ADS Update
ADS
This section 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.
England's Historic Seascapes is a programme of projects funded through the Aggregate Levy Sustainability Fund to develop a nationally-applicable method for assessing and mapping the historic character of our present coastal and marine environment: Historic Seascape Characterisation (HSC). In doing so, HSC will extend to the coastal and marine zones the principles of Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) already applied over much of England's land area. (http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/projArch/alsf/seascapes.cfm).
An Urnes style buckle taken from the VASLE Late Saxon Buckles PDF.
The Viking and Anglo-Saxon Landscape and Economy (VASLE) Project. In the last fifteen years the role of metal-detected objects in the study of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian England has greatly increased through reporting to the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Early Medieval Corpus. There are now thousands more artefacts and coins known than a decade ago which, in conjunction with fieldwork, have the potential to revolutionise our understanding of the early medieval period. The Viking and Anglo-Saxon Landscape and Economy (VASLE) project was the first attempt to examine this data on a national scale. Such an approach enables the detailed analysis of the nature of portable antiquities data, the biases within such datasets and the relationship between patterns of recovery and historic settlement. This digital archive released by the ADS is a major outcome of the VASLE project. It contains both a national database for finds dated to AD c.700-1050; and a sites database providing further information about finds recovered from over 65 so-called 'productive sites'. The archive should be used in conjunction with the report: "Anglo-Saxon landscape and economy: using portable antiquities to study Anglo-Saxon and Viking Age England", to be published in Internet Archaeology.(http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/archive/vasle_ahrc_2008/)
The Anglo-Saxon Kent Electronic Database (ASKED) was built collaboratively by Stuart Brookes and Sue Harrington to facilitate their PhD researches at UCL Institute of Archaeology, from 1998-2000. The resource at the heart of ASKED is the archaeological evidence for the Anglo-Saxon populations of east and west Kent AD 400-750. The evidence consists of the human skeletal remains, the grave goods and the burial structures from 53 inhumation cemeteries. The elements of its content presented here, act as the pilot database for a much larger corpus of material currently being gathered under the aegis of the 'Beyond the Tribal Hidage Project' - a Leverhulme funded research project being undertaken at UCL Institute of Archaeology. (http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/archive/asked_ahrc_2008/)
Medieval Britain and Ireland indexes is a major new online resource and new venture for the Medieval Archaeology journal and contains extended overviews of results, finds and contexts right back to 1956. The selection each year will aim to cover new evidence from urban, rural, religious, Saxon, Viking or medieval contexts. (http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/library/mbi/)
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.
A photograph of Gunfleet Lighthouse from the Southwold to Clacton seascape project by Oxford Archaeology.
