Time Team – Digging stories from the dirt

It is almost magic to watch a person pick up a small piece of pottery from the dirt of a shallow trench, hand it to a second person who identifies it as from a cooking pot and immediately gives an insight into the people whole lived in that field 2000 or more years ago. And as that explanation is being delivered a computer simulation builds onto the shard until a slowly revolving graphic of a pot fills the screen.  You are watching TIme Team, a delightful long-running television show from Britain.

Journalists write about digging for a story. These folks do it literally. Perhaps only the Brits could create a TV hit where archeology is the central theme. Perhaps it’s living in Britain where he earth literally yields layer, upon layer, upon layer of history, from recent times to victorian, tudor, medieval, anglo-saxon, viking, roman, iron age, bronze age, whatever came before that and everything in between. An intense cultural history lies just below the surface.

Can there be true TV story value and drama in a profession that usually spends weeks on their knees in the dirt with a trowel, then months sifting through the results? You betcha. This is television and the Time Team producers know how to tell a story and capture their public. They’ve been perfecting their style since 1994.

For starters each dig only lasts three days. That’s right. Dig up a Roman temple complex or an Anglo-Saxon village in three days flat. It’s archaeology on steroids (comparatively speaking). Sites are researched in advance but not by the actual Time Team archeologists. They arrive the afternoon before and direct to their hotel.

Every program opens with presenter/host Tony Robinson striding right up to the camera, announces its Day One and quickly introducing the site, and what they hope to find – the story challenge for that episode. Visuals over the introduction often include moving over the site in a helicopter then hots of historic maps and old drawings and photos, then cuts to the Team crowded over the hood of one of their Land Rovers discussing a spread of topographical maps, aerial photos and whatever at hand.

Meanwhile the geophysical crew are already walking the site mapping magnetic anomalies that might help suggest where the first trenches should be dug. Then it’s time to get down to classic archaeology. A small digger removes the topsoil for the first couple of trenchs and team members step in shovels, pails and trowel at hand. Meanwhile an incidence room is set up in a nearby building where the history experts pouring over records looking for that greater context that the site might have in regional and national history.

The Team is staffed with a dozen professional archeologists led by Mick Aston, senior archeologist and a cofounder of the show and now retired from teaching university at Birmingham, Oxford and Bristol. Phil Harding, another show original, is senior field archeologist, the show veteran with a trowel and an encyclopedic knowledge. He attacks the site with vigour on his hands and knees troweling out the bits and pieces that prove significant. He is joined by regulars Faye Simpson, Matt Williams, and Raksha Dave. Most have been with the show for over five years. Weekly fans soon identify to the real life personas of the team members. There non-fiction TV stars.

Because the program tackles a wide variety of sites of all time eras, a wide range of professional guests appear to complement the dozen archeologists of the core team. Local historians, pottery and artifact specialists for different periods identify, discuss, debate and disagree as the three days unfold. Aston remarked, in an interview with Current Archeology, that the caterers make plans for 60 at lunch everyday including locals who volunteer to help dig.

 It’s the stories

What makes Time Team interesting are the stories and the storytelling. Computer graphics are a key visual tool. Reconstructions of buildings, everyday items, occasionally jewelry and ceremonial artifacts, are carefully inserted into the program’s flow with trench-side explanations by both regulars and guest experts. We experience the re-creation of a world long since gone — a sort of modern day version of the wonderful National Geographic tableaus of my childhood. A Roman floor mosaic fragment expands to fill a room. A row of stone in a trench rises to become a wall and sometimes a full representation of a building of that era. What I like is that we, the viewers, get the sum of all the knowledge of the period through the site finds, graphics and trench side remarks of the archeologists and experts.

While there is no doubt the show is scripted with most graphics added later to bring those historical moments to us, there is much wonderful off-the-cuff-at-the-edge of the trench commentary. A regular viewer comes to know the personalities of the Team.

Coupled with the stories of antiquity, is the fun of watching the site’s story unfold. This show is about digging a hole then trying to decide what to do next. The results of day one informs day two and both inform day three. And those days can be very different from the plan presented around the Land Rover early that first morning. In a recently aired program,(in Canada, Friar’s Wash, series 16, episode 6) the hope was to find a small Roman temple based on a shape seen in an aerial photo from the 1970’s. The result, by day three was the most important Roman temple find in modern Britain with no less than four temples (one very rare) and an associated Roman period temple souvenir kiosk. (Souvenirs in antiquity, who knew). Other programs have ended with little value unearthed – a sort of “a nice try but no prize.” Richardson as host is ever optimistic, making the best of the dig in his end of show summation, regardless of the finds.

The show is available around the world. In many places past episodes can be streamed. Note that program streaming maybe restricted to the station’s home market.

Home website at Channel 4, UK

In Ontario, Canada it is on TV Ontario on Monday’s at 7 p.m.

Website for Australia and New Zealand

I did not find a current listing for Time Team in the US. The US started their own program some years ago on PBS.

Update: In an article at Current Archeology , Mick Aston reveals the Time Team formula.