Legacy: The Origins of Civilization

The Program
Legacy: The Origins of Civilization is a six-part series written, hosted, and narrated by Michael Wood, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.  The ‘episodes’ center around some of the earliest and largest civilizations: China, India, Iraq, Egypt, Central America, and Europe.  Each looks at what we know and how we know it of the early rise of those proto-civilizations, how they developed in their immediate “hearths” of climate, geography, resources, as well as contact with “outsiders.”  Then, not only how they changed, but how they were influenced by contact with the outsiders — either from conquest, disease, or trade.  The roles of religion, culture, government.  And, at a more fundamental level, asking what is civilization?  How does each civilization answer that question?  Are those answers — right?  And how did those answers, evolved thousands of years ago, still influence the modern world?

There are, of course, similarities between them.  Yet there are also significant turning-points where a single event — or even a single person — redirected the path that the entire culture took.  History, culture, archaeology, and anthropology all get rolled up into single-servings of how did we get to where we are today?  These questions span from the earliest signs of humanities rituals, to not only the communist revolution in the late 1940’s China, but to include up to the first Iraq-Kuwait war.  The programs visit early archaeological dig sites, ancient churches, temples, and shrines, to even some of the oldest continuously operating restaurant-cafés and pharmacies. 

A difficulty that the producers encounter is, “how do we take a lecture and make a good television program out of it?”  After all, various companies now makes a broad series of college-lectures available as audio or video recordings — but they are just lectures.  How does one ‘dress up’ a lecture for broadcast?  It is a distinct challenge, and it shows in this program by how, whilst visiting the 1153 restaurant, it is mostly a setting for a part of the lecture, rather than a more conventional documentarian exploration of Ma Yu Ching’s Bucket Chicken House.

Still, while a program might not be a completely satisfying tour of five thousand years of Egyptian history in 51 minutes, they do synergistically combine into the deeper, broader question of, what is civilization?  These programs stand together in a much stronger fashion than they might on their own.

The Video
The program is presented in 4x3 aspect ratio full-screen, color video.  Much of the program is shot in some forms of video, although there are also some modern film-sourced elements, as well.  The video aspects themselves range from good, clean material, probably variants of BetaCam-SP or perhaps even some early digital video tape formats, to some parts that look like they were recorded to Umatic-SP.  Video artifacts vary accordingly.  Also, much of the program was photographed in available light or with only minimal supplemental lighting.  This makes some of the night, street, or temple shots somewhat noisy, with the late 1980s vintage CCD sensors showing their pattern noise and the extensive use of electronic gain to try and get some image out of the darkness.  If post-production occurred at Maryland Public Television (which I can not recall; I interned there shortly after this program was produced,) it would have been edited in 1-inch analog.  But I suppose that is neither here nor there.

There are few instances where the limitations of the DVD format show in this program — usually some bit-starvation macro-blocking around rushing water, waving and blowing trees or crops — things like that.  Other than a few isolated incidences like that, the video is relatively clean, and perfectly acceptable for the era and the production decisions made. 

The Audio
To my mind, they did something quite remarkable: when in doubt, record stereo.  Less than half of the narration was recorded in a voice-over booth, but in the field and in front of a camera.  Without a lavaliere microphone, but instead, a stereo microphone on a boom.  The narration is surrounded with ambience, wild sound, and above all, atmosphere!  I must admit I did not notice this until the second episode, as Iraq was recorded mostly outside in the desert.  But by the time one is in Egypt, in old tombs, caves, and pyramids, there is an ambience that helps give texture to the overall sound. 

Music comes from two sources — wild sound recorded in the field, as well as some “music inspired by” the area of interest.  In either case, the soundtrack is always stereo.

To its detriment, there are a number of dropouts in the soundtrack.  These manifest generally as a momentary left or right dropout, and while they do not hurt the intelligibility of the narration, that the source-tapes seem to have decayed so much in such a short time-frame is disappointing.

The programs are captioned for, SDH.  The SDH-style captions tend to be “medium tempo music” and “camel burping,” but there is little else captioned apart from the narration.  Obtaining the captions is somewhat awkward and confusing: why did they make it so hard?  They are, however, available.

Extras
There are two sorts of “extras.”  On-disc are brief, still supplements talking about the lives of some of the great thinkers and philosophers to the concerned cultures: generally one per culture, and about two pages of on-screen text each.  The 18-page ‘viewer’s guide’ includes, for each program, a map, about a page of highlights text, and a few study-type questions.  Following that is a two-page bibliography ‘for further study,’ and then five or so pages of early inventions that still survive in today’s societies.  The last page and a half or so is devoted to a discussion on Zero: A brief history of nothing. 

In The End
Questions about what it means to be a member of the human race, or earthling society are some of the most difficult questions out there.  Not only what questions, but how are the questions asked?  Right or wrong, this set of documentary programs set out to ask a fairly specific set of questions.  Individually, the episode-long answers are not terribly satisfactory, but when one starts to integrate and compare the other episodes, and have a better context of how to interpret the answers, the series comes to life in a way that no single episode can hope for.  Within their understandably limited scope, I hope that the original producers felt that they succeeded in their project.  Myself, I have quite enjoyed watching these programs, and will recommend them to those interested in the greater history of Our People at large (more-so than those interested in, say, the history of the people of Iowa.)
From a technological standpoint, these programs are field-shot with the teleproduction equipment of the era, with all of the limitations, quirks, and challenges.  The DVDs present the programs, warts and all, in a far better form than probably most people could see during the original broadcasting.  And I hope that the other forthcoming releases of Athena/Acorn are of similarly interesting subjects.

Disclaimer and Disclosure
I was an intern for Maryland Public Television shortly after this program was produced and aired.  I have tried and hope that any lingering biases from a time in the process-darkrooms of MPT almost 20 years ago have not made it into this review.