In case you missed the first episode of the Time Team America PBS series, You can view the full presentation here online.
Dust off the old VCR or your DVD recorder or Tivo. This is one you'll want to save! This week, the much-anticipated Time Team America begins its premiere season on PBS, five weeks over the summer during which public television viewers will get a first-hand look at high-tech archaeology in the United States. The first program, airing the evening of Wednesday July 8th (8 pm EDT, check local listings), features ongoing investigations at Fort Raleigh, North Carolina, the site of the first English colony in the American continents. The site is perhaps more famously known as the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island, and its legend about Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas, and the mysterious disappearance of the colony has inspired untold numbers of American children into learning about the past. Time Team and Fort Raleigh Time Team America's hour long video on Fort Raleigh documents three days of excavations, assisted by geophysical survey. The test area is located at an area of the island that had been identified as containing historic artifacts of the right age about 10 years ago. Two large trenches are excavated over the three days in this area, opened using a backhoe to strip off the wind-blown sand believed to have been deposited on the area after the American Revolution. Backhoe stripping is a perfectly legitimate technique, which I suspect will surprise some viewers; its good and bad points aren't described here, but someday I might get to that.
JC
Kris's Archaeology Blog
Time Team America: Fort Raleigh
Monday July 6, 2009
Time Team America digging team leader Chelsea Rose and digging team member Jeff Brown carefully sift through the soil as they excavate at Fort Raleigh National Park on Roanoke Island. In addition to searching for artifacts, they are looking for subtle differences in soil texture that would indicate decayed wooden structures built by Roanoke’s legendary lost colonists. Photo by Crystal Street
Related:
http://the-lost-colony.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-time-team-went-to-roanoke.html
© History Chasers
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Time Team could not have picked a better site for its maiden voyage in the New World. Both the story of Britain's first attempt at American colonization and one of the oldest unsolved mysteries in American history, the location of the Lost Colony of Roanoke is truly one question that only archaeology can answer. But finding the Lost Colony is no small task. Over the last 400 years, the fragile footprint left by the vanished colonists has become even harder to find. In that time, the site has been host to all manner of disturbances, namely: various military garrisons, farmers, the Civil War, treasure hunters, enthusiastic re-constructionists, a movie set, thespians, erosion, dune formation, and finally, modern archaeologists. As a result, the site of the Lost Colony has remained hidden. Like the proverbial needle in a haystack, the traces of this short-lived and ephemeral settlement have continued to elude even the best of efforts.
The biggest break in this centuries-long search came in 1991, with the discovery of Thomas Hariot's science center. This discovery provided the first tangible link to the colonists on the island. It also firmly established that the modern fort reconstruction was not the site of the original colony. The visible ruins are now thought to date to a period long after the colonists' disappearance. Speculation of the colony's whereabouts had always been strategically linked with the fort's layout, and now archaeologists were free to look at the site with fresh eyes. Most still presume the settlement lies somewhere within the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, buried under the forested sand dunes. Some speculate that the colony may be underwater or washing out to sea from an eroding beach. Others suspect it could be located on an entirely different part of Roanoke Island.
http://www.pbs.org/opb/timeteam/sites/ft_raleigh/why.php
