Digital Data and Tools in Archaeology: The ROCEEH Out of Africa Database (ROAD)

The ROCEEH Out of Africa Database (ROAD) is a multidisciplinary database with archaeological and paleobiological content. It was developed to support the interdisciplinary research project “The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans” (ROCEEH), whose main aim is to study the cultural aspects of human expansions over the last three million years. The concept of the database is to bring together archaeological, paleoanthropological and paleoenvironmental content to allow quantitative and statistical analysis of the information stored. The data entered into ROAD include new results produced by researchers involved in the project, as well as published data from previous excavations. The data rely on a standardized vocabulary that is applied across the project and its publications; the data can be retrieved from the database in tabular form or using SQL queries. In addition to the archaeological and paleobiological information, ROAD contains spatial data (e.g., vector and raster data), generated by ROCEEH and other projects. One important part of ROAD is its web-based application, which allows the user to easily insert, update, review, query, export, visualize and analyse data.