ArchSearch News: the online catalogue of the ADS
Archives released in the last six months have been dominated by small finds. As well as updating established data sets, and preparing phase one of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link Archive, staff have been busy building interfaces to data about artefacts.
The English Heritage funded project to create a South Yorkshire / North Derbyshire Medieval Ceramics Reference Collection is now complete. Components include an online database of fabrics including thin sections images and a number of analyses, catalogues and reports. The reference collection should prove invaluable to researchers.
Continuing the pottery theme, recent additions to the National Museum Liverpool online excavation archives includes a pottery database and images of ware types from investigations on the site of the Hancock's Pottery in the town of Buckley in Flintshire, North Wales. Other archives pertain to the remains of a late 16th to early 17th century wood-fired glass furnace excavated in Glass Hey Field, Hall Lane, Bickerstaffe, Lancashire in 1968- 1969 by the Pilkington Glass Museum, St. Helens, Merseyside.
Moving from ceramics to beads, Birte Brugmann's 'Beads from Anglo-Saxon Graves' dataset, containing information on 32,000 beads from Anglo-Saxon graves of the 5th to 8th centuries, has also been made available online. The dataset represents beads of a variety of materials from 106 sites in nine Anglo-Saxon regions and was created as part of Brugmann's 2004 publication 'Glass beads from Early Anglo-Saxon Graves. A study on the provenance and chronology of glass beads from Anglo-Saxon Graves'.
Photograph of Vessels from Hancock's Pottery from the National Museums Liverpool Excavation archive.
Also of interest to finds specialists, the database resulting from the 1966 and 1967 excavations at the Roman cemetery at Brougham, Cumbria has also been made available online. The excavations, carried out by the then Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, uncovered a cremation burial cemetery of the third century to the east of the fort and vicus of Brougham. This remains the largest area of a Roman cemetery to have been excavated in Northern England. The range of finds produced have long been recognised as a resource of national importance. The database is a result of postexcavation research carried out between 2000 and 2002 and accompanies a Britannia Monograph.
For those with an interest in things Roman, or in the archaeology of Sussex, volume 138 of the Sussex Archaeological Collections is now accessible. Many articles, for example, 'Measurement and metaphor: the design and meaning of building 3 at Fishbourne Roman palace' by John Manley are of more than just local importance. Volume 137 is also available in full text, while abstracts are available for more recent material.
ArchSearch continues to grow with the addition of records covering the year 2000 from the English Heritage Excavation Index for England. Our e-theses collection has also seen the addition of Doortje Van Hove's University of Southampton PhD thesis 'Imagining Calabria - A GIS approach to Neolithic landscapes'.
ArchSearch News is brought to you by the ADS Technical Team: Tony Austin, Jen Mitcham, Kieron Niven, Stewart Waller and Keith Westcott.
ArchSearch is online at: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue
