Managing the Data: The Tell Ziyadeh Archaeological Project

Archaeological research depends on several types of data; material, contextual and analytical. Material data refers to the actual artifacts, features, and sites themselves. Contextual data are location, local geography, chronology, cross-correlations among data sets, historical and ethnographic. Analyses may be geochemical (petrographic, isotopic, pXRF), stylistic, or comparative archaeological. For an effective understanding of archaeological sites, a research project must be based on a research design suited for effective data recovery, analysis, interpretation and synthesis. With the development of digital technology, the amount of data that can be incorporated into each archaeological project has grown exponentially, and making these data accessible for other researchers and creating digital archives is critically important, especially as archaeology is a highly destructive science. In this poster, we use the example of our Tell Ziyadeh project, to show how archaeologists deal with such issues.