Katharina Ulmschneider

In this project we are investigating the requirements to ease interdisciplinary collaboration between computer graphics researchers and heritage-related researchers who work with shared graphics-related datasets. We postulate that most challenges can be overcome by ensuring that datasets (irrespective of discipline) are captured, processed and disseminated in ways that accommodate the needs of as many disciplines as possible – making the datasets more useful and more usable. This is not to say that a union of all discipline methodologies is required, but instead: we deem it necessary to identify what changes are feasible in existing (discipline-centric) practices to maximise the benefits, while limiting resource costs. The purpose of this paper is to begin this conversation, present our project, preliminary results and where the project will go next. We also propose the outline of an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewing framework that can be used across disciplines.

Colleagues who find the current climate inhibiting to pure scholarship and authors eager to see their name in print should read this: an ultimately uplifting account of Jacobsthal's struggle to establish one of the foundations of European archaeology at a time of grave political persecution. Not the least of the achievements of this paper is the definitive rehabilitation of the lost co-author of Early Celtic Art, Eduard Neuffer, whose name never appeared on the cover and whose contribution was perforce unrecognised.

In the Asian and European crossroads gallery, on the first floor of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the visitor is greeted by a large, Chinese, pottery camel. The braying camel stands proudly in a display cabinet with a second, much smaller, camel and other artefacts symbolic of the travel and transport connections between East Asia and the West along the ancient Silk Roads. Modestly labelled ‘Model of a camel, Tang Dynasty, China, soft whiteware, painted. Baxandall loan, EALI891.1’, there is, however, much more to this camel than initially meets the eye. Though there was no record of it in the Ashmolean archives, the camel was once the property of refugee academic Professor Paul Jacobsthal. In this article, the forgotten history of the object and the owner who brought it to Oxford is traced. This history offers a timely insight into the links between Oxford and its WWII refugee academic community, as well as reminder that the legacy of those who found refuge in Oxford is in danger of...

Colleagues who find the current climate inhibiting to pure scholarship and authors eager to see their name in print should read this: an ultimately uplifting account of Jacobsthal's struggle to establish one of the foundations of European archaeology at a time of grave political persecution. Not the least of the achievements of this paper is the definitive rehabilitation of the lost co-author of Early Celtic Art, Eduard Neuffer, whose name never appeared on the cover and whose contribution was perforce unrecognised.

THE surge in metnl-detecting over the last twenty years, aLthough highly controversial and problematic in its nature, has kd to an unprecedented explosion qfnew materialfir the Middle Saxon Period. Afirst assessment qfthesefinds in Lincolnshire illustrates not onry the outstanding ...

Archives form a valuable but under-researched resource for mapping the development of prehistoric archaeology as a discipline in post-war Europe. New work on the previously un-catalogued archives of Professor Paul Jacobsthal at the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford, exemplify the opportunities offered by archival research. Here, we focus on the correspondence between Professor Jacobsthal of Marburg University, who sought refuge in Oxford before the war, and his colleague, Professor Merhart, who remained in Germany. The surviving personal correspondence between Germany and Oxford from 1936 to 1957 illustrates the complexities, uncertainties, and challenges to personal and academic identities in the aftermath of the war, and show how the individual responses of archaeologists to their personal experiences impacted on the directions taken by archaeological scholarship in Europe and beyond after the war.

Archaeologists often ignore the presence of children as a contributing factor in the archaeological record. However, recent analysis of a number of glass plate and film photographs taken by archaeologists at the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century shows that children were often incorporated into the photograph, either deliberately or inadvertently. These images provide not just a record of ancient sites and monuments, but also of the many local children who appear in the photographs. The children recorded by archaeologists offer an insight into children, their childhoods, their freedoms, and their place in society across a range of cultures in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, as well as raising questions about how archaeologists ‘saw’ the human subject in photographs where monuments and sites were the object.

It is difficult to remember that only twenty years ago we did not know the whereabouts of the wic sites documented for the mid-Anglo-Saxon period at London and York. Both of those are now well known, and this book focuses on a concomitant development in research, the investigation of the nature of exchanges and of inland distribution of goods in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries. The main topic is sites that have been recognized from the large amounts of metalwork, especially coins, that have come from them, mostly because of reports made by responsible metal detectorists. The combined work of numismatists, fieldworkers and finds specialists is showing both the range of material and the challenges in its interpretation, the latter introduced in a characteristically insightful essay by James Campbell. As in any compendium, some contributors are updating work on which they have already published, while others are presenting summaries for the first time. Particularly welcome in this book are chapters on Continental developments, though these raise the problem of even coverage some countries do not allow metal detecting, and this is bound to affect the level of site identification. Equally, preservation factors vary widely, and the wholesale removal of Dutch terps for manure in the nineteenth century may mean that a pattern of development along the Low Countries coast will never be postulated with as much confidence as may be possible for the east coast of England. At times, the amount of new information can be overwhelming. 1066 And All That-siyle examination questions begin to form: 'Distinguish carefully between Barham, Bawsey and Brandon, but not between Coddenham, Congham and Cottam.' A real question, however, is whether Cottam can or should be distinguished: one of the few 'prolific' or 'productive' sites excavated, it may be showing that most of these places are not significantly different from others that happen not to have produced so much metalwork. Similarly, Brandon raises the question of our ability to distinguish places affected by having a significant church in them. Nor do I feel that I understand why Essex does not have more of these sites, especially now that one has been identified in Kent, at Hollingbourne. At present, however, it seems that the Thames estuary and river valley may have operated differently from the East Anglian, Lindsey/Mercian and south Northumbrian kingdoms. The analysis of the Seine Valley is particularly important in this respect, but is a case where absence of metal detectorist reports may be a biasing factor. Common themes to emerge are the importance of overland routes as well as of rivers and estuaries; the economic role of the Church; and that markets were developing at sites which had mostly had no early Anglo-Saxon antecedents. Some marketing may have pre-existed the recently identified Charnwood Forest pottery may be evidence of that but essentially a new system or systems emerged in the seventh and eighth centuries using sites which all but disappeared in the ninth and tenth. An impressive range of contributions to the study of these developments has been brought together in this very well-edited and timely book.

The Historic Environment Image Resource (HEIR) is a new database of over 10,000 lantern slide and glass plate negative photographic images. These images derive from Oxford University teaching collections brought together between c. 1880 and 1910. Although they were intended to be used for teaching in a variety of academic disciplines, none of which focused on children or childhood, nonetheless these images provide a useful new resource for an interdisciplinary study of global childhood at the turn of the twentieth century.

In 1983 a well-known authority on Dark Age trade stated that 'until 800 all the evidence points to an economy primarily directed by the elites'. Commerce would have been 'confined' to 'specific trading places' known as 'emporia' or 'gateway communities', while 'inter-regional market ...