Participate in a tDAR Workshop:

On Wednesday, April 18 and Saturday, April 21 from 1 – 4 PM, Digital Antiquity will present an intensive workshop entitled “Using tDAR (the Digital Archaeological Record) to Improve Your Professional Productivity.” The workshop will use tDAR as a lens to focus on issues of data sharing, maintaining confidentiality, citation and fair use, public engagement, and digital preservation. Digital Antiquity instructors will demonstrate the basic use of tDAR to participants, who are encouraged to bring their own sample images and data to upload during the session. Attendance is free of additional charge, but is limited to 30 persons per session (one Wednesday and one Saturday) and requires pre-registration online or via mail or fax using the advance registration form. Don’t forget to register by March 17 to receive discounts on the normal meeting fee as well as some workshops and outings!

Visit the Booth:

Don’t forget to visit us at the tDAR booth (#615) in the Exhibit Hall open from 9-5 April 19-21!

Attend one of the forums:

Digital Antiquity will also be hosting a Forum on Sunday, April 22 from 8 AM – 12 PM called “Using the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) for Management, Research and Education.” Discussants include researchers from a variety of backgrounds who have used tDAR for their academic research, through Digital Antiquity grants, and for their doctoral dissertation research. This forum requires no additional registration—we hope to see you there!

Digital Antiquity will be co-hosting a Forum with the Archaeology Data Service in the UK on Thursday, April 19^th in the evening called “Digital Data Standards and ‘Best Practices’ Needed for Access to and Preservation of Archaeological Information.” This forum will focus on the recently updated Guides to Good Practice, and improving preservation and access of archaeological information.

Digital Antiquity Staff will also be contributing to the following SAA Events:

• The Impact of Special Purpose Institutions on the Future of Archaeology
• Digital Data Standards and “Best Practices” Needed for Access to and Preservation of Archaeological Information
• The Future of Archaeological Publishing
• Virtual Archaeology: The Creation, Dissemination, and Use of Virtualized Artifacts, Sites, Assemblages, and Archives
• Mortuary Practices in the American Southwest: Patterns and Inference from Regional Databases
• Capacity-Building for Archaeology in the 21^st Century: How will People Manage the Information Explosion

Remember, even if you are not able to make it out to Memphis this year, you can still explore and use tDAR by registering, browsing and searching today.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a grant of $1.2 million beginning in March 2012 that will support the center’s operations and development. The grant enables the center to greatly expand the content of its digital repository, to enlarge the community of users and to continue development and enhancement of software to improve the repository user’s experience.

The Center for Digital Antiquity develops, maintains and oversees the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR), the country’s largest digital repository of world-wide archaeological data and information. The Center was established in 2009 with support from an earlier grant from the Mellon Foundation.

Technology has changed the way that people create and store information – moving from books and paper to digital files stored on tape, floppy disks, CD-ROMs and other media. A problem associated with this shift is that digital files are far more susceptible to loss due to degradation of storage media, software obsolescence and inadequate documentation.

When this happens with archaeological data, it is especially tragic. It entails a loss of irreplaceable information about our national and global heritage and represents a waste of time, effort and public money that has been expended to collect, analyze and report the data.

“In laboratory-based science, experiments can be repeated; however, you can’t dig a site twice,” said Keith Kintigh, ASU professor and sustainability scientist, who was the principal investigator for the first Mellon grant and is a co-principal investigator on the new grant. “The archaeological record provides our only access to most of human history. For example, human societies both contribute to and respond to gradual environmental change. Archaeological evidence allows us to better understand the conditions under which societies are resilient to long-term change, and the configurations that lead to collapse.”

Francis P. McManamon, Center for Digital Antiquity executive director and principal investigator for the new Mellon grant, notes that “approximately 40,000 archaeological investigations take place every year in the United States, yet only a handful thoroughly publish their findings and the supporting data in traditional, general distribution books. Most projects do produce limited distribution paper reports that end up in just a few of the thousands of state and federal agency offices and university libraries.” Compounding this problem, there is no reliable way to discover the existence of reports relevant to a particular research topic and the reports are frequently difficult to use and expensive to obtain.

The situation with the supporting data is far worse. Even in the unusual case that the supporting data (notes, drawings, photos etc.) exists in a public repository, they are even harder to find and are rarely adequately documented or maintained. Adam Brin, Center for Digital Antiquity director of technology and a co-principal investigator on the new grant, adds: “we want to make sure that these unpublished reports and the almost-never published supporting data and analyses are easily discoverable and widely accessible now and in 100 years. We have designed and built tDAR to ensure this.”

tDAR has been in full operation for about a year and is growing rapidly with thousands of documents, data sets and images, including 3-D scans of artifacts.

“By providing Web-based discovery and access of reports, images and well-documented data sets, tDAR enables archaeological syntheses that could never have been done before. tDAR’s cutting-edge data integration tools allow researchers to analyze data across projects that span large areas and long time intervals yielding new knowledge about the past,” Kintigh said.

Organizations that currently use tDAR as a digital repository include the Phoenix Area office of the Bureau of Reclamation, the Midwest Archeological Center of the National Park Service, the Mimbres Foundation and the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization.

“We have archaeological information from across the United States, from the Arctic to the Southwest, and from the West coast to New England. Documents, data sets and images from places like Cape Cod, coastal Georgia, the California desert, the Great Lakes region and New York City, as well as from right here in Phoenix and Tucson, can be found in tDAR,” McManamon said.

“We believe that digital copies of reports, along with the photographs, data sets and the other digital data from each project should be deposited in a trusted digital repository, such as tDAR, as part of every project’s normal workflow.  This will ensure that these digital records are preserved and can be easily discovered, accessed and used by current and future scholars,” he added.

The repository is ideal for public agencies, research organizations and individual scholars who want to preserve and protect their archaeological research project records, while making them readily available for use in research, leading to new discoveries and better understanding of the past. Agencies and scholars also will find tDAR an effective and efficient means of providing appropriate access to their research results to the general public.

“We now have in tDAR the archaeological reports from many large projects that were completed decades ago,” McManamon said. “For example, the repository includes a large number of reports and detailed records from archaeological investigations in the Phoenix area that were completed in advance of the construction of the Papago Freeway, the Hohokam Expressway and the Central Arizona Project.”

Securing a grant to ensure the future of The Center for Digital Antiquity represents an important professional milestone for McManamon, who spent 32 years at the National Park Service where he served as chief archeologist and recognized the need for an archaeological information repository like tDAR.

“We have a terrific tool,” he said. “The repository has been a crucial need for many years. We are very grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its essential and steady support that is advancing scholarship and preserving irreplaceable records of human history. We’re committed to rapidly expanding our collection of information and to building tDAR’s user community while ensuring long-term digital access to the archaeological record.”

The Center is associated with ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Global Institute of Sustainability, and the University Libraries.

Digital Antiquity announces Reports in Digital Archaeology, a series devoted to issues related to archaeological information, including:

• research and practice in digital archiving of archaeological materials,
• policy and other challenges facing the preservation of archaeological results,
• advanced uses of tDAR,
• research projects funded by the DA-tDAR Grants Program, and
• major data accessions or partnerships.

The Reports series is free of charge and available on the Digital Antiquity website.

The first two Reports have been published and include, “Building tDAR: Review, Redaction, and Ingest of Two Reports Series” (J. Watts, June 2011) and “Policies, Preservation, and Access to Digital Resources: The Digital Antiquity 2010 National Repositories Survey” (J. Watts, September 2011). The first paper focuses on the process of preparing pre-existing archaeological reports for and ingesting them to tDAR, discussing especially the problems presented by a series of reports spanning thirty years of archaeological work and publication. The second is geared toward an analysis of the present state of digital archaeological preservation and access on the national scale, and helps to explain many of the challenges associated with the management of legacy digital resources.

If you are interested in submitting to Reports in Digital Archaeology, please contact Digital Antiquity.

Digital Antiquity is proud to announce that the entire National Archaeological Database (NADB) has been ingested to tDAR. Staff spent months working to enhance the database in order to render the contents more useful and improve their discovery within tDAR. Keywords and other NADB metadata were amended and standardized, while citations were expanded to include more complete bibliographic information.

This major addition to the software represents the fruition of several months of effort on the part of Digital Antiquity staff—the over 358,000 citations had to be processed into tDAR records through the scrutiny of existing and the creation of new metadata. The NADB acquisition not only represents a great undertaking on the part of Digital Antiquity, but also a milestone in tDAR growth through the ingest of US records spanning the breadth and depth of the North American archaeological record.

Do you have a report in NADB, or a correction? If so, Digital Antiquity would love to reconnect the original work with the current NADB citation–please contact us and we’ll update it. Of course, we also encourage all tDAR users to browse and search for these records, as well as provide feedback on the new additions.

On June 22, 2011, Director of Technology Adam Brin presented some of the new tools being developed to promote ongoing research using tDAR’s integration engine at Digital Humanities. Digital Humanities is the annual conference sponsored by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), which this year was held at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

The presentation, part of a paper session on topics ranging from Roman funeral spectacle to digital resource sustainability, highlighted the fact that tDAR is a tool for information access, a repository for preservation, and a research and practice resource. Each of these facets was visually explained in greater detail: information access through several key screenshots of uploaded resources and data input pages; preservation through a flowchart of how files and file formats are migrated and maintained.

The focus of the presentation demonstrated the new user interface and functionality built into the data integration tools.  tDAR’s data integration and mapping features enable archaeologist-friendly data synthesis and comparison for data sets within tDAR. These include a new drag-and-drop interface for data integration and the display of a pivot-table style summary of results when integration is complete.  After the presentation, a short video was shown in order to demonstrate to conference attendees the ease of using the tDAR interface.

We are looking forward to feedback from Digital Humanities attendees and from our readers. Let us know what you thought of the presentation and demo by sending us your comments and suggestions.

• Sensory Data resource type (new)
• New API to add and update records in tDAR
• Batch Upload Tool (new)
• Better management of confidential resources
• File replacement (new)
• Improved page loading performance
• Improved dataset and ontology replacement
• Autocomplete expanded to all keyword fields
• Improved validation and help text
• Faceted search results page
• Improved ontology display

When the Bureau of Reclamation began the construction of McPhee Dam near Dolores, Colorado, federal law required an archaeological investigation of the area that would be affected by the new reservoir. During 1978-86 the Dolores Archaeological Program (DAP) employed more than 500 people and took over eight years to survey and retrieve information from 1600 prehistoric households and villages in the Dolores River Valley. The DAP was the largest public archaeology project ever undertaken in the United States. Archaeologists fully excavated 120 sites, providing an intensive look at Ancestral Puebloan life in the Dolores area. The resulting collections are preserved at the Anasazi Heritage Center, which is a legally-designated federal repository for archaeological materials from public lands.

The DAP digital files document a large amount of data from the recovery project area in southwestern Colorado, which is now submerged under the McPhee Reservoir. This collection is a remarkable acquisition for tDAR in terms of both its scope and depth; these data have been foundational to scholars studying the ecological, historical, and social relationships among ancient populations in the northern Southwest.  Interpretations of human community dynamics based on the DAP data also are of general interest for comparative anthropological and archaeological studies.  Once these data are contributed to tDAR, they will be available to a broader scientific community as well as to interested members of the general public.

The first workshop, in February 2011, was held in Washington, DC and featured attendees from a variety of federal agencies, state historic preservation offices, and national cultural resource management firms. This workshop provided Digital Antiquity with much-needed feedback and constructive criticism from governmental and corporate contributors to American archaeology.

On May 13, 2011, Digital Antiquity held a workshop at ASU’s Tempe campus for members of the Arizona Archaeological Council (AAC). AAC members were impressed by the access, search, and storage abilities of tDAR.  Digital Antiquity staff guided attendees through a series of demonstrations. Digital Antiquity values its relationship with the AAC and is dedicated, as updates to tDAR move forward, to continue incorporating member feedback and strengthening communication with this outstanding volunteer organization.

The third workshop in the series will take place May 24-25, 2011 in Denver, Colorado. This colloquium includes participants from tribal archaeology programs, the Bureau of Land Management, US Forest Service, Bureau of Reclamation, National Park Service, State Historic Preservation Offices, and CRM firms. As part of the discussions at the workshop, Digital Antiquity staff will solicit suggestions for improving tDAR so that it can be as useful as possible for public agencies and private firms, as well as to academic archaeologists. We are looking forward to a productive interchange in Denver!

If you or your organization is interested in attending a future tDAR workshop, please contact Digital Antiquity for more information.

Additional updates will be added as the “How to Use tDAR” page is created. Although this page is not yet publicly available, it will soon provide users up-to-date information about improvements to the tDAR user interface and other aspects of using the archive and its tools.

Digital Antiquity and tDAR remain committed to the preservation and management of digital data, including our own websites. Please let us know what you think!