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Center for

Digital antiquity

 
 

Digital Antiquity extends our knowledge of the human past and improves the management of our cultural heritage by permanently preserving digital archaeological data and supporting their discovery, access, and reuse.

 
 

News

Looking Back, Looking Forward – The Director’s View

Change is a constant and the last half of 2019, tripping into early 2020, has been an eventful time for Digital Antiquity and tDAR to say the least!  In October 2019, I became the new Director at Center for Digital Antiquity Director (DA/tDAR), after Frank McManamon and Mary Whelan’s retirement...

Publications

Federal Laws and Regulations Requiring Curation of Digital Archaeological Documents and Data, Cultural Heritage Partners (2012)

This report by Cultural Heritage Partners, PLLC describes and analyzes federal requirements for the access to and long-term preservation of digital archaeological data. We conclude that the relevant federal laws, regulations, and policies mandate that digital archaeological data generated by federal...

There are tales of early archaeologists burning wood from the ruins to make coffee. If we fail to curate the [data] … archives we collect…at public expense, we essentially repeat those mistakes.
Science Staff Science 11 February 2011, p. 693

Digital cultural heritage

Access and preservation

 

Document & Data Archiving

 

Caring for the digital products and outcomes of research and compliance work so that information can be accessed, reused, and preserved for years to come.

 
 

Long-Term Preservation

 

Ensuring that irreplaceable records of archaeological investigations are maintained for reuse by future generations of academic and CRM archaeologists.

 
 

Data Management

 

Planning for how data will be collected, organized, analyzed, documented, and archived.

 
 

Reuse & Research

 

Reused data are valuable, they:

  1. Validate the scientific method and hypothesis.
  2. Facilitate new research ideas.
  3. Save time and money so that data aren’t recreated.
  4. Give data creators credit for data gathered.
 
 

Compliance

 

Adhering to data curation guidelines set forth in the National Historic Preservation Act (Subchapter II §470h–4), Archaeological resources Protection Act (Section 4).

 
 
 

Searchability

 

Ensuring that data has its own metadata so that it can be located by people and search engines.

 


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