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Good news for all Time Team fans:
New Time Team Episodes Coming Soon!
The wait is nearly over… We’re delighted to reveal the release dates for Time Team’s first brand new episodes in a decade! Further details coming soon.
Each of the two digs will premiere on the Time Team Official YouTube channel in an extended three-part weekend extravaganza. Get ready and subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/c/TimeTeamOfficial
The two digs being shown were both carried out during the pandemic.
The first from Cornwall features the work of the Meneague Archaeology Group at Boden on the Lizard Peninsula, overseen by James Gossip of the Cornwall Archaeology Unit, where the site includes an Iron Age settlement and associated fogou.
The second dig investigates the site of what could be a huge, high-status Roman villa at Broughton in Oxfordshire.
Further details of both these digs can be found on the Time Team Digital website.
Welcome back!!
I recently watched a shockingly atrocious, but never-the-less entertaining, American pseudo-archaeology program called What On Earth. The description for the latest series reads as follows:
“Thousands of advanced satellites and drones orbit Earth, invisible to us yet scanning every inch of our planet. They capture our world in unprecedented detail, revealing areas that until now have remained a mystery. In an all new season of WHAT ON EARTH, experts look to this state-of-the-art imaging technology to discover bizarre phenomena and strange mysteries including an inaccessible cave of bones on an island off the coast of Africa, a bizarre concrete structure sitting off the coast of the Baltic sea, and a crater in Mexico with extra-terrestrial connections.”
One of the subjects of this particular episode (S09E01) was the – strangely never named in the program – Chun Castle, an Iron Age hill fort in Penwith, Cornwall.
Built during the Iron Age, in the third century BC, it is over 2000 years later than the nearby neolithic quoit. Although it is in a ruined state, its size is still impressive. The fort is 85m in diameter, and consists of a central area, surrounded by two concentric granite walls with external ditches. The outer ditch was 6.1m wide, and the outer wall is now 2.1m high, but may originally have been 3.0m high. The inner wall (now mostly destroyed) was some 4.6m to 6.7m thick, and could originally have been some 6.1m high. There were originally some Iron Age huts in the inner area, though no trace of these now remain.

Claims made in the program included the fact that it was built in ancient times to protect the cliff-top tin mines and engine houses (built in the 18th century!) nearby, on behalf of, yes, you guessed it – King Arthur!! An American archaeologist ‘investigated’ the site, and stumbled across what “the Germans (what do they have to do with Cornwall?) call a Hunebed – a burial tomb”. Why not call it a quoit, the local name for such dolmens? More nonsense was spouted about pagan ceremonies for the dead taking part at the quoit, with ceremonies for the living possibly being held in the nearby henge (the castle site). The late local historian Craig Weatherhill who dearly loved this site must be spinning in his grave at this piffle!
Whilst this is all patently nonsense, and Professor Mark Horton should be ashamed of being associated with the program, I must admit to wondering if there could indeed be any credence in the idea of Chun Castle being built on an earlier henge site. I know that a few years ago Sir Barry Cunliffe was involved in negotiations to investigate the monument with an archaeological excavation. Sadly, funding could not be obtained for the dig at that time and so we must wait until a future time for such questions to be definitively answered.
Time Time is currently recording their 20th series. There is no doubt that the program has been a phenomenal success. And yet it has its detractors, many saying that “proper archaeology can’t be done in 3 days”. But it remains a simple fact that Time Team has probably published more (significant) dig results in the last few years than any other archaeological unit in the country. That’s one tangible benefit, but not the end of the story…
As many of our readers will know, Mick Aston has left the show. Mick was the Lead Archaeologist on the digs, the Project Leader. In the latest series Mick has been ‘replaced’ by Francis Pryor, another Time Team regular. Francis has decided to blog about his experiences on the show, and his blog makes for very interesting reading, giving an insight into the show and the archaeological philosophies behind it. A recent post, for instance, pointed out that publication of the dig results in many cases is just the beginning:
The programme we’ve just finished was centred on an Iron Age hillfort. Very little was known about it. It was also very large and elaborate, but somehow had never been investigated, not even by those nosey local vicars of Victorian times. So the first thing we did was call in our friends from geofizz. It struck me, as I watched John Gator’s team stride up and down their carefully surveyed gridlines, come rain or shine, that in actual fact Time Team is a geophysics show. Because by far and away our biggest legacy to the group of keen local volunteers, who’d invited us over to work on their prize local site, wasn’t the few trenches we were able to open in our three days with them. No, our biggest gift to them was the detailed map of thousands of features still lying buried beneath the soil. That map was worth more than its weight in gold to the group who’d called us in. It would fuel research for decades to come. That research would also help to bind the local community together during the years of economic down-turn that are now staring us all in the face.
Those last two sentences really are pure gold. The potential for a future, ongoing research project, ‘binding’ the local community, arguably at a time when it’s most needed.
Now that’s a real tangible benefit!
Links:
- Francis Pryor’s blog
- Time Team Channel 4
- Time Team Digital
- Post-excavation Reports (Wessex Archaeology)
La Cotte, Jersey. Image credit Man vyi, courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Screened on Friday, 30 September 2011 on BBC2 from 9:00pm to 10:00pm. See also Neanderthal survival story revealed in Jersey caves by Becky Evans.
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