Documentary films & series
Our analyses and companions to the great documentaries on prehistory and antiquity: what science actually says, with sources.
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 →The only wonder of the ancient world still standing, the Great Pyramid of Khufu continues to defy archaeologists. An empty sarcophagus, a hidden corridor revealed in 2023, the Merer papyrus, the workers' village , 2.0 archaeology keeps pushing back the boundaries of the possible.
Watch the documentary →Between 50,000 and 35,000 years ago, Neanderthals vanished as Homo sapiens produced the first artworks and built the first social networks. Seven filmed lectures from the Collège de France dissect this pivotal turning point in human history.
Watch the documentary →From the semi-buried pit houses of the early Basketmakers to the great houses of Chaco Canyon and the cliff villages of Mesa Verde, the Ancestral Puebloan culture shaped the Four Corners landscape for nearly three millennia. A look back at a farming, sky-watching, city-building civilization whose heirs still live in the Hopi and Zuni pueblos.
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.
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