The national collection is distributed throughout communities, localities, and national organisations. In the past two decades communities have adopted digital technologies to gather and record their collections in a form of 'citizen history' that has created a truly democratic and vast reservoir of new knowledge about the past. This reservoir could immeasurably enrich our national and global understanding but remains largely untapped, hard to find, and at risk of disappearing altogether. The intellectual and economic investment in community-generated digital content (CGDC) is immense and its rich and diverse content is one of the UK's prime cultural assets, but it is 'critically endangered' due to technological and organisational barriers. CGDC has proved extraordinarily resistant to traditional methods of linking and integration, meaning that resources often funded and produced by the public stand alone or are inaccessible. Diverse community-focused voices, sustaining the fragile histories of communities in transition, have effectively been silenced within our shared national collection. Existing solutions to this problem involving bespoke interventionist activities are expensive, time-consuming and unsustainable at scale, whilst any unsophisticated computational integration of this data would result in a lowest-common-denominator solution which would erase the meaning and purpose of both CGDC and its creators. The Our Heritage, Our Stories project responds to this urgent challenge by bringing together a powerful partnership, including researchers in digital humanities, archives, history, linguistics, and computer science at our HEI partners, the Universities of Glasgow and Manchester, with world-leading archive and digital infrastructure development at The National Archives (TNA), the project's lead IRO. This team will bring cutting-edge approaches from cultural heritage, humanities and computer science to dissolve existing barriers and develop scalable linking and discoverability across CGDC and the collections of TNA. We will collaborate in this process with leading UK heritage organisations, including Tate, the British Museum, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, and a network of smaller regional and local heritage organisations holding digital content created by and relating to communities. Our geographic range is essential for a truly national approach which engages with every part of the UK. Our project will use multidisciplinary methods to make previously unfindable and unlinkable CGDC discoverable within the national collection, while respecting and embracing its complexity and diversity by co-designing and building sophisticated automated tools to make it searchable and connected. We will showcase its new accessibility to the world through a major new public-facing Observatory at TNA where people can access, reuse, and remix this newly integrated content. As we dissolve barriers and add meaningful links across these collections, we will make them accessible to new and diverse audiences and open them up for research - demonstrated via multidisciplinary case studies - and embed new strategies for future management of CGDC into heritage practice and training. Public engagement is a driving theme in our project, which will be developed on principles of co-production and participatory design. The lasting legacies of this project will be the wealth of previously siloed, hidden, and fragmented CGDC it will situate and render discoverable. By so doing, we will revolutionise our understanding of the past, and the methods and means to achieve this, by developing cutting-edge tools, AI methods, historical and linguistic research, and new frameworks for sustainable archival practice. By enabling CGDC to be re-used and reimagined, we will help it survive and be nourished, for the future and for our shared national collection.

Exploring how communities respond to economic and climatic crisis is key for enhancing understanding of resilience in the past and present. This project will explore responses to a deteriorating climate and trade collapse at the end of the Bronze Age in Britain. A major focus is the new social and economic networks that developed and how these made communities resilient in the face of turmoil. This will be achieved by employing a new suite of scientific methods to analyse the very rich, but understudied sites known as middens. Around 800BC Europe suffered great upheaval as the climate deteriorated and economies collapsed, with bronze abruptly losing value. Like the 21st century economic crisis, this first millennium BC boom and bust caused great instability. In southern Britain, society did not shift focus to iron, but rather to agricultural intensification and grand-scale feasting; there was a 'Feasting Age' prior to the Iron Age. The remains of these feasts created some of the most startling archaeological sites ever unearthed. These 'middens' represent the very richest resource of material from British prehistory, some covering an area the size of several football pitches and producing hundreds of thousands of artefacts. These provide the key to understanding socio-economic change during this phase. In spite of the rich archaeological resource and the importance of this transition in shaping society for centuries, we still know remarkably little. The most fundamental change was the breakdown in the bronze trade network, which had controlled the movement of people, ideas and artefacts for centuries. We know very little about the new social and economic networks that emerged and centred on these vast feasts, making society resilient at a time of instability and framing power relations and community interaction right up to the Roman conquest. They are key to understanding not only this transitional phase, but British later prehistory more broadly. New research developments mean that the time is right to address these archaeological problems. Recent excavations have provided a wealth of material to address these issues. In addition, scientific advances mean that we can now establish patterns of human and animal movement with greater precision than was previously possible. Finally, there is a large body of material and a suite of scientific methods that can reconstruct the changing face of society in southern Britain and examine how it remained resilient in the face of economic and climatic deterioration. The project will focus on six middens that date to the Bronze Age-Iron Age transition (c. 800BC-400BC) in two regions: Wiltshire and the Thames Valley. These areas were the epicentres of activity during this phase, hosting vast feasting events evidenced by rich material assemblages. These feasts were at the very centre of the dynamics of a changing society. They provide a focal point for community interaction, forging and consolidating new alliances. They are also the focus of new economic practices, representing hubs for the intensification and trade of agricultural produce. Therefore, using a suite of bioarchaeological techniques, the project will examine the new social and economic networks that developed and, using theoretical models, will examine how they made communities resilient in the face of adversity. Multi-isotope analysis (strontium, sulphur, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen) will reveal where animals and humans came from and how agricultural production was maximised through different husbandry practices and landscape use. This will reconstruct the new inter-community networks and the organisation of the economy and agricultural production, thus revealing the strategies that made communities resilient. It will provide a key case study into responses to socio-economic collapse and will transform understanding of how change at the end of the Bronze Age shaped society in southern Britain for centuries.

Hoards of valued materials, particularly coins, are a common, and rapidly growing, class of discovery across the Roman Empire. While these are most commonly seen as having been deposited for safe keeping, other explanations for this activity are also possible. There has been little explicit discussion or research on why Roman coin hoards were buried, why hoards were not recovered in antiquity, or what they tell us when studied as a group. Six hundred hoards are known from Britain containing coins of the period AD 253-96, an unprecedented concentration, and they provide a key and under-used dataset that can shed light on a poorly known period of British archaeology and history. The British pattern of later 3rd-century hoards differs markedly from the rest of the western Roman empire, despite the political problems that affected Britain at this time being felt equally or more severely in many other European provinces. This anomaly merits detailed investigation and the results will have implications not only for interpretation of this specific hoarding phenomenon, but will contribute significantly to more general debates about hoarding behaviour in antiquity. Traditionally these hoards have been interpreted as having been buried with the intention of recovery but recent discoveries such as the Frome hoard have suggested the possibility that these hoards may have been ritual (or `votive') deposits. Ritual deposition is a common explanation for prehistoric metalwork, and many, if not all, Iron Age coin hoards. Can we show whether any of the 3rd century hoards were likely to have been ritual deposits and, if so, how many? If so, what are the implications for the use of their contents in studying monetary history or political history? We propose to ask the following research questions: 1. Why were coin hoards deposited in Roman Britain - and was this for similar reasons as other Iron Age and Roman coin hoards? 2. Why were so many coin hoards deposited (and not recovered) in 3rd-century Britain and is their date of burial the same as the date of their latest coins? 3. What do coin hoards tell us about the economic and political history of 3rd-century Britain? 4. How different or similar are 3rd-century British coin hoards to those from other periods of Roman Britain or other parts of northwestern provinces of the Roman Empire? 5. What wider lessons can be learnt about using coin hoards to understand the economic, political and religious history of the Roman Empire? The project brings together the expertise of the British Museum in the study of Roman coins and hoards and the academic strengths of the University of Leicester in Roman archaeology and their experience of investigating coin hoards in a landscape setting. The PI, Dr Roger Bland, is Keeper of Portable Antiquities & Treasure at the British Museum and has very extensive experience studying hoards; the CIs are Professors Colin Haselgrove and David Mattingly, leading experts respectively on Iron Age archaeology and coinage and on the archaeology and economy of the Roman Empire. Under their collective guidance and with input from expert colleagues, 3 RAs will study (1) the hoards from Britain and the wider Empire, (2) a landscape study of the hoard findspots and archaeological evidence for Roman Britain in the 3rd century AD; and (3) reasons for the deposition of metalwork in the Iron Age and Roman periods. The key outputs will include a monograph, at least 5 peer-reviewed articles, 2 conferences (the papers of which will be published), two exhibitions, articles for popular magazines and a web-based hoards database. The project will build on discoveries made by members of the public and reported through the Portable Antiquities Scheme to provide a comprehensive study of coin hoarding in Britain in the 3rd century AD, set in a wider context, and will also address key wider questions relevant for understanding coin hoards in other periods.

This project's starting point is a series of objects that are traditionally assumed to be the 'finest' and 'most important' artefacts from the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age in Britain (c.3000-800 BC). They include the intricately embossed gold cape from Mold, the mixture of local and exotic finery from barrows around Stonehenge, and the enigmatic chalk 'drums' buried with a child at Folkton in North Yorkshire. The ways in which objects such as these have taken on iconic status within archaeological accounts is important for understanding the role of museum collections in the narratives told about prehistoric Britain. Objects like these are traditionally presented as proxies for, or 'exemplars' of, society, culture and religion during the period: representative of people, cultures, connectivity and changes over - often very long - time periods. They have generally been characterised as 'symbols of power', buried with (or by) important or wealthy people who notionally 'controlled' trade and exchange and thus gained status and wealth. This concept leant its name to the 1985 National Museum of Scotland exhibition 'Symbols of Power at the Time of Stonehenge', and has become a successful (if tired) trope of prehistoric galleries and exhibitions ever since. Interestingly, and significantly, in academic accounts of the period, these supposedly iconic objects often serve a passive role on book covers and as token illustrations, rather than being active objects incorporated into narratives of the period in their own right. The appeal to power politics has also removed these objects from more engaging, egalitarian and emotional accounts of the past. This project will make the most of the opportunities afforded by a major exhibition entitled 'World of Stonehenge' (WoS), to be staged at the British Museum from June-October 2021, in order to rethink and represent the period. The project will ensure that the research potential generated by staging the exhibition can be fully exploited. Too often this valuable resource and opportunity is lost. We will challenge, evaluate and research the concept that effective museum objects have to be singular, iconic 'masterpieces'. The processes by which objects become empowered and 'iconic' are essential for museums and galleries in light of their need to communicate and engage their visitors within restricted timeframes, budgets and space. This project does not seek to replace iconic objects in general. Rather, we will critique the essentialism that informs current attitudes to 'icons' and introduce new approaches to exhibiting and thinking through important objects (in the form of textual content/context, display techniques and design principles). In this way we will develop new 'iconic objects' that are more reflective of what we know of the period today. Some will be single artefacts but other icons will be assemblages from sites and landscapes. We will address the lack of connection between exemplar objects - shown as 'precious jewels' in our museums - and the relatively unloved contents of archaeological storehouses. We will develop new ways of linking the quantitative significance of storehouse assemblages and the qualitative significance of exhibition exemplars. This approach will re-route the traditional top-down approach of cherry-picking 'special' finds for publication and display by showing the potential of more modest but emotive finds to communicate more personal and representative aspects of prehistoric life. It will bring to fruition the notion of museum exhibitions as research processes, through which ideas, concepts and engagements with material culture can be evaluated, critiqued and re-thought. The project will result in three major peer-reviewed articles that will build on a major British Museum exhibition. We seek to establish a new agenda for displaying prehistoric objects in north European museums, and to rethink the status of iconic objects more generally.