Legacy data and archaeological archives in Europe and North Africa
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-01-02

Perhaps the hardest data to render open access is that of the archaeological archive, even when, as is not necessarily the case, it is lodged in an institution. A survey of practices for the archiving of excavation data in a number of European countries has revealed that centralized archiving is vanishingly rare, while even university archives of excavation data are hardly easy to access. A particular example of legacy data is offered in this paper, the case of the archives of 150 years of excavations in North Africa. Carried out initially by colonial regimes, many of the archives of these excavations were returned to Europe, where they remain in large part inaccessible to the countries where they were created. No functioning archives were left in their wake, so data collected since then has rarely been properly organized. Many of these archives are in the hands of the descendants of the original excavators, some of whom have sold them, while others have simply left them in the attic. A new project, the North African Heritage Archive Network (NAHAN), is attempting to assemble on one platform the catalogues of as many as possible of these archives, which are found in four North African countries, seven European countries and the US. Under the aegis of ICCROM, the project will build on the ARIADNE infrastructure model to provide information about these resources, in the hope of generating new scholarship on this massive collection of data, and of rendering this information available to the archaeological services of
the countries where it was created.