The National Bronze Age Implement Index
Discover the Bronze Age
An innovative Citizen Science project, which began its journey to provide a definitive index of Bronze Age implements in 1913 with a call to action.Then 100 years later, the MicroPasts project (a partnership between University College London and the British Museum) set about digitising and using the power of the crowd to unlock the paper records.
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project has now successfully delivered a digital index of the National Bronze Age Implement Index, which is freely available to all, including the code, data and images.
This website allows archaeologists, academics and the public to explore the wide array of metalwork found and reported to museums, universities and the Portable Antiquities Scheme.
Combined data
Within this website, the MicroPasts team have combined datasets from the National Bronze Age Implement Index with publicly accessible data (only those objects with findspots made available) from the Portable Antiquities Scheme database.
This allows you to explore Bronze Age metalwork found across the UK, and to compare the data from the two sources, to search, map and interrogate. There will be errors present in these data, places might not be in the right location, object types might need revising. If you see a problem, you can either report it, or if you can code, submit a pull request.
Just give me these data...
You may just want to use the raw data, that's fine.
We have two CSV files with image links from the BAI and PAS which are liberally CC-BY licensed and are used to power this site. You could use these to drive new research, or simply use it to help report errors.
3D Models
The MicroPasts team ran a citizen science powered 3D modelling series of projects during the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded phase. Over 100 models were generated by the public, and these are now available to view and download from Sketchfab and are integrated here.
These objects range from broken and complete palstave axes, hoards such as Goudhurst, Stibbard and Arreton Down to large ceremonial dirks and swords.
Please feel free to download and remix these models, and if you do, please let us know!
Uncover the past
Building on collaboration, friendship and trust, the MicroPasts team have worked with the team behind Peripleo (funded in part by the British Library's Locating a National Collection, to create a map interface for interrogating discovery of material in the Bronze Age Index.
These data in the BAI are generally approximated coordinates based on placenames (geocoded against OpenStreetMap's Nominatim API), whilst the included PAS data only includes records with a location that is unmasked and uses the four figure grid reference system to create the point.
Explore the Bronze Age Index using Peripleo
