Sites of Interest

www.instrumentum.net - Instrumentum - includes an excellent bibliography
www.finds.org.uk - Portable Antiquities - includes a searchable database of artefacts, as well as news items and an interesting blog
www.britarch.ac.uk - Council for British Archaeology
www.britac.ac.uk - British Academy, leads on to British School at Rome excavations
www.journalofromanarch.com - The JRA - search for relevant articles
www.newcastle-antiquaries.org.uk - Museum of Antiquities, Newcastle; includes Armentarium, a guide to military equipment
odur.let.rug.nl/arge - Archaeological Resource Guide for Europe (in English)
www.uni-heidelberg.de/institute/sonst/adw/edh/recherchen.html.en - Consult CIL using the Epigraphische Datenbank Heidelberg - incomplete (in English)
www.ecole-francaise.it - The French School in Rome, includes details of their excavations
www.aais.org.uk - Association of Archaeological Illustrators and Surveyors
portico.bl.uk - The British Library
www.english-heritage.org.uk - English Heritage
www.romansociety.org - The Roman Society, currently celebrating its centenary year

Blogs

A Don's Life - Cambridge academic Mary Beard reports on the modern and the ancient world - www.timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life
Later Silbury Project - follow English Heritage's blog from the evaluation of the Roman settlement opposite Silbury Hill - www.latersilbury.wordpress.com
Roman Silchester - Blog from the Trench - www.silchester.rdg.ac.uk/blog

Museums online

Objects from the British Museum collections are now available through COMPASS (Collections Multi-media Public Access System) both online in the BM’s Reading Room and on the museum’s website (www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk). About 3000 objects have been selected as representative of the collections, and they are presented as high-quality colour images, with brief explanatory texts, the principal published references, and links to associated items. However, the search facilities are not sophisticated, and serious researchers should still contact the relevant department/curator.

Also online is the catalogue of the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology - no images here, but record cards giving the usual details of accessions - provenance, size, published references, etc. Searches are done by headings such as keyword, material, site, etc, so can be very easily targeted to get precisely what you want. museum-server.archanth.cam.ac.uk.

The Museum of London's online Roman galleries are well worth a look - find out about Londinium life through features and commentary on home, work, public life, religion and the military. Take a virtual walk along London Wall and see films of the galleries. The Museum's online catalogue is also there, an invaluable resource for artefact researchers: http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/

Pots online

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has launched a project called PotWeb which aims to to create an online catalogue of its ceramic collections. The pilot study covers the periods from 1000 to 2000 AD. Brief summaries of available forms are accompanied by thumbnail colour pictures. These are of a very high quality, and certainly convey an excellent idea of the vessels. www.ashmolean.org

More and more museums are putting their collections, or parts of them, online in similar ways, or as simple databases. One of the first to put its database online in the 90s was Hampshire County Council Museums Service. The entries are basic, but if you are a student tracking down objects for a corpus it is enough to tell you if a letter or visit is needed or not. Click here, then go to 'search the collections catalogue.'