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The best thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else.
—Rufus Pollock
In 1995, Brian Fagan drew attention to what he called “archaeology's dirty secret” (1995:16)—the failure of archaeologists to publish definitive reports on their fieldwork, pointing to problems in scholarly culture including a focus on funding field research rather than analysis or publication. He identified the digital as a catalyst for change: “The demands of the electronic forum will make it harder to duck the responsibility of preparing one's data for scholarly use and scrutiny. In many cases, ‘publication’ will consist of meticulously organized databases, including graphics” (1995:17). In the intervening years there has been a significant development of digital repositories in the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere, facilitating this vision by providing for the preservation and distribution of archaeological data. However, rather than resolving archaeology's “dirty secret,” they have in fact unwittingly extended it. Consequently, referencing Fagan's “dirty secret,” Cherry has observed that archaeology “remains stubbornly intransigent in the face of digital technologies” (2011:12).
In the meantime the preservation of archaeological data within digital repositories has become normative practice (Kansa, Kansa, and Arbuckle 2014:58), underlined by the current range of professional archaeology codes of practice. However, evidence of actual reuse of these data remains rare (Huvila 2016; Kansa, Kansa, and Arbuckle 2014:58), and reminiscent of Fagan's earlier criticism, much archaeological research remains focused on the generation and collection of new data. This is despite a number of studies demonstrating archaeological commitment to and support for digital preservation and data reuse (e.g., Faniel, Kansa, et al. 2013; Frank, Yakel, and Faniel 2015). There is therefore a paradox: archaeologists deposit and share their data but make comparatively little use of data shared by others.
This situation has implications for the sustainability of the digital repositories that manage the data and for the wider discipline. Justifications for the considerable investment of time, money, expertise, and energy to create and manage archaeological data archives and to make data available for sharing might be open to question if they are seen solely as places for storage, even if those data are among the primary surviving evidence of fieldwork encounters with the past. Data resilience through reuse is seen to support data...