Season 18 - Episode Guide

The first stone henge to be discovered in Britain for a century would be cause enough for major celebration. But there's double bubbles as Tony Robinson and his hardy team of archaeologists celebrate their 200th dig. Jane Marchand from Dartmoor National Park Authority was alerted by a walker to standing stones peering out of an East Devon reservoir at low level. This is Francis Pryor's dream site, but Mick has also been interested in Dartmoor for some time. They have stone circles, stone rows and cairns apparently dating from 3000 to 1500 BC. There is a central mound which interests Francis, and which Phil thinks is Stone Age, thus pre-dating the other monuments. But the cairns may be recent, throwing into doubt the dating of the other features. This is cultivated farmland, atypical of Dartmoor's usual bleak landscapes. John is dubious about getting any meaningful geophysics results, but proposes nevertheless to wheel his trolley through the mud. Stewart and Henry create a 3D image of the prehistoric landscape. Phil teaches Matt his favourite activity, flint-knapping.
 

The Time team investigate a well known site, presumed to be used for Saxon burial rituals in West Langton Leicestershire. While there they explore the funeral practices of the Saxons, and recreate a burial using one of the Time Team members. As the three day dig continues they begin to find evidence the Saxons where not the only people to use the site, this challenges all involved to piece together a history of hundreds of years of use of a small non-descript piece of countryside.  The Team are intrigued by metal detecting finds and pottery scattered across some fields in Leicestershire, which suggest they're on the site of a high-status Anglo-Saxon burial ground.

Tony and the Team get a unique opportunity to dig at an army firing range at High Ham in Somerset and investigate a series of mosaics first discovered 150 years ago. Everything indicates a Roman villa, though perhaps not on such a grand scale. The inhabitants may have been Romanised Britons, living from the 2nd to the early 5th century. Matt volunteers as a slave for the day. When the cold east wind sets in, Phil and the other diggers temporarily "down tools". They are joined by Martin Brown from the Defence Estates and Roman finds specialist Philippa Walton.

Tony Robinson doesn't usually get to decide where the Team should dig, but in this episode he chooses his first ever site for investigation: a German anti-aircraft battery on Jersey. The Time Team travel to the Channel Islands. This time they explore the ruins of the German occupation of the islands during WW2. They find evidence of both military defenses built around the islands and many of the day to day activates that made up life for German forces during the occupation. The dig director was Dr. Ben Robinson.

Dense and tranquil woodland in the County Durham countryside provides an unlikely venue for Time Team's investigation into the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution.  Tony Robinson and his time team travel to Derwentcote near Newcastle in England. They have three days to investigate the ruins of an iron and steel works that produced world class metal from the early 1700's to the 1850's Their interest is based on the number of different processes developed in the area during the time, culminating in evidence the site was much older than first thought.

The Team face one of their strangest challenges ever: digging through a church graveyard in search of what could be one of the largest Roman structures ever built in Britain.  The Time Team head to the town of Castor to dig in the grounds of a Church looking for remains of a substantial Roman complex. Complicating the excavation is the work of Edmund Artist who took detailed measurements and dug the area 150 years ago. They need to first find the ruins, and try and understand and confirm what Artist saw.

Tony and the Team discover evidence of a dynasty that arrived with William the Conqueror and went on to produce two queens of England: Elizabeth I and Lady Jane Grey.  The Time Team visits the ruins of the home of the Grey family, and property the family had lived on for nearly 800 years. The team tries to establish the history of a castle built on the site in the 12 century.

Tony Robinson heads to Jersey to investigate the origins of Mont Orgueil Castle. Today's castle is a Tudor structure built on earlier foundations, and it's that early castle, built by King John, that the Team are looking for.  Mont Orgueil in Jersey is a well known fortification that has history stemming back to the 12th Century. The Time Team's job is to unravel where the series of 17th Century extensions absorbed the original medieval construction, and what the castle originally looked like in the time of the Normans.

Investigating an archaeologist's dream. An ancient moat has been discovered and no one knows what it once protected. Was it an early Welsh chapel, a Roman fort, a fortified cattle enclosure, or even the ancestral home of one of Wales's most important families?  The team visits Llancaiach Manor in southern Wales to investigate a series of strange structures found in the 1970s. What begins as a straight forward search for a missing manor house turns up a far more complex and interesting story.

There is evidence at Buck Mill Somerset of an ancient water wheel and mill. As the team begin to explore the site, discoveries ask more questions than answers given. Horse owner Stephanie Fry believes an 11th-century flour mill once stood on her land, near Stoke Trister in Somerset, and asks the Team to dig. There is reference to a mill in the parish in Domesday, and standing remains of a building depicted in a 1782 parish map. Multiple leat earthworks in the area indicate multiple mills over the centuries. The remains of the standing mill include parts of the last mill wheel, a 19th-century overshot wheel. This was the second mill Time Team dug; the first was in Season 14 (Ep.#9 "The Domesday Mill" - Dotton, Devon) The two episodes are easily confused as they have almost the same name.

Nowadays, London's East End is synonymous with the 2012 Olympic Games. Cutting-edge engineering and design have transformed the Olympic Park. But 150 years ago, the world was watching for a very different reason, although the spectacle on display was as high-tech as anything on offer today. The East End was once home to the most advanced shipbuilding industry - and best workers and shipyards - in the world. A century and a half ago, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Britain's most famous engineer, was about to launch a ship five times bigger than any that had ever been built before, the most revolutionary vessel the world had ever seen: the SS Great Eastern. Pioneering the transition from sail to steam and timber to iron, Brunel and East London's ship builders created vessels that were bigger, faster and tougher than ever before. But this launch was a disaster. Brunel went from hero to laughing stock overnight as his leviathan stuck on the slipway. Brunel died not long after. Today archaeologists are scouring the banks of the Thames to discover why launching such a big vessel proved a complete disaster. Examining the slipways, they hope to discover what went wrong and how it affected shipbuilding in London for ever. Tony Robinson joins them in their quest to solve the puzzle. But he and the team also explore some of the extraordinary successes of this long-gone industry and a time when the East End led the world.

In 1916 a frightening new weapon is unleashed on the Germans by British forces. The Livens Flame projector was a terror weapon of amazing ability, yet no examples exist today. Members of the Time Team join an archeology team excavating remains of such a machine and then build a replica to test the weapons true potentialTony Robinson joins a dig in France to investigate a terrifying British weapon that may have been used to fire burning oil at the Germans in the Battle of the Somme.