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Private Notes
The first black republic in the world Haiti, was born in 1804 from a slave rebellion. The man who led that revolt was himself a former slave - Toussaint L'Ouverture. The revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality were immensely powerful in their impact on blacks and whites alike. Once they had tasted freedom, the blacks fought desperately to retain it. Napoleon Bonaparte, however, was determined to reduce Toussaint, 'this gilded African' as he called him, to submission. After a long and bitter struggle the victory over slavery was won, though Toussaint's own end was to be tragic. This extraordinary history of colonial warfare and foreign intervention is full of echoes for our own time. It is told by JOHN JULIUS NORWICH in the exotic plantations, fortresses and villas where the story unfolded.
Treasure hunting is suddenly big news, with the discovery in Ireland of the Derrynaflan Chalice. But despite the importance of the find, archaeologists have viewed the discovery with mixed feelings because it was found by a man using a metal detector.
While treasure hunters 'prospect', archaeologists believe that irresponsible metal-detector users are destroying valuable evidence of the nation's archaeological past and profiting from the proceeds. Next month the Government plans to introduce new penalties for metal-detector users who go on scheduled sites. They also propose to put rescue archaeology on a statutory basis and declare new archaeological areas out-of-bounds for treasure hunters. Chronicle investigates whether metal-detector users really are a threat to archaeology.
Almost 5,000 years ago, at Avebury, hundreds of people struggled for decades to build the great stone circles. In Scotland, centuries later, small family groups banded together to build a circle each. Stone circles are monuments to a lost religion, born of fear, in times of hardship and pestilence. Human bones and objects of value were buried within them, to placate the underworld. Traces of fire are found, as if from a pyre, and the builders of the circles watched the sun and the moon rise and set above the stones as part of their worship.
AUBREY BURL has spent his life studying stone circles and their meaning. This film shows him at work in Aberdeenshire excavating the site where a small circle once stood and contrasts the evidence there with that found at Avebury in Wiltshire, one of the greatest prehistoric monuments in the world. Stone circles will always remain mysterious. But, if all the evidence is taken into account, they need no longer be mystifying as well.
In 1974, near Xian, the ancient capital of China, a group of peasants digging a well came upon an entire army of 6,000 soldiers, officers, men, horses and chariots - all sculpted in terracotta. This extraordinary find proved to be the battle array of the first Emperor of China, the man who built the Great Wall and died in 210 BC. Colin Renfrew traces the reasons for this amazing burial and, with exclusive film acquired from China, Chronicle looks in detail at the Emperor's army, now being excavated and displayed 22 centuries later to an astonished world.
It was a hot day in July 1545. As Henry VIII's great battleship, the Mary Rose, set sail with the rest of the English fleet, she fired her first broadside, heeled violently to starboard, capsized and sank. All efforts to raise the hull failed. The glutinous mud at the bottom of the Solent held her down, covered her up and, in the end, preserved her. But for more than 400 years the site of the wreck was forgotten and the Mary Rose was believed lost. Now, in 1980, prior to raising the hull in 1982, the Mary Rose Trust are conducting the largest exercise in underwater archaeology that Great Britain has ever seen. Chronicle cameras were with the divers when the site was first yielding its secrets, ten years ago. Now Chronicle brings you the story of the ship, the men who went down with her and an up-to-date report on the people who are excavating the site. Re-aired 21st Apr 1982.
China is now once again raising its bamboo curtain. For centuries this vast civilisation has fascinated the West. Using the actual accounts of travellers who observed China at first hand, and beginning with the most famous of them all, Marco Polo, the programme reveals the strange and shifting relationship between East and West.
Blaenavon is a small town in South Wales which for 200 years has existed by mining. It was one of the first Welsh iron towns. It shared in the great coal boom before World War I. And like most of South Wales it has lived through the long and painful process of industrial decline and change. Now Blaenavon is marketing its past by turning to tourism. Big Pit in Blaenavon will be the only Welsh colliery to be preserved as an underground museum. This film sketches in the history of Blaenavon against the background of the rise and long decline of the South Wales coal field and helps explain something of the miners' attitudes today.
Chaco Canyon in New Mexico contains the spectacular ruins of a vanished civilisation. Great masonry buildings, built in a near-desert, bear witness to an American people who have now vanished without trace. They left behind elaborate walled cities, complete with living quarters, vast storage rooms and large round underground chambers called 'kivas', in which they worshipped. Between their towns they constructed roads; they also had a long-distance signalling system. At the height of their power the people of Chaco controlled an area of some 40,000 square miles. But why did the civilisation fall? Is there a message for us today in what happened 600 years ago? Recent archaeological excavation provides us with some of the answers.
In August 1980 a party of 15 American volunteers arrived at Repton, Derbyshire, to join an archaeological excavation. They included businessmen, housewives, students and retired professors, most of whom had never done any archaeology before. All had paid for the privilege of working hard in a muddy trench in a wet English summer. Chronicle follows their three-week progress. Do the rain, the Repton mud and the school dormitories get them down? How is a site excavated from the cabbages downwards? Is the mound in the vicar's garden just a Victorian garden feature or a Viking burial?
Magnus Magnusson presents a report on the fourth year of the annual Chronicle competition for amateur archaeologists.
This year's finalists presented work on neolithic bog oaks and Saxon fish weirs, the rediscovery of Welsh carved slates and a study of early domestic architecture, the lost Roman defences of the Cumberland coast, and a study of an ancient landscape from the air. MAGNUS MAGNUSSON follows the judges as they scrutinise the finalists' work and finally choose the winner of this year's competition and the Chronicle crystal goblet.
The Elissa was a square-rigged sailing ship built in Aberdeen in 1877 at a time when sailing ships still commanded the seas. Her home port was Liverpool and she had 20 years as a successful trader before being badly damaged in a storm off the coast of Ireland. She was sold, and over the years her appearance was completely transformed. Her masts were cut down, an engine installed, and in the 1960s the shape of her sleek bow was altered to camouflage her activities as contraband smuggler in the Aegean. The Elissa had twice put into the port of Galveston in Texas in the 1880s. This historical connection provided the necessary excuse for the Galveston Historical Foundation to spend nearly two million dollars on her rescue and her restoration. When the Elissa is finally restored she will be the oldest operational iron sailing ship in the world. This film is the story of the Elissa, her history, her restoration in Greece and her journey to Galveston.
