The ADED project (Archaeological Digital Excavation Documentation) gives access to documentation from archaeological excavations in Norway. The UniMus:Kultur cooperation gives free access to images and a joint collection of archaeological artefacts from the university museums in Oslo, (Museums of Cultural History), Stavanger (Arkeologisk museum), Bergen (The University museum), Trondheim (The Science museum) and Tromsø (Tromsø museum) at unimus.no. ADED will be part of UniMus:Kultur and provide links between excavations, images and artefacts. ADeD also has links to Kulturminnesøk (kulturminnesok.no).
Partners in ADED are the directorate for Cultural Heritage and the aforementioned university museums in Oslo, Stavanger, Bergen and Tromsø. The Science museum in Trondheim is also included in the project. The project leader is Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo.
The university museums conducts around 150 archaeological excavations every year. The excavation reports are published online, but the detailed documentation has been kept as separate datasets, and it has not been possible to query and download several such datasets at once. As an example, ADED makes it possible to query and get an overview of observations from excavations anywhere in Norway. Both details like post holes and aggregated information like houses and burials can be displayed on a map and downloaded as data sets.
ADED will open up new venues for archaeological research, and make archaeological excavations much more accessible for everyone interested in early Norwegian history.
The Archaeological Digital Excavation Documentation (ADED) will be an infrastructure for all digitally born excavation data in Norway. Whereas storage of such data until now has been subject of local solutions, and nly been available locally, ADED will make these data available in a common database for use in research as well as heritage management and for the public in general. The most important result is that this cross regional access to large digital datasets opens for research questions that have hitherto not been solvable. ADED will also be one more step in integrating all Norwegian archaeological databases in an accessible, seamless infrastructure. Due to the unique nature of Norwegian heritage management, the process of establishing and operating an infrastructure like this will be an unprecedented asset for Norwegian archaeological research milieus concerning international funding and partnerships.