EAA 2022: Abstract

Lead (Pb) isotope geochemistry is an approved key method in archaeological sciences to reconstruct the resource provenance of metals and trade networks of the past civilisations. Successful application and interpretation of Pb isotope signatures of metal artefacts rely crucially on the published ore data, which are partly only available from pre- or re-digitalised publications. Most Pb isotope reference data collections were compiled by individual working groups, usually focussing on their projects and regions of interest. A great step towards a large-scale collection of Pb isotope data came with the release of the OXALID database in the early 2000s, which has benefited the scholars in the natural science discipline as well as the more untrained users from the archaeological community. Still up today, OXALID is the most used and cited source for reference data, despite the accumulation of many additional data sets since then. All of them are set up as static data collections, limiting the possibilities to expand, correct, and modify them with the publication of newer results or analyses. Additionally not all of them are easily available for people from across the world and only recently compilations for regions outside of Europe and the Mediterranean became widely available.
Riding the wave of open science and new data infrastructures, the authors are endeavouring to digitalise and construct a global Pb isotope data base using the statistical environment R and Shiny App. The presentation will demonstrate this highly promising application for the modernisation of archaeometry as an applied geoscience discipline.

Lead isotopes, Shiny App, Open data, FAIR, archaeometallurgy, Web application

Oral presentation

  Abstract (PDF)

Thomas Rose^1,2,5

Sabine Klein^4,5,6
Katrin Westner³
Yiu-Kang Hsu⁵