A Map to Navigate the Data Archipelago: the "Open-archeOcsean" Catalogue of Open Datasets for Pacific, Southeast and East Asia Archaeology

Archaeological datasets are sparsely published and distributed, and efforts to collect and assemble them have been an inherent part of this scientific practice for decades. All along the development of the discipline, multiple calls to openly share structured and reusable data were launched: among others, from Jean-Claude Gardin's 1955 “Problems of Documentation” paper to more recent statements by Charles Perrault in his 2019 “The Quality of the Archaeological Record” book, advocating for the integration of massive datasets to address macro archaeological processes. In this regard, several parts of the globe benefit from large data infrastructures, e.g. “Ariadne” in Europe, “tDAR” in the USA, “ADS” in the United Kingdom, “DANS archaeology” in the Netherlands, etc. This is not yet the case for Pacific, Southeast and East Asia archaeology, where no supranational repository is available. This absence results in higher dispersion of datasets and research efforts, in a region also characterised by its vastness and a manifold of islands, and scarce archaeological investigation; the importance of research carried out by non-local archaeologists and, consequently, particular attention paid to autochthonous data sovereignty (Gupta et al. 2020); and a significant linguistic diversity in publishing. In this context, “Open-archeOcsean” was created, as a curated and interactive online catalogue of open-source datasets for Pacific and Southeast Asia Archaeology (https://analytics.huma-num.fr/open-archeocsean/). This catalogue was coined in reference to the European project “OCSEAN. Oceanic and Southeast Asian Navigators” (https://www.ocsean.eu) --where its development started-- a project that aimed at integrating linguistics, genetics, and archaeological data about the long history of human settlement in East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific. As an initiative intended for archaeological and local communities, “Open-archeOcsean” is an evolving tool, continuously enriched by monitoring (ancient and recent) resources and open to users' contributions. In this perspective, it draws on the FAIR principles (for scientific data management and stewardship) and CARE principles (for indigenous data governance), implementing them at two levels: 1) about listed resources, by reflecting and highlighting the use of these principles by resources' authors; 2) about “Open-archeOcsean” itself: by publishing its data and code under open licence. This poster will report on “Open-archeOcsean” current contents, its software infrastructure (based on the “spatialCatalogueViewer” R package), the metadata documented for each listed resource, and some limits of its implementation of the FAIR and CARE principles.