Roman pottery training and digital dissemination

English Heritage summaries. 2002/2003

This project, based at the McDonald Institute and funded by English Heritage, is designed to address two issues. First, the need to train new pottery specialists and second the requirement to develop a system for the digital publication of pottery reports.

There are now few younger specialists working on Roman pottery. Established specialists with expertise and accumulated experience are very busy, several with forward programmes of writing reports that stretch 2-3 years ahead. However, there is little or no provision for passing on their expertise to the next generation. There are also few people are coming through Universities writing PhDs that allow them to develop skills in pottery research appropriate to the profession.

Conventional pottery reports represent an uneasy compromise between what it is possible to publish through the print medium, what we can afford to print, and what it would be ideal to present. The best specialists collect a lot more information than is used in published reports but this in generally only available through their paper archives. Digital dissemination through proper electronic publication offers the prospect of making this information more widely available in a more useful form

Our project is addressing these issues by training a Phil Mills as a specialist in Roman pottery whilst deploying his computing skills to develop and pilot a new system for creating an integrated digital pottery archive. We are working with the ADS and Internet Archaeology in York to produce a fully integrated digital publication of the pottery on which he is working.

This project is being run by Martin Millett in collaboration with Dr Jeremy Evans, a specialist in Roman pottery who is well established in the profession. It is using the pottery from the research excavations at Hayton, East Yorkshire as the basis for the project. Work started in summer of 2003 and continues for 12 months.

This page was published 22/12/03