Time Team Day 12 - The Search for the Real Life Flintstones

Good morning, the Thirty-One days of Time Team continue with a search for the real-life Flintstones.
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Time Team is hot on the trail a place where there is evidence of human settlement dating back to the Stone Age.  Stone Age England was a very different place.  It was covered in lush greenery.  Lions, rhinos, and elephants wandered around.  The Dig is in a clay pit that dates back from the Victorian period.  In the pit, there is an area where Stone Age tools were found.  It is a site that dates back to 400,000 years ago and the Time Team is working with the British Museum.

Phil and Nick Ashton have started the dig and are finding good evidence of people making flints and tools along with a rule.  This site is rare for the Time Team.  Tony asks if they will find human remains on the site and Phil says they will not.  One of the Time Team’s tasks will be to find the plants that the Stone Age people lived with.  Tony then learns that environmental archeologists use vole teeth to date a site.

Carenza is at a site five miles away from the initial trench and the Time Team will excavate another area where there were Stone Age Remains found.  It was an archeological area that has not been excavated lately.  They will have to clear some foliage first before the second trench goes in.

In the first trench, a piece of hand ax is found, and Phil is ecstatic with the find.  They slowly dig around the dirt to free it and it comes out of the ground.  The hand ax was the single most important tool for the Stone Age Man.  Geophysics will be working to find an ancient river that ran through the landscape.  It will take time to build a picture of the landscape.  Finding the river will help archeologists look for additional Stone Age sites.  Stewart is field walking the area and looking for archeology on the surface.

Day One ends on a rainy note, the trench is covered to prevent a mud hole and the archeology continues.  The work to find plant material continues despite the rain.  In fact, a mussel shell was found while digging and would hint at something being preserved.  Clay is put into buckets and hydrogen peroxide is added to dissolve the clay leaving behind organic material.

Day Two kicks off with Phil working to make a stone tool.  He tries to try it out by chopping down a tree. Geophysics continues with their search for the ancient river.  It will take yards and yards of cord and avoiding man-made features to find this ancient river.  In Carenza’s trench, they are finding some interesting finds.  Carneza calls for Tony to bring an intact ax head and Phil.  The environmental trench is struggling to break down the clay to determine what organic material was around during the time of the Stone Age.  Victor paints a scene of life at the riverbank.  What was life for these people?  Tony meets up with a computer graphic artist to see what the people looked like.  What will the Time Team find?  Will they find that elusive whole hand ax?  Will they find the remains of an ancient river channel?  Tune into the rest of this episode to find out more about the Stone Age people of Britain.

This would be something interesting to show a landscape class because of the environmental archaeology involved with the Time Team’s search.  It would be a good episode to help teach about experimental archeology as well.