David Plaza was awarded a 2012 Center for Digital Antiquity grant for his project entitled The Anasazi Origins Project Digital Archives Initiative (AOPDAI), designed to digitize and ingest into tDAR the associated records stored at Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU). The AOPDAI’s mission is to aggregate and digitize all data associated with the Anasazi Origins Project (AOP), and archive the data on platforms that are capable of easily sharing the results among researchers, professionals, and the interested public.
The AOP was led by Cynthia Irwin-Williams to investigate the antecedents of the Ancestral Puebloans (Oshara Tradition) in the Arroyo Cuervo Region of northwestern New Mexico. Irwin-Williams’ project was fundamental to illuminating the poorly understood Archaic period in the northern Southwest, and resulted in an enormous collection of artifacts, ecofacts, and contextual documents from its field campaigns.
tDAR aids in improving and disseminating this important collection by providing additional long term preservation services to aid in ensuring access to the AOP records in perpetuity. Furthermore, tDAR’s data integration tools allow information from various components of ENMU’s AOP data sets to be easily synthesized for new analyses.
The AOPDAI uploads to tDAR is an effort to collect and migrate digitized data of the AOP from various parts of the country into a central location. At present, the AOPDAI on tDAR draws from several components of the AOP collection held at ENMU: publications, field maps, photographs, artifact spreadsheets, site records, and inventory sheets for notes. In addition, there is a data set of the site records from the AOP field campaigns organized using the laboratory site record format that can be used in spreadsheets or a Microsoft Access database. Plaza will continuously update this data set for the next two years as more lab work is completed and as additional records and artifacts are located and digitized. Additional planned uploads will include artifact catalogues describing the AOP collections housed at Eastern New Mexico University. Near future endeavors will consist of virtually reunifying components of this collection that exist at the National Anthropological Archives with those at ENMU and tDAR.
Scholars or curators with resources relevant to the Anasazi Origins Project and interested in contributing these resources to The Anasazi Origins Project Digital Archive Initiative should contact David Plaza at david.plaza@enmu.edu.