ARCS: Archaeological Resource Cataloguing System

FAIN: HK-50173-14

Michigan State University (East Lansing, MI 48824-3407)
Jon Michael Frey (Project Director: February 2014 to March 2022)
Ethan C. Watrall (Co Project Director: July 2014 to March 2022)

The Archaeological Resource Cataloging System (ARCS) would provide an open-source application where users can upload, tag, sort, and link together digitized copies of photographs, drawings, and (frequently handwritten) documents of the archaeological record. Building from the original case study of Ohio State University’s excavations at Isthmia, the team would add three archaeological sites (in Polis, Chersonesos, and Nemea) to test the development of ARCS.

ARCS (Archaeological Resource Cataloguing System) enables individual archaeologists and larger, multi-member archaeological projects to collect, annotate, display, search, organize, and share primary documentary materials such as field journals, photographs, and artifact catalogs over the web. Through the use of crowdsourcing and a common metadata scheme, this open source platform offers archaeological projects a way to annotate and share non “born digital” data with scholars and the general public in a way that respects their unique identity and budgetary constraints. A version of ARCS was created for use at the Ohio State University Excavations at Isthmia and was the original test case for the Digital Humanities Startup Grant. To further develop the utilities designed to encourage collaborative research between scholars and projects, it is now proposed that ARCS be implemented at a select number of additional archaeological excavations.