During this year’s Digital Past Conference in Aberystwyth, we were invited to attend and take part in a workshop discussing the management and archiving of digital datasets. A number of organisations were asked to attend the workshop and give short presentations on how they use digital data.
Along with Allen Archaeology the speakers were from; Archaeology Data Service, The Discovery Programme, DigVentures, Historic England, Wessex Archaeology and the University of Bradford.
Chris Casswell, the head of fieldwork at DigVentures and Li Sou, a PhD student from Bradford hosted the workshop.
While a number of topics, including storage space and metadata were covered, the one most affecting our sector was archiving. In commercial and field archaeology we are required by law to archive the data that we collect for clients as part of the planning process. If you are unfamiliar with this archiving method please follow the link here to our blog explaining archiving.
The main observation was of a blinkered understanding by research groups of the differing archiving requirements commercial units deal with on a daily basis. There is a lack of cohesion with regard to the physical archives and the proposed use of digital archiving with ADS.
Archiving requirements and field methodologies differ from county to county. Field methodologies are usually very similar with differences usually in the kind of cameras used and the specificity of the sampling method (how much we excavate and environmentally sample). However, archive requirements can differ greatly and with technology changing at such a rapid pace and companies working in all different parts of the country it is an issue that is becoming more and more important.
While in the past a small to medium archaeology companies may only work in one county and only deposit in one archive, the nature of commercial archaeology now enables companies to work all over the country. This is a wonderful opportunity for a company and for archaeologists to encounter all sorts of archaeology in their career without having to work the ‘archaeological circuit’ (working on temporary contracts from company to company). However, it does make the work of our post-excavation archiving teams difficult.
These differences are down to a number of reasons. Funding is foremost in this and it is not an easy fix. The issues that other groups brought in also include differences in storage requirements and having appropriate systems to store and process the metadata. These are also not easy fixes and require much collaboration between many different groups, including commercial archaeology units. This conference was one of the first to begin the conversation and in bringing together people from all sectors of archaeology I am optimistic that we will develop something that is more suited to both research groups and commercial companies.
3D image created by Shoned of a medieval ankle-boot found in Lincoln
P.S Some of the terms used in this blog are quite industry heavy, here for your perusal is a Glossary to give you a hand.
Archiving:
All of the information that we acquire on an archaeological site, context sheets, photographs, the final report and finds are all deposited within the local archive for the area of that site. In order for that data to be compatible with other data that other companies and research groups deposit, it must be submitted to conform with specific requirements which can be unique to each archive, .i.e. photograph formats (TIFF or JPEG), report formatted as pdf.
Digital vs Physical Archiving:
Physical archives are the finds themselves (pottery, animal bone etc) and the paper documents that were created on site, such as the context sheets, printed photographs (in the case of film photographs, slides and negatives), printed copies of the report and such.
Digital archiving are the photographs as digital media (JPEG, TIFF) archived using ADS (Archaeological Data Service), by uploading the files to a digital archive. This can include digital versions of the report, 3D models, GIS projects, CAD drawings, Geophysical data etc. I could go on and on.
Metadata: data that describes and gives information about other data e.g. a photograph that contains information regarding the date and time it was taken.