Since 2014, we have had a DINAA booth at the Society for American Archaeology conference. Please pay us a visit (booth #302) during the SAA meeting in Vancouver!
Project Team
David G. Anderson
David G. Anderson is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He has done fieldwork in the southeast, midwestern, and southwestern United States, and in the Caribbean, primarily in the US Virgin Islands. Professional interests include exploring the development of cultural complexity in Eastern North America, climate change and its impact on human societies past and present, improving the nation’s cultural resource management program, and writing syntheses of archaeological research. He founded the Paleoindian Database of the Americas (PIDBA) in 1990, and has long been an advocate for large scale, openly accessible data analysis and reporting in archaeology, as exemplified by efforts like DINAA.
Joshua J. Wells
Joshua J. Wells is an Associate Professor at Indiana University South Bend, with joint appointments in the Anthropology and Informatics programs. Through the Digital Index of North American Archaeology, he researches interoperability issues between large-scale heritage management databases, promoting data reusability and reproducible research. As convener for the Digital Data Interest Group of the Society for American Archaeology, he facilitates technological capacity building and open-source ethics in professional development. He sits on the editorial boards of Open Context and Reviews in Anthropology. He has consulted on big data, open science issues in Australia, North America, and the European Union.
Eric Kansa
Eric Kansa (PhD, Harvard University) leads development of Open Context (http://opencontext.org). His research explores Web architecture, service design, and how these issues relate to the social and professional context of the digital humanities. Eric also researches policy issues relating to intellectual property, including text-mining and cultural property concerns. He actively participates in a number of Open Science, Open Government, cyberinfrastructure, text-mining, and scholarly user needs initiatives. He has taught and practiced project management and information service design in the UC Berkeley School of Information’s Clinic program. He has been a principal investigator and co-investigator on projects funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, NEH, IMLS, Hewlett-Packard, Sunlight Foundation, Google, NSF, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Sarah Whitcher Kansa
As Executive Director of the Alexandria Archive Institute, Sarah promotes data sharing and publishing in various archaeological and cultural heritage communities. She has a Ph.D. in archaeology and has spent over 20 years conducting zooarchaeological research at sites in the Near East and Europe. She stands on the International and Executive Committees of the International Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ), where she is currently serving the 2018-2022 term as president. Sarah is currently chair of the Digital Technology Committee for the Archaeological Institute of America. Her past service includes the publications committees of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) and the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR). She is also the series editor for Archaeobiology (Lockwood Press) and Executive Editor of Open Context.
Kelsey Noack Myers
Kelsey Noack Myers, RPA, PhD, is the District Archaeologist within the Planning Branch of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Regional Planning and Environment Division North, Mississippi Valley Division and the Tribal Liaison for the Rock Island District. Her doctoral dissertation focused on cultural perseverance and increasing the visibility and inclusion of historic Native groups and their descendants in the study and practice of colonial archaeology in the Midwestern U.S. She has participated in archaeological projects across the Mid-Atlantic, Southeastern, Midwestern, and Northern Plains regions of the United States in the private, academic, and (state, federal, and tribal) government sectors. As a co-convener for the Digital Data Interest Group of the Society for American Archaeology, she facilitates technological capacity building and open-source ethics in professional development and practice.
Stephen J. Yerka
University of Tennessee PhD student, Stephen J. Yerka, MA, RPA, collaborates on all technical aspects of the DINAA project. He is Historic Preservation Specialist at the Tribal Historic Preservation Office of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indian. He is also co-director of the Paleoindian Database of the Americas (PIDBA) and is a member of Open Context’s editorial board. A former GIS/IT manager for the Tennessee Archaeology Laboratory, Steve worked on the first phase of DINAA and has published in American archaeology and informatics.
Thaddeus Bissett
Thaddeus Bissett earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 2014. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Philosophy at Northern Kentucky University. Formerly a CRM archaeologist, he has done fieldwork throughout the Southeastern United States. His research is focused mainly on Archaic period cultures of region, and he is currently involved in field projects in northern Kentucky, coastal South Carolina, and western Tennessee.