Will It Ever Be FAIR?

Archaeologists seek to improve our understanding of the past by studying, preserving, protecting, and sharing nonreplaceable archaeological resources. Archaeological collections hold information that can assist these aims as long as they are properly cared for, identified, and accessible. One of the most serious barriers is the lack of large-scale coordinated efforts to make archaeological collections findable and accessible. This article suggests that developing and implementing the use of a standardized set of attributes regarding collections provides solutions and strategies to find collections. These attributes can connect and standardize existing archaeological collections from a variety of sources (federal and state agencies, CRM firms, Indigenous and descendant communities, and academic departments), serving the profession in multiple ways. Most critically, the baseline data can be synthesized to inform and direct priorities for future fieldwork, thereby decreasing redundancy in archaeological collections and improving curation efforts nationwide. Such efforts would also provide a resource to students and researchers looking to understand and interpret the past at multiple scales by encouraging more collections-based research and less archaeological site destruction. Access for descendant communities will also be improved with information about their cultural heritage. This, in turn, encourages transparency and collaboration between those communities and archaeologists.

Section: How-to Seriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making Archaeological Collections More Findable and Accessible through Increased Coordination

Neller,

Heckman,

Bollwerk

et al. 2024

“…These organizations also make such data accessible to the public through web portals. Over the last two decades, a variety of aggregation strategies have been implemented (Nicholson et al 2023:…”

Section: The System's Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Equally important is adding cultural metadata to datasets so that information on the cultural provenance, permissions, and protocols associated with data are shared with a data user (Anderson and Hudson 2020;Gupta et al 2023). Tribal Historic Preservation Offices, tribal communities, and other descendant communities need to be able to find, access, and maintain control over archaeological data that are about them and that are recovered on their lands (Neller et al 2024).…”

Section: Bringing Balance To the Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Systems-Thinking Model of Data Management and Use in US Archaeology

Bollwerk,

Gupta,

Smith

2024

OverviewArchaeology in the United States is caught in a “curation crisis” (Childs 1995; Childs and Warner 2019; Marquardt et al. 1982; SAA Advisory Committee on Curation 2003; Trimble and Marino 2003) and a “digital data crisis” (or “deluge”) more specifically (Bevan 2015; Clarke 2015; Kansa and Kansa 2021; Katsianis et al. 2022; Kersel 2015; McManamon et al. 2017:239–240; Rivers Cofield et al. 2024). Recent estimates suggest that, collectively, over 1.4 billion dollars are spent annually to support archaeological work that is mandated by federal law (SRI Foundation 2020). Although substantial efforts are underway to generate and provide mechanisms for managing, curating, and sharing the resultant digital data, we suggest that a critical step that has yet to be taken is to describe and visualize the components, connections, and causal dynamics of the US digital data system as it currently functions. Here, we specifically apply a “systems thinking” approach to produce such a high-level model of this system. We argue that understanding and visualizing this system will help us all “think bigger” (Heilen and Manney 2023); identify sources of knowledge, opportunities for critical analysis, collaboration, and capacity building; and increase much-needed archaeological digital literacy (Kansa and Kansa 2022). We conceptualize this as bringing “equilibrium” to the system, and in this article, we make several suggestions on how to bring this about. These insights can enable practitioners to better understand their roles in and contributions to the overall system and to evaluate efforts to improve data sharing, management, and curation practices not only within their organizations and departments but beyond.

“…These discussions help localize broader concerns surrounding archaeological data and Indigenous communities that we are working to incorporate into our own research and explore how they articulate with our current data management strategies. These issues include better addressing the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) and CARE (collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, ethics) principles (see, e.g., Gupta et al 2023; Nicholson et al 2023). We also hope to explore ways in which Passamaquoddy approaches to ethnographic data, such as the use of traditional knowledge labels (Anderson and Christian 2019), may be extended to archaeological settings.…”

Section: Embedding Librarians In the Downeast Archaeology Field Schoolmentioning

confidence: 99%

Embedding Librarians in Archaeological Field Schools

Hrynick

Anderson

Moore

et al. 2023

Participating in an archaeological field school is one of the only educational experiences that nearly all professional archaeologists have during their training. As a result, field schools are uniquely suited to provide experiential education in emerging skills that all archaeologists will need, such as information and data literacies at all stages of the contemporary research and publishing cycle. The “embedded” librarian program in the University of New Brunswick's Downeast Maine Coastal Archaeology Field School is an effective means to deploy that focused expertise to help students better understand the relationship between fieldwork, data, and dissemination. At the same time, being in the field provides librarians with the knowledge to respond more effectively to the complex data management and research needs of archaeologists. We encourage large research projects to consider librarians as specialist members of the research team.