After the Gear is Gone: Perspectives from the Digital Index of North American Archaeology on How Archaeologists Implement Digital Instances of Past Peoples and Scientific Concepts

Summary

Archaeologists today engage with digital records of primary data, derivative interpretive information, and ontological descriptors used to represent intellectual models of individual research, and instantiations of theoretical constructs from the local to the landscape. Prior to and into the digital age, the archaeological record writ large as a testable and defensible set of hypotheses and factual statements is constructed from a melange of meaningful information expected to correlate with sociocultural behaviors and socioculturally salient environmental factors (diagnostic artifacts, industries, horizons, dating strategies, ecofacts, etc.). Archaeological site definitions and descriptors, digitally instantiated, comprise the backbone of the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA), which provides an unparalleled capacity to understand the extent to which different strands of archaeological data are used and combined to develop records of past behavior. Emergent patterns from textual analyses of the DINAA public and open dataset of half a million archaeological sites will be discussed.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Going Paperless: The Digital Age of Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 1028