Linked (Open) Data with Provenance for Prehistoric Mining Archaeology
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 28/10/2020

We want to present an approach how to model prehistoric mining technology transfer in the Eastern  Alps  with  Linked  (Open)  Data  as  an  interpretation  of  physical  evidence.  To  infer  a  technology  transfer  we  use  the  CIDOC  CRM  ontology  with  the  CRMarchaeo  extension  for  archaeological  excavations  and  the  CRMinf  extension  for  argumentation.  These  allow  us  to  relate interpretations of technology transfer to the observations and physical remains they are based on and thus keep the provenance of the argumentation. This structure of representing data enables as well the inclusion of experimental archaeology and ethno archaeology research results in the argumentation process. The approach is exemplified with data on prehistoric min-ing indicating a specific way of smelting called the “Mitterberg process”, named after the biggest producer of Alpine copper in the Bronze Age. For this purpose, we integrated data from three different areas spreading over 400km that have been investigated by institutions from Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Each institution has its own way of representing and documenting their  research  data  with  spreadsheets,  databases  and  Geoinformation  systems  and  in  order  to investigate technology transfer we had to first integrate the data. on a conceptual level. We applied the CIDOC CRM ontology and the DARIAH Back Bone Thesaurus for the conceptual integration and used semantic data standards of RDF and SKOS for the implementation. With the generated linked data we address the research question of the temporal and spatial spread of the “Mitterberg process” over the Alps and visualise different hypothesis.


Gerald Hiebel, Annette Hornschuch, Leandra Reitmaier-Naef, Phillip de la Casa, Gert Goldenberg, Klaus Hanke, Erica Hanning, Markus Staudt, Thomas Stöllner, Peter Thomas, Manuel Scherer-Windisch