Field Archaeology for universities

Field Archaeology is a research atlas for England. It gives a department one spatial research environment: one metre LiDAR, Ordnance Survey maps from 1885 to 1961 and the national heritage records on one map, read together around a research question, with every source cited.

Last updated 25 October 2026

Why a department needs one map

The evidence for a landscape already exists, but it is held in many places. A dissertation on one parish might draw on the Environment Agency's LiDAR, Ordnance Survey maps scanned by the National Library of Scotland, Historic England's National Heritage List and its mapping from aerial photographs, the names written on the old maps, Domesday places, the British Geological Survey's geology and, still separately, the county's own Historic Environment Record. Each comes from its own website, in its own format and under its own licence, and each has to be brought onto the same grid and cited in its own way.

The atlas's own Sources and licences page shows the scale of it: 28 datasets for England, from 19 organisations and communities, under ten different sets of licence terms. Field Archaeology puts them on one map, where they can be read against each other around a research question, and every record carries its source, its licence and a citation. How Field Archaeology works sets out the whole approach.

What a department gets

Field Archaeology is in a private pilot. Part of what this page describes is in the atlas today; the rest comes with the academic release, which is being finished now. The table shows which is which.

Research: from a question to a cited result

A landscape project follows the same steps whether it is a dissertation, a thesis or a funded study. In Field Archaeology each step happens on the same map, and the names below are the tools' own. Research projects, Ask about an area, Records in view, Compare views, Map regression, My maps, the Desk-based assessment and Saved views come with the academic release; the rest is in the atlas today.

1. Start an investigation. A research project has a name, a colour and a research question, which everyone it is shared with sees.
2. Find the place. Search by National Grid reference, postcode or place name. The chip at the top of the map gives the eight-figure grid reference of the crosshair at its centre, ready to copy.
3. Select the evidence. Turn on the layers the question needs: the Environment Agency's 1 m terrain model, which covers about 99 per cent of England from surveys flown between June 2000 and April 2022, in the Agency's own hillshade and eleven further views; Ordnance Survey maps from 1885 to 1961; and records such as the National Heritage List for England, Historic England's Aerial Investigation and Mapping, Heritage at Risk, hillforts, Roman roads and Domesday places. Then ask the spatial question. Ask about an area gives every open record in the view, a drawn area, a circle round a grid reference, a saved mark or a project item, counted by period and by site type in the FISH vocabularies' terms, with the nearest of each type and a table of distances and bearings. Records in view lists what is on the map, to sort, filter and read with a keyboard or a screen reader.
4. Analyse the landscape. Compare views sets two or three maps side by side, moving together, each showing a LiDAR view, an old map edition, today's map, satellite or a dated aerial. Map regression lays out every old map edition at the crosshair, then today's map, satellite and LiDAR, oldest first, as a figure sheet. An elevation profile reads the height every metre along a line, Hybrid LiDAR 3D shows the ground of a drawn area in 3D, and My maps pins your own scans, geophysics plots or excavation plans onto the ground, by control points if you wish, with the error at each point in metres.
5. Record what you see. Each item in a project is a point, line, area or circle, with a site type and a period from the FISH lists; the evidence for it, any of 18 kinds from LiDAR and cropmarks to excavation, HER and PAS records and field visits; a confidence of Certain, Probable, Possible or Doubtful; a status of Proposed, Checked, Verified on the ground or Rejected; notes; and who recorded it and when.
6. Attach the sources. Every record card ends with its source, the record's own number, linked to the original entry where there is one, its grid reference and Cite. An item's References hold HER and NHLE numbers, archive references and publications, and a project can import records from a file such as an HER extract, as CSV, TSV, GeoJSON, KML, GPX, zipped shapefile or GeoPackage.
7. Work with colleagues. A project's owner shares it by email, as editor or viewer, and the database enforces the roles: viewers read, editors add and change items, and only the owner changes the project itself.
8. Write it up. An area report lists what the open datasets record in an area up to 20 km across, with record numbers, grid references and the sources and licences at the end, to print, save as a PDF, keep in Your files or download as rows. The Desk-based assessment builds a report in five steps, from the site boundary and study area to a numbered gazetteer with distances, figures with the National Grid, a scale and a north arrow, and the sources, licences and references.
9. Export, share and cite. A project's gazetteer goes out as CSV, GeoJSON or KML, and a project or the records in an area as one GeoPackage. A saved view keeps the map exactly as it was, with a link that opens it again and a reference to cite it by. The exports and citing are set out below.

Teaching: modules, practicals and classes

The atlas runs in a web browser, so a class needs nothing installed, and each student signs in to their own account. With the academic release, a module can also be run in the atlas itself.

• Classes. A lecturer makes a class, gives students its join code, sets exercises and marks the work. Each student works on an exercise in a project of their own and hands it in; the lecturer opens it on the map and returns feedback and a mark. Co-lecturers and markers can be added. Students never see each other, or each other's work.
• Practicals. Five are ready-made at real places, each with learning outcomes, the law and access for its places, steps, questions, reading, and handouts and worksheets to print: reading earthworks on LiDAR, from barrows to ridge and furrow and hollow ways; a landscape survey of a parish at Avebury; map regression from the tithe map to today at Cranbrook, Devon; which came first, a Roman road, a barrow cemetery or a dyke, on Cranborne Chase; and surveying a hillfort from the terrain at Maiden Castle, Dorset. Check against the records shows the open records within 60 m of each feature a student has recorded. A practical can be done alone or set for a class.

Some ways to use the atlas in a module today:

• Reading LiDAR. Show one place in several views and ask what each brings out and what it hides. Reports, prints and LiDAR downloads carry a note of how each view was drawn and, where there is one, the paper it follows, so students can describe their figures in a methods section. The notes are also on LiDAR visualisations.
• Working back through the maps. Fade the Ordnance Survey editions from 1885 to 1961 over today's map and the LiDAR, and ask when a field, a track or a pond appeared or went. Historic maps lists the series.
• Records and their limits. Set what the LiDAR shows against what the National Heritage List and Historic England's aerial mapping record. Each area report ends with what it does not include, a ready start for a discussion of what lies outside the open data.

Historic England's guidance on airborne LiDAR explains why more than one view matters:

Even when one visualisation seems particularly useful it is good practice to use as many different types of visualisation as possible to obtain a comprehensive overview of the archaeology.

The same guidance reports a comparison by Bennett and colleagues (2012) in which no single technique recorded more than 77 per cent of features, while any combination of three recorded more than 90 per cent.

Fieldwork

For field schools and survey modules, the academic release adds two tools for work on the ground.

• Field recording. GPS points with photos, sketches and notes, and walkover tracks, saved to a project. Every save waits in an outbox on the phone and goes when there is a signal, so a record made in a field without one is not lost. Each point shows its GPS accuracy, and photos are redrawn at 2,048 pixels as JPEG, so the location a camera writes into a photo is not kept. The maps themselves still need a signal.
• Fieldwalking grid. Squares of 10, 20 or 50 m on the National Grid over a field, with finds counted per square as worked and burnt flint, pottery by broad period, ceramic building material, metal and other. The squares are shaded by finds per hectare and go out with the survey conditions as CSV and GeoJSON, and several walkers' counts merge square by square.

Before a site visit, Print a map to scale makes a sheet from 1:1,250 to 1:25,000 with National Grid lines, a scale bar, a north arrow and the sources of the layers shown. On the map, scheduled monuments show in red, and tapping one gives the consents that apply.

How do students cite what they find?

Cite the record, not the map. Every record card ends with its source, its licence, the record's own number and its grid reference, and Cite copies a reference in Harvard form (Cite Them Right) with the date and the grid reference. A reference in that form for Maiden Castle reads:

Historic England (2026) National Heritage List for England, list entry 1015775: Maiden Castle. Available at: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1015775 (Accessed: 25 October 2026). Open Government Licence v3.0. NGR SY 6689 8845.

For the LiDAR, credit the heights to the Environment Agency with its attribution statement and the Open Government Licence v3.0, name the view, and give the date you used it; How to cite has the exact form. The Agency's attribution statement is: © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2022. All rights reserved.

For an area report, cite the records by their numbers; the report ends with every dataset it drew on and its licence.

With the academic release, the map itself can be cited. A saved view keeps the centre, zoom, bearing and pitch, the base map, every layer, the LiDAR view and its colours, the historic map edition and every opacity, with each dataset's version as it was when the view was saved, and gives a link that opens it again for anyone with a Field Archaeology account. Its reference takes this form, followed by a reference for every dataset the view drew on:

Field Archaeology (2026) The view's title. Map view, its grid reference. Available at: its link (Field Archaeology account required) (Accessed: the date it was saved).

Export references gives every dataset, and the view on the map or your saved views, as RIS for Zotero, EndNote and Mendeley or as BibTeX for LaTeX, each with its version. How to cite sets out references and credit lines for each kind of source.

Which GIS formats does it export?

Field Archaeology is not a geographic information system (GIS); it hands its data to one. The shapefile and the British National Grid GeoJSON open straight into QGIS and ArcGIS in EPSG:27700, and the CSV opens in any spreadsheet, with eastings and northings and latitude and longitude.

Today, records reach the National Grid through the Ordnance Survey's Helmert transformation, which can put a point a few metres from where OSTN15 would, as the shapefile's README explains: use OSTN15 where survey accuracy matters. With the academic release, OSTN15, the transformation that defines the National Grid, is behind every grid reference and every British National Grid export, reproducing Ordnance Survey's own coordinates to about 0.1 m; until it has loaded the atlas uses the Helmert, and the README says which was used. The LiDAR heights are not converted at all; they come exactly as the Environment Agency serves them. The LiDAR heights panel also gives the addresses of the Agency's own map services, so the terrain model can be streamed into QGIS without downloading it.

What do the data licences allow?

Most of the atlas is open data. Of the 32 datasets on its Sources and licences page, 17 are under the Open Government Licence v3.0, among them the Environment Agency's LiDAR and Historic England's National Heritage List. That licence lets anyone copy, publish, distribute and adapt the information, commercially or not, as long as they acknowledge the source with the attribution the publisher asks for.

• Creative Commons. The Atlas of Hillforts, Beyond the Tribal Hidage, the Domesday shires and hundreds and the Devon tithe survey come through the Archaeology Data Service under CC BY 4.0, which asks for credit. GB1900 and Wikipedia are share-alike: work made from them and shared goes out under the same licence.
• The old maps and the base map. The Ordnance Survey maps come from the National Library of Scotland under CC BY 3.0, which asks for a credit with a link to maps.nls.uk. They reach the atlas through MapTiler, as do the base map and the terrain shading, and MapTiler's terms allow printed maps for an internal purpose, up to A4. Ask MapTiler before publishing a print that shows them.
• Labelled as it goes. Every exported row and every report names its dataset, publisher and licence, so the terms travel with the data.

Each dataset, its publisher and its licence are listed on Data and licences.

From the field to the record

One feature is in development and not yet in the atlas: From the field to the record. Metal detectorists already find most of what the Portable Antiquities Scheme records: 94 per cent of the finds it recorded in 2024 were found by detectorists (British Museum 2026; Stephens 2026). The feature will bring detectorists' own records of their digs into Field Archaeology: each find with its photograph, its exact findspot and its depth, and the ground they searched, including where they found nothing.

For research, that means finds with their context, and a measure of where people looked. Historic England's guidance Our Portable Past says of detecting surveys on battlefields that recording each find's position on a ‘random wander’ is not enough: the gaps in the record have to reflect the finds in the ground, not how much time was spent in each area. Detectorists' walks are opportunistic search with its effort measured, not systematic survey, but they record where people searched, including the ground where nothing came up; we found no published equivalent.

The records will reach researchers de-identified and through verified access: never public, exact findspots only to organisations we have verified, and never with a finder's name. Finders report their finds to the Scheme themselves, through its own submission tool, and nothing is reported automatically. The feature is being piloted through 2026 and 2027.

Speed and rigour: what the pilots will measure

Field Archaeology is meant to shorten the slow part of landscape research, gathering the evidence and citing it, without loosening the rigour. The Chartered Institute for Archaeologists' standard for desk-based assessment asks that ‘All sources consulted should be listed in the report, whether or not they have been productive’. In the atlas, area reports, exported records and saved views each list the datasets they drew on, with their licences, which is where such a list starts.

We publish no figure for the time saved, because nobody has measured it yet. Measuring it is the work of the university pilots in the research programme, planned through 2026 and 2027, starting with one or two departments: the time it takes to assemble the evidence for a landscape, the sources consulted, the datasets used, the researcher's confidence in the result, and whether people carry on using the atlas. A pilot that studies people needs the university's own ethics review and a data agreement before it starts. The programme also plans an evaluation with Finds Liaison Officers, a first case study and independent review; we will publish the method and the results.

Accessibility

Field Archaeology has not yet had an accessibility audit, so we do not claim that it meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. Dialogs hold the keyboard focus while they are open, every area report can also be downloaded as CSV, which opens in any spreadsheet, and with the academic release Records in view lists the records on the map for a keyboard or a screen reader. If a student or colleague needs the atlas to work differently, tell us when you ask for access, or through Send feedback in the atlas, which goes straight to the team building it.

Accounts and personal data

Everyone has their own account, with an email address and a password of at least eight characters, and sign-in is guarded by a captcha check. There is no single sign-on through a university login and no multi-factor sign-in. A university email is quickest for us to check, and a personal email is fine for anyone who has no other. The atlas keeps:

• each person's account: email, name, university or organisation, department and role;
• the marks they save and the files they add to Your files, private to them;
• their place on the pilot's invite list: email, organisation and the dates they were invited and joined;
• if they asked for access, their request: what they told us on the form, with a scrambled form of their network address and the name of their browser, kept to stop abuse of it;
• anonymous counts of sign-ins and of errors, with no name or email attached.

With the academic release it also keeps each person's research (the projects they make or join and what is recorded in them, field records with their photos, fieldwalking counts, the maps they place, their saved views, and their classes with the work handed in) and counts of what they use: sign-ins, reports, exports, prints and the like, each with the date, the account and the institution, and never what was looked at. The people in a project see its records, a class's lecturers and markers see the work handed in to them, and an institution's lead sees each of its people's name, email, when they were last on and these counts.

The database, sign-in and Your files are held in Frankfurt, Germany, and the functions that answer the atlas's requests run in Washington DC, in the United States. Data a student brings onto the map from their own files is read on their device and stays there unless they choose to save it. We do not sell or share personal data. From the dashboard, anyone can download their data in one file or delete their account; with the academic release the download also covers their research, their usage and their access request. Questions sets out what each covers today.

Licences, and how a department joins

Places in the pilot are free and by invitation while it runs, and there are no prices, payments or subscriptions in the atlas. For a department or an institution that wants to go on using it, there are department licences and institution licences, priced on request. Licences sets out what each includes, and the facts a procurement team asks for.

Field Archaeology is made by Gitwix Limited, a private limited company registered in England and Wales, company number 15817715, with its registered office at 9 Owen Street, Manchester, M15 4UA. The company is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office, registration number ZC211025.

1. Ask through Request access on the atlas's sign-in page. The form asks where you work or study, your role, what you would use the atlas for (research, teaching, a student project or dissertation, fieldwork or survey, heritage management or planning advice, or finds recording) and a short description of the work. Students can name a supervisor or tutor, and anyone can add an ORCID iD.
2. We check every request ourselves and reply by email.
3. When a place is agreed, we add colleagues and students by their email addresses. Someone who already has an account gets in at once; someone new is sent a link to set up their account, which works for 30 days.
4. With the academic release, an institution can have its own lead, who adds people at the institution's own email domains, each emailed their own link, switches them off and on, and sees the institution's use month by month.

Questions and answers

Sources

1. Bennett, R., Welham, K., Hill, R.A. and Ford, A. (2012) ‘A comparison of visualization techniques for models created from airborne laser scanned data’, Archaeological Prospection, 19(1), pp. 41 to 48. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/arp.1414.
2. British Museum (2026) 2024 was a record-breaking year for archaeological finds and Treasure in Britain [press release]. Available at: https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/press/press-releases/2024-was-record-breaking-year-archaeological-finds-and-treasure-britain (Accessed: 25 October 2026).
3. Chartered Institute for Archaeologists (2020) Standard and guidance for historic environment desk-based assessment. Reading: CIfA. Available at: https://www.archaeologists.net/sites/default/files/2023-11/CIfA-SandG-DBA-2020.pdf (Accessed: 25 October 2026).
4. Environment Agency (2022) LIDAR Composite Digital Terrain Model (DTM), 1m. Available at: https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/01b3ee39-da3f-47b6-83da-dc98e73a461f/lidar-composite-digital-terrain-model-dtm-1m (Accessed: 25 October 2026).
5. Historic England (2018) Using Airborne Lidar in Archaeological Survey: The Light Fantastic. Swindon: Historic England. Available at: https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/using-airborne-lidar-in-archaeological-survey/ (Accessed: 25 October 2026).
6. Historic England (2018) Our Portable Past. Swindon: Historic England. Available at: https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/ourportablepast/heag177-our-portable-past/ (Accessed: 25 October 2026).
7. MapTiler (no date) MapTiler Cloud Terms and Conditions. Available at: https://www.maptiler.com/terms/cloud/ (Accessed: 25 October 2026).
8. National Library of Scotland (no date) Historic Maps API. Available at: https://maps.nls.uk/projects/api/ (Accessed: 25 October 2026).
9. Stephens, S. (2026) ‘PAS report highlights public engagement in museums’, Museums Journal, 21 January. Available at: https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news/2026/01/pas-report-highlights-public-engagement-in-museums/ (Accessed: 25 October 2026).
10. 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).
11. 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).