The Paleoindian Database of the Americas: On Such a Full Sea Are We Now Afloat

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*SE Big Data and Bigger Questions: Papers in Honor of David G. Anderson" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Paleoindian Database of the Americas (PIDBA) freely shares primary and detailed attribute data on tens of thousands of ancient lithic tools spanning the Paleoindian and Early Archaic time periods. In its first iteration in 1990, David G. Anderson compiled descriptive datasets into a tool for investigating the distributions of certain technologies and how they can apply to questions at scale. PIDBA has become now a 30-something-year-old cottage industry of sorts with numerous researchers volunteering time and effort to sustain PIDBA and advance research. PIDBA from its inception has been inclusive and open for any interested researchers to join in, or for researchers to access separately and make use of the provided lithic survey data, maps, attribute data, and spatial information. This presentation will outline the future state of PIDBA and how it will connect with other digital infrastructures. Additionally, this is a lesson on community building fostered by PIDBA and other Anderson projects like DINAA: projects where young and less young scholars work together hand-in-hand, where ideas and innovation are welcomed and encouraged, thus rising a tide of collaboration, and we must take the current when it serves.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• *SE Big Data and Bigger Questions: Papers in Honor of David G. Anderson   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39504.0