| Time Team America | |
|---|---|
| Format | Archaeological reality television |
| Country of origin | United States |
| No. of seasons | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 5 |
| Production | |
| Executive producer(s) |
|
| Running time | 60 minutes |
| Distributor | PBS |
| Broadcast | |
| Original run | July 8, 2009 – August 5, 2009 |
| Chronology | |
| Related shows | |
| External links | |
| Website | |
Time Team America is an American television series that airs on PBS. It premiered on July 8, 2009. It is an Oregon Public Broadcasting adaptation of the British show Time Team, produced in collaboration with Channel 4 which commissioned the original show[1], in which a team of archeologists and other experts are given 72 hours to excavate an historic site[2].
The U.S. version features "freelance and university-affiliated experts [who] mostly join existing excavations...[and] arrive with resources that the archaeologists already on the case usually can’t afford and specific questions that, if answered, will advance the understanding of the site."[3]
Contents |
When PBS introduced a video player on its website in mid-April 2009, an episode of Time Team America became the most viewed.[3] Original air dates are as announced by PBS, but may vary by PBS station.
| # | Episode | Location[4] | Original airdate[5] |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Fort Raleigh, North Carolina" | Roanoke Island, NC | July 8, 2009 |
| The team travels to Roanoke Island to look for evidence of the Lost Colony of Fort Raleigh and learn what life might have been like for the first English colonists.[6] | |||
| 2 | "Topper, South Carolina" | Topper, SC | July 15, 2009 |
| Time Team America goes to the woodlands near the Savannah River in South Carolina to help with the excavation of the Topper site. One part of the team will dig a Clovis quarry, while the other will investigate a controversial cultural layer claimed to be pre-Clovis.[7] | |||
| 3 | "New Philadelphia, Illinois" | New Philadelphia, IL | July 22, 2009 |
| New Philadelphia was the first town in the United States platted and registered by an African American, Free Frank McWorter, some 30 years before the Civil War. Time Team America joins the ongoing research of New Philadelphia to help search for the town's schoolhouse.[8] | |||
| 4 | "Range Creek, Utah" | Range Creek, UT | July 29, 2009 |
| Time Team America was invited to Range Creek in the Book Cliffs in Utah to help with the research into the extraordinary well-preserved pit-houses and granaries of Fremont people.[9] | |||
| 5 | "Fort James, South Dakota" | Fort James, Hanson County, SD | August 5, 2009 |
| Fort James in South Dakota was one of the few stone forts on the American frontier, and it was abandoned only a few years after it was built in the 1860s. The team goes on a mission to find out how big the fort was to protect its archaeology for future research.[10] | |||
A Newsday review said "Time Team America at moments, employs [an] approach much in favor at PBS, which worries — needlessly, I think — that the only way to make serious subjects appealing to the attention-deficit-disordered youth of our TV nation is to throw in plenty of zing, zest and zip.... But don't hold any of this against the show, because it's engaging, thoughtful, smart, nicely produced and really, really interesting."[11]
All the 5 episodes of the first season have been released on separate DVDs[12].