Collection Highlights
In the following sections colleagues and collaborators present their personal views on some favourite ADS resources.
Danebury Excavations Digital Archive
Jen Mitcham
ADS Curatorial and Technical Officer
Danebury was one of the first archives I was given to work on when I started at the ADS in 2003. I was really excited to be given this archive as Danebury is a site that I felt I knew very well. I had learned much about the site through reading books and reports from Cunliffe's excavations at Danebury in preparation for tutorials as an undergraduate. Perhaps it was this site which first sparked my interest in the Iron Age and specifically in hillforts. When I went on to do a masters degree at Southampton I chose to carry out a spatial analysis of the placement of hillforts in Hampshire using Geographic Information Systems and Danebury was one of the key sites I was looking at as part of my fieldwork and research.
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| Earthworks at Danebury, B.Cunliffe |
This archive is an interesting one to me for a number of reasons. It is a good demonstration of the importance of digital archiving. Cunliffe's excavations were carried out between 1969 and 1988, and the processing of the large datasets from the excavations continued beyond this period. The decision to computerise the archives from Danebury was taken at a time when the use of computers in archaeology was in its infancy and issues of digital archiving within archaeology had hardly been thought of. Database files had been stored as ASCII space delimited files in the Oxford University VAX mainframe archive and some files had already been lost as a result of several changes of location and mainframe. Database files containing information on pits, pottery, animal bone and daub however have been successfully rescued with the necessary metadata and code-breakers that will allow future researchers to use and re-analyse this data for many years to come. A selection of slides relating to the excavations has also been scanned and they are available for download alongside the database files.
Another neat thing about this dataset is the way it links to other materials within our archives. We preserve and disseminate digital versions of out-of-print CBA Research Reports and 4 of these reports relate to the excavations at Danebury hillfort. It is therefore quick and easy for people who are using the Danebury archive to download PDF versions of sections of the reports in order to enhance their understanding of the hillfort and the datasets that relate to it.
Danebury:
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/resources.html?danebury_var_2003
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