From "Gray Literature" to "Big Data": Synthesizing Archaeological Data in Washington, DC

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The vast array of technical reports produced through cultural resources management (CRM) archaeology are sometimes referred to as “gray literature,” due to their limited reuse after the project is completed. However, archaeologists working in CRM excavate the majority of sites in the United States, and these reports represent the collected findings of decades of archaeological excavation; they provide a valuable but complex dataset for addressing numerous research questions. As archaeologists continue to call for synthetic research and collections-based work, the under-examined data from the “gray literature” provides an opportunity for a “big data” approach to synthesizing archaeological findings. In this paper, I discuss methodological possibilities and obstacles for tackling this dataset. I use ArcGIS and R to experiment with approaches to data visualization and analysis. As a case study, I examine data from technical reports relating to 40 household refuse deposits, excavated within the city of Washington, DC. The dataset draws together artifacts discarded between 1850 and 1930, collected during archaeological projects that took place between 1980 and today. I discuss how I collected and “cleaned” the data from the reports, and present preliminary approaches to visualization and analysis.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36700.0