Time Team Conclusion

Aug 29, 2006 Alun The Past Archaeology, History, Pop Culture, Television, Time Team

Buck­ing­ham Palace, one of the sites in the Big Royal Dig. Photo by sml!

The final pro­gramme was fairly typ­ical of the whole week­end. The only site that was presen­ted as hav­ing moved on a lot was Buck­ing­ham Palace.

Buck­ing­ham Palace

If the earlier days at the palace has been like the final day then I’d have been won over. There was at last an obvi­ous plan of action where the archae­ology was mean­ing­ful. Using Ground-Penetrating Radar they were able to loc­ate the pos­i­tion of Arling­ton House and Gor­ing House, two pre­vi­ous build­ings on site. Of more interest to me was what they found in the garden. The strata revealed agri­cul­tural use. For some­where that’s in the centre of mod­ern Lon­don that’s inter­est­ing. You can ask how did open fields sur­vive to the sev­en­teenth cen­tury or flip the ques­tion round and ask what pro­cesses led urban Lon­don to migrate into this area? Either way you have an inter­est­ing prob­lem. They con­cluded the shape of the palace gar­dens was defined in pat by the medi­eval field sys­tems that it came to be built upon.

Wind­sor Castle

The excav­a­tion at the Round Table was slow. They have dated the build­ing to the four­teenth cen­tury, so it’s the right period. They also decided that the build­ing was an arena for reen­act­ment which was par­tially covered. I didn’t catch how their archae­olo­gical finds led to that con­clu­sion. Hav­ing found the site the pace has under­stand­ably slowed.

In the Lower Ward the Great Hall was in the second loc­a­tion they looked at, close to the cur­tain wall. The wall of the Great Hall was robbed out where they dug, but a look fur­ther along revealed it was still stand­ing to quite a height. The his­tor­ian got in a nice dig that “His­tory res­cues Archae­ology” in iden­tifing the wall. In a per­fect world you’d expect the two to inform each other.

Holyrood House

I com­pletely lost the point of this sec­tion. They didn’t find Queen Mary’s ten­nis court though I still didn’t under­stand why they’d want to. They did find tene­ments. This could have been inter­est­ing if they’d spent more time look­ing into it. The palace site became occu­pied by squat­ters who used it as a royal sanc­tu­ary to escape the law. This phase could be fas­cin­at­ing, how did the decline occur. How were the people evicted, when did the Royal Fam­ily reclaim the site and why? What we got was a quick com­ment that they’d found Vic­torian rubbish.

There were also missed oppor­tun­it­ies else­where. There was the bath house, which wasn’t a bath house. The build­ing was laser-scanned but I don’t know exactly what prob­lem they were hop­ing to solve with it. There was James IV’s lost tower which they found. That allowed them to check some plans of the lost palace, but the implic­a­tions of that were lost as they sped elsewhere.

Over­all I think the three days weren’t a tele­visual suc­cess, though I sus­pect they were archae­olo­gic­ally suc­cess­ful. The usual three-day dig is frantic, but with the edit­ing and nar­ra­tion done later there’s a chance to build a mean­ing­ful nar­rat­ive so that with hind­sight finds can be placed in their wider con­text. In this series of digs I never really under­stood what the con­text was, bey­ond “These sites are all Royal!” In the case of medi­eval Wind­sor and Holyrood that’s a really tenu­ous link. There could have been much more of interest in explor­ing the dif­fer­ences between the sites.

On the plus side there are grounds for optim­ism. This is pre­sum­ably being filmed dur­ing the 2007 series sched­ule. The chem­istry between the presenters is still there and when they iden­ti­fied a prob­lem they weren’t bad at tack­ling it. The pro­gramme has sur­vived the loss of one or two mem­bers of the team, and the fash­ion among some TV sta­tions to take some­thing that works and ‘update’ it. While these pro­grammes were miss­able I reckon if they get their hands on a good Roman site in the new series, it’ll remain excel­lent TV.

You can read more about the Big Royal Dig at Chan­nel 4.

Time Team on Sunday

Aug 28, 2006 Alun The Past 4 Comments Archaeology, History, Pop Culture, Television, Time Team

Wind­sor Castle on of the loc­a­tions in the Big Royal Dig. Photo by this­Ro­bot.

It’s as if they’ve listened to Alan’s com­ments and decided to prove him right. The Sunday pro­gramme was worse than the Sat­urday pro­gramme, partly because of the split between the sites.

Buck­ing­ham Palace

They’ve con­firmed that they’ve found the canal. Addi­tion­ally parch­marks on the lawn show where they think the steps lead­ing to the canal were. There were two seg­ments that per­suaded me that a good pro­gramme on the his­tory of Buck­ing­ham Palace could be made. One was the phrase “polit­ical gardener” that they dropped in when dis­cuss­ing the sit­ing of the palace. They were inter­est­ing on how the Duke of Buck­ing­ham used pre-existing land­scape fea­tures to emphas­ise his own prestige and how he manip­u­lated the garden to amp­lify this.

The other good bit was the brief trip into the wine cel­lars of the Palace. Archae­ology isn’t just about dig­ging things up, and they scratched the sur­face of what some exam­in­a­tion of the lower levels of the palace could tell you about its his­tory. Sadly I still don’t see how either fits into the prob­lem they’re research­ing, but then I can’t work out what the prob­lem they want to solve at Buck­ing­ham Palace is. It seems to simply “Wahey! We’re at the palace let’s see what we can dig up!” — which isn’t at all like Time Team usu­ally is.

This was par­ticuarly brought home when they recon­struc­ted what Buck­ing­ham House would have looked like. The recon­struc­tion was good, but based on maps and his­tor­ical records. I couldn’t see why any excav­a­tion was necessary.

Wind­sor Castle

The digs at Wind­sor Castle are quite a con­trast to the Buck­ing­ham Palace digs, but not without prob­lems. In the Upper Ward they’ve found the Round Table, the best bit being a bit of floor tile in situ. Floor tile can be dat­able by its pat­tern­ing, so it’s feas­ible that by the final show they’ll be con­clus­ively be able to say where the Round Table is — if not what it was used for. Though I’ll be hon­est I’m not sure why any­one would want to tile the floor of an arena. There are lim­it­a­tions on where they can go with this due to the pro­tec­ted nature of the site.

In the Lower Ward things are just as inter­est­ing, but prob­ably a lot less tele­visual. They haven’t found the Great Hall. They seem to have dug to the right level, but it’s not there. That’s inter­est­ing because it does mean that the under­stand­ing of the lay­out of the Castle in Henry II or III’s time is wrong. They’re look­ing else­where and the inform­a­tion they get could mean that the under­stand­ing of how the castle developed is greatly changed. In light of this the care­ful plan­ning makes slightly more sense in that it appears to have been done to settle whether or not the Great Hall was where is was expec­ted to be. Fas­cin­at­ing stuff, but it’s hard to show no major finds on TV and get excited about them. Nev­er­the­less this might have been the most excit­ing find on last night.

Holyrood House

The seg­ment was the last of the three to get a lot of air time, and a lot of that was a brief his­tory of Mary Queen of Scots. This site is where Alan is right in say­ing the pace is too quick. There’s a lot of inter­est­ing strati­graphy at Holyrood House with lay­ers from dif­fer­ent times obscur­ing each other in pos­sibly unex­pec­ted ways. Strati­graphy is one of these con­cepts which sounds simple, new stuff over­lays old stuff, but when newer drains are cut through older depos­its it starts get­ting dif­fi­cult to keep a grip on it. Sadly there’s simply not the time given to the excav­a­tion that it deserves.

It gets more bizarre with the new trench they’re open­ing to find Mary’s ten­nis court — hence the long his­tory sec­tion. This is a sched­uled monu­ment, they’re not open­ing trenches on a whim so they’ve got a good reason to dig there. Maybe the maps are ambi­gious or con­tra­dict­ory there, but if they gave a reason I missed it. It seems they’re simply keen to see where she played tennis.

Over­all I don’t think the three sites are work­ing well together. I can see why they have three sites — they have to have a pro­gramme by the dead­line and hav­ing three excav­a­tions max­im­ises the chances of hav­ing some­thing to talk about and three-site pro­grammes have worked in the past. The spe­cial they did at York look­ing at a Roman, Vik­ing and Post-med site, was excel­lent. I think the dif­fer­ence is that in that case the finds from each site also fed into an over­arch­ing nar­rat­ive. This isn’t hap­pen­ing this year. If the word Royal isn’t over­whelm­ingly excit­ing, there’s no com­mon thread. At each site they have to explain the his­tory and the loc­a­tion. Three medi­eval sites would have been inter­est­ing, or multi-period digs on one site, but three sites from three peri­ods is too diffuse.

There are two good pro­grammes they could have made on the archae­ology of the sites. Hope­fully when it con­cludes tonight they’ll prove me wrong and they’ll have some­thing archae­olo­gic­ally inter­est­ing from Buck­ing­ham Palace.