CARE to Be FAIR: Case Studies in Accessible Digital Data Management

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Massive amounts of data are produced during archaeological investigations, yet they are often siloed away by individual researchers and institutions or only made accessible through paywalled publications. This widespread inaccessibility makes it difficult to justify the destruction of the non-renewable resource that is the archaeological record. Digital data repositories such as the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) enable researchers and the public alike to preserve, share, and reuse archaeological data in new ways, providing an escape from the endless cycle of destruction and inaccessibility associated with the typical model of archaeological data publication. Using two case studies from tDAR, this research illustrates how the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship and the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance can be employed to create meaningful interactions with archaeological data. By keeping data as open as possible, but as closed as necessary, digital data repositories foster reuse and engagement across academic and public spheres. These accessible and reusable case studies are exemplary blueprints for the future of ethical and accessible stewardship in an increasingly digital age.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53762