Time Team Archaeology

Unearthing the Roman Invasion is a delightful compilation of 12 episodes of the original British version of Time Team, spanning the length of it's two decade run, and the four hundred years of Romano-British archaeology. While Americans might be surprised by some of the cavalier treatment of "post medieval" cultural materials (since historical in archaeology in the Americas is ALL post-medieval, I found the nearly 600 minutes of this boxed set immensely entertaining and educational.

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. A second season is scheduled for 2013.

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

Stand up comedian and actor Eddie Izzard visited Britain's Time Team, when they were excavating a Roman period site, and they put him to work in what proved to be a virtually empty excavation unit. In this bit from his drag queen routine Sexie, Izzard pithily described the experience.

The first program in the Time Team America's first season, which aired July 8, 2009, featured 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.

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.

In 2009, Time Team America also visited New Philadelphia, the archaeological ruins of a small town founded in 1830s Illinois by Free Frank McWorter. McWorter was an entrepreneur who pbought 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.

On July 29, 2009, Time Team America visited Range Creek, a 4,000-acre ranch in Utah that has preserved virtually pristine archaeological ruins assigned to the early agricultural Fremont Culture, located in the high sagebrush and pinyon region of the western Colorado Plateau and the eastern Great Basin of the southwestern United States, The Fremont culture farmed the basin and range between AD 600 and 1400, and in this program Time Team America provides excavators with great results from magnetometer survey, laser scanning imagery and a bit of excavation.

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). This program aired on PBS in August of 2009.