Time Team is a television program that started in Britain in 1997 and still airs on Channel 4. Led by actor Tony Robinson, the Time Team drops in on archaeological sites all over the world. The program is enormously popular in the UK, and so, in 2009, an American Time Team program was started, produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting and appearing on PBS.
1. Time Team America
Photo Credit: Meg Gaillard
Premiering Wednesday, July 8, 2009, is Time Team America, a new PBS television series that is the first U.S. program dedicated to showing the nuts and bolts of archaeology in action.
2. Resources for the Time Team America Programs
Photo Credit: Meg Gaillard
A collection of websites, published reports and local resources for each of the archaeological sites visited by Time Team America. Here you'll find special websites and publications for Fort Raleigh and Roanoke Island; Topper Site; New Philadelphia; Range Creek; and Fort James
3. Eddie Izzard on the Time Team
MJ Kim / Getty Images
Stand up comedian visited Britain's Time Team, when they were excavating a Roman period site, and in this bit from Sexie, he describes the experience.
4. Time Team America: Fort Raleigh
Crystal Street
The first program, which aired July 8, 2009, features ongoing investigations at Fort Raleigh, North Carolina, the site of the first English colony in the American continents. The site is perhaps more famously known as the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island, and its legend about Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas, and the mysterious disappearance of the colony has inspired untold numbers of American children into learning about the past.
5. Time Team America: The Topper Site
On July 15, 2009, Time Team America visited the controversial Topper site, an extensive and important Clovis site (likely ca 12,500-12,900 bp, no dates yet from the Clovis occupation at Topper) with a controversial preclovis occupation (bracketed between ca 15,000-50,000 bp) in South Carolina.
6. Time Team America: New Philadelphia
Time Team America visited New Philadelphia, the archaeological ruins of a small town founded in 1830s Illinois by Free Frank McWorter. McWorter was an entrepreneur who bought himself and his family out of slavery in Kentucky and established this integrated town a short 15 miles east of the slave town of Hannibal, Missouri. Program aired July 22, 2009.
7. Time Team America: Range Creek
Credit: Dr. Julie Schablitsky
On July 29, 2009, Time Team America visits Range Creek, a 4,000-acre ranch in Utah with virtually pristine archaeological ruins of the Fremont Culture. The Fremont culture farmed in the basin and range between AD 600 and 1400, and TTA provides excavators with great results from magnetometer survey, laser scanning imagery and a bit of excavation.
8. Time Team America: Fort James
Fort James, near Mitchell, South Dakota, is the ruins of a military outpost, established in 1865, to protect European American settlers on the leading edge of settlement in the early years of the Plains Indian Wars (1862-1891).
