Padstow, North Cornwall
First screened 9 March 2008

Q&A

Time Team's landscape archaeologist, Stewart 'lumps and bumps' Ainsworth, answers our questions.

What's your favourite Time Team dig?
Nevis in the Caribbean. Why? Because of the sunshine! Also because I used to live and work out there in the 1980s and kept finding remains of colonial period plantation settlements but had little time to follow them up.

What's your favourite Time Team find?
The wallet belonging to the pilot of the Spitfire that was shot down at Wierre-Effroy in France. A very emotional find.

What's the most important Time Team discovery?
All finds are important but because I am a landscape archaeologist I would say that discovery of any new site becomes more important than any single object.

What's your best Time Team moment?
John Gater opening his wallet!

What's your favourite archaeological site in the UK?
Yeavering Bell in Northumberland. This is a massive, stone-built Iron-Age hillfort in the Cheviot Hills. It has over 100 hut sites still surviving above ground and it is a beautiful walk to get up to it.

And abroad?
Brimstone Hill. A colonial period fort in St Kitts in the West Indies.

Who's your archaeological hero?
Christopher Taylor. He is one of the pioneering landscape archaeologists who worked for the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments when I first joined.

What's your favourite archaeology book?
The Making of the English Landscape by W G Hoskins. This book opened my eyes as to how to read the landscape.

If you could travel to one moment in time, where to and when?
Back to Sarajevo in Bosnia on 28 June 1914 with the power to change history and prevent the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the resulting slaughter of the First World War.

If you could dig one site, what would it be?
Howley Hall in West Yorkshire. This is the site of a 16th-century country house, which I discovered some years ago and is in the town where I was born. The site is extremely well preserved with elaborate garden archaeology of the period.

If you could make one find, what would it be?
Money in John Gater's wallet!

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