Novum Inventorium Sepulchrale - Kentish Anglo-Saxon graves and grave-goods in the Sonia Hawkes archive

Project start date: 2005-07

Project end date: 2007-07

The county of Kent is exceptionally rich in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries and excavations of some of these cemeteries in the 18th and early 19th centuries provided a wealth of finds reflecting Kent's close political and economic ties to the Frankish world in the 5th to 7th centuries. The website contains a searchable database of manuscripts, photographs and drawings from Sonia Hawkes' collection. Some of the information from the excavations was published in the nineteenth century and in Sonia Hawkes' series of monographs. This website makes the remainder of the archive available by creating a digital database of archaeological finds from the cemetaries to enable future generations of researchers to gain a better understanding of the origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The line drawings, photographs and X-rays in the Hawkes Archive were scanned for archive quality TIFF images and web-surrogates were produced. Metadata was imbedded on each of the archive images detailing its content and copyright. These TIFF images have been deposited as an archive with the AHDS-Archaeology repository. The pages are written in HTML combined with PHP scripting throughout. PHP is also used as a means of providing a web-based interface with a MySQL database. The home page uses Dublin Core Metadata in order to describe the site and enable intelligent information discovery systems. Production of compressed JPEG files from uncompressed TIFF files for web dissemination