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interest. Cover sheets deal with the history of archaeological activity at a site, specifically the justifications for fieldwork, research objectives, and potential for future research. Best of
all, the entire database is keyword searchable. Simply type in your research topic or an artifact type and get back
a list of sites that may be of interest. More robust searches can even be carried out on variables like soils type, archaeological research unit, county, etc.
Two versions of this database are available online. One portal is open to the general public, the other is available to professional archaeologists. Search functionality and the universe of sites within the database are identical in both versions. However, geographic locations and site setting information within the Public Access version of the database are intentionally vague to protect
site locations from potential looting activities. Latitude and Longitude data is only accurate to within 1 square mile of each site. This option is suitable
for gross distributional analyses. The Professional Access version of the database includes detailed site location information and is only available to
authorized archaeologists who have obtained an online account from MHT with archaeological data privileges.
The Maryland Archeological Synthesis Database can be accessed online at https://mht.maryland.gov/archeology_ synthesis.shtml.
THE COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS PROJECT
Another online resource of particular interest to readers of this volume is
the Colonial Encounters Database,
which focuses on 34 sites in the Lower Potomac River Valley. Specifically, the database focuses on sites which date to the period of intense contact between Native Americans and the newly arrived European colonists, from about AD 1500 to 1720. This project began in 2002 when a number of institutions in both Maryland and Virginia began collaborating on research projects focused on the culture and landscapes of the Chesapeake during the early Colonial period. Ironically, the research revealed just how diverse the cultures of this area were
at that time and, “called into question efforts to lump the Maryland and Virginia
Tidewater into a single cultural region.” This led to a more focused effort to characterize the sites of a single river valley, the Lower Potomac.
In 2012, the National Endowment for the Humanities provided funding
to St. Mary’s College of Maryland to begin characterizing the collections and extant data from the sites of
the Lower Potomac at the various institutions which were custodians of that data. The result is the Colonial Encounters Database. Description pages are available for each of the 34 sites which provide links to artifact inventories, field photographs, site maps, raw geographic data, scanned archival data and artifact catalogs, site reports, artifact images, and more. In addition, keyword searches can be run on the entire database of artifacts, or on specific contexts within sites. The entire database has been published online under a Creative Commons license: free for use by the public so long as proper attribution is provided.
The Colonial Encounters Project can be accessed online at http://colonialencounters.org.
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