One metre LiDAR
The Environment Agency's survey of England as hillshades, slope and local relief, so banks, ditches, mounds and hollow ways stand out where the eye and the satellite miss them.
A research atlas for England
Read the landscape of England.
LiDAR, historic maps and the recorded past on one map, with every source cited. For archaeologists, universities and heritage teams.
Maiden Castle, Dorset
One hillfort, many views.
From the air, then in eight views of the Environment Agency's one metre LiDAR over exactly the same ground, so you can see what each one brings out.
Satellite
Powered by Esri. Source: Esri, Vantor, Microsoft, Earthstar Geographics and the GIS User CommunityEnvironment Agency one metre LiDAR, Open Government Licence v3.0
About us
Field Archaeology is made by Gitwix Limited, a software company in Manchester. The evidence for England's past is held by many public bodies, each with its own website, format and licence. Field Archaeology brings it onto one map, cites every piece of it, and leaves the interpretation to you.
What we do
Field Archaeology brings the evidence for England's past onto one map: one metre LiDAR of the bare earth, historic maps from the 1880s to the 1960s, and England's heritage records, each with its publisher and licence. It is made for the work of reading a landscape: looking, comparing, recording and writing it up.
The evidence for a landscape already exists, but it is scattered across many publishers, formats and licences, and gathering it for one question can take days. In one place, with every source cited, the time goes on interpretation instead. How it works
Historic maps
Ordnance Survey maps from 1885 to 1961, laid over the ground and compared with today.
The recorded past
The National Heritage List for England, Aerial Investigation and Mapping, Heritage at Risk, Portable Antiquities Scheme findspots, hillforts, Roman roads and Domesday places.
Reports and exports
Area reports to print or keep, maps printed to scale on the National Grid, exports in CSV, Shapefile and GeoJSON, and LiDAR heights as GeoTIFF for QGIS or ArcGIS.
Cited at every step
Every dataset names its publisher and licence. Every record has a Cite button, and reports and prints list their sources, ready for a dissertation or a client report.
Your work stays yours
Your files and marks are private to you. What we keep about you is set out plainly, and you can download your work or delete it.
For research and practice, in development
- Research projects
- Record sites and features with Historic England's periods and monument types, share a project with colleagues as editors or viewers, and export the gazetteer.
- Desk-based assessments
- Draw the red line, set the study area, and build the gazetteer, the numbered figures and the sources table.
- Spatial questions
- Everything within an area or a buffer, the distance to the nearest site, and counts by period and type.
- Compare and regress
- LiDAR views side by side, and every map edition at one place, from the earliest to today.
- Your own data
- Bring in CSV, GeoJSON, KML, GPX and shapefiles, which you can do today, and place your own scans, geophysics plots and excavation plans on the ground.
- Citable views
- A link that reopens the exact map, layers and date, with a citation ready to paste.
For teaching and fieldwork, in development
Classes
A lecturer creates a class, students join with a code, and work is set, submitted and marked in one place. Students only ever see their own.
Practicals
Ready-made exercises in LiDAR interpretation, landscape survey and map regression, set in real places in England.
In the field
Points recorded by GPS with photographs, walkover tracks, and fieldwalking grids laid out on the National Grid.
Where it is going
From the field to the record
Most finds are made by detectorists, and the details that matter are known only at the moment of discovery. A planned feature brings finds recorded at the source to Finds Liaison Officers and researchers, complete, consented and at a safe precision.
Research programme
We are setting out to measure whether one cited atlas makes landscape research faster and better, with the people who do it, and to publish what we find, whichever way it falls.
Open data, properly credited
Field Archaeology is built on open data from the bodies that hold England's record. Every exported row and every report names its dataset, publisher and licence, and the full list of sources, with their licences, is on Data and licences.
- Environment Agency
- Historic England
- Portable Antiquities Scheme
- National Library of Scotland
- Ordnance Survey
- British Geological Survey
- Atlas of Hillforts of Britain and Ireland
- Itiner-e
- Pleiades
- GB1900
- Wikidata
- OpenStreetMap contributors
Field Archaeology is independent. Naming a source does not mean it endorses Field Archaeology.
Licences
Field Archaeology is in a private pilot. While the pilot runs it is free for the universities, archaeological units and heritage bodies we invite.
Universities
A licence for a department or the whole university, with a named lead who manages its people.
Archaeological units
Seats for the team, with area reports and exports for client reports.
Heritage bodies
Access for officers and volunteers, arranged to suit how your team works.
Licences after the pilot will be offered to pilot members first, and are priced on request. How licences work, or get in touch.
Contact
Tell us who you are and what you would use Field Archaeology for, and we will reply by email.