Secrets of Lost Empires [5 one-hour episodes on 3 DVDs]. Pyramid, Obelisk, and Inca written,
produced, and directed by Michael Barnes. Colosseum and Stonehenge produced by Cynthia
Page and Julia Cort, written by Julia Cort. WGBH/Boston Video, 2006. Total running time
approximately 280 minutes.
The structures left behind by ancient civilizations continue to fascinate us. The testify to
the ingenuity of the societies that created them—their ability to work stone, move materials,
organize laborers—and challenge our smug certainty our abilities far exceed theirs. The
instinctive reaction of modern onlookers to ancient structures has, for centuries, been: “How did
they do that?” The question has generated a great deal of far-fetched nonsense (some of it
involving alien visitors and lost races with mysterious powers), but also a fair amount of serious
archaeological investigation. Secrets of Lost Empires—a series of five hour-long episodes coproduced by WGBH and the BBC and originally aired on the PBS science series Nova in 199697—concerns itself with the latter.
Each of the five episodes has the same basic structure: A team of scientists and other
experts is assembled and given the job of recreating, on a small scale, a major work of ancient
engineering. Each episode cuts back and forth between footage from the job site, play-by-play
commentary from the experts on how things are going, and studio-produced chunks of historical
and engineering background. The result is an improbable hybrid of a conventional archaeology
documentary and a home-makeover program, overlain with the dramatic conventions of reality
shows like Frontier House. The cast of experts changes from one episode to the next, but (like
the members of a Hollywood infantry platoon) they represent a standard array of archetypes.
Each episode features at least one Learned Professional with extensive archaeological
knowledge, one Amateur Expert with an unconventional idea, and one Practical Man with handson experience in some skill closely related to the job at hand. Inevitably these three principals
have different ideas about how to accomplish the task at hand—differences that the producers
highlight in the interests of drama.
The challenges in three of the five episodes—Pyramid, Obelisk, and Stonehenge—are
variations on the same basic theme: How do you cut, move, and erect large stones with only the
simplest of tools? Pyramid challenges its team of experts to build a miniature version of a
classic Egyptian pyramid, six meters high with a square base nine meters on a side. Obelisk
poses the challenge of setting a previously carved 40-foot, 40-ton granite pillar upright on a stone
base. Stonehenge presents its team of experts with three massive concrete slabs and asks them to
recreate the largest of the famous monument’s “trilithons:” two vertical slabs bridged by a third.
Colosseum revolves around a significantly different challenge: How do you put a canvas roof
over the seating areas of a stone arena? The venue is a stone-walled bullring in Spain, half the
size of the famous Roman structure. Roughly half of the fifth episode, Inca, has its team of
experts trying to replicate the stonework found in the South American empire’s mountainside
citadels: walls with whimsically shaped polygonal blocks and gently curving joints too tight for a
knife blade to penetrate. The other half reduces them to spectators as Peruvian villagers use
traditional methods to build a woven-grass suspension bridge over a 40-foot-deep gorge in the
Andes.
All of this works remarkably well as drama. Nova’s long-established “house style” of
straightforward documentary photography, crisply drawn animations, and carefully modulated
narration keeps the series from feeling like Survivor: Ancient Engineering. The principal
investigators’ arguments about methods come across as vigorous but essentially amiable
professional disagreements. The climactic moments when stones are raised and canvas roofs
unfurled are not stretched out, needlessly repeated, or burdened with breathless narration hinting
that disaster is only one misstep away. The best parts of the series are, ironically, among the
least inherently “dramatic:” low-key, detail-rich conversations among the experts about how to
handle a particular aspect of the larger challenge. The producers’ decision to use experts from a
wide range of backgrounds comes into its own here, as does their care in showing how each sees
the problem through the prism of their own experience.
How much light these Nova-sponsored projects actually shed on ancient engineering
methods is another matter. Nearly all the challenges are carried out under seemingly arbitrary
time limits, with workforces smaller and less experienced than those that would have been
available to ancient builders. To counteract this, the investigators are periodically allowed to use
modern materials and techniques to help the process along. The 40-ton granite pillar in Obelisk
is shifted from quarry to job site by heavy machinery, the concrete slabs in Stonehenge are
moved using a track built of sawmill-cut square timbers, and most of the limestone blocks in
Pyramid are finished with modern steel tools rather than ancient Egyptian copper ones. The time
limits also have a more subtle effect, encouraging the investigators to define “success” as solving
the problem by the deadline, rather than figuring out how ancient builders would have solved the
problem. Present to varying degrees in Obelisk, Pyramid, and Inca, this tendency reaches its
apex in Stonehenge. There, the modern engineer in charge of the project erects a 25-foot, multiton slab concrete slab using an improbably complex sliding-counterweight method. The series—
with the notable exception of Colosseum—thus comes off more as a series of stunts than a series
of exercises in experimental archaeology.
The emphasis on getting the job at hand done, rather than on getting it historically right,
also limits the series’ potential utility in the classroom. Each episode provides snippets of
ancient historical and technological context for the present-day narrative, but they never add up
to a rounded portrait of the civilization involved—or even a full picture of its technological
capabilities. Colosseum is, again, atypical of the series. Tightly focused on a single, welldocumented structure, it presents a fairly detailed picture of how the giant arena was designed,
constructed, and used. It also works in a modest amount of social history, including (somewhat
obliquely) the Colosseum’s role as a site for conspicuous public displays of Imperial wealth.
Documentaries about ancient civilizations are available by the score. Documentaries
specifically about ancient technology are considerably rarer, and ones that go beyond simple
admiration of what the ancients did to serious, detailed consideration of how they did it are rarer
still. Secrets of Ancient Empires falls squarely into that latter category—a category small enough
to make it worth watching, despite its limitations as history.
A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Southern Polytechnic State University
bvanriper@bellsouth.net