Burrow House Farm, Cottam: an Anglian and Anglo-Scandinavian Settlement in East Yorkshire

The Anglian and Anglo-Scandinavian settlements known as Cottam B (East Yorkshire) were the focus of field walking, geophysical survey, and excavation from 1993-5. A second site, at Cottam A, was examined in 1996; here a Romano-British farmstead was re-used in the Anglo-Scandinavian period. The fieldwork was conducted under the auspices of the Department of Archaeology, University of York, and principally funded by the British Academy and the Earthwatch Foundation.

The Cottam B fieldwork was published in the Archaeological Journal 156 (1999). By kind permission of the Royal Archaeological Institute it is also featured as an experiment in electronic publication in Internet Archaeology 10 (2001), providing enhanced database search facilities, and with an electronic text which is fully integrated with the supporting digital archive deposited with the ADS. The finds and paper archive are deposited with Hull Museum. (The Cottam A publication will appear in print in due course and at that stage its digital archive will also be deposited with the ADS).
The archive reports and raw data for Cottam B are offered here as a pilot study in the potential re-use of primary fieldwork data. Those aspects available in the digital archive but not in the traditional paper publication include:
(1) "Level III" reports covering the full stratigraphic sequence
(2) the complete flint report
(3) an extensive finds database, with 2-D co-ordinates for each find, geo-referenced to the OS national grid
(4) a sample of CAD files, including a rectified aerial photographic plot which provides a suitable base map for an intra-site GIS
(5) colour images of many of the metal-detected finds
During post-excavation analysis extensive use was made of distribution plots generated in the project GIS using ARC/INFO. A limited number of finds distributions were examined in the publication but one of the strengths of the digital archive is the potential for the user to recreate aspects of the project GIS from the CAD files and database and to explore further intra-site patterning. Users are encouraged to explore and re-analyse the dataset on condition that any publications acknowledge the data source.