With National Science Foundation support Dr. Britt Bousman and his collaborators will convert handwritten archaeological site data to an electronic format and make it widely available to interested researchers. For over a decade archaeologists have conducted survey and excavation in the Zeekoe Valley which is located in the upper Karoo region of South Africa's central plateau. Some 5,000 sq. km of scrub desert have been searched on foot to produce site distribution maps that document, in one valley, repeated occupations from over a million years ago to recent times. This is the largest available body of data on prehistoric hunter-gatherer spatial organization in the world. Approximately 15,000 individual sites have been recorded in pencil and paper format. At the time most of this work was conducted, means for electronically recording and sharing data were not available. Thus this valuable data base is difficult to analyze or share and is in danger of physical deterioration. With this award, the team will consolidate the entire Zeekoe Valley record and transfer it to electronic media. They will: 1. Render the data far more easily and rapidly manipulatable in a GIS format which will overlay each mapped site on an aerial photograph; 2. make the record fully accessible on CD-ROM in all its parts to all interested scholars, thus encouraging new avenues of enquiry beyond the collaborators own interests in the data; 3. make the record available on the Internet to educational institutions with upper level undergraduate or graduate classes in hunter-gatherer archaeology and geography, fields where there is already a perceived need for such data bases; 4. develop a protocol for similar projects in the future; 5. rescue extant documents from physical decay.
Archaeologists wish to understand how human societies at technologically simple levels adapted to harsh and changing environments, to determine what subsistence and locational strategies they employed and how these changed over time. To do this, good distributional information is essential and the Zeekoe material provides an unparalleled data base. The electronic archive will be widely used by anthropological researchers.
