Have you seen their shows? They’ll often have 8 or 12 trained archaeologists digging - which many if not most other digs don’t have. They also bring in a wide variety of experts in many different fields - pottery specialists, coin specialist, human remains, geophysics, landscape investigators, historians with different specialties - ON-SITE, DURING the dig.
Stopping in three days doesn’t mean that anything is lost; it means that the dig is very limited. They’re virtually always limited to a few trenches and test pits, never the whole site like you see on regular long digs. What they find is well documented, AND THEN if others think it’s warranted, they can do a more extensive dig.
Many of those 200+ digs wouldn’t have been done otherwise - there simply isn’t the funding to go around. What they’ve done is show that yes, a site has something worth further investigating, or no, it hasn’t. As Tony Robinson said at the end of one dig, “We always said it would happen, and after 10 years it finally his. On this episode, we have found NOTHING.”
Make no mistake; some of their three-day digs HAVE been followed up by regular long entire-site digs.
