What Collections and News Are Featured on the Archaeology Data Service?

Updated

The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) highlights specific archives through its Featured Collection and News & events sections, while the wider database holds freely available project collections, reports, publications, and metadata records. If you want to discover concrete material rather than search a known site, start with the featured and recent items below; if you already have a research target, use the database search instead.

Featured Collection

The current featured archive is the Digital Archive from the Programme of Archaeological Excavations on the Carlisle Northern Development Route.

  • Excavations were conducted by Oxford Archaeology from May 2008 to April 2011.
  • They uncovered several key sites dating from the Mesolithic to the medieval period.
  • The collection includes digital images from fieldwork: photographs of the excavations and excavated remains, overhead views and panoramas, aerial photographs, and primary records.

This is a useful entry point if you want a complete, curated example of how ADS presents a fieldwork archive — images plus primary records rather than a single report.

News & Events

The News & events section mixes collection announcements, training, and editorial content. Current items include:

Item What it covers
Collection Highlight: Illustrated Catalogue of Viking Inset Weights A recently released archive: the Illustrated Artefact Catalogue of Viking Inset Lead Weights from Britain and Ireland, co-authored
New Ingest Training Sessions: Book Now for August–December A new round of free online training, announced four months after the launch of Ingest
Latest blog post: CATs Week 2026 The annual Curatorial and Technical Staff (CATs) strategy week, held in July 2026

The pattern is worth noting: news items often point to a newly ingested archive, so the section doubles as a discovery feed for recent deposits.

Related ADS Outputs

  • Internet Archaeology — described as the open access digital journal for archaeology, publishing international, peer-reviewed research that uses the digital medium.
  • Showcase your work — ADS invites depositors to extend the reach and value of their data by writing an Internet Archaeology article.

How to Use These Entry Points

  1. Open the Featured Collection to see a full example archive and its contents.
  2. Check News & events for recent collection highlights and training dates.
  3. Use Search the database when you have a specific site, project, or record in mind — the collections, reports, publications, and metadata records are described as freely available.
  4. If you plan to contribute, read Instructions for Depositors under Help & guidance before preparing data and metadata.

One caveat: the featured collection and news items rotate, so a specific archive mentioned here may no longer be on the front page later. The underlying records remain searchable in the database.