The inspiration for writing this blog came from finding an axe whilst trawling through the archive of weird and wonderful objects held in the Alexander Keiller Museum at Avebury. Most of the objects in the museum were found during archaeological excavations and are boxed along with crucial information on which excavation they were uncovered by, […]
Tag: National Trust
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A witch visits Avebury?
One of the reasons I got involved with the Avebury project was because I am a Wiccan/Pagan, and the stones are an important spiritual site for those people following a similar spiritual path. I am particularly interested to learn when the site became a popular place for like-minded “Witchy folk” to visit. I am currently […]
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Surveying Avebury’s Stones (with poles!)
Visitors to Avebury recently may have witnessed the odd sight of two people walking around with cameras on the end of long poles. Certainly, many people came up to ask what we were doing, and no, it wasn’t part of a mysterious mid-summer ritual! The truth is sadly more mundane. Adam Stanford of SUMO GeoSurveys […]
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Cool Finds of the Month
*Content warning: drawings of a human skull at the end of the post* Whilst organising the stables archive there have been some interesting discoveries, here are some of them: These mounted pictures of dinosaurs were used as a museum display piece! From left to right we have a styracosaurus, an iguanodon, and a ceratosaurus. During […]
Here in the archive, we are gearing up for round two of photography. We are moving the photography equipment to the stables archive where we have a lot of our larger maps and plans stored. But before we make the move we have to make sure everything is in order. To make sure photography at […]
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, […]
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Avebury People
Can you help us to identify the people who made the modern Avebury? The Alexander Keiller Museum archive holds hundreds of photographs of people. The photographs span several archaeological campaigns across the decades, including excavations run by Harold St George Gray in Avebury Henge in the 1900-10s, and the Alexander Keiller-led work at Avebury and […]
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Digitisation in progress: photography
Header image: Denis Grant King’s diary, Accession Number 1732623-002. In the ‘archive scoping’ blog post I talked about our ambitions for the archive, and how we hope to embed reminders that, behind the digital files we create, there are real objects. We’ve now been photographing for 4 months, and making good progress. Our wonderful volunteers […]
This blog post is part of a series: you may want to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 first. Having reconstructed the process and produced an analogue plot of the final grid arrangement, I was ready to replicate the process ‘on the digital ground’ within a Geographical Information System (GIS). My starting […]
Whilst going through the archive in the Alexander Keiller Museum I came across some boxes of worked flint from the West Kennet Avenue. The material consists primarily of flint flakes, some of which is waste material from making stone tools, some of which are tools in their own right. The latter would have been flakes […]