News Bytes March/April 1998 |
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Excavating Occaneechi Town: An Archaeological Site Report on CD-ROM |
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When archaeologists excavate a site, they keep detailed photographic and written records of their finds. When a site report is published in book form, they must make hard decisions about which illustrations and data can be included. But a remarkable collaboration between UNC Press and Research Laboratories of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has resulted in a better way to report archaeological finds: on CD-ROM.
The Press has recently published Excavating Occaneechi Town: Archaeology of an Eighteenth-Century Indian Village in North Carolina, its first CD-ROM publication. It incorporates a remarkable body of information on the archaeological discoveries made at the Fredricks site, an eighteenth-century Occaneechi Indian community located in present-day Hillsborough, North Carolina. With detailed descriptions and interpretations, hundreds of color photographs, and complete data on all artifacts and archaeological features found at the site, the CD-ROM will prove much more detailed and useful than an archaeological report in book form. It includes sophisticated tools for navigating and searching text, hypertext links to bibliographic references and illustrations, extensive cross-referencing, and machine-readable databases for statistical analysis.
The CD-ROM was edited by R. P. Stephen Davis Jr., Patrick Livingood, Trawick Ward, and Vincas P. Steponaitis.
Another innovation is the unique "electronic dig" feature that allows teachers to simulate an archaeological excavation in the classroom. Students start with a blank grid that represents Occaneechi Town, and they select the units to be excavated. Then, when they give the command to excavate, the computer uncovers each unit and provides students with photographs, descriptions, and lists of artifacts that were actually found when that unit was first excavated. The CD-ROM provides guidelines for effective use of this feature for teachers from grade school to college level.
More information on the CD-ROM, including system requirements and ordering information, can be found at http://sunsite.unc.edu/uncpress/occaneechi.
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