The ArchaMap Data Integration Tool: A Case Study from the Roosevelt Dam Archaeological Projects, Arizona

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological data are complicated and rarely highly standardized between projects. Using data from multiple sources often requires a time-consuming and difficult process of mapping data ontologies, categories, recording schema, and contextual information among projects manually. This work is error prone and it is difficult to document substantive decisions and translations made. In this poster we present ArchaMap, an open source tool designed to aid in the integration of multiple complex data sets with different sources and ontologies. ArchaMap is an R Shiny Application and graphical user interface designed to save time, increase consistency, and document complex data merging processes among multiple sources. Importantly, this online platform stores and suggests past translations to build an ever-expanding list of associations to aid in connecting categorical data across different sources. In this poster, we use data from two large projects conducted simultaneously around Roosevelt Lake, Arizona (Roosevelt Community Development Project and Roosevelt Platform Mound Study) to demonstrate the tremendous time-saving potential for standardizations of material culture data. These projects were conducted in the same region at the same time but they were conducted by different institutions with different procedures and data structures so the data have not previously been compatible.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37015.0