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Mapping Our Heritage: Towards a Sustainable Future for Digital Spatial Information and Technologies in European Archaeological Heritage Management

  • Peter McKeague
  • , R.H. van 't Veer
  • , Isto Huvila
  • , Anne Moreau
  • , J.W.H.P. Verhagen
  • , Loup Bernard
  • , Anwen Cooper
  • , Chris Green
  • , N. van Manen

Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

The enormous increase in digital spatial information has led archaeologists all over Europe to rely ever more on digital data to prepare and carry out archaeological research, both in academic and heritage management contexts. Spatial information is increasingly used to guide heritage management policies, from urban design to rural planning and tourism. Furthermore, spatial information is more and more employed to involve the general public, using digital technologies in museums and other places of archaeological interest, but also to involve amateur archaeologists in data collection programmes using crowdsourcing. With this proliferation of data and data use, issues of sustainability of digital data repositories, accessibility and reliability of data, standardization of data formats and management of property rights are currently widely debated inside and outside archaeology. However, they have not yet led to generally accepted practices of data management across or even within European countries. In this paper, we sketch the state-of-the-art of archaeological spatial data management, identify the major problem areas and reflect on potential improvements. We conclude that technical solutions are available, but will need a long-term transnational strategy in order fulfill the promise of open and sustainable spatial archaeological data for all user groups involved.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)89-104
Number of pages16
JournalJournal of Computer Applications in Archaeology
Volume2
Issue number1
Early online date7 Jun 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019

Funding

As highlighted earlier, efforts to guarantee the sustainable archiving of digital archaeological data have been partially successful at the local and national level, even when the spatial dimension of archaeological data has not been the primary focus. However, even well-established initiatives are still very vulnerable to changes in the political climate. Almost all organisations curating archaeological data do so on the basis of governmental funding, and changes in political priorities can easily lead to loss of datasets if curating these is not part of the legal obligations of administrative authorities at local, regional, national or transnational levels. The Dutch national digital archive DANS, for example, is currently financed by the Dutch government as a partnership between the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), as part of a larger effort to curate scientific research data. However, there is no guarantee that this agreement will continue in the future, and if so, whether accessing data will remain free of charge, and if DANS will continue to receive enough funding to adapt its services to changing technological and research environments. And the Netherlands are ahead of many other countries in acknowledging that there is a problem that needs to be addressed at the national level. The funding for the German IANUS initiative (IANUS 2019), for example, was ended in 2017 without a follow-up strategy for implementing the project’s results. Clearly, sustainability is not just a matter of developing exchange standards and creating repositories, but also of developing infrastructures that have a sound financial and legal basis. This paper developed from presentations held by the authors at the EAA2017 conference in Maastricht (30 August – 2 September 2017) in the session “Mapping our heritage. Towards a sustainable future for digital spatial information and technologies in archaeological heritage management”, organized by Philip Verhagen, Niels van Manen, Loup Bernard and Isto Huvila. Some of the presentations are available online (EAA 2019). Verhagen and Van Manen gratefully acknowledge the support of CLUE+, the Research Institute for Culture, Cognition and Heritage at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in organising this session. This paper is further based upon work from the COST Action ARKWORK (2019), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology, www.cost.eu). Huvila’s work was partially supported by the Archaeological Information in the Digital Society project (ARKDIS) project funded by the Swedish Research Council Grant 340-2012-5751.

FundersFunder number
Research Institute for Culture
Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences
European Cooperation in Science and Technology
Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek
Vetenskapsrådet340-2012-5751

    Keywords

    • spatial technology
    • digital archaeological data
    • heritage management
    • sustainability

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