Big Data/Big Picture Research: DINAA (The Digital Index of North American Archaeology) and the Things Half a Million Sites Can Tell Us
Author(s): Thaddeus Bissett; Joshua Wells; David Anderson; Eric Kansa; Stephen Yerka
Year: 2015
Summary
The DINAA project allows archaeologists to explore archaeological questions at a large scale, facilitating big picture research. Information from >500,000 archaeological sites in 15 states in Eastern North America is used to examine the effects of climate and vegetation change on human existence, in the past as well as in the future. Distribution maps illustrate where people were concentrated on the landscape at various times in the past, as well as areas they avoided, and environmental factors that helped shape those patterns. The total dataset additionally highlights variation in archaeological survey coverage at a regional scale. How changes in sea level affected settlement in the past are examined, and the same data also document how even modest rises of from 1 to 3 m in the near future will affect tens of thousands of known sites, including thousands considered eligible for the NRHP. A multi-institutional collaborative effort, DINAA provides a framework for distributed linked open data initiatives in North American archaeology; promotes greater interaction between data generators, managers, and users; and helps promote a greater appreciation for archaeology among researchers, resource managers, and the general public.
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Cite this Record
Big Data/Big Picture Research: DINAA (The Digital Index of North American Archaeology) and the Things Half a Million Sites Can Tell Us. David Anderson, Stephen Yerka, Eric Kansa, Joshua Wells, Thaddeus Bissett. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 397217)
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Keywords
General
DINAA, CRM, Cyberinfrastructure
Geographic Keywords
North America - Southeast
Spatial Coverage
min long: -91.274; min lat: 24.847 ; max long: -72.642; max lat: 36.386 ;