Spatial Data and Images from the Lea Valley Mapping Project

This collection contains spatial datasets and images from the Lea Valley Mapping Project. These include the gazetteer and databases of archaeological, past environmental and dating evidence compiled for the project along with the shapefiles of the semi-interpreted project data, interpolated geoarchaeological models, and selected figures from the publication. This project was published as Jane Corcoran, J,Halsey, C, Spurr, G, Burton, E, and Jamieson, D, 2011, Mapping past landscapes in the lower Lea valley: a geoarchaeological study of the Quaternary sequence, MOLA Monograph Series 55. The Lea Valley Mapping Project was funded by English Heritage, now Historic England, under the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund and carried out by Museum of London Archaeology during the period 2002-7 in collaboration with the British Geological Survey, supported by a team of academic university- and EH-based advisers. The lower Lea valley in London lies in an area earmarked for regeneration where extensive quarrying has been carried out in the past. The impact of any future quarrying and the process of regeneration will involve large-scale groundworks that will affect archaeological deposits. Very little is yet known about the archaeology that lies within the buried deposits of the Lea valley, but ALSF funding has provided an opportunity to redress this, through a mapping project designed to predict areas of archaeological potential within the buried and unknown Quaternary stratigraphy. These deposits have previously been mapped by the BGS mainly as Holocene alluvium and Pleistocene river terraces, without any correlation between potentially commercially valuable aggregates or zones of high archaeological importance.