These are the slides of the presentation given as part of the workshop 'Where do I start with FAIRification of sensitive data?', organised by Nina Grau and Deborah Thorpe as part of the FAIR-IMPACT project. The workshop took place on 25 June 2024. More information can be found at https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.12607650 and https://fair-impact.eu/events/fair-implementation-workshops/where-do-i-start-fairification-sensitive-data.

Abstract of this talk

Most research datasets in archaeology do not contain personal data; after all the study subjects died centuries, if not millennia, ago. Archaeological datasets do contain another type of -potentially- sensitive data though: location data could aid looters to find archaeological sites and execute illegal excavations, destroying the archaeology. Yet for this inherently spatial discipline, location data are often essential for understanding and reusing a dataset. A similar sensitivity of location data can also be found in disciplines like ecology (location data of rare species) or geology (location data of precious materials). In this short talk I will discuss what strategies are used in archaeology for dealing with sharing location data, and whether or not sharing location data actually makes a difference to preventing looting.

Image credits

• Flohr P et al. (2021). Tracing the patterns: fields, villages, and burial places in Lebanon. Levant, 53(3), 315–335. https://doi.org/10.1080/00758914.2021.1968114 (CC BY).
• APAAME project, Robert Bewley, APAAME_20141013_RHB-121 (CC BY NC-ND). Aerial Photographic Archive of Archaeology in the Middle East (APAAME), archive accessible from: www.humanities.uwa.edu.au/research/cah/aerial-archaeology.
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cephalanthera\_rubra\_Luxemburg\_05.jpg (CC BY-SA).
• https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-person-checking-the-gps-on-the-cellphone-7362886/ (Pexels license).
• https://www.pexels.com/photo/birds-eye-photography-of-mine-2101135/ (Pexels license).
• Google Earth, standard background imagery (June 2024).
• PAN, https://portable-antiquities.nl/pan/#/object/public/146328 (screenshot of public website, license unknown).
• Caspari G et al. (2024). Employing discrete global grid systems for reproducible data obfuscation. Sci Data 11: 509. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03354-5 (CC BY).
• EAMENA project, https://database.eamena.org (CC BY).

Image credits can also be found on the slides and in the comments of the pptx version.