Selecting Archaeological Archives in England

Abstract

Local museums in England have customarily acted as the repository for archives generated by archaeological fieldwork, but due to pressures on storage space, more and more of them are deciding no longer to accept material produced by developer-funded projects. The reasons behind this state of affairs, resulting from an expansion of archaeological activity in the last twenty years, accompanied by an increasingly competitive market for archaeological fieldwork contractors, are set out in this paper. Our museums and archaeology collections are now faced with a storage crisis and some of the suggested solutions are considered here. One way of addressing the problem of space in museum stores is to be more selective about what is retained from fieldwork. The principles of selection of an archaeological archive are presented here with a case study that shows how a selection process, aimed at rationalising existing museum holdings, can ease the pressure on storage space.