‘I thought that it was all theatre, cooked up in the edit suite… but it really is as chaotic as it looks!’ Dr Gus Casely-Hayford joked on a sunny late September day in 2021. Sitting in a field of turnips in rural Oxfordshire, Gus – the inaugural Director of V&A East – was reflecting on his very first experience of filming a Time Team excavation. Just two weeks earlier, he had been exploring an Iron Age souterrain, or fogou, in Cornwall (of which more below), and now the Team were investigating the site of a large Romano-British villa on the estate of Broughton Castle, near Banbury in Oxfordshire.
Despite the rural tranquillity of the setting, the scene before him was a hive of activity, with almost a hundred people darting in all directions, variously armed with trowels, cameras, metal-detectors, drones, or walkie-talkies. This flurry of movement was the result of months of careful planning coming to fruition, with each individual purposefully setting out on a specific task – which, of course, needed to be accomplished over the traditional three-day span.
The digs also marked a significant milestone, representing the first new Time Team excavations in a decade. First airing in 1994, Time Team quickly became a Sunday teatime staple and a celebrated British institution. The flagship Channel 4 series produced 20 series, over 230 episodes, and countless spin-offs and specials, before finally drawing to an end in 2014 (see CA 274). Its success saw Channel 4 essentially ploughing £4 million directly into British archaeology during the show’s run, and the post-excavation reports that were produced by Wessex Archaeology represent a significant body of research that is a remarkable archaeological legacy in itself.
