Josh Gates Scans Stonehenge With $250,000 Mapper | Expedition Unknown

stonehenge myth and legend have always  surrounded its origins it’s been called both a healing site and a place of  human sacrifice was it a calendar or a stellar observatory its construction has been  attributed to druids the wizard Merlin and even aliens for centuries historians have fiercely  debated the site’s true purpose but now for the first time ever they’re coming close to solving  the Enigma cuttingedge technology is revealing secret markings etched into the stones nearby the  revelation of other hidden monuments is rewriting everything we thought we knew hello Josh hi Josh  i’m Mike mike nice to meet you hi Susan susan hi Robert robert pleasure mike Parker Pearson is a  leading expert in the archaeology of Stonehenge and his recent findings are the reason I’m here  but first I asked him for a bit of Stonehenge 101 so what is a henge it’s It’s not the stones right  no a henge is actually an earththen enclosure with

a ditch and a bank so if these stones weren’t  here this would still be a hench it’s still a henge because there is a bank and ditch outside of  it so that’s one mystery solved stonehenge isn’t just a name it’s a description of a stone circle  inside a henge that ancient peoples managed to plan and construct in stages between 4 and 5,000  years ago historian Susan Greeny has studied how they might have done it the smaller stones you  can see around us here these have been bought from southwest Wales about 180 mi away and we think  they’ve been bought by the sea by boats and then overland Stonehenge that’s crazy considering the  complexity and the difficulty of the engineering do you think there was some centralized power  conducting this i think there has to be this is a work of genius there’s so much thought that  has gone into every single bit of it the evidence

we have is that this may well have been a moment  of cohesion where people are bringing autonomous groups together to all act in synchrony mike  tells me that five millennia ago Britain was populated by desperate groups of people who were  finally making the transition from hunting and gathering to farming these weren’t rogue druids  like Spinal Tap would have you believe druids didn’t even exist until thousands of years later  no these were surprisingly advanced Stone Age or Neolithic people who started working together  on this massive project but its biggest mystery remains what the hell is it for for decades many  focused on the site’s entrance it’s aligned with the rising sun on the summer solstice so many  believed it was intended as an astronomical worship or celebration site but recently an  investigation turned up a Macob find that began to change the accepted view of Stonehenge when we  dug here what we found was human remains that was

just a fraction of the number of people who were  buried here this place was full of the cremated remains of the dead it’s basically the largest  cemetery within Britain for the whole of the 3rd millennium BC incredible so Stonehenge was much  more than some ancient stargazing site it also appears to be a massive graveyard the connection  between the two functions has remained elusive but in recent years the magic of technology has  helped experts crack the code english Heritage which maintains the site has been working on the  most detailed scans of the monument ever conducted the team behind the tech is here today this is  Steven hi Antonio nice to meet you Josh hi how are you pleasure to meet you they’ve been using 3D  scanners that shower the area with lasers mapping and measuring every detail of the landscape down  to fractions of a millimeter some are mounted on

tripods but others like the Leica Pegasus backpack  are a bit more mobile that’s a dollk from Doctor Who correct correct yes wearable Dalek what is  this thing it’s a mobile mapping unit do you want to have a go oh for sure i’d love to this  is the coolest backpack I’ve ever seen so if I were to break this what is the value of this thing  I’m wearing it’s about $200,000 well it sounded a lot like you said $200,000 i did indeed this is  literally worth more than everything that I own i walk through the monument with a laser scanner  talk about doing work on the go this thing has 32 individual lasers on board that are capable  of capturing half a million data points every second and the onboard cameras are able to see  every single time I take a step generating 25 megs of data every meter that I walk forward in  other words this thing is able to see everything

in the most recent rounds of scans English  Heritage generated an incredible 850 gigabytes of data which has started to settle long  simmering debates about the site’s original function so the scan showed us that particularly  in this direction where the sun sets in midwinter along the solstice alignment the stones was shaped  much more carefully than some of the other stones the scans reveal that special care was used in  constructing and refining a specific viewing alignment not just the summer solstice but  in fact completely the opposite stonehenge seems to instead have been built to channel  the sunset on the shortest day of the year we’ve all been thinking about the  midsummer sunrise but it now looks as though the most important direction of sight  is through that gap towards the mid- winter sunset far from being an altar to worship the  gods who brought the light and warmth of summer

Stonehenge appears to have been made for the  dark cold of an English winter and that’s not all the data has shown one of the things the  laser scanner also shows us is the detail of the dressing of the stones and when I say  dressing what we mean is the way that the stones were worked and they were shaped using  hammerstone you can see here these mushroom shapes so these are all axes look at that that is  spectacular the amazing detail uncovered 72 never before seen symbols carved into the stones oh here  that’s right though more recent than the original construction the carvings here serve as a sort of  nail in the coffin for what Stonehenge was really for we only find carved axes on slabs associated  with burials this along with the winter solstice alignment supports Mike’s theory that Stonehenge  was actually built as a monument to the ancestors

a so-called land of the dead in and of itself this  is a bombshell revelation for a site once thought to be a simple calendar or a place of celebrations  but the question remains why was Stonehenge built in this particular spot what makes this place  special mike leads me outside the Stone Circle to reveal another amazing find do you notice  anything weird out here well you’ve got this kind of ditch mound here that’s it these banks are  natural landforms the natural formation that was here sits in an alignment with the stars and sun  above to the builders of Stonehenge this made for the perfect spot to erect their monument what they  did when they built Stonehenge was to embellish this natural feature that matches the movement  of the heavens this may have been the center of their cosmos does it lead anywhere down to the  valley over that ridge there we found another

henge which has come to be known as Superhenge  i’m sorry did he just say Superhenge josh this is Superhenge look at that it’s massive yes it  is the largest henge in the world incredible nearly 2 miles away northeast of Stonehenge is  an enormous bank and ditch construction with walls nearly 10 ft tall and a diameter of 1,600  ft across it’s more than five times the size of the earthworks at Stonehenge but what I do not  see are any stones yeah this is all about timber archaeologists here discovered a timber circle  then another then a third and then this last year we discovered that the whole thing was surrounded  by a giant timber circle wow 1,200 ft in diameter probably more than 300 giant posts posts the  size of totem poles that is extraordinary this was a sophisticated civilization but it’s  just one small part of what’s going on in this

landscape back in prehistory from Superh we  fly on to Silbury Hill the tallest man-made mound in Europe finally we come upon the site  that Mike is most excited about showing me josh you see this town up ahead of us yes  do you notice anything strange about it it’s got a circle around it yeah it’s sat  inside a hedge oh my god look at that this is the town of Avery which sits inside the  largest stone circle in the world 16 times bigger than Stonehenge it originally had  98 Sarsson slabs running around the edge