A Lesson in how to interest people in HISTORY - TIME TEAM

Okay, I will admit it, I am an anglophile. Several years ago I discovered I am 50% British dna, so that may explain my affection for British Mystery Books, and British Archaeology. Also, I LOVE British tv shows. Currently I am watching TIME TEAM, which has been hugely successful in Britian and is now on amazon prime. The measure of the success is in the number of seasons - 20! The only show I watch that has beat that many seasons is a mystery, Midsummer Murders.

Strangely enough the Time Team don't ever seem to find very much but what they find, they can deduct whole worlds of information from. They dig trenches and come up with bits of pottery no bigger than a couple of inches and they can tell when and where the pottery was made. They dig up bits of metal, or even slag, and they can tell what ore, and what period, and even why it was there. The Time Team responds to letters from members of the British public who have parts of stone walls in their gardens, or who have heard myths about their pastures housing Roman forts, or they have nearby churches or chapels with mysterious gravestones, or they have, themselves found mysterious items when plowing or fishing, or metal dectecting.

The Time Team, presented by the ever spry and game Tony Robinson is composed of an archivist, an artist (my favorite - this artist can do the most descriptive and evocative renderings from the bits of information given by the time time, so that you can see the Anglo Saxon village or the Roman villa as it would have looked. I am an artist too, so I am wonder struck by this talent.

The Time Team has a geophysics expert who scans the fields looking for places to dig, an archivist, who finds all the pertinent historic records, blueprints, historic accounts, letters and so on to help the story emerge. There is a osteoarchaeologist, a bone expert, who has branched out with her own program called DIGGING BRITAIN and I have watched it as well. And there are diggers, like Phil, and other archaeology experts in various fields of expertise. In many episodes, Phil or one of the others, will engage in an activity relating to the dig such as smelting or brewing, or even stone blade knapping.

Inevitably, kids and other townsfolk will gather to watch the goings on, often joining in and helping. Sometimes there is a party afterwards and all the community join the fest. Even though they have rarely, as long as I have been watching, come up with more than bits and pieces and a terrific story, people are captivated, even people like me who don't live in a land with two thousand years of history in the garden. It is inspirational and I always end up wishing I had gone into archaeology!

You may have noticed that I have learned enough html to create paragraphs now that blogspot has quit opensource and given us this new format where apparently a lot of the programming must be learned and done by us. Fortunately, many many years ago in the early days of free websites, I had learned a little html by creating sites with angelfire and geocities - remember them? Happy Trails! (underground, overground, or on the tv screen)

Jo Ann

ps. I will learn more so I can enlarge the text and add images, I promise! If you want to contact me, use my email, thanks, the comments feature is robo-hacked and is awful sorry I don't know how to make my e-mail address a link yet, but I will learn - I bought a book.

wrightj45@yahoo.com