desktop archaeology

Today (3rd April), Howard Brooks of the Trust was working on a desk-based assessment or ‘dba’ (also ‘desktop study’ or just ‘desktop’) at Roman Circus House. Howard is a senior archaeologist and our ‘dba’ specialist. A ‘dba’ is a report which summarises previously-known discoveries of archaeological finds such as coins, pottery and brick and also evidence from cropmarks and other written records (whether in published books and maps or in a county’s Sites and Monuments Record). The term ‘desk-based’ means that this is archaeology done without digging any actual holes in the ground!

The Trust undertakes quite a few ‘dba’s every year for clients, perhaps in advance of a planning application to develop a site. In some cases, the local planning authority requests that the client submit a ‘dba’ before they will consider a planning application. We do not publish ‘dba’s in our online archive because they may contain confidential information. We are not limited geographically with the ‘dba’s that we undertake, although we already do fieldwork across quite a wide area, mainly Essex and Suffolk (not just Colchester!), but we have produced ‘dba’s for sites as far afield as Cambridgeshire and Warwickshire.

The images show Howard hard at work today at his desk, on cartographic material for a ‘dba’ on a site in Essex.

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