** today **
TITLE: DATA SHARING FOR NEW MEXICO POTTERY TYPOLOGIES
SPEAKER: Dr. Eric Blinman, Director, Office of Archaeological Studies New Mexico
Wednesday August 11, 12.30p
Santa Fe Complex Commons, 632 Agua Fria Street
Lunch will be available for purchase for $7
ABSTRACT: The study of ancient Southwestern pottery should be simple. Someone makes a pot, it breaks, an archaeologist picks up the sherds, sorts and counts them, and writes up a report. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) things aren’t that simple.
4,000 years of changing technologies, traditions, styles, trade relationships, migrations, and uses of pots get in the way on the front end, and variations over the past century in the training, experience, and goals of archaeologists get in the way on the back end. Variation on the front end is meaningful data about cultural adaptation that we want to understand, not control. Variation on the back end needs to be controlled as much as possible, which means finding a way to effectively share data and interpretations throughout a poorly integrated discipline.
Data sharing hasn’t been attempted at a regional scale in the past 50 years in part because it has been so difficult to find a way to organize and present the rapidly developing picture of front end variation. We want to take a stab at this through the design of a web-based tool for archaeological pottery information.
In this talk, Eric Blinman, director of the New Mexico Office of Archaeological Studies, will outline the complexities inherent in understanding and classifying pottery traditions across 2000+ years of New Mexico history and describe the office’s interest in creating a collaborative web-based application for the sharing of archaeological data and interpretations.
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