Joe Roe

Joe Roe

Computational archaeologist specialising in Southwest Asian prehistory.

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XRONOS: open chronometric data from archive to infrastructure

Joe Roe and Martin Hinz

Paper presented at Digital Archaeology Bern 2023, 2023.

Abstract

Chronometric data has been one of the principle domains in which open data and open science approaches have been applied over the last ten years. Comprehensive compilations of radiocarbon dates have become available for many parts of the world in the last decade and, as natural next step, there are now several initiatives to collate this data globally, including the retrieval tool c14bazAAR (Schmid et al. 2019), the IntChron exchange format (Bronk Ramsey et al. 2019), and the synthetic database p3kc14 (Bird et al. 2022). This move from archiving individual datasets to producing a living open data infrastructure for archaeological chronologies raises a number of challenges. Radiocarbon datasets are still sorely lacking for many parts of the world and, even in those regions with good coverage, the quality of data is highly uneven and largely undocumented. There exists no central repository ensuring the long-term sustainability and completeness of these datasets, and the potential of placing other sources of chronometric information (e.g. dendrochronology, typological dating) in an open data framework has hardly been realised at all.

Here, building on and complementing these initiatives, we present XRONOS: a new web-based platform for chronometric data from archaeological contexts worldwide, combining an open data repository with tools for importing, curating and analysing chronometric information from diverse sources. The principal design goals of the software are to:

  1. combine all available sources of radiocarbon and other chronometric data in single database;
  2. develop robust tools for the continuous ingestion and refinement of this data;
  3. disseminate this data within an open and FAIR framework, embedding it in the wider world of Linked Open Data in archaeology and beyond.

This talk outlines the conceptual and technical infrastructure developed to realise these goals in XRONOS’ initial phases of development (2019 and 2021–2022), including a generalised data model for site and radiocarbon information, extendable to other chronometric data; an R- and Ruby-based pipeline for continuous ingestion of data from a variety of sources; continuous, semi-automated data cleaning protocols; a Ruby-on-Rails application providing a web-based frontend to the data and a REST API for programmatic access; and an R package for interfacing with the API. We believe the XRONOS framework provides more open, more reliable, and more comprehensive access to chronometric data than previously available, as well as a foundation for its continuous expansion and refinement.

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