this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
1 points (100.0% liked)

Archaeology

2266 readers
1 users here now

Welcome to c/Archaeology @ Mander.xyz!

Shovelbums welcome. 🗿

Notice Board

This is a work in progress, please don't mind the mess.

About

Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.

Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.

The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Be kind and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. No pseudoscience/pseudoarchaeology.

Links

Archaeology 101:

Get Involved:

University and Field Work:

Jobs and Career:

Professional Organisations:

FOSS Tools:

Datasets:

Fun:

Other Resources:

Similar Communities

Sister Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Plants & Gardening

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Memes

Find us on Reddit

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
1
Digital public archaeology: Excavating data from digs done decades ago and connecting with today’s communities (theconversation.com)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
0 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The ancestors of Alaska Native people began using local copper sources to craft intricate tools roughly 1,000 years ago. Over one-third of all copper objects archaeologists have found in this region were excavated at a single spot, named the Gulkana Site.

This is the site I’ve studied for the past four years as a Ph.D. student at Purdue University. In spite of its importance, the Gulkana Site is not well known.

To my knowledge, it isn’t mentioned in any museums. Locals, including Alaska Native Ahtna people, who descend from the site’s original inhabitants, might recognize the name, but they don’t know much about what happened there. Even among archaeologists, little information is available about it – just a few reports and passing mentions in a handful of publications.

However, the Gulkana Site was first identified and excavated nearly 50 years ago. What gives?

Archaeology has a data management problem, and it is not unique to the Gulkana Site. U.S. federal regulations and disciplinary standards require archaeologists to preserve records of their excavations, but many of these records have never been analyzed. Archaeologists refer to this problem as the “legacy data backlog.”

As an example of this backlog, the Gulkana Site tells a story not only about Ahtna history and copperworking innovation, but also about the ongoing value of archaeological data to researchers and the public alike.

no comments (yet)
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
there doesn't seem to be anything here