The Afterlife of Archaeological Information: Use and Reuse of Digital Archaeological Data
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)
Archaeological projects generate a lot of data. High value, interpretable data are published in the final report or other publications, but a great deal of additional data remain inaccessible. What happens to these invaluable supporting data (e.g. field notes, photographs, raw data sets, GIS files, etc.) after the final product is complete? This poster session explores ways that archaeologists who practice in many different settings (academic, agency, CRM) preserve and make available their digital archaeological products for future use.
Site Name Keywords
AZ AA:7:27(ASM) •
AZ T:3:86(ASM) •
AZ T:4:293(ASM) •
AZ AA:3:55(ASM) •
AZ:T:5:59(SIU)
Other Keywords
Curation •
Digital Data •
data sharing •
Preservation •
Cultural Resource Management •
Data Management •
Data Synthesis •
Database •
Public Archaeology •
Archaeological Data
Investigation Types
Heritage Management •
Collections Research
Geographic Keywords
North America - Southwest •
United States of America (Country) •
North America (Continent) •
Arizona (State / Territory) •
US (ISO Country Code) •
New Mexico (State / Territory) •
Delaware (State / Territory) •
Connecticut (State / Territory) •
Colorado (State / Territory) •
Utah (State / Territory)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-11 of 11)
- Documents (11)
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The Aferlife of Archaeometry; the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Database Project (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
What happens to artifact-sourcing data after a laboratory closes? We provide an update on the ongoing effort to preserve archaeometric data produced between 1968 and 1990 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Over the past decade, we have located and digitized chemical and contextual data for over 10,000 archaeological specimens analyzed by the laboratory. Our efforts are now turning toward analysis and application of these data, many of which have never been published let alone...
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Best Practices for Good Digital Curation (2015)
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Archaeology is awash in digital data. Archaeologists generate large numbers of digital files in their field, laboratory, and records investigations. We use digital mapping, digital photography, digital means of data analysis, and our reports are drafted and produced digitally. Good curation of digital data provides easy means by which it can be discovered and accessed, as well as ensuring that it is preserved for future uses. In many ways the planning for and carrying out good digital involves...
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Digging without Getting Dirty: Making use of Archival Data to Explore Variations of Labor Costs in Hohokam Residential Architecture at Pueblo Grande. (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Archaeological research in Arizona’s Phoenix Basin has been ongoing for nearly four decades, reaching its heyday during the 1990s. This resulted from large CRM projects associated with development in Phoenix, especially ADOT. The potential uses of data collected as a part of these excavations has only begun to be realized, and efforts to digitally preserve and make available these data accessible for new analysis are underway. At Pueblo Grande and elsewhere in the lower Salt River Valley, there...
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A Digital Approach in Consultant Archaeology: PaleoWest at the Ironwood Village Site (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
In the Summer of 2014, PaleoWest Archaeology stripped seven acres within Ironwood Village site in Marana, AZ for archaeological data recovery ahead of a land development project. Digital methods allowed PaleoWest to conduct high-quality cutting-edge archaeology, manage a complex field effort, and complete work on time within an aggressive development schedule. This poster outlines a fully digital workflow using tablets and smartphones connected over cellular networks in the field. Data entry...
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The Digital Legacy of Public Archaeology in the Phoenix Basin, Arizona (2015)
DOCUMENT Full-Text
Federal undertakings, particularly flood control and water transmission projects, have served as the impetus for some of the largest public archaeology projects in Arizona since the 1950s. The Central Arizona Project, a 336 mile diversion canal that distributes water from the Colorado River into central and southern Arizona, was the largest and most costly transmission system constructed in the United States. It took nearly 25 years to identify and mitigate the cultural resources within the...
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DINAA and Bootstrapping Archaeology’s Information Ecosystem (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Data management is fundamental to the practice of archaeology in the 21st century. As such, archaeological data management requires wide engagement and capacity building across our discipline. Archaeological data management increasingly involves the choreography of diverse data, software, Web-based services, and communications channels deployed and curated by a host of actors, ranging from individual researchers, to open source projects, libraries and archives, publishers, and commercial...
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Evaluating a Cooperative Approach to the Management of Digital Archaeological Records (ECAMDAR): A Defense Legacy Project Assessing tDAR for the Department of Defense (2015)
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The Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory (MAC Lab) and the Regional Archaeological Curation Laboratory (RACF) in Ft. Lee, Virginia are archaeological repositories that meet high professional standards for the care of artifacts and paper records. Unfortunately, neither facility has the expert technical staff and specialized infrastructure necessary to qualify as permanent repositories for digital records, despite the exponential rise in site documentation that exists in digital form...
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It Takes a (Big) Village: Preserving the Legacy of Pueblo Grande (2015)
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Archaeology can marshal new digital infrastructure not simply to rescue endangered legacy information, but to revive and enhance those data for innovative research approaches. Over the course of two decades, Soil Systems, Inc. (SSI), collected vast amounts of archaeological information and digital data during the company’s work at Pueblo Grande, one of the largest and most centrally-located of the Classic period Hohokam villages in the Salt River Valley. This poster highlights efforts to...
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Moving Forward While Looking Backward (2015)
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Many know the curation challenges associated with space and data preservation when it comes to archaeological collections. As we keep digging for answers an intense need has developed for appropriate storage of not only the physical findings, but the intellectual materials as well. Most curation repositories require original paper copies of field notes, maps, and analytical data; however, with today’s advancing technologies paperwork is being phased out in preference of digital media such as...
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(Poster) Unlocking the data behind the Chora of Metaponto publication series: "on-the-fly" solutions for sharing and archiving an evolving collection (2015)
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Archaeological publishing is moving from the traditional model of the print monograph (as the definitive word), to an open and interactive model in which it is expected that primary data and the processes of their collection and interpretation are exposed for the reader to validate, re-use, and reinterpret. Online representation of archaeological data and research, then, must achieve transparency, exposing the relations between field collection and research methods, data objects, metadata, and...
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Synthesizing Legacy Data : Using tDAR’s Data Integration Tool (2015)
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Archaeological projects generate abundant data that is often underutilized in research and analyses beyond the life of the project. Although some projects curate their data, they often do not make those data widely available, accessible, or easy to aggregate at different granularities for additional research. Discipline specific digital repositories and data publishing platforms (e.g. tDAR, ADS, Open Context) are beginning to address problems related to the access and the utility of legacy...