Overview

DigVentures is a social enterprise committed to designing, developing and delivering community archaeology projects. We combine our considerable experience and understanding of commercial archaeology with a strategic approach to outreach and engagement, designing public-facing research tailored to the specific needs of our project partners and heritage managers. DV is a Chartered Institute for Archaeologists Registered Organisation, and the first-ever CIfA Accredited Field School. We have pioneered the use of crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and digital methods to increase access and opportunities for real people to purposefully participate in real research. In 2012, our team launched the world’s first-ever crowdfunded and crowdsourced archaeological excavation at Flag Fen, a Bronze Age wetlands site and Scheduled Ancient Monument near Peterborough, UK. It was a huge success, raising a worldwide community of over 250 citizen archaeologists and £32,000 to run an internationally-important collaborative archaeological research project. Since then, we have run over 40 projects and grown our community year upon year, proving time and again that the crowd are at the heart of what we do. In 2018, we hosted the DigNation festival, sharing a livestream from Lindisfarne to the world; we’ve built Digital Dig Team, the world’s first live, open-access mobile digital archaeological recording system, enabling us to share our research from the trenches in real time; we’ve launched How to Do Archaeology, and an online course to help people all over the world who want to learn how to dig. In 2021, we were awarded two of Europe’s top heritage prizes, the Europa Nostra Award and the Heritage in Motion award, for our project Archaeology at Home, which brought together over 11,000 people from 90 countries during the COVID-19 lockdowns. We’ve got new projects across the world and plenty of tricks up our sleeve to keep involving as many people as possible in what we do, so keep in touch.