UC Berkeley

The aim of our project, Last House on the Hill (LHotH), is to holistically reconstitute the rich multimedia and primary research data with the impressive texts of the monograph, the printed final report of the Berkeley Archaeologists at Çatalhöyük (BACH) project, in which a team from UC Berkeley excavated a group of Neolithic 9000-year old buildings at this famous cultural heritage location in Central Anatolia, Turkey. The Last House on the Hill brings together the published text, complete project database (including all media formats such as photographs, videos, maps, line drawings), related Web sites, data and media outside the direct domain of the BACH project, and recontextualized presentations of the data as remixes, movies, and other interpretive works by BACH team members and many others. We are achieving this through an event-centered, CIDOC-CRM-compatible implementation ontology, expressed through an open-source Web publishing platform, providing open access, transparency and open-endedness to what is normally the closed and final process of monograph publication. The idea of embedding, interweaving, entangling, and otherwise linking the data and media from archaeological excavations with their interpretation and meaningful presentation in an open access sharable platform has long been an ambition of those of us working in the digital documentation of archaeological research and the public presentation of cultural heritage. Formidable barriers still exist to making it possible for projects to achieve these aims, ranging from intellectual property concerns to providing commitments to the long-term sustainability of the digital content. We believe that our event-centered implementation ontology will make it far easier for archaeologists and researchers in other disciplines to organize, manage, and share their data while gaining the significant benefits of the CIDOC-CRM framework. This article describes the strategy, goals, architecture, and implementation for the project, emphasizing the novel and innovative approaches that were required to make the project successful.