Could not resist copying this review across from the Telegraph today. Echoes my feelings about the way this documentary was done. And one comment below also tunes in with my thoughts. Always good when somebody agrees with one!
During the 1920s the archaeologist OGS Crawford embarked on a survey of British archaeological sites seen from the air – he’d been an observer with the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War. The photographs he took prompted widespread astonishment. There, etched upon the landscape, were the remains of countless sites that couldn’t be seen at ground level .
The lesson here – and it was a very heartening one after the horrors of the War – was that nothing ever disappeared, not entirely. Instead, everything left a trace: you just had to be in the right place to see it. Ninety years on, it was beginning to look as if the world had given up most of its archaeological mysteries – but not any more.
Now something called Space Archaeology has been invented which is like Crawford’s aerial archaeology, only much more so. The idea goes roughly as follows: satellites take incredibly detailed photos which are then passed through infra-red filters by someone in a white lab coat lightly spattered with chicken blood who yodels briefly at the Dog Star, Sirius, presses a button and lo – the long-hidden past springs back to life.
So far more than 1,200 new sites have been discovered in Egypt alone, including 17 pyramids. Howard Carter spent eight years trying to locate the tomb of Tutankhamun. Using Space Archaeology, he could probably have managed it in that awkward gap between elevenses and lunchtime.
This then is very big news – which made it all the more maddening that Egypt’s Lost Cities (Monday, BBC One) should have been presented by a pair who already appeared to have undergone that ancient technique of mummification where the brain is removed through the nostrils while leaving the facial features intact. (Love it!!)
One was called Dallas Campbell – he had the bouncy, eager manner of a two-legged King Charles spaniel – and the other was Liz Bonnin, who gazed at everyone she interviewed with an expression of open-mouthed bafflement. The reason soon became all too plain – neither of them appeared to have a clue what they were talking about. Campbell hadn’t even been to Egypt before. Here was the equivalent of getting someone to present a wildlife documentary who’d once heard a rumour that birds could, if they so chose, ascend into the air as if by magic.
The scale of their ignorance caused periodic looks of alarm to pass across the face of Dr Sarah Parcak, the American academic who pioneered the use of Space Archaeology. Gamely she ploughed on, pressing yet more buttons so that a network of streets sprang out of an apparently featureless landscape. It was still mesmerising stuff, one of those rare occasions when you stare at the ground beneath your feet in a completely new way, but oh how much better it could have been.
And the Comment
Found Egypt's Lost Cities interesting, but I agree with the reviewer about the gormless presenters and could also have done without the all too frequent interludes of convoys of Toyota Landcruisers charging around the place in great clouds of dust!
Trying too hard to make things exciting?
