Round Tables

Session Organisers:

Christin Keller, German Archaeological Institute
Agnes Schneider, Leiden University

Session Format: Round table

Description

Session Format

Round table (90 minutes, with short statements from panelists followed by open discussion)

Background and Motivation

Archaeology, like all sciences, is entering an era where the volume, complexity, and interconnectivity of data are central to research progress. From excavation records and 3D models to GIS layers and analytical datasets, archaeological research increasingly depends on the ability to store, preserve, share, and analyse data in interoperable, sustainable, and trusted environments.

In other scientific disciplines, research data infrastructures (RDIs) have already become the backbone of collaboration and discovery. If archaeology is to keep pace with these developments, it must ensure that such infrastructures are not only technically operational, but also widely adopted and embedded in everyday research practice. Without this combination of functionality and uptake, archaeology risks falling behind in the wider scientific landscape.

This is particularly relevant to the CAA community, which thrives at the intersection of archaeology, computing, and quantitative analysis. The power of advanced methods—statistical modelling, machine learning, network analysis, and simulation—relies on having large, well-curated, and accessible datasets. Without robust infrastructures that enable aggregation, interoperability, and reuse, the potential of these methods cannot be fully realised.

Across Europe, RDIs for archaeology exist at different stages of maturity:

• Established services with decades of experience in preservation and dissemination.
• Mid-career infrastructures that have proven their value and are scaling their operations.
• New initiatives still defining their scope, governance, and technical frameworks.

Understanding how these infrastructures develop, gain acceptance, and adapt is not just a matter of institutional interest—it is a prerequisite for archaeology to remain an evidence-driven, data-rich, and methodologically innovative discipline.

Scope and Goals

This round table will bring together representatives from archaeological RDIs in different countries to exchange practical, experience-based perspectives. Our goals are to:

1. Compare engagement models — How do top-down institutional approaches differ from grassroots, community-driven models? How are archaeologists incentivised to contribute data? What roles do professional associations and informal networks play?
2. Examine trust and acceptance — What makes researchers, heritage professionals, and institutions actually choose and use an infrastructure? How do early-stage projects build credibility, and how do mature infrastructures sustain it?
3. Share operational challenges and lessons learned — Insights into technical deployment, training, support, funding continuity, and sustainability planning.
4. Explore different stages of development — How do priorities, risks, and opportunities change from the early phases to long-term operation? What can young initiatives learn from established ones, and how do established infrastructures stay agile?
5. Analyse legal forms and frameworks — How do organisational structures (federated vs. centralised, public bodies, consortia, non-profits, etc.) and differing national or EU legal environments affect governance, data policies, and the ability to collaborate internationally?

Comparative Dimension

A central feature of this session is its explicitly comparative approach. By bringing together infrastructures that differ in community size, governance model (federated vs. centralised), juristic form, funding environment, and stage of development, we will highlight both common challenges and distinctive solutions. The discussion will not only compare archaeological infrastructures across national contexts but also set them in relation to established examples such as the Archaeology Data Service (UK), community-driven organisations like CAA International, and interdisciplinary frameworks such as the Research Data Alliance. This comparative lens will ensure that the session moves beyond isolated case studies to identify transferable lessons, structural constraints, and opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Format and Structure

The round table will be structured for maximum interaction:

• Opening statements: Each panelist will have 5–7 minutes to introduce their infrastructure, national context, and position on the themes above.
• Thematic discussion blocks: The moderator will guide the conversation through the five key themes, drawing comparisons and encouraging panelists to reflect on successes, failures, and unexpected challenges.
• Audience engagement: Participants will be invited to contribute their own experiences, pose questions, and comment on the applicability of different approaches in their contexts.
• Summary and recommendations: The session will conclude with collaboratively defined takeaways, which will be documented and shared with the CAA community.

Expected Audience

We expect this session to attract:

• Archaeologists and heritage professionals involved in data management or infrastructure projects.
• Members of the CAA community working with quantitative methods who depend on large, interoperable datasets.
• Policy makers, funders, and administrators concerned with digital research sustainability.
• Students and early-career researchers looking to understand and influence the future of archaeological data sharing.

Relevance to CAA 2026

The CAA community is uniquely positioned to benefit from and contribute to the development of archaeological RDIs. This session addresses core concerns of the conference:

• Advancing quantitative archaeology by enabling large-scale, high-quality datasets for analysis.
• Strengthening international collaboration through shared infrastructure models and interoperability.
• Bridging policy and practice by comparing how national contexts and legal frameworks shape the reality of implementation.
• Encouraging sustainable, community-driven solutions for data preservation and access.

If archaeology is to continue evolving as a data-intensive science, it must ensure that RDIs are not just technically sound, but fully embedded in the discipline’s workflows. This round table will directly address how to achieve that goal.

Expected Outcomes

By the end of the session, participants will have:

• A comparative map of how archaeological RDIs operate in different legal, organisational, and community contexts.
• Insights into how infrastructure maturity shapes priorities and challenges.
• Practical strategies for fostering trust and adoption in digital services.
• A clearer understanding of the role infrastructures play in enabling large-scale quantitative methods in archaeology.
• A set of shared recommendations for the CAA community and beyond.

The discussion outcomes will be summarised and shared publicly after the conference in paper form, ensuring that insights reach practitioners who could not attend.

Session Organisers:

Thomas Huet, CNRS
Eythan Levy, University of Zurich

Session Format: Round Table

Description

This round table aims at discussing the current challenges and future perspectives on the modelling of time in archaeology. Duration: 2h30.

Some 30 years ago, the introduction of GIS into the archaeological toolbox sparked a ‘spatial turn’ in the discipline, greatly improving the interoperability of spatial data. However, no such integrated tool exists for managing temporal data. Chronological methods are highly diverse (e.g., seriation, stratigraphy, cross-dating, absolute dating), each typically handled by different software applications and libraries. The lack of interoperability between software outputs, formats and standards hinders the ability to understand cultural developments across different societies. In our view, the time has come to make chronological data more interoperable through the use of standardised formats (e.g., EDTF), relative temporal relationships (e.g., before/after), and specialised software (e.g., OxCal). Such an approach could pave the way for a Temporal Information System (TIS), enabling the calculation of a temporal metric for the rate of human cultural evolution (see our position paper: Huet & Levy, 2025).

We invite all interested colleagues to participate in the open-forum discussion at the round table.

Position paper

Huet, T., & Levy, E. (2025). Foreword – Archaeometry special issue on chronological modelling. Archaeometry, 67(S1), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1111/arcm.13095

Session organisation

• Foreword [5-10 minutes]

Thomas Huet and Eythan Levy

• Topic 1: Epistemology of archaeological time [30 minutes]

chair: Joan Anton Barcelo

History and Archaeology, sciences of societies in time, are based on the ordering and clustering of events, but differ mainly on the different nature of the proxies they use. History uses mainly authored time-stamped writings (e.g., diplomatic letters, political writings) while Archaeology uses anonymous time-uncertain material culture (e.g., ceramic and stratigraphic sequences). How can such archaeological series be grouped to create periods? To what extent can two periods be considered as contemporaneous?

• Topic 2: Archaeological time in practice: cross dating, anchor dates, cultural periods [30 minutes]

chair: Keith May, James Taylor

Archaeologists often deal with multi-aligned chronological data: a piece of material culture can be related to a stratigraphic unit containing other objects, to site-wide stratigraphy with groupings and phasing, to broader landscape and/or cultural periodisation, to seriation, to artifact types found in other archaeological cultures, and to so-called ‘absolute’ dates from scientific dating methods (e.g., radiocarbon dates). How, in practice, are these data aligned with each other? How is uncertainty propagated over different chronological assessments?

BREAK: 15 minutes

• Topic 3: Formats, standards and interoperability [30 minutes]

chair: Florian Thierry

Deterministic dates, whether seemingly exact (e.g., 79 AD), approximate with uncertainties (e.g., 80/81 AD), or relative (e.g., after 68 AD), can be encoded unambiguously using standards such as ISO 8601, EDTF, or OWL-Time. Such date expressions can serve as the basis for space–time gazetteers (e.g., PeriodO and ChronOntology) and be reused in ontologies (e.g., CIDOC CRM). However, these formats, gazetteers and ontologies cannot directly express probabilistic temporal distributions, such as those derived from radiometric dating. Furthermore, the different ad hoc chronological formats and syntaxes used by chronological software (e.g., OxCal, ChronoModel, or ChronoLog) add a further layer of complexity. How can we foster interoperability between all these formats and standards?

• Topic 4: Mathematics, Algorithms and Software [30 minutes]

chair: Joe Roe

A host of mathematical methods and algorithms exist for both deterministic and probabilistic temporal assessments in archaeology. Software packages (libraries), as well as interactive software applications, are being used to solve a wide variety of chronological problems, such as seriation, Bayesian calibration of radiocarbon dates, or chronological network modelling. Mastering the whole array of available chronological methods, algorithms and tools can be challenging. Is a unified, standardised approach feasible and desirable? And if so, what concrete steps can be taken to achieve it?

Conclusion: Towards a Temporal Information System? [5-10 minutes]

Session Organisers:

Corey Noxon, Ritsumeikan University
Markos Katsianis, University of Patras
Wilhelm Kerle-Malcharek, University of Konstanz
Jannis Werner, University of Cologne

Session Format: Round Table

Description

The field of 3D analysis has made significant advances since the formation of the 3D Spatial Analysis SIG at CAA Tubingen in 2019 (e.g. Hostettler et al. 2024). A founding aim of the SIG was to define the meaning of 3D Spatial Analysis, with early efforts focusing on larger scale GIS-based approaches to better incorporate three-dimensional data into modern archaeological practice. Since that time, the possibilities for digitizing objects—particularly cultural heritage objects—have reached levels of quality, ease of use, and availability that make it possible for anyone with a smartphone to engage in the process, and now forms part of the standard toolkit for many practitioners. Significant improvements in 3D capture technology and accessibility since the founding of the SIG has prompted the need for a re-evaluation of 3D technologies, analytical approaches to the ever-increasing corpus of 3D data, and ways in which we can better incorporate these advances into analytic and synthetic knowledge-building workflows. 

Reflecting these changes, the 3D Spatial Analysis SIG is updating its name to the 3D Analysis SIG and is looking to update its aims and goals to better reflect the current technological and analytical landscape. As part of this process of update and renewal, this roundtable session will have participants discuss the state of the field, identify the gains we’ve made, the areas where we need to improve, and where we aim to go moving forward. Discussion will initially be focused on the following topics: definition of 3D analysis in archaeology, practical applications of 3D analysis in archaeology, project management, “best practices” for data management, 3D outputs directed towards other researchers and the public at large, and new directions for the SIG in general.  

Recorded 3D data has become a more mainstream method to display artifacts and other archaeological data, but data reuse for analytical purposes still has a lot of room to grow. Participants will discuss improvements in archaeological applications of 3D data as well as new and upcoming analytical approaches. While GIS applications remain as relevant as ever (e.g. Dell’Unto & Landeschi 2022), the increased accessibility of 3D digitization makes object-based analytical approaches like GMM more accessible as well. In addition to these approaches, recent work related to room illumination and similar visual-based approaches are just a small sampling of the ever-increasing analytical approaches that are opening up to archaeologists and serve as starting points for further discussions.    

As photogrammetry and other forms of 3D digitization become more commonplace for recording sites, features, and artifacts both in the field as well as part of subsequent post excavation processing, how can we better integrate this “new” form of data within the broader assemblage of recorded archaeological data?  How can the digitization of archaeological findings be positioned as an integral part of the archaeological process and archaeological project management? Are we at a stage in which certain aspects of digitization techniques, such as 3D scanning, can replace prior recording methods, or should multiple methods be continued in tandem? Are there ways in which 3D digitization can be better streamlined to smoothly integrate into existing workflows, whether it be on-site recording or lab-based documentation? What are ways in which we can better integrate 3D scan data into other forms of gathered data to help provide a more holistic and contextualized record of archaeological sites or features? 

An equally important part of project management is data management. As data is gathered it must be organized and stored. While less glamorous than other aspects of 3D work in archaeology, the manner in which data is organized and stored becomes increasingly more important as the amount of gathered 3D data increases. Multiple discussions have been had stressing the importance to data management practices like FAIR and CARE, but broadly accepted implementations of these ideals are still far from standardized. Taking a broader view, long-term archival storage of 3D data is another pressing topic of serious importance to the field. Existing database structures are rarely suited for the large file sizes involved in 3D, whether it be large high resolution models, or the hundreds or thousands of images used to create photogrammetry-based scans. If the totality of the gathered and processed data is too large to store long-term, are there any particular types of data that we all agree should be stored as a minimum? What files types and formats should data be stored in? Are some lossy formats “good enough”, and if so, how lossy can they be? If archiving 3D models is difficult, how difficult is it to archive the results of 3D analysis? A shared understanding of the realities of these data management challenges could help to provide some realistic guidelines for practitioners moving forward. 

Finally, 3D recordings of archaeological sites, features, and artifacts are significantly multi-functional in nature. The same 3D models that are processed for analytical purposes can also be processed for broader public consumption. One of the most approachable methods for this is preparing an individual artifact or component for public access on a 3D model viewer, but uncertainty related to commercial platforms calls into question the long-term sustainability of this approach and stresses the importance of alternative platforms and modes of model presentation. The contexts of objects play a key role in our understanding of objects, and while there has been some work in the field, developing and implementing ways in which individual 3D objects can be better visualized within broader contexts for public consumption and incorporated into a larger site narrative seems another area to be further explored. Incorporating AR and VR technologies is another way in which we can possibly provide new ways to create immersive environments to help provide better spatial understandings of cultural heritage sites. While advances have been made along these lines as well, there still seem to be significant barriers in their implementation. Rather than focusing on individualized approaches to these issues, are there ways in which a shared platform can be developed to further improve accessibility in this form of data presentation?

The problems and opportunities facing 3D analysis in archaeology evolve and change as the field moves forward, and are too numerous for any individual to tackle on their own. This roundtable will hopefully provide a chance to pool the experience, background knowledge, and additional resources of the participants to help identify, discuss, and continue to engage in these areas of movement in the field. With the renewal of the 3D Analysis SIG we hope to be able to continue these discussions and work in a more closely connected and collaborative manner in an attempt to move beyond a patchwork of isolated solutions and help drive the field forward together.