Going to the SAA Meetings in Austin?  Connect with Digital Antiquity staff to learn more about Digital Preservation, tDAR, and Digital Antiquity by:

 
Attending our forum on Digital Preservation and Curation for Archaeological Data – Thursday, 6PM

• You’ll hear from public agency archaeologists, CRM firms, researchers, teachers, and archivists who discuss the successes and challenges of digital preservation and data reuse.

Scheduling an appointment with one of our digital curation experts at SAA.  Click here to schedule your appointment! We can help with specific problems or questions, such as:

• New to tDAR?  Ask for a quick guided to tour!
• Are you an SAA student member and need help deciding what to archive with your tDAR credit? 
• Are you planning a new archaeological project and want to ensure good digital data archiving from the outset?
• Do you want to learn how to budget properly for digital curation using tDAR in responses to RFPs?
• Are you interested in learning more about data integration for synthetic research? 
• Are you afraid your digital archaeological legacy is at risk, but don’t know where to start? 
• Would you like to see how easy it is to add a file to tDAR? 
• Do you know how much to budget for digital data management for your next grant or project proposal?
• Do you need help organizing managing your personal, project, office, or agency archaeological files?

 
Visiting us at the Digital Antiquity booth in the exhibit hall anytime.

• Our booth number is 511 and we will be open from 9 AM – 5 PM.
• You can say hello, and enter to win one of our daily giveaways!

 Hope to see you there!

In a recently published paper in American Antiquity, Kintigh and colleagues describe an effort to identify “What are archaeology’s most important scientific challenges?” This question was posed to the archaeological community to crowd source key themes, and the results were used to inform and augment the topics developed by an esteemed group of scholars.  The top 25 “grand challenges” they identified are replicated at the end of this post.

What the authors argue is most needed to address these important research questions is not more data (though, undoubtedly some new field work will be undertaken), but rather, a discipline-wide effort to locate, synthesize, and interpret the extensive amounts of data that have been collected through extensive archaeological efforts to date.  tDAR’s data integration tools have been developed and refined with these tasks in mind, and the repository is capable of serving as a storage facility for the data and the supplementary information that support them. 

Data sets archived in tDAR can include detailed column metadata describing the data so that researchers unfamiliar with the data set are still able to understand and reuse the data.  Furthermore, multiple discrete data sets can be integrated into large, synthetic data sets using tDAR’s data integration tools.  In addition, data sets in tDAR are afforded the myriad other benefits to being archived in tDAR—archaeologically specific metadata and long-term preservation with forward migration to ensure that data files are accessible and usable long into the future. 

Get started today!  Add your data sets to tDAR, find others, and begin synthetic analysis!

 

Archaeology’s Grand Challenges

Emergence, communities, and complexity

1. How do leaders emerge, maintain themselves, and transform society?
2. Why and how do social inequalities emerge, grow, persist, and diminish, and with what consequences?
3. Why do market systems emerge, persist, evolve and, on occasion, fail?
4. How does the organization of human communities at varying scales emerge from and constrain the actions of their members?
5. How and why do small-scale human communities grow into spatially and demographically larger and politically more complex entities?
6. How can systematic investigations of prehistoric and historic urban landscapes shed new light on the social and demographic processes that drive urbanism and its consequences?
7. What is the role of conflict—both internal factional violence and external warfare—in the evolution of complex cultural formations?

Resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse

1. What factors have allowed for differential persistence of societies?
2. What are the roles of social and environmental diversity and complexity in creating resilience and how do their impacts vary by social scale?
3. Can we characterize social collapse or decline in a way that is applicable across cultures, and are there any warning signals that collapse or severe decline is near?
4. How does ideology structure economic, political, and ritual systems?

Movement, mobility, and migration

1. What processes led to, and resulted from, the global dispersal of modern humans?
2. What are the relationships among environment, population dynamics, settlement structure, and human mobility?
3. How do humans occupy extreme environments, and what cultural and biological adaptations emerged as a result?
4. Why does migration occur and why do migrant groups maintain identities in some circumstances and adopt new ones in others?

Cognition, behavior, and identity

1. What are the biophysical, sociocultural, and environmental interactions out of which modern human behavior emerged?
2. How do people form identities, and what are the aggregate long-term and large-scale effects of these processes?
3. How do spatial and material reconfigurations of landscapes and experiential fields affect societal development?

Human–environment interactions

1. How have human activities shaped Earth’s biological and physical systems, and when did humans become dominant drivers of these systems?
2. What factors drive or constrain population growth in prehistory and history?
3. What factors drive health and well-being in prehistory and history?
4. Why do foragers engage in plant and animal management, and under what circumstances does management of a plant or animal lead to its domestication?
5. Why do agricultural economies emerge, spread, and intensify, and what are the relationships among productive capacity, population, and innovation?
6. How do humans respond to abrupt environmental change?
7. How do humans perceive and react to changes in climate and the natural environment over short- and long-terms?

 

Kintigh, Keith W., Jeffrey Altschul, Mary Beaudry, Robert Drennan, Ann Kinzig, Timothy Kohler, W. Frederick Limp, Herbert Maschner, William Michener, Timothy Pauketat, Peter Peregrine, Jeremy Sabloff, Tony Wilkinson, Henry Wright and Melinda Zeder 

(2014)  Grand Challenges for Archaeology. American Antiquity 79(1):5-24.

Kintigh, Keith W., Jeffrey H. Altschul, Mary C. Beaudry, Robert D. Drennan, Ann P. Kinzig, Timothy A. Kohler, W. Frederick Limp, Herbert D. G. Maschner, William K. Michener, Timothy R. Pauketat, Peter Peregrine, Jeremy A. Sabloff, Tony J. Wilkinson, Henry T. Wright and Melinda A. Zeder 

(2014)  Grand Challenges for Archaeology. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122:879-880.

A January 16^th blog post on AWOL – The Ancient World Online – has highlighted the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology collection in tDAR.  This collection includes supplementary information associated with a number of their print publications.  The geographic and cultural range covered is quite vast—from the South Pacific to Mongolia to Eastern Crete!  Datasets, images, and documents from these projects and many more are available to download in tDAR now. 

The National Park Service December 2013 Archeology E-Gram directs interested readers to tDAR to view resources related to the Antiquities Act.  tDAR has over 40 publicly available resources related to this important preservation law. 

Angela Huster used her tDAR credits earned as part of her SAA student member benefit to publish data associated with her recent article entitled Assessing Systematic Bias in Museum Collections: A Case Study of Spindle Whorls in Advances in Archaeological Practice: A Journal of the Society for American Archaeology.  If you have data in tDAR associated with a published article let us know!

 

Student members of the Society for American Archaeology are eligible to upload three files (up to 30MB) to tDAR annually as part of their membership benefits.  If you were a student member in 2013, email membership@saa.org to receive your voucher today, then visit tDAR to upload your files and create metadata. New and renewing student members will be eligible for new vouchers in 2014, but your 2013 vouchers must be redeemed in tDAR by January 31, 2014.  Archive conference papers, raw data used in the analysis of your master’s thesis, dissertation, an article or class paper, important images related to your research, field notes, final reports, or lesson plans—check out our website for even more ideas.  tDAR is a flexible platform for your archiving needs!  Need suggestions or help completing your upload?  Email us at info@digitalantiquity.org. 

 

 

One hundred seven years ago this week, on 8 December 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt designated two archaeological sites as National Monuments.  Montezuma Castle in Arizona and El Morro in New Mexico were among the first properties set aside for special preservation by Roosevelt using the authority given to the president by Section 2 of the then-new Antiquities Act.  During his second term as president, Roosevelt would designate 18 National Monuments, encompassing over 1.5 million acres.  Among the other properties he proclaimed as Monuments are the Grand Canyon (Arizona), Muir Woods (California), Olympic (Washington), Lassen Peak (California), Tonto (Arizona), Natural Bridges (Utah), and Tumacacori (Arizona).

Interested individuals can learn more about the Antiquities Act, how this important national law has been used by Roosevelt and subsequent US presidents to preserve important cultural and natural resources and its importance to the historical development of archaeology from information available in a tDAR collection on these topics.

At the beginning of October, I attended the American Cultural Resources Association (ACRA) annual conference in Washington, DC on behalf of the Center for Digital Antiquity.  Digital Antiquity is an associate member of ACRA and was one of the vendors at the conference.  Despite the federal government shutdown, the conference was informative, well-organized, and useful.  There were discussions about coordinating actions to meet the demands for effective cultural resource management (CRM) involvement in energy development undertakings, dealing with copyright and intellectual property issues, and a variety of other matters.

One recurring topic in discussions with representatives of several CRM firms was the challenge they face to ensure long-term access to and preservation of the many reports, papers, data sets, and other professional products they and their firms have created over the years.  Of course, I was responsive to their common dilemma and pointed out that meeting this challenge is something that tDAR is designed to do.  tDAR provides an economical solution for archiving and managing access to digital archaeological documents and data that are these firms’ legacies.

This is not a new topic at ACRA meetings and it is likely to continue to be of interest.  The task of preserving and making decades worth of archaeological research results accessible is one faced by many CRM firms.  At present, it may be felt most acutely in those independently owned firms whose leadership (in many cases the founders of the firms) will retire soon.

This situation also affects professional archaeologists whose careers have been in public agencies that fund archaeological investigations or manage archaeological resources.  Many of the senior archaeologists in public agencies also are coming up on retirement time.  Managers in these agencies have legal obligations to ensure the accessibility and preservation of data and information about the archaeological resources they manage or that their actions have affected. However, these obligations sometimes are not met effectively or fully by the agencies.  When an agency does not provide for long-term preservation and access, the individual professionals may feel compelled to find other means of doing so.  Here too, tDAR can provide the solution.

Access and preservation of archaeological reports, data sets, images, and many other kinds of information are the primary goals of the Center for Digital Antiquity.  Using  tDAR enables individuals and organizations  to preserve for future access and use the archaeological legacy of a generation of archaeologists and organizations who have built CRM as an essential part of the discipline.

Some of these legacies have already been contributed to tDAR.  In most cases, these legacies are now available easily and broadly.  For example, readers might want to check the following tDAR collections and projects:

• The Central Arizona Project by the Phoenix Area Office of the Bureau of Reclamation
• The PaleoResearch Institute created by Linda Scott Cummings and her staff
• The Archaeology of Albany created by the staff of Hartgen Archeological Associates
• Brockington and Associates created by the staff of Brockington and Associates, highlighting their data recovery reports from Georgia and SC
• Casa Grande Ruins Compound A and Casa Grande Great House Preservation digital archive by Casa Grande NM
• Cape Cod Archaeology by Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts
• The Dolores Archaeology Program created by Tim Kohler and his students at Washington State University with the assistance of the Bureau of Reclamation
• Mohawk Valley (NY) Archaeology created by Dean Snow and his students at Penn State

At Digital Antiquity we encourage more CRM firms and public agency offices to build CRM legacy collections in tDAR and are glad to work with those that may be interested in doing so. If you are interested in building CRM legacy collections with tDAR please visit https://www.tdar.org/why-tdar/contribute/ for more information.

The current issue of Archaeology magazine (September/October 2013), includes two articles related to collections of archaeological data and other information in tDAR. 

One of the articles, “An Extreme Life” by Victoria Schlesinger, describes a long-term archaeological project by Ben Fitzhugh of the University of Washington to study the adaptation and 7,000 year history of human populations that once lived on the Kuril Islands, an 800-mile-long chain extending north from the island of Hokkaido in Japan to the Kamchataka Peninsula in Russia.

More detailed information about Fitzhugh’s project can be found in tDAR, where it is mainly accessable and available to other tDAR users.  The Kuril Biocomplexity Project Archive (NSF 0508109) and Kuril Biocomplexity Research Collection contain a rich record of the archaeological research and sites on the Kuril Islands, including over 130 reports, sets of photos, and maps.

Fitzhugh’s Kuril project is part of a larger network of research projects, the Global Human Ecodynamics Alliance (GHEA), which is using tDAR as a means of sharing research data and other results among the cooperating projects and with the wider world.  GHEA is an organization of social scientists, natural scientists, historians, educators, students, policy makers, and others interested in promoting cutting-edge research, education, and application of the socioecological dynamics of coupled human and natural systems across scales of space and time.  The research coordination is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs Science.   

Andrew Lawler’s article, “The Everlasting City” reviews past and current interpretations early urbanism in what is now southern Iraq.  Lawler mentions current research by Jennifer Pournelle of the University of South Carolina aimed at understanding how climate change and shifting river systems impacted early Sumerian civilization.  Pournelle also has set up and is building in tDAR a collection of documents and other information titled, “Ancient Civilizations: Mesopotamia."  The collection, which is growing, is designed to include resources for exploring the foundation, growth, and persistence of the long history of "Mesopotamia" (literally, "between the rivers") – the lands watered by the Tigris and Euphrates.

We are delighted that tDAR provides these research projects with a digital repository where their data can be managed, made accessible (as appropriate), and preserved for future use.  To get started using tDAR to manage your own digital archaeological information, please visit https://www.tdar.org/why-tdar/contribute/ today!