Web site puts Annapolis' past at your fingertips

The work has been painstaking, with years spent poring over old maps, land records and photographs or sifting through piles of dirt for shards of dishes or tools.

Now the efforts of archaeologists and preservationists in Annapolis have been compiled in a new project that marries history and technology: a single, interactive Web site that will offer the public unprecedented views of the city's Colonial past.

The Annapolis collection, called Preservation Search, catalogs only a fraction of the 2,000 structures in the city's historic district, but is one of the most comprehensive online collections of historic records of a single jurisdiction, said Mark P. Leone, a University of Maryland, College Park anthropology professor and the force behind the Archaeology in Annapolis digs.