The Digital Museum

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to conducting research on past excavations at Star Carr has been the access to the archive. Much of the paper archive is missing and Clark's excavated assemblage has been dispersed across many museums. In addition, much of what is housed in these museums is in the stores and so it is not easy to see.

In 2012, English Heritage funded an 'archive mapping' project with the primary aims of locating and cataloguing as much of the material as possible to enable further research and these archives and information are now hosted in the Archaeology Data Service.

If you go to this digital archive you can query the database for species, artefact type, artefact material or different museums and you will be presented with images and information about where the material is housed. So, for instance, if you want to see all the barbed points found by Clark (or at least the ones we could find) you can see images of them all by searching for barbed points.

In addition there is correspondence and news articles which are part of a paper record housed with the Scarborough Museums Trust. There is also a downloadable report explaining how the work was carried out and what still appears to be missing.

Find out more

Star Carr Archives Project

Download the documents relating to the archive here:

Archive Mapping report 2013 Finds from the 1980s excavation