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Wonders of the Deep: Bronze Age Finds from the River Thames in the Bronze Age Index

January 08, 2016 Authors: Jennifer Wexler

Our penultimate Bronze Age Index project focuses on Bronze Age swords from the River Thames. Finds from the Thames and other watery locations in Britain and Northern Europe have fascinated scholars for many years, and recent excavations at Must Farm and Flag Fen show the incredible importance of riverine environments to prehistoric peoples. In a sense, Thames finds have been central to the study…

A Hollow Human Head of Bronze

December 18, 2015 Authors: Jennifer Wexler

This September we were lucky enough to have a visit from a group of Egyptian scholars organised by the Egypt Exploration Society (http://ees.ac.uk/news/index/322.html). The Egypt Exploration Society (EES) has been one of main crowd-sourcing collaborators, asking MicroPasts’ contributors to transcribe early 20th century excavation records from Amarna West and Amara, and we have now done 18 crowd…

‘I was made in the year 1510’

December 11, 2015 Authors: The Mary Rose Trust

The Mary Rose Trust are very excited to be working with Micropasts again. This time, we will be working towards the production of a 3D model of the Mary Rose bell, one of the most iconic items to have been raised from the wreck site. The bell recovered from the Mary Rose was one of the last items to be recovered from the wreck site (it was found under the ship below the starboard side). It was…

Initial reflections on the MicroPasts Knowledge Exchange Workshop

November 12, 2015 Authors: James Doeser

How do we use crowd-based methods? What benefits do they generate? Where do they fall short? How can we sustain them? And how do they support the work of organisations in a heritage ecology? These were the questions addressed at a knowledge exchange workshop hosted by the UCL Institute of Archaeology on 23 September. It builds upon the MicroPasts project, which has put nearly £400,000 of Arts and…

MicroPasts Knowledge Exchange Workshops

September 22, 2015 Authors: Chiara Bonacchi

Two back-to-back workshops were held on 23 September at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. The aim of the MicroPasts Knowledge Exchanges workshops was to share the practices, shortcomings and achievements experienced by the MicroPasts project and use these as fodder for wider discussion about the use and evaluation of both crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding within a broader heritage ‘ecology’. Below…

The Mary Rose & MicroPasts Collaboration, Week 1

May 29, 2015 Authors: Chiara Bonacchi

On Friday 22nd May, the Mary Rose Trust and MicroPasts teams launched a collaborative 3D photo-masking pilot project on the MicroPasts crowdsourcing platform. The aim is to create 3D models for three of the museum’s artefacts. We are really grateful to MicroPasts collaborators for helping complete 37% of the application already (as of 29th May)! It is exciting to see people engaging with the…

The MicroPasts conference on YouTube

May 19, 2015 Authors: Chiara Bonacchi

If you missed the MicroPasts conference on ‘Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding our Human Past’, on 31 March 2015, you can now catch-up! We have published the videos of the presentations given on the day on our MicroPasts YouTube channel. Have a look and let us know any thoughts or questions! Chiara

Answers in the Amphoras

March 23, 2015 Authors: Andy Bevan

Carefully-made drawings have been a fundamental way that archaeologists have recorded their finds since the dawn of archaeology as a formal academic subject at the end of the 19th century. As time has gone on, these drawings have become ever more technical in their style and standardised in their components. Sadly, this means there are fewer opportunities these days for archaeological illustrators…

Crowd-sourcing and Crowd-funding our Human Past

March 19, 2015 Authors: Daniel Pett

The MicroPasts end of first phase funding conference will be held at the Royal Geographical Society on the 31st March 2015. We look forward to welcoming you and tickets can be purchased online or via contacting us directly. The conference programme has now been finalised and features some very interesting speakers as shown below. Lunch is provided in the ticket price and there will be some free…

Crowdsourced

February 13, 2015 Authors: Lisa Cardy

I’ve been a MicroPasts contributor for around two months now, a good time to write this post about why I wanted to be one of the ‘sourced’ crowd and what I’ve got out of it so far. To begin with, here’s my brief summary of MicroPasts: it’s a web-based collection of archaeological projects that anyone can get involved with. The MicroPasts site hosts lots of content, some of which I’ll return to…

The Devizes/Wiltshire Museum Collection in the Bronze Age Index

January 22, 2015 Authors: Jennifer Wexler

In the process of digitising the Bronze Age Index, we have come across a small collection of Index cards recording artefacts in the Wiltshire Museum (formerly the Devizes Museum: http://www.wiltshiremuseum.org.uk/). This was recently written up by Culture24 (http://www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/archaeology/art513504-bronze-age-finds-from-barrow-cemeteries-in-stonehenge-country-to-be…

Later Bronze Age Ornaments

December 11, 2014 Authors: Alex Davies

Bronze Age ornaments form a major category of metal artefact. Those made of gold are some of the most captivating prehistoric objects known to us. They are probably the most personal objects surviving as they were worn on the body and, as is still true today, were a daily and ever-present signaller of identity, status and an individual’s personality. The term ornament is rather cumbersome and old…