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Refining Archaeological Data Collection and Management - Ep 201
735 Plays1 year ago
The February 2023 issue of Advances in Archaeological Practice highlights the efforts of people trying standardize and fix data management in archaeology. There’s a massive data problem in this field, from the collection of data to the longterm management of it. Michael Heilen and Shelby Manney organized SAA symposia and the issue linked below and are at the forefront of this effort. We bring them on to discuss what they’ve been up to in this space.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/201
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Contact
- Chris Webster
Twitter: @archeowebby
Email: [email protected] - Paul Zimmerman
Twitter: @lugal
Email: [email protected]
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Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Introduction of Show and Guests
00:00:08
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 201. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we talk to the editors of the February 2023 issue of Advances in Archaeological Practice about the data collection and management problem in archaeology. Let's get to it.
00:00:25
Speaker
All right. Welcome to the show. Everybody. Paul is still doing fieldwork on the other side of the planet and it's nighttime for him. So he won't be joining us for this episode, but that's no problem because I've got an interview with Michael Highland and Shelby Manet. Michael and Shelby, welcome to the show. Thank you, Chris. It's great to be here. Great to be here. Thanks.
Focus on Data Processes in Archaeology
00:00:45
Speaker
All right. So you guys are on because you are promoting the February, 2023 issue of advances in archeological practice on refining archeological data collection and management. And you guys were the guest editors of that episode. So I don't know which one he wants to go first, but how did this come together? What brought you into this?
00:01:03
Speaker
So, I mean, we've had an interest in trying to move the needle in terms of how archaeology and also particularly CRM does business and particularly with respect to data. And we feel that there's been a lot of discussion of data practices and approaches, particularly with digital data in most recent years, but
00:01:27
Speaker
They usually consider one portion of the data lifecycle or workflow. And what we wanted to try to address is that
00:01:36
Speaker
Perhaps to address what we call in our introduction to the issue, the archaeology's data problem, is that we really need to look at the entire data cycle and lifecycle and workflow and consider all the elements because they're all linked together and they impact each other, particularly starting with the planning and data collection.
00:01:59
Speaker
data collection itself.
Origin and Purpose of Data Issue
00:02:00
Speaker
This particular issue began with a symposium that Shelby and I organized the SAA meetings, which were to be in San Francisco in 2021. And we had invited a lot of people that we thought were involved in various aspects of this problem and had some things to say.
00:02:23
Speaker
And we got a great group of presenters together, presented some really inspiring and we thought visionary papers. So we reached out to the editors that advances in archaeological practice to see if we might organize a special issue surrounding the subject.
Shelby's Data Journey
00:02:45
Speaker
Yeah, Michael and I have been interested in data, not just archaeological data, probably for me for most of my life. And the funny thing, I didn't want to be an archaeologist. I loved data and linear thinking and was an annoying child that had to make sure everything was backed up by facts and data and statistics. Nice. Writing to local newspapers, telling them that you can't say that, you have no data to back it up. They kind of can't.
00:03:12
Speaker
I had a lot of trouble with human interaction and people. And so I said, well, I need to figure out the data problem there. I don't have the data to understand people. And then I found out that, well, the only way you can get access to deep data about humans is to become an archeologist. So I did that. So we've been wrangling with these issues, found Michael, and this is just a series in several different types of publications.
00:03:38
Speaker
and things that we've been doing to try to make what it seems to be looking at static data in archaeology like this time period and we have neat little tables that say this is this time period and that's that time period and this one period this is the period.
00:03:53
Speaker
put it in a nice table divided by dates that may or may not be the rough dates. So just thinking about as living data through time, they can tell us stuff now, you know, in the past and now and in the future. But in order to do that, we have to look at as archaeologists, the whole data life cycle and how that's connected to this dynamic and living ecosystem, you know, this big blue globe that we're in instead of just in very pinpointed time and space. So that's
00:04:23
Speaker
Thinking about that, we wanted to get people together and wanted to make the issue also something that was accessible to publish it with open free copyright so that people could share it and start discussing the topics that are in there so we can come together and then integrate with others outside of our field in a more robust way to start thinking about data as being linked in this cycle.
00:04:48
Speaker
Okay.
Roles and Contributions of Guests
00:04:49
Speaker
That's an excellent primer into how the issue came about and what you guys are doing. Let's talk about you guys again real quick before we get into some other stuff that's in the issue. Shelby, I'll start with you. Do we try to keep employers and things like that out of these conversations, just keep a little more generic, but what does your day-to-day look like? What's your day job around this? Well, I am the deputy director, now interim director of the Environmental Management Office for the Arizona Army National Guard.
00:05:16
Speaker
Okay. I started here as a principal investigator and my life was actually in CRM, the majority of it, I don't know, 15 years or whatever it was. Okay. As one of the leads for TRC. And so I've tried doing this sort of thing, getting data, answering questions about human past and integrating it into biological data, geological ecology, et cetera. We do an environmental data as a
00:05:44
Speaker
PRM, you know, archaeologist, and then in academia. And it's been tough going. So I decided, well, if I'm an agency archaeologist, and I have land, you know, we have 32 facilities, so I
00:06:01
Speaker
I have a good data sample, so I literally picked my job based on the data sample. So I would have access to different cultural areas and ecological zones so that I could test out
00:06:17
Speaker
certain things and see if we can possibly do that, also to influence policy. So the DOD owns a lot of land and so integrating it with other people in the army, the DOD, maybe we can have it come all together and show the federal government and others in a way that we can ask broader questions about the human past and its integration into this living and dynamic ecosystem that I was talking about.
00:06:44
Speaker
Awesome. That sounds pretty exciting, actually. I love it. What about you, Michael? What's your day job look like? Well, I am the director of what's called the Center for the Study of Cultural Landscapes, which is embedded within a CRM firm. A lot of my career in CRM in the past
00:07:04
Speaker
maybe fifteen years has been in directing the research for a large and complex project, some of them large excavations, other ones land extensive surveys or excavations in many different areas as part of say a transportation project. And through that I had a lot of opportunities to synthesize, try to compile synthesized large data sets, have a focus in geospatial
00:07:31
Speaker
and quantitative analysis. For the last few years, I began working with Shelby and her office, supporting them in modeling, in developing data models and schemes and collection and management schemes for their cultural resource and natural resource data.
00:07:52
Speaker
and in trying to come up with both analytical, technological, and also human workflows for sort of pushing the envelope in how we do CRM and integrate it with natural resource management.
00:08:09
Speaker
activities that shall be overseas. Nice. All right. Well, again, also sounds exciting.
Challenges in Data Collection Methods
00:08:15
Speaker
I love it. We're going to talk about some of the stuff in the issue of advances in archaeological practice, but I just want to talk to you guys about this whole topic, just bringing it up, because it sounds like you're really into this. And the fact that you guys are both in CRM or were in CRM for a long time,
00:08:32
Speaker
You know as well as I do that the initial data problem in this whole business comes right from the boots on the ground people that are collecting the data. I was in CRM as a field technician and as a crew chief and a project manager for a long time. I've worked in 18, 19 different states and different regions around the country.
00:08:51
Speaker
Interestingly enough, I never really worked in the Southwest except for like New Mexico, but I almost don't even count it. It was just like a month, maybe two. And that was pretty much it. But I worked in the Southeast, the Northeast, California, Nevada, Washington, you know, a lot of places in the Midwest and in between. And everybody collects the same things. I've always said this on this podcast. We all collect information about artifacts, features, and landscapes. We take pictures and we do descriptions, but literally every state does it differently.
00:09:19
Speaker
Right. Everybody has different forms. Everybody has different terms and different, you know, ways of doing this. I figure if we're going to talk about the data collection problem in this country, I mean, we have to start right there, don't we? And what's the solution? Yeah, I think it hit the nail on the head there. I mean, that's absolutely a great characterization of the of the problem. Well, that's definitely what it's, you know, if you look at what we have. So I divided up my strategy.
00:09:48
Speaker
and that I've tried to do, like I said, through some various, you know, trying any profession I possibly can to do it, divided my strategy into the data lifecycle and looking at both human workflows, meeting how we do things and the data workflows and trying to match those up to get rid of a site concept and more look at, you know, initial observation. So if we think of, you know, kind of the scientific method,
00:10:15
Speaker
And making sure that we can be as accurate as possible in the initial observation, especially when excavation is involved because we can't go back, right? So looking at the data collection, as you said, is paramount, is critical. There's a cornerstone of everything else that comes after it.
00:10:32
Speaker
And because artifacts move on the ground, it's a dynamic system of aggregation, dispersion, whether it's through time or at the time of deposit, that we have to do repeated observations in order to understand the full observation, not just a site that is dog-leashed. So looking at the collection problem and why we collect things differently is nonsensical.
Need for Standardized Frameworks
00:10:54
Speaker
We need to have, even if we disagree, we need to have an understanding and a basic concept of
00:11:00
Speaker
higher level ontologies, higher level categories that at least will allow us to open up a conversation and collect things systematically so that I don't have to try to integrate something that's completely collected differently than obfuscated by the facts that people have normalized and moved it around and the only original data is on someone's computer
00:11:20
Speaker
So all I have are these documents, maybe, and these reports. So I have no idea how they collect it sometimes. Collection is critical. I agree with you 100%. Michael? Well, I think you said it very well. That is a crux of the problem. And I think if we could get to a state where we're actually collecting things that funnel into some sort of common core
00:11:49
Speaker
ontology or meta ontology and basically agree that as Chris says, we're basically making observations about the same types of things. We're just schematizing them in different ways and different formats, sometimes a bewildering variety of forms and specific methods are used.
00:12:18
Speaker
It's an obstacle to our ability to understand the past and to leverage the data, the massive amounts of data that are being collected in CRM to understand our present and chart the future or make sense of those data and make them also available to other disciplines that could benefit from an archaeological perspective.
00:12:42
Speaker
And I honestly don't think that the issue here is that, you know, that it's an impossible and insurmountable task. There's lots of other sciences and lots of other disciplines that do this. Even human data disciplines, like say, I don't know, looking at the Census Bureau, right?
00:13:01
Speaker
just break some categories. Sometimes they're not great through time, it might change, but we document those changes as they change through time so then we can change and look at the other data. Or at least let's decide on the scale at which our observations are going to happen. Let's just start there.
00:13:17
Speaker
And what, what scale can we currently gather data on the surface, subsurface, and what are some techniques that we can better understand the subsurface without digging? You know, then we can attack these other types of problems starting with the question is fine, but instead I think we should collect, regardless of the question, the range of the field so that if someone else were to have a question in the future or then that they can ask
00:13:43
Speaker
there are questions and maybe even have the data come up with, say, in machine learning, et cetera, some actual things that we wouldn't have thought of, some similarities, you know, that we might not have thought of. And we can't do that because data is usually collected for a particular purpose in mind and the rest of it, you know, is not there. So I really believe that we have an epidemic of overfitting in archaeology.
00:14:11
Speaker
I feel like I'm at this RVing event and there's a lot of different people here from different backgrounds and different jobs and things like that. We were all sitting around a campfire last night listening to some music. There's a gentleman who we've gotten to know, and he's originally from Scotland, but he's been in this country for 20 to 30 years or something like that. He actually said it, which I think
00:14:34
Speaker
exemplifies the problem that we have in data collection and archaeology. He said, when I first came to this country, I thought I was coming to one country.
Regional Practices and Data Standardization
00:14:41
Speaker
And as I traveled around, I realized I was in 50 different countries. Not just from a cultural and even a regulatory standpoint, but driving laws and people and culture and everything was just different. And it gets even worse in archaeology when you look, you could have CRM firms in one region. And even they may do things slightly differently.
00:15:02
Speaker
Everybody that listens to this show regularly knows that I consulted and still consult for WildNote, which is a data collection platform. And one of the things that we have in there is a standardized output for primarily California DPR forms, which is their recording forms, and then Nevada IMAX forms, and then a few other states around. But those are kind of the big ones. And we still have CRM firms that want to use those forms. And they say, hey, can we make changes to this form? And we're like, you mean the agency output form? No, you can't.
00:15:30
Speaker
Like this is what the agency is dictating and yet even though there's a standardization, if you will, of that data collection method, they still want to do it differently because they're used to just making changes on their own and the agency's not enforcing anything on top of that. So let me give you guys a chance to comment on that on the other side of the break because we're just about up on time on this segment. I didn't mean to take it all the way to the end, but we'll come right back here in just a minute.
00:15:55
Speaker
Welcome back to the architect podcast. And I'm talking to Michael and Shelby, and I just said a whole bunch of stuff right at the end of the last segment about, you know, how nothing is standardized in data collection, even amongst agencies and to see her infirms of a particular region. Do you guys have any comments on that?
00:16:10
Speaker
Well, I agree now. So when I was in CRM, I manage projects pretty much all over the country. So a hundred, you know, or more archaeologists at one time. I had this same purpose in mind when I, when I did it for CRM. And it's astounding how even if I dictate it right and starting developing some of the tools that Michael
00:16:37
Speaker
I and the team have been continuing on developing, but they still won't do it. And even in agency archaeology, it's not a matter of how much you're paying them. It really is a culture. So the hardest part for us, like I was leading to in the last segment, is not one of difficulty. It's a behavioral change. What do we do as archaeologists to change our mindset from
00:17:04
Speaker
you know, this is good enough or this is how it's done to how can we do it better. There's a real problem if, as I've studied and lots of other people study different parts of archaeology, we go and we ask biologists for their data and we ask, you know, women, you know, doctors or etcetera for their data. I have yet to have anybody from an outside field ever ask me for my data. Why?
00:17:30
Speaker
Yeah. I think there's a kind of an old adage, you know, put 10 archeologists in the room and you have 10 different opinions.
00:17:37
Speaker
There's always an interest in having the leeway to do something differently or have some flexibility. But as we discussed earlier, we collect a lot of the same data routinely just in different ways. And even as you point out, when people are confronted with a form that they have to fill out, they want to change the form even when it's the initial form.
00:18:01
Speaker
But I tend to think that going back to the primary observation issue is we need to start having ways that archaeologists and organizations are submitting their data at the most primary level into a system that enforces at least a standard ontology, a level of standardization
00:18:29
Speaker
that makes them already, or at least increases very strongly the prospects of them being interoperable and reusable. There's an extreme amount of resistance, as Shelby pointed out,
00:18:44
Speaker
for people to change how they do things, and they don't want to do, often attempt not to get with the program in a sense, when they're required to do so, they tend to subvert that. But if we start placing requirements, I think, especially in CRM on, say, contract firms, every project has to have a data management plan, and it has to fulfill certain requirements.
00:19:14
Speaker
And if we build and is enforced,
Educational Needs in Archaeology
00:19:17
Speaker
yeah. And if we start to have like, it would have to be a collective thing, obviously, but come up with a sort of more centralized, cohesive and integrative data standard that people actually are required to submit their data into digitally, then
00:19:36
Speaker
Maybe we would start to get to a place where we can start to shed all these variety of things. We would have to do that at, and I think that we attack it at the, I'm interested in archeology phase, sort of college and pre-college phases, and where you have courses on data collection methods, not just appeal in school.
00:19:58
Speaker
or whatever. And so they get introduced to these systems as a way of doing things. As opposed to what happens now, it seems like if there is a CRM course in college, you learn about the laws, et cetera. But where is the data lifecycle management? Where is that part? It's different statistics and everything else you might get. But where is data ethics? Where is that? Which happens in lots of other fields, a lot of other fields.
00:20:25
Speaker
Sure. Why don't you have something like that so that we're not battling these misconceptions? Instead, those up-and-coming archaeologists, you know, will have a voice and be able to push, you know, push these things through. And anyway, I think that that's kind of the entry point at which we decide to do this. And one other thing is that we're not saying that at the more refined levels that we wouldn't want to
00:20:56
Speaker
you know, at the smaller scales that we wouldn't want to allow for interpretation or, or flexibility in the ontologies. What we're saying is that we have to have basic, the base amount of data, the baseline data.
00:21:10
Speaker
needs to be systematic, needs to be collected systematically, handled systematically, just the additional things. And also on the additional things, we need to add decoding sheets and reference points at how did we come to this conclusion based on the base data that we collected.
00:21:30
Speaker
That's well said addressing sort of the, you know, teaching the new generation coming up, right? And teaching them the right way, so to speak, so they can come in with a voice. I know just because of the way that the world works, this will get better as well.
Adoption of Digital Tools in Archaeology
00:21:43
Speaker
I mean, there's no way to say it, but as the old guard retires or leaves the field and the new people come in, this is going to get better. But I can tell you, I was in grad school when the first iPad came out in April of 2010 and I bought it within a week of it coming out.
00:21:58
Speaker
I was like, this thing is going to be a game changer. I need to do this. And I was in a shallow geophysics class over the summer and, you know, we're doing field data collection. Now, again, you know, this old technology now, because it was the first iteration and it got real hot in those Georgia summers and I had to put in a van sometimes to cool it down. But that, that was a problem that's getting better. But either way, I had so much resistance.
00:22:19
Speaker
trying to collect this data that we were doing digitally. And then coming into the field, into archaeology after that, I was in CRM before that and I went back into CRM after that. I tried working with CRM firms that I was a field tech and then a crew chief and then eventually a project manager at and saying, hey, we're going to do all these things. We're still going to record the way you want to, but can we just do it on tablets? Can we do it on something and find out of a standardized way to
00:22:45
Speaker
to keep people from coming up with their own things, come up with drop down menus, start to standardize some of these things, but allowing room for creativity. And I ended up having to start my own company because the resistance was so high to any sort of collection like that, whether it was the standardization or just the technology to begin with, people saying, iPads will never work in the field. And people still say that. Well, sorry for you on that one.
00:23:11
Speaker
Brand new, beautiful iPads, and we've developed a survey, one, two, three, and we have our ones that actually do this. And we've got these new iPads have LIDAR and et cetera on them. They sat, you might have bought them now three times, but they sat unused in a CRM form for
00:23:29
Speaker
A long time. And good news is that Michael and a new archeologist, a young archeologist just hired who's a data enthusiast doesn't have a lot of experience, but you said the word data and I said the word higher are going to go out next week and pilots the teary system. I'm trying to get started for eight years.
00:23:51
Speaker
We're looking at things in a grid-like pattern at various scales and we're going to test out iPads and other devices to kind of do a baseline to see which ones work better in the field and can we actually get better resolution of data and does it cost more. That's a misnomer and I still think it is.
00:24:12
Speaker
If anybody's done any real research on that, Jeff Alshul and also Michael, there's several articles on actual comparisons between, you know, doing walking surveys versus doing something on, you know, digital platform and using a TRU system. So we're going to try it out again very systematically. We did regular survey work, you know, the pedestrian, can you see your neighbor one?
00:24:36
Speaker
And we've done a complete total survey of that. We could go back and try targeted samples to compare whether it does cost more, whether the data actually gives us better quality data for land management purposes.
00:24:50
Speaker
Yeah, I can tell you after over 10 years of collecting data digitally in the field and using almost exclusively iPads but branching out into some Android devices occasionally, my two cents on that is sometimes it's not quicker. In fact, a lot of times it's not quicker to collect digitally in the field because if you're working with a
00:25:09
Speaker
a paper form that's got a grid, and you just have to make tick marks. There's no difference between doing that on a piece of paper and doing it on an iPad, right? And sometimes even the typing is slower on an iPad. So it may actually take longer in some cases to collect the data in the field. However, the time savings on the back end are just massive. I mean, absolutely massive. You're not reading my left-handed chicken scratch that I'm dragging my hand across my Right in the Rain notebook with my left hand.
00:25:36
Speaker
You're not reading any of that and trying to have those errors of transcription. You're at least getting something that's a little more homogenized and readable. And then in some cases, you just tidy it up a little bit and export a form and you're done. And that's exactly what I meant to do.
00:25:53
Speaker
comparison. So it's through the whole life cycle of the project. One of the arguments that I've had is that people are like, it's going to take so long. And I had them, I had certain archeologists come up with how long more do you think it may cost us to pay for it to take a little bit longer there.
00:26:09
Speaker
Now, what I said was, okay, now how much does an archeologist cost, especially to the federal government or government or the client? How much per hour does an archeological tech and maybe a crew chief, maybe a field director that's out there, how much do they cost an hour? Okay, now how much does that project director archeologist and that PI cost an hour that isn't looking at the shipping scratch and everything that you're saying, and while we're using sites and making up stuff that they don't know because they couldn't read it, how much does that person cost? Now, let's do the math.
00:26:38
Speaker
Every three men crew is maybe an hour of a PI or high directors time. So if I can, if it costs me just one extra hour, I'm still saving an hour there. Right. So there you go. You know, it's, you know, my hypothesis and we'll see, I've got an eight years now of, you know, how much these projects have cost.
00:27:06
Speaker
So let's see what comes out of it. And even if it doesn't, can I manage the land? So say it was even, maybe a little bit more to do it this way, because we're also asking them to be more refined in what they're doing. Can I manage this land better? Can I help, in my case, mission readiness? So do I know enough that if a soldier called, you have to do a critical training or there's an explosion or whatever happens on our facilities that I can't talk about,
00:27:33
Speaker
whatever that stuff is. And I need to make a split second decision. There's a fire coming on our, on our Northern installation. Can I make a split second decision based on chicken scratch and waiting for the report? No, I can't. I don't. And they're like, well, it's not consulted and, and conferred on my, you know, by Shippo. And I'm like, so you're just going to let everything burn, I guess, or whatever. Yeah.
00:27:58
Speaker
I can tell them to move their actions somewhere else quickly or to create firebreaks. If I at least had the data in real time, which can be done on tablets and devices like this, I can make decisions and have them out in field, the emergency response people out in field respond quickly to protect the sites. I cannot do that in this current format, nor will I ever be able to do that because it's going to take them another
00:28:21
Speaker
six months to get me a report. Anyway, I'm real passionate about it. Sorry if I've seen it right. It's very frustrating. It's been 40 years of nonsense, it seems. I hear you. Yeah, totally. On top of that, when you're collecting in a digital format, you can also collect all kinds of data in the background.
00:28:45
Speaker
about the user, all the data are linked to the user, maybe to the precise location, the time. There's all kinds of other data that you could be collecting that kind of enrich and help to validate your dataset that the field crew don't even have to think about. And improve their methods. Say, okay, this person's walking at this pace and, you know, whatever, at this time of day, et cetera, et cetera. And it seems like there's richer
00:29:13
Speaker
data from time. So we collected it seasonally, which I've been trying to do along with like a fixed-wing and geophysical data. We've got several different things going on. Now I can integrate all of those different types of data at the same scales and see, you know,
00:29:32
Speaker
how we can better manage that land, protect the land, you know, avoid impacts or et cetera. So like Michael was saying, it's collecting all this data about the user, about the texture, all kinds of other things that can influence and bias. We don't really have access to accept the chicken scratch we were talking about based on the thing that says it's hot today. You know, I see some plants, it's not a little sunny. It's a right that really teach you to do that.
00:29:58
Speaker
I don't know how many people actually still write, you know, kind of the environment that they're operating.
00:30:05
Speaker
Yeah, I'm interested to, going back to the issue of archaeological advances, I mentioned the Nevada IMAX form.
Efforts in Data Standardization and Integration
00:30:12
Speaker
Well, some people don't even remember that IMAX stands for Intermountain Antiquities Computer System, I believe. And that was a whole mountain region with many states recording basically on the same forms. And I don't know how long it took for them to all end up with their own versions of the IMAX form, but it wasn't very long. And then Nevada's got their own. Utah's.
00:30:34
Speaker
doesn't even call it that anymore. And Nevada actually dramatically changed theirs a few years ago from a longer complicated form to basically a short form, which I think was a mistake because they had a lot of nice little boxes that you could fill in and now you just kind of have to know everything and new people in the field just don't and they might miss some stuff. But either way, looking at one of your articles here, it looks like the BLM is trying to bring this kind of thing back with the national cultural resources information system. What can you tell us about that in the last couple of minutes of this segment?
00:31:03
Speaker
I'll let Michael talk about that. We're trying to work with all kinds of federal landowners, federal land, our site from Texas, you know, covers a majority of lives. A lot of these sort of let's help get data looking better.
00:31:19
Speaker
Well, Nick Krims, the system that the BLM has developed was developed because of some of the problems that we're talking about. They cannot access data in order to make decisions quickly and reliably.
00:31:35
Speaker
A number of years ago, there was a requirement put forth by the BLM that the BLM's offices had to make travel management plans to plan how different roads and other pathways are being used on the lands that they manage. They cross jurisdictions, go across states.
00:31:53
Speaker
And they realized they didn't really have the data to do that. And they needed to access these data that are most of the data that the system integrates are from a whole series of different state databases that are individually maintained. They all have different formats and schemas, all kinds of things like that.
00:32:19
Speaker
What they did is over many years of meeting all kinds of consultation with agency personnel and SHPOs and database administrators, they finally came to the agreement to be able to get the data from the different SHPOs into their system.
00:32:40
Speaker
In order to do that, they have to create complex Python scripts that extract and translate the data from the database into their standardized common data model.
00:32:55
Speaker
And then those data are hosted, integrated data are hosted in an enterprise portal that the BLM administers that allows them to be able to see all the sites that have recorded the project areas.
00:33:13
Speaker
do some basic modeling within the interface that allows them to predict based on topographic and hydrological and other variables, the likelihood of archaeological sites in any of the areas they're looking at.
00:33:30
Speaker
and also summarize, like say draw up polygon of area of interest that they need to make decisions about, summarize the history of investigations and what's been found there, how much has been surveyed and that sort of thing.
00:33:47
Speaker
But that was a tremendous effort that they had to do over many years. And still the data that they're able to integrate is actually fairly high level summary data about sites and projects. It doesn't include all the many observations that went into those interpretations. Sure. Well, that sounds like a massive effort, like you said. And I've got some other questions around that sort of, I guess, data
00:34:17
Speaker
importing and consolidation. And we'll talk about that on the other side of the break, back in a minute. Welcome back to the Archeotech Podcast, final segment of this Data Problem episode, which I feel like we've talked about these kinds of things a lot on this podcast, and especially with Paul on and him being a huge database nerd. We've talked to a lot of different people and a lot of different interviews and talked about different articles and a lot of things around how do we collect data in a way that makes it
00:34:46
Speaker
useful for the future, not just for right now in the report that you have to turn in at the moment in time and make this one decision, but also in the future so we can bring these big decisions together. And something one of you guys mentioned in a previous segment reminded me as we're recording this, one of the last episodes of the CRM archaeology podcast,
00:35:04
Speaker
You know, one of our hosts there is a professor at Berkeley and he was brought us a topic about chat GPT and how chat GPT could be used to write, you know, is being used to write by some people papers, reports and whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing.
00:35:22
Speaker
Using AI to do that, I think one of you guys mentioned, if we had this standardized collection of data, we actually could use AI to look at these connections that we just are incapable of seeing across different areas. It's absurd that we even have the standard of different states when it comes to prehistoric data because they didn't have the concept of states back then.
00:35:43
Speaker
They were all over the place, sometimes isolated in little regions and sometimes across massive expanses of areas. And we should just be looking at the data in that way, not in these little smaller pockets. You know what I mean? We're the duty and responsibility, and we are failing, unfortunately, to make you sad.
00:36:03
Speaker
we have this heart like i was saying these humans are a part of this like a living and dynamic system like biology, ecology, geology, these atoms and part of this warming rounds against the beautiful you know oxygen rich earth but they all have interconnections to each other with
00:36:20
Speaker
data and the changes happen through time. But there's just a chasm in the ability to understand these interconnections and the changes. In the chasm, we're creating. It's the human data, namely archaeological data. So climate change and everything else, we have to be able to
00:36:37
Speaker
to integrate and you have these arbitrary boundaries, not just the state level or the country level. We create them ourselves. They're called the management. We don't call management units, but they're sites and they're enforceable by law. That's crazy. We need to utilize AI and look at impacts, densities. We're quite familiar with this drawing. It's with cancer, say, on a part of your body, just drawing a circle and be like, I think that's going to capture it all. Right.
00:37:07
Speaker
No, don't take all of that out. You need to actually see the density and analyze that density. And if we did that, imagine if regulations change. I'm not saying change or the basic regulations of what a site is and per state has different definitions, tribes have different definitions. What I'm saying is that if we did this, it can inform these decisions.
00:37:30
Speaker
And also we can make those decisions weighted based on these types of regulations and if a regulation changes, say in Arizona, certain types of things were important for historic trash. We're just going to use that, right? And all of a sudden they're like, we get too much historic trash stuff. Those aren't really sites. Okay.
00:37:50
Speaker
How hard is it for me, with tens of thousands of sites, unless I go reanalyze what part of the component of something was, consider the historic trash and its significance, I got to redo the survey again. Or if I had the data, I can just devalue, deweight the observation, and boom, I adhere to the law. Thank you, grant me maps. Sorry, I'll hit you.
00:38:22
Speaker
I mean, I think another point though is to your point is that many of the agencies now are moving towards or want to move towards a landscape perspective and to manage things at a landscape level. BLM has, uh,
00:38:39
Speaker
landscape approach to the management of public lands. Other agencies are voicing the same interests. There's consortiums that have been assembled to do those kinds of things for ecology, but we don't have the data organized or integrated in a way that we could actually do that, nor are we implementing the methods that would allow us to do that.
00:39:02
Speaker
more readily. So we're at a loss in those kind of ways that Shelby's saying right now to be able to look at data across a larger landscape and integrate those data with environmental and other data to which they're directly related.
00:39:22
Speaker
By the same token, we're unable to really address the concerns of a lot of tribes and other stakeholder communities who are very interested in the landscape,
00:39:36
Speaker
the resources in the landscape, the plants, the animals, the minerals, the landforms, and how all those things relate together to form their heritage or component of their way of life. And we're essentially ignoring those connections and those relationships much of the time by siloing the data, not only
00:40:02
Speaker
in terms of storage and archiving, but siloing how we actually collect and represent the culture resource data as being pertaining to individual sites and projects.
00:40:18
Speaker
Beyond that as well, these data, as we've been trying to emphasize, are important not just to archaeologists or to the management of the archaeological record. They're important to understanding our place within the world and processes that have occurred with societies and the environment for thousands of years. Archaeology
00:40:43
Speaker
is the only discipline that can provide a deep time perspective on what has happened in terms of human environment interactions and changes in societies as a result of things like climate change, warfare, migration,
00:41:04
Speaker
Archaeology is uniquely positioned to be able to do that, and CRM has been developing and can contribute these massive volumes of data about many different times and places and environmental and social contexts that right now, frankly, we're unable to access in a way that would make those data as powerful as they could be.
00:41:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, can I interject here really quickly? The reason why I can be so aggressive too, Michael saying, we can't integrate, can't do this, we can't do that, and you've said it as well, Chris, is that internally we're thinking, well, we want to do all this stuff, but if we don't, and I agree, we can't do any of it, but the issue too is that we need to do it.
00:41:54
Speaker
If we don't do it and without the transparency and the ability for others outside of our field to understand the purpose of archaeology and the usefulness of archaeology, I mean, we've probably all heard like, what do you
Concerns and Potential of Data Projects
00:42:07
Speaker
guys actually do? You know, from your clients to whatever, why do we have to do this constantly and constantly? And we say, well, it's required by law. Now watch this. If you have policymakers, which we do in various different levels of the government, that are questioning why is CRM
00:42:24
Speaker
that relies on these regulations. That's why it exists in the US. And it is. It's a moneymaker. It might be a multimillion or even maybe billion dollar company, you know, companies right now in the street. And what if they just decide to deregulate?
00:42:41
Speaker
because they don't understand it, and we're not useful, because they have to fund other things like biology or whatever that seem to be more useful to us now as humans. So, in fact, right now there are bills and regulations currently under review to deregulate the requirements of archaeology, namely like the SLI, the Secretary of Interior requirements and standards for archaeologists.
00:43:05
Speaker
They want to minimize, they want to reduce what those requirements are. Now, because it's too expensive and we don't have enough of them and we can't find them and it's too cumbersome, as well as section 106 and section 110 and other requirements. If they do that, now you won't have the manpower, the incentive or the money to change. Behavior change has to happen now.
00:43:27
Speaker
Wow. And that's absolute, right? Going back to the last segment real quick on the BLM effort, I got to mention this because I want to get this in. I see Sarah Kanza on one of these articles and we've talked to her before. Eric, her husband was actually on like, I think the third or fourth episode of this show, you know, over eight years ago.
00:43:48
Speaker
and talk to both of them a lot. And they, of course, run Open Context and started that. And the DINA project, the Digital Index of North American Archaeology, was born out of the Open Context project. And when we first started hearing about that a long time ago, and we talked to a few people about DINA on this, probably six, seven, eight years ago,
00:44:08
Speaker
you know, talking about that, I just expected it to spread across the country a lot faster than it has. And it almost seems to have stalled out. I don't know if I'm getting a misread on that, but it's just, it's just like, it seems like that is almost one of the solutions that we're looking for. At least the start of a solution that we're looking for. What do you guys think about the, the Dina project and their efforts with open context? Well, I appreciate, I know them quite well. They were, they were on a tag grant and we wrote some of that book I was talking about offline with you.
00:44:38
Speaker
the guides of the practice in digital archaeology in TDAR, which I worked on with Keith Kentig kind of in its infancy started. It's very good. I think it's a great start, but we need to get people like that and TDAR people that have different perspectives. One's looking at the artifact level, the other one's looking at the report and looking at this and BLM is trying to do this. The problem is not that we don't have people that want to do this. It's that we can't get together and decide
00:45:08
Speaker
ties together and find one solution and lobby to make people realize that we can be transparent in archaeology. You can see the process which directly correlates with the regulation and directly correlates with the requirements. Right now, they have no idea. And if you don't have an archaeologist that's in an agency firm and they're just sending a report, they check the box, like it's done and they put the report on the shelf and then the project goes forward. And that's it.
00:45:38
Speaker
So I think that you need to definitely
00:45:43
Speaker
look at things like Opencom. I think that they've done an amazing job and I think it stalled out because people don't see the point to use it. It could be pricing models that I think have issues with TDAR. We need to get together and talk a lot over and over and have working groups. When we get federal grants like all of these have, we have an accountability even further to make sure that what we're doing
00:46:08
Speaker
is actually transferable, right, to other applications and usable and widely spread. And I can't speak much more to it. I respect them wholeheartedly and they've taught me a lot also about data and data ethics. So Michael, I don't know if you're thinking that.
00:46:28
Speaker
Well, I think a very important thing that OpenContext and Dina have been able to accomplish or that they've been working on is developing ontological matching schemes. And they've demonstrated the ability to pull together all these diverse data sets and diverse taxonomies and ways of
00:46:52
Speaker
you know identifying the same thing or something that's similar they've been able to bring those together into a common scheme so that you can find things that are of a similar nature that fall within the same time period or have the same function or the same types of features.
00:47:13
Speaker
And so that allows, you know, in the case of, like Adena, that allows people to identify sites that are recorded in many different state databases that have, you know, a similar attribute, like they're all paleoindian or a particular period within that. But I think the very nature of them, you know, being able to show that these data can be integrated and to develop the
00:47:42
Speaker
some of the means to do that is a great foundation for us coming together and finding a common sort of core meta ontology that data can start to coalesce.
00:47:58
Speaker
in towards and enable us to start collecting and managing data that are readily interoperable if not from the point of inception, interoperable and reusable. I think something that's really maybe handicapped to some people's views that the use of those data is that they're
00:48:24
Speaker
restricted in terms of being able to share locational information. So the very precise locational information that's maybe stored in a state database is not available to the average user of DINAS. You only get it at a certain
00:48:42
Speaker
course of resolution. So being able to immediately harness those data to, say, do some kind of broad scale regional or even broader analysis that makes use of other data like environmental variables on hydrology or habitats or that sort of thing, topography,
00:49:07
Speaker
It's not really achievable in the state that things are. They could actually be with the data that they've been able to integrate. On some level, although those data, of course, are collected in many different ways and individual sites mean different things in different places because of how those data or those sites are defined.
00:49:30
Speaker
I think it's an excellent foundation. And as Shelby points out, I think we're at the point now where we all really need to get together and there needs to be a collaborative
00:49:43
Speaker
community that's working on this towards a common goal. That's a good point. Yeah, absolutely.
Future of Data Standardization in Archaeology
00:50:05
Speaker
We've got to wrap up this show. I've got one more question for you guys. You mentioned this issue was born out of a similar symposium you guys ran at the SAAs. I know when you come off of one of those symposiums, especially at the SAAs,
00:50:22
Speaker
You just got this real high like, Oh my God, we're going to do so much with this. And then, you know, if nobody takes the reins on that, it just kind of dies. Well, at least you guys took that and put it into this issue. And now that that's, and I know probably these articles are probably written and edited nine months ago or something. It's always a big delay on that kind of stuff. But now that the issue is out, we're a month and a half or more past that.
00:50:44
Speaker
And people are probably recognizing your efforts here in the efforts of the authors of these papers. Building on that high, where do you want to go now? What's next? Shelby, we'll start with you. Right. So we were approached that same question at the SC, so you can buy that one of the
00:51:02
Speaker
editing, you know, publishers there with advances. And we have lots of plans for what's next, so we never stopped. You know, we've got lots of newsletters and other publications out there that we're going to continue to build, as we've did with the articles before this article, before this special issue, we had a pretty special issue. So not every, you know,
00:51:24
Speaker
two years or so, we want to continue that in the archaeological community. But I really want to go and try to get this information out in other venues outside of archaeology, as well as push forward with our desire to get together. You know, we're creating a website, et cetera, to sign up with the like-minded types of things. It's not quite out yet. But so we can start getting together and finding
00:51:54
Speaker
where we start and where we're going. So Michael, you might have some additional comments about that. The issue, developing the issue and the whole thing is a, is quite a long road. So I believe along the lines of what Shelby saying that we, we really need to start developing the collaboratively, the, the tools and the,
00:52:18
Speaker
community to push the needle forward and start implementing new types of processes and systems that we can actually achieve the things that we're talking about. Because right now the issue is really about a vision for the future and we need to start taking the steps to realize aspects of this vision and we are certainly just one little piece of that ourselves.
00:52:47
Speaker
So we're really asking people to join us and let's change the world together. And so reaching out and let's get together and have the conversations with productive outcomes, start to better understand what are the next steps in order to push these types of things forward. Certainly there are tons of very good work that's going on all over the place in archaeology. I just think both for funding purposes and time,
00:53:16
Speaker
uh, you know, how much time we have to do. Let's get together and come up with a unified purpose. And that sounds probably a lot easier and shorter than, than colossal effort that that would take. I mean, we are archeologists after all, and we're kind of all, you know, alpha personalities. So you go really well or really bad. Well, there's many worth mentioning that there's a early house
00:53:41
Speaker
seminars that were done in the seventies, uh, to, to figure out how to do CRM and they kind of, they basically try to write the book about
00:53:53
Speaker
what needs to be done to develop the industry and to comply with the laws that had been recently passed, the National Historic Preservation Act, principally. They had some great ideas and a number of the thoughts that they had at the time, issues that they brought up, we still haven't been able to
00:54:16
Speaker
address and achieve. There is another, there's a sort of an early house revisited
00:54:23
Speaker
effort that is being organized right now, and the SAA has been involved in it. There was a forum at the most recent SAA meetings in Portland. And as far as I understand, they're going to have, I think it's the National Park Service is going to host in their facilities in West Virginia, a large group of archaeologists, people working in the preservation
00:54:52
Speaker
field, I think maybe 30 to 50 individuals maybe, to try to hash out what the big issues are and essentially write a plan for the next 50 years of CRM. The issue of data collection and management, I haven't seen as being a major component of that.
00:55:19
Speaker
And that, to me, is a little bit mystifying. And I think, at least for Shelby and I, there are certainly issues that are highly critical that haven't been addressed, like decolonizing archaeology, incorporating tribal perspectives and interests in a much better way, and a whole variety of other issues that have come to the fore in the last
00:55:48
Speaker
decade or more. But data collection and management of the type of things that we're talking about thus far doesn't seem to be the major focus, and I really think it should be.
00:56:02
Speaker
All right, guys. Well, that's all the time we have for this episode. It sounds like, I mean, we still have a long way to go. And we still have a lot of people to convince and a lot of conversations to have. But it really sounds like the people that need to do this, that are the driving force of this, namely you guys and some other people in this space are really driving it forward. And I hope we can keep that going and end up in a good place.
00:56:27
Speaker
Thank you for coming on the show. We've just interviewed Michael Hyland and Shelby Manet. And again, thank you guys for coming on. And we really appreciate it and look forward to whatever's coming out from you guys next in this space. All right. Thank you so much for having us. Yes. Thank you for having us. It's great to be here.
00:56:46
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:57:11
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.