Enabling the Study of Long-Term Human and Social Dynamics: A Cyberinfrastructure for Archaeology

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Traditional scientific research is focused within academic disciplines with a marked divide between social and natural sciences. However, scientific research is now crossing disciplinary boundaries, seeing human and natural systems as inextricably linked. This project is ultimately concerned with understanding long-term change in linked human-natural systems. Rapid change is often obvious, whereas long-term change is difficult to observe and even more difficult to study because scientific data typically span, at most, a few decades. Archaeology, on the other hand, collects and analyzes data on human societies and their environments that span centuries or even millennia. Thus, archaeology has the potential to play a unique role in developing and testing scientific models on such topics as demography, economy, and social stability. However, the use of archaeological knowledge for these purposes is limited by the inherent complexities on the data. Indeed, it is nearly impossible to execute meaningful analyses that integrate primary data from many archaeological research projects. This research initiates the process of building a cyberinfrastructure for archaeology that would incorporate both new and extant archaeological databases and would use systematized archaeological knowledge and sophisticated computer methods to transcend the problems of data comparability. The first component of this grant is a broad-based workshop that will attempt to build a scientific consensus on a vision for a cyberinfrastructure of archaeology, assess the professional and technical challenges, and outline a strategy for achieving that vision. The second component is in-depth exploration of a limited archaeological problem by a team of archaeologists and computer scientists. This component seeks to understand the detailed sorts of knowledge needed to compare and integrate actual data from different field projects (e.g., their preservation and collection strategies) and how to systematically represent that knowledge for computer use. The third component will examine the technical problems posed by archaeological data integration in light of the experience of other disciplines.Scientific Merit. A knowledge-based archaeological data-integration system encompassing both new and extant datasets could provide Internet access to extensive social and environmental data archives. Researchers could extract databases of analytically comparable observations, propelling synthetic research to a new level and enabling researchers across scientific disciplines to address large-scale and long-term questions with a level of empirical support that has been unthinkable. This research will also contribute novel computer methods of data integration applicable to other scientific domains in which data are inconsistently collected.Broader Impacts. The proposed system has the potential to transform a key component of undergraduate education in archaeology. Employing this knowledge-based system, critical thinking exercises could use large-scale research datasets instead of the "toy" problems usually analyzed. The proposed system has far-reaching impacts on the infrastructure of social and natural science. It would provide a means to maintain the long-term utility of irreplaceable data in the face of inadequate documentation and rapidly changing technology. Academic, governmental, tribal and private enterprises would all be active consumers of the resulting data integration system. 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.