CyberSW: A Preservation Archaeology Approach to a Web-based Southwest Regional Database

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Refining Archaeological Data Collection and Management to Achieve Greater Scientific, Traditional, and Educational Values" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

CyberSW (NSF Award # 1738062), is a web-based science gateway built to facilitate research on the regional- and landscape-scale archaeology of the southwest United States and northwest Mexico (https://cybersw.org/). The data—focused on sites, ceramics, obsidian, rock art, and public architecture—are collected from a wide variety of legacy and contemporary sources and adapted to fit the data model of cyberSW so that researchers can query the data and conduct analyses without having to build their own ontologies. Topics such as prehistoric demography, migration, and social networks are particularly well suited to this large but cohesive research database. While the artifact data from sites are available to registered users, sensitive information such as site locations remains masked. The database underlying cyberSW is built on the innovative graph database platform Neo4j. In addition to new projects, cyberSW aggregates data from the Coalescent Communities Database, the Southwest Social Networks database, and the Chaco Social Networks database. CyberSW is maintained by Archaeology Southwest, extending the broader ethic of Preservation Archaeology to the data generated during archaeological field and lab work—much of it from cultural resource management projects—to advance science, education, and partnership with Indigenous communities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Refining Archaeological Data Collection and Management to Achieve Greater Scientific, Traditional, and Educational Values

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32701