2008 Pecos Conference

Schedule > August 9 (SAT) > Program

2008 Pecos Conference

Program Subject to Change (download pdf doc)

Preliminary Program: “A Century of Cooperation, Collaboration, and Progress“

Saturday, August 9
Location: Pecos Main Tent

8:00 to 10:00 am: Plenary Session 3

Panel Discussion of Comet Explosion Theory

10:00 am to 12:00 pm: Plenary Session 4

Mega Databases in Southwestern Archaeology: Current Status and Future Prospects

The participants in the Mega-database Plenary are:

Chair: David R. Wilcox, Senior Research Anthropologist, Museum of Northern Arizona
Bill Doleman, Director of ARMS, Laboratory of Anthropology, Museum of New Mexico
Michael Barton, Chair of the AZSITE Consortium, Professor of Anthropology, School of Human Evolution & Social Change, Arizona State University
Jeffrey S. Dean, Professor, Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona
David R. Wilcox again
Scott Ingram, Ph.D. Student, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University
Teresa Rodrigeus, Physical Anthropologist, Gila River Indian Community
Keith Kintigh, Professor, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University

Once each of the panelists speak, the microphone will be opened for discussion. We encourage others who have assembled mega-databases to come forward and give a brief report on what they are doing along this line.

About this symposium and the on-going work behind it Keith Kintigh notes: "... With funding by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Archaeoinformatics.org (a consortium of 6 institutions: ASU, U of Arkansas, Penn State, SRI Foundation Washington State, U of York) has been working for the last 18 months to develop a plan for a digital information infrastructure for archaeology. Our two fundamental premises are: (1) as archaeologists we have ethical and legal responsibilities to assure the long-term preservation of irreplaceable digital representations of the archaeological record; and (2) improved access to digital reports, databases, images, and other records of archaeological investigations would improve the outcomes of current field research, enable comparative and synthetic research that could transform our understandings of prehistory, improve our ability to manage effectively the nation’s heritage resources, and speed and streamline the compliance process. At the same time ASU, with funding from NSF, has been building a prototype implementation of a platform, called tDAR for "the Digital Archaeological Record" that will allow integration of data across databases that use different recording schemes. At the 2008 Pecos Conference I will briefly introduce this initiative and describe its current state. See http://tdar.org and http://archaeoinformatics.org ... "