CAA Conference

The volume of data on past environmental and climate changes, as well as human interactions with these, has long since passed the level where it is manageable outside of large scale database systems. The Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database project aims to not only store and disseminate such data, but also provide a set of tools for querying and analysing them, whilst maintaining a close connection with the archaeological and ecological data that are essential for their comprehensive interpretation. Large scale, geographically and chronologically unrestricted databases provide us with essentially unlimited scope for putting individual sites into a broader context and applying locally collated data to the investigation of earth system level changes. By providing integrated access to data from a variety of proxies, including plant macrofossils, pollen, insects and geochemistry, along with dating evidence, more complex questions can be answered where any single proxy would not be able to provide comprehensive answers.