In 2009, the Berkshire Archaeological Society published
Living in Iron Age in and around Berkshire, the results of a desktop study undertaken to provide the people in Berkshire with details of how people lived in Berkshire from 800 BC to AD 43.
Since then the Berkshire Archaeological Society has encouraged the public to take an interest in the archaeology and history of Berkshire. The Society has also encouraged members to work as archaeologists to reveal new evidence of how people lived and worked in the county.
The Society’s early work was created using maps drawn with a drawing package and archaeological data managed in spreadsheets. As the datasets got larger, members of the Society started to develop IT applications to manage the large datasets.
Following the advice of Sarah Orr and Fiona MacDonald, the then archaeological officers for West Berkshire and Berkshire Archaeology, the Society decided to implement those parts of the MIDAS data standard which were relevant to desktop research. Anchurus was the son of MIDAS and the IT system Anchurus I was produced.
In the early 2010s, the Society was regularly undertaking desktop research projects and geophysics surveys. Furthermore, for many years, members of the Society had been working under the guidance of Professor Mike Fulford and Amanda Clarke on Silchester Insular IX excavations. Eventually the Society decided to undertake an excavation at Blounts Court, The Johnson Matthey Technology Centre at Sonning Common.
In 2023, the University of Reading Archaeology Department invited the Society to partner them in the Unlocking Old Windsor Project. As a result in 2023 and early 2024, Society members were involved in recording excavation details from the Old Windsor site in the Integrated Archaeology Database system (IADB 2017). This experience led to:
a) Society members recording details from the Society’s Blounts Court excavation in IADB 2017
b) The Society, recognising that IADB 2017 was a IT system which was likely to go out of service within a year or two
c) The Society’s IT Group producing a new system Anchurus II to support the recording and interpretation of an archaeological excavation