Finds and field recording

It's Day Four at Standish and the familiar Time Team faces have long since packed up and headed off home. For one person, though, the work is far from over. This is Wessex Archaeology's Steve Thompson, who is still toiling away in the field. On this dig he has been forced to take drastic measures to get the job completed: he is using the headlights of the Team's 4x4 vehicle to illuminate the archaeological context sheets so that he can finish recording the dig.

'Beginning with the 2004 series, I was responsible for coordinating the recording of all trenches and the archaeology in them,' says Steve. His role during the 2005 series has been to coordinate all of the finds from the excavations. It's not a simple task, as Time Team unearths many thousands of finds each year and every single one of them has to be cleaned, stabilised, catalogued and stored.

'It's a great job really,' Steve says. 'When you're a digger on a Time Team site you can be stuck in a trench all day while there are 15 other trenches uncovering material and a whole story emerging, which as an archaeologist working on one specific area you just wouldn't be aware of. As finds coordinator I get to see absolutely everything that comes out of the ground and have a good idea about how everything is going.'

Many of the finds are cleaned on site by helpers from local archaeology and history societies or interested youth groups. 'You get to meet some really nice people,' Steve continues. 'They all help us out a lot. After everything has been cleaned it's bagged up and marked so that we know exactly where it came from. Then, after all the filming has been done, we take it back to Wessex Archaeology where further research is done and people like pottery and bone specialists can look at the material. All this work goes towards making a proper report for the site. The finds are then stored in an archive, which is usually held by the local museum to the dig or by the landowner.'

Audio file: Listen to Steve talking about finds.

Meet the Team: Find out more about Steve.

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