The house in the loch: a Time Team Special (repeat) Loch Tay, Perthshire Sunday 17 April, 5.30pm
In the summer of 2003, a small crew from Time Team spent eight weeks in the beautiful setting of Loch Tay, Perthshire, in Scotland. They were filming the ongoing underwater excavation of Oakbank crannog, an Iron-Age lake dwelling, which was first surveyed in 1979 and is the subject of a full-scale crannog reconstruction at the Scottish Crannog Centre on Loch Tay.
The husband-and-wife team of Dr Nick Dixon and Barrie Andrian had invited Time Team to follow their summer's excavations, and to recap on two decades of work on a site that is causing archaeologists to re-write what we know about life in the Iron Age. Tony Robinson made a flying visit to the site and fronts the film, but for the main part Nick, Barrie and the students who were participating in a summer field school there take centre stage.
The web pages to accompany this programme can be found at:
I'm not entirely sure what prompted that triple dose of scepticism, but there's no doubt that the detailed study of crannogs over the past two decades has had a great impact on what we know of life in the (Scottish) Iron Age. For example, excavations during this period have pushed back the accepted chronology of crannog occupation (and all that that entails for life in the surrounding landscape) from the Roman Iron Age to the seventh or eighth centuries BC. The preservation of organic material in the waterlogged conditions - and our vastly-improved ability to recover it by underwater excavation - is also transforming our understanding of how people lived, what they farmed and ate, what they wore, how they built their homes and so on. Plenty of reason in all this to justify the statement, I'd have thought ....
It was lovely to see that one again as it is easily my favourite underwater archaeology dig so far in Time Team or any other archaeology programme. I would love to know how they got on last year so I shall go and google them now.
I still can't understand how all the bits of wood that fell off the crannog sank to the bottom of the loch instead of floating away. I think the water level back in Bronze Age was even lower than specualted.
