Time Team 1998

The 1998 series of Time Team promised to be the most exciting in the five years that the programme had been running. It was also the longest, with eight programmes instead of the usual six.

Christmas Special

As a curtain-raiser for the new (1998) series of Time Team, which started in January, Tony and the Team gathered to celebrate the festive season with a look back over the last five years and the archaeological odyssey that had taken them from prehistoric Oxfordshire to the dawning of modern age technology in Victorian Britain.

Programme 1: Richmond

The series kicked off with an excavation – beneath a pristine croquet lawn – of the privy lodgings of Elizabeth I at Richmond Palace, which she inherited from her father Henry VIII and where she died.

Programme 2: Greylake, Somerset

From Tudor times, we travelled back more than 5,000 years to the Somerset Levels, where the peat hides some of Britain's best-preserved wooden structures. Led there by the possibility of finding a trackway, we were excited to uncover something even more unusual – a mysterious platform complete with Bronze-Age finds.

Programme 3: Orkney

The Viking invasion was a significant event in British history. Orkney was used by the 'Northmen' as a stepping stone for their forays, and on the Ness of Brough on the island of Sanday, we investigated a series of mounds that might just be a Viking burial site.

Programme 4: Gloucestershire

Before Britain was invaded by the Scandinavians, it succumbed to the Romans. On a farm in Gloucestershire, Time Team made a fabulous find – one of the most important undiscovered Roman villas in the UK. This was shown on Time Team's first 'live' broadcast over the August Bank Holiday weekend; the programme in the series had specially shot footage of what we found.

Programme 5: Mallorca

This year's expedition abroad took us in pursuit of the Beaker Folk on Mallorca, where an entire settlement of this enigmatic culture has been found. We investigate a strange area known as 'the Maze' and an ancient temple site that has a fascinating link with astronomy.

Programme 6: Shropshire

Back in Britain, within an ancient farmhouse deep in the Shropshire countryside, we discovered the remnants of a grand manor house and pieced together the story of its construction and the strange fate that befell the family who had hoped to live there.

Programme 7: Downpatrick, Northern Ireland

Going further afield, to Northern Ireland, we excavated the ecclesiastical settlement of Downpatrick, where – legend has it – St Patrick died. It was also the site of Bronze-Age encampments and later Benedictine monasteries, and we had the task of sorting out this historical puzzle.

Programme 8: High Worsall, North Yorkshire

Finally, we visited the medieval North Yorkshire village of High Worsall for the first time since it disappeared!

As well as the archaeology, we continued our practice of trying out various activities of the time periods we were studying. For this series, Carenza made Elizabethan perfume and groomed Phil's hair with a Viking comb, and Mick learned the secrets of medieval plaster-making and discovered that catching fish medieval style is harder than it looks. Meanwhile, game-for-anything Phil built a prehistoric trackway across a marsh, found out about Roman pewter bowl-making, smelted copper ore the Beaker Folk way, and tried to turn a calf skin into parchment.

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