Bbc 2020

The Maya Biosphere Reserve is the largest rainforest north of the Amazon and was once the heart of the Maya civilisation. Amanda Ruggeri explores the new technology that is allowing archaeologists to explore the hundreds of structures still hidden beneath the jungle.

The ancient city of Baiae was the Las Vegas of the Roman Empire. Over the centuries, it slowly sunk beneath the sea. Amanda Ruggeri meets the archaeologists and engineers developing some surprising new technologies to protect the underwater site for future generations.

Spanish Armada captain Francisco de Cuéllar was shipwrecked off the Sligo coast in September 1588. He spent seven months in war-torn Ireland, trying to escape death and marriage before eventually making his way to Madrid via Edinburgh. He wrote an account of his amazing adventures in which he describes bloodthirsty battles, sieges won against all odds, attacks by pirates and the attentions of beautiful women. We follow his journey home to Spain.

Richard Clay explores how Mythologies, written in 1957 by French philosopher Roland Barthes, laid bare the myth-making at the heart of popular culture. Now, following in Barthes's footsteps, Richard Clay dissects some of the everyday myths we still take for granted in the 21st century, revealing the hidden meanings in everything from money, Wi-Fi and race to the Madonna.

Neil Oliver presents a drama-documentary series telling the tales of Scotland's most epic and bloody conflicts and the characters who made their mark in this memorable era of the country’s history.

In 1970, an 18-year-old schoolgirl left the Bogside in Derry to represent Ireland in the 15th Eurovision Song Contest. What happened that night was to change her life forever.

Follows the four-year debate over how Henry Dundas should be remembered on the inscription of the Melville Monument in Edinburgh. Sir Geoff Palmer and his supporters have argued for years that Henry Dundas deliberately delayed the abolition of the slave trade when he won support for abolition to be ‘gradual', whereas Henry Dundas’s ancestor Bobby Melville and others argue that Dundas was an abolitionist who was being pragmatic.

Anthropologist Professor Alice Roberts and historian Dr Yasmin Khan explore the tale of two of Britain’s greatest cities - how one became the capital of a global empire and the other the workshop of the world - through the giant excavations being undertaken at either end of the first stage of the HS2 rail project.

Rachel Nguyen tells the story of the Vietnamese Boat People who came to Britain in the 70s and 80s. British-born Rachel, whose parents fled post-war Vietnam, discovers how a new community came to exist in Britain when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher eventually agreed to take in 10,000 Vietnamese refugees.

The former MP heads to Europe to discover how the divisions exposed by Brexit are reflected across the EU, exploring the role that national identity and pride have had to play in fuelling the rise of right-wing populism across the continent.