Warwick Bray (1981: 228) argued more than two decades ago that the stereotypical archaeologists in popular culture have remained unchanged since 1939 when ”the clock stopped.” Whether or not this was correct then, it is certainly no longer correct now (cf. Ascherson 2004).

The TV documentary series Time Team, which Tim Taylor has been producing for Channel 4 since 1993, arguably revolutionised the portrayal of archaeology in the British media. More than one hundred episodes have been filmed of this ordinarily 50 min long programme. According to data supplied by Channel 4, episodes broadcast in spring 2003 still attracted regularly around 3.4 million viewers and a very impressive 15-20% total market share (on average, 51% of the viewers were male and 56% were between 16 and 54 years old). These are astonishing figures, especially if you take into account that Channel 4’s Big Brother series, now promising real sex on camera (broadcast after 10pm), attracted in May 2004 a very similar figure of 3.3 million viewers, or a 15% audience share!

The normal Time Team format is a one-hour programme documenting a 3-day, archaeological excavation at a chosen site in the U.K., but there have also been episodes filmed abroad and Time Team Specials with life reporting over the course of several days or showing what goes on ”behind the scenes”. The special characteristic of the Time Team format is that, on each site, a fairly down-to-earth, local historical question is being investigated by excavating in front of the cameras. The regular team featured in the series consists of presenter Tony Robinson (formerly seen as Baldrick in the comedy series Blackadder) and the professional archaeologists Mick Aston, Carenza Lewis, and Phil Harding who have all become minor celebrities. In addition, there is a large team of support staff and a pool of experts that are consulted when evidence in their area of expertise comes to light. Besides excavations, the programmes also involve experiments and demonstrations with recreated techniques and reconstructed artifacts.

The British state archaeological service English Heritage has understood that this show provides a wonderful opportunity to improve its image, and therefore made a point of involving some of its staff as regulars into the programme. In an internal newsletter English Heritage’s Chief Archaeologist, David Miles, expressed the hope that they come across as ”helpful and keen but representing standards and common-sense.”

The enormous popularity of the series has a lot to do with two factors in particular. Firstly, Time Team thrives of the notion of archaeologists discovering a series of material clues gradually solving a hidden mystery, usually with the help of science. Secondly, Time Team’s appeal also relies on some very special personalities involved, particularly Tony Robinson who gets so reliably excited whenever new discoveries are made, and has a very down-to-earth attitude, mediating between the viewers and the archaeological experts. On the extensive Time Team homepages hosted by Channel 4, Sally Beck explained likewise that ”part of the success is down to presenter Tony Robinson, whose enthusiastic on-air explanations have been so successful in demystifying the process that the science of digging up the past has reached cult proportions.” The archaeologists are colourful personalities and interesting to watch, too.

Figure 3.3

Although Ian Jacob, then head of the BBC, is reported to have stated in the late 1950s that the two most popular things on television are archaeology and show-jumping (Daniel 1964: 150), it is probably fair to say that during the 1990s Time Team has brought archaeology to the people in a way that had previously been unthinkable. On the programme’s already mentioned webpages you can order not only the site reports and books associated with the series but also subscribe to the quarterly Time Team magazine Trench One. Through Time Team, archaeology has become a part of British everyday culture, says Peter Addyman whom I met in York (see chapter 2). In the past, local farmers may not have been all that interested in archaeology on their land and on-lookers of an exacation project may have asked questions like: ”Have you found any gold yet?”. Since the success of Time Team, Addyman explained, archaeologists are welcomed with the question ”Will you do a geophys?” (That method has no doubt become a buzzword, most often pronounced ”geofizz” as in the hillarious, home-produced spoof Grime Team I + II and in Marcus Brigstocke’s parody series We are History).

I came across several archaeological sites in the UK advertising with the slogan ”as seen on Time Team”, so that the relations between archaeology and television appear to have come full circle: archaeology makes for attractive TV, and TV now also makes for attractive archaeology. Likewise, besides its other achievements, Time Team has without doubt attracted many students to archaeology (Hills 2003: 209). By the same token, at Cambridge University the fame of the series also guarantees attractive academic teaching: Corpus Christi College mentions on its webpages among its teaching staff for Archaeology,"Carenza Lewis of Channel 4’s ‘Time Team’."

Several decades ago, both Mortimer Wheeler (1890-1976) and Glyn Daniel (1914-1986) had also been popular archaeologists in their programme Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? and were even chosen as TV Personalities of the Year for 1954 and 1955 respectively. But their appeal was that of the intellectual and lovable professor who told stories about strange artifacts from long dead civilisations, not that of the digging archaeologist in the field around the corner (Jordan 1981; Russell 2002b: 43). Time Team, on the other hand, celebrates the dirt and the mud as well as the gradual process of learning about local history by investigating material clues. Compared with the stereotypical mummy with golden teeth on a Caribbean wreck, as proposed by Norman (see above), Time Team and other current British TV programmes tend to focus on an altogether different kind of archaeology: they present British sites, preferably of Roman or Anglo-Saxon age, associated with a human story about bodily remains of ancestors or how they lived (Kulik 2003b).

As stated in a press release accompanying the most recent Time Team book (Robinson and Aston 2002), “archaeology has never been so much fun. This book will inspire everyone to get out into their back gardens and start digging.” That is precisely what was meant to happen during the single weekend of 28 and 29 June 2003, when Time Team invited everybody in the UK to take part in The Big Dig. This project was intended to become ”the biggest archaeological dig this country has ever seen”. The idea was for people to find out what may lie buried in their gardens by digging (and recording) test pits approximately 1 x 1 m large and up to 60cm deep. Time Team would broadcast the most promising projects in a series of special programmes, live on national television. This is a far cry from the programmes produced by Graichen and Burenhult in Germany and Sweden respectively, where the viewer is notoriously glued to the TV screen, marvelling at the adventurers of others.

Although professional guidance was offered both regionally and nationally, the Big Dig was nevertheless a very controversial undertaking. Whereas some professional archaeologists considered it a ludicrous project, more entertainment than research, and also ethically wrong in its implications for the preservation of very many unthreatened sites, others warned against elitism and welcomed the chance for people to get involved in finding out about their own local history. In the end, approximately 1,400 archaeological test pits were dug as part of that campaign, and the programmes were each watched by around two million British viewers, corresponding to an overall market share of circa 10%.

Recently, Channel 4 has launched a new archaeological series that combines the Time Team appeal (and some of its staff) with a more dramatic narrative reminiscent of Indiana Jones scripts. Extreme Archaeology is drawing on archaeology’s old affinity with adventure in unfamiliar locations. According to a pitch to advertisers, each programme shows:

a race against time to rescue an important and often unique piece of evidence from the past and save it from destruction. Using state of the art geophysics and observation equipment, a small group of multi-skilled archaeologists record and evaluate the site before it is destroyed. Their challenge - to get out of an area with the information intact. Whether climbing rock faces, hacking through jungle, diving or pot holing – nothing must stop them reaching their goal. The pressure is on as the battle against the elements pushes them to the limit of their abilities and teamwork becomes essential to their success. A challenge to save treasures against the clock…

As series director Mel Morpeth explains on the project webpages:

We wanted to create a series that wouldn’t be perceived as being just another archaeology TV show. Too often TV viewers see experts wading across muddy fields with paper maps being blown about by the wind. We wanted to bring archaeology bang up to date and into the 21st Century.

Intriguingly, one anonymous contributor to a recent discussion on an archaeological discussion group commented that the Extreme Archaeology website ”looks like a university prospectus”. Whether or not that is demonstrably true, the comment relates to the fact that University Departments are increasingly competing with each other in attracting students to their degree programmes. The same appeal that makes or breakes archaeology on TV is also becoming increasingly important for the well-being of academic archaeology –at least in the U.K.

Each of these case-studies from the U.K., Sweden and Germany has to be understood within its specific cultural context (and market). Nevertheless, they all share one thing. That is a common trend of portraying archaeology as a process rather than a set of results: archaeology is about adventure and discovery, it involves explorations in exotic places (near or far), and it is carried out by digging detectives. Arguably, in popular culture, the research process – archaeologists in action – has actually become more important than the actual research results themselves (Rieche 1996: 154-5; Hills 2003: 208; Ascherson 2004: 156). Can this intriguing trend be confirmed from looking at the way archaeology is reported in newspapers?

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