Oxford University Bronze Age Index Cards

This application focuses on Bronze Age Index cards found in the CFC Hawkes archives at the Institute of Archaeology's archives at the University of Oxford. The cards document the Isleham hoard from Cambridgeshire, UK.

CFC Hawkes was a former curator of British archaeology at the British Museum from 1928-1946 and the Chair of European Archaeology at Oxford from 1946-1972, where he managed the updating, research, and reorganisation of the Bronze Age Index from 1950-1966. As part of the final stages of digitisation of the BAI, we are drawing together these archival resources from various sources in order to help the British Museum's curator of the Bronze Age collections, Neil Wilkin, to make available a huge card catalogue of British prehistoric metal artefacts discovered in the 19th and 20th century.

This information has long been known to be an extremely important untapped resource. Metal finds are not only crucial forms of evidence for dating Britain's prehistoric past, but also tell us a great deal about prehistoric society and economy.

Digitising the thousands of objects in this catalogue will make these records publicly available via their incorporation into the Portable Antiquities Scheme website. The result will be the largest national database of prehistoric metal finds anywhere in the world and a near comprehensive view of what we currently know about such finds in the UK.

The cards have been scanned and uploaded to Flickr, and it is from there that the current application will retrieve and manipulate the scans. These cards contain some fairly standardised kinds of information: about where the artefact was discovered, its dimensions, a longer description of what it looks like, etc.

What the research team would like people to do, is to transcribe the details from each section on the card into some pre-determined fields, and also to attempt to geo-reference the object via its place of discovery.

This project is on behalf of

Find the code on Github