Hello. If you reached this page via the Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC) registration process or meeting program, then welcome to the PACP! This page provides background information about our project goals, history, and the technology used to create this database. For more information about how to register and begin uploading data to the PACP, please visit our Instructional Videos page. If you have any other questions about participating in our upcoming workshop at SEAC or if you’d like to host a virtual or in-person workshop of your own, then don’t hesitate to contact our Editors-in-Chief.
The Pan-American Ceramics Project (PACP) is a community-based digital project seeking to enhance FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) and CARE (collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, ethics) principles in the dissemination of information related to the production and function of ceramics across all time periods from Canada to Argentina. This includes information on prehistoric, historic, and modern potting communities. At present, the PACP allows users to browse among ceramic wares, types, vessels, petro-fabrics, thin sections, kilns/workshops, and sites that have either been added by registered contributors (i.e., those responsible for data creation/collection) or uploaded on their behalf. A "Get Citation" button allows anyone to get the proper citation for each entry. Not only does this function provide security regarding intellectual property but there are three privacy levels from which contributors can select when uploading data: open access (default setting: visible to anyone), restricted access (only visible to select users), or completely private (only visible to the listed contributor(s)).
Our long-term vision for the PACP is ambitious:
First, the ultimate temporal and spatial scale of the PACP will be unprecedented, allowing for the observation of phenomena at scales previously unattainable and facilitating collaboration within and across international boundaries.
Second, we envision the PACP as a sustainable, interactive, and accessible tool that will depend on an ever-growing community of diverse stakeholders: archaeologists working in academia, historic preservation or tribal offices, CRM companies, ceramic technology specialists, archaeological scientists, museum curators, Indigenous practicing potters, and educators. In that respect, this project is forward-looking and designed to keep pace with the ever-growing knowledge of American ceramics.
Third, we intend to develop an iterative, inclusive, and equitable process by which the PACP application and content will grow through the years, to help undo the colonial roots of exploration and excavation throughout the Americas. As we all know, accessible does not mean free for all. But how exactly do we balance data accessibility and Indigenous data control across the Americas, while also wanting a web tool that grows organically, through its community of users? We do not have the answer but look forward to workshopping this with you as our community continues to grow. What we do know is that the process through which data become available is as important, if not more important, than the data themselves.
Ultimately, by making respectful, high-quality, searchable data across the Americas during the last 7500 years accessible, the PACP will (1) allow the exploration of large synthetic questions, (2) expose gaps in our existing knowledge, thus generating a multitude of student projects, (3) bring high-quality images, drawings, and data to Indigenous communities, especially those who were forcibly moved from their homes, and (4) provide space and opportunity for multicultural and multinational collaboration over data, adhering to the FAIR and CARE principles.
Pottery matters because it makes people visible. Since its invention, people have made and used ceramic pots for tasks inside and outside of their homes: to prepare, cook, serve, and store food; to set the table; to transport commodities; to accompany ritual and ceremonial acts; to accompany their dead; to teach their youth ‘proper’ ways of making and using pots within their community - proper ways of being. Pottery situates people in time and space, reveals communities of practice, and illuminates past lives. It is an indispensable form of archaeological evidence as well as a material link between past and present.
There have been multiple approaches to making archaeological data digitally accessible to various stakeholders through digital repositories, such as the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) and the Alexandria Archive Institute’s Open Context, but none are dedicated to the complexities of archaeological ceramic data. Those that do address pottery are often created to make accessible a collection of pre-existing material defined by region, time period, or a specific type. The problem is that they do not allow crowd-sourcing or direct editing by users and, thus, cannot develop as knowledge expands. In that way, they are web-based encyclopedias that cannot accommodate new scholarship or scholars. Their static nature reifies the state of the field at the time they were conceived, making them repositories of an ever-receding state of knowledge. Most importantly, and beyond scholarship, these sites have not focused on enhancing representation, inclusivity, and equity in how archaeological data come to be presented, accessed, and interpreted. Because they have been created using a Western scientific frame of reference, they perpetuate the marginalization of other voices, especially those of peripheralized and underrepresented people.
What began as frustration in 2014 among Dr. Andrea Torvinen and her colleagues working in Northwestern Mesoamerica who sought a mechanism for integrating their ceramic data across projects, later became the focus of her NSF SBE Postdoctoral Fellowship with Dr. Kostalena Michelaki (Arizona State University, ASU) and Dr. Andrea Berlin (Boston University), who is the Founder and Editor of the Levantine Ceramics Project (LCP). The LCP is a similarly ambitious project that covers 7,000 years of ceramic history through the Levant (i.e., Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Jordan, and Egypt). It has grown from 29 contributors and 500 vessels in 2011 to over 600 contributors and 17,500 vessel entries today. Not only has our development of the PACP benefited greatly from the advice and expertise of Dr. Berlin but she gifted us with the LCP software code, from which approximately 60% has been used to form the base code of the PACP. Financial support from the NSF SPRF Program (Award #2105424) and ASU’s Institute for Social Science Research and the School of Human Evolution and Social Change has funded the adaptation and expansion of the PACP code for use in the American context. These features include the addition of ceramic type as a subcategory of ware, the incorporation of ceramic technological attributes, the inclusion of site assemblages using type frequencies, and most recently the ability to bulk upload several thousand vessel entries.
The PACP web app officially launched in December 2022. Since then we have been adding content primarily from Northwestern Mexico and the US Southwest and Southeast due in large part to a team of ASU Undergraduate Research Apprentices: Jerod Edwards, Alicia Fritz, Renee Kreczmer, Amanda Pannell, Evelyn Park, Yazmin Sagastume, and Chiara Umbriano. We have also presented on the PACP at professional conferences and hosted a series of virtual tours for different stakeholder communities who all provided us with valuable feedback on future directions and areas for improvement. Our project has also been selected to participate in the Networking Archaeological Data and Communities (NADAC) Institute, which will run through November 2024. We are also in the process of establishing an Advisory Board and a Traditional Knowledge Network that together will help us achieve and remain true to our FAIR and CARE principles, while also building a sustainable process for app development that will encourage our community to grow and thrive.
This fall we are looking forward to two exciting opportunities to grow the PACP community. First, we are organizing a Listening Session with Dr. Wade Campbell (Diné, Boston University), one of the members of our Traditional Knowledge Network, and Paulina Przystupa (Open Context) titled "Working with CARE and Indigenous Data Sovereignty as accomplices" to the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums 2023 Conference. Second, we will be hosting a workshop on "How to Participate in the Pan-American Ceramics Project" at the Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference.
As designed by Lachmann Technologies, the PACP is a Ruby on Rails 5.2.5 application that is hosted on the Heroku cloud platform as a Postgres database. A backup of the PACP database is automatically downloaded daily at 5:00 am Eastern and stored on Heroku for seven days. All images uploaded to the PACP are stored using the Amazon Web Services S3 bucket service. Access to the software code will be made available through GitHub once a stable app release has been achieved.
At its core, the PACP is built around community and we are always looking for opportunities to grow, expand, and improve. This is just the first iteration of what will be an interactive and ever-evolving platform for storing and accessing information about pottery. If you have ideas you would like to share or you would like to get involved in the future design and development of the PACP, then please contact the Editors-in-Chief: Andrea Torvinen and Kostalena Michelaki.
We also encourage you to reach out if you are interested in (1) organizing a workshop with us for you and your colleagues to begin discussing and uploading descriptions of ceramic wares, types, or petro-fabrics, or (2) volunteering to join our Editorial Team as an expert on the pottery of a particular country or region or the various compositional methods used in the archaeological sciences.