The Grand Challenge of interlinking palaeoenvironmental data and interpretations
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 16/11/2019

Palaeoenvironmental data are derived from a wide variety of analysis methods, archaeological and geological contexts, and spatio-temporal situations. Different environmental proxies complement each other in terms of the evidence they provide for different aspects of the past, and provide information at different resolutions. In order to understand landscape changes, and human parts in these, it is thus necessary to aggregate and integrate a variety of data. With some work, and sufficiently high resolution metadata, individual datasets can be linked or aggregated in terms of space and time. This results in large and complex (meta)datasets which require multiple domain experts to understand and interpret. Many archaeologists however, would prefer to meet the data at the next level up, as users of the interpreted results from individual proxy analyses, where advanced knowledge of the analysis methods is not required. This not only requires a different approach to linking, such as the use of higher level concepts (e.g. indicators of woodland or openness in a landscape), but also has implications for the type of interpreted data that are made available for linking. It also has significant implications in terms of research transparency, as it is more difficult to ensure adherence to FAIR data principles (or similar) when the delivering synthesised or interpreted data to portals and tools. This presentation will use data in the Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database (www.sead.se) to provide illustrations some of the challenges and possibilities when providing and using interpreted data in a multidisciplinary research context.

(Philip Iain Buckland, Mattias Sjölander, Rachel Opitz)