Behind the scenes with series editor Michael Douglas

For this programme, series editor Michael Douglas provides another 'behind the scenes' look at Time Team. Michael has a long history with the programme and is a regular director of individual programmes. For the 2006 series he also worked as the series editor, a job that involves coordinating the Time Team season as a whole. Here he lets us in on some of his impressions of the Withington programme.

Time Team has excavated a lot of Roman villa sites now. Do you feel that you already know what to expect before you get digging?

We made a conscious decision to try to avoid villa sites this year for that very reason. But when [local archaeologist] Roger Box got in touch with us about the Withington site it was just too intriguing to ignore. Plus it had the added advantage of re-investigating, and locking down into the landscape, a villa dug almost 200 years ago.

What particular part of this site and its story grabbed you?

Moles! When we first visited the site there were molehills and bits of tesserae [small squares of terracotta or stone used in Roman mosaic floors] everywhere. So that wasn't a bad beginning.

Then, once you had the landscape explained to you, you could clearly see platforms where structures had been all over the place. It was so close to the existing villa excavated by Samuel Lysons 200 years ago that you couldn't help but wonder what was going on here. Roger Box had also found hypocaust tiles [from tile stacks used to support floors in underfloor heating systems] and roof tiles all over the site. It was just begging to be dug.

Villas can be huge sites to pin down. How do you go about tackling a potentially massive site with regards to getting a tight story together in just three days of digging?

We basically had two targets: this fantastic field of mole-redistributed tiles and the other villa originally excavated by Samuel Lysons. So once again, as at Glendon, we split our resources to investigate both sites at the same time. The geophysics team played a blinder in the mole field and I think their final results are spectacular – and all the more impressive when you see the quality of the archaeology in the ground.

The Lysons villa was much harder to pin down and as it was scheduled we had to place our trenches very carefully. As the geophysics was less reliable in this area, that proved to be a challenge. We were determined to answer both our challenges, but with so much good archaeology coming up from the mole field we were stretched to the limit. That's when Tim Taylor [series producer of Time Team] and the site supervisor and Roman specialist, Neil Holbrook, came into their own and worked out the best strategy.

Behind the scenes with Michael Douglas at Glendon, Northants.

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