Digging up History

Digging up History

Documentaries about archaeology.

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Digging up History
  • Lost Worlds: Hands on Prehistory

    1 season

    Prehistory, the longest period in humanity's past - but the one we know least about.

    Archaeology can help give us a glimpse into what life might have been like for the people living during this period. But the artefacts and other evidence of past human activity often throw up more questions than...

  • The Ryedale Hoard: Yorkshire's Roman Mystery

    History Hit's Tristan Hughes has special access to the Ryedale Hoard: A Roman Mystery exhibition at the Yorkshire Museum to speak to the people responsible for its discovery and investigate these incredible artefacts.

    Featuring the remarkable 1,800 year old bust of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, ...

  • The Lost DNA

    1 season

    Some 9,000 years ago, dark-skinned, blue-eyed hunter-gatherers roamed our forests and plains. Thousands of years later, a new wave of settlers washed into Europe from the Middle East and Mediterranean, bringing with them a dynamic new technology - farming. Now Lara Cassidy, a young geneticist at ...

  • Rome’s Disaster: The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest

    2 seasons

    Tristan Hughes investigates one of Rome’s greatest disasters, the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.

    The Battle of the Teutoburg forest stopped Roman expansion in its tracks. It’s a story of betrayal, of one man’s vehement desire to liberate his people from Roman rule and the brutal, bloody length...

  • George Washington: The First Battle

    Dan Snow goes to Pittsburgh to explore the extraordinary story of how an over-ambitious young George Washington fought for the British and helped to fire the shots that started the Seven Years War, the world’s first global conflict.

  • Endurance: Rediscovered

    It was one of the last great lost shipwrecks of history - Sir Ernest Shackleton's Endurance. But now, incredibly, it has been rediscovered - over a century after it sank beneath the ice in freezing Antarctic waters.

    Organised by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, the expedition to locate the...

  • Archaeologist Spies of World War One

    Archaeologists excavated the ancient past during peacetime, but in war they had a different mission - to play a vital role in modern military intelligence. Historian of archaeology Dr Amara Thornton explores a network of archaeologist-spies, codebreaking, mapping and running agents, and with expe...

  • Hunt for the U-576

    A team of maritime archaeologists descends 700 feet off the coast of North Carolina in search of the U-576, a German submarine that went down in a historic 1942 battle, possibly trapping 45 Nazi sailors inside.

  • The Relics of Egypt: Exploring the Largest Museum in the World

    A stone’s throw from the iconic Cheops pyramids, another famous man-made creation rises, towering over the Giza Plateau: The Grand Egyptian Museum.

  • A Tudor Discovery - Thomas Cromwell’s Prayer Book

    History Hit digs deep into a fascinating new discovery that has grabbed the attention of historians across the world.

    Prof. Suzannah Lipscomb explores what is being called the most exciting Tudor find ‘in a generation’ as curators at Hever Castle identify a bejewelled, gilded prayer book, tuc...

  • Hidden London

    1 season

  • Tutankhamun: A Century of Discovery

    On November 4th 1922 a breathless archaeologist, who had spent his life working in Egypt, wrote a hurried diary entry: “First steps of Tomb Found”. This was the very moment that Howard Carter found the entrance to the tomb of Tutankhamun.

    In this very special film, shot in Egypt and England, Dan...

  • Mary Anning: The Forgotten Fossil Hunter

    Born in Lyme Regis in 1799, Mary Anning was a pioneering palaeontologist and fossil collector who's story continues to inspire so many scientists to this day. In this documentary Dr Anjana Khatwa, Dr Liz Hide, David Tucker and Anya Pearson explore Anning's life and legacy.

  • Anglo-Saxon Burial at Bamburgh Castle

    A story of bloodshed, tribal rivalries and a warrior class obsessed with and defined by the battlefield has emerged from the discovery of a burial site at Bamburgh Castle. What can the latest archaeological work tell us about the history of Bamburgh, of the people who lived and fought at the cast...

  • Uncovering The Bayeux Tapestry

    One of the world's most famous and well-preserved pieces of medieval embroidery, the 70-metre-wide Bayeux Tapestry depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England concerning William, Duke of Normandy, and Harold, Earl of Wessex, later King of England, culminating in the Battle of ...

  • Prehistoric Ireland

    1 season

    Tristan Hughes travels to Ireland to delve into the mysteries and myths of prehistoric Ireland.

    In the first episode, History Hit’s Ancients expert Tristan Hughes travels to Ireland to delve into the mysteries of Newgrange and its surrounding tombs — exploring the secrets of Stone Age Ireland. A...

  • Mudlarking

    Dan joins author and mudlark expert Lara Maiklem for a spot of mudlarking.

  • Life on the Wall

    In this episode, Tristan Hughes visits two key sites along Hadrian’s Wall that can tell us more about everyday life on this far flung frontier, with a particular focus on hygiene and worship. First on the list is Chesters Roman Fort. Described as one of the most complete cavalry forts that surviv...

  • Timewatch: The Crusaders' Lost Fort

    In 1178 Christians and Muslims were on the brink of total war. The blood-drenched conquest of Jerusalem by the First Crusaders had enraged Islam, and their Kurdish warlord Saladin. This clash of titans is one of the great untold battle stories of the period, with the Muslim attackers laying siege...

  • Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt

    2022 isn't just 100 years since the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. It's also exactly 200 years since one of history's greatest linguistic puzzles was cracked: when Jean-Francois Champollion made the ultimate breakthrough and deciphered the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic code. To mark this very s...

  • A Tudor Wonder - Hardwick Hall - with Prof. Suzannah Lipscomb

    A History Hit treat for the holidays, this special new film reveals an extraordinary Tudor life-story and an amazing creation. We meet the extraordinary Bess of Hardwick and go inside the incredible home she built, a spectacular construction in glass and stone that defined the elegance and grande...

  • The Cutting Edge: Testing the Stone Age

    History Hit visits Kent State University, Ohio to film a fascinating ‘cutting-edge’ experiment that takes us to the beginnings of the Stone Age, over 2.6 million years ago.

    Kent State is home to one of the world’s leading experimental archaeology laboratories, scientifically exploring the distan...

  • Access All Areas

    1 season

    History Hit gets AAA permission to head behind the scenes at top history locations!

  • The Treasure in the Tin Cup: Artefacts and Archive from Auschwitz

    In the Holocaust, also referred to as the Shoah, Nazis systematically murdered some 6 million European Jews. Between 1941 and 1945, around two-thirds of the Jewish population in Europe were killed. Jews were part of a larger group that included anyone the Nazis considered to be ‘Untermenschen’, o...