Using CRMarchaeo to combine excavation archives into FAIR resource
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 17/03/2024

Stephen Stead

We have previously discussed the Swedish National Infrastructure for Digital Archaeology project (SweDigArch) and the decision to use CRMarchaeo to underpin the facilitation of the production of aggregated and harmonised datasets.

CRMarchaeo is an extension of CIDOC CRM and is designed to link a wide range of existing documentation from archaeological excavations both within and across sites. The CRMarchaeo extension has been created to promote a shared understanding of how to formalise the knowledge extracted from the observations made by archaeologists. It provides a set of concepts and properties that allow clear explanation (and separation) of the observations and interpretations made, both in the field and in post-excavation.

This paper considers the nitty-gritty of representing the content of an integrated context recording platform as differentiated observation and interpretation instance data. It will illustrate some of the critical decisions in the disambiguation process and thereby shed some light on design decisions in future recording practice.