Jan Brouwer's British Rock Art Collection - back online

Submitted by rockartuk on Monday, 09 December 2013 Page Views: 4691

Type: Rock Art

Internal Links:

**Buttony 4** submitted by rockartuk : A striking example of Prehistoric craftmanship. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Quite a few people will hopefully remember BRAC (the British Rock Art Collection) - the online image gallery covering British rock art sites. It was originally setup in 2004 by the Dutch rock art enthusiast Jan Brouwer (alias Rockartuk) and his friend Gus Van Veen. Over several years Jan went on to expand the collection to well over 18000 images, covering 1200 sites.

Sadly, in 2011 Jan Brouwer became ill and passed away, a great loss to all his family and friends. Around this time Fotopic (the internet company hosting the BRAC gallery) also closed down and so the rock art collection was lost too. The online nature of Fotopic meant that gallery owners had no real back up of their sites. Attempts to contact the company drew a blank until early 2013 when the old Fotopic servers were brought temporarily back online to allow customers to retrieve their images. At this point Jan’s friends took the opportunity to rescue the collection.

Unfortunately the old BRAC website no longer existed and only the images were available for download, so these images have now been compiled into a new website using Jalbum photo gallery software.

As with the original BRAC site, this new version consists of photographs from Jan Brouwer’s own collection and those of his many friends, who provided copies for inclusion in the BRAC. Other images were used with permission from the owners, but as Jan is no longer with us it is difficult to know what the arrangements were for every single image.

Many filenames include the name of the contributor so it has been possible to compile a ‘credits list’ on the new site to both acknowledge and thank those who contributed to the collection. As would be expected there are quite a few TMP members listed (some simply by their usernames) so we are hoping these people are still happy for their images to be part of the British Rock Art Collection.

At the present time BRAC is effectively an archive of all the images brought together by Jan Brouwer and it still forms a useful resource for anyone interested in British rock art. In the future new sites could be added to it, but it will be hard to match Jan’s dedication in this respect.

Please take a look at the new BRAC. It’s a kind of tribute to Jan’s interest and passion for these ancient rock carvings and also his wish to share this with everyone. As BRAC is a collaborative effort we hope it can continue to be the largest website dedicated to UK rock art on the net.

Link - British Rock Art Collection

Contributor Bio for rockartuk: Based in From Castricum, The Netherlands, contributing since 2002. Favourite site: Weetwood Moor, Northumber.

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