Digging the Dirt with Time Team by Tim Taylor
ISBN 0 7522 6161 4

Channel 4 books 2001


In this book, we look behind the scenes as the Time Team go in search of archaeological clues at six completely new sites.
First stop is the River Thames at Vauxhall. Recently, huge rows of timber posts have been found on the muddy foreshore. Are they the remains of a platform from which our Bronze Age ancestors threw gifts to the River Gods, or could this be London’s first bridge? Time Team’s next dig is at Chicksands, which, in the thirteenth century, was home to a revolutionary monastic experiment: a priory for men and women. Now the nun’s cloister is missing and skeletons have turned up under the lawn.
Travelling north to Shropshire, a stone’s throw from Ironbridge, the birthplace of Britain’s Industrial revolution, they visit the Kynnersley Arms pub, built on top of the remains of a blast furnace for smelting iron. Time Team know that this isn’t just any blast furnace….Nearby High Ercall Hall was the site of three sieges during the English Civil War. Time Team will unravel what life was like for those inside the Hall 350 years ago.
In the 1960’s, local enthusiasts dug up Roman bricks, tiles and pottery in Cheshunt Park, just metres from the route of the Roman road Ermine Street in Hertfordshire. Will Time Team discover an entirely new roman settlement? And finally the team visit an organic farm in Cornwall, which shows all the signs of having once been a thriving Iron Age Hill Fort.
Illustrated throughout with Chris Bennett’s stunning photography, Digging the Dirt with Time Team gives you the complete inside story-the trials and the tribulations- of each of these digs.