The Early Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf Research Project
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-11-02

The Early Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf research project is the first phase of an effort seeking to collect disparate regional data and analyze intersections within it. Making disparate legacy and contemporary project data communicate is difficult, but necessary to: better allocate resources to preserve the region’s endangered heritage, help standardize terminology across projects, and update existing interpretations. Online repositories may not entice legacy or contemporary projects with existing solutions, but a dynamic research tool that can give multiple projects access to a single, shared, robust database might. ‘New’ requires patience for colleagues not accustomed to digital tools, but our project originally began with traditional analysis, and our developing system is recursively informed by the needs of our Ur and Al-Hiba legacy excavation datasets in southern Iraq that contain nearly 60,000 objects and richly detailed sherd counts that intersect with spatial contexts. We are using this new system to analyze intersecting patterns of cuneiform seals and ceramics from both sites within geospatial and temporal contexts. We will showcase cross-project analyses in our newly built web-application that heavily extends the Django web framework, which acts as a powerful generic database backend with an overlapping web content management system, and offer our system to interested parties who wish to contribute to this shared data project that provides easy record manipulation/creation, auto-publishing of content to a public front-end, research-oriented query tools that connect disparate project data, secured customized public and private access, and a prototype geospatial query implementation based on OpenLayers’ Javascript libraries.

Full title: The Early Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf Research Project: An Online Solution for Aggregating Regional Legacy and Contemporary Data for Research 

(Robert C Bryant, Steve Renette, Darren P Ashby)