The BIAD Standards: Recommendations for Archaeological Data Publication and Insights From the Big Interdisciplinary Archaeological Database

This article presents a series of recommendations for the publication of archaeological data, to improve their usability. These 12 recommendations were formulated by archaeological data experts who mined thousands of publications for different data types (including funerary practices, accelerator mass spectrometry dating, stable isotopes, zooarchaeology, archaeobotany and pathologies) during the initial construction of the Big Interdisciplinary Archaeological Database (BIAD). We also include data harmonisation vocabularies utilised for the integration of data from different recording systems. The case studies we cite to illustrate the recommendations are grounded in examples from the published literature and are presented in a problem/solution format. Though practically oriented towards the facilitation of efficient databasing, these recommendations – which we refer to as the BIAD Standards – are broadly applicable by those who want to extract scientific data from archaeological information, those who work with a specific region or theoretical focus and journal editors and manuscript authors. We anticipate that the use of the BIAD Standards will increase the usability, visibility, interoperability and longevity of published data and also increase the citations of those publications from which data were mined. The Standards will also help frame a unified foundation to support the continued integration of the natural sciences with archaeological research in the future.