Scheduled Maintenance
Please be advised that this website will undergo scheduled maintenance on the following dates: •
Tuesday 3rd December 11:00-15:00
During these times, some services may be temporarily unavailable. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
HES Cropmark Rapid Update Project: 2022
Date September 2022 - October 2022
Event ID 1146284
Category Project
Type Project
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1146284
A national review of cropmark site records continued with a small project to review a selection of cropmark site records in East Lothian, undertaken in September and October 2022. The site records were in three discrete areas: NE of Longniddry, around The Chesters and around Doon Hill/Little Pinkerton. The main aim of the project was to revise the selected NRHE cropmark site records, ensuring that they met and exceeded minimum record standards and are therefore accurate, accessible and usable. The project was managed by Dr Kirsty Millican and the project executive was Dr Dave Cowley.
The project made use of material held in the HES archive, primarily oblique aerial photographs, cropmark mapping (transcriptions) and the 1:10,000 Record Sheets maintained by the OS Archaeology Division and subsequently RCAHMS. Other datasets were used where appropriate, all in a QGIS environment. These included vertical aerial photographs (supplied by Getmapping plc), successive iterations of OS Historic maps at 6-inch and smaller scales (supplied by the National Library of Scotland), and current OS raster and digital mapping.
The project involved the desk-based review of 54 site records. Checks were made to classification and period. Location was defined by a site area polygon and a precise National Grid Reference generated from its centre. Where required, oblique aerial photographs were rectified to assist with the definition of site area polygons. Text descriptions were written where there was no existing description, or the existing description was considered inadequate. Terminology for the classification and date of archaeological sites was drawn from published HES thesauri while site area polygons were created using the Historic Environment Polygonisation Standards (Scotland) technical guidance.
In total, the project reviewed 54 archaeological sites. Some 45 required a change to their classification or period and 35 new text descriptions were written.
The project archive includes the initial dataset before review, quality assurance and peer review (TM002258), the final dataset (TM002259) and some nine rectified oblique aerial photographs created during the project. Quality assurance was undertaken in September and October 2022, and the project dataset was entered into the NRHE in October 2022.
Information from HES Archaeological Survey (K Millican), 10 July 2023
