Seven thousand collections -

Seven thousand collections -- on the Web. How many later prehistoric pottery collections are there inEngland? This simple question was the basis for a survey funded byEnglish Heritage at the instigation INSTIGATION. The act by which one incites another to do something, as to injure a third person, or to commit some crime or misdemeanor, to commence a suit or to prosecute a criminal. Vide Accomplice. of the Prehistoric Ceramics ResearchGroup. The goal of the survey was to create a register of all thecollections which date between the Late Bronze Age and the Late IronAge, c. 1000 BC--AD 50, and to complement this with a bibliography ofpublished collections. From January 1996 to October 1998, a team of 21 surveyors fromacross the country was engaged in the desktop recording of as manycollections as they could find. This recording was conducted using asingle-page proforma which requested the following information abouteach collection: date of record, survey area, name of collection,county, parish, NGR NGR National Grid Reference (UK)NGR National Grape Registry (UC Davis)NGR National Guard RegulationNGR Non Grain Raising (wood finish), SMR (Specialized Mobile Radio) The communications services used by police, ambulances, taxicabs, trucks and other delivery vehicles. Throughout the U.S., approximately 3,000 independent operators are licensed by the FCC to offer this service, which provides always-on , Scheduled Ancient Monuments code, type of siteusing the RCHME RCHME Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (UK)Thesaurus of Monument Types (1995), current location ofcollection, final curatorial location, method of recovery (excavation,field-walking, evaluation, pipeline, causal pick-up, watching brief,other, no information available), size of collection, date range, andwhether the collection had been published. Museums, units, amateurgroups and individual collectors were contacted by the local surveyor. If the collection had been published and that information wasavailable in the public domain, then details derived from thepublication were recorded using a second, single-page proforma. Thisrequested a full reference for the publication, and the followinginformation if available: number and weight of the sherds,`condition' of collection (total profiles, partial profiles,measurable rims, rims present but diameters not reconstructable), otherpottery present at site by date range, other ceramic artefacts recoveredwith the later prehistoric collection (briquetage, clay weight, clayspindle whorl whorln.1. A form that coils or spirals; a curl or swirl.2. A turn of the cochlea or of the ethmoidal crest.3. An area of hair growing in a radial manner.4. , crucible, mould, oven/hearth furniture, other clayartefact See artifact. ), other non-ceramic artefacts (copper alloy object, ironobject, quern, slag, worked bone object, stone weight, stone whorl,worked flint), details about deep stratification on site (ditches withmore than one layer, rampart, well, midden middendungheap. , quarry hollows, house/yardfloor, other), pits (how many), structures (curvilinear/drip gully,posthole post��hole?n.A hole dug in the ground to hold a fence post.Noun 1. posthole - a hole dug in the ground to hold a fence postpost holehole - an opening deliberately made in or through something round structure, 4 or 6 post structure, fence lines, grave,shrine, rectangular building, square barrow, other), contextual detailsfor the later prehistoric pottery specifically, presence of an archiveand scientific reports about or associated with the later prehistoricpottery (radiocarbon dating, TL dating, petrological analysis, heavymineral analysis, X-RF spectroscopy, neutron activation analysis Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) is a nuclear process used for determining certain concentrations of elements in a vast amount of materials. NAA allows discrete sampling of elements as it disregards the chemical form of a sample, and focuses solely on its nucleus. ,residue analysis, other). The survey discovered 7138 collections of later prehistoric potteryin England of which 2032 (29%) are published. The proforma data aboutthese collections were entered into a relational database using Accesssoftware. The database is currently maintained at the Department ofArchaeology, University of Southampton In the most recent RAE assessment (2001), it has the only engineering faculty in the country to receive the highest rating (5*) across all disciplines.[3] According to The Times Higher Education Supplement and known as The LaterPrehistoric Pottery Collections Register and Bibliography for England: aGazetteer gazetteer(găz'ĭtēr`), dictionary or encyclopedia listing alphabetically the names of places, political divisions, and physical features of the earth and giving some information about each. . What is the data like? What kinds of information are there? For example, there are 272 known later prehistoric potterycollections in Berkshire and 85 of these are published representing over30% in print. In contrast Norfolk has 799 collections but only 4% ofthese are published -- because 605 of these are from fieldwalking. Themost common method of recovering later prehistoric pottery in thiscountry is by excavation (38%), with 23% by fieldwalking. More recenttechniques of evaluation, watching brief and pipeline investigationshave 3% produced new collections. However, across the country the methodof recovery is highly varied -- in Hampshire, the commonest form is byexcavation (33%) but in Northamptonshire collections were morefrequently recovered through fieldwalking (42%). Watching briefs,evaluations and pipeline work have had a greater impact on recovery inNorthamptonshire (28%) than in Hampshire (11%). Artefact scatters account for the most frequent type of site fromwhich collections had been derived (24%), while the more famoushillforts make up only 5% of all collections. Settlements (enclosed,unenclosed and undefined ones) account for 31%. But what about the size of these collections? Only three registeredcollections, Danebury (Hampshire), Potterne (Wiltshire) and Dragonby(Lincolnshire), have extremely large assemblages of more than 50,000sherds. There are only eight other sites with more than 20,000 sherds.The majority of published collections consist of less than 3000 sherdsand 51% have less than 1000 sherds in them. Do you want to know more? If you have access to the Internet, thenyou can explore the database yourself at http://www.arch.soton.ac.uk/Research/ PotteryGazetteer/ Or would you like some of the data on disk or a printout of aspecial query of your own? This is available by contacting The GazetteerCo-ordinator, Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton,Avenue Campus, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK (e-mail gaz@soton.ac.uk) whowill tell you the cost for the production of data onto a disk in eitherAccess or Excel or for making the query and sending you the printout. The Prehistoric Ceramics Research Group (PCRG) is committed to themaintenance of this database with annual updating of the register andthe addition of new collections as they are found. However, this isdependent upon the information being made available through planningauthorities and other interested parties. A recommendation in the reportabout the survey results submitted to English Heritage has proposed thatcurators should require applicants for planning permission to providedata about any later prehistoric pottery collections discovered throughtheir interventions, using the survey proforma. This would prevent anycontinuation of the major impediment which all surveyors discoveredduring their searches -- the standard of information presentation inmost reports is highly variable; obvious details such as the size ofassemblages or the NGR were not always provided. The Gazetteer is more than just a list of collections. It is atremendous new resource for the investigation and management of not onlylater prehistoric pottery but also the later prehistory of England. ELAINE L. MORRIS & T.C. CHAMPION(*) (*) Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton,Southampton s017 1BJ, England.