All issues on the political, economic and social agendas today and, apparently, 3,500 years ago as TV's Time Team discovered last week at Cairncastle.

Presenter Tony Robinson and a team of archaeologists headed by Phil Harding - he of the long grey hair and Indiana Jones hat - spent three days on the distinctive basalt outcrop that straddles the farms of Campbell Tweed and Tommy Stewart at Knockdhu, on the very edge of the Antrim plateau.

Progress was slow to begin with at one of the more challenging sites excavated by the Channel 4 experts. The long deserted remains of an ancient promontory fort, the foundations of a few unremarkable dwellings, some shards of flint.

It didn't look terribly promising, but with just a few hours of daylight remaining on the final day they found their holy grail; the find that will undoubtedly steal the show when the programme is broadcast next spring.

As regular viewers will know, a "holy grail" in Time Team terms usually amounts to something much more mundane. In this instance a seemingly non-descript, dirt-encrusted shard of pottery.

But it's the one find that made the whole expensive exercise very worthwhile because it may help the archaeologists to date the site, to put it in historical in context and from there, perhaps begin to answer some of the puzzling questions posed by the Cairncastle settlement.

Were the earthworks - a substantial civil engineering project in the late Bronze Age - accumulated as a defensive structure, perhaps topped with a palisade fence? Or did the site perform some mystical ceremonial function?

The most pertinent question from those who hiked to the 1,200 ft promontory was why build up there, seemingly in the middle of nowhere and exposed to the wind and rain that lash the site with almost predictable regularity.

As it turns out the site was actually right in the middle of somewhere because the tell-tale signs of 14 stone-and-earth round houses - foundations, cobbles, even hearths and charred animal bones - were excavated just a few feet away.

The existence of a nearby flint mine, thought to date to this era of pre-history, had already been documented.