Refining Archaeological Data Collection and Management to Achieve Greater Scientific, Traditional, and Educational Values

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Refining Archaeological Data Collection and Management to Achieve Greater Scientific, Traditional, and Educational Values" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological data have much to offer in learning about the past, preserving heritage, contributing to cross-disciplinary scientific studies, and informing on public policy. Cultural resource management (CRM) efforts are producing an ever-increasing volume of archaeological data. Yet, once data are collected and reported on for individual projects, they typically remain dormant and largely untapped. Current CRM data collection and management methods are not often designed to cumulatively and longitudinally address major research topics within archaeology and other disciplines, and their accuracy and reliability are rarely tested. Additional problems are that CRM data are often difficult to access, inter-operationalize, and reuse, and are challenging to synthesize at a broad scale. Moreover, there have been few incentives in CRM to explore multiple methods and data models that can refine or augment standard approaches. Papers in this session will explore methods, mechanisms, and requirements for refining data collection and management in CRM that will enable archaeological data to be more broadly accessible and useful to multiple disciplines and constituencies.