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Playing favorites can get you into trouble, but Time Team America's archaeologists tossed caution to the wind to brief us on some of their pet places.
Dr. Meg Watters Let's see... was it the pig farm? No...... must have been either the Vilcabomba Inca burial survey in the Andes, where we flew up to our high-altitude camp in an old Russian helicopter, or looking for the Manilan shipwreck carrying Ming Dynasty porcelain on the Baha Peninsula, Mexico where we putt-putted out to our site, camped on the beach, and almost ran out of food.
Dr. Julie Schablitsky It has to be the Donner Party site in California. It was truly surreal to pick up broken bits of dishes and chopped bone from around their fire hearth, knowing the suffering they endured during the winter of 1846-47.
Dr. Adrien Hannus Certainly the Lange/Ferguson site. My special focus in North American archaeology is the early peopling of the New World. Lange/Ferguson is a Clovis site at which two ice age mammoths were killed and butchered about 12,000 years ago. The site not only yielded several Clovis points, but also provided the best evidence yet recovered in the New World for a bone tool industry associated with the Clovis culture. Flaked bone tools provided the hunters with sharp and easily discarded cutting tools, thus reducing the need for stone tools.
Eric Deetz Hands down Jamestown. I spent a fifth of my life there, I met my wife there, and had the best mentor you could ask for in Bill Kelso. The archaeology was mind blowing and the crew became like family. In some cases it was family.
Chelsea Rose I have to say my favorite site ever was the Time Team dig at the Fort James site in South Dakota. It was beautiful, the archaeology was interesting, and I was constantly surrounded by giggling hoards of Hutterite children. They let me practice my German, and I taught them archaeology -- it was a wonderful arrangement!
Have you been to a site that is forever burned into your memory (for better or worse)?
Share your stories below!
Got to be Prairie du Chien Wisconsin and the French fur trade sites their. Particularly, Fort Marin the 1750's era lost War of 1812 Fort.
That would be a great one for the Time Team to dig, come on up and I'll show you where it is/was...
RJH
Joya de Cerén, El Salvador - a Maya agricultural community rapidly abandoned when a previously unknown volcanic vent opened near the site and buried them in 6 meters of volcanic ash. As well as non-elite households and ceremonial buildings chock full of items left behind when people fled, we’ve excavated agricultural areas by using dental plaster to fill voids where plants once stood, then excavating the casts. This has allowed team members to identify and plot the exact locations of the botanical species planted. Payson Sheets (P.I.) is at the site right now excavating large beds of manioc. It’s not often that we get THAT kind of detail from 650CE!
Hands down it's been Galveztown, a small community and fortress built by the Spanish in the late 1700's on the very Eastern edge of their New World empire to watch Bayou Manchac (which terminates in Lake Ponchatrain and would've given people water access to the Gulf of Mexico without going through New Orleans) and to watch the French on the other side of the river.
Settled by British Loyalists who escaped raids on their land at Canewood during the American Revolution and by Canary Islanders or Islenos, who were recruited to come to North America with promises of land ownership and a better life, the township suffered through about 40 years of inhabitation, enduring multiple hurricanes, floods and several epidemics that decimated the population before the site was abandoned around 1820 and most of the survivors moved to what is now Spanishtown in Baton Rouge.
Currently, teams under the supervision of Dr. Rob Mann, Louisiana State Archaeologist for the region, have conducted shovel test pits at the site for 2 spring seasons (and dug one unit on top of what may have been a trash heap) and the plans are for several more seasons of pits and units to begin to determine the layout of the town.
The site is endangered in some ways, as a 2 lane highway runs through it (probably laid out close to or on the site of the original road leading to the township) and the area is now becoming "suburbanized". The 2 lane highway needs widening, due to the amount of traffic on it, and several buildings have been built on the land of the site and more may be expected in the coming years. The landowners where the settlement was thought to exist all, luckily, welcome the excavations (after the first landowner whose land is central to the site allowed excavations and the other landowners saw how little damage was done to front lawns).
Fascinating stuff for historical types, as the time span of Galveztown was only about 40 years, and the site was of such political importance in its day; and truly fascinating stuff for the people on the dig, as we're all volunteers who actually pay to participate (in the form of leisure learning classes sponsored by LSU).
I would really to join you in some of your expeditions. I am a 59 year old retired man that is search for something to do. Please resopnd. The segmont about the Freemont Indians was very interesting.