The ArchaeOBIA concept applied to data curation for the Acheulean site of Cagny-l’Épinette (Somme Valley, France)

This paper highlights the promising contribution of the ArchaeOBIA methodology to the toolbox of digital humanities applied to data curation in digital archaeology. ArchaeOBIA stands for the methodological concept of object-oriented image analysis (OBIA) applied to knowledge extraction from archaeological image data. Here, the scope of this concept has been extended for the first time to the data curation of the digitized version of handwritten field drawings. This innovation has been implemented over the accumulated data from the Paleolithic site of Cagny-l’Épinette (Somme Valley, France). After thirty years (1980–2010), the 277 square meters excavated on this site are documented by a heterogeneous corpus of archives, in various analog and digital formats, totaling 23,785 referenced remains. This corpus offered a unique opportunity to take up the methodological challenge of a unique data curation, essential to provide data input for the first exhaustive thematic spatial analysis for the site of Cagny-l’Épinette. This paper discusses the added value and limitations of information reconstruction while building a comprehensive and consolidated prehistorical spatial database, in other words, to build a meta-archaeology of Cagny-l’Épinette. We understand “Meta-archaeology” as a revisit of existing data accumulated over a long period of excavation. Both a validation phase and a data integrity assessment confirm that our curation workflow enables us to optimize the collated data and to reconstruct some of the incomplete data. This is a new inspiring instance of the ArchaeOBIA methodology, which enlarges the scope of applications for the optimization of analog archaeological legacy archives.