HNDS-I: From Households to Landscapes: Cyberinfrastructure for Interdisciplinary Research in the Ancient American Southwest

CyberSW is an online gateway to archaeological knowledge. Free to anyone with Internet, cyberSW opens the way for big-picture research on the ancient American Southwest. To date, it contains data on 25,000 Indigenous villages, including pottery, stone tools, room counts, and public buildings at those villages.

This grant will expand the structure of cyberSW to include data on individual households within some of these villages, using information similar to that collected by the US Census. The US Census collects information such as wealth, cultural background, and number of people from a particular address or neighborhood. This project will collect similar data from ancient households and neighborhoods using the artifacts and architecture they left behind.

In addition, links between households, neighborhoods and settlements will be explored through time. Because cyberSW currently provides data only about settlements, expanding the database to include households and neighborhoods within settlements will allow new research on how Indigenous peoples lived before the Spanish arrived.

Under the guidance of Tribal members, cyberSW will be expanded to include information about rooms, trash deposits, and other household features. This will make it easier to study how households and their networks changed over long periods of time. The project will develop a variety of network analyses and metrics from household architecture and associated artifacts, and make these analyses and metrics available through the online science gateway.

This gateway will include a chronology tool that dates and groups artifacts and households to reconstruct neighborhoods and networks at different points in time. Using this interface and other tools, scientists, Tribal members, and the public will be able to explore ancient Indigenous settlements without compromising actual site locations. People will gain insight into the different social groups who lived in these villages.

They will also be able to explore how households and villages interacted with one another. Importantly, it will be possible to download data in formats and at scales useful for other kinds of research. This will make cyberSW a great tool for geographers and other scientists who use census data to study households.

It will also encourage researchers to cross disciplines and work together to learn about the past, present, and future of households. Finally, cyberSW will serve as a model for large archaeological databases across the world.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.