New public television series focuses on Lost Colony

IN THE SUN-DAPPLED WOODS of Fort Raleigh National Historic Site on Wednesday, there was an unusual amount of activity for the sedate park.

Men with big video cameras on their shoulders pointed lenses into dirt pits and at the faces of archaeologists. Nearby, beeping ground-penetrating radar flashed murky images on a small screen.

Meanwhile, a mini-excavator scooped out the top layers of previously explored soil to hasten access to the undisturbed areas that might hold intriguing artifacts.

The first episode of a new public television series, "Time Team America," is focused on the ongoing search for evidence of the Lost Colony on Roanoke Island. After arriving this week, the crew is expected to wrap up at Fort Raleigh by week's end.

As an excavation unearthed a kernel-size piece of lead-glazed earthenware from a layer of dirt, veteran archaeologist Nick Luccketti was summoned and quickly surrounded, a microphone hovering nearby.

"It's great to find it. I was hoping to find something a little more sizable. But it will do," he said into a camera, a wry smile on his face as he held the tiny broken bit.

Luccketti is a founding member of the First Colony Foundation, a nonprofit group that has renewed the archaeological exploration of the park after numerous fruitless investigations since the 1930s.

Another member of the foundation, Eric Deetz, also belongs to the TV production's archaeological team. Deetz had alerted series producer Graham Dixon to the foundation's work.

The colony of 117 men, women and children who had sailed from England in 1587 vanished without a clue sometime after August of that year.

As the oldest abiding American mystery, any artifact

that could help decipher their fate would be akin to the Holy Grail of U.S. archaeology.

Dixon said that the foundation's work fit the criteria for the program, which is based on the popular British series, "Time Team," that Dixon first produced in 1992.

First, the Lost Colony story is attention-getting. Also, the production could look over the shoulders of the foundation team, which had already planned this latest two-week project.

"The story is such a fascinating one," he said as people scraped and sifted dirt behind him. "While I don't claim we can solve it in three days, it's an opportunity to tell it from a different angle. We tell it from the perspective of the archaeologist."

About 50 people are working on the TV project, Dixon said, including archaeologists and geophysics specialists.

"If we could come in and lend a lot of help, we might move some things forward," he said.

The show, co-produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting and Videotext Communications, is committed to featuring four more sites after Roanoke Island, including the Topper site in South Carolina, where the first evidence of humans living in North America was discovered; and New Philadelphia, Ill., believed to be the first incorporated U.S. town founded by a freed slave.

Eric Klingelhofer, another founder and veteran archaeologist with the First Colony Foundation, said the production is giving his team a welcome boost.

"It's very helpful to our needs," he said. "They bring us a lot of people and a lot of

energy for three days. But we need those three days of help.

"We're trying to uncover the past history of the site. Instead of looking for one thing, we're looking for everything."

Catherine Kozak, (252) 441-1711, cate.kozak@pilotonline.com