On the Web Winter 2000

In this column, which I hope will become something of a feature; I will try to point out some new, interesting and not so interesting archaeological web sites.

General links

The essential starting point for any exploration of British resources should be the CBA guide to archaeology online at http://www.britarch.ac.uk/info/uklinks.html.

For more far-flung links the Archaeological Resource Guide for Europe is located at http://odur.let.rug.nl/arge/ and for world archaeology start at the ArchNet Virtual Library for archaeology at http://www.lib.uconn.edu/ArchNet.

Media

Probably the most popular archaeological site on the web at the moment is the Time Team Live web site at http://www.channel4.com/timeteamlive/. This site is staggeringly popular, you can see the preparations for the next three-day special at Canterbury, read the fan mail about Mick Aston’s jumper and see how popular archaeology is! It is heartening to see how the public are interested in archaeology and archaeologists.

The BBC’s coverage of archaeology is gracelessly split between the history web site at http://www.bbc.co.uk/history and the education site at http://www.bbc.co.uk/education. Both sites do the difficult job of presenting material for all ages and have plenty of links to other resources and the coverage is worldwide. On the education site you can find the archive for Julian Richards’ Radio 4 series Mapping the Town, which will have finished it current series by the time you read this. Who would have thought that landscape archaeology would work so well on radio?

Units

There are always problems with listing web sites, as sites are likely to change or disappear quickly or worse not be updated.

There are still a few units that do not have any kind of web presence at all.

My pick of the current unit web sites would be the Heritage Trust of Lincolnshire’s informative site at http://www.cix.co.uk/~heritage/ It manages to present information to a range of audiences, covers “heritage”, not just archaeology and is regularly updated. You can even buy a listed building in Lincolnshire.

The recent MOLAS site at http://www.molas.org.uk/molas.html is disappointing – dull text with no images, and you have to go to main Museum of London site to find any useful information such as press releases.

General Projects

One of my favourite sites has been updated recently. It is the Friends of Williamson's Tunnels at http://www.williamsontunnels.com. Read this and marvel at the bizarre story of Joseph Williamson and his network of secret tunnels under Liverpool. The design puts many ‘professional’ sites to shame.

Journals

Assemblage is an online journal produced by students at Sheffield University found at http://www.shef.ac.uk/~assem/. It is irregularly produced and the last issue came out in April 2000. It is always interesting and I hope they can keep up the high standards of the first issues. Meanwhile the last few issues of Internet Archaeology at http://intarch.york.ac.uk/ have disappointed and not lived up to its early promise. Most of the recent papers have been about computer issues with few papers about archaeology.

Finds

The Portable Antiquities Scheme homepage at http://www.finds.org.uk/ is another resource that everyone should bookmark – the amount of information coming from the scheme is enormous and available online. More worrying is the Illegal Antiquities Research Centre at http://www-mcdonald.arch.cam.ac.uk/IARC/home.htm. The trade in illicit antiquities is not just a problem for others – it affects the UK as well, and everyone should be aware of it. Finally of course I must mention IFA’s very own site at http://www.archaeologists.net, which by the time you read this should have been updated considerably – with many IFA documents available online. If you have particular favourite web sites that you wish to share please contact the author. Finally, happy surfing.

Archweb