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DIGITAL ANTIQUITY: Transforming Archaeological Data into Knowledge

Digital Antiquity is a collaborative organization devoted to enhancing preservation and access to digital records of archaeological investigations in order:

• to permit researchers to more effectively create and communicate knowledge of the long-term human past;
• to enhance the management of archaeological resources; and
• to provide for the long-term preservation of irreplaceable records of archaeological investigations.

Digital Antiquity will establish a financially and socially sustainable, national/international, on-line digital repository that is able to provide preservation, discovery, and access for data and documents produced by archaeological projects. The repository, known as tDAR (for "the Digital Archaeological Record") is set up to encompass digital documents and data derived from ongoing research (more than 50,000 field projects are conducted in the US each year) as well as legacy data collected through more than a century of archaeological research in the Americas. With the active participation of the discipline, this initiative has the potential to transform the practice of archaeology and to revolutionize our knowledge of the past by enabling synthetic and comparative research on a scale that has heretofore been impossible.

With generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funding, Digital Antiquity staffing includes a full-time Executive Director, two software engineers, a data curator, and clerical staff.  Francis P. McManamon is Digital Antiquity's Executive Director and Adam Brin is Technical Director. Recruitment for additional staff is underway. Management of Digital Antiquity is overseen by a 12 member Board of Directors and informed by a distinguished external Science Board of professionals in archaeology and computer and information science. Digital Antiquity currently is housed at Arizona State University, as a collaborative effort with the University of Arkansas, the Pennsylvania State University, the SRI Foundation, Washington State University, and the University of York.

Although the Mellon Foundation has provided start-up funding for Digital Antiquity, its business plan is based on a data curation model in which those responsible for archaeological investigations will pay a fee for the deposit of digital data and documents. Once deposited, access will be freely available over the Internet upon user registration, consent with a use agreement, and with restrictions for sensitive information. The entrepreneurial, service-oriented focus of the enterprise is necessary for Digital Antiquity to become financially self-sustaining in a 4-5 year period. It is planned, at that point, for the organization to transition into an independent not-for-profit entity or be brought under the umbrella of another appropriate not-for-profit (such as a professional society) that can host the repository in the long term.

Digital Antiquity is now funded by a two-year, $1.29M Mellon Foundation implementation grant. Planning and prototype development of the tDAR repository has been funded by two grants from the National Science Foundation ($100K, $750K) to Arizona State University and one from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Scholarly Communications Program ($150K) to archaeoinformatics.org, the predecessor collaborative organization of Digital Antiquity. A grant to enable interoperability with the UK's Archaeology Data Service is underway, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (PX-50022-09) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England of the United Kingdom acting through the Joint Information Systems Committee.

For more information about Digital Antiquity please contact Frank McManamon.

Use tDAR---the Digital Archaeological Record

Related Information:
Digital Antiquity Board of Directors
Digital Antiquity Science Board

Digital Antiquity McManamon and Kintigh SAA Archaeological Record (2010)
The Promise and Challenge of Archaeological Data Integration Kintigh American Antiquity (2006)
The Challenge of Archaeological Data Integration Kintigh UISPP (2006)
Cybertools and Archaeology DSnow, et al. Science (2006)

Digital Antiquity Draft Metadata Specification

Wordle view of Digital Antiquity proposal (click to enlarge).