Smithsonian Anthropology Collections Database
The Jeffersonian—oops! no, Dr. “Bones” Brennan doesn’t work here—Smithsonian Institution has a nice, online Anthropology Collections Database. It “includes 97% of the cataloged specimens that are currently in the Ethnology and Archaeology collections. New records are added as specimens are cataloged. The online records include the fields of information most commonly requested by researchers, including digital […] Read MoreOIDOO
“Oidoo”? It sounds a bit like something Scooby-Doo would say… Just kidding. It actually is an acronym that stands for Oriental Institute Demotic Ostraca Online. Held in the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute Museum, it is “a large collection of nearly 900 Demotic ostraca, pottery sherds upon which ancient scribes recorded a wide variety of […] Read MoreChogha Mish Fauna
We are proud to announce the arrival of a new, exciting project in the Open Context database, co-authored by Levent Atici (University of Nevada Las Vegas), Justin S.E. Lev-Tov (Statistical Research, Inc.) and our own Sarah Whitcher Kansa. Chogha Mish Fauna This project uses the publicly available dataset of over 30,000 animal bone specimens from excavations […] Read MoreWFU Museum of Anthropology Online Artifact Database
A nice article (also available as pdf) in the news section of the recently-revamped Archaeological Institute of America website introduces the Museum of Anthropology Online Artifact Database at Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, NC). “The Museum of Anthropology’s collections of approximately 28,000 archaeological and ethnographic objects represent ancient and contemporary traditional non-Western cultures from around the […] Read MoreDigitising Cultural Heritage at the BM
A study day at the British Museum Saturday 4 September, 09.55–16.30 Stevenson Lecture Theatre Free, booking advised As well as revolutionising modern work and social life, digital technology is also transforming cultural heritage management. The power to store, organise and distribute vast quantities of complex data makes it possible to do things that only 20 […] Read MoreOnline archaeological-site catalogs
I’d like to point out two examples of what I would call online archaeological-site catalogs, i.e., databases that provide brief but to-the-point info on as many sites as possible of a specific region. The first example is the Delta Survey. An information centre for the archaeological sites of Lower Egypt, an initiative of the Egypt Exploration Society […] Read MoreThe Global Egyptian Museum
The Comité International pour l’Égyptologie/International Committee for Egyptology (CIPEG, a committee of ICOM) provided the impetus for the Global Egyptian Museum project (GEM). It is “an international electronic database of Egyptian objects as a tool for scholarly research” (14,975 entries) but also including a version geared toward the general public (1,340 entries). “The aim of the GEM […] Read MoreTutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation
An article in The Guardian (UK)—tip of the hat to Heather Baker—drew my attention to an Egyptological gem: the Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation website. This labor of love by a team led by Jaromir Malek of Oxford University, started in 1993 and finally in sight of the finish, “is ambitious in its scope but simple in […] Read More