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Research

Research

Research

Summary

Scientific investigations of change in socio-environmental systems are impaired by the lack of millennial- or centennial-scale data. In developing and testing explanatory models, we must do more than project recent observations—reflecting at most a few decades—into the past or future. Archaeology can provide the real-world, long-term data needed for such models and illuminate critical topics in demography, economy, and social stability. To date, efforts to recognize phenomena operating on large spatio-temporal scales have been crippled by the inherent complexities of archaeological data, the lack of data comparability across projects, and limited access to primary data. Indeed, scholars engaged in synthetic research rarely compare their data-driven interpretations with data recovered by other archaeological projects, but rather with the conclusions drawn by other researchers. Erroneous conclusions based on inconsistent premises become entrenched in the literature as "facts" that serve as faulty premises of subsequent scientific arguments. Nonetheless, the potential for archaeological insights to contribute to the study of long-term human and social dynamics is enormous; the fundamental challenge is to enable scientifically meaningful use of the expanding corpus of data. Internet publication of well-documented research databases alone would not solve these problems; issues of data comparability, complexity, and context remain.

To meet these challenges, a team of archaeologists, computer scientists, ecologists, and modelers designed and prototyped a knowledge-based archaeological data-integration system (KADIS) encompassing both new and legacy datasets. KADIS will provide scientific communities with concept-oriented, cross-project, Internet access to extensive social and environmental archives of primary data. Researchers will be able to extract a sensibly integrated and appropriately scaled database of analytically comparable observations from multiple datasets, gathered using incommensurate recording protocols. It will provide an open-source extensible foundation for a global, archaeological information infrastructure that will propel synthetic and comparative research to a new level and enable researchers across scientific disciplines to address large-scale and long-term questions with empirical support that has heretofore been unthinkable. The proposed work will lead to novel data representation and integration techniques applicable to diverse scientific domains in which data are inconsistently collected, many inferential steps separate scientific understandings of major phenomena from observational data, and primary data are highly contextual.

A substantial number of graduate and undergraduate students were engaged in this multidisciplinary research. More broadly, this project has the potential to transform a key component of undergraduate education in archaeology. Using the proposed system, critical thinking exercises could easily employ large-scale research datasets instead of the artificial data often analyzed. KADIS will act as a research-, test-, and development-bed where Computer Science students can learn and experiment with various aspects of information integration and scientific data management. Undergraduates worldwide can become a community of new users of real-world archaeological data and knowledge-based information management systems.

The project has far-reaching impacts on the infrastructure of social and natural science. It will provide a means to maintain the long-term utility and accessibility of irreplaceable primary data in the face inadequate metadata and rapidly changing technology. Its effects will extend far beyond the traditional boundaries of academia. Tribal and private enterprises are active partners in this project and would be active consumers of the resulting data integration system and archives. Using this system, specialists in other fields will gain direct access to intermediate-level archaeological knowledge as well as to primary data that are scaled and reconciled to match the scope of their inquiries. By providing scholars in diverse fields with meaningful access to long-term data on society, population, and environment, archaeology can help explain the complex human and social dynamics that have constituted today's social world and have shaped the modern environment.

Funding

National Science Foundation

Timeline

September 2004 — August 2006