Legacies Ancient and Modern: Hybrid Approaches to Digital Presentation of Legacy Data

Mediterranean and Near Eastern “Big Digs” of the 20th century are a significant source of information on the ancient world, but because of their broad scopes, managing and presenting their data is complicated. Recording and interpretive systems evolve over decades, and changes in personnel result in shifting priorities and the loss of project “oral histories.” This paper will provide a comparative perspective on the challenges of digital documentation and data presentation from two sites: the Poggio Civitate Archaeological Project (1966-present) and the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis (1958-present). Both projects are lynchpin sites for the study of their respective cultures, ancient Etruria and Lydia, and their investigation has been crucial to shifting and enhancing the modern understanding of them. Due to the projects’ consistent leadership and the prioritization of presenting information to scholarly and general audiences alike, they have been able to create digital presences that cope with the complexities of integrating legacy data with newly-discovered finds. This paper will outline the hybrid approaches used by the projects to automate some aspects of data standardization and the conversion of analog formats, while, by necessity, relying heavily on hand-curation by those intimately familiar with project histories. Even though both projects shifted to digital databases at around the same time and they share a core philosophy in making their data amenable for integration with other data sets, the way in which each has chosen to prioritize and present information differs, based on the nature of their original recording systems.

(Theresa Huntsman, Eric Kansa)