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83rd Annual Society for American Archaeology Meeting or "SAA"
This year the annual SAA meeting was held in Washington D.C. The SAA conference brings professional and avocational archaeologists together from across the U.S. and the globe.
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Amanda Castaneda and Vicky Roberts present at SAA.
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Each year, Shumla researcher's prepare presentations and publications to present at SAA. It's an important and valued part of their professional development. At SAA they can connect with their peers in the industry, learn and communicate best practices, give and receive advice and constructive criticism and - best of all - have fun with their friends from all over the world.
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Dinner at a DC indian cuisine restaurant with friends.
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It takes a lot of preparation and planning for the Shumla team to present at the SAA each year. It would be a lot easier to just keep working. However, as a professional archaeological organization, we must engage with our peers, receive peer review of our methods and findings, and learn from best practices of others. Without this engagement, it would be very easy to become isolated.
We intend to stay on the cutting edge of our field, always improving, always learning. As we improve, so does our ability to achieve our mission - to preserve the oldest "books" in North America.
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Charles presented a poster.
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This year, we were particularly interested in learning and sharing knowledge on the topics of data management and virtual site experiences.
Data Management
Data management is a pivotal part of our mission. The data we gather must be stored securely and accessibly into perpetuity and it must be useful to future researchers. This is a tall order for a small non-profit. It's a tall order for anyone! Technology has advanced so quickly in terms of how much data can be gathered at a rapid pace. We all must advance to care for that data properly.
Think of your phone. A few years ago you could store a few photos, a few songs, a few apps. Now you can store thousands upon thousands of photos, songs, apps, and more. But the best way to care for and access that data has been slower to advance.
Apps must constantly be updated to fix glitches. Photos get left on an old phone and then that phone is lost or breaks. Music and data is streaming from all different apps, folders and sites, some paid, some free, some in the cloud, some tied to other devices.
It can easily get overwhelming.
This is what we must avoid at Shumla. Our stakes are much higher because of our commitment to preserve the information and make it accessible. We have to get this right.
Virtual Site Experiences
We also learned about the ways other archaeological organizations are developing virtual reality experiences to allow people to "visit" sites virtually. This type of technology has many applications both for tourists and researchers. Imagine walking into a room in a museum and being transported virtually to a rock art site in Australia. That's not too far off. While we are not actively designing virtual reality experiences right now at Shumla, we can be thinking about applying this new technology as we collect data during the Alexandria Project.
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