Archaeological and heritage-related illustration

I have worked on a wide variety of projects related to archaeology and museums which have required my illustration and computing skills. Below are images and details of a selection of them.

I provided two illustrations depicting layouts of pottery kilns for the paper The development of the bottle kiln in pottery manufacture in Britain by D. Dawson and O. Kent (Post-Medieval Archaeology 42/1 2008, 201-226). These illustrations of kilns from Dunster (Somerset) and Sorring (Denmark) were drawn in Paintshop Pro.

Much of the archaeological fieldwork that I have participated in have needed illustrations for their final written reports. The examples here include a reconstruction of a Roman structure which was discovered on an excavation with Thames Valley Archaeological Services in Fleet, Hampshire. The reconstruction was built in Google SketchUp and the final render post-processed in Paintshop Pro.

The majority of the illustration work that I do at Thames Valley Archaeological Services consists of digitising maps, site plans and feature cross-sections for publication. An example of this is this drawing of a Bronze Age burial found in a ditch on a site in Wantage, Oxfordshire. I drew the original on site in pencil on Permatrace, scanned it on to the office computers and drew over it in FastCAD.

Further examples of my illustrations can be found in several of the reports in the TVAS online report archive, designed and built by myself, here: TVAS Online Report Archive.

My fieldwork recording the Second World War defences of the Somerset coast revealed some interesting local designs. This one was sketched in ink from memory.

This elevation and plan were drawn as part of the first-year training dig at Abbey Park, Leicester with the University of Leicester. Both were drawn on site in pencil and then inked up in the drawing office:

Another university excavation, this time on Ramsaukopf, near Hallein, Austria, required trench plans for the report. These were drawn up from sketches made on site, inked in and had labels added on the computer.

In addition to excavation illustrations I have produced images, models and displays for museums. These include a design for some display boards and an advertisement on a beer mat, both for an exhibition on the history of the church and organ in Croxton Kerrial, Leicestershire. I prepared (scanned, resized and digitally cleaned) hundreds of images for publication in two books: Dawson, D.P., Giles, S., and Ponsford, M.W., 2002. Horemkenesi, may he live for ever! The Bristol Mummy Project, 89, drawings by Alison Sturrock and Lizzie Induni, and Lowe, B.J., 2003. Decorated Medieval Floor Tiles of Somerset, 129. Drawings by Barbara Lowe.

Two other examples of my work are the construction of an HTML-based catalogue for Glastonbury Abbey, Somerset as part of their Opening Up the Stores project and a reconstruction model of medieval Shapwick village, Somerset. The catalogue was designed to be run in a kiosk in the museum so that members of the public could look at and read about documents which were kept in the museum store and were not on display. The model depicts the village of Shapwick as it may have looked in the medieval period and was designed to be used with school groups.