Anchurus II supports the archaeological workflow

The overall workflow

The figure below shows the overall workflow.

How Anchurus II supports the workflow

Anchurus II offers comprehensive support for archaeological workflows:

Carry out desktop research: this has the objective of understanding significant archaeological sites and finds round the site you are about to investigate. This normally involves collecting site data from Historic Environment Records and fieldwork reports, relevant Lidar data and maps and historic data.

Anchurus II supports this by encouraging you to record this evidence on maps using QGIS

Complete and get approval for a Written Scheme of Investigation (WSI) or project proposal: this can be in response to a request from a third party or because an area looks archaeologically interesting.

Anchurus II supports this by providing you with a draft of an appendix to your WSI/proposal that explains how you are going to use Anchurus II

Preparing your IT systems: recognises that today nobody is going to be able to carry out an excavation without some use of IT applications to manage and process the resulting volumes of data.

Anchurus II is designed to support the excavation of large, complicated sites with hundreds of contexts and thousands of finds and large teams of people. Faced with this challenge, you need to spend time preparing your IT systems (see user manual page Anchurus II applications and IT infrastructure)

Prepare for going on site: if you have a small site where you expect to excavate a few trenches with an experienced team and a prepared van full of equipment, this is comparatively a simple task. If you are preparing a community excavation with a large group of people with varying knowledge and skills, more care is needed because this is going to be a significant learning experience for many of those coming with you.

Anchurus II has been designed to support such a large community learning experience. Data collection is highly structured with most of it being written by hand on paper and permatrace. This approach has been adopted because it supports one to one learning as excavation leaders encourage less experience diggers to record what they see and then review their work.

Establishing the site grids: this is the first task to be undertaken when you get on site. Using a grid of control points that you should have prepared earlier, you will walk round the site using a global positioning system or Total Station to establish, and in some cases label control points.

Anchurus II supports this activity by providing guidelines for defining your site grid and facilities using QGIS to create a plan of your site grid

Carry out geophysics surveys: if your WSI /proposal calls for a geophysics survey, it should have specified the equipment to be used and areas to be surveyed. Anchurus II enables you to record anomalies found in earth resistance, gradiometer and ground penetrating radar data and to integrate them with results of the excavated stratigraphic analysis.

Anchurus II supports this activity by providing you with guidelines on how to collect data in the field, process it, use QGIS to plan and label anomalies and record them in the Anchurus II database so that the anomalies can be amalgamated with excavation data to enhance the archaeological interpretation of the site.

Excavate excavation areas. In the first instance, these areas are identified in the WSI/Proposal and. if you are working to a tight timescale and budget, this is what often happens. However, if you are less constrained, the results for geophysics surveys and excavation work can lead to excavation areas being extended and new areas being opened.

In all cases, Anchurus II encourages you to have a rigorous process for recording contexts using context forms, plans, spot heights, section drawings , photographs and stratigraphic matrices and for collecting bulk, special finds and soil and radio carbon samples.

The key objective is to enable you to leave site having collected as much data as possible.

Starting work on Stratigraphic analysis This work starts by ensuring that you have access to:

• Context records
• Context plans and spot height information
• Stratigraphic matrices

Anchurus II supports this activity by providing a template for a folder structure preferably using a shared filestore that holds all this information.

It encourages you to draw matrices in various formats relevant to interpreting the results of an archaeological excavation using Draw IO, a third party drawing package. These formats include:

• Stratigraphic relationships between contexts
• The aggregation of contexts into subgroups, groups and phases
• Stratigraphic relationships between groups

This Anchurus II manual provides advice and guidance on how to draw plans for contexts, section drawing and special finds using QGIS and save them as shape files.

Working on Finds analysis During a typical excavation you can reveal finds in at least 15-20 different material types. You start work on these by processing them in accordance with practice recommended for each material type, label them, include them in a finds register and file them in boxes This work usually involves a find specialist who will group them into groups based on a combination of evidence seen on or in the find and knowledge of how and when it was produced.

Anchurus II supports this activity by recommending that you start working on your finds with a find specialist. Alongside this, you are encouraged to use object oriented data analysis methods to produce a find type hierarchy for each material type. This helps you understand what your find specialist is saying.

As a result of doing this, you can use Anchurus II to record finds and the findgroups that represent how, when and where they were produced. This will enable you to understand the significance of the finds documented in a finds report and their contribution to interpreting the site.

During this process you can use Anchurus II queries to gather data for your find reports.

Work on site interpretation: is an iterative process as you blend together the find and findgroup evidence with the context information. The Archaeologists Guide to Good Practice handbook encourages you to aggregate the contexts into subgroups, groups and phases and establish their data periods.

Anchurus II provides lot of support for interpretation. By this stage, your database will hold details of contexts, finds and find groups and the links between them. You will also have a shared filestore with digital copies of stratigraphic matrices and all your context plans and some understanding of the phases, groups and subgroups.

You start with interpretation by recording in your first interpretation your phases, groups and sets. While you are doing this you can use concurrent displays of matrices and context plans on your computer screen. This allows you to review the stratigraphy, the position on the site of the contexts in a group or a phase and where finds of a material or in a findgroup were found on the site.

During this process you can use queries to gather data that will help with your interpretation.

Using Anchurus II you can save an interpretation and produce other interpretations as enhancements or alternatives the ones you have created.

The dating evidence, always a data period in calendar years, starts with find production dates usually provided by a find specialist and recorded in findgroup records. This dating evidence is then inherited by the finds in that group. To date a context, you take all the available dates of finds found in that context and aggregate their dates to decide on the context dates. To help with this activity, Anchurus II includes an algorithm to which you supply the find dates and which produces a relative frequency date graph. From this graph you will be able to select a data period for the context based on find production dates and expected file histories. It will also enable you to verify that context data period by highlighting the finds that were found in site and those which were not.

Write reports and presentations: is the output of an excavation. Reports enter the archaeological records. Presentations including websites, videos and exhibitions present the results of an excavation to a wider audience.

Anchurus II supports this work through its template for a shared filestore which provides a comprehensive filing system for everything associated with an excavation.

Archiving the results of an excavation: is the final stage of an excavation. Interesting finds are deposited in museum stores; digital files are deposited in digital archives.

The key to a digital archive is the metadata which explains the meaning of every item of data. Every item of data recorded in an Anchurus II database is checked by both the software and by the archaeologists. The meta data is an integral part of an Anchurus II database and hence is archived with it. Similarly, the files held in the shared filestore are of a limited number of standard file types such as PDF/A files and shape files all of which can be held and maintained by a digital archiving system such as the UK Archaeology Data Service.

Finally, as find specialists work their way through the finds from a site, there are facilities in the find database records to tag a find as worth depositing in a museum store. The find specialists can also identify finds that you should keep and hold in your local reference collections. Anchurus II has facilities for recording these local collections so they can be used to identify finds from you next excavations.

Recording workflow

Managing workflow is key to completing a successful excavation project from producing its WSI/proposal to deposing finds in a museum store and documents in a relevant Historic Environment Record, a national digital archive such as the Archaeological Data Service or in your organisation’s archive.

Managing workflow is best handled using project management software or the project leader’s spreadsheets.

The Anchurus II approach to supporting workflow management is to provide every item of information held in the Anchurus database with a workflow field which allows you to record information about the position of that item in its workflow.

Andrew Hutt
Version 06
17/4/2026