Time Team Day 10 - Vlochos

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on when you are reading this!  I am continuing the Thirty-One Days of the Time Team.  This time I am flash-forwarding to a newer episode.  This time the Time Team has sent a special team to Greece.  This is a two-part episode on the Time Team YouTube Channel.  The series is called Vlochos: Recovering an Ancient City.  The first episode has a run time of 26:00.  Episode two has a run time of 28:51.

Dr. Derek Pitman and Lawerence Shaw join a team of experts investigating an ancient settlement in Greece.  This was a relatively unknown site to the archeological world.  This has been an ongoing archaeological expedition uncovering a thousand years of history.  Using modern technology, this team has been investigating this settlement in Central Greece to learn more about the history of Ancient Greece.  This expedition team has a longer time to look at the site than the traditional Time Team.

Pitman and Shaw get together with the leader of the expedition to learn what is going on with this site.  The site is massive and has some complications.  This site has been worked on for the past five years and Pitman and Shaw will have two weeks on this site.  The initial expeditions looked to map out the site and gather artifacts.  It seems that there were four different periods of occupation on the site, however, translating these periods is a bit of a challenge.  There are many different levels in the land as well as some overlap in the period.  Magnetometry is employed to help map out the site.  The results show an extensive street layout.  It would have been at its height during the Hellenistic period under Alexander the Great.

Pittman and Shaw walk the site and notice stones in the area.  They imagine that they are walking along a classic Hellenistic Street with storefronts.  They use the features in the ground to map out buildings.  The pair talk about how other sites were similarly constructed during this period.  This special crew is going to look for a massive Roman Wall that was on this site.  It would have cut across the town and was a surprise discovery when the geophysics results were looked at.  What was going on with this Roman wall?

The site was abandoned for a time after the Hellenistic period and would eventually be occupied by the Roman people.  The expedition crew is going to look at the Roman end of town and for this wall.  Pittman had been working on the area in the previous summer and his discovery from last summer included a large wall just beneath the surface.

As part of this expedition, a new survey of the area is going to be conducted using resistivity where probes are inserted into the ground to pick up the electrical signal in the soil.  This should allow the crew to make even more finds from this site.  What sort of data will this crew discover as a result of this survey?  Will they find the Roman remains?

The expedition continues in the second episode of this short series.  Pittman and Shaw are going beyond the original site to see how Vlochos connects with famous people from the Ancient World.  This second episode has a short recap of the finds that were discovered along the surface of this field.  There is a discussion on the pottery finds that were discovered on this site and a piece of amphora is discussed.  What else is discovered about the site?  Tune into the rest of the episode to find out.

It was cool to see the collaboration between different archeological groups to learn more about this site.  Technology has come a long way since the original Time Team and there was a 3D recreation of the site which both Derek and Lawerence walk through.  It is a change-up from the traditional Time Team.  I felt there was way too much time talking about the technology and not enough on the finds themselves.  Perhaps the episodes could have been longer and more because I get the feeling that there were a lot more discoveries that could have been shared and the episodes were way too short to cram into two short episodes.  If I was a teacher, I would be skipping these two episodes of the Time Team.