Last House on the Hill. Premises and goals.

We thought that it could be useful to share here thoughts about the LHotH project, for the interest of those of us new to this space.

The idea of embedding, interweaving, entangling and otherwise linking the data and media from archaeological excavations with their interpretation and meaningful presentation in an open access sharable platform has long been an ambition of those of us working in the digital documentation of archaeological research and the public presentation of cultural heritage.

Working in collaboration with the contributors, archaeological project managers, publishers and information technologists, we devised a content licensing agreement that makes it possible for the primary research media and data, combined with the monograph texts, to be freely and openly accessible in perpetuity.

The aim of our project, Last House on the Hill (LHotH), is to holistically reconstitute the rich multimedia and primary research data with the impressive texts of the monograph, the printed final report of the Berkeley Archaeologists at Çatalhöyük (BACH) project, in which a team from UC Berkeley excavated a group of Neolithic 9000-year old buildings at this famous cultural heritage location in Central Anatolia, Turkey.

The UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, who will be publishing our printed report entitled House Lives, have decided to give up on supplemental media (CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs) in favor of on-line digital versions of their publications. We, as archaeologists who have long been involved in digital documentation and publication of archaeology and cultural heritage were delighted with this news.

We felt that these media had a limited lifespan, not only because they could easily go missing, but also because of their regular need for migration due to physical degradation and the inevitable (unless carefully archived) obsolescence of their software. We were also aware of the disadvantages of read-only CD-ROM media, as with the printed word, of offering a definitive closed narrative, whereas we feel that the narratives about archaeology, history, cultural heritage, and the past – including those about the data themselves – should be anything but closed, but should always be open for expansion, critique, and modification.

The online digital mirror of House Lives that is presented in this paper – entitled the Last House on the Hill project – is one which goes much further than to bring together supplemental materials along with digital versions of the published texts. Its ambition, one which we have long wished to satisfy, is to embed, interweave, entangle and otherwise link the data and media from the archaeological excavations with their interpretation and meaningful presentation in an open access, sharable platform. The project brings together the published text, complete project database (including all media formats such as photographs, videos, maps, line drawings), related data and media outside the direct domain of the BACH project, along with recontextualised presentations of the data.

We are achieving this through an event-centered database structure built in Filemaker that is conceptually based on a CIDOC-CRM compatible implementation ontology. As a web publishing platform we are exploring the open source Omeka, in order to provide access, transparency and open-endedness to what is normally the closed and final process of monograph publication.

The architecture and content management practices with which the Last House on the Hill has been constructed will act, we think, as a model and an encouragement for our archaeologist colleagues to share their work with the public for the long-term. Our attitude to sharing our knowledge with the public in which we make the process of our archaeological interpretation transparent in order to engage them more intensively in our work, and our attitude to breaking the strict bondage of the empirical data is, we feel, very close to that of the Çatalhöyük team as a whole, who have made all of their data and media accessible through Creative Commons 3.0 licensing.