OA is a Registered Organisation with the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists (CIfA), and carries out commercial archaeological fieldwork in advance of development, as well as a range of other heritage related services.
Oxford Archaeology primarily operates in the UK, but has also carried out contracts around the world, including Sudan, Qatar, Central Asia, China and the Caribbean.
In the late 1960s, the recently created Oxford City and County Museum led the archaeological response to a development boom in Oxfordshire.
A consensus rapidly emerged that this duplication was wasteful and that all the committees should pool their resources to provide a county-wide service for archaeological research, using the opportunities presented by development.
The Lancaster office continued the wide range of work undertaken in the past, from desk-based assessments, through evaluation and rapid surveys of both the landscape and the built and industrial environments, to major excavations.
These have included infrastructure projects on the A1(M), A66, the Asselby to Pannal and West East Link Main pipelines, and the Carlisle North Development Route (CNDR).
Since the North was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, the investigation of factories, mills and workers’ housing also forms an important part of the work carried out by the Lancaster office.
Its lineage started in the early 1980s with Manpower Services Commission-funded community programme projects, and it continued to carry out developer-funded work in the mid-80s as the 'Archaeological Field Unit'.
Its large rural landscape projects include complex Middle Bronze Age field systems, enclosures and settlements at Clay Farm, Trumpington.
The most notable of these techniques is photogrammetric mapping, which uses photographs taken from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to create accurate three-dimensional models of the archaeological evidence, including artefacts, historic buildings or whole landscapes.
A registered charitable trust[23] with educational aims, OA has various outreach and community archaeology projects running alongside its commercial work.