The Levantine Ceramics Project: Phase II

SPRING 2013 RESEARCH INCUBATION AWARDEE

Andrea Berlin (Archaeology, College of Arts and Sciences)

In the field of archaeology we are drowning in data, and that creates an unusual problem. In most fields, more data is a good thing. In theory that’s true for archaeology as well. In practice, however, keeping up with ever-increasing amounts of material evidence isolates researchers into specialized silos where in-house talk becomes off-putting jargon, deflecting others from understanding and leveraging new information. Sheer quantity creates roadblocks instead of pathways, hindering efforts to marshal the evidence we find to address the questions we pose. This isn’t only a problem for archaeologists. Archaeological discoveries and the insights they generate are relevant to an array of disciplines, from anthropology to history to religious studies. There should be a straightforward way for scholars in such areas to access archaeological evidence, and archaeologists themselves should have a way to easily submit, collate, present, compare, and deploy that evidence.

This work was funded by a Hariri Research Award made in June, 2013.