Taking CARE to Make tDAR FAIR

Summary

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

Every archaeological site holds the potential to contribute its own irreplaceable piece into the vast jigsaw puzzle that is our shared human past. Meticulous field and lab procedures ensure data and subsequent reports are accurate. But what happens after the project closes?

For decades, it has been standard practice to file the report away into an internal clandestine storage system, organized by idiosyncratic departmental criteria. Any primary data associated with the report typically remains on the researcher's hard drive, or on other forms of increasingly dusty and increasingly obsolete technology. This unfortunate combination leaves us with archaeological data that is at best, available to limited audiences; And at worst, vulnerable to catastrophic loss.

While the site is gone forever, its data remains an invaluable tool for current/future researchers. Only by preserving, curating, and sharing data can we better understand the myriad complexities acting on societies across time and space.

To this end, the Center for Digital Antiquity (CDA) advocates for both the FAIR Principles for Data Stewardship and the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance to be implemented as standard guidelines in all archaeological data management efforts. FAIR asserts that data should be Findable (easily found via online search), Accessible (easily acquired, downloadable), Interoperable (easily synthesize multiple sources of research/data), and Reusable (easily cited for future use/collaboration). CARE focuses on furthering Indigenous Data Sovereignty, advocating that Indigenous Data contribute to the (C)ollective Benefit of Indigenous communities, that Indigenous Peoples have the (A)uthority to Control their data, the (R)esponsibility of researchers to use data in ways that support Indigenous Peoples' self-determined goals, and that the (E)thics of data use holds Indigenous Peoples' rights and well-being as its primary concern.

This poster highlights how CDA applies the FAIR Principles and CARE Principles in its digital repository, The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR), and affirms how these sets of Principles empowers researchers to responsibly leverage cultural heritage data across academic, governmental, and cultural resource management entities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Presentations on Digital Antiquity and tDAR   •
• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37700.0

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