The Creation and Curation of Archaeological Data

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ideas, Ethical Ideals, and Museum Practice in North American Archaeological Collections" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Arizona State Museum (ASM) Repository holds collections associated with thousands of archaeological excavations that span the advent of anthropologically oriented archaeology in the American Southwest. Encoded with these collections are various approaches to excavation and data management, which have dramatically changed over time. Repository personnel will standardize terminology as much as possible, for internal institutional searchability purposes. The curation facility will also create metadata and add attribute information to the collections to meet their various legal and agency requirements, applying consistent data formatting and institutional ontologies to promote long-term usability of the collections. The idea is to ensure that the artifacts are findable for all stakeholders, including researchers interested in revisiting collections for re-analysis, and integrating artifacts into big picture research questions, but this is challenging to accomplish. Excavated materials and associated data from the Grasshopper Field School (1964-1992) are an illustrative example of the inherent impediments to reconstructing and integrating excavation datasets for a single, long-term excavation for collections management needs, while also considering the challenges associated with comparing complex excavation datasets for big picture research questions. This paper focuses on archaeological data as an aspect of the “curation crisis” and explores options for finding common ground.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ideas, Ethical Ideals, and Museum Practice in North American Archaeological Collections   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39798.0