Introducing the Museum of Archaeology Ōtautahi: Challenges and Opportunities

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Christchurch Archaeology Project was established to preserve, share and research the archaeology of Ōtautahi Christchurch, a city founded by English colonial settlers in 1850. A key part of our vision is to make the wealth of archaeological data recovered following the 2011 earthquake accessible to the public and heritage practitioners alike. To this end, we have built a database to hold the data and a website to make it publicly available. There have been numerous challenges along the way, including the innate complexities of archaeological and historical data from an urban context. Other challenges included capturing data recorded using a range of systems that changed over time and presenting it in ways that were useful to both the public and heritage practitioners. The end result is the Museum of Archaeology Ōtautahi, a database of urban archaeology that is freely available to archaeologists around the world.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow