Where to Find Archaeology Images

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A list of places to search for images about archaeology. Whether it is a photo of a site or an artefact, map or video, images make an impact with learners.

Often a picture can explain something better than any words, so the following is a list of great places to get images for you to use in your lessons.

But first a note on copyright

The copyright of images on the Internet is important, pictures are artistic works and therefore belong to someone. All of the sources of images below offer (either fully or in part) their images free of charge for non-profit educational use as long as you acknowledge their copyright.

Copyright can be a bit confusing so the CBA will be producing a guide to copyright for teachers.

The Archaeology Image Bank

The Archaeology Image Bank is a slowly growing storage centre for free educational use images, it provides a searchable database based on keywords with and additional advanced search which allows very specific content searches based on object type, monument, period, continent, country or place. It is very simple to use: search for images, browse the results to find the one you want, click on the image to see the full size version and then right click and choose “save as.” If you have any good images you are willing to share this is the place to donate them!

The Portable Antiquities Scheme

The Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) is a voluntary scheme to record archaeological objects found by members of the public in England and Wales. Their website is a useful resource for teachers and also provides information about finds days around the country. In addition to this the PAS has put online their database of artefacts and images making it a great place to find pictures of artefacts to illustrate your lessons with.

The finds database is in the process of being upgraded and we found that the “advanced search” option is currently a more reliable way to find images.

The British Museum

The British Museum is putting its catalogue of it’s complete collection online (currently over 1.2 million artefacts are listed) and it is slowly adding photographs to each of these records (over 300,000 so far and increasing by about 2,000 per week!) The BM catalogue is therefore an wonderful resource as each photograph is accompanied by a written summary including it’s find spot location, period or culture and information on the material and production technique used to make the artefact.

On the Search the Collection page you should tick the box “images only” to filter out those records that currently don’t have photos or drawings attached to them yet.

The vast majority of the images are copyright of the British Museum and/or it’s trustees and the images are offered free for non-profit educational use. See the terms of use for more information.

The British Museum also has a commercial site where images for commercial use may be purchased, and again non-profit educational use is available free to these as well.

English Heritage

English Heritage is the historic environment service for England. It holds a very large number of images and many of these are available free for educational use.

English Heritage have a summary page of the various collections with links to each. The summary page also includes where to get aerial photographs in England, Wales and Scotland.

Of particular help to teachers (with online resources) are:

Cadw & Historic Scotland

Cadw (Wales’ historic environment service) and Historic Scotland unfortunately do not offer a free gallery of images online to education like their English counterpart (English Heritage) but both do have a photo library that you can visit and order copies from and in Historic Scotland’s case you can view and purchase images online.

Details are available on each of their respective websites:

Wessex Archaeology’s Gallery

Wessex Archaeology have a very good gallery of images on their website with excellent quality images from sites they have worked on.

The gallery is broken down into easily identifiable sections and is particularly useful for images of archaeological techniques.

The images are distributed on a creative commons licence for non-commercial use, details of which are here.

Canterbury Archaeological Trust

Canterbury Archaeological Trust (CAT) are known for their education and outreach work and their website continues this with a gallery of images useful for teachers.

Whilst the majority of the gallery relates to archaeology within Kent, the images within the collection are not limited to photographs but include many illustrations of archaeological principles and techniques, all organised in thematic groups making the site a gold mine for making lesson slide and presentations.

The Archaeology Coursebook images

The Archaeology Coursebook is aimed at the AS and A level archaeology course and is widely used by tutors and students of that course. Jim Grant has made available the images from the coursebook as digital images on the above site.

Historylink101

This American site by Eric Rymer, an Ohio Public School teacher, includes a range of images and information broken down by period/location groups with about 50% of the images being identified as “Royalty free” images for education. The layout of the site is a little out of date but the images are fairly easy to find and use.

The images are available in the following sections:

Have we missed somewhere?

Whilst we’ve tried to cover as many sites as possible, we’re always keen to add more so if you know of a source of great images for teaching about the past (and they are free for educational use) then let our education team know via our contact page.