Iron Age

It pretty much gets no better than this, really.

You normally dig sites which are Roman or Iron Age, and you can't really put yourself into the shoes of the people who lived and worked on that site, but the archaeology of this particular site is just all about one man, and it's his life and times, and you can really begin to feel your linking to the person as we're excavating down through material which he would have walked on or threw away.

Kevin and the team have already made some fascinating discoveries.

We've got this stone roof tile here with the hole where the nail would have been to hold it in place.

For three and a half thousand years since construction ceased, the stones have stood in the same configuration.

Through the Iron Age, the Roman Occupation, the Saxon Settlement, the Norman Conquest, the Medieval Period, the Reformation, the English Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, and the age of motorways and tourists and helicopter tours and UNESCO World Heritage status, The monument has outlasted every civilisation that has looked at it and wondered what it meant.

It has outlasted the languages of every person who has ever tried to explain it.

The explanations have changed, century after century, theory after theory, but the stones have not.

But Stukely was wrong about the builders.

Stonehenge predates the historical Druids by at least 2,000 years.

The Druids, described by Caesar and other classical authors, were an Iron Age priesthood.

Stonehenge is a Neolithic and Bronze Age monument.

We know it's one of these Canaanite cities, most likely fortified.

We have actually found some of the inscriptions and tombs, the sarcophagi, of some of the rulers from the Iron Age, not so much from the Bronze Age at this time.

But I do talk about it a little bit in the after 1177 BC sequel.

So there's been some excavation, especially, like I said, about a century ago.

We don't get that level of globalization and internationalization again until the early 8th century.

776 BC, the time of the first Olympics in Greece.

So we've got literally 400 years, 1177 to 776 BCE, when we have a time of chaos, anarchy, rebuilding, which we call either the Dark Ages or the Iron Ages.

And that's what happens.

But you go back earlier, it's where Quintus Fabius Maximus would have walked, it's where the Scipios would have walked, and before them, so on and so forth.

There's a main little thoroughfare, it's not very wide actually, down the middle of it, and you think, yeah, everyone from Romulus, if he's real, everyone from Romulus, in fact the people from the Iron Age settlements, like 1200s BC, Aeneas, if he's real, Everyone from Aeneas through to...

Well, everyone to now.

They've walked down this little bit of road, this little cobbled bit of lane.

Yes, they were formally interdicted from attending the public sacrifices.

And in the Iron Age, that doesn't just mean you aren't allowed into the temple.

Far from it.

In a deeply integrated religious society where public sacrifice was the literal social glue holding the community together, being banned from the sacrifices meant you were deemed profoundly impious and criminal.

That is amazing.

But it really underscores the reality that these were not pacifist hermits meditating in the woods.

They were deeply embedded in the gritty, violent, pragmatic reality of Iron Age politics.

They absolutely were.

It wasn't great for finds for us that day particularly, but there have been amazing things that have come up since.

And I have actually been back to one of those East of England rallies and I found an Iron Age Potent.

So I was very happy with that.

So yeah, I think it was just an unlucky field.

Yeah, come on.

What do you want to find?

Well, obviously, an Iron Age thing would be fantastic.

Something gold or silver, Iron Age, or some sort of horde might be nice.

Ghosts and demons in ancient Mesopotamia were often strongly associated with the death of pregnant women and young children.

Multiple talismans and cylinder seals from the later Iron Age depict scenes of childbirth.

in which male figures, presumably exorcists, protect women from attacking demons.

The most feared of these demons was Lamashtu, who was sometimes worshipped as a goddess in her own right, as Mesopotamian mothers thought that this veneration could prevent her from killing one's children.

While the great Gilgamesh is able to directly approach the gods and demand to see his dearly departed friend, most mortals are not so lucky.

In typical Near Eastern mythology, communion with the world of spirits is only possible with the help of some kind of intermediary, or if you will, a medium.

A late Iron Age Babylonian text known as the Exorcist's Manual prescribes treatment for physical ailments that Mesopotamian peoples attributed to ghostly disturbance.

In particular, seizures were attributed to interference of a ghost or demon.