Secrets of Lost Empires [5 one-hour episodes on 3 DVDs] (review)

The structures left behind by ancient civilizations continue to fascinate us. The testify to the ingenuity of the societies that created them—their ability to work stone, move materials, organize laborers—and challenge our smug certainty our abilities far exceed theirs. The instinctive reaction of modern onlookers to ancient structures has, for centuries, been: “How did they do that?” The question has generated a great deal of far-fetched nonsense (some of it involving alien visitors and lost races with mysterious powers), but also a fair amount of serious archaeological investigation. Secrets of Lost Empires—a series of five hour-long episodes co-produced by WGBH and the BBC and originally aired on the PBS science series Nova in 1996–97—concerns itself with the latter.

Each of the five episodes has the same basic structure: A team of scientists and other experts is assembled and given the job of recreating, on a small scale, a major work of ancient engineering. Each episode cuts back and forth between footage from the job site, play-by-play commentary from the experts on how things are going, and studio-produced chunks of historical and engineering background. The result is an improbable hybrid of a conventional archaeology documentary and a home-makeover program, overlain with the dramatic conventions of reality shows like Frontier House. The cast of experts changes from one episode to the next, but (like the members of a Hollywood infantry platoon) they represent a standard array of archetypes. Each episode features at least one Learned Professional with extensive archaeological knowledge, one Amateur Expert with an unconventional idea, and one Practical Man with hands-on experience in some skill closely related to the job at hand. Inevitably these three principals have different ideas about how to accomplish the task at hand—differences that the producers highlight in the interests of drama.

The challenges in three of the five episodes—Pyramid, Obelisk, and Stonehenge—are variations on the same basic theme: How do you cut, move, and erect large stones with only the simplest of tools? Pyramid challenges its team of experts to build a miniature version of a classic Egyptian pyramid, six meters high with a square base nine meters on a side. Obelisk poses the challenge of setting a previously carved 40-foot, 40-ton granite pillar upright on a stone base. Stonehenge presents its team of experts with three massive concrete slabs and asks them to recreate the largest of the famous monument’s “trilithons:” two vertical slabs bridged by a third. Colosseum revolves around a significantly different challenge: How do you put a canvas roof over the seating areas of a stone arena? The venue is a stone-walled bullring in Spain, half the size of the famous Roman structure. Roughly half of the fifth episode, Inca, has its team of experts trying to replicate the stonework found in the South American empire’s mountainside citadels: walls with whimsically shaped polygonal blocks and gently curving joints too tight for a knife blade to penetrate. The other half reduces them to spectators as Peruvian villagers use traditional methods to build a woven-grass suspension bridge over a 40-foot-deep gorge in the Andes.

All of this works remarkably well as drama. Nova’s long-established “house style” of straightforward documentary photography, crisply drawn animations, and carefully modulated narration keeps the series from feeling like Survivor: Ancient Engineering. The principal investigators’ arguments about methods come across as vigorous but essentially amiable professional disagreements. The climactic moments when stones are raised and canvas roofs unfurled are not stretched out, needlessly repeated, or burdened with breathless narration hinting that disaster is only one misstep away. The best parts of the series are, ironically, among the least inherently “dramatic:” low-key, detail-rich conversations among the experts about how to handle a particular aspect of the larger challenge...