Just finished watching a documentary about Stonehenge, featuring a recent excavation whose team leaders think the stones were ‘a prehistoric Lourdes’. I disliked it on two points. First, BBC documentaries are in a dire state. Secondly, Stonehenge has not been well-served by the grand claims made for it on the scantiest evidence.
BBC documentaries have been flailing for years, popularising various topics in exactly the wrong way. They have an uncanny ability to dumb-down and talk-up. The venerable Horizon strand, which started a new series today with a documentary about those silent Wiltshire stones, has long since lost its authority.
The voice-of-god narrator announces some upcoming revelation only to disappoint: the announcement that the results of a chemical analysis are ‘unexpected and startling’ makes you sit up, until you quickly find that it only confirms the site is a few hundred years older than previously thought. Given that, as the documentary said, we have had to make educated guesses about the age of the circle, putting the supposed age back 300 years seems fairly underwhelming, as much as we may appreciate the new accuracy.
How can the age analysis of organic material (in this case a single grain found under a stone), on a site not excavated since the 1960s, possibly give up ‘unexpected’ results when this is the first such accurate analysis made to determine the age of the site? What were they expecting? And confirming that our educated guesses were 300 years out is hardly startling: the startling thing is how accurate those guesses were. There is much more like this to be annoyed at in the documentary.
The link between the skeletal remains of an old, injured archer in the vicinity and the healing power of Stonehenge seemed specious. Hypothesis is fine, but BBC documentaries have a way making everything seem just-so plausible.
As much as the smaller bluestones brought from Wales might have been used in healing rituals, the idea that shards of such stones found in the soil might indicate people chipping away at the stones to keep as talismans seems under-supported by evidence. It is as likely that the stones were refined on-site by craftsmen, leaving some offcuts behind that eventually found their way deep in the soil.
For me, the most intriguing finds were ‘a patchwork of holes’, evidence of a ‘continued reshaping and re-structuring of Stonehenge over thousands of years’, which seems to me to be fairly good grounds for saying that the purpose and power of the site changed according to the needs and beliefs of the dozens of generations who flocked around that site.
Eventually, we seemed to have given up on the site, and the impressive, stout stones were damaged, stolen or left to the elements, so that what we see today is an incomplete circle and, judging by this documentary, an incomplete story of Stonehenge, whose mystery is far from unravelled.
October 4th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Hello Ashley,
I have to say I found myself nodding in agreement with everything you said in the review of the Stonehenge programme, and laughing out loud at your comments about the ‘unexpected and startling’ results.
In the programme they seem to use the presence of the archer to justify the idea that the blue stones were healing and then pointed to the ‘fact’ that the blue stones were healing stones to justify the archer being there in the first place. Sometimes the narrative reminded me of a dog chasing its own tail.
I did love the graphics, but they completely ignore the wooden phase of building. Most of the interpretation presented as new can be found in the guidebook.
One the whole I would have to agree with you, I could have done without the CGI in favour of a bit more insight, or at least balance from the researchers (far too much about Lourdes, not enough about the actual archaeology). What has happened to BBC documentaries? They can’t rely on Michael Wood to pull them out of the proverbial every time.
PS I hope you are keeping well, I’m working in Hampton Court Palace now, and loving it!