http://www.abebooks.com/Maadi-Vol-Predynastic-Cemeteries-Wadi-Digla/9410760608/bd
- Stephen Ramsay, “Databases,” in Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Professional, 2004)
Archaeology is essentially the study of stuff – material culture remains, or artifacts, are studied in various ways to extrapolate information about a wider extinct society. Certain case studies in archaeology are incredibly well suited to being organized and then further examined with the use of a database.
Stephan Ramsey defines the purpose of a database (especially in the relational sense): “to store information about a particular domain, and to allow one to ask questions about the state of that domain.” He emphasizes that the particular usefulness of the Relational Model in database design is in the language; instead of simply storing large amounts of data, the Relational Model allows interaction between the individual data points. The example he uses is a database of American Novels, and he demonstrates how primary and foreign keys can provide links between the data points. Almost like a game of bingo, the primary and foreign keys allow one to relate information across categories: for example, assuming the bingo call is B7, B would be the primary key of “Author,” and 7 the foreign key “name of work,” thus a search for B7 would tell us that Mark Twain had written Tom Sawyer.
This type of relational interaction of data can be extremely useful in the study of settlement layout and function, or even for mortuary archaeology. Imagine you have uncovered a grave yard with over individual 100 burials (which is actually a very modest data set). Within each burial you have specific data points such as sex of the deceased, approximate age, health, location of the grave, contents (did the person have burial goods? If so what, how many of each type, etc?). By inputting all of the information into a Relational Model database, the investigator can begin to draw comparisons between relative wealth or status (quantity/quality of burial goods) and the age or sex of the individual. A pattern in these types of correlations can begin to elucidate the mechanisms of social hierarchy and status within a society, whether status is achieved or inherited (finding infant graves with a lot of wealth is a great example of inherited status), how the society works in terms of gender roles, etc.
These databases can also produce a picture of the larger society by relating the location of artifact finds in a settlement site to their function. For instance, if a database search demonstrates that there was a high occurrence of food waste materials in a certain location, it may have been a cooking area. This can then be cross-referenced with the location of any ovens or firepits at the site to further the argument.