The ROCEEH Out of Africa Database (ROAD): A large-scale research database serves as an indispensable tool for human evolutionary studies.
The ROCEEH project have had a paper published in PLOS ONE which details the conception, development and design of the ROAD Database: (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289513).
The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans (ROCEEH) is a twenty-year (2008–2027) research centre of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities operating within the framework of the Academies’ Programme of the Union of the German Academies.
The ROCEEH Out of Africa Database (ROAD) is a large-scale data management tool that enables the collection, management, analysis and presentation of data for researchers studying the deep history of early humans and their environments. It is the largest database of its kind, covering Africa and Eurasia with a time depth from 3,000,000 to 20,000 years ago. Its database model mirrors the ROCEEH project’s interdisciplinary approach and facilitates a holistic view of sites by combining archaeological, paleoanthropological, paleontological, paleobotanical and paleogeographical information. Its contents are compiled from a variety of sources, including an extensive body of literature that makes publications in various languages and from different regions accessible. ROCEEH designed several analytical tools to query, aggregate and visualize data and help users distil knowledge from this vast amount of information. Compliance with the FAIR principles makes the database suitable for a wide range of user-friendly applications.
A total of 8,589 records from ROAD have been published in the ARIADNE Portal, each one corresponding to a site/monument resource. Clicking on the Landing Page URL in each record will generate a ROAD Summary Data Sheet as a PDF document. The presence of the ROAD collection in ARIADNE is a valuable addition in terms of time span and geographical coverage as well as the richness of the data and it provides ROCEEH with greater visibility to the worldwide archaeological community.