Archaeologists call on the widest possible range of evidence when trying to develop their ideas. While most studies include analysis of plans, maps, fieldwork notes, artefacts, and relevant written sources, the inclusion of pictures, particularly older, unpublished ones, may be overlooked. What if there were an easy-to-use, searchable, online resource that could provide access to this type of image covering the era from 1860 to the present day? As it happens, there is one: the HEIR Project digital image archive of the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford (https://heir.arch.ox.ac.uk).
What is HEIR?
HEIR stands for the Historic Environment Image Resource. Its core mission is to rescue neglected and endangered photographic archives, unlock their research potential, and make them available to the public. It is an expanding collection, currently including more than 45,000 images gleaned primarily from technologically obsolete visual teaching resources from several Oxford departments, along with images from the personal photo collections of academics from archaeology, history, and classics, blended with a small number of image donations from private sources. Most of the pictures have been scanned from lantern slides, glass plates, film negatives, photographs, and 35mm slides, or uploaded directly as digital files. While the images span the globe, because of the history of the collections, the Classical world and the countries of the former British Empire are most thoroughly represented in HEIR.
The initiative evolved from a campaign undertaken in 2012 by Dr Sally Crawford and Dr Katharina Ulmschneider to overhaul the archives at the School of Archaeology, Oxford, with a view to bringing forgotten historic resources back to light and into the academic debate. Having evaluated a treasure trove of images, many of which had been unseen for 70 years or more, scanning of the photographic archive began in 2013, with an initial grant from the Logan Foundation. In the same year, a scoping survey of other social science and humanities departments within the university revealed that the School of Archaeology was not the only department to house seemingly ‘obsolete’ historic photography collections. Soon the Ashmolean Museum, the departments of the History of Art, Geography, and Plant Science, Harris Manchester College, and St Hugh’s College added their collections to HEIR. When combined with several scholars’ personal photographic archives, the result is a resource of unusual scope and depth for archaeologists and historians, as well as a visual bedrock of British archaeological history.
New evidence for the changing importance of cattle husbandry in Ireland