The documentation system of Hendrik Jan van Beuningen contains about 9,000 maps with unique data of medieval insignia and ampoules, found by archaeologists in the Netherlands and Belgium.
Thanks to a contribution of € 14.000 from the Pronk Visser Fund, managed by the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, the data of ca. 1,750 new records of insignia and ampoules have been entered in the Kunera database. Thanks to a financial contribution from the Religious and Profane Medieval Badges Foundation the data of the remaining cards, presumably about 1,500 pieces, are now being processed in the Kunera database. Due to corona, the process has been delayed, but the project is expected to be completed this year.
The Kunera project is an ongoing database project at Radboud University in Nijmegen, in which the data of medieval insignia and ampoules has been collected, documented, analysed and presented online for many years. The object-oriented project Kunera is dedicated to medieval insignia and ampoules from circa 1200 to 1600. On the one hand, it concerns finds - which comes to light during archaeological excavations as well as isolated finds - and on the other hand, it concerns insignia and ampoules in old collections whose provenances have long been lost.
A large part of the insignias in Hendrik Jan van Beuningen's documentation system are finds that have not been documented elsewhere and are therefore of great value to Kunera, which has the aims to make the data of these objects accessible. Not only does Kunera protect the now digitised data from loss, it also makes this available to a large public of interested parties (scientists, archaeologists, detectorists, etc.) because the database can be consulted freely online via the domain kunera.nl. Moreover, registration of these finds, most of which was brought to light by private individuals and meticulously checked for reliability by H.J.E. van Beuningen, is of direct importance for the archaeological map of the Netherlands.
