Time Team: The Team's Favorite Digs

A secluded Welsh valley is home to an archaeological conundrum - a site rich in Roman and medieval artifacts centered on what appears to be a Neolithic tomb, an ancient holy spring, and a possible Norman tower. The discovery of an Iron Age sword on top of a length of modern barbed wire adds to the mystery of the site and the skepticism of the team.

This island off the rugged Pembrokeshire coast poses real challenges to the Time Team. To get there, members have to strap on a harness and cross on a zip line. Once onsite, the difficulties continue: Was the settlement Celtic, Roman, or Viking? What were its links to a nearby prehistoric fort on the mainland? And will the Time Team finish before the rain returns?

Tony and his colleagues bring their expertise to bear on a modern dig. Traveling to a site in northern France, they locate the spot where an RAF Spitfire crashed after being shot down by a German fighter plane early in World War II and whose remains have been buried there ever since.

Based on a pattern of lines seen from the air and corroboration from the ground, Time Team goes to work in a Gloucestershire field, suspecting it has located one of the largest Roman villas yet to be uncovered in Britain. What they find is a window into the past, when the province of Britannia was at its most prosperous and when its glory was beginning to fade.

Eighteen months after discovering the Roman villa here, Time Team takes three more days to excavate the Turkdean site. With every new trench they dig, they find a whole range of other buildings. Could their original villa have been even bigger than suspected? Or might there have been two villas in this same location - and if so, why?

Intrigued by a brass Byzantine bucket found here, Time Team comes to this Saxon gravesite in Hampshire looking for answers. What they find raises even more questions: older Bronze Age artifacts, double-burial sites with other buckets as well as shields and spears, and a grave with a baby placed between the feet of two adults.

The medieval village of High Worsall lies buried under Yorkshire with only its churchyard and a clutch of tombstones still visible. Time Team sets out to discover not only the location of its main buildings and manor house, but also who lived here, why they left, and how the settlement simply disappeared off the map.

Time Team travels to the tiny island of Nevis, determined to investigate the remains of Mountravers, one of the great sugar plantations of the Caribbean. With much of the site now under dense jungle, especially the quarters of the slaves who once lived here, the archaeologists find trowels less useful than machetes on this "dig."

While continuing the search for the slave quarters on the Mountravers plantation, Time Team now sets out to discover traces of the original Amerindian inhabitants who lived on Nevis a thousand years before the British arrived. They also try to solve the puzzle of Jamestown, the colonial capital that locals say vanished into the sea.

As the second largest settlement in Roman Britain after Londinium, Cirencester is not short on ancient artifacts. But in the modern Gloucestershire town, Tony and his colleagues believe they have a chance of discovering a lost Roman road, an early Christian church, and--in what would be a Time Team first - a Roman mosaic floor.

The very first episode of Time Team finds the gang in Athelney, Somerset, investigating a tip from a local farmer. The team sets out to discover if these hills could hold evidence from the reign of Alfred the Great. Will the fens and orchards of Athelney [Wedmore] reveal Alfred's hiding place during his defeat of the Danes?