Presentations on Digital Antiquity and tDAR

DOCUMENT Full-Text Francis McManamon. Keith Kintigh.

Digital Antiquity (http://digitalantiquity.org) is a new organization dedicated to establishing an online digital repository of archaeological data and documents. Its primary goals are to expand dramatically access to the digital records of archaeological investigations and to ensure their long-term preservation. Through a web interface, users world- wide will be able to discover and download data and documents relevant to their research. Users also will upload their own data and documents along...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Keith Kintigh. Francis McManamon. Katherine Spielmann.

The ability to easily compare and synthesize research results can have a huge impact on the productivity of a scientific research community. Meaningful comparisons across data sets created by different investigators demand both adequate documentation of the data semantics and the capacity to represent the data sets within a common schema. For research going forward, the adoption of standard terminologies and analytical procedures minimizes key problems of data comparability. Less obviously,...

DOCUMENT Full-Text adam brin. Leigh Anne Ellison.

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 comparable levels 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 databases...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Sara Rivers Cofield. Jodi Reeves Eyre.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Francis McManamon. Julian Richards.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Jodi Reeves Flores. M. Scott Thompson.

Currently, rock art research generates large amounts of digital data, both un-structured and structured. This paper discusses the significant role that digital data management systems and repositories such as the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) can play in the examination, management, and long-term curation of these data. tDAR is a dynamic digital platform that allows archaeologists to conduct research with and manage their data. The paper describes how rock art researchers can use tDAR to...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Leigh Anne Ellison. adam brin.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Brin. Leigh Anne Ellison.

The future of archaeological research is dependent on our ability to synthesize data across sites and leverage both current and legacy data. Asking questions of regions or clusters of sites where data was recovered over over decades or centuries and by multiple researchers becomes difficult without significant, manually-performed normalization and standardization processes at a great impediment to synthetic research. Beyond archiving, tDAR provides integration tools to extend the lifespan of...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Francis McManamon.

This tDAR record contains a summary of the presentation delivered at the 2016 SciDataCon held in Denver and a copy of the PPT slides used to illustrate the presentation. In recent decades, approximately 50,000 archaeological investigations have been conducted annually in the United States. Such field studies are required by archaeological and environmental laws and regulations. The term “cultural resource management” (CRM) describes the majority of these investigations. It is estimated that...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Leigh Anne Ellison. Jodi Reeves Eyre. adam brin.

Archaeologists generate large numbers of digital materials during the course of field, laboratory, and records investigations. Maps, photographs, data analysis, and reports are often produced digitally. Good curation of digital data means it can be discovered and accessed, and preserving these materials means they are accessible for future use. In many ways the managing, curating and preserving digital materials involves similar steps as those taken with physical artifacts, samples, and paper...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Leigh Anne Ellison. Jodi Reeves Eyre. adam brin.

Archaeologists generate large numbers of digital materials during the course of field, laboratory, and records investigations. Maps, photographs, data analysis, and reports are often produced digitally. Good curation of digital data means it can be discovered and accessed, and preserving these materials means they are accessible for future use. In many ways the managing, curating and preserving digital materials involves similar steps as those taken with physical artifacts, samples, and paper...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Scott Rivas.

In conjunction with multi-scalar integrative faunal research on the use of aquatic resources by Archaic period hunter-gatherers, the EAFWG has been required to focus on both environmental and demographic reconstructions for both specific locales and larger regions within the interior of the North American Eastern Woodlands. Although the importance of social and ethnic factors has increasingly been recognized, both environmental change and variability and human population growth and aggregation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bonnie Styles. Mona Colburn. Sarah Neusius.

The Eastern Archaic Faunal Working Group (EAFWG), established with funding from NSF, is preserving Archaic period faunal databases from interior portions of the Eastern Woodlands in tDAR (the Digital Archaeological Record) in order to undertake data integration at multiple scales that examines the use of aquatic resources across time and space during the Archaic. A major initial question about our existing datasets is how comparable they are taphonomically and contextually. Protocols for...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Francis McManamon. Jodi Reeves Flores.

This conference poster describes for individuals, organizations, and public agencies responsible for cultural heritage the challenges and opportunities that stewards of this important information face. Challenges include: heritage loss due to poor access and preservation; lack of perceived value; hesitancy to share information resulting in absence of public interest; and loss of heritage information through destruction or neglect. Digital techniques can provide access to information (with...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Leigh Anne Ellison. Francis McManamon. Jodi Reeves Eyre.

Archaeological collections take on many forms, and increasingly include significant digital components. Many archaeologists, repositories, and other managers of cultural heritage and archaeological collections are not equipped to successfully care for digital collections; at worst, placing the information at risk of permanent loss, and at best making it more difficult to access and use for research, education, and public outreach. The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) is an online...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Renee Walker. Tanya Peres.

Uploading faunal data from eastern Archaic sites to the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) as members of the Eastern Archaic Faunal Working Group (EAFWG) was a very exciting prospect. We are pleased to be involved in a project that will address significant questions about animal use during the Archaic period. However, making the data comparable entailed some challenges and compromises. While most zooarchaeologists agree on taxonomic designations, developing ontologies for elements, portions,...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Francis McManamon. Rachel Fernandez. Leigh Anne Ellison.

Like other public agencies, the US Army Reserve is responsible for the care of archaeological and cultural heritage resources on the facilities and land that they manage. Data and information about these resources also must be managed effectively for access, use, and sharing. This presentation illustrates how the tDAR repository is a tool that the US Army Reserve can use to meets its responsibilities. Use of tDAR also will make managing and using the data much more effective and...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Keith Kintigh. Katherine Spielmann. K. Selçuk Candan. Adam Brin. James DeVos. Tiffany Clark. Matthew Peeples.

Addressing archaeology’s most compelling substantive challenges requires synthetic research that exploits the large and rapidly expanding corpus of systematically collected archaeological data. That, in turn, demands an integration procedure that preserves the semantics of the data when combining datasets collected by multiple investigators who employ different systematics in their recording. To that end, we have developed a general procedure that we call query-directed, on-the-fly data...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Center for Digital Antiquity.

The Center for Digital Antiquity (Digital Antiquity) strives to protect and preserve the archaeological and cultural heritage data and information that is deposited in tDAR. We focus on preserving, curating, and maintaining these data. We accept this responsibility as one of our primary missions. This document outlines the various approaches we take to store and secure digital information. We also describe tDAR features that allow data contributors to control and manage access to information...

DOCUMENT Full-Text William Doelle. Sharlot Hart. Lauren Jelinek. Teresita Majewski.

This record describes a session at the 2018 Arizona Historic Preservation Conference that provided short presentations and a discussion on the curation of digital archaeological data and current practices to carry it out. The PPT slides by McManamon introduce the topic and the panelists. Doelle used a set of PPT slides, also provided here, to illustrate examples of the past use of large amounts of digital data to examine ancient coalescent communities and other Southwest social...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Leigh Anne Ellison. Francis McManamon. David Martínez. adam brin. Keith Kintigh.

The Digital Archive of Huhugam Archaeology is an ongoing NEH funded project designed to locate, digitize, and make publicly available in tDAR grey literature reports related to Huhugam archaeology and prehistory. We will apply advanced digital humanities techniques to maximize the synthetic potential of this massive digital database, with implications for improved archaeological research, indigenous access to their cultural heritage, cultural resource management, and public outreach. This...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Rachel Fernandez. Leigh Anne Ellison.

With every trowel stroke, archaeologists expose layers of the past, allowing for the preservation of material while using destructive methods. Fortunately, with the formulation of research and documentation methods over the years, our destructive behavior has been offset with the increase of data and research possibilities. In more recent years, this data has taken on a digital format which has accumulated exponentially. As the amount of data produced from archaeological investigations increase...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Uploaded by: Francis McManamon

On the wintery morning of 5 January 2018, the panelists in the scheduled session, “Probing, Publishing, and Promoting the Use of Digital Archaeological Data,” at the 119th Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and a small, but engaged audience participated in the session. Unfortunately, the blizzard conditions of the day, and “severe winter weather” warnings of the previous day prevented more of the panelists and potential audience members from attending. In Boston, the...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Leigh Anne Ellison. Francis McManamon.

Archaeologists are busy all the time. Often stretching to meet a variety of professional obligations. CRM and government agency archaeologists are among the most stretched given the different directions that pull upon their professional lives. Scholarly pursuits; administrative, bureaucratic, regulatory, and public outreach responsibilities related to physical sites and collections, easily fill or over-fill their schedules. Now the care and curation of digital data adds to the piling up of...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Chris Nicholson. Rachel Fernandez.

This is a presentation from the 2021 Arizona Archaeological Council (AAC) Fall symposium on "The Archaeology of Canals in the Arizona Desert". Staff from the Center for Digital Antiquity will provide an update on the Digital Archive of Huhugam Archaeology (DAHA), which contains over 2000 digital datasets, documents, reports and images focused on the ancient Huhugam (1500 B.C. – 1450 A.D.) of the southwestern U.S. These files are primarily “grey literature,” that is, unpublished reports and...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Rachel Fernandez. Charlene Collazzi.

The Center for Digital Antiquity at Arizona State University, in collaboration with the Amerind Museum, utilized a 2017 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a comprehensive digital library of archaeological investigations of the ancient Huhugam (Hohokam). The Digital Archive of Huhugam Archaeology (DAHA) now contains copies of more than 2,000 major archaeological reports, images and data sets made accessible through tDAR (the Digital Archaeological Record), an...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Rachel Fernandez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the call from the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to make federally-funded research openly and immediately available, many archaeologists, archivists, and CRM professionals in the U.S. are left wondering how this affects their research and ability to preserve and protect their data. Most affected by this governance are state and...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Charlene Collazzi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Every archaeological site holds the potential to contribute its own irreplaceable piece into the vast jigsaw puzzle that is our shared human past. Meticulous field and lab procedures ensure data and subsequent reports are accurate. But what happens after the project closes? For decades, it has been standard practice to file the report away into an...