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Time Team
1994 · TV series · documentary · 50 min episodes · 25 seasons
Created by Tim Taylor
Time Team is a British television series which has been aired on British Channel 4 from 1994. Created by television producer Tim Taylor and presented by actor Tony Robinson, each episode featured a team of specialists carrying out an archaeological dig over a period of three days, with Robinson explaining the process in layman's terms. This team of specialists changed throughout the series' run, although has consistently included professional archaeologists such as Mick Aston, Carenza Lewis, Francis Pryor and Phil Harding. The sites excavated over the show's run have ranged in date from the Palaeolithic right through to the Second World War.
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24 comments on Hacker News
> The latest work has again been made possible by funding from Time Team, for a new programme they will be making next year.
This is funded by a TV show whose primary concern is ratings earned by how exciting is the entertainment value. I think that explains the low-content but very breathless press-release article now: they want to hype it up for the show to get viewers. This smells like show-biz hype rather than scientific excitement.
So does Time Team, and they're back making new episodes.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtpbubYLW2fdf9ySyCS0fcRRp5nJrfmCk
I used to love 'Scrap Heap Challenge' - brilliant Sunday TV (mixed with an episode of Time Team too!)
The downside of Esperanto is that very few people speak it and is harder to learn in some ways as there's far less media in the language – you got that 1960s William Shatner film that's entirely in Esperanto, and maybe 2 or 3 more, and ... that's it.
Meanwhile you can learn English from watching Star Trek, Time Team, SpongeBob, reading Harry Potter, The Hobbit, shitposting on Reddit, etc.
For better or worse, English already is the de-facto universal language, or the closest we have to it. We tried the Esperanto thing back in the 20s, and it didn't really work out as there was very little interest outside of a fairly sizeable but ultimately limited group of enthusiasts. I don't see how Esperanto or any other constructed language will take off in the foreseeable future.
Continued evolution of English pronunciation and spelling seems like a more realistic and better option – the language will change anyway, as all languages do, so might as well ensure it changes in a reasonable direction. Time spent advocating Esperanto is probably better spent on advocating more consistent English.
There's a line in an old Time Team episode about how Phil Harding [I think] had found one of the most exciting things an archaeologist could find: [Totally deadpan] "A ditch."
Indeed, the things that make good historical evidence are very frequently rather counter-intuitive.
Best episode of Time Team ever
They had radar and geomagnetic mapping back in the 1990s, at least - Time team did ~250 digs that were broadcast on channel 4 and are now all on youtube, most in HD now.
And "geophysics" were used to decide what and where to dig in most of them. They're making new episodes now, as well.
https://www.youtube.com/c/TimeTeamClassics
Anyone who has watched Time Team understands why this took place.
England is filthy with Roman ruins, among other sorts. But only when you have a noteworthy celebrity, a reality TV show, and everything that is involved in that, do you have an opportunity to even scrape the surface on many of these sites. The funding just isn't there.
The work is hard, complex, interdisciplinary, and mostly unsexy. But the findings are sometimes incredible.
Yep. Reminds me of when I was working for a remote sensing startup and we had conversations about being featured in an episode of a popular BBC magazine show. I could understand why they were interested: "space detectives" fighting environmental crime with satellites sounds very cool on a TV listing. It's just their concept of a TV proposal had us zooming in on live action they staged for us like a spy film, and the reality was a guy in a home office tweaking scripts to batch process low resolution static images from previous months followed by enforcement officers possibly taking some action months later (I figured out that beyond the pretty images we could theoretically visit an actual location with historic prosecutions and get just-for-TV drone footage as well as interviews for background context, but we never got close to the relevant stakeholder permissions)
And I say this having also watched Time Team so I know you can make good TV from an archaeological dig with the right experts and permissions and pretty good background knowledge of what was built there when!
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1463500314001164?via%3Dihub comments
> The resulting tsunami had run-up heights of around 10–20 m on the Norwegian coast, over 12 m in Shetland, 3–6 m on the Scottish mainland coast. ...
> We compare results from our multiscale model to previous results using constant-resolution models and show that accounting for changes in bathymetry since 8.15 ka, neglected in previous numerical studies of the Storegga slide-tsunami, improves the agreement between the model and inferred run-up heights in specific locations, especially in the Shetlands, where maximum run-up height increased from 8 m (modern bathymetry) to 13 m (palaeobathymetry).
The Time Team episode (mentioned elsewhere here) says the wave at Doggerland was up to 10 meters. https://youtu.be/XTvOcm5dgDI?t=1835 .
The most recent publication I found on the topic is https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2021.767460/full :
> The Storegga tsunami has previously been theorized as having brought about a swift and catastrophic end to Doggerland, the submerged palaeolandscape of the southern North Sea (Weninger et al., 2008). However, a more nuanced understanding is beginning to emerge in the wake of numerical modelling of the wave’s dispersal (Hill et al., 2014; Hill et al., 2017), and the discovery of the first confirmed evidence of the tsunami from a submarine context, “core ELF001A” from the “Southern River” submerged river valley, recovered by the Europe’s Lost Frontiers team (Gaffney et al., 2020). Clearly the Storegga tsunami hit some of the coastlines of the southern North Sea with considerable force, but the severity of this impact was probably variable (Walker et al., 2020).
It cites "run-up heights in excess of 25 m recorded in parts of Scotland and Norway".
Tangentially related, time team and hugely popular archaeology program that ran in the 90's-2000's in the UK has many of their episodes legally up on youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/c/TimeTeamClassics/videos
If you want an absolute banger of an episode to evaluate, try this one...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW3UQEDQ0zQ
There is a particularly fascinating episode of timeteam where it became apparent that the whole thing had been a con by the owner of the land. Instead of just canning the episode they decided to carry on, because the process of working out and proving that it was a con was a great demonstration of how all their techniques work to build up a picture of a site. In this case the picture they were building made no sense, which is when they realised someone was trying to trick them.
Time team was such a great programme. I struggle to think of a programme at the moment that put smart, knowledgeable people front and center like this.
As kinda mentioned in the Timesigns note in the article they're all available on All4(the new name for 4od). So UK folks, and people who ahem... have IPs that look like they are, can watch all the episodes for free.
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/time-team
Time team is brilliant.
To me its an ocean of calm. No conflict, a bit of tongue in cheek, just fun.
It also introduced me to 3d design. (I downloaded blender in 1999 or there abouts). long story short, I ended up in the VFX industry.
I have recently joined a local archaeology group, so I've come round full circle.
Time team have an active group on facebook, and are currently raising funds to re-start shooting.
They also hold a live Q&A after re-release on of an episode on youtube
Remarkable series. US folks can get most of episodes on Amazon Prime Video (the gaps can be filled by YouTube). And it might return, thanks to Patreon: https://www.heritagedaily.com/2020/12/the-return-of-time-team/136345.
The 3-day time limit makes the show seem like an archaeology equivalent of a hackathon. Glad to read in the posted article that only 5 of the excavated sites remain unpublished (due to much offscreen work and monies extending past the 3-day horizon)
I'm finding this whole comment thread a bit hard to read, because this is at least the third Stonehenge special Mike Pearson has done with the BBC at this point, not to mention plenty of appearances on Time Team.
You're pretty spot on - this is a well-known archaeologist with an established record as a television presenter. From what I remember of the previous Stonehenge specials, the filming process appeared to be: academic research team does the excavation for a few months, camera crew comes in when a "big moment" is expected, and also films a rollup where the researchers talk over exciting discoveries made in the past months while they're there. They've been digging near Stonehenge and on associated sites along the river for years and years.
Also, loved that show although I never really knew why.
In series four, there was an episode in the US¹ that I found quite jarring with the discussion of prehistory finds only a few hundred years old. Obviously, the term has a different meaning given the context, but it still sticks in my mind to this day.
¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Team_(series_4)
When I was a child I used to love watching Time Team, a British Channel 4 series where each episode the team would carry out a different archaeological dig.
Of course, normally they would be excavating a mediaeval or Roman site, but I remember seeing an episode where they were digging up a crashed WW2 B-17. That expanded my idea of what archaeology could be.
If you like this stuff, I recommend checking out the UK show 'Time Team'. Each episode they do an archaeological dig spanning three days, to see if they can piece together what was going on in a particular site. Many of their digs are on old Roman sites in England.
There's 17 seasons of it, most of which is on Amazon Prime (I think youtube has episodes as well). It's been my goto show lately for interesting entertainment during the pandemic.
I watched a lot of old Time Team episodes lately and this looks like more of the same from the era. Really nice, complex looking work but overall what can be expected for the time period. Cool that it's so well preserved though and hasn't suffered from having a plow or seismic event turn it into a puzzle.
I’m a big fan of the British TV show Time Team that is now on Amazon Prime streaming
In earlier seasons, they often recreate some of the artifacts of the age they are digging, and it’s fascinating to see some of that technology in action
During the run of the British archeology TV show "Time Team" they examined a couple of sites in Cornwall associated with tin. In each episode they discuss the far reaching international trade for tin from Cornwall during the bronze age including as far as to locations in Africa, so while adding to archaeological knowledge this find doesn't seem to be breaking new ground.
This was a Time Team Special in 2005 [Series 18, Episode 138], unfortunately named the "King of Bling". The location was given as Prittlewell, Essex [on the outskirts of Southend]. For non-Brits, Time Team has been a very long-running series on British TV, popularising field archeology to a very wide audience. It took a 'quick hit' approach following-up local suggestions to do a single week's digging with good resources. It reported the week's progress in a single, compact and well-structured broadcast. Much loved, it is now in hiatus, if not gone forever. Why it was not mentioned in connection with this 'discovery' is hard to say...
Time Team wasn't a BBC series, it was made by Channel 4 (one of the other main UK TV Channels)
It is however an exceptionally good show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLcxwPeeohk
One of my favourite episodes