I enjoyed watching the first episode of Time Team America on PBS last night. I've never seen the UK show on which it is based. The program has a nice web site, where you can stream last night's show. On yesterday's episode, the team was trying to find evidence for the European colonization of Roanoke Island, North Carolina.The show started out with some magnetometry, showing the very Bartington instrument I had been checking out for a proposal yesterday, and Meg Watters, the team geophysicist, running gpr. Personally, I'd explain magnetometry a little differently, but why quibble (except for the fact that I am an academic, so a professional quibbler). The archaeologist at the site was Nick Lucketti, of the First Colony Foundation, whom I did a small archaeomagnetic job for seven years ago. I also met Eric Deetz, another member of the Time Team, on that same trip to the Jamestown area. The show recalled to me some criticism of the Time Team Program that these three-day site visits are not how archaeology works, and I can see that criticism. The finds were relatively slim, although, as Nick said, more European household artifacts than had been found for some years. Still, this seems like a good way to excite the public about the possibilities of archaeology, and the application of scientific methods.
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