KENT ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY  -- RESEARCH      Studying and sharing Kent's past      Homepage

HISTORICAL ASSESSMENT AND SURVEY OF OLD BUILDINGS   Page 16
These webpages are designed to be viewed with the screen resolution set at 800 x 600 and text size at normal. HOW TO

such equipment and the cost of training to use it will only be affordable by large institutions and commercial contractors.
   The longer term future of survey devices seems to lie in the direction of laser scanning equipment, which scans the entire surface of a building (or indeed of a landscape) and establishes the 3 dimensional coordinates of as many points on that surface as may be required by the researcher. The resulting "point cloud" is then stored in a computer and may be used to plot features or cross sections, with elements added from other, conventional survey sources, as required.

22. WHAT TO DO WITH THE COMPLETED ASSESSMENTS AND SURVEYS

   It is obviously desirable to preserve the results of building research of any sort, so that it does not have to be repeated and so that in the event of a building being destroyed (which still happens regrettably often), something is saved for future generations to see and learn from. Deposition of a copy in a public library is a good first step, though the long term future of local public libraries looks uncertain. Part V of Morriss’s Archaeology of Buildings (Annex 3 Book 26) has some good advice.
   The classic advice is that surveys should be published and certainly there is nowadays a range of journals published annually at national level which specialise in buildings and related studies of particular periods, such as Britannia, Medieval Archaeology and Vernacular Archaeology, to mention only three of many. There is also our county journal, Archaeologia Cantiana. Whether these journals would be able to cope with a flood of surveys of minor and in many cases similar, buildings if such were to be produced, remains to be seen. If the surveys proved to be of varying quality, or uncertain interpretation, editors might well become somewhat selective in what they would agree to publish.
   One alternative is to publish surveys as local monographs, which has become an increasingly easy task with modern "desk-top publishing" software for home computers. Another alternative is to publish them on the internet, though at the present date, this does seem a somewhat impermanent medium of record. As time goes on, other, better means of publishing building surveys may appear. We sincerely hope that any present uncertainty in preservation of the record will not discourage the very valuable activity of historical assessment and survey of historic buildings.
____________________________________________________________________________

Roger A C Cockett

for the Historic Buildings Committee
of the Kent Archaeological Society

Candlemas 2008

Previous Page       Back to Contents Page       Next Page     

For details about the advantages of membership of the Kent Archaeological Society   click here

Kent Archaeological Society is a registered charity number 223382
© Kent Archaeological Society 9th January 2008

This website is constructed by enthusiastic amateurs. Any errors noticed by other researchers will be to gratefully received so
 that we can amend our pages to give as accurate a record as possible. Please send details too research@kentarchaeology.org.uk