2025-11-14 –, Area
Since OSM Ireland started their buildings project utilizing the TaskManager, I have discovered over 120 potential archaeological sites previously unrecorded by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland. In this talk, I will speak about how to identify them and the challenges and rewards in reporting them to the National Monuments Service.
OpenStreetMap Ireland started their buildings project in November of 2019 and has been utilizing the Task Manager for that purpose. Most of the early tasks were created for whole counties using Esri Clarity imagery and at times Bing imagery as a source.The digitisation of the 1st and 2nd edition OS maps by the National Library of Scotland has been an additional resource in identifying recorded sites.
Discovering previously unrecorded archaeological sites presenting on aerial imagery is only a side effect of mapping buildings and highways. However, the gridified task allows for very systematic handling of the area, provided few mappers work on the task. Fortunately for archaeology, the enthusiasm in the community for the buildings project has decreased since the Covid lockdown was lifted, so that my contributions often cover about 90% of a task (28,302 tasks mapped in 4,036 hours of mapping as of July 30th 2025).
The Archaeological Survey of Ireland/ National Monuments Service hosts a map of recorded monuments which is accessible online which one is supposed to check before reporting a monument. There are issues with that database which will be outlined in the talk.
archaeology,task manager,citizen science
I started mapping in 2013 occasionally, but my efforts intensified with my move to Ireland in 2016 and the start of the buildings project in 2019. Apart from contributing things useful to the general public, my interest lies in recording heritage from small things like boot scrapers and jostle stones to large sites such as field systems. When I’m not mapping, I play the fiddle and mandolin in several bands or fall down historical research rabbit holes.