Licences for universities and organisations

Field Archaeology is a research atlas for England. While its pilot runs, places are free and by invitation; departments and whole institutions that want to carry on can take a licence, priced on request. This page sets out what each includes, how a pilot becomes a licence, and the facts a purchasing team will ask for.

Last updated 25 October 2026

Pilot places and licences

Field Archaeology can be taken up in three ways. The atlas is the same in each, with no tiers and nothing locked behind a payment. What differs is who the place is for, how long it runs and how it is agreed.

Licences after the pilot are offered to pilot members first.

What every place includes

• The evidence on one map. The Environment Agency's 1 m LiDAR in the Agency's own hillshade and eleven further views, Ordnance Survey maps from 1885 to 1961, the National Heritage List for England, Historic England's Aerial Investigation and Mapping, Domesday places, Devon's tithe fields and more, each dataset listed with its publisher and licence on Data and licences.
• Records that cite themselves. Every record card ends with its source, the record's own number, its National Grid reference and a Cite button that copies a Harvard reference. Saved views cite the map exactly as it was shown, with a link that opens it again, and references export as RIS or BibTeX for Zotero, EndNote, Mendeley and LaTeX.
• Research projects. Sites and features recorded on the map with Historic England's FISH monument types and periods, the kinds of evidence, a confidence and a status, shared with colleagues as editors or viewers and exported as a gazetteer.
• Analysis. Ask about an area lists every open record round a place, with counts by period and site type; Compare views sets two or three maps side by side; Map regression lays every old map edition out, oldest first; Elevation profile reads a height every metre along a line.
• Reports. An area report, a desk-based assessment builder with a numbered gazetteer and figures, and maps printed to scale from 1:1,250 to 1:25,000.
• Teaching. Classes with a join code, co-lecturers and markers, in which each student works in their own project, hands it in and gets feedback on the map; and five ready-made practicals with handouts and worksheets. Students never see each other's work.
• Fieldwork. Field recording of points with photos, sketches and notes, and of walkover tracks, which waits in an outbox on the phone when there is no signal; and a fieldwalking grid on the National Grid.
• GIS. CSV, zipped shapefile, GeoJSON and GeoPackage on the British National Grid, with OSTN15 behind every grid reference; the Environment Agency's heights as GeoTIFF; LiDAR views as georeferenced images; and your own scans and plans placed on the ground and exported for QGIS or ArcGIS.
• Accounts. Each person has their own account. The people in a project see its records, a class's lecturer sees the work handed in, and the rest is theirs alone. Anyone can download their data, or leave, at any time.

It runs in a web browser on a computer, tablet or phone, so there is nothing to install; the maps need a signal. For universities says more about teaching and research with it.

Department and institution licences

Department licence

For one department, school, research centre or team. It includes:

• accounts for its staff and students, each added by email and sent their own link to set up an account, which works once, for 30 days;
• one or more leads from the department, who add people at the institution's own email domains, switch accounts off and on, and take people off the atlas; we add anyone with another address;
• the whole atlas, from research projects and classes to every export;
• the department's use by month, for its leads, as a table and as CSV;
• support by email from the people who build the atlas.

Institution licence

For a whole university, archaeological unit or heritage body. It includes everything in a department licence, for everyone the institution adds across its departments, with its leads looking after its people and its use by month in one place.

For archaeological units and heritage bodies

An archaeological unit or a heritage body takes the same licences: a department licence for a team, an institution licence for the whole organisation. Its people are added at its own email domains in the same way.

Usage reporting

Under Your institution, a lead sees its people and their use of the atlas by month, for up to 12 months: sign-ins, reports, exports, prints and everything else, and how many people were active, with a CSV download. For each person, the lead sees their name, email address, when they were last on and their counts.

Each count is one row: the person, their institution and the time of a sign-in, a report, an export or the like, never what was looked at. Counting began in October 2026. Our admins see the same counts for every institution. These are Field Archaeology's own counts, not COUNTER reports.

Adding someone never tells a lead whether that address already has an account, and no set-up link is ever shown to a lead: each person is emailed their own.

Support and onboarding

• We set up the institution with its own email domains, name its leads and add the first people.
• The atlas carries its own Layer guide, How to cite and Sources and licences, and this website has guides to LiDAR visualisations, historic maps, desk-based assessment and citing sources.
• Teaching can start from the five ready-made practicals, from reading earthworks on LiDAR to surveying a hillfort from the terrain.
• Questions and problems go to admin@fieldfinders.co.uk, or through Send feedback in the atlas, and reach the people who build it.

We do not yet publish service levels or support hours. Ask us, and we will tell you plainly what we can offer.

How a pilot becomes a licence

1. Ask for a place. Use Request access on the atlas's sign-in page, or write to us, saying who you are and what the department would use the atlas for.
2. We set you up. We add the institution with its email domains, name its lead and add the first people; the lead adds the rest.
3. Use it in real work. Run a module, a round of dissertations or a research project in it. The lead sees use by month, and anyone can tell us what is missing through Send feedback.
4. Ask for a quotation. When the department or institution wants to carry on, ask us for a quotation for the licence that fits, and we reply in writing.
5. Carry on. A licence carries on with the same accounts, projects and classes, so there is nothing to move.

Separately, we are planning university pilots with one or two departments, which would measure how long it takes to assemble and cite the evidence for a landscape question, which sources and datasets people use, and how confident they are in what they find. Each would need its own ethics review and data agreement. Nothing about them is agreed yet, and a pilot place does not commit anyone to take part.

What a licence does not change

A licence is for Field Archaeology itself, not for the data in it. Each dataset stays under its publisher's licence, which every record, report and exported row names. Most are open data, many of them under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

The base map, the historic maps and the terrain shading come through MapTiler, whose terms allow printed maps for an internal purpose, up to A4. A licence for Field Archaeology does not extend those terms, so ask MapTiler before publishing a figure that shows them. Searches of a Historic Environment Record are separate too, under each HER's own charges.

The company

• Field Archaeology is made by Gitwix Limited, a private limited company registered in England and Wales, company number 15817715, incorporated on 3 July 2024.
• Registered office: 9 Owen Street, Manchester, M15 4UA.
• Registered with the Information Commissioner's Office as a data controller, registration reference ZC211025, from 31 July 2026 to 30 July 2027.
• Licences, quotations and data protection questions: admin@fieldfinders.co.uk.

Field Archaeology is independent: no public body runs it or endorses it.

Personal data and where it is held

Field Archaeology keeps:

• each person's account: email address, name, university or organisation, department and role;
• the work they make: marks, files, research projects and their items, field records and photos, fieldwalking grids, placed maps, saved views, classes and the work handed in to them;
• if they asked for access, their request, with a scrambled form of their network address and the name of their browser, kept to stop abuse of the form;
• a count of each sign-in, report, export, print and the like, as set out under Usage reporting, and anonymous counts of errors.

Photos added to field records are redrawn at 2,048 pixels, so the GPS position a camera writes into a photo file is not kept. Data people bring onto the map with Your own data, and GeoPackage files they open, stay on their device unless they choose to save them. We do not sell or share personal data, and there is no advertising in the atlas.

The database, sign-in and stored files are held by Supabase in Frankfurt, Germany. The atlas's server functions, which handle sign-up, access requests, invitations, data downloads, account deletion and elevation profiles among them, run on Vercel in Washington DC, in the United States, so personal data sent through them is processed there. Vercel also serves the atlas's pages from its edge network. Cloudflare provides the Turnstile check on sign-in and forms and stores the map layers, and Brevo sends the atlas's emails.

Map tiles from MapTiler and Esri, and the live services of the Environment Agency, Historic England, Natural England and the British Geological Survey, are fetched by each person's browser directly, so those services see the network address of whoever is looking, as any website does.

The privacy policy the atlas links to today sets out the safeguards Gitwix Limited relies on for transfers to the United States. It was written for the company's other product and does not yet mention Field Archaeology, which does not yet have a privacy notice of its own. Under a licence, whether Gitwix Limited acts as a controller or as the institution's processor is for the licence agreement to settle.

Anyone can download their data from Your account: their account record and access request, projects and items, saved views, classes and work handed in, usage counts, marks and the list of their files. Leave or delete my account takes a person off Field Archaeology, and deletes the whole account if it was made only for Field Archaeology. What happens to an institution's accounts and work at the end of a licence is not yet set out.

Security

In place today:

• HTTPS for the atlas and this website;
• row level security on every Field Archaeology table in the database, so each request is checked against the person making it, with database functions that check the caller and limit how often they can be called;
• sign-in by email address and a password of at least 8 characters, behind Cloudflare Turnstile;
• invitation and set-up links stored only in hashed form and working once, for 30 days; a lead never sees one, as each person is emailed their own;
• on Request access, Turnstile checked on the server, a hidden field that catches automated forms, limits by a scrambled form of the network address, one open request per email address, and the same answer whatever is sent, so the form never reveals whether an address has an account;
• headers that stop other sites framing the atlas and stop browsers guessing file types, and that limit referrer details and browser features;
• no advertising tags.

Not yet in place: multi-factor sign-in; single sign-on, as we have kept to an email address and a password for each person; a Content Security Policy for the atlas; and an independent penetration test. Send us your supplier or security questionnaire and we will complete it.

Accessibility

Field Archaeology has not yet had an accessibility audit, so there is no accessibility statement, and we do not claim that it meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. What has been done so far:

• focus is held inside each dialog while it is open;
• Records in view lists the records on the map, to sort, filter and read with a keyboard or a screen reader;
• colours are chosen against contrast targets set in the code;
• every area report can be downloaded as CSV, which opens in any spreadsheet.

If someone at your institution needs the atlas to work differently, tell us when you ask for a place, or through Send feedback in the atlas.

Contracts, invoicing and terms

Licences are priced on request. Tell us the department or institution, about how many people would use the atlas, and the modules or projects you have in mind, and we will reply in writing.

Not yet published: how we take purchase orders and invoice, payment terms, service levels and support hours, and what happens to accounts and data at the end of a licence. Ask us about any of them, and we will tell you plainly what we can offer.

Field Archaeology does not yet have terms or a licence agreement of its own. People in the pilot agree to the terms of use and the privacy policy that Gitwix Limited publishes for its other product.

Questions about licences

Sources

1. Companies House (no date) GITWIX LIMITED, company number 15817715. Available at: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/15817715 (Accessed: 25 October 2026).
2. Information Commissioner's Office (no date) Register of fee payers, registration reference ZC211025: Gitwix Limited. Available at: https://ico.org.uk/ESDWebPages/Entry/ZC211025 (Accessed: 25 October 2026).
3. MapTiler (no date) MapTiler Cloud Terms and Conditions. Available at: https://www.maptiler.com/terms/cloud/ (Accessed: 25 October 2026).
4. The National Archives (no date) Open Government Licence for public sector information, version 3.0. Available at: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/ (Accessed: 25 October 2026).
5. W3C (2024) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. W3C Recommendation, 12 December 2024. Available at: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/ (Accessed: 25 October 2026).