Using ArchaMap to Help Datasets Talk to Each Other: A Case Study from Southwest Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Center for Archaeology and Society Repository (CASR) at Arizona State University holds collections for thousands of archaeological sites. These collections are an important resource for the archaeological community, yet accessing them is difficult due to a lack of awareness of which sites are available. An exemplar of public access to data is the cyberSW project. Many sites in the CASR collection are included in CyberSW, yet it is challenging to identify corresponding sites. Here we show how ArchaMap can help solve this and related problems. ArchaMap is part of the CatMapper family of tools designed to aid in integrating datasets, documenting the integration, and making metadata about new merged datasets easily accessible. Using ArchaMap, our team has linked thousands of sites in the CASR collections and CyberSW database, permitting new synthetic analyses. A user can access the application, use the search engine to find a site, and identify whether connections exist to CyberSW, CASR, or other entities, datasets or even publications. More generally, ArchaMap can be used to reconcile and merge many categories of archaeological data from any region in the world and allows users to find the data and make connections across datasets.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38296.0