ADS Update

Stuart Jeffrey

This article covers just a few of the new resources made available via the ADS since the last issue of the newsletter. A quick visit to the Collection History page of our website will provide the complete list. It is also possible to be kept up to date on new releases via the ADS RSS feed available from our home page.

September saw the online release of the Silchester Project Roman Town Insula IX archive. (http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/resources.html?silchester_ahrc_2007)

The Roman city of Calleva Atrebatum was subjected to an extensive programme of excavations by the Society of Antiquaries of London between 1890 and 1909. In 1997 a new programme of excavations began on part of insula ix with the aim of exploring the full sequence of occupation from the late Iron Age through to post-Roman abandonment. It rapidly emerged that House 1 had a complex history of development with abandonment and demolition in the mid 3rd century AD.

As well as being a significant archive in its own right, this release is an exemplar archive for the Linking Electronic Archive to Publication (LEAP) project (http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/leap/). As such it represents one of the most sophisticated demonstrations of just what is possible when an archaeological archive can utilise online technologies to link directly with both a live database from the excavations and an interpretative journal article, in this case published in Internet Archaeology, the ADS partner in the LEAP project. The corresponding article can be found in Internet Archaeology 21: http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue21/index.html

The Council for Scottish Archaeology's annual Discovery and Excavation in Scotland (DES) publication has long been a mainstay for both reporting and researching archaeology in Scotland and is unique in Europe. It was with much pleasure that October saw the online release of digitised versions of DES from 1947-2001 hosted by the ADS. All are available directly for download in Adobe PDF format. (http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/resources.html?des)

Also in October the ADS released a major new resource for Egyptologists on the web. The Oxford Expedition to Egypt (OEE) Scene Details Database, an archaeological and bibliographical database of (arguably) the most informative two-dimensional art of Ancient Egypt: the carved and painted scenes and scene details in private tombs of the 'Pyramid Age' or Old Kingdom period (c. 2650-2150 BC). A detailed look at this resource is in the Collection Highlights of this edition of ADS News on page 14. (http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/resources.html?oee_ahrc_2006 )

In celebration of the Society for Medieval Archaeology's 50th anniversary the first fifty volumes of Medieval Archaeology have been made available in digital form. The papers are searchable in a number of ways and the complete series of indexes has also been published. The release will ultimately comprise two parts; the currently released digitised articles followed by the corresponding plates and copyrighted images, due in 2008. This resource represents a freely available form of one of the UK's most significant scholarly journals and will further enhance its status as an invaluable source for archaeological research. (http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/library/med_arch/index.cfm)

January saw the launch of the Late Prehistoric Pottery Gazetteer. How many later prehistoric pottery collections are there in England? This simple question was the basis for a survey funded by English Heritage at the instigation of the Prehistoric Ceramics Research Group. The goal of the survey was to create a register of all the collections which date between the Late Bronze Age and the Late Iron Age, c 1000 BC-AD 50, and to complement this with a bibliography of published collections. Now available for live query or for download, the gazetteer database comprises details of over 7000 collections. (http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/resources.html?lppg_eh_2007)

Also in January, the Scotland's First Settlers Project archive was launched. This project was set up in 1998 to provide a detailed study of the Mesolithic around the Inner Sound and Sound of Raasay, between Skye and the west coast of Scotland. Fieldwork consisted of coastal survey, test pitting and selected excavation. The archive consists of roughly 1700 files and including documents, data and images. (http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/resources.html?sfs_ba_2007)

The resources detailed above represent only a small fraction of the archives and publications that have been released recently. For example, hundreds of new grey literature reports have also been added to the Grey Literature Library and many new additions have been made to the PhD Library. It goes without saying that a few moments exploring the website will reward the researcher with many items of interest.

Stuart Jeffrey is the ADS User Services Manager, sj523@york.ac.uk