The Irish Stone Axe Project Digital Collection

The Irish Stone Axe Project (ISAP) Digital Collection is an image catalogue containing scaled photographs, artefact drawings and images of petrographic thin sections (produced by microscopic coring for petrographic identification) for 366 stone axeheads from the island of Ireland. These stone axeheads were selected from the ISAP Database, as they were deemed to have the most comprehensive records.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, The Irish Stone Axe Project, with funding from the Heritage council and the Irish Research council, established a database incorporating contextual, morphological and petrolographic information for over 21,000 stone axeheads with an Irish provenance. The ISAP database is the largest and most comprehensive archaeological database covering a specific artefact type at national level. The project is widely considered state of the art and continues to serve as a benchmark by which artefact studies are measured internationally.

The ISAP Digital Collection has been divided into three sub-collections: 1. Scaled Photographs; 2. Artefact Drawings; and 3. Petrographic Thin Sections.

The ISAP Digital Collection has received Royal Irish Academy (https://www.ria.ie/) funding from the Nowlan Digitisation Grant in 2022.