ScAPA (Scottish Archaeological Periods & Ages)

The 4 month project on Period Terminology Research for Scottish Chronology was funded by Historic Environment Scotland. Archaeologists in Scotland have experienced difficulty reaching a uniform consensus concerning historical periods and date ranges. The process of periodization involves the subdivision of time into discrete named blocks representing periods, utilising knowledge of past events. The aim of the project was to document named periods and associated date ranges within an openly available published periodization. This extensible framework could provide relative context for dating of events and artefacts that could be useful for categorization and temporal orientation of Scottish cultural heritage records.
The outcome was converted to SKOS RDF and published on HeritageData.org as a new Scottish period list. The project was described on the Scottish Archaeology Research Framework (ScARF) website, with a link to the final implementation report.