ZooArchNet: Linking Zooarchaeology Data to Archaeological and Biodiversity Information for Big-Data Archaeological Research

Summary

Re-use of large zooarchaeological datasets offers new ways of tackling the grand challenges of archaeological science. But big-data research requires integrating multiple zooarchaeological datasets while maintaining the biological and archaeological details needed to contextualize the faunal information. Accessing and combining these data remains difficult despite the increasing use of open-access archaeological data publishers and archiving services, and the open-access, interoperable biological data of the global biodiversity data network (GBIF and associated worldwide nodes). We do not yet have a means to effectively integrate data among zooarchaeological, biological, and archaeological databases.

Here, we present ZooArchNet - a bridge between zooarchaeological data and the biological and archaeological open-access networks that will allow us to contribute meaningfully to big-data archaeological research. ZooArchNet is a collaborative project that spans expertise in zooarchaeology, archaeoinformatics, and biodiversity informatics and that links zooarchaeological data to the biodiversity distributed data network and the many publishers and archives of the developing archaeoinformatics infrastructure. We discuss the benefits and challenges of such a system based on our current work combining several millennia of Florida zooarchaeological data with Florida biodiversity data from the biodiversity network (represented by VertNet) and site-based archaeological context through links with archaeoinformatics (represented by Open Context).

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20233