In August 1980 a party of 15 American volunteers arrived at Repton, Derbyshire, to join an archaeological excavation. They included businessmen, housewives, students and retired professors, most of whom had never done any archaeology before. All had paid for the privilege of working hard in a muddy trench in a wet English summer. Chronicle follows their three-week progress. Do the rain, the Repton mud and the school dormitories get them down? How is a site excavated from the cabbages downwards? Is the mound in the vicar's garden just a Victorian garden feature or a Viking burial?