Documentary films & series
Our analyses and companions to the great documentaries on prehistory and antiquity: what science actually says, with sources.
History Forge traces the history of the Ancestral Puebloans (Anasazi): from the first farmers of the Colorado Plateau to the Great Abandonment of 1…
Watch the documentary →Its entrance is 37 metres below the sea. Its paintings are 27,000 years old. Cosquer Cave, discovered by a diver in 1985 in the Marseille calanques…
Watch the documentary →Since 2019, dozens of international teams have returned to Mesopotamian sites around Mosul, inaccessible for half a century. This ARTE documentary …
Watch the documentary →From the Fertile Crescent to the first cities of Mari and Ebla, from Palmyra to Damascus: beneath Syria's sands lie the roots of civilization. A do…
Watch the documentary →Lascaux, Altamira, reindeer-antler harpoons and sculptures of extraordinary refinement: at the close of the Ice Age, Magdalenian hunters brought Palaeolithic art to its peak. A documentary on the carved face of these artists.
Watch the documentary →Around 1350 BCE, pharaoh Akhenaten overturned Egyptian religion, imposed the cult of the solar disc Aten, founded Amarna and reinvented art. An ARTE documentary on a monotheistic revolution with no future.
Watch the documentary →Grid cities, covered drains, engraved seals and an undeciphered script: a dive into the vastest and most mysterious of the Bronze Age civilizations, with the imineo documentary.
Watch the documentary →Between January and February 2026, Jean-Jacques Hublin, professor at the Collège de France, delivered six lectures on the fundamental question: how and why did <em>Homo sapiens</em> replace all other human species? Available in full on YouTube, they are an exceptional resource for understanding our own evolutionary history.
Watch the documentary →At Saqqara, archaeologists unearth an Old Kingdom vizier's tomb, untouched for 4,000 years. Who was this all-powerful man? What does his tomb reveal about the secret organisation of pharaonic power?
Watch the documentary →Second part: the climatic aridification around 2200 BCE dries up the Nile floods, starves populations and precipitates civil wars. The Ipuwer Papyrus testifies to a world turned upside down.
Watch the documentary →How did the most powerful empire of the ancient world collapse in less than a century? This Arte documentary retraces the political disintegration of the Egyptian Old Kingdom.
Watch the documentary →Nota Bonus hosts Franck Monnier, associate researcher at the CNRS, for an hour-long interview on ancient Egyptian building techniques. Pyramids, ramps, quarrymen, site organisation: science has answered far more questions than most people realise.
Watch the documentary →Where the North Sea now lies, hunter-gatherers lived 10,000 years ago. Doggerland, a vast plain linking Britain to the continent, was slowly drowned, then swept by a tsunami.
Watch the documentary →