This application enables the creation of transcribed data from the British Museum's Worthington George Smith manuscript collection.

Worthington George Smith (1835-1917) played an important role in the formative period of British Palaeolithic Archaeology. He meticulously recorded and published some of the most important Palaeolithic sites found in Britain and left behind well-documented collections of artefacts. The WGS Manuscript Collection contains Worthington Smith’s list of the artefacts in his collection, along with details about the circumstances of their discovery and whether he later gave them away to fellow collectors or museums. The list provides invaluable contextual information that can help us to understand the spatial distribution of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic sites across Britain. Transcribing the manuscript will allow us to link Worthington Smith’s catalogue to a database of Palaeolithic artefacts that is being compiled for the Leverhulme-funded 'Mapping Palaeolithic Britain Project'.

If you would like to learn more about Worthington Smith and his contemporaries you might like to read O’Connor, A. 2007. Finding Time for the Old Stone Age: a History of Palaeolithic Archaeology and Quaternary Geology in Britain, 1860-1960. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Once transcribed, these data will be available as CSV or JSON and can be reused under a CC-BY licence.

The image of WG Smith is from Wikimedia Commons and is a Public Domain image.

Limitations

Because of the technology we're using, this may not work on some older versions of Apple's iOS.

This project is on behalf of:

Find the code on GitHub

Contributors to this project

Daniel Pett, Ernst Schnell, Elaine Dale, Liz D, Joellen mcGann, Jane Fellows, Denis Antoine, Susan Magyarody, Van C. Vives, Catherine Ford, Peter Hoare, susan mcclain, Nicola King