Message
Dear All
I'm happy to report that Professor Gosden has been in
touch with an offer of a presentation for the forthcoming HER Forum Winter
Meeting (7th December). This has been accepted and we may thus look forward
to hearing more about the project then.
Best wishes
Nick
Reply from the principle investigator of the English Landscapes and Identities
Project, Professor Chris Gosden:
Dear All,
Many thanks indeed for your interest in this project, which I am very
excited about. I attach a press release on the project which gives a little more
information. We have just formally started the project and are still recruiting
for posts. We have had some consultation with interested parties, although we
are only now starting to announce the project more widely. I should stress at
the outset that we see this project very much as a collaborative and cooperative
one which we hope will benefit as many aspects of the archaeological community
as possible.
The key to the project is looking at continuity and change in the nature of
landscape layout and use between the middle Bronze Age and the Domesday Book,
which is obviously very big, but does have the advantage of cutting across the
normal period boundaries and looking where points of change actually fall. A
vital set of data is that from the National Mapping Programme at EH, which we
are hoping to complement with information from the ADS and other sources. We
will also overlay artefactual information onto the mapped landscapes to look at
correlations between landscape forms and divisions and various classes of
artefacts - this will involve metalwork in particular, using PAS data.
A key source of information will be the HERs, although we are very
aware of what a difficult time it is for many people at the moment. The project
will be in two broad phases: first an England-wide survey of the nature of field
systems, land divisions, trackways and settlements looking at regional
variations and differences; then we will focus in on a number of case studies
and integrate broader sets of information on artefacts and other aspects of the
evidence. In both these phases we are hoping to work with HER data, but we hope
to be able to give back data which has been enhanced and added to, as well as
taking data in the first place. We would be interested in talking to you about
how such two-way interchange might work. The more detailed case studies will be
partly influenced by the enthusiasm of particular HERs for work of this kind. We
will really get going in October and will start to get in touch with individual
HERs then.
The project will have two major outputs: a monograph (and ancillary
articles); and a website which can be searched using natural language queries.
We have a number of programmers work on this, in collaboration with a team
working with EH.
There is no doubt that this is an ambitious project, premised on the fact
that there is now a huge amount of data out there, much of it in digital form.
It is experimental both in an analytical sense and also in the combination of
people and bodies that might come together around it. We are very much hoping
that people will be enthusiastic about it and hope to work closely with as many
of you as possible.
Best wishes,
Chris Gosden
Portico: your gateway to information on sites in the National Heritage Collection; have a look and tell us what you think. http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/professional/archives-and-collect ions/portico/
