Blurb:

Using examples hosted by the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) to illustrate good curation practice, this chapter discusses the problematics of archaeological data curation, management, and preservation as one of the main challenges that archaeology and heritage-related disciplines face in the 21st century. It presents a fact-based discussion of how archaeological data is typically produced in the U.S. and discusses internationally-accepted guiding principles such as the FAIR Principles and the DCC curation lifecycle and other best practices. The chapter defines and addresses relevant themes for this volume: What is digital data curation? Why is archaeological data curation important? Following a description of the work that tDAR and other digital repositories/institutions (e.g., Archaeological Data Service and OpenContext) spearhead to respond to the issue that data produced by older or current archaeological investigations are difficult or impossible to discover, access, and use/re-use, two examples from the American Southwest (the Pueblo Grande and the Eastern Mimbres Archaeological Project (EMAP)) are presented to demonstrate repository solutions for at-risk data sets.