About the CBA Website

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The CBA website c. December 1998 The CBA has maintained a presence on the World Wide Web since 1995, when our first website went live. This site was innovative at the time, and we were among the first archaeological entities to go online during these early days of the Web.

From that point on our website continued to grow and the services it offered expanded, making it a well-used and invaluable source of information on British archaeology and a popular gateway to archaeology on the Web. In 1998, the site boasted, over 15Mb of online information!

However, while the content on the website was being constantly updated and augmented, the design and layout of the site remained largely unchanged for 13 years from 1995 to mid-2008. The old structure could eventually no longer support the amount and complexity of the information we were serving up, and the design was beginning to show its age. The site became so baroque that it hindered navigation and made it difficult to use and find things, and it became clear that it was high time for a fresh new website to be produced.

The core aim of the CBA website is not just to provide information about ourselves as an organisation, but to act as a gateway to archaeology: guiding you to the resources you need to do your research, participate in events, fieldwork and discussions, or campaign on the issues that matter.

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The CBA servers. Clockwise from top: SRV03, Leoben, Boomer The CBA website is hosted on a Dell server with a 3.06Ghz Intel processor and 4Gb of RAM. Requests are handled by Apache 2. A similarly specced machine running MySQL serves as a database backend. Both machines run Debian Gnu/Linux. A third server running Windows 2000 is kept in service for some legacy content. Caching and backend selection/routing is handled by a Varnish server running on one of the Linux boxen.

The main website itself is powered by the Drupal CMS, and serves valid XHTML and CSS as best it can. As such we recommend that you use a modern browser to access this site. However, the site is intended to degrade gracefully if viewed with a less standards-compliant browser.

The site was designed by Dan Hull, and implemented by Marcus Smith.