Barra, Western Isles
First screened 20 January 2008

Q & A

Time Team human remains expert, osteoarchaeologist Jackie McKinley, answers our questions.

What's your favourite Time Team dig?
I think probably Barra for a variety of reasons, not all of them archaeological! The island itself is beautiful, fabulous seascapes and beaches – I love the sea so I'm biased. The archaeological setting was unusual and interesting; some of it was new for me and therefore I learnt from working there. It's always interesting to see how people adapt to the landscape they live in and how they affect it by doing so; in this instance, how the evidence for their presence was so easily wiped out and then exposed again by the actions of nature.

What's your favourite Time Team find?
The street of mausolea we found at Binchester – that was a truly fabulous and important find.

What's the most important Time Team discovery?
Ditto my previous answer!

What's your best Time Team moment?
Probably seeing the plait of hair over the shoulder of the female skeleton in the Isle of Man in the 2007 series as the last cover stone was lifted off her cist grave. I hadn't expected it and such finds help make someone seem even more real and accessible than their skeleton alone can do. Not only could we tell she had been a slightly built woman with a fine featured face, but she also had this lovely long, probably dark, hair. Mind you, I do always enjoy a good pyre – Birdoswald, year dot.

What's your favourite archaeological site in the UK?
Hum … difficult one. Probably Old Scatness in Shetland. All the Northern Isles sites are brilliant. With so little wood they built everything in stone and that makes the archaeology more accessible, bringing you so close to the people, where and how they lived – it's a fantastic feeling to be the first person to walk down a flight of stairs since about 700 AD! Skara Brae in Orkney would probably come a close second and for much the same reasons, though obviously I didn't work there and was not the first to walk around in the buildings. It was a TV programme about Skara Brae back in the 1970s – dear old Magnus Magnusson – that made me decide to be an archaeologist.

And abroad?
I've not visited nearly enough but Petra (Jordan) would probably come close to if not at the top. It's stunning in terms of its size (and most is still under the sand), architecture and setting. It's fantastic to think that so many people lived there and passed through it at one time and now there are just tourists and the odd camel … a lesson in there somewhere?

Who's your archaeological hero?
I'm not into hero worship, there's a lot of good chaps – generic term, not gender specific – out there doing good stuff in their own fields and archaeology is such a very big pie.

What's your favourite archaeology book?
Doctors and diseases in the Roman Empire by Ralph Jackson: informative, readable, at times eye-watering and assists in proving 'what the Romans did for us' – and the Greeks and the Persians etc. It also makes you realise how fortunate we are to live now not then!

If you could travel to one moment in time, where to and when?
This I'm not sure about, I suspect the smell at any time would have been too much to stomach. Eighteenth-century Britain just before the industrial revolution hit – a very vibrant time in terms of discoveries, inventions, innovations and such brilliant music … but probably very smelly.

If you could dig one site, what would it be?
An untouched classic example of a Bronze-Age barrow complete with pyre sites, cremation burials and other cremation-related deposits; then I'd be able to recover enough associated data to see how it really worked.

If you could make one find, what would it be?
An intact Romano-British columbarium with the cremation burials in their niches and some nice inscriptions. Sorry, does that count as more than one? The cremation burials would not have suffered from the soil infiltration and the bone would be as at the time of deposition (unlike as we usually find them with a lot of additional fragmentation to the bone due to the burial environment). The better preservation and clear association between burials would enable a lot more information about the cremation process, mortuary rituals and social network to be recovered.

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