Collection Highlights

Here colleagues and collaborators present their personal views on some favourite ADS resources.

Roman Amphorae: a digital resource

Jonathan Bateman

Jonathan Bateman
ADS Curatorial Officer

The amphora is a ubiquitous artefact throughout the realm of Roman influence and critical to our understanding of the movement of people, things and ideas during this period. Having been a subject for study for over 100 years their remains have shaped our understanding of the Roman period, and the study of amphora has become a highly specialised, but also slightly impenetrable corner of the discipline.

'Roman Amphorae: a digital resource' sets out to open amphora studies to archaeologists, museum professionals and students not familiar with, for example, what exactly a 'Dressel 8'looks like. Having recently found myself plunged into the world of the amphora obsessive, with a current European project on underwater archaeology (VENUS), this resource has jumped straight to the top of my favourites list.

The collection presents exactly what you'd expect amphora specialists to know off the top of their heads, but it's here at your fingertips. About 250 amphora forms are represented, detailing their distinctive features, dates of production, places of origin, distribution, and what might have been contained in them. With illustrations of form and fabrics the collection represents a real tool for non-specialists to use to make a reasonable attempt at identifying an amphora in any collection, or even a vessel in a drawing or photograph. Comprehensive drawings and photographs of example vessels and their fabrics make confirming an initial identification much easier.

An example of the search interface showing samples images for each characteristic.

An example of the search interface showing samples images for each characteristic is shown in the right.

As well as helping to answer specific questions with searching by the physical characteristics, the resource can also help to give an overview of amphora production, trade and consumption through searches of date and location of production, distribution and even possible contents. The authors (Professor Simon Keay and Dr David Williams of the University of Southampton) claim that this is an introductory resource rather than a definitive study for amphora specialists. For the non-specialists this does tend to raise the question of exactly how much more is there to know about amphora, so comprehensive are the details provided for each vessel form.

Take Almagro 51A & B for example, a rather pretty, rotund amphora. We have a comprehensive description of its form and the relations of its four variant types; details of its date range (3rd to 6th centuries AD), origin (Lusitania) and distribution (Iberian peninsular, but also Italy, Algeria, Carthage, Libya and Germany); evidence of its likely contents (fish) and its usual capacity (c 8 litres); illustrated listings of its characteristics; four example photographs and eleven drawings of the type; a visual description of the fabric and its petrology, accompanied by eleven zoomable and annotated thin-section slides; nine zoomable, high-resolution images of specimens of the fabric; and a bibliography of sources relating to this amphora type - should you feel the need to chase further details!

I'm fairly confident that a good roam around 'Roman amphorae' will at least allow me to nod knowledgably along when the conversation inevitably turns to these iconic pots at my next meeting with some of our European partners.

Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Project

Michael Charno

Michael Charno
ADS Curatorial Officer

Since coming to the ADS in September I have been eased into the procedures and system with relatively straightforward archives, such as The Nidderdale AONB Archaeological Survey Archiving Project. In addition, much of my time has been spent endeavouring to prepare all of our archives for transport to AHDS deep storage, which with 300+ collections, has been quite a task. These assignments, along with the other day to day tasks, have given me both a broad and narrow perspective on ADS operations. However, with a personal interest in geospatial data and its applications, I had been waiting for a complex project which allowed me to employ these interests. The Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Project (TAESP), a joint project of the University of Glasgow, the University of Cyprus and Oregon State University, provided just that.

The TAESP project archive is an exemplar of the Linking Electronic Archives and Publications (LEAP) project, a joint venture between the ADS and Internet Archaeology. Because of this, the TAESP project required a standard ADS archive in addition to a WebGIS interface related to the associated Internet Archaeology article. The archive included database tables, zipped archives of the projects shapefiles (GIS), and a number of images including artefact drawings, fieldwork photographs, and panoramic VR movies. The database and GIS files constituted the raw data from the project. The derived data for these data types were left to the forthcoming Internet Archaeology portion of the project, in particular the associated WebGIS. The article's authors (Given et al) provided a number of specific views (110 to be exact) into the spatial data related to various sections or topics within the article. Using our existing template, a WebGIS interface was created and embedded into the article to allow the reader to analyse the spatial data related to a particular section of the article. These views and their layers were largely based on queries into the database and GIS file attribute tables, which were created by the article's authors. Additionally, a so called 'master map' was created to allow users to analyse the entire spatial dataset.

In addition to getting to work with WebGIS, a novel aspect of this publication and archive was the dissemination of raw and derived data. This allows the user to not only assess the authors and data creators' interpretations, but also interrogate the raw data to potentially come up with their own conclusions. This ability for the user to develop new interpretations is one of a number of issues surrounding the LEAP project and its objectives, and which made this such an interesting project to work on. The TAESP project archive is scheduled for release in June 2007.

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