Time Team - Medievalists.net

Time Team is a British television series that has been airing since 1994. Presented by Tony Robinson, a team of specialists carry out an archaeological dig in three days, with Robinson explaining the process. The show “marks a new approach to archaeology on British television and sets out to capture both the excitement and immediacy of the process of discovery – archaeology as it happens.”

Over two hundred episodes of Time Team have already been aired. Sites are suggested by landowners, local archaeologists, scholars or members of the public, and have included everything from the Paleolithic period to World War II. For example programmes have featured the excavation of Bronze Age and Iron Age settlements, Roman villas and medieval churches. Several excavations have resulted in the discovery of sites of national significance, and dozens of academic papers have been written by the members of the show about their discoveries.

Jerome de Groot, writing in his book Consuming History, says Time Team, “presents archaeological investigation as a time-specific adventure, a voyage into the unknown and the harvesting of the hitherto unremarkable sites historical relevance. In some ways the locale becomes the subject of genealogical investigation, a digging into the past in order to understand the journey from that past to the present.”