Internet Archaeology

Internet Archaeology is going totally Open Access for the duration of OA Week. Already a hybrid Open Access journal, we wish to move fully towards an Open Access model and encourage all potential authors to include or seek OA fees in their research funding applications.

As an aid to understanding chronology, economics, identity and culture contact, the early medieval bone/antler hair-comb is an under-exploited resource, despite the existence of an extensive literature borne out of a long-standing tradition of empirical research. Such research has been undertaken according to diverse traditions, is scattered amongst site reports and grey literature, regional, national, and international journals, and is published in a number of different languages. The article provides a general synthesis of this data, together with the author's personal research, situated within a broad view of chronology and geography. It presents the author's classification of early medieval composite combs, and applies this in a review of comb typology in space and time. It makes use of recently excavated material from little-known and unpublished sites, as well as the classic studies of familiar towns and 'emporia'. The atlas is intended for use as a reference piece that may be accessed according to need, and read in a non-linear fashion. Thus, it may act as a first port-of-call for scholars researching the material culture of a particular spatio-temporal context, while simultaneously facilitating rapid characterisation of freshly excavated finds material. It should provide a useful complement to recent and ongoing question-oriented research on combs. The publication costs of this article were met by a successful bid by the author to the Research Committee at the Department of Archaeology at York. This has resulted in the article being Open Access, in line with Internet Archaeology policy as a hybrid OA journal.

This article addresses the application of high-precision 3-D recording methods to heritage materials (portable objects), the technical processes involved, the various digital products and the role of 3-D recording in larger questions of scholarship and public interpretation. It argues that the acquisition and creation of digital representations of heritage must be part of a comprehensive research infrastructure (a digital ecosystem) that focuses on all of the elements involved, including (a) recording methods and metadata, (b) digital object discovery and access, (c) citation of digital objects, (d) analysis and study, (e) digital object reuse and repurposing, and (f) the critical role of a national/international digital archive. The article illustrates these elements and their relationships using two case studies that involve similar approaches to the high-precision 3-D digital recording of portable archaeological objects, from a number of late pre-Columbian villages and towns in the mid-central US (c. 1400 CE) and from the Egyptian site of Amarna, the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten's capital (c. 1300 BCE). This is a LEAP II project exemplar. Preparation of this electronic publication and associated archive was assisted by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

This article provides an overview of the STAR project which centres around enabling highly granular cross search over a collection of archaeological datasets, including structured excavation databases and unstructured grey literature reports. It also gives a detailed explanation of the online demonstator application. The final discussion section provides the basis for the debate within the archaeological research and cultural data management communities, on the emerging possibilities for data integration and cross searching at various levels of detail. This is an Open Access article funded from an AHRC grant.

This project emphasises the unique character and construction of Mousa broch, questions the model of Mousa broch as a roofed structure and considers the way in which sound and light informs our understanding of the spaces contained within its structure. The identification of a characteristically 'dry' acoustic associated with dry stone construction allows us some insight into the acoustic environment shared by our ancestors in Atlantic Scotland.

Open Access review by Adam Rabinowitz

The mixed media 'Ye Devill Among Ym' project (concerning discipline in the early post-Reformation Scottish church) aimed to evoke in its audience the experience of both participating in the performance of social discipline and of archaeological interpretative practice. This article presents the context of the experimental article and the feedback collected from participants on their engagement with the material provided. It also presents the original experimental project itself, and explores the potential for creative archaeology to facilitate the translation and communication of past human experiences. The article features a comments facility for continued dialogue and exploration.

The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) and South Caucasus Pipelines (SCP) were constructed through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey during the period 2003-5. BTC was built first from the Caspian Coast to the Georgian border during 2003 and 2004, while the SCP pipeline was built from the Georgian border towards the Caspian and parallel to the BTC in 2005. To investigate and mitigate the effects of this construction, a four year archaeological fieldwork programme (2001-2005) was carried out, followed by a further six-year post-excavation programme that ended in early 2011. This article draws on this extensive archaeological project that combines both the broad corpus of material known in Azerbaijan and new techniques introduced in the Republic for the first time and used on a range of sites that are of both national and international significance.

Three short articles asking some fundamental questions about the recording that archaeologists undertake.