2004 NSF Grant

Enabling the Study of Long-Term Human and Social Dynamics:
A Cyberinfrastructure for Archaeology

2004 National Science Foundation, Human Social Dynamics Grant 0433959

Principal Investigators: Keith W. Kintigh, John M. Anderies, Chitta R. Baral, K. Selçuk Candan, Hasan Davulcu, Michelle Hegmon, Subbarao Kambhampati, Ann Kinzig, Huan Liu, Peter H. McCartney, Ben Nelson, Margaret C. Nelson, Charles L. Redman, Arleyn W. Simon, Katherine A. Spielmann, and Sander van der Leeuw

Project Objectives

Goal 1: To develop a widely shared vision for a cyberinfrastructure of archaeology, to assess the major sociological, archaeological, and information technology challenges that must be confronted, and to outline for a long-term strategy for achieving that vision. This goal was attacked through a December 2004 workshop (see below)including individuals representing diverse archaeological interests, computer scientists concerned with information integration and informatics, and scientists associated with informatics infrastructure projects ongoing in other disciplines. The workshop focused on the needs for information integration in archaeology and was hosted by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). The product of a workshop was a set of recommendations presented in a formal report published in American Antiquity in 2006 (below).

Goal 2: To develop a base ontology and schema for a limited segment of an archaeological data domain, to use that ontology to develop metadata for modest a modest variety of sample data sets; and to illustrate the flexibility and utility of this approach. This has been accomplished by a smaller working group of Faunal Analysts working intensively with computer scientists on a concrete problem with actual data. This group met once in November 2004 and will meet again in January 2006; initially to refine the problem and work through ontology and metadata issues in general, and second to discuss and evaluate the application deriving from the first meeting.

Poster Presented at NSF at a September 2005 Meeting of PIs of NSF's 2004 Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) Grants:

• Poster as PowerPoint Slides (198K)

Workshop: The Promise and Challenge of Archaeological Data Integration

Summary Conclusions: New technologies in information integration will enable archaeologists to:

1. work at scales not currently possible to answer pressing questions that cannot now be addressed due to a lack of effective access to existing data;
2. foster the development of a new paradigm of integrative and synthetic research;
3. scale and integrate archaeological data so that they can be used to address compelling questions in other disciplines; and
4. sustain the scientific utility of existing digital data that are critically endangered by media degradation, software obsolescence, and inadequate data documentation (metadata).
   To meet pressing research needs and to help stem the loss of existing information, it is essential that we embark now on the task of creating an infrastructure that will allow us to archive and make available integrated databases of archaeological data.

Faunal Working Group