In July, 2006, Keith Kintigh published an article in American Antiquity entitled, “The Promise and Challenge of Archaeological Data Integration,” reporting on the 2004 the workshop of the same name. Archaeologists, computer scientists and other informatics researchers met at the 2004 workshop to develop a shared vision of archaeological cyberinfrastructure based on new technologies in information integration. The workshop members concluded that a well-planned infrastructure would enable research at greater scales than currently possible by providing more effective access to data. The workshop conclusions also noted that such an infrastructure would protect fragile data while improving documentation.

For more information, check out the full article linked here.

Dean Snow and colleagues Mark Gahegan, Lee Giles, Kenneth Hirth, George Milner, Prasenjit Mitra and James Wang recently published an article in Science about creating an appropriate architecture for entering and managing archaeological data. Their proposed system would integrate image and text searches, GIS analysis, as well as visualization and content management tools. Additionally, their planned use of open-source versions of the toolkit would allow more accessibility by different users, facilitating the addition and use of data.

Read the article online here.