BaseFer aims to give a global picture of the published knowledge on the Iron Age, without claiming to be exhaustive.
Its purpose is to:
– Inventory the Iron Age sites, geo-located at the centroids of the wards where they are found, providing the dating, types of structure as well as the associated artefacts, ecofacts and materials. BaseFer is a qualitative, presence-absence database of published data. It does not provide quantitative information, except possibly in the optional comments.
– Produce distribution maps from the recorded data. Initially centred on France, BaseFer was extended to all of Europe. For each country, the administrative levels chosen are those of Regulation (EC) No 1059/2003 on the establishment of a common classification of territorial units for statistics (NUTS): smaller administrative units, NUTS 3 and NUTS 2. To simplify, these levels correspond to wards, districts and counties.
The typochronology provided by BaseFer goes up to the change of era. But as mentioned above, the database aims to give a global picture of the knowledge about the Iron Age. Therefore it is not intended to inventory Roman sites. For rural sites, villae will not be inventoried but the indigenous sites or sites of indigenous tradition will be described.
BaseFer User Guide
Practical Guide for Entering Site RecordsThis document provides a minimum manual for the use of the « BaseFer Online » application, which allows manipulations of the base base iron through a browser.
Access to the application requires registration as a user. This operation is carried out by an administrator of Base Fer. The latter not only provides a user account, which is characterized by an identifier name associated with a strictly confidential password, but also grants rights for editing site cards or administering the database.
The application offers several features for querying the BaseFer database, retrieving data, obtaining statistics, identifying communes, updating site description sheets and obtaining documentation on the basis.
This manual presents the main points. It is available in the Documentation section of the application.
Contact us to have access to the Iron Base and participate in the project.
