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Matthew Pike

This past August, Matthew Pike, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology, traveled to Michigan State University to participate in the Institute on Digital Archaeology Method and Practice, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Institute is designed to encourage archaeologists to explore and adopt digital methods in collection, analysis, interpretation, representation, and distribution of archaeological data and cultural heritage in an open and accessible digital format. 

Matthew will incorporate his dissertation research - modeling innovation in copper technologies among pre-contact Arctic and Subarctic peoples of North America - into a digital project for the Institute. According to Matthew, his project, The Northern Copper Database, will be designed to make the data he has  gathered from northern curation facilities "accessible online to multiple stakeholders, including archaeological researchers who may benefit from incorporating a large dataset such as this, indigenous communities of the north who deserve to have access to their material heritage, and the general public who are interested in archaeology but are daunted by the typically dense academic literature.”  Matthew’s project will be developed over the course of the next year with guidance from scholars at Purdue and at the Institute, and will be published online in August 2016.