The Archaeological Recording Kit (ARK) – 10 years of learning lessons
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 17/09/2017

Ten years ago at the Computer Applications in Archaeology conference in Berlin we introduced the Archaeological Recording Kit (ARK - Eve & Hunt 2008). In the hazy times before Twitter and Facebook, we had big revolutionary ideas for our new archaeological database system, we envisioned an open, transparent and free system that would adapt to archaeologists needs and be a platform around which we could build a community. Since then ARK has been used on a large number of projects both commercial and academic around the world, including the award-winning Fasti Online and Prescot Street projects and it is the main back-end of the highly successful Digital Dig Team from DigVentures. ARK is currently being used in the field to record primary data, in the lab to catalogue and analyse data and in the office to create post-excavation assessments and online data publications. In 2016 we began work on ARK v2 – our attempt to completely re-factor the ARK database onto a modern framework with the aim of drastically improving database performance, ease of maintenance, and to allow the development of a suite of tools external to ARK on multiple platforms. This paper will discuss the lessons we have learned from 10 years of at-the-coal-face experience of working with numerous different archaeological projects, what the needs have been from both our clients and our own projects and how we and the profession can move forward with regard to archaeological data recording.

Stu Eve, L - P: Archaeology