ENN101891 - Northamptonshire National Mapping Programme, 1993-2002

The Northamptonshire NMP project ran for seven years from its inception in January 1994 to the completion of mapping and recording in August 2001. It forms part of English Heritage's (formerly RCHME's) National Mapping Programme (NMP). The Northamptonshire project was initially funded by RCHME, but with the merger of RCHME with English Heritage in 1999 it was funded through English Heritage's Archaeology Commissions Programme as part of the NMP Acceleration Programme. The interpretation work was carried out by members of Northamptonshire Heritage and a freelance archaeologist in Northampton. As part of NMP the Northamptonshire staff worked to the specifications of NMP, and quality control was overseen by staff from the Aerial Survey & Investigation team based at the NMRC.The project area covered the county of Northamptonshire, with mapping taking place on every OS 1:10,000 quarter sheet which contained any part of the county. This is a total of 130 quarter sheets covering an area of 3,250 sq kms. 66 quarter sheets overlap into one or more of the neighbouring eight counties and two unitary authorities. The contribution of this project to the coverage of other bordering counties, however, is minor since recording in the overlap areas was not completed to the same specification as the Northamptonshire data. As the air photographs held by collections in the overlap counties were not consulted for this project the mapping and interpretation in these areas is considered to be incomplete and has not been entered into the MORPH2.2 database. However the scope and quality of mapping and interpretation are consistent with the general NMP standards and the mapping is available for future NMP projects in these areas.The overall objective of the project, as part of NMP, was to map, describe and classify all archaeological features, showing either as extant earthworks or plough levelled cropmarks (for the purposes of NMP this includes all vegetation marks including parchmarks and soilmarks). The mapping was carried out using computer rectification of photographs. Initially this consisted of tracing archaeological data onto overlays and rectifying this, but in the latter stages of the project the photographs themselves were rectified producing ortho-photos. The archaeological data was then imported into the Northamptonshire County Council GIS, where it was edited and had object data attached. As well as the graphic product a record was made of each site using the MORPH2 database. Whilst transcriptions were produced for entire quarter sheets the morphological recording was only carried out up to the county boundary.Since the completion of the project the data from the NMP sheets have been returned to English Heritage as exports from the Northamptonshire MapInfo GIS. The MORPH2 database records are available for consultation, but it is hoped that the data, which has been incorporated within the Northamptonshire GIS, will be incorporated into AMIE at some point in the future.A management report has been completed for the project and the synthesised results have been published in a book 'Mapping Ancient Landscapes in Northamptonshire' that is available as a PDF download from the English Heritage website