AEONS project lead Professor Ingrid Mainland was in Germany last week for a meeting of the PalaeOpen initiative in Munich.
The event saw archaeozoologists and paleoecologists from Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Sweden and the Czech Republic engaged in intensive discussions on the topic “Developing data sharing in Archaeozoology.”
PalaeOpen is an EU-funded initiative aimed at connecting researchers who generate and analyse paleoecological data as part of their projects. This includes metadata from a wide range of disciplines.
Much of this data is scattered across various repositories and databases and is mostly not publicly accessible. To date, there are only a few platforms that bring this multidisciplinary data together. Only by linking these discipline-specific repositories can the data be utilized for paleoecological meta-analyses.
At the workshopvarious platforms for data exchange and recording were presented and evaluated – particularly regarding their use by a multidisciplinary research community. This contributes to activities the UHI Archaeology Institute is undertaking as part of the AHRC/RICHeS-funded AEONS project.
