Planned

Community

Contribution, review and disagreement. Not yet open, and this page states the terms it will open under rather than showing an empty forum.

NOT YET AVAILABLE

This project has no accounts, no logins and no submission pipeline yet. That is not an oversight: the value of the corpus depends on every record being traceable to a source someone actually read, and a contribution system that accepts unreviewed records would undermine that on the first day.

The problem a contribution system has to solve here

This corpus is unusual in that disagreement is a stored value, not an error. Two scholars dating a phase differently are two records that both remain. So a contribution system cannot work like a wiki, where the latest edit wins. It has to work like a correction register:

A contribution is an addition, not an overwrite. The prior record stays readable.
A correction carries its reason, and the reason is displayed alongside the correction.
Nothing is deleted. Superseded material is labelled SUPERSEDED and remains visible.
Every new statement must cite a source, and the source must be one that can be checked.

What will be needed first

Identity

So a correction can be attributed to a person and reviewed. not started

A submission schema

A proposed observation plus its citation, held as a proposal until reviewed. not started

A review queue

Distinct from the corpus, so unreviewed material cannot appear as evidence. not started

An audit trail

Who added what, and on what basis. not started

Contributions that are welcome today

Without an account system, the useful thing to send is not data but sources we should hold and do not — particularly openly licensed excavation reports, and published radiocarbon determinations for southern Mesopotamian sequences. That is currently the project's real bottleneck.

See the About page for the method any contribution will have to satisfy.