Finds
Copyright (c) The Crickley Archaeological Hill Trust 1969-2021. The right to use, copy, distribute or otherwise disseminate this material is reserved to those specifically authorised by The Trust.
What’s in the archive
The excavation produced something over half a million finds. These range from small fragments of flint and pottery up to items of jewellery and arrowheads. All the find spots were measured in so that large scale distribution analysis could be undertaken. The physical finds are in a National Trust store near to the site in Gloucestershire.
The principle finds record is the finds ledger. This is a hand written catalogue of all the finds, largely completed on site by the finds supervisor. The significant finds were drawn and numbers allocated to everything. This ledger runs to nearly 30 volumes. Behind this, there are daily notebooks used by the teams on site who were actually recording and measuring the find locations, which gives a second source of information.
The finds ledger is partly digitised. It is scanned in full, and links to those scans will be provided on this website in due course. There is also an electronic version in spreadsheet form. This is complete for seasons CH69-CH88. Seasons CH89-CH91 are partially present - each year omits the last few days of excavation. CH92 is not currently available and there are some issues with the handwritten records. CH93 is about 50% complete and will be completed in due course.
There are some challenges in presenting this huge database online. The route selected is to use the electronic version to create a finds register for each cutting, sorted by feature number. These are available via the ‘Finds catalogue’ button at the bottom of each cutting page. In this way it will be possible to look for finds associated with a given feature. Beware - this index can be a very large file for some cuttings with dense finds (up to 40MB), so please be patient. It is also intended to make the hard copy registers available to download as albums of pages, rather like the supervisor notebooks in due course.
