Just in time for Volunteers’ Week, 1-7 June in the UK, the Archives and Records Association (ARA) invited us to take part in their Outside the Box podcast!
Ros Cleal (Curator at AKM), Ros Preuss, Bev Stapleton, Prue Saunders (all volunteers with the digitisation project), and I chatted about how the project has been progressing, what it’s like volunteering at Avebury, and the kinds of stories we’ve started to explore.
You can listen to the interview on Spotify or via Libsyn.
A huge thanks to host Deborah for inviting us onto the show!
Outside the Box is a podcast about archives and the wonders they contain. Outside the Box is part of the Archives and Records Association’s Explore Your Archive campaign.
Dr Colleen Morgan was interviewed by Ellie Brennan on BBC Radio York on Friday 23 January. Listen to the clip below.
Transcript
Ellie Brennan:
Now, from dissertations and homework, to a very serious and amazing project going on to do with a world-famous stone circle. It’s going to be brought to life online for the first time. Experts from the University of York are involved in the work to digitise the archives about the Avebury stone circle in Wiltshire, and they’re going to make them available to the public.
And with me now is Dr Colleen Morgan, who is from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. Morning, Colleen.
Colleen Morgan:
Oh, so nice to join you, Ellie, thanks for the welcome.
Ellie Brennan:
Thank you for coming on and talking to us about this, it sounds amazing, For people that don’t know, can you describe the Avebury site for us? How significant is it?
Colleen Morgan:
Oh, it’s very significant, it’s a key component of the UNESCO Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site, and it’s actually the largest stone circle in the world.
And I think people are really personally very invested in this site, It is from the Neolithic, but unlike Stonehenge, you can actually go up and touch the stones.
Ellie Brennan:
Oh, my goodness, I was just going to ask you about this, because Stonehenge, I feel like, gets all the glory here. I had no idea that Avebury was the biggest.
Colleen Morgan:
Yes, absolutely, and it’s just a fantastic opportunity to investigate this really important archive that has been hereto really inaccessible.
It’s in the middle of the monument, so you have to actually go there, and it’s really difficult to access even if you are there. And it’s really interesting to be there because there’s not a lot of phone signal, the internet is not very good, and so it really is revealing this world-class archive to the entire world.
Ellie Brennan:
So that’s why it’s important to digitise, more people are going to have access to it.
What’s the most interesting thing you’ve discovered in the archives? And what might we be able to see in the future?
Colleen Morgan:
I think for me, personally, it’s actually seeing the faces of the old excavators: there were a lot of excavations in the 1930s headed by Alexander Keiller, he’s the major player, but we don’t know the personalities of the people involved.
But we’re also doing a full analysis of all the material that’s ever been excavated there at Avebury as well: Ben Chan from Bournemouth is working on this, and so we’re really excited to do the more scientific techniques that we’ve developed since the 1930s on this really important archive.
Ellie Brennan:
How significant is this archive for you in terms of history?
Colleen Morgan:
Well, it’s got 13,350 pages of documentation, it’s got 500 drawings and 3000 images, much of which have just been under used to a certain extent. They did a similar project at Stonehenge a few years ago under the same curator, the amazing Ros Cleal, and they were able to herald a new programme of research at Stonehenge and so we’re hoping the same revival comes to Avebury as well.
Ellie Brennan:
You’ve just mentioned there over 13,000 documents, 3000 pictures, how long is it going to take to digitise this? Because that sounds like an awful lot of scanning in.
Colleen Morgan:
Oh absolutely! And so there’s a fantastic researcher down there right now, Fran Allfrey, and she’s been working really hard to scope the archive. It is going to be finished in the four years that we have on the project, but we are also enlisting many, many volunteers down in Wiltshire.
But the exciting thing is that after we digitise things, we’re going to need the help of online volunteers to actually do a lot of the transcription because Alexander Keiller has the worst handwriting I’ve almost ever seen in an archive, and so it’s going to take a lot of puzzling out.
Ellie Brennan:
Okay, so if you think you’re good at reading handwriting, you’re needed: is that the call out here?
Colleen Morgan:
Absolutely! And there’s just going to be so much there and so much available, and it’s going to be available through the Archaeology Data Service, which we are really lucky to have here at York because it is, again, a globally known digital archive for archaeology that is freely available online for people to go and root through the past.
Ellie Brennan:
That sounds absolutely incredible. I mean, if people would like to volunteer and get involved with this when it is going online, how can people find information about this, Colleen?
Colleen Morgan:
www.averypapers.org
Ellie Brennan:
Fantastic. Well, it sounds like a mammoth project and so interesting, thank you so much for coming on to talk to me about it today. That’s Dr Colleen Morgan who’s from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, who I think will be doing a lot of scanning over the next few months, of all the archives about the Avebury stone circle in Wiltshire.
I had absolutely no idea that was bigger than Stonehenge: every day truly is a school day isn’t it!
