8 posts authored by Jennifer Wexler

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

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

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…

The Devizes/Wiltshire Museum Collection in the Bronze Age Index

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…

Things that go bump in the night: The Selborne-Blackmoor Hoard; the significance of LBA weapon hoards

Authors: Jennifer Wexler

Our new app focuses on the wonderful Blackmoor Hoard (partially pictured above). Known also as the ‘Blackmoor-Wolmer Forest’ or ‘Selborne’ Hoard, the hoard was found near the hamlet of Blackmore (just east of Selborne, Hampshire) on the land that was originally part of Lord Selborne’s estate. Multiple hoards from different periods, including various Romano-British coin hoards, have been found in…

Later Prehistoric Britain: the Development of Bronze Age Metal Objects

Authors: Jennifer Wexler

What we call the ‘later prehistory’ in Britain and Ireland traditionally spans the first use of metal artefacts and thereafter the replacement of bronze technologies with iron, an overall period of approximately two and a half millennia which starts around 2500 BC and, by academic convention, is said to end with the Roman conquest of Britain in AD 43 (which brings in the a series of hitherto…

Online Transcription

Authors: Jennifer Wexler

How can it be useful? Letters, documents and literary works are useful for several different kinds of research into the human past. For example, transcribing old excavation records can make them more amenable to spatial and quantitative analysis, whilst transcribing historical documents from past literate societies can be compared and contrasted with the evidence from contemporary objects. Other…

The British Museum Index

Authors: Jennifer Wexler

The index of the British Museum was a major archaeological initiative first founded in 1913 and then moved to the British Museum in the 1920s. For over 70 years, it represented the highest standards of Bronze Age artefact studies. This catalogue contains index cards detailing object find spots and types, alongside detail line drawings and a wide range of further information about the object’s…

Preparing the British Museum Bronze Age index for transcription

Authors: Jennifer Wexler

Since late 2013, the MicroPasts team has been preparing the British Museum‘s (BM) Bronze Age Index to be the first offering on our crowd-sourcing platform. This corpus consists of around 30,000 (roughly A4 sized) cards (holding information going back to as early as 1913). The majority of these are double sided and generally have text on the front and a line drawing on the reverse (there are many…