The Revival of the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD)

Summary

CARD was developed at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now the Canadian Museum of History) by Richard Morlan as a text-based online tool to compile c14 dates from archaeological and palaeontological contexts. Over the years it has compiled about 40,000 dates from across Canada and into the northern United States. The database has grown to the extent that it can now be used to answer critical continental-scale questions of demography and human-ecosystem interactions In July 2014, the CMH and the Laboratory of Archaeology (LOA) at the University of British Columbia initiated a partnership to revise CARD. In this paper we review and showcase the new features of this foundational database (including spatialization, data field flexibility, batch up/downloading, dynamic searching). We also outline our plans for expanding the database’s reach in area and subject as well as adding to its functionality. We also discuss CARD as an example of a new management system for ‘big data’ which decentralizes authority and develops comprehensiveness through crowdsourcing.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Issues in Building Radiocarbon Chronologies

Keywords

Spatial Coverage