“There was initially a hesitation about digitisation and big data in field work, but that started to change in the 2010s,” said Peter Cobb, an archaeologist at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) who has been at the forefront of working to integrate digital data analysis into archaeology.

“Even now, there are still a lot of people doing traditional ‘paper and pen’ archaeology, and this makes you wonder about the efficient use of our limited resources. We cannot take advantage of big data unless everyone is creating and sharing large digital data sets,” he said.

That mindset has started to shift as more people recognise the value of big data, such as its ability to provide macro-level insights into ancient societies.

For example, a group of archaeologists from Xinjiang University painstakingly sifted through all of the written information about digs in the region and compiled a database.

When it was completed, the team had compiled the geographic location of each Paleolithic era and Bronze Age site in Xinjiang.

The scientists hope archaeologists and data scientists could use the information to analyse how prehistoric peoples settled, and migrated around Xinjiang.

Lothar Von Falkenhausen, a professor of Chinese Art and Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in that study, said big data could prove incredibly valuable in gathering more precise economic insights.

“It is one thing to know that metal production increased, there is no doubt about that. But with the help of big data, we hopefully could learn by how much, and if it was regionally focused or a China-wide trend,” he said.

Cobb, from HKU, emphasised that data extraction and collection is extremely difficult because of a few unique factors.

One problem is that the industry has a long-standing culture that, if an archaeologist uncovers a dig, they consider themselves the owner of that information.

And that is not an unreasonable instinct in the industry. Publishing research papers is crucial to an archaeologist’s career. It incentivises “information hoarding”, which silos data and makes it extremely difficult to compare information across digs.

“There have been many efforts to create open access data publication platforms, but it has to be a bit of a passion project. Career and financial incentives generally do not make it worthwhile to spend time on creating open access data sets,” said Cobb.

Another issue is the fact that inputting the data is still a manual exercise in archaeology. We do not yet have the technology to run an artificial intelligence scan across an ancient tomb that inputs every artefact it contains, so data entry during excavation is manual.

Despite challenges in implementing big data into archaeology, there are projects working to improve accessibility. One of those is called Open Context, a project run by Eric and Sarah Kansa in Berkeley, California.

The idea for Open Context started as early as the year 2000, after the couple received their PhDs and “wished to have somewhere to share all the data we’d painstakingly collected”.

“Anyone wanting to make inter-site comparisons has to basically reinvent the wheel every time, which is an opaque and error-prone process. We think that streamlining the data-sharing process and rewarding data-sharing will free up more time to focus on research questions rather than data clean-up,” Sarah Kansa said.

For example, a project called Oracle Bones in East Asia inputted location and detailed image data for oracle bones – animal bones that have been altered for religious purposes – found in China.

The result is it could allow scientists to build a picture of where ancient oracle bones were made, what types of bones were commonly used and how they developed from the Neolithic era to the Bronze Age.

“Publishing oracle bone data and data collection protocols together in an open access format will encourage scholars from around the globe to use the database for their research and to contribute specimens from their collections,” said Sarah Kansa.

However, once again highlighting where financial incentives lie in archaeology, Open Context sustains itself mostly on short-term grants, a type of funding that is unpredictable.

“Archaeological heritage faces many threats, including climate change, rapid development and land use, looting, and armed conflicts,” she said.

“We need better ways to use archaeological data to conserve archaeological heritage, and to make that heritage more accessible and informative for education and for understanding human history.”