

So this one's high.

NARRATOR

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.

BRUCE BRADLEY

Andy brought this theory to me. I was astounded because it just made sense. It's just so obvious. Why didn't somebody think of this before?

NARRATOR

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

YOUNG

It's not straight, though.

NARRATOR

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 and 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.

YOUNG

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.

NARRATOR

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

BRADLEY

The worst fear would be that we'd get just a couple of 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.

NARRATOR

They load 3.3 tons-- roughly the weight of a bluestone at Stonehenge.

BRADLEY

One, two, three, go! Keep it going, keep it going! Oh, darn.

NARRATOR

Almost immediately, they're stuck. Man, what happened? The weight is crushing the Douglas fir.

BRADLEY

This amount of weight seems to have compressed it enough that our gap, we're losing our gap.

YOUNG

It's less than a centimeter, and that is not good. As soon as you've got that crib touching the rail, you've just got friction. You've totally undermined everything we've done with the balls.

NARRATOR

Young's worst fear about the soft wood has come true. But there's a quick fix. To offset the compression of the Douglas fir, 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?

MAN

Hey, you girls, the call will be "giddy up."

BRADLEY

All right. One, two, three. Go! It's moving!

YOUNG

Keep going, folks. Keep at it! Let's get on those wooden balls! We're gaining speed! Whoa! (cheering) We've moved the bluestones, and once it was going, we were going. Yeah, we were having a hard time stopping. We're not as heavy as the sarsens at Stonehenge. But I'm convinced that that's it; we can move the sarsens, no problem.

NARRATOR

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 Stonehenge. 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 sarsen emerging from-- of all things-- mole hills.

PARKER PEARSON

The little molehills allowed us to see that there was sarsen under the ground, those little chips were dug up by these little furry creatures.

NARRATOR

A small trench revealed an astonishing carpet of stone fragments, debris from the dressing of giant stones.

PARKER PEARSON

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.

COLIN RICHARDS

This is the hammer stone. 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 banging 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 something which had never been created before. It's a bit like their own space program.

NARRATOR

Stonehenge is a masterpiece of Stone Age technology. But what did it mean to the people who built it? Was it simply the 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. Well, 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.

RUGGLES

Everyone thinks that it's some sort of ancient observatory that incorporated lots of alignments. In fact, we archaeologists are only confident in one alignment at this monument, and that was the main axis that you see here.

NARRATOR

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 21.

RUGGLES

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 been a 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 shortest day of the year, midwinter sunset. So the sun would be coming down like this and setting this direction along the axis.

NARRATOR

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

RUGGLES

Stonehenge isn't the only place that has 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 a connection 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.

NARRATOR

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.

PARKER PEARSON

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 led to our project getting up and running.

NARRATOR

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 from Madagascar.

PARKER PEARSON

When my colleague Ramilisonina 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 huge new program of archaeological research.

RAMILISONINA

Alors l, je crois que c'est...

TRANSLATOR

I believe this is a meeting place to connect with the ancestors. I am utterly convinced the stones are linked to the ancestors.

PARKER PEARSON

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

NARRATOR

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 discovered 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.

PARKER PEARSON

We know from mythologies all round the world that water is a very important part of that journey from the world of the living to the world of the dead.

NARRATOR

It was a clever theory, with little to back it up... Until excavations began at Durrington Walls.

PARKER PEARSON

My interest in Durrington Walls was to 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.

NARRATOR

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.

PARKER PEARSON

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 sides, so timber faade 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.

NARRATOR

The floors of eight other houses came to light. They were built around 2500 BC, the same time the sarsens were put up at Stonehenge. Hundreds of other dwellings probably filled Durrington Walls, clustered around the timber circle.

PARKER PEARSON

I think we could be looking at this entire area covered in houses, perhaps with a central open area forming the largest village in Northern Europe at that time.

NARRATOR

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.

PARKER PEARSON

We found a lot of them still joined together, so they must have been thrown away while there was still soft tissue holding them together. What this is telling us is that these are people who are feasting.

NARRATOR

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

PARKER PEARSON

It may just be the sense of an unending cycle that is being reenacted by this flow back and forwards between the living and the dead to enable society to keep going.

NARRATOR

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 on a 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 and measuring its resistance. The technique can detect structures under the surface. It picked up a series of mysterious grooves running beneath the avenue for more than 200 yards. Parker Pearson was convinced these grooves were the remains of a manmade structure older than the avenue. His team opened a shallow trench to investigate. This runs over there.

PARKER PEARSON

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.

NARRATOR

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 these natural stripes in the landscape actually aligning with the direction where the 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 river bank where the avenue ought to end, just beyond a row of country estates. So Parker Pearson brought his team.

JIM RYLATT

We came down here looking for the end of the Stonehenge avenue. And what we were expecting to find would have been fairly straightforward, just two banks and two ditches. But what we actually found was completely different.

PARKER PEARSON

What we have here is a ditch that is curving around in a semicircle, and most likely it 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.

NARRATOR

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 test his system for moving giant stones. They tackle the equivalent of a sarsen at Stonehenge. These range from seven to more than 40 tons. Pick up the slack! One, two, three! The team starts with a load of 8.3 tons. They give it everything they've got. Nope. Not going. We didn't even budge it. It's that moment of inertia that you've got to break, 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.

BRADLEY

There it goes! Keep it going! Little faster! (cheers) (chatter and laughter) Yeah! Hey! All right! Let's have a look at that gauge. Just over one point two. One point two-- that's very good.

NARRATOR

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

YOUNG

So what's happened there? The insert is obliterated.

NARRATOR

The spacers are breaking down. It's too soft. But Young wants to try one last load.

YOUNG

What we could do is take off the top two, build the other crib and spread the weight out more, redistribute it.

BRADLEY

I think that's the plan. Pleased to meet you finally. Lovely to see you.

NARRATOR

Just then, Stonehenge expert Mike Pitts drops by. I've been reading your work for years and always been very impressed. Well, thank you. Thanks for bringing the rain-- appreciate it. Pitts is briefed, while the team sets up a second crib.

PITTS

What 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.

BRADLEY

Absolutely. You need an engineered route again almost, don't you? Basically, yeah. It's pretty sophisticated.

PITTS

Yeah, but I can't believe that in the Neolithic when they were moving these stones that the landscape is going to be nice and clear and smooth. But there's going to be all sorts of things going on with swamp and forest and 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.

BRADLEY

Okay?

NARRATOR

Now the rig is ready for a final run. Nearly 13 tons, heavier than some sarsens at Stonehenge, about a third the weight of the monument's largest stones.

BRADLEY

There it goes! Keep it going! Keep it going! Keep it going! Uh-oh. Stop!

YOUNG

What happened? Something just... it just sort of went down, and I think it went down... I don't know where it went down. The wood's 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.

NARRATOR

The skies 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.

BRADLEY

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

YOUNG

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.

NARRATOR

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

PARKER PEARSON

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 to 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 meters high in places.

NARRATOR

The complete circle probably held 25 stones. The team names it "Bluestonehenge."

PARKER PEARSON

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.

NARRATOR

Found in the stone holes, a distinctive type of arrowhead suggests Bluestonehenge may have been built around 3000 BC, at the same time Stonehenge was first built, as a ring of 56 bluestones. The two monuments may have been linked from the start.

PARKER PEARSON

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.

NARRATOR

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 sarsens 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 bluestones mean? Why were dozens gathered from these outcrops in Wales, at least 150 miles away? Some of Britain's first farmers put down roots in Wales a thousand years before Stonehenge was created. Parker Pearson believes their descendants brought the bluestones to Salisbury Plain.

PARKER PEARSON

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 symbol that even our ancestors occupy this space." So, what I think we're seeing is that sense of transferring one's ancestors and ancestry in the form of stones, and here we have this very expression of belonging.

NARRATOR

Around 2500 BC, Stonehenge became a monument like no other, a symbol of everything the Stone Age could achieve.

PARKER PEARSON

But this is one of the last great monuments to be built in southern Britain. It's the end of an era rather than the flowering of a huge, powerful civilization. It's something of a swan song.

NARRATOR

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. The exploration continues on NOVA's h.org This NOVA program is available on DVD at shoppbs.org, or call 1-800-play-pbs.