Crowd- and Community-fuelled Archaeological Research

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This project will not only use 'crowd-sourcing' methods to enable academics and other archaeological communities to co-produce innovative open datasets, but it will also pioneer a novel approach to co-designing and crowd-funding follow-up research. Archaeology has long been successful in piquing the interest of professional practitioners, volunteer societies and the wider public. These different archaeological enthusiasts do sometimes collaborate over archaeological fieldwork, interact via museum exhibitions or interact over other engagement activities, but beyond the edge of the excavation trench or the gallery case, they rarely cooperate on developing archaeological knowledge or on designing new research agendas. This project explores this untapped potential in three promising areas: transcription of archaeological archives, low-cost 3D object modelling and 'follow-up' research. We want to deepen existing links between two major London research institutions, the British Museum (BM) and University College London (UCL), and several well-established communities associated with (a) the UK's Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) and (b) some of archaeology's most famous archival and object collections from Flinders Petrie, Kathleen Kenyon and colleagues' early excavations in the eastern Mediterranean. These two strands capitalise on considerable expertise, heritage assets and interest within London itself, but each also offers wider national or international reach, opening up opportunities to explore how best to blend the respective research inputs of pre-existing online communities of interest, and a further 'crowd' of potential contributors worldwide. Together, we will crowd-source the transcription of hard copy archives and pioneer the construction of large numbers of 3D artefact models from ordinary photographs. The existing communities, new contributors and traditional academics brought together by these efforts will collectively also design attractive follow-up projects that might, over the longer term, be financed via individually small but collectively important online donations.