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The Promise and Challenge of Archaeological Data Integration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Keith Kintigh*
Affiliation:
School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-2402 ([email protected])

Abstract

This forum reports the results of a National Science Foundation—funded workshop that focused on the integration and preservation of digital databases and other structured data derived from archaeological contexts. The workshop concluded that for archaeology to achieve its potential to advance long-term, scientific understandings of human history, there is a pressing need for an archaeological information infrastructure that will allow us to archive, access, integrate, and mine disparate data sets. This report provides an assessment of the informatics needs of archaeology, articulates an ambitious vision for a distributed disciplinary information infrastructure (cyberinfrastructure), discusses the challenges posed by its development, and outlines initial steps toward its realization. Finally, it argues that such a cyberinfrastructure has enormous potential to contribute to anthropology and science more generally. Concept-oriented archaeological data integration will enable the use of existing data to answer compelling new questions and permit syntheses of archaeological data that rely not on other investigators' conclusions but on analyses of meaningfully integrated new and legacy data sets.

Résumé

Résumé

Este foro reporta los resultados de un taller auspiciado por la Fundación Nacional para las Ciencias (National Science Foundation), el cual se enfocó en la integración y conservación de las bases de datos digitales y de otros datos estructurados derivados de los contextos arqueológicos. Este taller llegó a la conclusión de que para que la arqueología alcance su potencial de avanzar en el entendimiento científico de la historia humana a largo plazo, hay una apremiante necesidad de que exista una infraestructura de información arqueológica que nos permita alcanzar, acceder, integrar, y extraer bases de datos diferentes. Este informe proporciona una evaluación de las necesidades informáticas de la arqueología, articula una visión ambiciosa para establecer una infraestructura de información disciplinaria distribuida (ciberinfraestructura), discute los retos presentados, y esboza los pasos iniciales hacia su realización. Finalmente, argumenta que dicha ciberinfraestructura tiene un enorme potencial de contribuir a la antropología y más generalmente a la ciencia. La integración de los datos arqueológicos orientados a los conceptos permitirá el uso de los datos existentes para resolver nuevas preguntas obligadas y conformar síntesis de los datos arqueológicos que se basan no en las conclusiones de otros investigadores sino en los análisis de bases de datos nuevas y heredadas integradas significativamente.

Type
Forum
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 2006 

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