Wickenby, Lincolnshire
First screened 23 March 2008

Q & A

Time Team archaeologist and prehistoric specialist Francis Pryor answers our questions.

What's your favourite Time Team dig?
One we did right at the end of the 2007 season on Bodmin Moor, in Cornwall. It poured with rain and all my raincoats leaked like sieves. I can remember doing an interview with Tony and feeling cold streams running down my spine, yet the site was wonderful. There was a huge Neolithic bank cairn – a sort of ceremonial burial mound dating to about 3500 BC. If that wasn't enough, we put trenches into what looked like an Iron-Age (say 300 BC) village of roundhouses surrounded by a wall and proved them all to be over a thousand years earlier (say 1500 BC). Wow!

What's your favourite Time Team find?
Some sherds of pottery we found at another Cornish site, this time at Lellizzick, in the 2008 series. They were imported to Cornwall from the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa in the 5th-7th centuries AD. I've always been fascinated by this Dark-Age trade and to have the evidence for it in my own hands was quite astonishing.

What's the most important Time Team discovery?
Most probably it's the huge circular building found at Windsor Castle in the Big Royal Dig of 2006 (see The real knights of the round table). It's not often that sites that have been so closely studied for so many centuries produce a secret as big as that.

What's your best Time Team moment?
When we thought that a site we were digging on Anglesey in 2006 was sterile, then I had a bright idea, worked right through the tea break on day two (not like me) and found we had all stopped about three inches too high. Then we found a burial in a stone cist. That was good.

What's your favourite archaeological site in the UK?
The one my team found at Flag Fen, Peterborough, in 1982. It's so incredibly well preserved. To be able to kneel down on a Bronze-Age floor with one's shoulders below the tops of Bronze-Age posts and then pick up Neolithic flints that had been spread on the floor along with sand and gravel brought there 3,000 years previously, from the nearby settlement at Fengate. That quality of preservation takes some getting used to.

And abroad?
The mysterious lines of Neolithic standing stones at Carnac, in Brittany. The scale of those gradually ascending lines of massive great boulders dwarfs even Stonehenge and Avebury. They are quite literally awe-inspiring.

Who's your archaeological hero?
The archaeologist Brian Hope-Taylor, who taught me at Cambridge. He was one of the finest and most adventurous field archaeologists of all. His excavations of the huge Dark-Age royal palace complex at Yeavering in Northumberland were light years ahead of the times. The report is a work verging on genius. He was also an inspired artist whose drawing of Iron-Age objects for the Ordnance Survey map of Iron-Age Britain gave Celtic Art – itself inspired – a new lease of life.

What's your favourite archaeology book?
The Common Stream by Rowland Parker (Paladin Books, 1976). The author is a gifted amateur historian and this little book became a best seller simply because it brought the past to life in a way that few professionals could ever manage (because our minds are generally too cluttered up with facts). He was able to cut through all that and somehow penetrate the minds of people in the Middle Ages. A masterpiece.

If you could travel to one moment in time, where to and when?
Somewhere in the Fens, around Ely, say, in 80 years time. I'm curious to see whether global warming will prove as catastrophic as we all currently think.

If you could dig one site, what would it be?
The Iron-Age 'marsh fort' at Borough Fen, just north of Peterborough. Potentially this is an absolutely intact medium-sized 'hillfort', with massive waterlogged ramparts, but lying near sea level. The entire interior has been buried under thick layers of flood clay and it has never been ploughed. Sadly, it's both scheduled (ie protected by law) and it's drying out. But nobody can touch it. There won't be much left of its unique waterlogged finds soon.

If you could make one find, what would it be?
A waterlogged bag containing the perfectly preserved packed lunch of a Bronze-Age farming family, out for a picnic in the Fens.

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