This dataset presents Palmyra’s public inscriptions from the first four centuries CE, a period of time during which the city flourished. The Palmyrene elite used inscriptions to advertise their contributions to public and private building projects, and commemorate the dead. These stone carved inscriptions were written in all the major languages of the region: Palmyrene Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. A total of 1134 public inscriptions have been compiled and digitized by researchers, thus constituting the most comprehensive dataset of the public inscriptions from Palmyra to date. As such, it is a unique source of information about building activities, elite patronage, and the evolution of Palmyrene social structures.

This dataset provides a georeferenced and digitized version of Harold Driver’s Indian Tribes of North America (1953) [1], one of the most comprehensive ethnolinguistic maps of Indigenous North America. The printed map was scanned, georeferenced using original grid intersections and geographic control points, and reprojected to the North America Albers Equal Area Conic projection. Ethnolinguistic territories were manually digitized as polygon features and attributed with tribal names, and language families. The dataset offers a spatial framework for comparative archaeological and ethnographic research on North American ethnolinguistic diversity and historical geography. It is not suitable for land acknowledgements or legal purposes.

This dataset contains 243 silhouette images of Edo-period Ogame (“large jar”) vessels from Hizen and Chikuzen Provinces (modern-day Saga and Fukuoka prefectures), Japan. These thick-walled stoneware jars served diverse functions, from storing soy sauce and fertilizer to containing human remains in burials. The silhouettes were extracted from archaeological site reports and prepared for outline-based Geometric Morphometric (GMM) analysis, a method that quantifies shape independently of size or landmarks. By enabling replicable shape analysis of large, curvilinear ceramic forms, this dataset supports research into morphological standardization, workshop practice, and the intersection of political economy and material culture in early modern Japan.

Desert kites are massive hunting traps found in the Near and Middle East, which have sparked significant research interest. Their numbers and geographical distribution were largely unknown until about a decade ago. This dataset provides the locations of all identified kites, along with detailed morphological information for a sample representing approximately 10% of them. It also includes data on other hunting-related structures within the same geographical region. These data were gathered through the analysis of high-resolution satellite imagery and are organized into feature classes. The dataset is available at the Zenodo repository under an open-access license. It can support a wide range of spatial analyses, including investigations into the morphological diversity of the traps, their environmental contexts, and potential connections with other archaeological data.

This database compiles representations of aquatic animals and fishing scenes from prehistoric and protohistoric Japan, spanning the Jōmon (ca. 14,500– 1000 BCE), Yayoi (1000 BCE–250 CE) and Kofun (250–710 CE) periods, as well as the Epi-Jōmon (340 BCE–CE 700), Satsumon (600–1200 CE) and Okhotsk periods (500–1000 CE) in Hokkaido. The corpus includes 120 representations: 108 depictions of aquatic animals and 12 of fishing activities. These images are on a diverse range of media, including clay pots, swords, dōtaku (bronze bells), haniwa (clay figurines), other clay objects, wooden boards, stone fragments, beads, bones, teeth, petroglyphs, bronze mirrors, and tomb wall decorations. Data were extracted from excavation reports, museum collections and academic publications. The database includes only those examples for which visual documentation was available. Entries are classified following identifications proposed in the existing literature. This database offers considerable potential for future expansion and use in comparative iconographic studies, validation of archaeological interpretations, and interdisciplinary research exploring maritime cultures and fishing practices in early Japan. Furthermore, its value extends to studies of related themes in other regions and periods, facilitating cross-cultural comparisons and contributing to a deeper understanding of human interactions with the aquatic environment.

This dataset constitutes a comprehensive inventory of 125 excavated sites from the territory of southern Bilad al-Sham attesting the occurrence of the Islamic Cream Ware (ICW). It provides information on the typological variety, dating, and general contexts of appearance of this pottery class. In addition, it is supplemented by bibliographical references to all sites included in the database. In general, the following dataset can appear useful for scholars working on the various subjects related to Early and Middle Islamic pottery and settlement of southern Bilad al-Sham.

This dataset is an exported subset of the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) database. It includes archaeological and cultural heritage places, such as ancient settlements, historical structures, traditional villages, and irrigation systems within the central areas of the historical landscape of Sistan (سیستان), located in eastern Iran and southwestern Afghanistan. The data was gathered by the visual inspection of 16,875 km2 of open-access satellite imagery accessible on Google Earth covering the period from 2001 to 2022, utilising the EAMENA methodology for archaeological and condition assessment. It is stored in the EAMENA web-based open-access database, hosted by the University of Oxford. The primary objective of compiling this dataset is to evaluate the impact of recent climate and environmental changes, as well as other disturbance factors, such as agriculture, building and development, and infrastructure, on the cultural heritage places of this historical region.

The dataset described in this paper presents an annotated compilation of absolute dates obtained from archaeological sites located in northern Iberia corresponding broadly to the Cantabrian region (Spain). It consists mainly of radiocarbon dates chronologically framed between 45-30 ka BP. This is the period when the last Neanderthals disappeared and the first Anatomically Modern Humans dispersed into northern Iberia, widely considered a key region for understanding the patterns and processes of this transition. Providing chronological information as well as serving as palaeodemographic proxies, this novel compilation facilitates new analyses of this key period. The dataset contains 224 dates from 37 archaeological sites and more than 87% of the dates included have been positively assessed for use. It is available at Github and linked to Zenodo with the aim to ensure accessibility, reproducibility and continued extension.

This dataset is comprised of metric and non-metric lithic assemblage data from terminal Pleistocene through late Holocene prehistoric lithic assemblages recovered at nineteen archaeological sites in the upper Susitna River basin, southern Alaska Range. The data is stored in The Digital Archaeological Record public repository. This dataset has the potential to be reused in meta-analyses of demography and land-use patterns over time, aggregate regional lithic research, studies assessing methodological approaches to lithic analysis, and for educational purposes.

Article: Object Detection Model, Image Data and Results from the “When Computers Dream of Charcoal: Using Deep Learning, Open Tools and Open Data to Identify Relict Charcoal Hearths in and Around State Game Lands in Pennsylvania” Paper