What to Do with All Those Digital Data: Examples from the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS)

Summary

The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) is a Web-based initiative designed to foster inter-site, comparative archaeological research on slavery throughout the Chesapeake, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean. The goal of DAACS is to facilitate research that advances our historical understanding of the slave-based societies that evolved in the Atlantic World during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this paper we argue that the digital methods encapsulated within DAACS enable archaeologists to conduct innovative analysis at scales that would be impossible to achieve using analog methods. These methods consist of: 1) entering archaeological data into the DAACS Research Consortium (DRC) Database Application using well-defined classification and measurement protocols, 2) serving that data for free through the DAACS website (www.daacs.org), and 3) providing training and assistance for those who conduct research with the data. We offer three case studies to demonstrate how these methods enable collaborators to address old research questions using legacy collections, answer new questions with data from recent excavations, and adapt the system to incorporate data from different regions. These case studies illustrate how DAACS has balanced the need to maintain rigorous data entry standards and reproducible methods with the needs of an expanding user base.

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): 20812