A History of Ancient Britain - Series 1 [DVD]

This is another excellent BBC History series this time exploring the ancient History of Britain from prehistoric times to the Roman Invasion of 43 B.C. Neil Oliver is excellent in presenting this series and his enthusiasm really rubs off. It's amazing to me how advanced Humans were thousands of years ago and the organization and manpower needed to construct places such as Stonehenge.

An interesting series and I would highly recommend this to lovers of history and archaeology.

This four-part series looks at the ancient history of Britain and is presented by action-man archaeologist Neil Oliver, familiar from Coast and other factual TV series. Each episode is an hour long and features an entertaining mixture of sweeping photography, ancient relics, cave paintings, mysterious stone monuments, expert opinions and informative interpretation. It's a lazy form of learning; visually striking and often wildly windswept...

Oliver is a dashing presenter, at home with very old archaeology and obviously enthralled by some of the really rare bones and bits which are showcased in this series. He zigzags across the UK as the series unfolds, telling its story from around 100,000 years ago when pre-humans inhabited the land through the whole of the Stone Age to be beginning of the Bronze Age in around 1500BC. There will be a second series to pick up the story through the Iron Age and to the coming of the Romans - but don't expect to see that until 2012!
The first episode is the weakest of these four; inevitably because so little evidence exists from the Palaeolithic era. Even so, Oliver does his best to make the information exciting and he largely succeeds (although maybe there's a little too much emphasis on the abseiling and similar activities). The animated graphic which shows how Britain was originally part of the European landmass during the last full Ice Age is wonderful; it's amazing to watch bits of a continent disappearing under water and the familiar shape of our island appear. The footprints preserved in the mud in south Wales are spooky, too; they date back 8000 years. The evidence for a mighty tsunami in 6000BC was interesting, too; especially as it swept away the last land link between Britain and Europe. After that we were on our own!
In the second programme, Oliver explores what happened when farmers arrived from the continent and how that affected the hunter-gathers already living in Britain. He dives to see a sunken coastal settlement which has preserved the first evidence of woodwork, and digs into an Irish peat bog to find a wall made by farmers some 5500 years ago. The first pottery evidence turns up in this era, too, as do early earthworks - as man starts to shape his environment. This episode beautifully demonstrates how archeology pieces together tiny fragments of evidence to create an overview of the situation. Apparently the first farmers arrived both in Kent and the Scottish Isles at roughly the same time -- and this is shown from the skulls of tiny voles, common to mainland Europe and the Orkneys and nowhere else! Pollen is also used to show how the landscape changed from deep forst to grassland and then the first cereal crops appeared.
(Fascinating too, to note how human health declined as farming became widespread. Eating cereals and staying stable made the first homesteaders less fit than their hunting ancestors!)
Ep2 also takes us to the magnificently weird standing stone of Carnac in France, and explores the nature of the first neolithic burial chambers.

Episode three is the one which will interest most people because it covers the period when Stonehenge and other mysterious monuments were built. So there's lots of evidence from this period - but lots of `maybe, perhaps' speculation, too. I may scream if I hear the word `ritual' mentioned again. The sequence in the Lake District, finding evidence of an axe factory was just as interesting to me as the various theories about what ancient folk might have believed.
Finally, this short series wraps up with the arrival of metal in the shape of copper in Ireland, and Oliver makes suggestions about how this influenced the development of what became the modern world. We see the first of the Beaker people and their burials, and the earliest copper and gold items ever found in Britain. This is a strange time; it's when the first permanent settlements sprung up in the shape of villages on Dartmoor, but it's also when weaponry became part of normal life, too.

In common with many modern documentaries this series tries a little too hard to be hip and dramatic. The soundtrack is a touch over the top at times and there's probably a few too many swooping helicopter shots than necessary. Sometimes it feels like padding - I hope that no
interesting interviews or expert advice interpretation were sacrificed so we could see another five minutes of the sea crashing onto the rocks...
That grumble aside, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining series. Oliver shares the limelight with many other historians and experts, so the odd geologist pops up now and then to explain how the landscape might have influenced human development at that time; or we hear from an anthropologist/sociologist about the development of homo sapiens through the ages.
Throughout the series there is a strong emphasis on showing how physical archeology relates to social history; how farming led inexorably to civilisation and the growth of human settlements. The 'striding aroud London' dialogue segments get a bit wearing after a while but they deomstrate a key point of the series: what happened 8000 years ago has affected us all today.
Well worth watching if you already know something about the subject, or if you're unfamiliar with Britain's Stone Age history. Very easy going; no specialist knowledge needed so it's suitable for a wide range of ages. If you are familiar with the subject then every programme should still manage to provide a `really? I didn't know that!' surprise or two.
8/10

In four episodes, Neil Oliver summarises thousands of years of human colonisation of Britain and takes us on a sweeping geological and archaeological journey. With excellent computer animations, visits to spectacular sites, fabulous vistas, original artefacts and interviews with specialists, Oliver entertains and informs. He maintains interest and momentum even though there is so little known about this period of history with no identified individuals, no known events or dates, and the lives and beliefs of the people having been extrapolated from a limited number of artefacts and sites.
As well as the fabulous sites such as Carnac, New Grange and Stonehenge (to name just some of the the best known), Oliver himself is a star of the series, with his full screen facial close ups to add gravitas to his words; his wry humour and his trademark flicking behind his ears of his shoulder length hair. However, his excitement and obvious interest in the people, places and objects is infectious and at times moving.
There were a few worrying moments when Oliver joined "new agers" for the summer solstice at Stonehenge but almost immediately he took this event to a more serious level. Apart from some exaggeration e.g. "this was the greatest natural disaster the earth has ever known", referring to a 10 metre tsunami off the east coast of Scotland, Oliver generally maintains a serious historical narrative.
This is an entertaining and informative series.