Time Team - Tale of Two Villages

 Good morning, thirty-one days of the Time Team is winding down for March.  We are near the finish line.  Today’s episode is a Tale of Two Villages.
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Tony introduces Wicken, it housed two villages separated by a small creek.  Time Team was invited to investigate the origins of the two villages and which half of the village was older.  Who has the oldest part of the village in their back garden?  What will the remains tell the Time Team?  What will the residents of Wicken learn about their village?

The Time Team will work alongside a university.  The university started a dig on a manor house area.  They started with test pits around the village.  The Time Team will dig on the church site.  The Time Team planned on dressing in two different colors to show the different villages.  However, the team leaders did not want to make the fashion choice.  One team will dig Wick Hamon and the other team will dig Wick Dive.

Stewart Ainsworth has been examining the landscape.  There are lumps and bumps in the land that Stewart believes are slight earthworks.  Tony points out that Stewart has ideas on where the Time Team should dig.  A trench goes in over Stewart’s earthworks and it is a section where pottery was found.

Then the Time Team works on the church site.  Stewart is back working looking at the landscape.  This time, he examines a map with one of the leaders.  He shows the locations on the map and where they were in the landscape.  Geophysics starts working on the site after the wheat is flattened.  IT should be quick work because it is a small site.

As a second trench goes in, Phil discovers some Medieval pottery.  At the church site, the Time Team examines the geophysics results.  They are not typical of church sites.  It shows there is a building but there is a lot of rubble.  Mick asks if the results would demonstrate where the Chancel is in the church.  He sees the Chancel in the results but the rest of the results are hard to read.

The church would have been important to the Medieval people.  The Manor Owner would have gotten permission from the bishop to build a church.  The Bishop would have granted the permission and the church would be built.

Phil and Helen Geake are looking at finds in a trench.  Phil discovers a metal lacer in the ground.  It is a tiny piece of evidence that tells the story of the Wicken area.  Mick and Helen visit a local family.  They had made several finds and stored their finds near the stream that was the boundary of the Wick Dive and Wick Hammon.

In the meantime, the Time Team is discovering the walls of the church.  In Wick Dive, archeology is proving to be challenging.  There are plenty of pottery finds but no building remains.  Later in the dig, the Time Team discovered post holes.  Some of the pottery shards are coming from the early 900’s.  The residents are getting in on the digs as well, allowing the Time Team to dig test pits around the villages.  Mick gives instructions to the volunteers on how to dig test pits.  These test pits will help further Wicken’s story.  To learn more about Wicken, watch this episode.

It was good to see Time Teamwork together with another organization to discover the history of a village.  The story of Wick Dive and Wick Hammon proved to be complicated at times, but in the end, the Time Team managed to fill in more of the history of Wicken.  This would be a good episode to show in a history classroom.