An approach to uniformly describing lead isotope data in archaeology: The TerraLID metadata profile

Lead isotopes became an important method in archaeology for reconstructing the raw material provenance of, among others, non-ferrous metals, glass, and pigments. The reliability of interpretations drawn from lead isotope data essentially relies on an as complete as possible data collection from items with known raw material provenance as well as sufficient contextual information to take geological and archaeological aspect into account. Currently, combining reference data from different publications is time-consuming to impossible due to a large variety of metadata, their different levels of detail, their sometimes ambiguous definition, and imprecise information.

A core element of TerraLID, the research data infrastructure for lead isotope data in archaeology, is a metadata profile that aims to overcome the above-mentioned challenges by providing a uniform way for the description of lead isotope data and their contextual information. Developed by the TerraLID editors, representatives of the scientific community, its draft is currently available to the entire community for feedback to ensure that it will be as widely applicable as possible. As part of this feedback process, the scope of the metadata profile will be presented before some aspects will be discussed in more detail with the aim to stimulate discussion and feedback on its compatibility with current data handling workflows of the session participants.