Time Team America (2009)

It is one of the oldest mysteries in American history: What happened to the "Lost Colony" of Fort Raleigh? In 1587 the English sent a group of hardy, hopeful colonists to make a go of it in the New World. But when English ships returned with supplies just three years later, they found the settlement empty and the colonists gone. Only one clue was left behind: the word "Croatoan" carved in the gatepost of their fort. To this day, the fate of the colonists and the location of the original settlement remain a mystery. Time Team America travels to Roanoke Island to look for evidence of the colony, find out what it looked like, and learn what life might have been like for those first English colonists.

Deep in the woodlands near the Savannah River in South Carolina lies a remarkable archaeological site that may challenge our understanding of America's first inhabitants. Named after the local man who discovered it, the Topper site was once the location of an ancient quarry, a kind of prehistoric workshop, where people came thousands of years ago to make weapons and stone tools. For archaeologists, the site is providing a wealth of material left behind by the Clovis people. Known for their distinctive stone spear points, the Clovis people are commonly thought to be the first to inhabit North America around 13,000 years ago. But evidence being found at sites like Topper is challenging the long-held theories about when people first came to the American continent. Did they follow big game across a land bridge from Siberia to North America 13,000 years ago or did they arrive much, much earlier and by a different route? Time Team America visited the Topper site to join the hunt for evidence that could shed light on these questions.

Buried beneath farmlands in Western Illinois, lies the remains of the first American town founded by a freed slave before the Civil War. The story of New Philadelphia is a little-known episode from our frontier past and a dramatic testament to victory over enslavement. In 1836 "Free Frank" McWorter purchased his freedom from a Kentucky plantation owner and headed North. When he reached Illinois, he planted roots, started a town, and sold enough property to purchase the rest of his family out of slavery. Eventually, New Philadelphia became a thriving, multi-racial community which endured until well after the Civil War. The local landowners, descendants of the town's residents and the McWorter family want to uncover what remains of New Philadelphia to commemorate its place in history. Time Team America was invited to join the research already in progress and to help search for the schoolhouse where New Philadelphia's African American children learned to read and write in freedom.

Located in the remote Book Cliffs region of eastern Utah, Range Creek is the kind of site archaeologists dream about. The sage-covered meadows and rocky cliffs are scattered with the remnants of an ancient people: pit houses half-buried in the sand, mysterious petroglyphs scratched into the rock walls and bits of pottery and stone tools lying where they were dropped over a thousand years ago. Best of all, most of the hundreds of archaeological sites remain virtually untouched, providing a rare opportunity to find out what may have happened to the Freemont people who once flourished here. Time Team probes the ground, scales the cliffs and learns what life was like in these canyons a thousand years ago.

In 1865, a unit of cavalry soldiers thought they had volunteered to fight in the Civil War. Instead, they found themselves sent west to defend pioneer settlers against angry Sioux Indians in what is now South Dakota. Upon their arrival, the soldiers built Fort James, one of the few stone forts on the American frontier. The fort's quartzite walls still peek out from under a grassy field that seems to have somehow survived intact. The site has never been excavated, but experts believe that the fort's remains hold a time capsule of information about life on the early frontier. Time Team America traveled to South Dakota on a rescue mission: to find out how much of the fort survives and how big an area it covers so that the archaeology can be protected for future research.