I am looking for any kind of georeferenced data on archeological discoveries (or maybe unsuccessful expeditions) in African countries. Ideally, these would span the last 100 years and identify the location of discovery and the "discoverer".
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1 Answer
You'll often have a hard time finding open data relatively to that, as this kind of data is generally restricted or obfuscated to limit risk of archeological looting.
For North Africa, there is the EAMENA database, which is partly accessible upon registration: https://database.eamena.org. It may not have all the data you're after, and many records have extremely sparse data (e.g. only an identifier and random approximate coordinates, no name, date, or type of site). If you're a researcher, you might get access to more data and features than what is accessible to the general public, have a look at their open data policy.
This is not my field, but given the ethical and possibly legal implications of accessing this kind of data, generally the best option here seems to be a collaboration with archeologists or organizations working in this field and area.
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1Interesting. I had not thought about the looting and ethical concerns. Very relevant. I'd also be interested in the original origin of artifacts in western museums, I guess ethical concerns about sharing this are less, because they are already looted, no? Do you know if that exists?– sheßMar 15 at 13:09
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@sheß I really don't know. Sometimes places already looted are looted again. Maybe you may find some info on the Arachne website (arachne.dainst.org, see in particular this map that may interest you: arachne.dainst.org/map), iDAI website (idai.world), or Europeana (europeana.eu/en/themes). But no guarantee that they have the data you're after.– J-J-JMar 15 at 19:17