NARRATOR: Giant stone jars litter this plain in Indochina.
Who put them there?
What were they for?
Can science unlock the secrets of the Plain of Jars?
In Turkey, can this man cast light on the lost
art of the ancient architects?
Is their knowledge hidden in the stones?
Does this find under the Californian sea
prove that long before Columbus, the Chinese discovered America?
Mysteries from the files of Arthur C Clarke,
author of 2001, and inventor of the communications satellite.
Now in retreat in Sri Lanka, he ponders the riddles
of this and other worlds.
[THEME MUSIC]
ARTHUR C CLARKE: We are in Kotte, one of Sri
Lanka's ancient ruined cities.
It lies on the outskirts of modern Colombo.
It's hard to picture the bustling civilization
that once flourished here.
But that's a sort of reconstruction
that archaeologists try to do.
They spend their lives searching for keys to the past,
and perhaps one of their greatest challenges is in Laos.
NARRATOR: The fabulous temples and golden statues of Vientiane
hide an even greater treasure.
For Thongsa Sayavongkhamdy, a journey
to the strangest place in Indochina begins with this job.
THONGSA SAYAVONGKHAMDY: The Plain of Jars
is a large area, where thousands of jars
have been laying there for more than 2000 years now.
And no one knows exactly who made them-- why they were made.
And there are a lot of mysterious things
about these jars.
NARRATOR: Thongsa is the top archaeologist of Laos,
in charge of the first modern survey of the jars.
They lie far away in the remote north.
THONGSA SAYAVONGKHAMDY: During the American intervention
from '64 to '70, the Plain of Jars
had been heavily air bombed.
The countryside is covered with craters.
NARRATOR: The town of Phonsavanh is the nearest
settlement to the plain.
To the local people, the jars are just part of the landscape.
The jars are scattered over 600 square miles.
In the province of Xieng Khouang,
there are about 20 sites where there are jars.
But this site is the biggest.
It is called Ban Ang.
There more than 250 jars in this site.
The jars, here in Ban Ang, are made of sandstone,
but in other sites, they are made of quartz.
But the interesting thing is that this rock is
not available around the sites.
NARRATOR: In the 1930s, a pioneering study
was undertaken by French archaeologist,
Madeleine Colani.
An intrepid traveler, she made three expeditions to Laos.
She counted, measured, and mapped the jars,
but never managed to uncover all of their secrets.
She could find no trace of where the jar builders lived.
THONGSA SAYAVONGKHAMDY: The shape
is also very interesting, because it's
not a regular shape.
You can't roll a jar.
It wouldn't be easy to roll a jar.
It's irregular.
There's a large variety of shapes too--
all of them are different.
NARRATOR: Helped by local state archaeologists,
Thongsa begins his field work by checking Colani's findings.
At 10 feet in height, this proves
to be the largest jar of all.
Thongsa finds more questions than answers.
In this site, we have found one lid.
But why only one lid when we have 250 jars?
And the shape, the size doesn't fit to any of the jars.
So another theory says that it might be an offering
table rather than a lid.
NARRATOR: At the nearby mineral water bottling plant,
local entrepreneurs are tapping the jars commercial potential.
Legend says that the jars were vats for rice wine
at a party held by a Chinese warlord
to celebrate a victory in battle.
Other stories say they were cocktail glasses for giants.
But Thongsa thinks that Madeleine
Colani had the best idea.
THONGSA SAYAVONGKHAMDY: My feeling is
that this site is funeral site.
It's a grave yard.
There is a large cave with two man-made openings on its roof.
This is the theory which I support,
suggesting that it used to be a crematorium and remains
were kept in the jars.
And we'll have to look for these remains.
The Plain of Jars, it's unique of its kind.
It's a very valuable cultural site.
It's a place full of mysteries and questions,
and we are just trying to find the answers to them.
What an extraordinary place.
I wonder if the people of the future
will be as puzzled by the bomb craters as we are by the jars.
The only thing that would clear up this frustrating mystery
would be some kind of a written document explaining
why people created it.
And that's very unlikely now.
But sometimes archaeologists do find
surprising answers, often against the most
formidable odds.
NARRATOR: This steamy inland waterway in South Carolina
has not always been navigable by boat.
Underwater archaeologist Mark Newell has
studied the canal's history.
Although heavily used in the 1800s,
it silted up and almost vanished in later years.
During work to clear it, Mark and his team
made a remarkable find in the mud.
MARK NEWELL: It was a bit of a sediment in the canal.
We were excavating and sifting there through screens.
And I was standing there watching the material coming
out of the screen, when they suddenly
this popped into the screen.
On careful examination, you can very readily
see that the chips that were taken from the stone
were very carefully chipped off.
This was no accidental manufacture.
And when you see that kind of care
taken in creating a stone shape, then you realize you
have a tool-- a stone tool of some kind.
NARRATOR: It fitted so neatly into the palm of his hand,
that Newell was convinced he was holding a hand axe
once use by Neanderthal man.
MARK NEWELL: The first, immediate, question
was how could it be here?
I checked with various experts and immediately
established that it definitely wasn't a South Carolina tool.
And from the general shape, it was
thought that it was very similar to European ancient tools.
So we began to examine that possibility.
NARRATOR: The trail led him to the British Museum
and its vast storeroom of Stone Age implements.
The boxes contain specimens of every type
of prehistoric tools.
Jill Cook has years of experience
in identifying and dating them.
JILL COOK: Mark Newell turned up on the doorstep
one afternoon in 1989.
I opened the box, and he said, have you ever
seen anything like this before?
I said, well, no.
Not, from South Carolina, but certainly from Europe.
NARRATOR: Jill Cook recognized telltale markings
that told her the axe was carved over 200,000 years ago.
She suspected it came from France.
I advised Mark to take it to a geologist, who
would be able to identify all the little microorganisms
in the raw material, which would indicate where
the flint might have come from.
With the results of the geological analysis,
we know that this little chap must have come from southwest
France, the hinterland of Bordeaux,
where it would have been made about 350,000 years ago.
Our problem is, how did it end up in South
Carolina in the 18th century?
NARRATOR: The trail led back to Charleston.
The search for clues took Mark Newell
to the city's private library.
I'd like to see copies of the South Carolina Gazette
for 1824.
1824.
Just a moment, please.
I'll be at the table over there, thank you.
NARRATOR: In existence since colonial days,
the library society is the repository
of local historical knowledge.
Newell's hunch was that the answer
lay in newspaper reports of a tragedy on the Santee Canal,
where the axe was found.
The Gazette for 1824.
We do ask that you be very careful.
The pages are brittle, so they tend to tear or flake easily.
And if there's anything else you need, just ask.
Thanks a lot.
One of the most interesting items we found,
was this report right here in the Gazette of Saturday,
May 22, 1824.
And it's an account of how a canal boat belonging to a Mr.
Sayler, of Charleston, blew up in the Santee
Canal when its cargo of vitriol and gunpowder mixed.
And that began to give us an explanation.
Or some clues, as to how this thing might
have ended up in the canal.
NARRATOR: The small vessels supplying the canal
in those days carried rocks and stones as ballast,
often this came from ocean ports,
dumped by ships from Europe after taking on new cargo.
MARK NEWELL: When the boat blew up,
the explosions scattered the entire contents,
cargo and ballast rock, throughout the canal.
Plus, the canal boat would have been dragged through the canal
to clear it after the accident, again depositing its contents
along the length of the canal in which
our excavations took place.
For a quarter of a million year old Neanderthal tropical
to be transported from somewhere near the port of Bordeaux
to Charleston, and from Charleston
into the Santee Canal, and then to be
discovered that many years later, is pretty phenomenal.
NARRATOR: Off the coast of California,
these divers know that beneath the waters of the Pacific,
they will find puzzling archaeological treasures.
In 1975, Skipper Bob Meistrell retrieved a strange stone
from the ocean floor.
A hole had been drilled clean through it.
The divers are looking for some more.
Bob, I'm looking at this.
We need the line to tie it off with now.
NARRATOR: The stones had obviously
been carved deliberately.
Experts recognized an uncanny resemblance to anchors
used by fishermen in old China.
BOB MEISTRELL: Well I don't think their local,
because who would ever make a piece--
a stone anchor when we had steel?
Steel anchors had been around for years and years and years.
I mean, it's quite a project to drill
that hole through that rock.
You take it into a guy that cuts cement pilings and stuff
and ask him to drill hole in that rock, he's-- you're going
pay me a lot of money.
NARRATOR: Meistrell thinks that American history
should be rewritten.
BOB MEISTRELL: If we can confirm that these are from China,
from a different part of the world,
and they've been here a long, long time,
then we can definitely say that Columbus
didn't discover America. Somebody else did.
NARRATOR: Not everybody agrees.
The first stone that Bob recovered
was examined by Professor Frank Frost.
I took a small piece of the stone to the geology department
at UC Santa Barbara.
And a specialist there in sedimentary rock
tested it and told me that it was Monterey shale, which
is the most common rock formation all along
the coast here in Southern California.
The first question was answered, and that is whoever made them,
made them here out of a local rock.
NARRATOR: Frost discovered the Palos Verdes, beside where
the stones were found, had once been a fishing
village for Chinese immigrants.
BOB MEISTRELL: We discovered that the Chinese living here
in the 19th century had used stone anchors
in their fishing industry.
This answered at least part of the question.
The possibility the, the greatest possibility,
was that these were made by Chinese fishermen
here in the 19th century.
NARRATOR: Frost's explanation of the anchor's origins
pours cold water on the idea that the Chinese
beat Columbus to America.
On Columbus Day regularly, there
used to be a little sidebar in the paper saying,
but was Columbus first?
And then there would be all sorts
of speculation about Orientals or Egyptians
or Hittites, or whatever.
But no, to my way of thinking, there's
no evidence for a pre-Columbian discovery of America.
NARRATOR: Another riddle to lifted from the sea bed
has taken 60 years to solve.
These are ivory tusks.
They are under investigation by underwater geologist David
Long.
Long has a favorite theory that the North
Sea was once dry land and home to prehistoric animals.
He read in the Times of 1934 that the two ivory tusks had
been hauled in in the nets of a fishing vessel
off the Shetland Islands.
Professor Richie of Aberdeen University,
declared they had come from a mammoth.
The owners of the fishing vessel were
delighted with the publicity this
brought to their fish shops.
David Long was curious to know if the story was true.
And so I took measurements and photographs.
And I then went off and tried to look at other mammoth tusks
in various museums, and realized this
is not quite the same thing.
NARRATOR: Long used a known mammoth tusk for comparison.
The way one can distinguish between mammoth tusks
and the elephant's, is that the mammoth tusk
is curved in two planes.
You can see the big curve here.
But there's also another curve underneath here,
if I rotate it.
And that the tusk is turning slightly,
whereas these two tusks here are actually
just curved in one plane.
They're quite flat, up here on the bench.
They're just curved like that.
I Immediately began to realize that they're quite different.
NARRATOR: He got permission to take
a small sample of the ivory for carbon-14 dating.
He sent it to Oxford University.
They analyzed it, and wrote back
that we came up with the dates of about 290 years old,
plus or minus about 100 years.
And they cannot be mammoths.
They must be from modern elephants.
Now what were they doing east of Shetland?
NARRATOR: The shipping records of 1689 gave Long his answer.
War in the English Channel caused ships to divert
around northern Britain.
Hidden in archives in Holland, he
found the papers relating to a convoy of four Dutch traders.
These had foundered and sunk in a storm.
The fourth ship, which was the [INAUDIBLE],
had actually set sail from what we call Sri Lanka these days.
And that was well known as the major ivory exporter
from the Indian subcontinent.
Most ivory came out of that area,
and that ship is recorded as having
been lost to east of Shetland.
My feeling is, that is probably most
likely vessel from which these elephant tusks have come from.
That they are modern elephant tusks, brought by a ship.
Not a mammoth, which happened to be
wandering around in the North Sea 50,000 years ago.
ARTHUR C CLARKE: The solutions to the mysteries
of the Chinese anchors and the Scottish tusks
are intriguing and ingenious, but they won't
change our view of the past.
For archaeologists, the greatest prize
is a discovery which gives a real insight into the thinking
of extinct civilizations.
One rare example of this came after centuries of research
into the great temples of the ancient Greeks.
An enormous amount is known about them,
but what happened to the architect's blueprints?
NARRATOR: The temple of Didyma in Turkey
was built in honor of Apollo, the god of light, art,
and prophecy who was said to have been conceived
under a nearby laurel tree.
For generations tourists and archaeologists
have been awed by the building's staggering beauty.
German researcher, Lothar Haselberger,
has been studying the building since he
first came here in 1979.
--The architect, he was just genius.
The amount of refinement that boils down
here in fractions of Inches.
And it's just a tiny detail of this giant building,
and this created this beauty that we are still amazed of.
NARRATOR: Lothar learned the temple's history,
but no one knew how the architects had planned it.
Until he took a walk amongst the ruins one afternoon.
LOTHAR HASELBERGER: I was here one day,
just wandering around looking at the wonderful ,
and unparalleled construction.
And all of a sudden I realized, my goodness, there
are incised lines that all of a sudden
meld together into quarter circles, and semi-circles,
and yet another sequence of quarter circles.
Exactly the way they are executed out in the temple.
It showed up in such a brilliance and clarity,
that I had no doubt-- these are the one-to-one scale
drawings of the construction plans for this very temple.
NARRATOR: To check is discovery, Lothar
used mirrors to throw light onto the faint scratchings.
He had found the blueprint for the columns.
LOTHAR HASELBERGER: What we're looking at here,
the outline-- the bent outline of the shaft
that towards the bottom of the column ends in a profile.
The quarter circle of which, I'm following.
And after a little step, it ends in a semi-circle.
Semi-circle, a profile, where we can actually
see even the center points for inserting the pair of dividers.
NARRATOR: Lothar drew out the plans.
He found that the architects had altered their workings.
But they were a perfect match for the finished pillars.
An accident of history had given Lothar this chance
of a lifetime discovery.
LOTHAR HASELBERGER: I was able to find these drawings
because the temple was left unfinished
at the end of antiquity.
These drawings, were of course, meant to be
taken away-- erased again.
This, however, didn't happen, because the temple
as a whole wasn't finished.
And it's due to that, that we are able to stand in front
of unfinished walls bearing the entire set of full-scale plans
as if standing in the architects design
office, left by the people just going out for lunch.
And we are able to look over their shoulders.
NARRATOR: Lothar examined every inch of the walls
with meticulous care.
He found horizontal lines representing the column shafts.
LOTHAR HASELBERGER: It's impossible to assume
that the ancient master builders were
exposed to this cumbersome procedure
of reading their own plans.
By looking more closely, along the wall surfaces,
I discovered on certain areas, traces
off reddish mineral pigments.
And to cut a long story short, the entire wall surface
intended for the drawings was covered
with this reddish iron oxide.
And I must say, they stand up quite clearly
against the reddish background.
After having understood what I've seen,
one thing was clear to me-- this is a much more general answer
than just we're solving the design of this very temple,
it's on the whole, the answer of how great buildings had
been designed.
ARTHUR C CLARKE:
ARTHUR C CLARKE: Well the moral of these stories
is this-- apparently insoluble mysteries may turn
out to have simple solutions.
But one thing is clear, the key to unlocking
the past that you can't do without,
is good old fashioned luck.