From paper to data: a georeferenced list of prehistoric personal ornaments from the Italian archaeological record

Personal ornaments can be broadly defined as objects that hold and display information about the wearer and their social group. These artefacts are therefore fundamental when reconstructing past human behavior and culture, and their evolution through space and time. Unfortunately, there is no unique repository for data on archaeological ornaments. Furthermore, the information is typically published in scientific articles or grey literature that are written in the local language and are often only available in print (or as scanned copies), making them difficult to locate. Moreover, publications often report information with different degrees of detail, depending on the focus of the work. Extracting information from the literature and translating it into open and accessible data enables scientific research to advance more rapidly and effectively. Here we screened a range of publications available online containing information about personal ornaments from Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic sites in Italy. We extracted published data on geographical location, geochronology, archaeological context, raw material, genus, class, species, anatomical district (if possible), type of ornament, and state of preservation. We then georeferenced our database using a GIS software and produced maps. Our aim was to create an online open access spatial database of personal ornaments, which can be consulted, edited and updated by other researchers, so that, in future, current representation and sampling biases can be corrected. Our work represents a first step towards a more normalised and data-rich approach to the analysis of personal ornaments.