Research AdditionalWODAN Project

The WODAN Project: Developing an archaeological wood and charcoal database for Ireland

Project description: Intention

The amount of wood and charcoal identifications from excavations in Ireland has dramatically increased in the last numbers of years. Apart from serving a dating purpose, increasingly the data is used to study the vegetation history of Ireland, as well as human factors in the development of managed woodlands and landscape change. Other aspects that have been studied are wood technology and of course worked wood. Much wood data appears in appendices to reports or in unpublished internal reports. There are a few very good exceptions to this rule, and the private sector especially is increasingly realising the importance of presenting environmental datasets. However, much data from excavations prior to c. 5 years ago is not widely available and no overview of it exists at the present time.

This project aims to establish a wood and charcoal database, that stores published and (when accessible) unpublished material. The database can be updated annually by incorporating newly available data.

The database can serve a multitude of purposes but first of all it will be a digital archive. The dataset will facilitate scientific research as well as optimising future sampling work. It will help to identify key research agendas for environmental archaeology. This will feed back to other aspects of archaeology thus facilitating fully integrated archaeological reports.

Phase 2: Aims

Phase 2, the creation phase, includes the following modules:

  • Consensus of final field to be used in the wood and charcoal database;
  • Archive of published and unpublished report, open to all researchers;
  • Review on wood and charcoal literature (list of references);
  • Trial period of input focused on the wood and charcoal assemblage from the Mesoithic and Neolithic period by using the database tool;
  • Planning for future needs with clear estimates how much time will be needed to import and host all known wood and charcoal identifications from Ireland within ‘WODAN’;
  • Investigate integration with other archaeobotanical datasets, in this phase in particular the dendrochronological database DCCD currently being designed by Cultureelerfgoed (formerly RACM) in Netherlands;
  • Promoting further international links between colleagues working with archaeological wood and charcoal. To bring Irish research into an international context and to ensure that new developments in the research are dissiminated within the IWAA (Irish Wood Anatomist Association) and more widely.

Phase 2: Output

The database will be designed in close collaboration with the wood and charcoal specialists in Ireland, and our international partners in Netherlands, Germany and America.

To investigate the linking with DCCD, a short visit is planned to discuss WODAN in the Netherlands in June/July.

The project will be presented with a poster at the EAA meeting in Riva del Garda, Italy and at the AEA conference in York, both in September.

In October, an international workshop is planned  on ‘WODAN’ with demonstrations of the database and templates to be used for future research. Future wishes and links can be inventarised. The meeting serves also to introduce Irish wood and charcoal specialists and our partners to each other, maybe including short presentation on Irish projects.

A concluding ‘national’ workshop is planned mid November, further training specialists in working with the database. The first results of input of archaeological data will be presented at that stage. The workshop will combine this occasion to include a session with microscopes to study problematic wood identifications. Wishes will be analyzed and summarized, to be included in the final report.

The final report will include a report on the database design.

Information on the progress of the project, actions and meetings will appear on the website www.wodan.ie, that will be regularly updated.

 

This project was supported by the Heritage Council under the
Irish National Strategic Archaeological Research (INSTAR) Programme 2008.