1970s excavation published

It's good to see old excavations being published. The PfA blog has deplored the existence of grey literature previously, so it's great to see that someone is doing something about it.

Internet Archaeology is pleased to announce the publication of "Iron Age Settlement at Blackstone, Worcestershire: Excavations 1972, 1973, and 1977" by Derek Hurst, Alan Hunt and Peter Davenport et al.

Excavations in the 1970s at Blackstone found a rectangular double-ditched Iron Age enclosure dated from the 2nd century into the 1st century BC. The initial structural analysis has been largely retained in this updated report and accompanied by a separate modern commentary, allied with the updated finds and environmental reporting, and overall discussion.

Internet Archaeology thanks and acknowledges English Heritage for the publication grant that has enabled us to make this article Open Access.

The Archaeology Data Service also has an archive of grey literature.

A lot of grey literature is generated by commercial archaeology on sites that are being excavated before construction takes place. The reports are only stored at county archaeology units, so researchers have to travel to get hold of them, according to an article by Matt Ford in Nature.

Newton, Stukeley and the apple

The New Scientist reports that the real story of Newton and the apple has been discovered, and was recorded by none other than William Stukeley, archaeologist, vicar, Freemason, and Druid enthusiast.

Squirreled away in the archives of London's Royal Society was a manuscript containing the truth about the apple.The manuscript, from 1752, is a biography of Newton entitled Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life written by William Stukeley, an archaeologist and one of Newton's first biographers. Newton told the apple story to Stukeley, who relayed it as such:

"After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees...he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself..."

The Royal Society has made the manuscript available today for the first time in a fully interactive digital form on their website.

Open Archive

Open Archive - a new web based system for accessing our past

The wealth of information gathered by local archaeological groups and societies on excavations, surveys and documentary research is one of the important sources of data for the study of archaeology in the UK. Currently, this archive of British archaeology is stored locally, within libraries and local history centres as well as with the originating group themselves. In addition, PhDs and other research can be found in locations often scattered throughout the country. The premise of Open Archive is to collect the records of the past and present and share them with everybody.

Open Archive is an accessible library of user generated reports and publications where archaeology societies, PhD research students, graveyard recording and community groups can share their discoveries with a wide audience.

The easy to use interface combines intuitive searches by period, type of project and location with a map based view showing the location of the selected documents. Each item can then be viewed as either a short description or as the complete publication. This resource creates a public portal to the records of our shared heritage that were previously only available on a few local archaeology group websites OR as paper copies in the local library. The idea is to allow this to be both interactive and open to sharing via feeds and direct data transfer.

This looks like a really great resource, and very usable too.

Save the archives

Jason at the Wild Hunt blog reports on the impending dispersal of the Harry Price Library of Magical Literature at the University of London, which the university proposes to sell in order to raise funds. There's an article in The Independent, which reports that students are lobbying their colleges for financial contributions. Unfortunately it does not explain how to go about lobbying your college for financial contributions.

This is important because these texts reveal past understandings of magic and mystery, and how occult thought has developed. They should at least digitise the archive before selling the books.