Federal, state and local governments spend millions of dollars each year to support archaeological research, much of it mandated by law to mitigate impacts associated with construction/development activities. To obtain maximum return it is necessary to develop methods to integrate and analyze large bodies of data which extend across multiple sites and projects. This research project serves to further that goal. Radiocarbon dating is the primary method that North American archaeologists use to document the ages of archaeology sites, and millions of dollars in federal funding has been spent in obtaining those dates. With large samples of such dates, archaeologists can generate "summed probability distributions" to reconstruct population histories. These population histories provide an important piece of North America's ancient history: where and when did populations rise and decline? The database this project will create will provide researchers with a useful tool to investigate many different problems in several disciplines.
Compiling the dates is time-consuming, since there are tens of thousands, and since they are published in many different places, including on the web, in books, journals, monographs and in grey literature. In addition, it is not simply the dates themselves that must be compiled, but also their associated information that researchers need to "clean" the database and create a sample useful for their research. Dates will be compiled for California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana from existing regional databases, through "deep dive" web searches, and crowd-sourcing to professional and amateur organizations. The major (private sector) radiocarbon labs have also offered to assist. Eventually, the compiled dates and associated information will be made publically available through the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database, which will have a Google Earth link so that both temporal and spatial patterns in date (population) distributions can be studied. Researchers will be able to upload dates easily in batches to this database to keep it current. Although the focus is on western North America, the intention is to extend the database to the eastern U.S. as well. It is anticipated that this will become the world's largest database of radiocarbon dates.
Summed probability distributions of radiocarbon dates are commonly used as measures of prehistoric population sizes. Therefore, this database will leverage research into all population-related phenomena in North America. Researchers can use it to test hypotheses (a) of how human population responds to climate change, technological innovation, emigration, and disease; (b) that relate behaviors such as warfare, migration, and technological innovation to population pressure; (c) drawn from genetic data, e.g., that hypothesize population bottlenecks. Such a database will transform how hypotheses are tested and consequently how one understands North American prehistory.
This project will (a) create a free, public archive for researchers that will enhance the research infrastructure of archaeology in the academic community and the private (CRM) sector and benefit educational institutions with a resource for student projects and class demonstrations; (b) help move North American archaeology toward its next frontier, "Big Data," since archaeology's strength is its ability to see patterns across vast reaches of space and time; and (c) this project will help catalyze a shift in the culture of American academic archaeology by moving it toward a model that is more typical of researchers in the physical and natural sciences that create databases as research tools.
