Original subtitles

A massive earthquake triggers a devastating tsunami

on the island of Jamaica,

submerging large sections of a thriving port city.

But the church rector's response

to this tragedy was a little strange.

And that he hoped the disaster would lead

to some kind of moral reform for the town.

After having experienced something so horrible,

why would you react like this?

A volcanic eruption in El Salvador

buries an ancient Mayan village,

preserving its structures and artifacts for over 1,400 years.

The eruption and devastation of this village

happened during the time of the ancient Maya,

a people indigenous to Central America.

The village sits at about 1,500 feet above sea level

and covers an area of 12 square miles,

which makes it a little over half the size of Manhattan.

So we know it's pretty big, but what kind of village was it?

A wildfire raging across Yorkshire, England,

reveals large craters and stone structures.

All over the world incredible discoveries are being revealed

by devastating events.

Floods, earthquakes,

droughts, hurricanes,

volcanic eruptions.

Trails of destruction expose extraordinary history.

This is Discovered by Disaster.

On June 7, 1692, disaster struck Port Royal, Jamaica.

Although the town's residents were used to earthquakes,

as the ground began to shake,

a church rector quickly realized

this one was different.

With the ground shaking violently,

he ran into the streets where he immediately observed

the earth literally splitting open,

swallowing both buildings and people.

The rector later wrote that the sky turned red,

landslides rocked the mountains,

and geysers erupted from the ground.

After three minutes, the earthquake stopped,

and he described the town as shaken and shattered to pieces.

And just when they thought the worst was behind them,

the tsunami hit.

When the giant wave rolled in over Port Royal,

it left over half the town underwater.

Along with the catastrophic damage to the town,

2,000 people were killed either by the earthquake

or in the ensuing tsunami, while in the days following,

another 3,000 would die as a result of injury or disease.

But the church rector's response

to this tragedy was a little strange.

In his recollections of the disaster,

he wrote that some of the people of the town were ungodly,

and that he hoped the disaster would lead

to some kind of moral reform for the town.

After having experienced something so horrible,

why would you react like this?

It really does seem as if the city

had some sort of curse over it,

because in the following decades,

hurricane after hurricane, and earthquake after earthquake

battered the town to such an extent

that its residents eventually had no choice

but to abandon it for good.

Almost 300 years later,

amateur archaeologists decided to explore the area

and see if they could find any evidence of the long-lost city.

Searching underwater, they used a suction pump

to remove sediment from the seafloor.

After bringing up approximately four to six feet

from beneath the surface of the ocean,

they started finding things.

Over the course of subsequent excavations,

divers found these beautifully made white stone sculptures

coated in a thick white glaze emerging from the seafloor.

They're quite ornate,

featuring a lion or a dog bearing its teeth.

The craftsmanship here is extremely sophisticated.

Meaning that these things would have been incredibly expensive

at the time.

And not just that, stylistically,

you can tell that these are of Chinese origin,

because the animal is similar to what we see

on other Chinese ceramics and imagery.

These particular statues were prized home decor

for wealthy Europeans at the time.

In total, there are 28 similarly valuable Chinese ceramics

found on the seafloor.

When you consider how much time has passed since the earthquake,

you have to figure that a whole bunch of those things

have been lost to time, so there must have been even more of them

before the earthquake hit.

Even though the trade

for this kind of Chinese porcelain

peaked in the 18th century,

they were very hard to come by in the 17th.

So how did these incredibly expensive, luxury items end up

in such a small, out-of-the-way place like Port Royal?

At the time of the earthquake,

Port Royal was a little English outpost

surrounded by mostly Spanish colonies.

Nearby to Port Royal was the former Spanish colony

of Saint Domingue, which was on its way to becoming the richest

and most important colony in the region.

This was a while before the British really managed

to control large parts of North America.

They had made some inroads into the Caribbean,

but these were remote colonial outposts

that by no means boasted the ostentatious wealth

that we can see existed in Port Royal.

So what was going on?

As the archaeologists are excavating

a section of the seafloor that appears to have been

the remains of an old wall,

they find a small, circular, egg-shaped object.

The egg shape is a result

of years of accumulated coral.

But once this was removed, you can see that it's made of metal

and it hasn't really corroded at all.

This indicates that it's made of a precious metal.

There does appear to be something inside,

but the opening and closing mechanism is not made of silver.

In order to determine what's inside,

the archaeologists send the object to be x-rayed.

The images reveal a series of Roman numerals

ranging from one to 12 in a circle.

The three and the nine are at right angles to the 12,

so there's only one thing that this could be,

and that's a pocket watch.

Not only would this have been a luxury item

of the time, but thanks to the x-ray,

we can actually see exactly when the clock stopped ticking

at 11:43.

This not only corresponds to when the rector said

the disaster occurred, but it's also the first time

that we have archaeological proof

of the actual time that a disaster struck.

The excavation records reveal that in total,

the town of Port Royal consisted of approximately

2,000 buildings, half of which remain underwater.

These buildings would have housed a population

of up to 10,000 people.

We're talking about an English colony in 1692 here.

So 2,000 buildings is a seriously large amount,

far more than anyone would expect.

To put this into perspective, at this same time,

the city of Boston had a population of 6,000 people.

And this was a port city vital to British interests.

So could Port Royal have been equally as important?

As more and more features of the old town

come to light, so do new objects.

Outside what the archaeologists initially think

is another dwelling, round glass containers are brought up

from the bottom of the ocean.

The shape of these artifacts is unmistakable.

Their onion-based shape and their long neck

tells us immediately what they are: they're onion bottles.

And there are a lot of them.

They were first manufactured in the late 17th century,

and they were meant for storing and drinking wine.

Some of these wine bottles were even monogrammed,

meaning someone had the money and the audacity

to have their own bottles made for them.

But it's not just old wine bottles found in this area.

There's also a ton of white clay pipes

which would have been used for smoking tobacco.

Considering the number of bottles and smoking pipes here,

I think we're looking at a tavern.

There's also a fair amount of pipes and bottles

distributed across the entire town,

so perhaps this is what the church rector was referring to

when he said this was a godless place.

Smoking and especially drinking tend to go hand in hand

with quite a few other vices.

With excavations nearly complete,

the archaeologists bring up an old 15th century cannon

from the seafloor.

The cannon is smaller than the typical one

you'd see at that time.

It's made of wrought iron, and it has this piece

that allows it to be mounted on a swivel,

so you can quickly pivot this thing

across a 180-degree range.

This kind of gun was used on ships.

And it was particularly useful for clearing the enemy's deck

in order to prepare for boarding.

And by clearing enemies' deck,

that just means firing indiscriminately at anyone

unfortunate enough to be there at the time.

But Port Royal wasn't really a primary port

for the British Navy;

at least not yet, that didn't happen until later.

So why was this place so extraordinarily rich

and equipped with such special guns

specifically designed for offensive actions?

Let's consider these artifacts in light

of what the church rector said about Port Royal.

In his testimony describing the disaster,

he said that he was at church reading prayers,

which he had to do in order to, quote,

"keep some show of religion

among a most ungodly and debauched people."

Historical records from the time

show that the Catholic Church condemned Port Royal

as the wickedest town in Christendom.

So, at Port Royal, they were debauched, wicked,

and they were filthy stinking rich.

Much more so than your other English New World towns.

In those places, wealth was defined

by the amount of commodities they had,

like sugar, for example,

but at Port Royal you can measure the wealth

in consumer goods.

The wealth you see on exhibit here

is more like what you'd expect to see

in a European capital of the time,

not a colonial Caribbean backwater.

So what's going on here?

According to the rector's account,

when he was running for his life,

he said that he headed towards Morgan's Fort.

Roughly 20 years before the earthquake,

the British and the Spanish had signed the Treaty of Madrid,

which outlawed piracy and privateering,

which is basically another word for legal piracy.

But just because you outlaw something

doesn't mean it actually stops.

Especially when it's such a lucrative practice.

Despite the treaty, the British Crown continued

to tolerate, if not outright sanction,

the plundering of Spanish and French ships by privateers.

After all, it was to their own benefit.

And Captain Henry Morgan

was one of the most infamous of privateers.

He was the scourge of the Spanish,

raiding and looting across their domains in the Caribbean,

becoming filthy rich in the process.

But when we look at Port Royal, we can see very clearly

that he wasn't the only one that got rich.

Looks like everyone did.

Privateering was incredibly lucrative.

For example, the destination for the thousands of tons of silver

stolen by the Spanish in Peru transited through Portobelo,

in today's Panama.

Captain Morgan's 1668 raid on Portobelo

yielded almost 100,000 pounds.

So you had Morgan and a

whole bunch of other privateers

terrorizing the region,

looting and pillaging in the name of the Crown.

Apparently half of the population of Port Royal

made their living in this way, and the other half

probably serviced them in one way or another.

Which is why taverns and brothels were a dime a dozen.

In the end, the rector, pray as he may,

couldn't get the citizens of Port Royal to behave

in what he thought was a good Christian way.

But in what could be construed as divine intervention,

the enormous earthquake that struck the city

marked the beginning of the end

for its role as the Caribbean capital of piracy.

[Narrator In around 600 CE, one of El Salvador's volcanoes

violently erupted.

Lava spewed from its vent

and ash rained down on the little villages

of the surrounding area.

As the lava poured down the face of the volcano,

it came into contact with a river,

which instantly vaporized the water.

This created a dangerous cloud

of superheated steam, fine volcanic ash and toxic gases

that descended on a village

just under half a mile south of the volcano.

The villagers abandoned everything in place

and escaped their homes as quickly as they could,

which was pretty smart, because over the next few hours

the village was covered in up to 23 feet of ash.

Their homes and most importantly, fields,

were completely devastated by the volcanic eruption,

so the people were never able to return,

and the village was abandoned for good.

In 1976, a site earmarked

for a grain storage silo was being built

just to the south of the volcano,

when suddenly a bulldozer unearthed earthen architecture

and several ceramic artifacts.

So 1,400 years after this volcano blew,

the village that was lost to history

all of a sudden became visible.

It's pretty incredible.

The state of preservation of the earthen architecture

is on a par with that of Pompeii.

That means that it's basically as perfect

as we could ever hope for.

So the big question is, what can we learn from this?

The eruption and devastation of this village

happened during the time of the ancient Maya,

a people indigenous to Central America,

who continue to occupy large parts of Mexico,

Guatemala and Belize.

Before the Spanish conquest of the region,

the Maya had developed one of the most sophisticated

civilizations of antiquity.

Their monuments, pyramids and cities can still be seen today

and are the subject of intense study and curiosity

by people the world over.

But what we know about the ancient Maya civilization

is largely a reflection of the experiences

and perspectives of the elite.

They were the ones who commissioned pyramids

and had priests write down their stories.

The layman's life has gone largely unstudied,

simply because there hasn't been much archaeological evidence

that could provide insight into their lives.

But maybe this village can provide some answers.

The village sits at about 1,500 feet

above sea level.

It's located in the Zapotitan Valley,

one of the major valleys of El Salvador,

and covers an area of 12 square miles,

which makes it a little over half the size of Manhattan.

So we know it's pretty big, but what kind of village was it?

Archaeologists survey the area,

looking to understand who lived there

and what the lives of your average Maya citizen

looked like 1,400 years ago.

They discover a building and begin excavating it

and the surrounding area.

This type of construction

is what's known as a bajareque.

It's a traditional way of building homes,

where sticks or reeds are interwoven

and then covered with mud.

This mud then dries,

resulting in a durable and stable building.

The house is built on a platform about waist height.

The walls are about five and a half feet high,

and were probably made higher

with the use of perishable materials that supported a roof.

But that evidence is all long gone.

There are two rooms that together measure

about 130 square feet.

There are also broken pottery handles embedded in the walls

which we can assume were used to hang things on.

Quite a practical use of otherwise broken material.

In a little niche built into one of the walls,

archaeologists find three ceramic bowls,

a shell from a mollusk and a painted object.

The ceramics are sent to the lab for analysis.

The bowls have food residue in them,

and there are still even marks in the bottom of them

where you can see that someone's fingers pressed

when they were picking up food.

This may seem inconsequential, but it's interesting

simply because it shows how someone ate or served food.

It's evidence of a mundane, everyday movement

that was frozen in time, and it's something that we all do.

Just to the south of this house,

there's another building that's just a little smaller.

Inside are five large storage jars

and a serious amount of firewood.

The jars have carbonized seeds in the bottom of them,

including the remains of some beans,

so they were probably used to store food.

There are also some very large ceramic ollas.

These were traditionally used to store water.

So they were storing a lot of both water and firewood.

Nearby this storehouse is another building

that's similar to the other two structures.

It's oriented the same way

and has the same solid clay walls,

but the roof is entirely different.

There's also a pretty small opening to get inside,

so if you're big or relatively inflexible,

there's no way you could pass through.

So what could this thing have been for?

The roof here is really interesting, too.

It's actually a dome, which is fascinating,

because Western historians and architects have long claimed

that the dome was brought to the Americas by European colonizers.

But here we can see this simply isn't true.

The Maya were building domed ceilings

hundreds of years before Europeans arrive.

Inside this structure the ceiling is anywhere

from three to six feet high, so if you manage to get in,

it's either really cramped or somewhat comfortable

depending on where you're standing.

The walls are blackened by fire,

and there's a lot of wood waiting to be used.

Also, some of the rocks on the ground

have been fractured by heat.

Because there isn't that much volcanic ash on the ground here,

it doesn't appear that the volcanic eruption

broke up those rocks, so what else could have done it?

Surrounding the building

is a little stone platform.

It's the perfect height to sit on,

so this has to be a bench.

But why put a bench around this strange structure?

The evidence shows that the Maya

were tending a fire inside this building.

The heat in here would have been really intense

when the fire was going.

Because the Maya were trying to keep the heat

and humidity inside, this must have been a sauna.

The bench outside would have been used for resting

after the intensity of the heat,

and the ollas found in the storage room were probably used

to douse themselves in water to cool off.

And all the firewood?

Some of it was probably used for cooking,

but the rest must've been for heating the sauna.

The building is quite large,

so it's likely that the sauna was for the entire community,

and that the people living next to it were its stewards.

Even today, the Maya people still use the sauna

for both physical and spiritual purposes,

so it makes sense that this tradition

would also have existed over 1,000 years ago.

To the south and east of the house,

the storage room and the sauna are ancient fields

that were preserved by volcanic ash.

Lying under the layer of ash,

archaeologists find five corn plants tied together.

Corn is fundamental to the Maya.

According to their creation myth,

the gods fashioned the Maya people from corn flour,

so it's more than just a staple crop,

it forms the essence and the foundations of their culture.

The fields are so well preserved

that you can see how they went about growing their crops.

The plants are still exactly where they were 1,400 years ago.

Archaeologists continue to excavate the area

and come upon a structure that measures 570 square feet,

bigger and more complex

than many of the buildings excavated so far.

The building has two rooms and only one entrance.

Inside one of the rooms are the remains of a fire,

as well as bowls, jars and a grindstone.

The jar was found on top of the hearth,

as if something was cooking inside of it.

So was this some form of communal kitchen?

The adjacent room is painted a brilliant red,

which for the Maya represents not just the color of blood

but also symbolizes life.

The room contains a headdress made of the antlers

and skull of a white-tailed deer,

which is a ceremonial object.

So maybe this building had

some sort of ritualistic function, too.

Archaeologists also find

obsidian blades on a shelf.

They send them to the lab for analysis

to see if they can learn what they were used for.

One of the blades has traces of human blood on it.

The Maya believe that blood is the most sacred

of the human fluids, and that it's the best way to access

and communicate with the supernatural or spiritual world.

The way they would do this

is by cutting into their own flesh,

letting the blood drip onto flammable material,

and then burning it.

This blood smoke is what would call the gods,

allowing the Maya to communicate with them.

So this obsidian blade was probably used

to cut into earlobes, lips, nostrils, and tongues

to offer up blood to the gods, as a way to ask their favor.

And the building where it was found was likely

the center of this community's spiritual life.

They probably hosted ceremonies here,

as evidenced by the hearth and headdress.

It appears that everything was abandoned in order to escape

the danger posed by the volcanic eruption.

And so what we see here is just a normal day in the village,

frozen in time.

What's incredible is how the Maya tradition and culture

remains strong even today, despite the intervening years

and the devastating impact of colonization

on the region and its people.

Here we have a view into some of the habits and practices

of your average ancient Maya individual,

which makes it truly unique.

Since its discovery, archaeologists have found

a total of 18 structures

in the village now known as Joya de Cerén.

As they continue to be excavated,

more invaluable insight and knowledge about the life

and times of the ancient Maya may come to light.

Roughly 3,500 years ago,

a catastrophic volcanic eruption

rocked the Greek island of Thera, now known as Santorini.

The Santorini volcano has erupted at least 12 times

over the past 250,000 years, with the last one being in 1950.

But this eruption was the big one.

And it's thought to have been

one of the most explosive volcanic events

ever witnessed by any humans.

Debris from that eruption has been found

as far away as Israel and Egypt.

And to make matters worse,

it's believed that a massive earthquake shook the region

at the same time,

possibly precipitating the volcanic eruption.

The ancient city of Knossos on the island of Crete,

roughly 70 miles south of Santorini, was devastated,

as were other settlements on the island's northern shores.

Crete was home to the Minoans

at the time of the disaster,

an important civilization in world history

that peaked during the Bronze Age.

The island has countless ancient archaeological sites

and has been the subject of intense study

for over 100 years.

In 1989, two archaeologists conducting

an excavation on Mochlos, a small island situated

just east of the Gulf of Mirabello in eastern Crete,

uncover something astounding.

They find sandstone blocks that appear to be

the foundations of an ancient structure, possibly Minoan.

But what kind of building is it?

It could be a religious site,

some kind of temple.

Several have been discovered nearby.

Just over 40 miles west of Mochlos

at the northern end of Mount Juktas

are the ruins of the temple of Anemospilia.

It's believed that this temple was only in use

for about 50 years or so before it was destroyed

by an earthquake about 3,700 years ago.

The site's unique, though, in terms of Minoan structures,

because it's largely symmetrical

with three large, rectangular rooms in a row

and a corridor that spans across them.

Other Minoan sites from this period

were all sort of maze-like, sort of like labyrinths

with intricate, interconnected hallways and rooms.

Anemospilia is controversial among historians

because some have claimed there's evidence

of human sacrifice at the site.

The skeleton of a young man was found lying

on what appeared to be a low, altar-like platform

with a knife resting on the remains.

The position of the bones led some to conclude

that he had been tied up and drained of blood,

but others have argued that there isn't enough

concrete proof to say conclusively

that he was a victim of human sacrifice.

If you look at the stone blocks

that make up the ruins of the temple,

they are similar in appearance

to what was discovered at Mochlos.

So it's possible that it, too, was a religious site.

Maybe this is part of a bigger complex

that hasn't been uncovered yet.

Maybe it's a palace, because if there's one thing

the Minoans love to make, it's palaces.

Just south of Heraklion,

the capital city of modern-day Crete,

lies one of the ancient world's most impressive sites:

the Palace of Knossos.

The first palace was built around 1900 BCE,

but it was destroyed by an earthquake

around 200 years later.

So it was then rebuilt on a much more impressive scale,

covering over 215,000 square feet over three stories

surrounding a central courtyard.

It was the religious, cultural and administrative center

of Minoan society, rather than a true royal residence.

There's too many impressive features to list,

but some of the elements were well ahead of their time.

A theater that held 400 people;

complex drainage and water supply systems;

light wells, porches, and verandas

that kept rooms cold in the summer and warm in the winter.

While Knossos is the largest and most important,

there are four other Minoan palace ruins on Crete:

Phaistos, Malia,

Zakros, and Kydonia.

So given the Minoans' propensity for building

these impressive complexes, it's certainly possible

that the structure discovered on Mochlos

could be another example.

But Mochlos is a pretty small island.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to build a giant palace complex

in such a small place.

And geographically, it's isolated from the rest of Crete.

I mean, it's an island.

Plus, when you get to the mainland right there,

it's all mountains, I mean, it's really cut off.

If you look at where the other palaces are situated,

they're all way more accessible than Mochlos island.

As the archaeologists continue to excavate,

several features of the structure

catch their attention.

Only the front, the top, and the bottom sides

are smoothed off of the sandstone blocks.

That's a masonry style called ashlar.

And there's a slab of green limestone

that looks to be the entryway,

and evidence of a switchback U-shaped staircase.

All of these elements are typical

of Minoan architecture,

so we're definitely looking at a Minoan-era building.

Probably a simple house, maybe part of a larger settlement.

But when was it built?

Looking for answers, the archaeologists dig deeper

and make a surprising discovery.

They find a layer that contains crystals

and tiny glass fragments, which that can only mean one thing:

volcanic ash, probably from the Santorini eruption.

This is a big discovery because it's the first time

that ash from the cataclysmic event has been found on Crete.

Under the ash layer is a pavement of stone slabs

and pottery in the Marine Style of the late Minoan period

decorated with nautilus and octopus designs.

This isn't really a surprise because it's always been known

that the Minoan civilization existed

at the time of the eruption.

But what is surprising is that

the originally discovered structure

is on top of the ash layer.

For the last 80 years or so,

conventional belief among historians held that

the Minoan civilization essentially disappeared

around 1450 BCE

because of the Santorini eruption and earthquake.

But the fact that this structure was built

on top of the ash layer tells us otherwise.

Radiocarbon dating of seeds and wood

found in volcanic ash on Santorini

confirms what the archaeologists

have begun to suspect.

The eruption occurred around 1600 BCE.

That's 150 years earlier than previously believed.

So not only did it not wipe out the Minoans,

it means they continued to thrive on Crete

for 150 years after the disaster.

But if it wasn't the eruption

that spelled the end of the Minoan civilization,

what caused them to all but vanish

from the historical timeline

after over 500 years of prominence in the Mediterranean?

It's hard to say exactly,

but it was probably a combination of factors.

While the eruption didn't cause a complete collapse,

it certainly would've had a significant impact

on the Minoans in terms of climate.

A volcanic winter likely occurred, affecting agriculture,

livestock, and even the water supply,

generally making life much more difficult.

These stresses may have caused a fragmentation

of Cretan society over a few generations,

smaller and smaller communities breaking away

from those palace centers and becaming more independent.

And that would have meant more competition for resources

among those communities.

There's even evidence to suggest that a huge wave of fires

swept over the island,

which may mean that this once glorious, unified society

just descended into anarchy.

While internal strife may have triggered

the fall of the Minoan civilization,

external forces most likely finished the job.

Between 1600 and 1200 BCE,

the city of Mycenae on mainland Greece flourished.

At one point it was ruled by Agamemnon,

who according to legend led the Greeks in the Trojan War,

and this spawned the heroic exploits

of Achilles and Odysseus.

With the Minoans on Crete infighting,

there might have been a power vacuum,

one that the Mycenaeans were more than happy to fill.

So the most likely scenario was that the Minoans

were finally finished off by a Mycenaean invasion,

and absorbed into their culture.

But here's the thing.

The Mycenaeans were pretty fanatical about their mythology,

as evidenced by the tales of the Trojan War,

but nowhere in Greek mythology is there any mention

of conquering the Minoans.

And some scholars believe that even though the Minoans

were in decline, they still would've been stronger

than the Mycenaeans at the time the civilization disappeared.

So who knows what really happened?

It's a bit of a mystery that's certainly still up for debate.

Whatever fate befell the Minoans,

the calamitous eruption of the Santorini volcano

and the corresponding earthquake

probably hastened their demise.

The seat of power in the Mediterranean

passed from Crete to the mainland,

and the Mycenaeans eventually gave way

to the golden age of ancient Greece.

In the late summer of 2003,

the moors of Yorkshire, England, burned.

The dry heather went up like a torch.

The heat was intense, and fires raged across an extensive area,

burning up ancient peat bogs

undisturbed since time immemorial.

In the end, the fires burned up

more than 2.5 square miles of moor.

This destroyed the sensitive ecosystem

vital to several species of ground nesting birds.

Because of the extensive fields of heather

that form the habitat of the red grouse,

curlew, and golden plover,

the area has been designated

as a site of special scientific interest.

When the fires finally stopped, much of their habitat was gone.

This part of the Yorkshire moors

is also of interest to scientists because it's so old.

Some of the coastline here dates to the Jurassic period,

which ended 145 million years ago.

The fires had burned away much of the vegetation,

exposing features in the landscape

that had long gone unnoticed.

Running across the moors is a long, dilapidated railway line.

The railway was abandoned a while ago,

as the area was given protection status in 1952.

If they built tracks out here, it could be

that they were for bringing something out of the moors,

and not bringing people in.

Yorkshire is famous for its coal mines.

Could they have been mining something here?

Under the surface,

the ground is composed of three layers of gray shale.

The middle layer is less chalky

and inflected with shades of pale gray and yellow.

This middle layer actually consists of alum,

a chemical compound with a wide variety of industrial uses.

This is interesting because alum was an essential ingredient

in the Industrial Revolution and the establishment

of British economic power in the 19th century.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution,

the economy of England was based

around the production of wool and linen.

Naturally, people wanted to add color to these textiles.

The way to do this was to use alum.

The only dyes available at the time

were made from plants and minerals,

but these dyes would bleed out when the material was washed.

The way to fix the dye,

so that it wouldn't bleed out in the wash,

was to soak the textiles in alum.

Until King Henry VIII assumed the throne of England

in the early 16th century,

all of the alum had to be sourced from Italy.

But when he decided to break from the pope

and create the Church of England,

all that alum became unavailable.

So they had to find their own source of it,

and they found it in Yorkshire.

So they mined alum here,

transporting it to factories all across England.

The industry collapsed when in the late 19th century,

synthetic dyes were created.

But until then, this area was vital

to one of the largest industries in an industrializing England.

And these tracks are reminders of that.

As more people explore the burned moors,

large craters pockmarking the land

become visible to the naked eye.

But it's not just that; there are also these holes

dug into the ground

that look like they're made for protection.

And there are also these long slit trenches,

but what really clenches it is a set of abandoned tank tracks

that are rusted out on the ground

as well as spent cartridge cases.

There seems to have been

some heavy military activity here.

The holes dug into the ground are foxholes,

and the trenches are firing positions.

So what was going on here?

There's a Royal Air Force base pretty close by,

and it's a radar and listening station.

But the spy plane and radar stations of the RAF

don't conduct exercises like this,

which are more the signs of army and infantry.

Considering the fact that this area became protected

in the early '50s, this was probably a training area

for the British Army during the Second World War.

With so many finds popping up

across the burned moors, more interest around

what they may be hiding leads to more discoveries.

Not far from where a road cuts across the moorland,

a round, flattened piece of stone

with strange shapes and lines is uncovered by archaeologists.

This stone has zigzags and lines all across it,

and at first it just kind of looks like a random pattern.

But when you pay more attention, you can see that it really looks

like every line has been drawn with a specific intent.

So what is this thing?

There's also a smaller stone right next to it

with many little round circles on it.

It almost looks as if a cup has been pressed into the stone,

creating all these little circular features in the stone.

These zigzags and circles are definitely not

the result of any natural process.

Both of these patterned stones

are lying next to a ring of boulders.

It's a little more obvious

what this ring of boulders is: it's a cairn,

which is usually what people use to mark a specific spot.

So not only is this ancient rock art,

but someone has built the cairn here as well

in order to communicate to passersby that the art's here.

Our human ancestors have been creating rock art

going back at least 40,000 years,

probably well before that.

It's hard to know what this rock art is meant to communicate.

Is this a map of the area?

Is it a grave cover with symbolic shapes and lines on it?

Whatever it is, for the people of the time,

it was made with care.

It had to be important.

Although humans have been creating rock art

in different parts of the world for millennia,

when we talk about rock art in England,

we're mostly looking at the Paleolithic and Mesolithic ages,

which means that they're 4,300 years old, at the youngest.

So it's highly likely that people hunted out here.

It's not ideal for living

considering how exposed you are to the elements,

but for a Stone Age hunter,

this would have been prime hunting grounds.

As the archaeologists continue exploring,

the complete lack of vegetation reveals yet more

interesting rock formations all across the moors.

There are three large stones

with numerous cup-like marks.

A few of the cup markers have concentric rings,

whereas some are connected by a carved channel.

These marks are very distinctive but are still quite similar

to the ones seen on the big, flattened stone

with the zigzag lines all across it.

What's going on here?

Stones like this had several purposes.

Generally speaking, they appear at specific places

in the landscape where there is or was something significant.

So for example, to ancient hunters,

a hill would have been an important feature

in the landscape, because it would been from here

they could observe animals.

Or it could be a sacred site, like a burial,

or even where a natural spring was.

So this place was probably sacred to them,

whether because it was a good place to hunt

or maybe conduct ceremonies.

The importance of the site is reflected

in these people's desire to leave something behind,

in a sense documenting its existence.

In many ways this is not that different

from how humans are today.

We like to photograph everything we think might be important.

It's funny how we haven't really changed in thousands of years.

Just think of this.

British soldiers training for World War II,

lying in these foxholes, unaware that they're surrounded

by stone artifacts that predate them by thousands of years.

And then you go half a century later,

and we're fighting fires here.

It really drives home how this landscape has seen

so much different human activity

over the thousands of years that we've been there.

If these bogs could talk, they would have so many stories.

But bogs can't talk, so we have to go digging.

After exploring the entire area,

archaeologists discover a vast number of standing stones,

cairns and burial mounds that date to the last 3,000 years,

indicating how the moors have been in continuous use

from the Stone Age to the Second World War.

As important as the moors were in the past,

they remain so to the ecology of the region today.