Achievement

IGERT-TEECH Trainee Aaron Gidding is working on new imaging, archiving and analysis techniques for archaeologists which allow researchers to digitally recreate ceramic vessels from potsherds found during excavations and to synthesize this information in a Digital Pottery Informatics Database (DPID). His research is aimed at allowing archaeologists to acquire new information using imaging techniques such as x-ray florescence to augment the artifact specific information in the DPID and to subsequently run queries about the assemblages of data collected in the database to create correlations between different pottery artifacts that might not have been apparent otherwise. The DPID is currently based on data pertaining to 2 tons of pottery sherds from our field site in Jordan alone. The ultimate goal of the database is to create a venue for the rapid sharing of data between many researchers, to enhance collaboration and create new ways of mining data.