Time Team: the end of an era?
As Time Team ends its run, Jim Mower – an archaeologist and producer for ten years on the programme – reflects on two decades of television archaeology and asks: what’s next? Time Team is the longest running history/archaeology strand in television history. Although often criticised over its lifetime, this is, by any reckoning, a remarkable [...]
Time Team final episode – review
So that’s it! Last night saw the screening of the final episode of Time Team, notwithstanding a few ‘specials’ next year and a new project called ‘Dig Village’ currently in development. Sunday tea-times will never be the same again. Rather than one of the three-day digs for which the Team has become famous, this was a compilation [...]
Mick Aston’s latest dig
Mick Aston is best known as the leader of the Time Team, running around telling other people what to do and where to dig. But Mick is someone who practises what he preaches and for many years now he has been investigating his home village at Winscombe, near Western-Super-Mare in Somerset. Here he practises ‘total [...]
Reconstructing Richard III: the man behind the myth
Stop all the spades, fill all the trenches in…
While browsing the web for fun archaeological things to share with our readers (it is Friday, after all!) we stumbled on this fantastic ‘Eulogy for Time Team’, based on W H Auden’s Stop All The Clocks. It was originally printed in the Australian edition of the Big Issue, and by the power of the internet (thanks everyone [...]
Is this the skull of Richard III?
Is this the skull of Richard III? Today (4 February) the University of Leicester, with Channel 4, unveiled the world’s first photograph of the human remains found beneath a car park in Leicester city centre, interred in what was once the Grey Friars church. Later this morning archaeologists will announce the results of months of exhaustive [...]
CA 274
Covering the end of Time Team feels like writing an obituary. The programme has been there for much of my personal journey through archaeology. I first stumbled across it in 1996 as a channel-hopping schoolboy hoping to delay my homework a little longer. Stunned by the team’s discoveries at Stanton Harcourt, watching the episode was [...]
MOLA’s Movember masterpiece
This edible portrait of Mortimer Wheeler was baked by Richard Ward, an archaeologist working on one of the Walbrook sites currently under excavation by MOLA, and sent in by his colleague Sadie Watson. MOLA have been raising money for charity by baking cakes, and as this month’s cause was (of course) Movember, they chose to depict the moustachioed former keeper [...]
Digging Selborne Priory
What to do when you retire A lot of my friends seem to be retiring at present and for the same reason: that they all got their jobs in and around the magic years of 1972 and 1973. In my last blog I went to Mick Jones’ retirement party at Lincoln, and then at [...]
Exclusive interview – Mick Aston: an archaeological journey
Real-life Archaeologists rarely become household names. Mick Aston is an exception. A defining voice in the development of Time Team and stalwart of the show since its first season in 1994, Mick’s resignation earlier this year ignited a media firestorm. He was in the news again in July after receiving a lifetime achievement award at [...]
Phosphate-analysis pudding
This cake was made for Dr Johanna Ullrich, a phosphate-analysis specialist, to mark her departure from the University College Dublin School of Archaeology last October. On top of the cake there is an Ogham stone, a grey box marked ‘phosphate analysis’, and the blue book is Renfrew and Bahn’s Archaeology: theories, methods and practice. Sent in by Niamh Kelly, featured in [...]
Jaffa Cake Henge
This model of Stonehenge is one of eight other Jaffa Cake creations Dominic Wilcox made to represent Britain, from Tower Bridge to the Loch Ness monster. The building blocks were made by excavating about five different Jaffa Cakes then carefully balancing them in a circle. He created the strangely realistic reflection on the plate by shining a light through the orange cellophane packet. Sent in by [...]
Time Team: secrets of the Saxon gold
The discovery of the Staffordshire hoard (see CA 236) in July 2009 was one of the most exciting archaeological finds of the last decade. Since then, a dizzying array of interdisciplinary research has taken place to see what this extraordinary collection of artefacts can add to our understanding of Anglo-Saxon England. In this Time Team special, Tony Robinson guided us through what has been found out so far
Bryn celli ddu
This cake was made in the style of Bryn celli ddu, a Bronze Age mound and passage grave built over a Neolithic henge and stone circle on Anglesey, for the leaving do of Tanya Berks (Gwynedd Archaeological Trust illustrator and surveyor). Sent in by Matthew Jones, featured in issue 266 of Current Archaeology.
Archaeological bake-off
Museum of London Archaeology recently held an archaeological bake-off, raising £86.50 for Refuge: Women and Children against Domestic Violence. Entries included a festive site snow scene (with stratigraphy in section and in plan), a coin hoard buried deep within a cherry bourbon chocolate cake, a timber-framed building with impressive transverse sectional elevation, chunks of Roman road, and the winner: a trench, complete with tools, treasure, [...]
Digging with the Time Team
What is archaeology alongside a film crew like? Matthew Symonds found out. There is something different about a Time Team dig. Excavations normally have an air of calm, with people quietly troweling, sectioning features or wrestling with drawing frames. The hustle and bustle comes at tea time, when diggers compete for the best biscuits and [...]
Reconstructing the Hallaton Helmet
A Roman imperial jigsaw puzzle The discovery of fragmentary remains of several Roman helmets at Hallaton, Leicestershire, set conservators quite a challenge. Now, over a decade later their work is complete. Helen Sharp and Simon James reveal what has been learnt. It is 11 years since a mass of corroded iron was found in a [...]
The Hackney Hoard
One summer’s day in 2007 several companions set about an ambitious piece of landscaping in the back garden of their residence in Hackney, Greater London. As their shovels pierced the turf they were likely to have been thinking of the heavy work before them when a chance discovery brought them to a halt; for from [...]
