The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) is a digital repository for archaeology being developed with support from the National Science Foundation (grants in 2004 and 2006) and the Andrew. W. Mellon Foundation. This infrastructure aspires to become a national digital repository for archaeological information, including databases, reports, images, and other kinds of archaeological information. For archaeology, this project has the goals of: (1) advancing archaeologists' ability to engage in synthetic and comparative research; and (2) providing a means to maintain the long-term utility and accessibility of irreplaceable primary data in the face of inadequate metadata and rapidly changing technology. In computer science, the challenges are to develop methods to: (1) perform ad hoc data integration where the semantic demands of the query are reconciled with the semantic content of the available datasets; and (2) resolve conflicts in concept-oriented query processing that arise from inconsistent recording strategies (represented as ontologies). For more information about tDAR, please visit http://www.tdar.org.

In order to use this prototype you must first register and accept a user agreement but access is free. Those wishing access to sensitive information (such as site location) or desiring to contribute data must receive additional approval. This prototype accepts Microsoft Access databases and Excel spreadsheets, reports and other documents in PDF or plain ASCII format, and images in JPG and TIFF format. Additional data formats will be accepted in the future. The prototype integration effort focuses on archaeological faunal data but will be readily extensible to other material classes.

A tutorial that can help you get started with tDAR is available here.

You are using a beta version of tDAR. We will endeavor to fully maintain appropriate content contributed under this beta release. However, improvements in the production version may require some changes to previously added content. Also, once the production version of tDAR is released, newly submitted content will be subject to review, including for appropriateness to Digital Antiquity’s objectives and conformance with tDAR’s contributor agreement and its basic metadata requirements. With the production release of tDAR we expect to similarly review content submitted under the beta release. For these reasons, we may need to contact you for clarifications or approval of changes other than minor changes.

As this is a beta release, we will appreciate your tolerance of any problems you encounter and encourage you to send comments, suggestions, and bug reports to comments@tdar.org