How do you preserve the legacy of a group whose irrigation, craft specialization, trade, ceremonial networks, and large towns transformed the desert Southwest? The National Endowment for the Humanities has done its part by funding the Center for Digital Antiquity to begin producing the world’s biggest and most complete archeological research library on the ancient Huhugam (Hohokam). This new resource will be called the Digital Archive of Huhugam Archaeology.

Identification and collection of reports for the archive will begin in Summer 2017 and will build on the existing research records for this group within tDAR, which are already heavily used. This effort will be done in partnership with Arizona’s Amerind Museum and the digital library will include Amerind’s  reports on its many important archaeological investigations of the Mexican borderlands.

To tailor this online database to its users’ requirements, the NEH grant will also fund a crowd‐sourcing effort to better understand the needs of DAHA’s diverse user communities.  This includes an initial workshop of digital humanities and Native American scholars to explore new research opportunities the collection would offer, including to descendant peoples. Look for more information and coverage on this project coming soon!

 

 

Please Note: Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this post do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Center for Digital Antiquity is seeking a creative and innovative Software Engineer to help build and maintain tDAR (the Digital Archaeological Record), an international digital repository for archaeological and cultural heritage data.  This is a unique opportunity to leverage and expand your skills while preserving information crucial to describing and understanding the past by developing new and unique tools for digital data management, preservation, and use.

This position works with the development team to design, implement, document, and support tDAR, Digital Antiquity’s repository. tDAR is a set of Java-based web applications built using Struts 2, Hibernate, SOLR, Spring, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, JQuery, and AngularJS. This position reports to the Director of Technology.

For more information or  to apply:

https://sjobs.brassring.com/tgwebhost/jobdetails.aspx?jobId=2834196&PartnerId=25620&SiteId=5494&type=mail&JobReqLang=1&recordstart=1&JobSiteId=5494&JobSiteInfo=2834196_5494&gqid=1771

 

Applications for this position will be reviewed beginning on April 10.

As we make our final preparations for the Society for American Archaeology’s 82^nd Annual Meeting, excitement is building for the event and the presentations we have planned for the conference.  There are numerous ways to engage with the Digital Antiquity team in Vancouver.  Stop by our booth (#213) in the exhibitor’s hall Thursday through Saturday, 9:00AM to 5:00PM to test drive tDAR and win a prize, enter our drawing for a digital preservation package, or speak to one of our staff about your digital archiving challenges.  You can also learn more about tDAR by attending one of our presentations throughout the week (see below).

Thursday March 30^th, 2017

 

Symposium: “METHODS AND MODELS FOR TEACHING DIGITAL ARCHAEOLOGY AND HERITAGE”

Room: East Meeting Room 8 (VCC)

Time: 8:00 AM–11:00 AM

Francis P. McManamon – “Online and In-Person Professional Training for Archaeological Data Management and Digital Curation, ” 9:00 AM

 

Forum: “METADATA AND DIGITAL MANAGEMENT IN ARCHAEOLOGY TODAY”

Room: East Meeting Room 4 (VCC)

Time: 1:00 PM–3:00 PM

Francis P. McManamon, discussant

 

 Symposium: “FRISON INSTITUTE SYMPOSIUM: THE FUTURE OF “BIG DATA” IN ARCHAEOLOGY”

Room: East Ballroom C (VCC)

Time: 1:00 PM–5:00 PM: 4:15

Keith Kintigh, Katherine Spielmann, K. Selçuk Candan, Adam Brin and James DeVos – “Data Integration in the Service of Synthetic Research,” 4:15PM

 

Friday March 31^st, 2017

 

Forum: ”BEYOND DATA MANAGEMENT: A CONVERSATION ABOUT “DIGITAL DATA REALITIES”

Room: East Meeting Room 5 (VCC)

Time: 8:00 AM–10:00 AM

Adam Brin, panelist

 

Poster Session: “ADVANCES IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL METHOD AND THEORY”

Room: East Exhibit Hall B Poster Entrance (VCC)

Time: 10:30 AM–12:30 PM

Leigh Anne Ellison – “Digital Archiving for Archaeological Projects,” location  191-i

 

 Forum: “WHAT GOOD IS SECONDHAND DIGITAL DATA?” (Sponsored by Student Affairs Committee) Room: East Meeting Room 4 (VCC)

Time: 1:00 PM–3:00 PM

Francis P. McManamon, moderator

 

Saturday April 1^st, 2017

 

Workshop (currently sold out): “TAKING CARE OF YOUR DIGITAL DATA – DEVELOPING GOOD DIGITAL CURATION HABITS FOR STUDENTS”

Room: Georgia B (H)

Time: 09:00 AM–10:30 AM

Leigh Anne Ellison, workshop leader

 

Safe travels, and we look forward to seeing you in Vancouver soon!

With less than 1 month left for Advanced Registration at the 82^nd Annual SAA Meeting, the Center for Digital Antiquity (Digital Antiquity) is prepping for our trip to Vancouver where we will be holding two workshops this year: “Best Practices for Digital Data Management and Curation” and “Taking Care of Your Digital Data – Developing Good Digital Curation Habits for Students.”  We encourage archaeologists, both students and practitioners alike, to join us for one or both of our workshops as we cover a wealth of knowledge on the importance of data management, preservation, and use of digital archaeological data.

Register now, as part of the SAA Annual Meeting registration, for the 4-hour workshop: “Best Practices for Digital Data Management and Curation,” led by Francis P. McManamon and Leigh Anne Ellison, scheduled for Wednesday 29 March, 1 to 5 pm.  The workshop will cover ways of organizing digital files for economical, effective data management.  In addition, workshop attendees will learn methods and tools to incorporate good digital data management practice into standard procedures and workflow for academic and CRM project and research procedures.  Participants will be introduced to types of digital data and information repositories that are available and where they can browse, access, and download archaeological documents, data sets, and images. The workshop will include a “hands-on” exercise during which participants will create a metadata record and upload a document, image, or data set file to tDAR (the Digital Archaeological Record) repository managed by Digital Antiquity. Participants should bring a personal computer and file to upload to the workshop to take part fully in this exercise. Only 25 spaces are available for this workshop and a number already have been claimed, register soon to guarantee a space.

A more condensed workshop for SAA Student members is scheduled for Saturday, 1 April from 9 to 10:30AM.   This workshop: “Taking Care of Your Digital Data – Developing Good Digital Curation Habits for Students,” led by Leigh Anne Ellison, will describe how to integrate good digital data management habits into current research workflows to ensure easy access to data and research results long into the future.  The workshop will emphasize strategies that can be employed when planning for new projects, as well as ways to introduce digital data management into ongoing or completed research projects that initially lack a digital archiving strategy.  There is no cost for student members to sign up for this workshop, but advance registration is required.

Registration for both events is limited so be sure to register for them as soon as possible!  We look forward to seeing you there!

The Carlsbad Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management uses tDAR to preserve and make available resources created under the Permian Basin Programmatic Agreement.  To date, three projects and 18 additional resources have been added to tDAR as part of this PA.  Contractors perform the work, and upload redacted, public-appropriate resources to tDAR on behalf of the BLM.  Read on for a taste of some of the fascinating work at the Merchant Site carried out by Versar, Inc., and visit the Digital Repository of the Bureau of Land Management, Carlsbad Field Office’s collection in tDAR for all of the completed work that is currently available to the public.

The Merchant Site:  A Late Prehistoric Ochoa Phase Settlement in Southeastern New Mexico

By Myles R. Miller, Tim B. Graves, and Robert H. Leslie

The Merchant site (LA 43414) is a Late Prehistoric Period pueblo settlement located in the southeastern corner of New Mexico near the boundary where the basin-and-range region merges with the southern Plains.  The Merchant site is representative of the Ochoa phase, a poorly understood time period of southeastern New Mexico dating from around a.d. 1300/1350 to 1450.  The Ochoa phase, and the El Paso and Late Glencoe phases of the closely related Jornada Mogollon region to the west, are contemporaneous with the Pueblo IV period of the greater Southwest, the Antelope Creek phase of the southern Plains, and the Toyah phase of central Texas.  As such, Merchant and other Ochoa phase settlements were part of the widespread patterns of population aggregation, migrations, and diasporas and accompanying developments in social and ritual organization that occurred throughout the Southwest, northern Mexico, and southern Plains during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The Merchant site was first excavated by the Lea County Archaeological Society (LCAS) between 1959 and 1965, but the results of the excavations were never fully reported.  The excavated units and features were never backfilled. In order to remedy this situation, the Carlsbad Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management contracted Versar, Inc. to perform remedial mitigation and investigation of the Merchant site under the Permian Basin Programmatic Agreement.   The 2015 fieldwork included a high-resolution Transect Recording Unit survey, surface mapping and collections, remote sensing, hand and mechanical excavations, and geomorphic studies.  The entire site of LA 43414 was surveyed and mapped, identifying several areas of prehistoric occupations including possible agricultural fields.  The primary focus of the fieldwork was the village area excavated by the LCAS and the possible agricultural fields located 100 meters to the north.

The primary occupation of the Merchant site consists of a group of domestic rooms with stone foundation walls, two deep pit structures, and extensive trash middens.  Excavations in two large and deep pit structures excavated by the LCAS in 1959 and 1960 determined that they served as civic-ceremonial structures.  One of the potentially most significant findings was the discovery of possible agricultural gridded fields to the north of the village area.  Geomorphological, archaeological, and botanical studies were conducted in two possible agricultural features but the results are equivocal.  If future investigations confirm the presence of such features, they will represent the easternmost expression of Southwestern intensive farming practices.

The most significant finding of the reinvestigation of the site is that the architecture and material culture of the Merchant site and other Ochoa phase settlements represents a mixture or hybrid or something entirely new of Southwest and Plains traditions. The collective observations on architecture and material culture establish that the inhabitants of the Merchant site—whether involving one or several resident groups—forged new social identities and perhaps even some manner of hybrid material culture on the southern Plains of the 1300s and early 1400s.  The creation of the unique Ochoa Indented Corrugated ware among the Ochoa phase people of southeastern New Mexico is a visible and prominent identifier of the new social identity of the Ochoa phase migrant communities.  The manner in which the Plains hunters and pueblo agriculturalists interacted—whether symbiotically through exchange, by merging and creating new expressions of ethnicity and identity, or through conflict and warfare—is an important and fascinating topic of investigation for Southwestern and Plains prehistory and broader anthropological theory. The Merchant site and other Ochoa phase settlements of southeastern New Mexico have much to offer for such pursuits.

The Center for Digital Antiquity is excited to welcome Rachel Fernandez as the newest member of the Digital Antiquity team as our Digital Data Curator. Ms. Fernandez recently relocated from University of Colorado at Boulder to join our group at Arizona State University.

With an interest in landscape archaeology and GIS applications, Rachel has conducted fieldwork in several sites across the Mediterranean. In the U.S., Rachel has worked on cultural resource surveys, public assistance grants, and GIS applications for areas affected with natural disasters during her tenure with FEMA. Rachel holds a Master’s degree in Classical Archaeology from the University of Colorado Boulder and a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and Classics from the University of Florida.

We are excited for the experience and fresh perspective that Rachel brings to the table and cannot wait to see how her skill set will continue to advance tDAR’s mission and goals.