The Swedish Digital Archaeological Workflow in Action
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 10/09/2020

At  CAA  2014  in  Paris,  the  author  presented  a  paper  outlining  a  programme  of  work  being  carried out at the Swedish National Heritage Board. The programme, named Digital Archae-ological Workflow (DAP), was to run for five years and aimed firstly to streamline the flow of archaeological data between different actors in the Swedish archaeological process, and secondly to ensure that this data was preserved and made accessible. DAP was intended to to address a series of problems of accessibility and siloed data which had hampered Swedish archaeology for a number of years. By 2019, the DAP programme will have run its course, and the new platform will have been deployed. This includes new national monuments and fieldwork registers, a dig-ital repository for data and reports, and adminsitrative interfaces for local government agencies and fieldwork units. The DAP programme was ambitious, and not all of its ambitions have been fulfilled. This paper will compare the initial goals for DAP as outlined in the author's 2014 paper with the reality of the finished platform. Firstly, an overview of the new digital platform and its concomitant workflow will be presented. The paper will then examine some of the programme's original goals which were not realised, as well as presenting new elements not present in the project's early stages. The paper will conclude by examining the programme's reception among stakeholders in Swedish archaeology, as well as some of the lessons learned during its execution and plans for future development.


Marcus J. Smith