Above is a google calendar very similar to my own events calendar which I've blogged about previously, but this one lists archaeological events in the UK. A very nice compliment to my own. There is plenty on the calendar that would be of interest to Irish and other archaeologists.

The calendar was created by Win Scutt and can be accessed here. I met Win years ago when I was an undergraduate digging on Dartmoor with the Shovel Down project. Back then he drove a restored but battered old Land Rover with no roof which saved me walking to the pub quite a few times!

I have embedded his calendar on the events page with appropriate links and instructions on how to add it to your own.

Seandalaiocht is now a paid up member of the Twitterati with its own profile page and even a few followers. I've avoided Twitter for some time now, not really understanding what the point of it was, but I'm already seeing its addictive effects and I've only been on it for a few days.

If you call yourself a twitter fiend and you'd like to get shorter versions of the random ramblings on this blog then start following me!

I've also set up a twitter account for the events page which will update whenever I add something to the events calendar. You can sign up for it here.

I've posted previously about the events page on the blog where you can find a calendar of archaeology related events going on in Ireland. To highlight the calendar and how useful it can be I've decided to try out a weekly post listing the events for that week.

• Thursday at 16:00 sees the last lecture in the UCD School of Archaeology's seminar series will be given by Dr Ingelise Stuijts of the Discovery Programme
• At 19:30 in the National Print Museum a lecture entitled Hand Papermaking and Paper Art – Traditional and contemporary practices at the 20th IAPMA Congress, Tasmania, Australia will be presented by Tunde Toth
• On Saturday and Sunday the South Kildare Medieval Festival takes place in Athy, Co. Kildare. More info here. 
• “Communication routes in the western area of the de Lacy Lordship of Meath” is the title of a lecture to be given in Lismullin Conference Centre, Navan on Thursday 22 April at 8.00 p.m.  The speaker is Linda Doran.
  

The list is based only on what turns up in my inbox so if there's anything missing please contact me and I'll add the event to the calendar.

You can add the calendar to your calendar application or your Google Calendar by using the links on the events page. 

EDIT 20/04/10  : An additional event has been added

So we’ve established that Grey literature – when it has avoided becoming ‘ghost literature’ – is indeed a treasure worth finding but that begs the question: how do you get your hands on it and, importantly, who owns it?

I imagine that the issue of access is different in every country (do let me know in the comments) but in Ireland the way you get your hands on juicy grey reports is largely informal. We have the advantage of a tiny population and an even more miniscule group of archaeologists with very few degrees of seperation. A fair number of the reports I have managed to get my hands on for my research have been given to me by generous friends willing to let me raid their hard drives or put me in touch with someone else who would. However, I’ve found going the official route and contacting individual companies can be tedious and often a waste of time (a personal connection/introduction is often essential). Directors/excavators are usually far more helpful and generous with their material (if you can contact them) and the NRA archaeologists are generally happy to let you have anything you need.

The personal approach has worked for me but I run into brick walls when I don’t know anyone who I can contact directly and I imagine such an informal system is fairly useless for non-native archaeologists. What is needed is an online repository with a legal requirement to deposit and allow access. This has been done on a limited scale by a few laudable organisations (e.g. here here, here, here and here and by the ADS in the UK) but, while these are useful, a more coherent system is needed. Internet publication has to be the solution: it has the benefits of being cheap, accessible, and searchable and by putting peoples work out there you create a natural pressure to maintain standards.

Of course the issue of standards may be caught up in problems with ownership. At the end of the day who owns (and therefore is responsible for) the reports that make up the grey literature: the developer? The excavating director? The company? The author? The state? This isn’t an issue of money – no-one will be making any profit from these reports. It is more about responsibility and accountability. Commercial archaeology has complicated things and the idea of individual directors being responsible for bringing sites to completion (i.e. final reports) ignores the responsibilities and resources of developers and archaeology companies.

The issue of responsibility is one I haven’t got my head fully around (hopefully it will be addressed in the forthcoming archaeology bill) but I do feel strongly that grey literature – particularly where funded by state-developers like the NRA – belongs to everyone and should be easily available to them. Archaeology is a national cultural asset and the purpose of spending so much money on its excavation is to preserve it by record for the public; what’s the point if they never see the results?

This is part 2 of a series of 3 posts on Grey Literature and Archaeology.

I received an email from Janet Lang of the BM yesterday letting me know that the CPSA website has gone live. The CPSA, despite its grand title, is basically a forum for people interested in iron to keep in contact across Europe and the world. Its primary contribution in the past, when it was kept going by Radomír Pleiner, was a newsletter which gave news and abstracts of theses, articles and books published on iron as well as numerous international conferences organised by members. It has suffered from a bit of a pause in recent years but this promises to be a new beginning and I look forward to many updates on the new website!

'Grey literature' is a concept every research archaeologist is (or at least should be) familiar with. It refers to the various reports written by commercial, academic and government archaeologists that never see the light of day in traditional media such as journals, edited volumes or monographs. These reports vary widely in quality and importance but their main effect - on me at least - is to create a niggling sense that there have been lots of crucial finds or sites excavated that I have no idea about but would be crucial to my research.

The topic has been discussed (in relation to the UK) in a recent Nature Article by Matt Ford (Download a pdf here). Many of the issues raised ring true in Ireland as well and probably most countries where archaeology has become an integral part of the planning and development process. Since the early nineties in Ireland there has been a requirement to totally excavate archaeological sites prior to development. This led to the creation, exponential expansion and subsequent implosion of an Irish commercial sector.

This sector has created a huge amount of data in various form: feature and context sheets in the worst cases and completed final excavation reports with specialist analysis in the best.  So is it a hidden treasure? I think it definitely is, if a little too well hidden! My PhD research is based on a database of excavations with evidence of iron smelting or working and the vast majority of these have been excavated commercially in the last twenty years. This type of synthesising PhD is becoming very common in Ireland and in combination with the INSTAR projects (listed here) promise to transform our understanding of the Irish past.

However, the picture isn't entirely golden. The quality of reports is often good but in many many cases final reports just don't exist: they haven't been completed years after excavation has finished. This kind of thing is exasperated by archaeologists moving on from companies and even from the profession. Standards are not enforced and while I have a generally good impression from many of the reports I've sifted through, these are likely to be the best of the best because they have come from people or companies willing to share. Its the reports I can't get my hands on that I worry about. I think in the next few years the biggest worry will be non-existent or  'Ghost' literature rather than the much more viable and useful Grey Literature. 

This is part 1 of a series of 3 posts on Grey Literature and Archaeology.

This post is to celebrate (a little late) the 1,00th unique Irish visitor to Seandálaíocht. If my Irish is ok - and it probably isn't - the post title should read 1,000 Irish visitors to the Seandálaíocht website. That's according to the flag counter widget you can see above and on the blog sidebar. In reality I added that some time after the blog started so according to Google Analytics - a magical time wasting tool provided for free by Google - I've had something more like 1,198 unique visitors from Ireland (yes you're all very special) with 2110 unique visitors in total from 60 different countries.   

The most popular page on the site besides the home page (1128 views) and the blog page (1503 views) was the list of archaeological societies and other institutions (470 views), probably because it turns up in search engines a lot. The most popular post was one pointing the way to the archaeology jobs in ireland facebook group (183 views) with one on a viking house in Dublin coming a close second (179 views)

RTE are currently looking for entrants for a new archaeology programme involving fifth and sixth class students. There's a website to go with the show that gets applicants to play an interactive game where they identify a variety of archaeological objects that belong to a Bronze Age burial (I'm going to pretend I got them all first time..). Its really well done and actually informative! 

I presume this is connected with the archaeology element of the school curriculum which recently saw the launch of a transition year resource pack to go along with the primary school one. You can play the game yourself on the programme's website but I'm afraid you can't enter unless you're in fifth or sixth class and are happy to 'don an archaeologist's hat'. 

There's no indication that I can find of how the programme will work or what format it will follow but I'm a big advocate of this kind of popularisation of archaeology. Getting kids, and by extension their tax-paying parents, interested and involved in archaeology is the best way to justify our largely publicly-funded research.

The production company doesn't appear to have any background in historical/archaeological programming (judging by a brief glance at their website) and a lot of their recent stuff falls into the category of very light entertainment (e.g. 'Celebrity Jigs and Reels') but the website shows promise so I'll withhold judgement for now.

EDIT: More info on how to apply here.