Industry | Heritage/archaeology |
---|---|
Founded | 2011 |
Founder | Lisa Westcott Wilkins |
Headquarters | Registered office: The Workshop, 24a Newgate, Barnard Castle, County Durham |
Key people | Managing Director: Lisa Westcott Wilkins Project Director: Brendon Wilkins Head of Community: Maiya Pina-Dacier |
Products | Digital Dig Team; Dirty Weekends |
Number of employees | 5 |
Website | www.digventures.com |
DigVentures is a social enterprise organising crowdfunded archaeological excavation experiences. It is registered with the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists (CIfA), and is a CIfA Accredited Field School. [1]
Headquartered in Barnard Castle with offices across the UK, DigVentures is a platform that enables civic participation in archaeology and heritage projects. They have pioneered the use of crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and digital methods to increase access and opportunities for real people to purposefully participate in real research.
The organisation was formed in 2011, responding to the challenge of austerity and lack of opportunity in the heritage sector. [2] By adopting a crowdfunding and crowdsourcing approach, [3] DigVentures have sought to address this by using digital and social media to build audiences, increase revenue and find new ways for the public to participate in archaeological fieldwork. [4]
DigVentures projects are coordinated through their proprietary online multicurrency crowdfunding platform designed to connect heritage sector managers and archaeologists (project owners) with a worldwide crowd of interested and actively engaged participants. [5] To date, the team has raised approximately £2m in crowdfunding and matched grant finance. The archive of funded projects is available on the DV website. [6]
In 2014 DigVentures received a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to develop its Digital Dig Team. [7] This has been described as a ‘Community Management System’ for archaeology projects. [8] It is built onto a cloud-based, open-source software platform enabling researchers to publish data directly from the field using any web-enabled device (such as a smartphone or tablet) into a live relational database. Once recorded the born-digital archive is accessible via open-access on a dedicated website, and published to social profiles of all project participants. [9] Beta tested in the field at Leiston Abbey in 2014, early results have shown that the Digital Dig Team system can enable archaeologists to build audiences (through immersive storytelling), generate revenue (through crowdfunding), enable public participation (through crowdsourcing) and improve research by making results available to a networked specialist team in 'real time'. A children's version of this system has also been developed, based on a ‘Cyber Dig’ simulated excavation for use in schools or family events.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, DigVentures's digs, talks and workshops were postponed, and the online "How to Do Archaeology" course was made freely available. [10]
In 2012 DigVentures ran the world's first crowdfunded excavation, raising £30,000 to enable a three-week excavation at the internationally significant Bronze Age site of Flag Fen, near Peterborough. [11] [12] [13] The site had experienced a 50% decline in visitors since the large-scale English Heritage-funded excavations finished in 1995; the project's remit was to help revitalise the heritage attraction, whilst providing detailed scientific information on the preservation of the waterlogged timbers. [14] The project involved around 250 members of the public from 11 countries, supported by a specialist team including partners from the British Museum, Durham University, Birmingham University, York Archaeological Trust, University College London and English Heritage to assist in the scientific investigations. [15] Of the members of public, 130 individuals received hands-on training in archaeological techniques on site and visitor numbers increased by 29% from the previous year. Francis Pryor, who discovered the site in the 1970s, was supportive of the initiative and wrote afterwards: "happily, it was an experiment that worked: the participants had a good time, and the archaeology was professionally excavated, to a very high standard". [16] [17]
Leiston Abbey was the first crowdfunding campaign to run on the DigStarter platform in 2013, and has since raised more than £36,000 over two seasons. The project is ongoing and is currently entering the third year of five proposed digging seasons. [18] Its wider rationale has been to breathe new life into Leiston Abbey, providing opportunities for visitors to join in with the excavation, and to integrate the heritage attraction with the artistic and musical life of the onsite music school, Pro Corda, who manage the site for English Heritage. Fieldwork has so far focused on characterising undefined earthworks and settlement evidence in three different areas of the site, with a programme of remote sensing used to target thirteen small-scale excavation trenches aiming to identify settlement evidence indicated by geophysical anomalies or extant earthworks. [19] [20] Additional work included a photogrammetry survey to produce a metrically accurate 3D digital elevation model of the Abbey Church and a low-level aerial photography survey using kite mounted cameras and UAVs (drones) to assess structural evidence for absent buildings associated with the eastern range.
DigVentures also runs short taster sessions and masterclasses by experts in their respective subjects.
Time Team is a British television programme that originally aired on Channel 4 from 16 January 1994 to 7 September 2014. It returned in 2022 on online platforms YouTube and Patreon. Created by television producer Tim Taylor and presented by actor Tony Robinson, each episode featured a team of specialists carrying out an archaeological dig over a period of three days, with Robinson explaining the process in lay terms. The specialists changed throughout the programme's run, although it consistently included professional archaeologists such as Mick Aston, Carenza Lewis, Francis Pryor and Phil Harding. The sites excavated ranged in date from the Palaeolithic to the Second World War.
Seahenge, also known as Holme I, was a prehistoric monument located in the village of Holme-next-the-Sea, near Old Hunstanton in the English county of Norfolk. A timber circle with an upturned tree root in the centre, Seahenge, along with the nearby timber circle Holme II, was built in the spring-summer of 2049 BCE, during the early Bronze Age in Britain. Contemporary theory is that they were used for ritual purposes; in particular Holme II has been interpreted as a mortuary monument that may originally have formed the boundary of a burial mound.
Flag Fen, east of Peterborough, England, is a Bronze Age site which was constructed about 3500 years ago and consists of more than 60,000 timbers arranged in five very long rows, creating a wooden causeway across the wet fenland. Part-way across the structure a small island was formed. Items associated with it have led scholars to conclude that the island was of religious significance. Archaeological work began in 1982 at the site, which is located 800 m east of Fengate. Flag Fen is now part of the Greater Fens Museum Partnership. A visitor centre has been constructed on site and some areas have been reconstructed, including a typical Iron Age roundhouse dwelling.
Philip Harding DL FSA is a British field archaeologist. He became a familiar face on the Channel 4 television series Time Team.
Rescue archaeology, sometimes called commercial archaeology, preventive archaeology, salvage archaeology, contract archaeology, developer-funded archaeology or compliance archaeology, is state-sanctioned, archaeological survey and excavation carried out in advance of construction or other land development. Other causes for salvage digs can be looting and illegal construction. One effect of rescue archaeology is that it diverts resources and impacts pre-planned archaeological work.
Mes Aynak, also called Mis Ainak or Mis-e-Ainak, was a major Buddhist settlement 40 km (25 mi) southeast of Kabul, Afghanistan, located in a barren region of Logar Province. The site is also the location of Afghanistan's largest copper deposit.
Francis Manning Marlborough Pryor is an English archaeologist specialising in the study of the Bronze and Iron Ages in Britain. He is best known for his discovery and excavation of Flag Fen, a Bronze Age archaeological site near Peterborough, as well as for his frequent appearances on the Channel 4 television series Time Team.
Leiston Abbey outside the town of Leiston, Suffolk, England, was a religious house of Canons Regular following the Premonstratensian rule, dedicated to St Mary. Founded in c. 1183 by Ranulf de Glanville, Chief Justiciar to King Henry II (1180-1189), it was originally built on a marshland isle near the sea, and was called "St Mary de Insula". Around 1363 the abbey suffered so much from flooding that a new site was chosen and it was rebuilt further inland for its patron, Robert de Ufford, 1st Earl of Suffolk (1298-1369). However, there was a great fire in c. 1379 and further rebuilding was necessary.
Oxford Archaeology is one of the largest and longest-established independent archaeology and heritage practices in Europe, operating from three permanent offices in Oxford, Lancaster and Cambridge, and working across the UK. OA is a Registered Organisation with the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists (CIfA), and carries out commercial archaeological fieldwork in advance of development, as well as a range of other heritage related services. Oxford Archaeology primarily operates in the UK, but has also carried out contracts around the world, including Sudan, Qatar, Central Asia, China and the Caribbean. Numbers of employees vary owing to the project-based nature of the work, but in 2014 OA employed over 220 people.
Mark Chatwin Horton, FSA, is a British maritime and historical archaeologist, television presenter, and writer.
Dr Margaret Helen Rule, was a British archaeologist. She is most notable for her involvement with the project that excavated and raised the Tudor warship Mary Rose in 1982.
Frederick Bligh Bond, generally known by his second given name Bligh, was an English architect, illustrator, archaeologist and psychical researcher.
The year 2007 in archaeology
Sarah Helen Parcak is an American archaeologist and Egyptologist, who has used satellite imagery to identify potential archaeological sites in Egypt, Rome and elsewhere in the former Roman Empire. She is a professor of Anthropology and director of the Laboratory for Global Observation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In partnership with her husband, Greg Mumford, she directs survey and excavation projects in the Faiyum, Sinai, and Egypt's East Delta.
A number of archaeological excavations at the Temple Mount—a celebrated and contentious religious site in the Old City of Jerusalem—have taken place over the last 150 years. Excavations in the area represent one of the more sensitive areas of all archaeological excavations in Jerusalem.
The Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research is a cultural heritage research institute based in Oslo, Norway.
The Archaeology Awards is an annual awards ceremony celebrating achievements in the field of archaeology.
The Department of Archaeology at the University of York, England, is a department which provides undergraduate and postgraduate courses in archaeology and its sub-disciplines and conducts associated research. It was founded in 1978 and has grown from a small department based at Micklegate House to more than a hundred undergraduate students based at King's Manor and with scientific facilities at the BioArCh centre on the main campus.
Part of a Bronze Age settlement was uncovered at Must Farm quarry, at Whittlesey, near Peterborough, in Cambridgeshire, England. The site has been described as "Britain's Pompeii" due to its relatively good condition, including the "best-preserved Bronze Age dwellings ever found" there, which all appear to have been abandoned suddenly following a catastrophic fire. Research now suggests that the site was less than one year old at the time of destruction.