Report: Washington State University

At Washington State University, work on the Mellon Grant has been completed primarily by Dr. Timothy Kohler and Matt Bailey.  Bailey was replaced by Charles Reed as Kohler’s primary assistant in early January, although Bailey continues to provide answers to questions and technical support as time constraints from his new job allow.

Matt Bailey was responsible for the conversion of the Dolores Archaeological Project (DAP) data into the PostgreSQL format used on the Galisteo server for the Archaeoinformatics project.  Since the conversion he, and now Charles Reed, have worked largely on updating the data dictionary for the various databases to convert the data from numerical format into more user-readable definitions, gathered from the dictionaries supplied on the DAP data CD as well as “The Dolores Legacy: A User’s Guide to the Dolores Archaeological Program Data”, compiled by Richard Wilshusen (1999). There are a few fields within the data for which it will not be possible to provide dictionary definitions for various reasons.  These range from values that are not explained/not defined, to cases where Wilshusen is unsure of how the coding was done in the laboratory.  Currently, work is waiting for some additional information on the Bunny10 database being supplied by the Anasazi Heritage Center, as well for a small bug to be worked out that creating a situation where dictionary definitions from one table are used in similarly named tables in other databases erroneously.  Another problem that needs to be addressed is that of execution time out errors that have occurred when attempting to open the larger databases via a web interface; this is not a problem when using the command line interface.

Preliminary work is being done to convert the database compiled by the Bandelier Archaeological Excavation project into PostgreSQL format.  From there, similar protocols will be used as for the DAP data.
Table 1. Summary of components of the DAP database.