Cholula Database: Options

The National Endowment for the Humanities, Humanities Collections and Reference Resources “Foundations” Grant supported the initial development of the Urban Cholula Salvage Archaeological Geodatabase (UCSAG), which is associated with archaeological collections from the last 2,000 years in the Cholula area of Puebla, Mexico. Cholula is an important pre-Columbian urban and religious center, occupied through the conquest, whose archaeological collections enable researchers to tell the story of the rich Mexican Indigenous history before, during, and after Spanish colonialism. The site of Cholula is world-renowned, drawing over half a million visitors per year, yet visits are often limited to the Great Pyramid rather than its larger footprint, Urban Cholula, now covered by the modern cities of San Pedro Cholula and San Andrés Cholula. 

This project's goals were to undertake a collections assessment, design a geodatabase, and establish metadata and digitization protocols for archaeological data from two areas, San Pedro Cholula and San Andrés Cholula, around the site of Cholula. Collaborating with Mexican archaeologists and INAH, the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico, the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies at the University of Arkansas began designing a database and workflow that would be open-source, compliant with INAH standards, and incorporate the many fields and data types associated with the salvage excavations. The collections from Urban Cholula have the potential to transform understandings of how Cholula operated as a political and religious center during the pre-Columbian era, and continued to be a resilient locus of Mesoamerican culture throughout the colonial period, remaining so today. UCSAG-Foundations designed a geodatabase and determined the protocols to bring the attention of the world to these little-known, but incredibly significant humanities collections.

This file contains a powerpoint presentation, on geodatabase options for the Cholula project, that was given during the in-person workshop from February 21-23, 2024. in Puebla, Mexico. Other presentations from the in-person workshop can be found at: 10.5281/zenodo.12746302, on spatial data management for archaelogists; and 10.5281/zenodo.12746346, on migrating a database from FileMakerPro to ArcGIS.

The white paper for the UCSAG project is found at: 10.5281/zenodo.12745984

A guide for establishing an open-source archaeological geodatabase, developed by project member Jonathan Lim, can be found at: 10.5281/zenodo.12745406