19 posts tagged with "Archaeology"

The Bronze Age Index (BAI)

Authors: Daniel Pett

There's something quite magical about the idea of an object that is still safely in our stores being given to a child to hold and experience so far away. Back in 2013, our team was awarded Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding to work on the MicroPasts project, which in part focused on the British Museum's locked away index cards that made up the inventory of Bronze Age implements…

Artefacts, Archives and Ancient Egypt: Crowd-sourcing the EES object card records

Authors: Chiara Bonacchi

In 2015 the Egypt Exploration Society expanded its annual archive volunteer programme and made digitization its primary goal. Though the Society had already scanned a large number of archival documents and images, the new referencing system developed for the archive during 2014 had to be implemented across its virtual collections. To this end, the Society’s collections of object cards were felt to…

Naval heritage from the Mary Rose to HMS Hood

Authors: Alastair Miles Chiara Bonacchi

In March 2015, the team at the Mary Rose Trust met with Chiara, who introduced MicroPasts and the various projects that the MicroPasts team had been involved in. The Mary Rose Trust team were hugely impressed with the passion of the collaborators that had contributed to the online projects as well as the quality of the work that had been produced and the possibility of achieving a lot in a very…

‘I was made in the year 1510’

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…

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…

Initial reflections on the MicroPasts Knowledge Exchange Workshop

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…

The MicroPasts conference on YouTube

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

The Mary Rose & MicroPasts Collaboration, Week 1

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…

Crowdsourced

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 (Data) Science Behind Digital Heritage

Authors: Tullia Fraser

Digital engagement is beyond posting the odd picture of an artefact, as we learnt in our final practical session in Digital Heritage at Durham University. There is also a process of looking back and analyzing data, spotting trends and features to further improve whatever project you may be involved in. In this session, we utilized R software, an open-source software (and programming language). The…

Later Bronze Age Ornaments

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…

MicroPasts Crowd-funding

Authors: Daniel Pett Chiara Bonacchi

Hello! We’ve just launched the latest part of the MicroPasts project: a crowd-funding website. Have a look and see if you can help. Through this website, it is possible to raise up to £5,000 to fund archaeological or historical research projects that have been developed and will be undertaken collaboratively by professionals with institutional links (e.g. working in universities, museums…

MicroPasts at Digital Humanities 2014, Lausanne

Authors: Daniel Pett

The project has just been represented at the Digital Humanities 2014 conference in Lausanne, Switzerland.

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…

MicroPasts goes to Paris

Authors: Daniel Pett

Hi all, last week we had the opportunity to introduce the MicroPasts project at two international conferences: the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, in Austin, and the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology conference in Paris. In Paris, we discussed our experience of developing the MicroPasts platforms so far, our aims, the challenges we have…

Hello MicroPasts, thrilled to meet you!

Authors: Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert

My name is Adi, and I’m a research associate at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. Earlier this month I joined the MicroPasts team – and I’m especially excited about this project as it feeds into my background and interests in so many ways. Before coming to London I was an archaeologist and academic back home in Israel. A few years ago, I created the West Bank and East Jerusalem Archaeological…

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…

Crowd-sourcing, crowd-funding and archaeology

Authors: Chiara Bonacchi Daniel Pett

Hello! We are a team of researchers from University College London and the British Museum. In the past few years, we have been looking into the new opportunities provided by digital technologies for public engagement in archaeology, through several seminar series and a recent edited volume on the topic. We are now lucky enough to have funds from the AHRC to work on a project entitled Crowd and…

Public Archaeology in response to the crisis

Authors: Chiara Bonacchi

Hello, I am just back from Public Archaeology in a time of crisis a brilliant conference organised at the Valley of the Temples, in Agrigento (Italy), where I was invited as speaker along with other Italian, Greek, Spanish and UK delegates. Organisers asked: how should archaeology change not only to survive the economic crisis, but to improve through it? The answer, I believe, lies in projects…