Eric Kansa
Biographic Data
| ID | 126545 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eric Kansa |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eric |
| FAMILY NAME | Kansa |
| SIGNATURE | KANSA E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Alexandria Archive Institute |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5620-4764 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 175 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Archaeology in the AI Era: Demystifying powerful and problematic systems shaping the future of the past
This essay explores how Large Language Models (LLMs) and the generative "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) services they power impact archaeology's information ecosystem. Most of the discussion focuses on the dangers of escalating costs, commercial dependency, indeterminacy and reliability, and the potential for bias amplification. The essay highlights the need for structural reforms in archaeology's professional incentive systems, especially those s…
Open Context in a Changing Context: Data Publishing, Interoperability and Governance
This paper describes the rationale and strategies behind Open Context, an online data publishing service for archaeology. Launched in 2006, Open Context has published nearly 2.4 million records from 200 projects and sub-projects, representing the work of more than 1,600 scholars working across the world. Open Context's current data dissemination and curation efforts reflect our attempts to navigate a landscape filled with diverse and evolving cha…
Excavations at Poggio Civitate (Murlo)
Excavation during the 2024 season revealed new evidence related to industrial activities at Poggio Civitate as well as traces of habitation and related activities located to the east of Piano del Tesoro
Digital Data and Data Literacy in Archaeology Now and in the New Decade
OVERVIEW Digital data play an increasingly important role in how we understand the present and the past. The challenges inherent in understanding and using digital data are as intellectually demanding as any other archaeological research endeavor. For these reasons, data management cannot be regarded as a simple compliance or technical issue. For data to be meaningfully preserved and used in intellectually rigorous ways, they need to be integrate…
Digital archaeology and 'D' transforms
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Standardization, Storage, and Dissemination of Environmental Archaeological Data
A Square Peg in a Round Hole: Rethinking Archaeological Publication
This essay offers a first-hand look at how one archaeological project (the Athienou Archaeological Project on Cyprus) decided to rethink the definition of “final” and contribute to the growing discourse surrounding 3D visualization, archaeological publication, archival data, and access
Archaeological Analysis in the Information Age: Guidelines for Maximizing the Reach, Comprehensiveness, and Longevity of Data
With the advent of the Web, increased emphasis on “research data management,” and innovations in reproducible research practices, scholars have more incentives and opportunities to document and disseminate their primary data. This article seeks to guide archaeologists in data sharing by highlighting recurring challenges in reusing archived data gleaned from observations on workflows and reanalysis efforts involving datasets published over the pas…
Archaeology and Archaeological Information in the Digital Society
Archaeology and Archaeological Information in the Digital Society, edited by Isto Huvila, brings together a range of studies by archaeologists and information scientists to examine the implications of digital technologies on archaeological interpretation and how we engage with the past. Digital data collection and the embedding of digital media in interpretation and presentation means that archaeologists are all engaging in some way in “digital s…
Standardization, Storage, and Dissemination of Environmental Archaeological Data
Beyond the Archive: Bridging Data Creation and Reuse in Archaeology
This article presents research on archaeological data creation and management practices at two excavations in Europe in order to gain a better understanding of how to align these practices with the data reuse needs of a broader research community. The Secret Life of Data project follows the life cycle of data from the field to the digital repository to better understand opportunities and challenges in data interpretation, publication, and preserv…
Data Beyond the Archive in Digital Archaeology: An Introduction to the Special Section
This special section stems from discussions that took place in a forum at the Society for American Archaeology's annual conference in 2017. The forum, Beyond Data Management: A Conversation about “Digital Data Realities”, addressed challenges in fostering greater reuse of the digital archaeological data now curated in repositories. Forum discussants considered digital archaeology beyond the status quo of “data management” to better situate the sh…
The Digital Index of North American Archaeology: Networking Government Data to Navigate an Uncertain Future for the Past
Reclaiming a Broken Future for the Past
Sea-level rise and archaeological site destruction: An example from the southeastern United States using Dinaa (Digital Index of North American Archaeology)
The impact of changing climate on terrestrial and underwater archaeological sites, historic buildings, and cultural landscapes can be examined through quantitatively-based analyses encompassing large data samples and broad geographic and temporal scales. The Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) is a multi-institutional collaboration that allows researchers online access to linked heritage data from multiple sources and data sets. T…
Making Sense of the Ways We Make Sense of the Past: The Periodo Project
The PeriodO project seeks to fill a gap in the landscape of digital antiquity through the creation of a Linked Data gazetteer of period definitions that transparently record the spatial and temporal boundaries assigned to a given period by an authoritative source. Our presentation of the PeriodO gazetteer is prefaced by a history of the role of periodization in the study of the past, and an analysis of the difficulties created by the use of perio…
The value of energetic analysis in architecture as an example for data sharing
Reflections on a Road Less Traveled: Alt-Ac Archaeology
Reflections on a Road Less Traveled: Alt-Ac Archaeology Sarah Whitcher Kansa and Eric Kansa FINAL DRAFT, September 2015 To be published in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Fall 2015 issue on the theme “Alternative Academic Careers and 21 st Century Scholarship” In 2003, with recent Ph.D.s in Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology in hand, we did something risky. We decided to step off the traditional acade…
Data Sharing Reveals Complexity in the Westward Spread of Domestic Animals across Neolithic Turkey
This study presents the results of a major data integration project bringing together primary archaeozoological data for over 200,000 faunal specimens excavated from seventeen sites in Turkey spanning the Epipaleolithic through Chalcolithic periods, c. 18,000-4,000 cal BC, in order to document the initial westward spread of domestic livestock across Neolithic central and western Turkey. From these shared datasets we demonstrate that the westward …
Data Publishing and Archaeology's Information Ecosystem
Archaeologists increasingly employ various digital tools in the documentation of fieldwork and post-excavation analysis. In doing so, they create vast amounts of data. Archaeologists need to create such rich bodies of digital data because archaeology is often destructive; that is, an excavated area can never be excavated in exactly the same way again. However, professional norms that only reward conventional article and book publication endanger …
Open Archaeology: We All Know That a 14 Is a Sheep: Data Publication and Professionalism in Archaeological Communication
Archaeologists create vast amounts of data, but very little sees formal dissemination. This failure points to several dysfunctions in the current structures of archaeological communication. The discipline urgently requires better data professionalism. Current technologies can help ameliorate this, but scholars generally lack the time and technological know-how to disseminate data. We put forth a model of “data sharing as publishing” as a means to…
Additional Thoughts on Sustaining and Promoting Open Data in Archaeology
We are grateful to the respondents for their thoughtful contributions to this forum. Many of their comments focus on the issue of the profitability of open access/open data models for publication (see Pratt, Alexander, and Hall). Our own livelihood depends on sustainability, so we are naturally concerned about this issue. In our work with Open Context, we have benefited from public and private granting agencies for funding, libraries for data man…
Other People’s Data: A Demonstration of the Imperative of Publishing Primary Data
Openness and archaeology's information ecosystem
The rise of the World Wide Web represents one of the most significant transitions in communications since the printing press or even since the origins of writing. To Open Access and Open Data advocates, the web offers great opportunity for expanding the accessibility, scale, diversity and quality of archaeological communications. Nevertheless, Open Access and Open Data face steep adoption barriers. Critics wrongly see Open Access as a threat to p…
Gap: A NeoGeo Approach to Classical Resources
Google Ancient Places (GAP) is a Google Digital Humanities Award recipient that will mine the Google Books corpus for classical material that has a strong geographic and historical basis. GAP will allow scholars, students, and enthusiasts world-wide to query the Google Books corpus to ask for books related to a geographic location or to ask for the locations referred to in a classical text. The traditional difficulty of identifying place names wi…
Other People’s Data: A Demonstration of the Imperative of Publishing Primary Data
Openness and archaeology's information ecosystem
The rise of the World Wide Web represents one of the most significant transitions in communications since the printing press or even since the origins of writing. To Open Access and Open Data advocates, the web offers great opportunity for expanding the accessibility, scale, diversity and quality of archaeological communications. Nevertheless, Open Access and Open Data face steep adoption barriers. Critics wrongly see Open Access as a threat to p…
Open Archaeology: We All Know That a 14 Is a Sheep: Data Publication and Professionalism in Archaeological Communication
Archaeologists create vast amounts of data, but very little sees formal dissemination. This failure points to several dysfunctions in the current structures of archaeological communication. The discipline urgently requires better data professionalism. Current technologies can help ameliorate this, but scholars generally lack the time and technological know-how to disseminate data. We put forth a model of “data sharing as publishing” as a means to…
Protecting Traditional Knowledge and Expanding Access to Scientific Data: Juxtaposing Intellectual Property Agendas via a "Some Rights Reserved" Model
The twenty-first century has ushered in new debates and social movements that aim to structure how culture is produced, owned, and distributed. At one side, open-knowledge advocates seek greater freedom for finding, distributing, using, and reusing information. On the other hand, traditional-knowledge rights advocates seek to protect certain forms of knowledge from appropriation and exploitation and seek recognition for communal and culturally si…
Beyond the Archive: Bridging Data Creation and Reuse in Archaeology
This article presents research on archaeological data creation and management practices at two excavations in Europe in order to gain a better understanding of how to align these practices with the data reuse needs of a broader research community. The Secret Life of Data project follows the life cycle of data from the field to the digital repository to better understand opportunities and challenges in data interpretation, publication, and preserv…
Data Beyond the Archive in Digital Archaeology: An Introduction to the Special Section
This special section stems from discussions that took place in a forum at the Society for American Archaeology's annual conference in 2017. The forum, Beyond Data Management: A Conversation about “Digital Data Realities”, addressed challenges in fostering greater reuse of the digital archaeological data now curated in repositories. Forum discussants considered digital archaeology beyond the status quo of “data management” to better situate the sh…
Digital Data and Data Literacy in Archaeology Now and in the New Decade
OVERVIEW Digital data play an increasingly important role in how we understand the present and the past. The challenges inherent in understanding and using digital data are as intellectually demanding as any other archaeological research endeavor. For these reasons, data management cannot be regarded as a simple compliance or technical issue. For data to be meaningfully preserved and used in intellectually rigorous ways, they need to be integrate…
Archaeological Analysis in the Information Age: Guidelines for Maximizing the Reach, Comprehensiveness, and Longevity of Data
With the advent of the Web, increased emphasis on “research data management,” and innovations in reproducible research practices, scholars have more incentives and opportunities to document and disseminate their primary data. This article seeks to guide archaeologists in data sharing by highlighting recurring challenges in reusing archived data gleaned from observations on workflows and reanalysis efforts involving datasets published over the pas…
Googling the Grey: Open Data, Web Services, and Semantics
Primary data, though an essential resource for supporting authoritative archaeological narratives, rarely enters the public record. Lack of primary data publication is also a major obstacle to cultural heritage preservation and the goals of cultural resource management (CRM). Moreover, access to primary data is key to contesting claims about the past and to the formulation of credible alternative interpretations. In response to these concerns, ex…
The value of energetic analysis in architecture as an example for data sharing
Making Sense of the Ways We Make Sense of the Past: The Periodo Project
The PeriodO project seeks to fill a gap in the landscape of digital antiquity through the creation of a Linked Data gazetteer of period definitions that transparently record the spatial and temporal boundaries assigned to a given period by an authoritative source. Our presentation of the PeriodO gazetteer is prefaced by a history of the role of periodization in the study of the past, and an analysis of the difficulties created by the use of perio…
"An Open Context for "Near Eastern Archaeology
The common use by archaeologists of ubiquitous technologies such as computers and digital cameras means that archaeological research projects now produce huge amounts of diverse, digital documentation. However, while the technology is available to collect this documentation, we still largely lack community-accepted dissemination channels appropriate for such torrents of data. Open Context aims to help fill this gap by providing open access data p…
A Square Peg in a Round Hole: Rethinking Archaeological Publication
This essay offers a first-hand look at how one archaeological project (the Athienou Archaeological Project on Cyprus) decided to rethink the definition of “final” and contribute to the growing discourse surrounding 3D visualization, archaeological publication, archival data, and access
The Digital Index of North American Archaeology: Networking Government Data to Navigate an Uncertain Future for the Past
Data Publishing and Archaeology's Information Ecosystem
Archaeologists increasingly employ various digital tools in the documentation of fieldwork and post-excavation analysis. In doing so, they create vast amounts of data. Archaeologists need to create such rich bodies of digital data because archaeology is often destructive; that is, an excavated area can never be excavated in exactly the same way again. However, professional norms that only reward conventional article and book publication endanger …
Digital archaeology and 'D' transforms
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Archaeology and Archaeological Information in the Digital Society
Archaeology and Archaeological Information in the Digital Society, edited by Isto Huvila, brings together a range of studies by archaeologists and information scientists to examine the implications of digital technologies on archaeological interpretation and how we engage with the past. Digital data collection and the embedding of digital media in interpretation and presentation means that archaeologists are all engaging in some way in “digital s…
Reflections on a Road Less Traveled: Alt-Ac Archaeology
Reflections on a Road Less Traveled: Alt-Ac Archaeology Sarah Whitcher Kansa and Eric Kansa FINAL DRAFT, September 2015 To be published in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Fall 2015 issue on the theme “Alternative Academic Careers and 21 st Century Scholarship” In 2003, with recent Ph.D.s in Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology in hand, we did something risky. We decided to step off the traditional acade…
Gap: A NeoGeo Approach to Classical Resources
Google Ancient Places (GAP) is a Google Digital Humanities Award recipient that will mine the Google Books corpus for classical material that has a strong geographic and historical basis. GAP will allow scholars, students, and enthusiasts world-wide to query the Google Books corpus to ask for books related to a geographic location or to ask for the locations referred to in a classical text. The traditional difficulty of identifying place names wi…
Egyptian-Canaanite Interaction at Nahal Tillah, Israel (ca. 4500-3000 B. C. E.): An Interim Report on the 1994-1995 Excavations
The nature of the Dynasty 0-Dynasty I Egyptian presence in southern Israel has been a source of debate since the excavations of Tel Erani on the fringe of the northern Negev in the 1950s when numerous Egyptian artifacts were discovered. Since then, a wide range of models have been used to characterize the nature of Egyptian-Canaanite relations. These models include warfare/conquest, commercialization, distance parity, and world systems. The recen…
Protecting Traditional Knowledge and Expanding Access to Scientific Data: Juxtaposing Intellectual Property Agendas via a "Some Rights Reserved" Model
The twenty-first century has ushered in new debates and social movements that aim to structure how culture is produced, owned, and distributed. At one side, open-knowledge advocates seek greater freedom for finding, distributing, using, and reusing information. On the other hand, traditional-knowledge rights advocates seek to protect certain forms of knowledge from appropriation and exploitation and seek recognition for communal and culturally si…
"An Open Context for "Near Eastern Archaeology
The common use by archaeologists of ubiquitous technologies such as computers and digital cameras means that archaeological research projects now produce huge amounts of diverse, digital documentation. However, while the technology is available to collect this documentation, we still largely lack community-accepted dissemination channels appropriate for such torrents of data. Open Context aims to help fill this gap by providing open access data p…
Googling the Grey: Open Data, Web Services, and Semantics
Primary data, though an essential resource for supporting authoritative archaeological narratives, rarely enters the public record. Lack of primary data publication is also a major obstacle to cultural heritage preservation and the goals of cultural resource management (CRM). Moreover, access to primary data is key to contesting claims about the past and to the formulation of credible alternative interpretations. In response to these concerns, ex…
Other People’s Data: A Demonstration of the Imperative of Publishing Primary Data
Openness and archaeology's information ecosystem
The rise of the World Wide Web represents one of the most significant transitions in communications since the printing press or even since the origins of writing. To Open Access and Open Data advocates, the web offers great opportunity for expanding the accessibility, scale, diversity and quality of archaeological communications. Nevertheless, Open Access and Open Data face steep adoption barriers. Critics wrongly see Open Access as a threat to p…
Gap: A NeoGeo Approach to Classical Resources
Google Ancient Places (GAP) is a Google Digital Humanities Award recipient that will mine the Google Books corpus for classical material that has a strong geographic and historical basis. GAP will allow scholars, students, and enthusiasts world-wide to query the Google Books corpus to ask for books related to a geographic location or to ask for the locations referred to in a classical text. The traditional difficulty of identifying place names wi…
Open Archaeology: We All Know That a 14 Is a Sheep: Data Publication and Professionalism in Archaeological Communication
Archaeologists create vast amounts of data, but very little sees formal dissemination. This failure points to several dysfunctions in the current structures of archaeological communication. The discipline urgently requires better data professionalism. Current technologies can help ameliorate this, but scholars generally lack the time and technological know-how to disseminate data. We put forth a model of “data sharing as publishing” as a means to…
Additional Thoughts on Sustaining and Promoting Open Data in Archaeology
We are grateful to the respondents for their thoughtful contributions to this forum. Many of their comments focus on the issue of the profitability of open access/open data models for publication (see Pratt, Alexander, and Hall). Our own livelihood depends on sustainability, so we are naturally concerned about this issue. In our work with Open Context, we have benefited from public and private granting agencies for funding, libraries for data man…
Data Sharing Reveals Complexity in the Westward Spread of Domestic Animals across Neolithic Turkey
This study presents the results of a major data integration project bringing together primary archaeozoological data for over 200,000 faunal specimens excavated from seventeen sites in Turkey spanning the Epipaleolithic through Chalcolithic periods, c. 18,000-4,000 cal BC, in order to document the initial westward spread of domestic livestock across Neolithic central and western Turkey. From these shared datasets we demonstrate that the westward …
Data Publishing and Archaeology's Information Ecosystem
Archaeologists increasingly employ various digital tools in the documentation of fieldwork and post-excavation analysis. In doing so, they create vast amounts of data. Archaeologists need to create such rich bodies of digital data because archaeology is often destructive; that is, an excavated area can never be excavated in exactly the same way again. However, professional norms that only reward conventional article and book publication endanger …
Reflections on a Road Less Traveled: Alt-Ac Archaeology
Reflections on a Road Less Traveled: Alt-Ac Archaeology Sarah Whitcher Kansa and Eric Kansa FINAL DRAFT, September 2015 To be published in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Fall 2015 issue on the theme “Alternative Academic Careers and 21 st Century Scholarship” In 2003, with recent Ph.D.s in Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology in hand, we did something risky. We decided to step off the traditional acade…
Making Sense of the Ways We Make Sense of the Past: The Periodo Project
The PeriodO project seeks to fill a gap in the landscape of digital antiquity through the creation of a Linked Data gazetteer of period definitions that transparently record the spatial and temporal boundaries assigned to a given period by an authoritative source. Our presentation of the PeriodO gazetteer is prefaced by a history of the role of periodization in the study of the past, and an analysis of the difficulties created by the use of perio…
The value of energetic analysis in architecture as an example for data sharing
Sea-level rise and archaeological site destruction: An example from the southeastern United States using Dinaa (Digital Index of North American Archaeology)
The impact of changing climate on terrestrial and underwater archaeological sites, historic buildings, and cultural landscapes can be examined through quantitatively-based analyses encompassing large data samples and broad geographic and temporal scales. The Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) is a multi-institutional collaboration that allows researchers online access to linked heritage data from multiple sources and data sets. T…
Standardization, Storage, and Dissemination of Environmental Archaeological Data
Beyond the Archive: Bridging Data Creation and Reuse in Archaeology
This article presents research on archaeological data creation and management practices at two excavations in Europe in order to gain a better understanding of how to align these practices with the data reuse needs of a broader research community. The Secret Life of Data project follows the life cycle of data from the field to the digital repository to better understand opportunities and challenges in data interpretation, publication, and preserv…
Data Beyond the Archive in Digital Archaeology: An Introduction to the Special Section
This special section stems from discussions that took place in a forum at the Society for American Archaeology's annual conference in 2017. The forum, Beyond Data Management: A Conversation about “Digital Data Realities”, addressed challenges in fostering greater reuse of the digital archaeological data now curated in repositories. Forum discussants considered digital archaeology beyond the status quo of “data management” to better situate the sh…
The Digital Index of North American Archaeology: Networking Government Data to Navigate an Uncertain Future for the Past
Reclaiming a Broken Future for the Past
Archaeological Analysis in the Information Age: Guidelines for Maximizing the Reach, Comprehensiveness, and Longevity of Data
With the advent of the Web, increased emphasis on “research data management,” and innovations in reproducible research practices, scholars have more incentives and opportunities to document and disseminate their primary data. This article seeks to guide archaeologists in data sharing by highlighting recurring challenges in reusing archived data gleaned from observations on workflows and reanalysis efforts involving datasets published over the pas…
Archaeology and Archaeological Information in the Digital Society
Archaeology and Archaeological Information in the Digital Society, edited by Isto Huvila, brings together a range of studies by archaeologists and information scientists to examine the implications of digital technologies on archaeological interpretation and how we engage with the past. Digital data collection and the embedding of digital media in interpretation and presentation means that archaeologists are all engaging in some way in “digital s…
Standardization, Storage, and Dissemination of Environmental Archaeological Data
A Square Peg in a Round Hole: Rethinking Archaeological Publication
This essay offers a first-hand look at how one archaeological project (the Athienou Archaeological Project on Cyprus) decided to rethink the definition of “final” and contribute to the growing discourse surrounding 3D visualization, archaeological publication, archival data, and access
Digital Data and Data Literacy in Archaeology Now and in the New Decade
OVERVIEW Digital data play an increasingly important role in how we understand the present and the past. The challenges inherent in understanding and using digital data are as intellectually demanding as any other archaeological research endeavor. For these reasons, data management cannot be regarded as a simple compliance or technical issue. For data to be meaningfully preserved and used in intellectually rigorous ways, they need to be integrate…
Computer Science (19 works) · Archaeology (17 works) · History (17 works) · Image Processing and 3D Reconstruction (15 works) · Archaeological Research and Protection (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Data science (9 works) · Geography (9 works) · Research Data Management Practices (9 works) · History (8 works)