Many Quietus readers will no doubt be familiar with Time Team, the archaeology programme broadcast by Channel 4 for a decade between 1994 and 2014 and recently revived online. Presented by actor Tony Robinson (a wonderful move given his role as Baldrick in historical comedy Blackadder), each episode featured a team of archaeologists racing against the clock on three day digs on sites that spanned human history in the United Kingdom, from the Neolithic to the Second World War.
It was a simple idea that contained intense drama as the team battled the weather, the running down of the clock, and sometimes each other – evangelists for the emerging technology of geophysics at odds with the experts in maps or wielders of small trowels. Nevertheless, they would always seem to end up having a hoot and getting hammered on ale and cider, even if the dig was a disappointment. It’s this human dynamic that Mark S. Williamson pays tribute to here. Williamson has most recently been responsible for a string of excellent releases exploring the Calder Valley, both in a trilogy of albums inspired by the area’s geology, and with the Primitive Percussion Youth Orchestra of children from the primary school in which he works as a teacher – praise for that project from JR Moores and Noel Gardner’s New Weird Britain column can be found here.
Like Laura Cannell, Williamson has a keen ear for evocation of passing time and landscapes, both real and imagined. This is a warm and charming record of eddying folk made up of picked guitar, chanting and drones, with each track devoted to a different member of the Time Team – Mick Aston (who when he wasn’t a practitioner of naturism loved to wear lurid knitwear) and Carenza Lewis turned into ‘The Thinker’, ‘The Medievalist’ and so on. If you’re a fan of Moundabout, say, or Tristwch Y Fenywod, that should give you a bit of an idea of what Williamson has unearthed from the oomska here. Best of all is the haunting melodica of ‘The Artist’, which conjures up woodsmoke over ancient palisades, danger lurking in the nearby woodland, as effectively as the illustrations of the late Victor Ambrus, to whom it is devoted. ‘The Everyman’, meanwhile, sounds like ‘Who By Fire’ if Leonard Cohen had nicked it off a lonesome charcoal burner, years before he was born.
The music comes accompanied by portraits of the archaeologists and a passionately-argued essay about what made the programme so great. I wonder what it might conjure too –Time Team digger Miles Russell, now a leading archaeologist working on the major Durotriges project, used to appear on the show wearing a helmet featuring the Einstürzende Neubauten logo. A few years ago, I met Time Team archaeologist Francis Pryor at a thing where I didn’t know anyone. He was incredibly friendly and warm, we got stuck into the wine, and he told me that there was actually a Time Team band, and though my memory is fuzzy, I believe long-haired flint-knapping expert Phil Harding was the bassist. Further talk reaches us of him singing in Wiltshire pubs. As ever with the ancient past, who knows how much is fact and how much fiction, and art is more slippery than the science of archaeology – but if Williamson ever needs a backing band, perhaps there’s a ready-made group out there to take up instruments ancient and modern to join him.
