Ancient China from Above

Allan: This is an incredible scene.

There's really no other way to describe it than to say it's a

scene of mass death.

A single family. Frozen in time.

Buried in seconds, almost 4,000 years ago.

A lot of people refer to this as china's pompeii.

Could this tragedy hold clues to the

collapse of one of china's very earliest ancient kingdoms?

I'm allan maca.

An archaeologist and expert in ancient civilizations.

And I'm investigating china's distant past from

a whole new perspective, space!

Today, state of the art satellites see the world in stunning detail

and reveal hidden archaeology,

enabling us to recreate a lost ancient world,

invisible to the naked eye.

Working alongside leading chinese experts,

my team and I are traveling to some of the country's

most remote and incredible landscapes,

and with cutting edge science, investigating previously

unknown cultures, lost cities and devastating cataclysms.

This is ancient china as you've never seen it before.

300 miles west of beijing in china's shaanxi province and

on the edge of barren desert,

are the hills of the loess plateau.

I'm here to explore a revolutionary new discovery

that's completely rewriting the earliest history of china.

This is shimao.

A 4000-year old citadel.

At the heart of a lost ancient kingdom.

Nothing prepares you to see this place in person.

This is one of the greatest new discoveries in the

archaeology of the world.

This was clearly a massive, massive city.

The significance of this discovery became clear

just a few years ago.

Shimao, may have been the biggest city of its time

anywhere on the entire planet.

And chinese archaeologists are only just beginning to reveal its secrets.

Now, with new technology, I want to explore this

extraordinary ancient society.

Wow! Congratulations.

What's behind its most chilling discoveries?

I can tell that some of the bones are very young.

And can the fate of china's other lost civilizations help me solve

one of the greatest mysteries of all?

I feel like I am in the presence of something otherworldly.

Why, after 500 years of living here,

did the people of this great city seemingly...

Just vanish?

Before this discovery, this was just a grassy hill.

The only sign of anything manmade,

was a simple line of rocks.

When they first found this they thought it was a

part of the great wall, you can see why.

So they began some excavations around here and they found no

this is 2000 years earlier than the earliest phase of the great wall.

These walls are incredibly well preserved,

yet they're over 4,000 years old!

That means shimao is built at the same time as stonehenge in britain

and thrived more than 2000 years before the roman empire.

I've been to a lot of ancient cities and you don't

actually feel like you are in a city because they are ruins

but this, in this place I feel like I am there.

This would be an extraordinary discovery

anywhere but to understand why this is so ground-breaking,

we need to see it, from space.

The stepped structure at the center of the city is built

into a hillside, high above the meeting point of two rivers.

It's in dusty, rugged terrain that borders the sparsely

populated ordos desert.

Experts never expected to find a major ancient city here.

It was long thought that chinese civilization began

much later, and hundreds of miles to the south in the

fertile plains of the yellow river.

A stone walled settlement is totally

unexpected at this time period and this place but I want to

know what kind of society built something so large and

so sophisticated.

I'm lucky to have been invited to

explore the latest discoveries with shao jing,

one the lead archaeologists at shimao.

Shao: This is the path up to the giant central platform.

Allan: This is an immense amount of labor here.

This is not rammed earth.

This is not mud brick.

This is stone that had to be brought up here to the site.

It looks like nothing I've ever seen.

Shao: It's the first time in the history of chinese archaeology

we have found a 4000 year old structure built this way.

Allan: I know that I had never expected to see anything like

this but it's amazing to hear that you all had never expected

to find anything this far north at this time.

This vast stepped structure is at the

center of the city.

The team is currently excavating the remains of

buildings that once stood at the top.

They're trying to figure out how this society worked.

Shao: This is the top of the giant central platform.

The whole area covers 20,000 square meters.

In this prosperous city

the high-class people would live here.

It included the king's palace, his administration and large

scale artisan's workshops

allan: Okay, so all of the elites were here living, working.

The king was here.

From the latest excavation data we can recreate what

shimao might've looked like 4000 years ago.

A series of stone platforms with restricted access

to each higher level.

Right at the top, the palaces of the city's rulers.

There's clearly a well-defined hierarchy here.

This huge structure, this palace dominates the

entire area, it's visible for miles.

So this thing is a constant reminder of the power of the

people who governed here.

One of the crazy things is that archaeologists have only

excavated a fraction of this which makes me wonder how much

is out there in the surrounding area?

Chinese researchers are discovering

ruins spread all over the rugged terrain by combining

drone sensing with excavations.

Now, my tech specialist ryan kastner and drone pilot

william luo are going to create a photogrammetry model

so I can understand just how large this city was.

Ryan: Ideally what we want to do is we want to pop it up.

William: Okay.

Ryan: And we want to try to see where the wall's going.

Allan: My team engineer eric lo combines thousands of images

to create a 3d view of the terrain,

called a digital elevation model or dem.

Ryan: So let's have a look at the data.

Eric: So these are the three multi spectral flights that we did this morning.

Ryan: Mm-hmm.

Eric: And then we can see hints of the wall here.

But let's switch over to the dem so we have a bit of clearer view.

Ryan: Yeah. It's a lot easier to see on this, huh?

So we can see the wall we were focusing on.

Right on the ridge which makes a whole lot of sense.

Allan: The 3d reconstruction clearly brings

out the remains of a city wall that follows the ridgeline.

In all, 6 miles of these walls have been identified hidden in this landscape.

They mark out an enclosed inner city and an additional ring

of outer wall surrounds 1,000 acre site,

an area the size of about 200 new york city blocks.

That means that 4000 years ago this could've been the

biggest city on the planet.

The scale of this place is unprecedented...

But even the smallest artifacts being found here

are transforming our understanding of how

civilization develops in china.

Ahh, this is a lot of material here.

You guys have been busy.

This incredibly fragile jade scepter

is a symbol of power, carried by rulers of shimao.

It's very light, it's very light weight!

It would sit on a staff, right?

It's amazing to me how thin they could cut it.

I mean, you can see you can see my hand behind here in the light.

Shao: Only the son of the god, the emperor held this.

He held this to pray to the god,

to tell the god that he was the rightful ruler.

Allan: This is the earliest example of a

jade scepter ever found.

Even the most ordinary looking objects are ground-breaking.

These burn holes show that these are what's known as

oracle bones, a means of divining the future.

The very first chinese writing will later appear on just this

kind of fortune telling device.

And one crucial find gives its name to an entire age of human development...

...Bronze.

Shao: This is a knife.

Allan: This would have been the edge.

Shao: Huh. We have only a few dozen.

These date to around 2000 bc.

They are some of the earliest bronzes ever found.

Allan: Wow this is incredible.

All these amazing finds are revealing that many of the

foundations of chinese civilization appear here at shimao,

centuries earlier than anyone ever expected.

But the team has just made an astonishing discovery like

nothing ever seen in china before.

I'm one of the first outsiders allowed to see it.

Shao: This is a very important discovery.

The people of shimao have left us a gift from 4000 years ago

allan: Wow!

Allan: Archaeologists excavating the ancient megacity

at shimao have just discovered incredible

4000 year-old carvings in the central palace area.

Congratulations! This is unbelievable.

This looks like like the ancient mayan city of copan in honduras

from the 6th century a.D., 2500 years later.

As an archaeologist, does it get better than this?

Shao: Not that I know of.

Allan: There are faces that look half human half animal;

strange hybrids and familiar creatures are

all carved into the walls of the giant platform.

It's a unique insight into the beliefs of the people

who built this city.

Shao: These aren't images of people.