Time Team America at Fort Raleigh, NC

The team worked on 5 different sites located around the U.S., from Utah to the Carolinas. These sites ranged from several hundred years old to some of the earliest evidence of humans in North America, that are at least 13,000 years old with the potential of being even older. The first of these 5 sites that the team worked at is the Fort Raleigh site in North Carolina on Roanoke Island. This site is where the first Europeans arrived to settle America. The first group of English settlers arrived in 1585 but soon abandoned their fort to return to Europe. The second group came 2 years later and set up their village near the fort left by the previous group. This is what Time Team came to help look for. The exact location of this village isn’t known so the team was trying to find it. Because they were looking for a village site they hoped to find post holes, which would indicate that buildings were once present. As well as looking for evidence of buildings they were looking for more domestic materials, such as buttons from womens clothing or childrens toys, that would help to determine that it was in fact a village rather than something else such as a fort. Along with looking for these items they hoped that what they did find would help give them a better understanding of the dates associated with the site.
They did a really good job explaining the history behind this area, which was helpful in understanding the importance of the site and the reasoning behind trying to learn more about it and actually locate it. They also did a great job in showing the digging process starting with a backhoe (to remove a layer of sand that had blown in since the 1587) and then moving to the shovel and trowel. What I thought was really interesting was the pottery sherds they found. To most people you wouldn’t be able to tell much about a piece of pottery no bigger, in some cases, than a stack of three quarters. The team had brought in pottery specialists who knew the pottery of the period and could tell numerous things such as what kind of object it was and where it came from all based off of the glaze and type of clay used. Some of the pottery sherds that were excavated were determined to be from places such as London and Venice.

Another thing that caught my interest with this episode is when they talked about context and how important it is. They found prehistoric (Native American) pottery along with pottery brought from Europe, which wasn’t unexpected because they knew the settlers used pottery from the areas original inhabitants. They then found part of a pipe that dated later than what should have been found in that layer of soil, which hinted to them that they could be digging in the plow zone, which is the layer of soil that has been mixed up by a plow, thus destroying the original layers which in turn makes the stratigraphic information difficult to interpret.
More information about Fort Raleigh can be found here.