The Living Archive of Çatalhöyük (LAC): Providing Big Data Laboratories as Open Environments for Archaeological Research

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In archaeology data are stored in ways that reflect the strategies of research while conventional data repositories tend to freeze the original databases within their initial storage logic. In contrast, the interpretation of primary evidence changes during a project's lifecycle, and it becomes difficult for later researchers with different research questions, to make sense of highly codified archives fossilized in their own starting assumptions. The data of the Çatalhöyük Research Project is hereby a paradigmatic example, where research into the origins of settled agricultural life, the rise of civilization, emergence of religion and cognitive change has led to the accumulation of a dense record of information.

The Living Archive has been developed to provide access to the data gathered at Çatalhöyük. In order to make the genealogy of interpretation transparent, the web-application incorporates semantic modeling techniques to reverse-engineer the interpretive process and reveal the underlying patterns in the development and/or abandonment of concepts and ideas. Datasets stored in distributed archives are aggregated following the principles of Linked Open Data. In this way further interaction with the data and the addition of new information is possible to allow for the generation of new knowledge within the same framework.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33523