Time Team

- Season 7

(1999)

In the late 18th century, a young man opened his first factory in the village of Burslem, later part of Stoke-on-Trent. The man was Josiah Wedgwood. Time Team try and find if anything remained of these early ceramic manufacturing premises.

Papcastle, a small village outside Cockermouth in Cumbria, boasts a Roman fort. But when a local resident got in touch with Time Team about some substantial stonework he had dug out of his garden the moment had come to look beyond the fort.

The site of Thetford Grammar School in Norfolk may today be a place for exams and play, but in the 13th century, a large Dominican friary was here and before that, for a mere 24 years, a Norman cathedral.

Time Team was invited by the Marquess of Bath, owner of one side of the gorge, to investigate Cooper's Hole to see if they could find evidence of Palaeolithic human activity.

A village that had had its heyday in the Middle Ages. They looked in back gardens and public spaces, under stairs, in cellars and in attics for clues to the village's antiquity, but their biggest surprise came in the grounds of a nunnery.

Smallhythe is now a village amid fields. The nearest body of water being a Sewer and a drainage ditch. But in the 15th and 16th centuries, it was the site of a bustling shipbuilding industry right next to the mile-wide River Rother.

Down a bridleway within a dense Sussex wood, a Roman bath house stands, with walls head-high, completely forgotten for centuries.

In February 1944, two American 'Flying Fortresses' crashed into each other only a few miles from their home base, on their way back from a bombing raid over Germany. One of the aircraft tumbled into a marsh.

This year, for the first time revisiting an excavation, S5E4, the Team came back to the site to see if they could make sense of the spectacular geophysics results that they had not had time to investigate during the live dig.

Bredon Hill, one of the most important Iron Age hillforts in the country. Combine this geographical location with aerial photographs of extensive cropmarks that hinted at a Bronze Age settlement.

Time Team are joined by guests Sandi Toksvig and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall. They unearth fine Saxon jewelry, a stash of Norman pottery and a medieval murder victim near Kings Lynn.

The Time Team go to the West Indies and the island of Nevis. Their intention is to uncover the remains of a number of plantation houses that now are no more than ruins. The dig is important because the whole are is soon to be developed as a tourist complex with golf course.

On the second part of their West Indian trip focuses on finding the original settlement of Jamestown. Local legend suggests the town was destroyed in a tsunami, but the Time Team are not so convinced.