Managing 'A Mountain' of Rock Art Digital Data

Currently, rock art research generates large amounts of digital data, both un-structured and structured. This paper discusses the significant role that digital data management systems and repositories such as the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) can play in the examination, management, and long-term curation of these data. tDAR is a dynamic digital platform that allows archaeologists to conduct research with and manage their data. The paper describes how rock art researchers can use tDAR to study, organize, and share vast amounts of unstructured data; such as images, reports, and field notes; and large structured data sets. It also presents a case study from the American Southwest as well as other examples from current collections in tDAR to illustrate tDAR’s utility in managing rock art data. The case study focuses on legacy rock art data from A Mountain (Tempe or Hayden Butte) in Tempe, Arizona. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.