Despite the Nazi presence, local people retrieved Paul Klipsch's body from the remains of his aircraft and buried him in the village cemetery. His grave, now marked with an RAF headstone, remains there to this day. But while the time and place of this young pilot's death had long been known, we still knew little about how and why his Spitfire crashed. Time Team decided to see what could be revealed.

Mick Aston describes it as one of the oddest Time Team locations he's worked at. 'By day we'd be rooting about in this ancient clay and mud and looking for traces of our ancestors from 400,000 years ago, and then in the evening we'd all go back to this Center Park's holiday camp in the middle of the forest. Very strange.'

Whether or not it was the oddest, it was certainly the oldest site that Time Team has ever excavated. It was also one of the rarest. Sites showing evidence of human activity dating back 400,000 years are so uncommon in this country that the only way that Time Team was able to become involved in investigating one was by joining an established British Museum excavation. Nick Ashton, a Palaeolithic archaeologist at the British Museum, was pleased to invite the Team to bring in their expertise and resources to help out on his ongoing project at Elveden, near Thetford in Suffolk.

Flag Fen, a few miles outside Peterborough, is one of the most important Bronze-Age sites in Europe. Discovered in 1982 by Francis Pryor, who is now director of the Flag Fen Laboratories and Bronze Age Centre, the area is unique in that large quantities of organic material from the period, including wood and leather, have survived, pickled in the waterlogged fenland peat.

The centrepiece of this astonishing site is a one-kilometre-long alignment of posts passing across what would have been a stretch of open water during the Bronze Age and linking what was then the mainland with Northey Island. Where the alignment crosses the water, there is also a huge timber platform, some two and a half acres in extent.