The DAACS Research Consortium (2013 to present)
The DAACS Research Consortium (DRC) is a novel kind of collaboration among scholars based in scattered academic and research institutions, built on the foundation offered by the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery. The DRC is designed to advance DAACS’ two primary goals: to foster inter-site, comparative archeological research that will advance our historical understanding of the slavery-based societies that evolved in the Atlantic World during the early-modern era; and to serve as a useful model for the use of the web to encourage new kinds of scholarly collaboration and data sharing among archaeologists working in a single culture-historical context. This project received major funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Scholarly Communications, and is sustained by a NEH-seeded endowment and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
The DRC responds to inquiries from university and museum-based scholars and graduate students interested in adopting DAACS software for their own archaeological research. Adoption here means not just downloading data from the DAACS website to compare with data generated independently by researchers using their own spreadsheet or database applications. Rather it means being able to enter their own data into the DAACS database application and to take advantage of the analytical and collaborative opportunities that ensue. DAACS’s partners in the DRC include faculty and their students at six leading graduate programs focusing on the archaeological study of early-modern Atlantic slave societies. The consortium also includes scholars from four research institutions that hold major archaeological collections from those societies.
In collaboration with technology partners at The University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and Convoy, DAACS developed a first-of-its-kind web-based database application, using open-source software tools (primarily Ruby-on-Rails and PostgreSQL), to allow our geographically dispersed collaborators to digitize, analyze, and share their archaeological data with one another and with the wider archaeological community via the DAACS website. Read more about the DAACS Research Consortium here.
DAACS Research Consortium Partners
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Lindsay Bloch (left), University of North Carolina and Anna Agbe-Davies (right), Associate Professor of Anthropology, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Academic Partner since 2000.
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Douglas V. Armstrong , Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professor and Maxwell Professor of Teaching Excellence, Department of Anthropology, Syracuse University and Sara McNamara, Syracuse University
Academic Partner since 2006.
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Mary Beaudry (left), Professor of Archaeology, Anthropology, and Gastronomy and Laura Masur (right), Boston University
Academic Partner since 2013.
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Charles Cobb, Lockwood Professor of Historical Archaeology, University of Florida, and Brandy Joy, The South Carolina Institute for Anthropology and Archaeology and the University of South Carolina
Institutional Partner since 2006.
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Dorrick Gray, Director of Archaeology, The Jamaica National Heritage Trust and Michelle Topping, Archaeology Finds Officer, JNHT
Institutional Partner since 2006.
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Mark Hauser (center), Associate Professor, Northwestern University with Alan Armstrong and Khadene Harris, Northwestern University
Academic Partner since 2013.
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Barbara Heath (right), Associate Professor of Anthropology, The University of Tennessee and Hope Smith (left), The University of Tennessee
Academic and Institutional Partner since 2000.
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Carter Hudgins, Director of Preservation and Education and Sarah Stroud Clarke, Archaeologist and Curator of Collections, Drayton Hall
Institutional Partners since 2012.
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Frederick Smith, Associate Professor of Anthropology, The College of William and Mary and Camille Chambers, College of William and Mary
Academic Partner since 2013.
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Eleanor Breen (right), Director of Archaeology, Mount Vernon and Karen Price (left), Historic Preservation Lab Manager and Photographer, Mount Vernon
Institutional Partners since 2000.
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Jillian Galle (left), Director of DAACS and Co-Director of DAACS Caribbean Initiative, and Hayden Bassett (right), College of William and Mary
Institutional and Academic Partners since 2013.
