Time Team Tracker: Keeping track of three-day digs
Tony Robinson and Phil Harding at Codnor Castle, 2007. Photo: Stephen & Katherine, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
As my post about the ArcheoWalsie app may already have given away, I have become increasingly interested in archaeology over the past year or so. This interest was sparked by the TV series Time Team, which aired on British television (Channel 4) in the ’90s, the 2000s and the early 2010s.
Since the early 2020s the show has been making its comeback on YouTube, with new episodes as well as old material that is now being made available to the public again. The old episodes can be watched on the Time Team Classics channel. The new channel is called Time Team Official. Each episode runs for about 50 minutes and follows a three-day excavation in which archaeologists work on a different site. The digs cover everything from the Stone Age to the early modern period.
To keep track of which episodes I have already watched, I developed the Time Team Tracker app, once again with the help of Claude Opus 5.5, and I’m making it available for download here. It runs on Android, but is also available as a web app for the browser. The newest Android build can be downloaded here as an APK (see all releases), and the source code can be viewed on GitHub.
Should the YouTube links change or new episodes be published, the preset links can be edited, and new links can be added to episodes that don’t have one yet.
I hope you enjoy the Time Team Tracker app.
For anyone who wants to dig deeper, the book Time Team’s Timechester: A Companion to Archaeology is well worth a look, and it can be borrowed for free on archive.org. It is about Timechester, a fictional town in England, whose development is described from the early Stone Age to modern times. Along the way you get a good overview of the events of the different periods and of the archaeological remains that each of these activities left behind.
ArcheoWalsie is also available as a web app, with its source code on GitHub.