 myself and the co-authors thank you all for inviting us to the session and it's been a really cool session thus far and I also wanted to thank the previous presenters and in particular a number of you have actually presented like photographs of journal entries and photographs of the people you know from 150 years ago doing archaeology and stuff and I was so worried that my presentation with people would be like why is he showing us these journal entries who cares what's wrong with this so it's very nice to see so thank you so as archaeologists with the project tales of Bronze Age women and tales of Bronze Age people both led by Karen Fry at the National Museum of Denmark who again is giving a keynote tonight we do a lot of primary source archival research in our work as you may imagine from the titles of those two related projects both funded by the Prahlsburg Foundation much of our research begins and sometimes ends in Bronze Age archives at the National Museum of Denmark so we're actually quite lucky in this regard because the archaeological record archives at the National Museum house one of the most comprehensive national collections of original archaeological documentation in the world and certainly the most extensive records detailing the rich archaeological history of Denmark more specifically the Bronze Age reports in that collection date back to the mid 19th century including accession information collected and collated since as early as 1806 and many of the original reports date to at least mid 1800s the museum has as you can imagine a rather long and important history in the archaeology in archaeological thought especially in Europe in fact and the museum's first director was none other than the antiquarian Christian Thompson an early proponent and pioneer in the development of the now pretty ubiquitous three-stage three-age system that we archaeologists still use today so here are some file cabinets yeah I had to explain that yeah the archive houses the original excavation documents of much of the archaeology done in Denmark for the last 200 years from journals and personal notes to site sketches and maps to letters and correspondences and even including shipping manifests expense receipts and even some postcards as we've seen in some places before so here I would just like to share with you some examples of the cabinet in the archive each drawer here contains on average anywhere from 50 to 100 original reports composing probably around 60,000 individual documents so there's a lot of stuff beginning in 2018 in our use of reports housed in those very cabinets it it became very clear very quickly that many of the original and entirely one-of-a-kind documents were quite damaged and deteriorated so my colleague Samantha Ryder and I began working with our co-authors and our boss and other museum staff to implement a strategy whereby we could begin to systematically digitize and organize the reports as we were accessing them beginning notably selfishly with the specific reports that we were consulting at the time our earliest efforts were more of a systematic undertaking of a very unsystematic sampling strategy so if we needed to look at this report we were going to digitize it but we weren't doing it you know in order or anything like that and to give you an idea of what some of these reports look like here we have a couple of pages reporting on the excavation of a Bronze Age burial mound dated 12th November 1846 by A. Strunk and C. F. Herbst most of the report and certainly the earliest ones are absolutely beautifully handwritten with site and artifact sketches similar to this I often kind of just sit there and just stare at them I I don't know why but I just fetishized these these journals because they're just beautiful but anyway given the advanced age of many of the records as an American I think these things are archaeology in and of themselves but we were born like yesterday so so here are some other just random pages from another report by shrink this one from 1845 and another from 1862 you can see the level of artistry involved as well as the level of detail in many of the cases these notes and illustrations are literally only written record of these finds and you can also see in a lot of these how the images are starting to deteriorate and weather and such here are some notes from the 1863 excavation of a rather famous Bronze Age burial mound at Yeagersburg hang North Copenhagen I always like to point out the the wonderful sketch by C. H. Jolgensen but in these examples you can also see the damage that's occurred over the years to these originals they have coffee stains on them they have all kinds of problems and stuff but the the reports themselves are really cool and they tell interesting stories about even the people that that made the reports here we have a sketch of what the original excavator thought the individual in this mound must have looked like including having a beard and everything so I it's pretty funny this post up from the same report shows the warrior from Yeagersburg hang as imagined with from the grave good positions in the grave to the right are illustrations from the Enand Kirsten volumes in 1975 or in 1973 showing the artifacts that were actually recovered from that great this warrior was buried with weaponry numerous bronze items including quite unique large bronze disc which was actually covered in gold sheeting and which is a part of the existing Bronze Age displays at the National Museum of Denmark so here are two two similar pages from the works of Wilhelm Boy sketch maps from the famous Goldhoi site excavated in 1897 you can see similarly to some of the British reports that we saw actually in the very first presentation just how detail the sketch maps and stuff are and they are absolutely invaluable to our understanding of these very very early works so here we have a letter by JJ A. Worsig from 1861 discussing aspects of the Trimplei and Kongspoi mound excavations even including a receipt that was sent with that letter to the National Museum not only written works can be found in many of these these reports but also never before published sketches as we can see see here these artworks are also kept in the file folders and like this original pen and ink drawing from the same report we get an artist's rendition of actual textiles and stuff that were found in the excavation and we wouldn't have access to those otherwise I apologize for the pictures of old white men and hats looking at middle-aged white men and hats doing work but I didn't take the pictures so again these are from the original excavations at Goldhoi we have photographs taken during the original dig in 1891 here we get a glimpse of two of the three oak tree coffins that were discovered in that mound the largest has been dated then the chronologically to 1813 89 BC inside this coffin were recovered numerous grave offerings including the remains of a folding chair a bronze dagger and an axe a bronze pin two wooden bowls one with ornate decorated tack designs as well as a birch box and a horned spoon the kilt that we just saw was also inside the remains of two woolen caps and some other textiles and leather fragments but many of the reports also include photographs just like these these kinds of materials are absolutely invaluable to our understandings of early excavations and the contests of the files especially for those days conducted prior to them hopefully more rigorous standards of modern excavation methods other photographs including more recent images like this one left of a bronze sword from a double grave at Karlsruhe excavated in the mid 1960s this artifact is not displayed at the museum and photograph itself is not as irreplaceable per se as some of the earlier photographs that we just saw the report images nonetheless provide valuable visual record of archaeological materials that most people including museum staff will never lay eyes on so additionally the archives also house an extensive collection of original artworks commissioned by the museum for publication such as this watercolor and ink illustration of a bronze sword dated 1884 I apologize for not giving credit to the artist I can't read it can't read it here are some examples similar to some that we've already seen of original pen and ink drawings of Danish Bronze daggers from the artwork cabinets and at the right is just one of many boxes of excavator journals held in the archives this one containing the personal journals and unpublished notes of JJ A. Worsai with the top note both dated to 1881 here's another example of some some archaeological sketch maps and I really hope these just illustrate you know how important these documents are being able to actually recreate the archaeology that was going on even a hundred and forty hundred and fifty years ago that these kinds of archives just they're irreplaceable for us so and this is not just a part of Danish legacy of archaeology it's part of a greater European archaeology and cultural heritage and these these materials are significant to our understanding also just the Bronze Age in general so for doing archaeological research access to the full range of information in these records is as I said invaluable as the minutiae that one can uncover within the reports themselves is sometimes astounding for example these are images of a woman who was also on display at the National Museum she was a Bronze Age female buried in an oak coffin and ended up having immaculately preserved textiles with her including an absolutely amazing hairstyle and some gold artifacts and areas my colleague was doing research on this on the gold areas in particular and was trying to to see if we see in Denmark a correlation with similar artifacts for instance in central Europe and so she needed to look at how how accurate were the museum displays on exhibit to the way they actually were when school circle was was actually uncovered and so she was able to go back into the archives and find original sections and original images from when they literally pulled the textiles off of this woman to see that her gold coils were in a place indicating that they were very similar to the place to the central European ones probably over the helix of the ear instead of through the year just that kind of detail that you can find also one that I really love is going going through one of the reports there was a note by the excavator saying that well they were looking at the mound and the farmer was showing them what what you've uncovered they looked over and realized that the ice cows were drinking out of a wooden trough that was made out of a Bronze Age oak coffin those those little kinds of things are just great to know but so we were just happily and slowly digitizing these reports every couple of weeks as we pursued our own research and various research agendas and then as we've seen and we all know in September 2018 the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro burned down and this tragedy opened our eyes to similar possibilities God forbid in Denmark so we have since stepped up our efforts and we are currently digitizing using an Epson workforce thousand scanner that was already in the archives luckily not being used for anything but the scans are always made on the flatbed surface to avoid any potential damaging of the originals all scans are made at 600 DPI and in 48 bit color and in order is in which the pages appear in the original report documents well these settings make file sizes rather large the quality is exceptional and scans are then saved to an on-site computer in TIF format and we chose we were actually worried about choosing the scanner because there are issues with deterioration of inks and images and stuff from the from the scans and luckily as it turns out the sixty thousand is really quite good for that it doesn't deteriorate things as much so so we started digitizing the documents and then we went oh shit this really really illustrated just to us how none of these old buildings are safe and none of the materials in them are then safe and how easily these unthinkable events can completely alter the archaeological record so now we're continuing to work with the National Museum colleagues to make sure that the digitized materials are saved and stored properly each file is saved using file protocol indicating the the National Museum's existing location numbers recording for county district and parish making each image ultimately linkable to irrelevant accession information and other related documents the TIF files are converted to text searchable PDF formats and combined into a single PDF document to facilitate file compression and backup once uploaded along with the original TIFs together as a as a file folder these files are then uploaded to the National Museum's online archives on Cumulus which is a cloud-based storage platform so then they're kind of safe once on Cumulus files are linked by accession number to other relevant files such as artifact photographs and descriptions and in the future we hope to develop a volunteer-based crowdsourcing scheme similar to those developed elsewhere such as that the British Museum has done an amazing job with their broad section collections doing the same sort of thing so this may eventually facilitate things like translation and interpretation of many of these documents the vast majority of which are in Danish and often in Danish cursive which makes it very easy difficult to read especially for me because I'm not Danish so makes reading them problematic but we also hope to work towards making access to the digital files themselves more readily available to researchers as well as the general public and to the international community at large we are currently well get back there sorry we are currently running this project on a volunteer basis but we would love to extend towards a more concrete strategy and a best practices protocol and to also work towards digitizing other materials in the archive not just the Bronze Age reports you know we do that selfishly but of course another issue to consider that we all do is funding we don't have it and so if anyone has any funding ideas please come see me and that said we welcome any ideas and suggestions for streamlining this process as we move forward and thank you for your time