Publication

Publishing excavation reports has always been one of the biggest challenges facing the archaeological community. There are two problems. Firstly, working through the vast amount of data can take a long time, and it can be many years before reports are ready for publication. Secondly, the need to report on a very wide range of data often means that reports are very long, technical, and not very accessible to the general public.

The Cotswold Water Park project is designed to try to get round some of these difficulties.

Draft reports will be available on these web pages as soon as they are ready, and this should mean that interested readers can get access to the information straightaway, without having to wait until the whole monograph report is completed and published.

When the project is finished, the detailed technical information will be made available on CD-ROM and on-line, but it will not form part of the printed book. This digital component of the publication will include:

• detailed archive site reports, including full stratigraphic descriptions
• full finds and environmental reports for each key site
• detailed post-excavation methodology
• full phased plans and distribution maps
• finds databases
• environmental databases
• context databases

The printed book will draw together all the results and provide an overview of the project results, focusing on the landscape study. We hope that this will be colourful, readable and interesting. The book will include:

• discussions of the key sites
• discussion of the wider landscape and the questions we identified as our main research aims
• overviews of the finds and environmental assemblages, how these changed over time, and what this means
• emphasis on use of colour illustrations, photographs and reconstructions