Combining scientific and interpretive approaches to archaeological data: multi-proxy database
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2020-11-15

Internationally accessible data sources do not contain much information about Eastern Europe, especially Russia. Prevalence of cultural-historical approach in the Eastern European archae-ology has provided for a long time some robust explanations of cultural dynamics in the vast area where one migration was followed by another. Unfortunately, it turned the development of the discipline into a permanent struggle of numerous local schools of research, each with its own local chronologies and interpretations. Scientific data accumulated by the last two decades was  drowning  in  an  ocean  of  typologically  interpreted  sites  and  artifacts.  The  issue  of  com-bining data with different level of accuracy appeared to be challenging. A dozen of databases were developed to manage that huge massive of records during the recent decades, but all of them remained unused by researchers primarily because of inability to analyze different types of data. We present the preliminary results of a new Web-based and GIS-driven database that includes both cultural and stylistic interpretations and relative chronological sequences as well as absolute datings and ecofacts. It is based on the use of a graph database (Neo4j) that allows us to store, analyze and manage complex relationships between the archaeological evidence, its context, and interpretations, in the intuitive, but sophisticated, way. The functionality of our multi-user system includes data mapping, visualization, selection, and processing. Developed analytical tools include clustering according to the attributes of the objects stored and creating the chronology for the selected areas based on summed probability distribution of 14C dates.


Leonid Vyazov, Maxim Efimov, Timur Mardanov, Timur Timerkhanov, Ramil Sabitov, Natalia Selezneva, Julia Salova, Ayrat Sitdikov