TII Contribution to European Archaeology Days 2025

European Archaeology Days is an annual event that encourages public authorities and archaeology stakeholders to promote the archaeological heritage of member countries of the Council of Europe. This year the event runs from Friday 13 June to Sunday 15 June. The main objectives are to raise awareness of the richness and cultural diversity of Europe and promote archaeology and its protection. Another key objective is the sharing of knowledge between archaeology professionals and European citizens, which TII is honouring this year by publishing two important initiatives related to the TII Digital Heritage Collections.

 

Firstly, the GIS and Archaeology and Heritage sections of TII have collaborated with the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) to create the TII Digital Heritage Collections Portal, a new webGIS application that allows users to search and download resources held in the TII Digital Heritage Collections digitally preserved in the DRI. The Portal can be accessed on both desktop and mobile devices and provides user-friendly access to a collection of nearly 3,000 items, including archaeological excavation reports, archaeo-geophysical reports, datasets, and 3D laser scans. The Portal offers users multiple ways to select data which they can then export (as a .csv file) for their own research, making it a versatile tool for researchers, the public, planners, and statutory authorities. This initiative represents the first time that multiple records can be selected and exported from the Collections and incorporated into users own GIS, should they wish. In due course, the Portal will be expanded to allow access to other TII digital heritage resources.

The second initiative is the publication of a new StoryMap that has been created in collaboration with Abarta Heritage to further highlight the richness of the TII Digital Heritage Collections through the impressive archaeological discoveries made on one of our legacy road schemes— the M7 Portlaoise–Castletown/M8 Portlaoise–Cullahill motorway in County Laois, which was officially opened in 2010. A journey through time on the M7/M8 Motorway is an engagingly written StoryMap that invites you to journey along 52 km of motorway and side roads beneath which an average of one new archaeological discovery was made every 500 m. Your journey sets out from the recent past before travelling back through thousands of years of history to your final destination—a meeting with the very first farmers ever to till the soil of County Laois. The StoryMap facilitates direct access to all the final excavation reports from the M7/M8, as well as numerous other digital resources held in the TII Digital Heritage Collections and available through the TII website.

Click here to find out more about European Archaeology Days events throughout Ireland this weekend.