The modern United States of historical archaeology site reporting: A multi-state analysis of reported historical archaeological sites archived in the Digital Index of North American Archaeology.

Summary

It is recognized that certain biases exist in the archaeological recording of historic sites and contexts in comparison to those from prehistory. Typically, these studies deal only with one state or a discrete region of interest due to the legacy limitations of archaeological record keeping in research and cultural resource management settings. This study demonstrates a first step toward providing historical archaeologists with greater insights into the larger effects of the many discrete choices made during historic site reporting. The advent of the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) affords historical archaeologists an important opportunity to categorically and quantitatively assess how site recording is accomplished at a massive level. DINAA is a growing, open access system that provides research definitions for archaeological sites and can make interoperable multiple archaeological databases (currently covering 15 states and over 500,000 sites), through a linked open data strategy that correlates site descriptive ontologies to more standardized vocabularies. This poster provides an assessment of archaeological site definitions and other recording trends through multiple queries of the publicly available DINAA structure, and highlights potential patterns that emerge from disciplinary interests in reporting of cultural components, activity types, or material culture types.

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)   •
• The Acid Test: Exploring The Utility of The Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) For Use in Applies Research

Keywords

Spatial Coverage