I’m Neil Jakeman — Research Software Engineer, spatial analyst, sometime GIS practitioner, and persistent amateur of deep landscape history.

I’ve spent the last fifteen years working in digital humanities at King’s College London, building research tools, mapping interfaces, and 3D visualisations for academics working across everything from medieval manuscripts to Bronze Age metalwork. Before that: environmental consultancy, primary school teaching, IT helpdesk, and a geology degree that left me permanently interested in how the ground beneath us got to look the way it does.

FieldWorks is where that professional life meets a more personal preoccupation — the prehistoric landscape of southern England. Specifically the chalk downland of the South Downs and its surroundings, the hillforts and long barrows and earthworks that punctuate it, and what LiDAR imagery and spatial analysis can add to our understanding of that archaeology. And also what resists that kind of analysis: the resonance of these places, the long human habit of treating them as significant, the folklore that accumulates around them.

The name fieldWorks means something I can’t quite pin down — work done in the field, earthworks as historical artefact, fieldwork as method, work that arises from being out in landscape. All of those.

Most of what appears here will be a combination of: spatial analysis and maps, 3D visualisations of terrain and sites, written pieces on specific places and their archaeology, and occasional thoughts on methodology. The tone I’m aiming for is field journal meets analytical notebook — grounded, curious, not academic, not commercial!

If you want to get in touch: info@field.works