cyberSW is a cyberinfrastructure and collaborative space for exploring and conducting interdisciplinary research with the pre-Hispanic archaeological record of the US Southwest and Northwest Mexico. It is a living database that is updated, revised, and expanded on a regular basis; and its goal is to engage archaeologists, other social scientists, interested parties from federal, state, and tribal entities, and the general public. The database is available online to qualified users who establish a user account with no associated fees, and the project team is constantly adding new classes of data and developing new query and analysis tools.
In addition to being an online research and exploration tool, cyberSW is a team of researchers affiliated with CfAS who are utilizing this cyberinfrastructure to conduct research on long-term social dynamics at multiple scales. Two active grants from the Human Networks and Data Science Program at the National Science Foundation are supporting this work, which is being conducted at the Center for Collaborative Synthesis in Archaeology and at Archaeology Southwest, The University of Arizona, Arizona State University, and the Museum of New Mexico.
The first is: From Households to Landscapes: Cyberinfrastructure for Deep Time Network Analyses in the Pre-Hispanic US Southwest. From 2021 to 2024, this project will expand the scope of cyberSW to include data on individual households and neighborhoods, using information similar to that collected by the US Census Bureau. The work is being done with input from descendant community leaders and will produce a tool for deep time studies of social change in the US Southwest.
The second is: Human Networks, Sustainable Development, and Lived Experience in a Nonindustrial Society. From 2023 to 2025, this project will examine how patterns of connection between people affect their quality of life over 800 years in the southwestern United States. The project team will first combine demographic, socioeconomic, health, and environmental reconstructions of the past built from previous NSF-funded projects into a single research platform. Then, they will use this platform, together with ideas from complex systems and network analysis, to examine how spatial properties of human networks influenced other aspects of human development, using archaeological indicators of the UN Sustainable Development Goals as the basis for assessment.