Curse of the Ancients with Alice Roberts

Professor Alice Roberts charts the rise of civilisation from 6100BCE to the end of the Bronze Age. A time of great work in architecture, literature, and the arts, until most of these great civilisations suddenly collapsed, never to rise again, plunging the world into a dark age. Alice reveals how scientists are uncovering what happened to these civilisations - the devastating flood that separated Britain from Continental Europe; the cataclysmic volcanic eruption that wiped out Minoan civilisation; and the discovery of Europe’s earliest battlefield – throwing new light on disasters that shaped the world today.

The disastrous final days of the Roman Empire are examined in this episode, including the cataclysmic power vacuum following its collapse and the effects felt even beyond the Empire’s borders. Once known as the Dark Ages, this period saw kingdoms rise and fall, cities wiped out by invasion, and plague ravage Europe and the Middle East. Despite these disasters, archaeologists are revealing a world where trade continued, cultures flourished, and new world religions emerged and spread. Alice reveals how humankind continued to prosper even during the darkest of times.

In the final episode of Curse of the Ancients, Professor Alice Roberts looks at one of the most cursed periods in European history - the Middle Ages. Archaeologists reveal how wars, such as the Mongol invasion of Hungary, the Black Death that wiped out up to half of Europe’s population, and climate change causing cataclysmic floods – turned our ancestors’ world upside down. Death was a part of everyday life. With such calamities, Western society was on the verge of collapse. So how did it survive, and how did these catastrophes lay the foundation for the modern world?