Abstract
WOODAN is an online database developed to gather, present and analyse research results on archaeological wooden artefacts www.woodan.org. The database was released in 2017 and now contains over 2,150 wooden objects found during archaeological excavations in the Netherlands and Belgium, covering finds from the Mesolithic up to the modern era (First World War). For ca. 85% of these artefacts the wood species was identified and registered in the database. Furthermore, detailed meta-data is linked to the records, making WOODAN an excellent resource for finding comparable items and to study wood selection and craftsmanship throughout human history. WOODAN is accessible through a highly intuitive website which allows users to query the entire database. When a query is performed the results are instantly analysed (frequency of wood species used; number of objects for each chronological period), mapped (the geographical distribution of the finds) and visually presented in an interactive display (photographs, 3D-models). An export function allows further analysis of the search results—based on the available meta-data—tailored to specific research questions. Although WOODAN currently contains items from The Netherlands and Belgium only, its ambition is to become a pan-European database on archaeological wooden objects.
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Haneca, K., Deforce, K., van der Laan, J. et al. WOODAN: an online database of archaeological wooden objects. Veget Hist Archaeobot 31, 541–547 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-022-00868-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-022-00868-z