This is a slow news day so I thought I'd throw this in by way of adding a little colour to the day's proceedings. It may be lost on those of you who don't live in the UK or the US, for which my apologies, although Heather Pringle does describe the series and what it attempts to acheive.
Let me get my confession out of the way first. I don’t spend much time in front of the television set and, until just a few days ago, I had never laid eyes on the immensely popular British show, Time Team. Last week, however, I learned that this archaeological series is about to jump over the Atlantic: Time Team America will be premiering on PBS in July. To introduce the new series, the Time Team people were out in force at the Society of American Archaeology meeting in Atlanta last week, so I decided to hunt down an episode on YouTube and see what the hoopla is all about.
For those who have missed it, Time Team is a kind of reality television show about archaeology. Each week, the producers send a team of professional archaeologists on a dig somewhere in the U.K. , and they ratchet up the tension and drama for viewers by giving the excavators a huge deadline –three days to complete the entire dig. In the episode I watched, team members conducted extensive geophysical surveying, got out the earth-moving equipment, dug numerous trenches, excavated a big chunk of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery, removed ten bodies, and analyzed some of the grave goods—all in 72 hours flat. I felt exhausted just watching them.
See the above page for the full story.
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