New Digital Project – Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery, directed by Jillian E. Galle:

“The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery is a Web-based initiative designed to foster inter-site, comparative archaeological research on slavery throughout the Chesapeake, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean. Our goal is to help scholars from different disciplines use archaeological evidence to advance our historical understanding of the slave-based society that evolved in the Atlantic World during the colonial and ante-bellum periods. The archive was conceived and built by archaeologists at Monticello, with the collaboration of archaeologists, historians, and research institutions from across the Atlantic World. As a result, DAACS serves as a model for the use of the Web to foster new kinds of scholarly collaboration and data sharing among archaeologists working in a single region….

“…The heart of DAACS is a relational (SQL) database that contains a wide array of information from multiple archaeological sites where enslaved Africans and their descendants once lived and worked. DAACS data systemically describes both artifacts and the archaeological contexts from which they were excavated. The data are recorded by DAACS staff using a single set of classification and measurement protocols. This makes possible, for the first time, seamless quantitative analysis of assemblage variation across multiple sites. Researchers using DAACS data can discover previously unknown spatial and temporal trends, recognize site-specific departures from them, and more effectively evaluate hypotheses about the causes of these archaeological patterns.

“The DAACS database is available to anyone with an Internet connection at http://www.daacs.org. Point-and-click query tools make it easy for users to pull data from the database. Query results may be viewed on screen or downloaded for import into local statistical and mapping applications.”

View it here: About DAACS