Templar's Tunnels, HMS Victory and Troy: History's Best Historical Sites with Dan Jones

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3:29Hey folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Now if you're in the Northern Hemisphere like me, well, it's guys, it's high summer. Like me, maybe your routine's a little different. The kids are off school. The days are long. We're spending long evenings sitting out. Beer in hand in the pub garden. So in that spirit, I'm going to bring you something a little different on the podcast today. Something different to our usual offering. Something a bit loose on these hazy summer days. I'm not sadly in a pub garden, but the vibe is the same. I'm hanging out with my great friend, my fellow history obsessive, history's other great Dan, Dan Jones.

4:02Dan, how are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. Thank you for talking to me. Well, this is nice because the last time we were together, we were in a nice cozy studio. The last time we were together, we were freezing our little nadgers off in Runnymede, the place where Magna Carta was, to which the seals were affixed to Magna Carta. It was bone-shatteringly cold that day, so much nicer to know. It was obviously a high summer day, shivering. And thank you, because you've invited me to a lovely podcast studio. You're recording This Is History. It's your podcast. Thanks for having me in. We're going to talk about things we get asked about quite a lot, so I thought we could just do it together.

4:34Well, thank you very much for coming into the studio. One of the things I've been wanting to talk to you about for ages is your favourite places that doing history has taken you around the world. Because one of the great pleasures of this job, as I see it anyway, is the opportunity to travel, to explore, to go places for research. So I thought that we could have a little discussion of our favourite places and we're going to put this out on the This Is History feed and on our YouTube channel. Yes, you can listen to it here. You can also watch it on This Is History YouTube. You certainly can. Go and check it out.

5:10Dan, welcome to the show. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me. I want to talk today about the greatest places that we've visited in the course of doing history. Because I think one of the great privileges and pleasures of this job is it kind of takes you around the world. And I don't know, is there a continent you haven't been to? There is not. I have, I mean, I'm involved in it. You've been to Antarctica, Andy, Bill. I've been to Antarctica, although I've stood on the ice off Antarctica, which I think counts. I spent three weeks trapped in a vessel in the ice of the Weddell Sea and some absolute knobs said to me, you haven't been to Antarctica, have you?

5:42But it's like, if you're in Lime Bay, if you're in the Bristol Channel for three weeks, I think you're allowed to say you've been to Europe, aren't you? I think you are. I think so. I think you've been to Antarctica. You've certainly been closer than I have. But what I want to do is talk about some of the most memorable historical places that you've been in the past. And I'll throw in some of my own. I thought maybe we could start with the last place I think I saw you, which was in Runnymede. Yeah. Because we were down there. It was quite a cold day, as I recall. Yeah. But we had rather a nice time talking about Magna Carta there.

6:16It was 2015 was the big anniversary for Magna Carta. So that was the 800th anniversary. And I live about three miles away from Runnymede. So despite all your travels, actually, you came home. Starts at home. Yeah. So you've been down there before. I've been down there a lot. But it was brilliant going with you. And it's quite fun. sometimes you go to historic sites, don't you, where the geology or the farming or there's been urbanisation and there's almost no reason for being there. When you're at Runnymede, it all makes sense. It's like a water meadow. The Thames is there. You can see it and you can imagine it burst.

6:49And you explained to me that it was flat but it's damp. It's a safe place for meetings. It's a place where people go to parley and actually the geography is quite important there, isn't it? Well, in 1215, and listeners to our regular fixture a dynasty to die for will cast their minds back and remember when we were talking about King John but in this time there was you know you had the barons very angry with John for all of his his manipulations of the law and all of his oppressions and all of his tyrannies camped in stains and then you had the king at Windsor and it was this this sort of meeting point in the middle where because of the geography of the river it was almost impossible to launch an ambush yes whenever we think about historical places I think it's always worth trying to go do you agree?

7:36if you're trying to narrate a story about a place and you haven't you don't know what the physicality of that spot is like you can often miss the most obvious things about a story there are two kinds of stories in the world and there are those who go away on holiday and lie on a sun lounger and chill out and there are those who immediately scale the cliff behind the hotel to go and look at the castle or the gun battery Do I need to ask which one you want? No, well, and what I like about you, Dan Jones, is you are absolutely in the last category because I think it does matter. And when you're writing wonderful narrative history like you do or talking on the pod so eloquently, it's nice to be able to say, now the problem with that slope is, you know, the gravel's very loose.

8:16Which is true. Right. Which is true. And it's like the First World War. You walk across the Somme after it rains, which is most days, and within five minutes, you've got a plate of clay the size of a plate, a large plate thing a salmon serving dish on each foot because that is the nature of the soil so you're like and that is something actually you can read about it well I'm mud on feet what are they all complaining about you know there's certain things that in the comfort of your own library it's very hard to internalise and so I have enjoyed enormously going to places and getting that sense of things and as a view through the writing I can tell you always try and whenever I talk to you you're always going somewhere to do some research and I do think if you're privileged enough to do that it is absolutely essential It really helps to, the geography, the geology, the weather can really help to sort of, just fill the picture out when you're telling the story.

9:05And I guess the interesting thing about Runnymede, I like, last thing I'd say about my own, just quickly, is I do think that in 2015, we marked this, and it did feel important because at the moment we are now wrestling again with this. And actually, it's the oldest question in human existence, which is, how do we, normal people, exert any control over those who rule over us? And that question seems quite lively again now today, right? How do we go, hang on, mate, person who rules over us for reasons that are sometimes slightly obscure, we need you not to do certain things. And I think that feels to me, when I was at school and growing up, I thought those questions were settled.

9:47Turns out that's not settled anymore. And if you're in China, if you're in Russia, if you're in other countries, those are really very live questions. And Magna Carta, that's essentially what it's about, right? Well, it's interesting that we're sitting here marvelling somewhat. I mean, and not just sitting here in this room at this moment, but sitting here in society marvelling at the idea that these individual leaders can be out there making decisions and then just kind of doing stuff. Because the way I see it, for the most part in human history, that's been normality. That's normality. And the questions about how do you restrain a leader who really goes a bit off grid, as it were, off the rails.

10:25But we, being of the same generation, have grown up through probably the most unusual time in human history. Precious. In which we probably grew up in the high point of the rule of law, of international norms. Not everywhere, but by and large being like, okay, we really do have restraining mechanisms on individuated power. And all of that seems to be regressing towards the historical mean. It does seem like that. Yeah. Ronnie Meade's close to home for me. Yeah, I grew up nearby, but I understand why you've chosen it. But what about you? Well, weirdly, I've also chosen one that's close. I don't know.

11:01It's a bit embarrassing. We both came promising to tell stories of the far off and exotic. But I guess this is a landscape and a seascape that's very close to me. The Solent is the strip of water, for those of you who don't know, on the south coast of England, between the Isle of Wight, which is a sort of a diamond-shaped island off the south coast. You've got Portsmouth and Hailing Island in the east, and it runs all the way through to sort of her spit, amazing geology world's oldest boat building site has been found there, a Mesolithic boat building site, it's a Stone Age boat building site, you've got hollowed out canoe, evidence hollowed out canoe, world's oldest you've got, and then you've just got a, very dynamically lots of Romans, Vespasian as a young legionary commander invades, past the Claudian invasion of the 40s AD, he invades and captures the Isle of Wight, we know that, and then you get lots of Viking, Anglo-Saxon Viking activity.

11:54You've got the big cities of Southampton where Henry V leads to... Where do you stand on Southampton? There's great rivalry for international viewers and listeners between Portsmouth and the nearby town of Southampton. Well, I live close to Southampton, so I'm afraid I'm a Southampton guy. What's the name in Portsmouth for Southampton? The Wonderful Saints? I thought it was the Scum. I may have got that wrong. There's antipathy between the two cities as only neighbours can have. so Portsmouth great naval base Henry VIII does a lot of work there and then subsequently that's the site of HMS Victory now and it's a wonderful it's also Britain's still Britain's premier naval base and Southampton is more a commercial trading city very interesting position on the outs where two rivers converge and it's got this beautiful deep water harbour Titanic leads from Southampton Henry V leaves Southampton D-Day roughly speaking a huge number of the largest fleet of ships from the largest fleet ever assembled in human history in June 1944 they leave from Southampton Portsmouth, other ports from there and the Solent which is the stretch of water was so busy it was said you could walk from one side to the other without getting your feet wet so I mean I cannot tell you So in a way it's sort of the epicentre of naval history really I think so, I like to think of the epicentre of all history but yes, naval history in particular maritime history, a lot of very important maritime history Which is kind of your nerd specialty Nerd specialty You're a naval guy, maritime guy Absolutely, yeah, for sure.

13:19Until 1830 when George Stevenson got that little train running down between Liverpool and Manchester. If you had a heavy object and you wanted to take it somewhere, you did it on the water. You did it by boat. And you see this at the very dawn of our species. You see it with Stonehenge, whatever. And so the sea, if you looked out to the sea, now it looks empty. One enormous container ship going past carrying the entire gross natural product of a small country every week. But the rest of the sea looks quite empty. and the sea would have looked busy until the modern world. So there would have been fishing boats, there would have been coastal traders, there would have been passenger ships, there would have been little pirates, whatever it might have been.

13:56The seas around Britain, the seas around France, the seas of the Mediterranean would have just been crowded with sails. That's where humans did their business. It's where they traded, travelled, moved. And that's something I think it is difficult for us to get our heads around now. Well, so in a way, that sounds a bit like a kind of unseen revolution in human history. I talk a lot about the pain revolution at the beginning of the 20th century when pain effectively became somewhat optional with the availability of anesthetic and its introduction into everyday life as well as the medical system as being one of these massive revolutions that we kind of forget about because we live on the other side of it.

14:34So I wonder if we've lived through a similar one in terms of transport where it's so hard for us to imagine the world when seaborne power was and was everything. And you've written about this so beautifully. But now, if you show someone a map, the blue bit is, oh, God, C6, a barrier. And on the map, there's the highway map, the motorway map here in the UK. Those are the big arteries of travel you get from London to Manchester really easily. As you well know, until very recently, the links between Brittany, Cornwall, Normandy, Southern England, Norfolk, and the Low Countries, absolutely vastly more important than the links between Norfolk and Chester.

15:11Yes. So you would, in terms of language, marriage, power structures, and trans-maritime empires would have been very, very common. And so that has been a revolution. We see the water as a barrier. The water traditionally was a bridge to places. And so that is a challenge of telling that story a little bit. People just go, what? I mean, yeah, it's madness. I don't want to travel across water. It's a pain. I feel ill. Yeah, I feel ill. Dan, where's one of the best places a little further away? Where's one of the best places you've been? Well, so one of my favourite places that I've visited is probably the Templar Tunnels in Akka.

15:49This is northern Israel, just near the Lebanese border. And you can, these dates to the era of the Crusades, so there's high Middle Ages, but they're tunnels that run under the city from what was probably the Templar base through to the port. It's somewhere that I had a really interesting time visiting and don't think I could have really got into the history of this particular bit of history without seeing. I found that this took me into both the real history and the mythology of a subject, which in this case is the Knights Templar. Gosh, nearly 10 years ago I read a book about the Templars, and you can't really go into Templar history hoping that you won't encounter Templar mythology as well.

16:34And there's a really interesting place in the city of Acha in Israel where you can sort of get a feel for both. Acha was once the capital of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. After the First Crusade, Jerusalem was in Christian hands. But after Saladin, Jerusalem was lost. And so Acha became the capital and eventually the last city standing of the Crusader Kingdom. and the Templars set up one of the great headquarters in this town and had tunnels that seemed to have run from the Templar headquarters to the port. I mean, that's so cool. Possibly so they could evade taxes, but probably just to give ease of access.

17:13And you can still go down into these tunnels today. Off the top of my head, they're a couple of hundred metres long and in themselves they aren't particularly spectacular, they're tunnels, But they take you into this world, firstly, of the Templars in their real crusading historical setting, you know, in this time when there was this coming together of religion and of military conquest and of trade and of all of these things sort of piled together in this really quite small bit of the Mediterranean, of the Eastern Mediterranean. But just by virtue of saying Templar tunnels, it implies this sort of deep...

17:54what the hell were they up to and that I found so fascinating when I was doing a lot of work on the Templars and still do now because it's an organisation where people almost, I mean they want the mythology to be there and you're in this position as a historian when you start to say well I don't think the Templars necessarily did hide the secret bloodline of Christ and take a load of treasure up to Scotland and hide Shakespeare's real writings on Oak Island, you feel you're really disappointing people by not playing along. But you're allowed to tap into it. You have fun with it, though. I mean, that's great.

18:29Well, I think that's the key. If you just sort of put your foot down and say, no, absolute bollocks, don't be so stupid, you kind of drive people away. Yes, Annie. Well, what we tell each other, isn't it, Dan, that we tell each other, in fact, the true stories are more exciting. So you go, come for the Templar gold, but actually leave with a much more nuanced understanding of the Templars. And that's the real, that's the friends you make along the way. Yes, it's about having this attitude of welcome in. There's a reason why people are interested in the Templars. And if one approaches the subject by saying, well, there's a perfectly good hospital, a fortress in Aker, I don't see why you're not as interested in that as the Templar tunnels.

19:04In fact, well, that happens to be true. Also, people are allowed to be interested in what they're interested in. I mean, I think you have to meet people where they are. I've always found you can't get angry at people being interested in things. And it's just wonderful. It's a great springboard. You wrote a great book on Templars. Wonderful. A lot of people bought it. It's fantastic. Everyone's happy. You got a lot of credit for it. I go around the world getting thanked for it. I take that credit. Everyone's a winner. You listen to Dan Snow's History It. Don't give up on us just yet. There's more coming.

19:36This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. Yeah, make it. Yeah, drink it. Nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery. A detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what all baffle historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different.

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22:18See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2 % daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more.

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23:21But when Acre Falls, unbelievable siege, go and check it out, it's one of the great medieval sieges. They kill, is it the hospitalers that they slaughter or is it the temple? I think it's... Well, at various times in crusading history, they both get it quite literally in the neck. So it's after the Battle of Hattin in 1187. The Templars get lined up there. The Templars and the Hospitallers, because they're kind of the crack troops in the crusading army. Saladin, kind of, he's willing to ransom everybody of any value, except for the Templars and Hospitallers. So even King Guy of Jerusalem, yeah, off you go.

23:54But the Templars and Hospitallers, I mean, it's like having all the Navy SEALs and the SAS. Are you really going to let them go? I think it might be better to just chop all the heads off. And so chop all the heads off is what he does. but I suppose it's the ultimate backhanded compliment. I suppose so. I suppose so, that's true. That's true. Tough for them. So my equivalent of those tunnels, which I would love to see, is HMS Victory, which I think is a massive 18th century battleship that you can still go and see today. It's the ship that was Nelson's flagship, Battle of Trafalgar. Where is it?

24:28It's in Portsmouth, obviously. It's one of the best things in the world to go and see. So this is, at the time, the biggest warship ever laid down, ever built in Europe. 1759, the keels laid down. The year of victories, when Britain wins all these victories all over the world. So it's called HMS Victory. Awesome. And it then serves from 1759, amazing investment, all the way through to the Battle of Trafalgar 1805. It goes on serving after that as well. So they're getting their money's worth. 2 ,000 oak trees went into building it. Something like 60 acres of trees. 27 miles of ropes and rigging.

25:02it's got just over 100 guns it was the most complicated item on earth, like if a giant picked up something on earth at the time, that was the most complicated single thing that existed because again, remember matched with the thing that the ports, ports are very important and so if HMS Victory drops anchor off your port and you're in China, you're in Peru, you're in wherever you are it's like okay now we've we've got, we can't, this person just got their heel on our jugular, you know, on our windpipe. So that's why navies sort of matter so much in that period. And it's capable of obviously defeating the enemy fleet in battle.

25:41It's just astonishing. But to build it, to man it, to crew it, to ensure no one crashes it into rocks, you need an incredibly sophisticated, the beginnings of a really early, interesting modern state. You need officers who can pass exams who are not just there because their granddad is posh. You need, you know, the army's fine. The army, you can have officers that are posh and thick because their only job, an officer's only job in the army is to show the men how to die, to not flinch when bullets go past. Sergeants show the men how to fight, officers show the men how to die. But that's not good enough in the Navy.

26:10You need exams. You need, you know, you need a sort of objective criteria which to test people. You can't give them that much responsibility and not have them know what they're doing. And so this is the beginning of a kind of meritocratic state. It's the beginning. The state has to find funding for this. It has to upkeep. You know, you can't just, you can, as you know, medieval army you can if you've got gold you can sort of get an army together you've got a problem retaining it but you can just get it together you can train peasants in a year or so you know give them a give them a primitive firearm maybe a few months you can get them going you can't wish a navy into being you need dry docks you need seasoned oak you need canvas so you're talking about a multi-year multi-generational project a build hms victory and b keep it going and so if people listening to thinking I'm just sort of war, you know, excited about war.

27:00Yes, that's an amazing, you know, extraordinary part of it. Its story at the Battle of Trafalgar is unbelievable. But actually, what I love about it is what it represents in terms of what the tip of the iceberg and what's going on underneath it. And that talks a lot about, you know, why Britain, France and these other European countries sort of conquer the rest of the earth in this period. They put together all these kind of killer apps. Is there a moment from that represents the beginning of that process if HMS victory is the kind of, you know, the high point of it? I mean, when does this all begin in terms of the It's so interesting because Europe is this just little promontory on the end of Asia and most of the action in the economic and political military action throughout much of history has been the Indian Ocean, you've got Persia, you've got empires of India slightly adjunct South China Sea over there and suddenly these mad little Europeans.

27:50And it's the great expression, on the peninsulas of the peninsula. So not just in Europe, but in Devon, in Brittany, in Portugal and Spain. So these are the outside bits of the outside bits. They sort of put together shipbuilding technology, navigational advances, heavy weapons cannon, and they start staying very long distances, reasonably safely. I mean, still, I wouldn't want to do it, but reasonably safely. They're highly competitive. These absolute blighters, Spanish, Bretons, Portuguese, Brits, Scots all compete, so arms race absolutely frantically nicking each other's talent, nicking each other's braid Magellan's going here, Columbus's going there, Cabot's going over there they're stealing ideas from each other they're perfecting, they're getting a bit of kit and adding on to it and so yeah from about 1500 and then it just starts to, it just kind of snowballs and initially as you know they turn up British military will turn up, English British military will turn up in a place like India and they'll fight a reasonably even battle for a couple hundred and then suddenly you just see weirdly these Europeans just screaming ahead.

28:57And that's the other thing about navies. Very hard to catch up. Like insanely difficult. If you're a very wealthy Mughal emperor, you can summon a lot of troops together, but you look at a navy ship, you're like, I don't know how to get one of those. No. I need factories. I need ironworks. It's a lot of tech. I mean, it's making me think at the moment of the age that we're living in And there are several parallel huge technological leaps forward. One of them is the sort of latest age of space exploration. And I wonder if the comparable capital spend and just vision and just like dogged determination and belief that this technological revolution, everything will have to go into it.

29:44is the Musk and to a slightly lesser extent Bezos encouraged and supported by the American economy saying, you know what, we can build this new generation of ships that will take us reliably back and forth and back and forth to the moon and eventually to Mars. Is that too far-fetched an analogy for what happens in Britain and the Arctic? No, I think that's all analogies, as you know, in history that you have to take with a pinch of salt. But I think it's a really useful way to think about that. And I think we need to think about, the rest of us who aren't lucky enough to have our own space companies, need to think about the consequences and how we kind of regulate and go, well, when we get to Mars, when we got to North America, all we did was like, right, this is work.

30:26Let's immediately export our European squabbles to North America. So do we want to get to a world where there's American flags and Chinese flags and then private company flags being planted on Mars? Or do we want to kind of head that off before we get there and really try and learn the lessons, I guess, of that period of the dash for global empire? Well, here's a big historical question. Do people ever learn the lessons? I don't. Or do they just ask? What do you think about? You get asked. I get asked that every talk, don't you? I'm sure you get the same thing. Do we learn the lessons? I suppose on this subject, I'm increasingly pessimistic, but not for the old reason.

31:01I used to be pessimistic. I used to think people repeatedly make the same mistakes in different eras of history because they don't know enough about history. And then the more sort of powerful political people I kind of bump into or off as I grow up, the more I think, no, they usually know quite a lot about history. It's usually, no, no, I've read a lot of history and now I'm not going to do the same thing because I'm smarter. I'm going to invade Russia in the summer. Yeah, exactly. Yes. No, I'm still going to invade it in the winter, but because I know. I've got tech. Yeah, yeah. Get some coats.

31:32So my thinking about that is with regard to, you know, it would be very nice for us to go and colonize the moon and Mars and then not immediately have a massive war about who gets the best bit of it. It would be lovely. Yeah. I know, look, I hear what you're saying. And I also think, well, we are learning something. Otherwise, we'd all be still living in like Wattle and Dorb houses. So it feels like in some ways we are learning. But obviously, there's eye-catching examples of areas in which there are certain human problems seem to be kind of intractable. They seem to be baked into the way that we do things.

32:10Yes. And that's why I suppose certain foundational religious texts just endure, I mean, in their moral dimension. Because typically they're dealing with the seven deadly sins. Yeah, we have fatal flaws. Talking of ancient texts, you're going to love this segue. I mean, I just think I'm so close. I'm here for it. This is where do you want to go? Where do you want to go in the world? I want to go to Hisalic. And actually, we were just talking about it before we started recording. This time, almost exactly to the day, I went down to the putative site of the Trojan War. That's cool. Absolutely amazing.

32:46So this is in southwest Turkey on the Gallipoli, the Dardanelles, most famous historically for the Gallipoli landings. But there's an archaeological site that's been an archaeological site since the middle of the 19th century there, which is associated with whatever the historical event was that we now call the Trojan War. That's a hell of a mouthful because nobody knows the exact history of the Trojan War and the delineation between myth and history. But there is an exciting destruction layer at about 1180 BC or something, 1200 BC, which is about right. Which is so exciting, isn't it? It's about right for possibly the events described.

33:28So that's cool. I agree. It's an amazing place. And this was somewhere that I went because I was, you know, I've read this book about castles and I was trying to trace the origins of fortifications and of the human, you know, thinking about war in the West at any rate back to this moment, which if it happened at all, happened in about 1180 BC. But then there's an actual place, which certainly since Roman times, you know, Caesar visited, was associated with the Trojan War is extraordinary. And there's actually quite a lot. You've been there, right? It's epic. There's still quite a lot of it left, despite the efforts of the first guy to excavate it, Heinrich Schliemann, whose chief tool of excavation was dynamite.

34:15So just dynamite at a gigantic trench in the middle. But people should go and check out Google images of... He found some jewellery in a... He found a burial, which is actually before the period. He thought it was the right period. and he called it Helen of Troy's jewellery and he got his wife to dress up in it so you go see some amazing 90th century images of his wife looking at Helen of Troy which I think then got taken back to Berlin and I think the Russians stole it after the second war so I think it's now in Moscow weirdly that jewellery yeah the Hermitage or somewhere like that are you into the classics is there something that gets you what classics I mean these great sort of epics the Greek love them mate love them so I've just come back from Greece where we were sailing around the island of Ithaca so were you indeed yeah it was great we were going to make a show there I said but Speaking of sailing, where I've always wanted to go, so my version of Troy is Easter Island.

35:01That's for me, that's the one. I love Polynesia. Yeah. Not just because I watched Moana with my daughter and had a sort of epic meltdown. Basically, Moana is a movie about a dad and a daughter that loves sailing, an oral historical tradition, but the dad's too scared to leave the reef and his daughter goes off and saves the world. And that, I think, really does roughly reflect me and my daughter's relationship. So I was shaking like a leaf coming out of there. and Easter Island is the furthest of this gigantic Pacific diaspora. And there's a great argument about Easter Island is they make these huge heads.

35:37The heads now are all knocked over. There was a theory that there was a sort of environmental eco-side. They did chop down the trees, which was bad. We can all agree that there was trees, humans arrived, chop them down, bring in invasive species, destroy much of the flora and fauna. They build these amazing heads, they quarry these amazing heads, and it was thought that by the time the Europeans arrived, they'd already smashed the whole thing up with a few hundred people alive, and it was all a kind of Mad Max style kind of lesson to us all about ecocide. I think the latest, it was fun because it's nice when there's disagreement on scholarship.

36:05The latest scholarship is that actually there was a pretty thriving community when the Europeans arrived. Don't tell me the Europeans are the bad guys. Well, you'll be amazed to find out. And partly they did shoot a few people when they accidentally arrived. There was a misunderstanding. But most importantly, of course, disease. They were carrying disease on their ships that they had no natural ability to withstand. And so this Dutch expedition arrives about 1722. The head's up standing. They report a community of about 3 ,000 people, well-organized. Then it's about 80 years before another ship goes past.

36:37And at that stage, it's just chaotic. The head's fallen down. A couple of hundred people scrabbling. Loss of ability to make significant boats. And it's thought probably that's because of disease. So catastrophic pandemics. and then possibly other ships visiting who haven't left a good record. So, and then, because we know that after that, slavers came through, would take the people of the islands into enslavement in South America. So just a complete catastrophe on every front, really. And I'm just, I love the fact that, A, I like monumental sort of archaeology and I find that very romantic going to those out of the way places or the idea of the siege or whatever.

37:18But I also like, yeah, I like the idea of that really trying to get to the bottom of what actually happened. Because it's quite important, you know, it's quite important to learn what happens to societies when they chop down the trees or when they encounter pandemic disease. Or, you know, those things I still think are quite, they're very thought-provoking, aren't they? Very important, speaking of learning lessons. So, yeah. You mentioned Stonehenge very briefly in passing earlier on. Are you up on the Stonehenge mythology, not the mythology, the theories about how do they get it? One of those stones came from Scotland.

37:48Also Stonehenge, Scott. Isn't it exciting? Unbelievable. Unbelievable. What's that tell you about the Isles? Fascinating to me. More than once, I've almost crashed into the ditch going past Stonehenge, just because, you know, there is always a traffic jam going past it. Even though, when compared to the pyramids, let's be honest. Yes. It's not really funny. It's less good than the pyramids. It's much less good than the pyramids, and evidence, to rehearse an earlier part of this conversation, that for most of history, the very edge of Europe has been really quite primitive compared to the sort of beating heart of human civilization.

38:25But put that aside, Stonehenge is still good. You go past it, you go, oh my God, they did what? And that's like the new bit of the monument. They brought some stuff from Wales. Yeah, amazing. And something absolutely wild was happening in the very, very, very late Stone Age in that part of Britain. Dan Snow, what are you up to at the moment? What should people be looking out for? I've had lots of fun this summer. I got to make a, went on a great journey around the Greek islands to make a podcast series and TV show about the Odyssey to time with the movie. So speaking of Troy. So yeah, just check out Down to So's History wherever you get your pods.

39:01Fantastic. Check that out. And for our royal favourites, This Is History, please listen to this week's bonus episode where Dan and I will be dissecting your favourite places teeming with historical intrigue. You can listen to that at patreon.com forward slash thisishistory.

39:21Well, folks, thanks for listening. I really enjoyed that. It was great. Nice summer chat. Please go and check this out. You can go and watch this if you want to on the This Is History YouTube and This History is available wherever you get your podcasts. Go and check those out if you want more. Dan Jones, who doesn't? See you next time, everyone.

39:51This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2 % daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end-of-year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay.

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