A weekend of live broadcasts in June 2003 was preceded by a week of daily short programmes.
It involved about a thousand members of the public in excavating test pits each one metre square by fifty centimetres deep.
Most of these pits were in private gardens and the project stirred up controversies about approaches to public archaeology.
Time Team's Big Roman Dig (2005) saw the "Big dig" format altered, in an attempt to avoid previous controversies, through the coverage of nine archaeological sites around the UK which were already under investigation by professional archaeologists.
Over 60 other professionally supervised excavations were supported by Time Team and carried out around the country in association with the programme.
A further hundred activities relating to Roman history were carried out by schools and other institutions around the UK.