This Land, Your Land

"Time Team America," a new PBS science-reality series that sends archaeologists for 72-hour excavations of historic locations around the nation, premieres Wednesday with a visit to Fort Raleigh National Historic Site to try to determine the actual site of the original fort.

Fort Raleigh is home to one of the oldest mysteries in America, that of the fate of The Lost Colony, the first English attempt to colonize the New World. When supply ships returned to the Roanoke Island settlement after a three-year absence in 1590, the colony had vanished. All that was left was the word "Croatoan" carved in a gatepost of the fort.

The discovery of Thomas Hariot's science center at Fort Raleigh in 1991 provided the first tangible link to the colonists and firmly established that the modern fort reconstruction was not the site of the original colony, the program's Web site says. "Time Team was invited to the site by the First Colony Foundation. Short on resources but long on expertise and enthusiasm, the First Colony Foundation has been working on the site for years. Recent evidence suggested the area of the park called Hariot Woods was worthy of a closer look. So, using their best lead, the First Colony Foundation and Time Team partnered up for what would be the biggest excavation on Roanoke Island for over a decade. With just three days, Time Team ambitiously set out to find where the Lost Colony settlement was and what it may have looked like."

The program will air on WUNC TV at 8 p.m. Wednesday. The program is also available on the PBS Web site.