Anthropology Research Guide

Note regarding archaeological gray literature:

Most contract reports in the US are not in the public domain due to the need to protect cultural resources. Each state has a State Historic Preservation Office or SHPO that manages or curates archaeological reports (list of SHPO websites). Academic departments also have grey lit reports from faculty research conducted around the world. The latter are circulated among select colleagues. Some who work abroad post their unpublished reports on the web. The grey literature in this field is huge and immensely valuable. Domestic and international laws, the proprietary nature of scholarship (i.e., fear of others publishing your raw data), and a host of other peculiarities surround this mandated professional practice. The laws governing the document, the reason for requesting it, the report's content, and the author's plans for publication are all factor's that affect access. (By permission from Bruce Bachand, Archaeologist)

National Archeological Database

An expanded bibliographic inventory of over 350,000 reports on archeological investigation and planning, mostly of limited circulation. This "gray literature" represents a large portion of the primary information available on archeological sites in the U.S.

tDAR: the Digital Archaeological Record

An international digital archive and repository that houses data about archaeological investigations, research, resources, and scholarship.  tDAR provides researchers new avenues to discover and integrate information relevant to topics they are studying.   Users can search tDAR for digital documents, data sets, images, GIS files, and other data resources from archaeological projects spanning the globe.  For data sets, users also can use data integration tools in tDAR to simplify and illuminate comparative research.

Center for Digital Antiquity

A collaborative non-profit organization devoted to enhancing preservation of and access to irreplaceable archaeological records and data.  Digital Antiquity supports archaeological research, resource management, education,  and public outreach by providing new and innovative ways of finding, managing, preserving, and using archaeological information.  Archaeologists, computer scientists, and information management experts have created Digital Antiquity with two basic goals.  One is to improve substantially the ease of accessing and using archaeological information.  The other, equally important, is to provide for the long-term preservation of the irreplaceable records of archaeological investigations.

National Technical Reports Library (NTRL)

From the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) this database indexes over 3.0 million records of research sponsored by the United States and select foreign governments dating back to 1964. Contents include archaeological research reports, computer products, software, video cassettes, audio cassettes and more.

Archaeology Data Service: Unpublished Fieldwork Reports (Grey Literature Library)

The aim of this resource is to make available unpublished fieldwork reports in an easily retrievable fashion. There are currently more than 30,000 reports available and this number is increasing steadily through the OASIS project in England and Scotland.

Through this resource it is possible to list the reports by contractor, using the "browse by contractor" option and also to do a more advanced search filtering these reports by period, monument/artifact type and location using the search option. These unpublished reports cover archaeological interventions such as: watching briefs, excavation reports and building surveys. Desk-based assessments and specialist analysis are also included.