During the last few months, where much of the population has been in lockdown, many of us have become aware of the rich online resources. New resources have been provided and many organisations have reviewed access and cost. We have been able to access more things and at a lower cost to the user. Perhaps some such resources were previously available, but we didn’t realise or had not the time/opportunity to look. One such resource is “The Archaeology Data Service”
https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/about/background.xhtml or ADS for short. I have long used this resource, as a professional archaeologist I turn to it regularly to check what investigations may have happened in an area or to look at certain specific topics for an area. It is a wonderful resource, as it turns that vast body of reports and data, often never published, into a resource which researchers and interested parties can access. As the ADS website states:
“Archaeology is in a special position in that much of the creation of its data results from destruction of primary evidence, making access to data all the more critical in order to test, assess, and subsequently reanalyse and reinterpret both data and the hypotheses arising from them. Over the years, archaeologists have amassed a vast collection of fieldwork data archives, a significant proportion of which remain unpublished. Access to data, even those which are published, is often difficult or inconvenient at best. The ADS is building an integrated on-line catalogue to its collections, and a gateway to other collections, which will be available over the Internet”
(https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/about/background.xhtml – accessed 25 May 2020)
Reports by the founder of Abrams Archaeology can be found at this link:
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