Time Team - Season 10 - Eps 8: Back to Our Roots - Athelney, Somerset

Name: Eps 8: Back to Our Roots - Athelney, Somerset
Released: 2003-02-23
Rating: 3.6

2003-02-23 • 50 min • ⭐ 7.1/10

Time Team revisits Athelney Abbey, the hideaway of Alfred the Great, and also the very first site investigated by the team one hundred programs earlier. Ten years of technological advances in the meantime has significantly enhanced their geophysical survey methods and changes in heritage management attitudes have also given them the permission to dig at the site. Slag and magnetic readings suggest that iron and steel was smelted and worked at Athelney, the latter being a good indication of Anglo-Saxon presence. At the abbey site itself Phil and his diggers uncover several burials. Reenactors show Anglo-Saxon dress and weaponry and their Viking counterparts as the experimental part of the program, while Carenza and Tony make – and burn – traditional Saxon cakes. The archaeologists find a number of objects, a Medieval graveyard associated with Athelney abbey, a metalworking complex, and a substantial defensive ditch dug in the Iron Age, but reused in the time of king Alfred.

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About Time Team

Title: Time Team

First Air Date: 1994-01-16

Last Air Date: 2024-04-07

Status: Returning Series

Rating: 7.1/10 (from 14 votes)

Language: EN

Seasons: 22

Total Episodes: 239

Network: More4 Channel 4 YouTube

Genres: Documentary, Mystery

Production Companies: Unknown

Synopsis

Time Team is a British television series which has been aired on British Channel 4 from 1994. Created by television producer Tim Taylor and presented by actor Tony Robinson, each episode featured a team of specialists carrying out an archaeological dig over a period of three days, with Robinson explaining the process in layman's terms. This team of specialists changed throughout the series' run, although has consistently included professional archaeologists such as Mick Aston, Carenza Lewis, Francis Pryor and Phil Harding. The sites excavated over the show's run have ranged in date from the Palaeolithic right through to the Second World War.