WOODAN is an open database for exploring objects, taxa, and contexts across time and place.
Welcome to the renewed website of WOODAN. WOODAN is a free-to-use, open web database dedicated to archaeological wooden artefacts. It enables researchers, students, and the wider public to search, compare, and understand wooden finds across different sites, periods, and regions.
The database is hosted by the WOODAN Foundation. Our aims are twofold:
The new website makes it easier for users to search and compare records and includes a completely new input module. This allows universities, companies, museums, archaeologists, specialists or volunteers to enter artefacts themselves and validate each other’s entries. More information about entering finds yourself can be found here
↑ Discover what it is that WOODAN does ↑
With the rise of scientific databases, there is a growing need to create proper academic references to such resources. Most records in WOODAN include references to the original publication(s), ensuring that these sources can always be cited. Since WOODAN itself is described in a 2022 article in Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, it is also possible to cite it as follows:
WOODAN number 50045000. Haneca K., Deforce K., van der Laan J., Nicolaij S. & Lange S. 2022: WOODAN: an online database of archaeological wooden objects, Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 31, 541–547. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-022-00868-z
Please note that images may be protected by copyright, and it is not automatically permitted to republish them without permission from the original photographer or illustrator. For this reason, WOODAN only displays thumbnails of images, while references to the original publication or author(s) are provided for the full work.