CAT Report 1000: the Trust’s archive extension

Yesterday (7th December), Trust senior archaeologist Howard Brooks BA FSA MCIFA was working on the Trust’s archive extension here at our HQ. The Trust has worked as an archaeological field unit in the construction industry for over 50 years. In that time, the recording of archaeological remains and evidence, and of historic buildings, has developed with technology and with evolving professional best practice. The production of site reports and archives has also developed. The Trust has a very good publication record and, as a commercial field unit, we are required to submit our reports to to the local planning authority as part of the planning process, to clients, to the county historic environment record, to the national OASIS system, and to the local museum. As a charity, we are required to inform and involve our local community as much as we can. We produce paper and digital site records and reports and we have archives of these in our building: we also maintain an online archive of our fiieldwork reports. We think that we were the first archaeological field unit in Britain to establish our own online archive.

We initiated our numbered CAT Report series in 1997 with CAT Report 1. Before that, we had produced a series of unnumbered reports and also published twelve Colchester Archaeological Report volumes. Howard is now working on CAT Report 1000. This is a different kind of report – it will be a collection of all the Trust’s fieldwork reports in our unnumbered series and which have not yet been published either in a publication or online. These reports date from 1984 up to 1997. We have digitised all of these reports by transcribing and scanning the material, and Howard is now collecting the reports together so that he can edit them. He has got as far as report 93/12a in our system, which was the first report which the Trust wrote in December 1993. This was on some fragments of Roman pottery which were brought to us after being accidentally dug up at Colchester Holiday Park in Lexden. Interestingly, we recently conducted an evaluation there – in September 2016 – and wrote a post about it in this blog in November!

CAT Report 1 was the report on an archaeological evaluation which we conducted at Eld Lane in Colchester in April 1997. Trust archaeologist Steve Benfield undertook the fieldwork for the evaluation and he also wrote the report: he observed Roman deposits, including a tile-built drain or wall, from about 1 metre below ground-level. Again, interestingly, we have only recently – in November 2016 – conducted an archaeological watching brief (monitoring and recording) in Eld Lane. We retrieved several Roman brick fragments during this project and these may represent debris from the Roman town wall. Trust archaeologist Chris Lister conducted the fieldwork and Trust archaeologist Laura Pooley wrote the report which is titled CAT Report 1039. Both reports can be read in our online archive.

CAT Report 1000 will include about 250 reports. It is Howard’s magnum opus and we saved the report number ‘1000’ especially for it. Trust director Philip says that we are looking forward to seeing the Trust’s archive extension published online.

The images show Howard at work on the archive extension yesterday, a page from a report in our unnumbered series, and the home page of the Trust’s online archive at http://cat.essex.ac.uk/. [Image to follow.]

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