Achievement

We have developed a new methodology and computational tools for the analyses of archaeological data acquired at a cyber-enabled field site in Jordan. Archaeology has entered what computer scientist Jim Gray called the Fourth Paradigm of scientific research where new discoveries are a result of data-intensive science, or eScience. Our team went from traditional eyeball & pencil-and-paper to completely digital data methods, creating a data avalanche requiring an interdisciplinary IGERT team of engineers, computer scientists, and archaeologists to store, search, analyze, and disseminate these data. Utilizing diagnostic imaging techniques to collect billions of geo-referenced data points, plus GIS-based artifact and material culture sample datasets we created a new method for archaeological and historical discovery. These massive datasets required new transformative and translational visualization and analysis tools, moving archaeologists into the realm of data-intensive computing.