MINA is a Web-based platform developed for the Michigan State University Advanced Institute on Digital Archaeology Method and Practice. Dr Neha Gupta maintains the project. The code is on an MIT license and borrows from other repositories with similar licenses. Collaborators are welcome to add to this project
MINA aims to encourage intellectual interest in developing visualization tools appropriate for archaeology, and to promote intellectual interest in Indian archaeology.
A key challenge in Indian archaeology is the relative lack of digital (and digitized) archaeological data and need for greater attention to data-centric issues when working with historical sources. MINA begins to address this issue.
Data for MINA are drawn from Indian Archaeology - A Review (IAR), an annual in-house publication of the Archaeological Survey of India (Survey). The Survey is the national department for archaeology and heritage management in India. IAR consists of summaries of archaeological field investigations that were carried out during each calendar year. The current focus of the project is on the years between 1953 and 1960.
Location information (place name, district name, state name) have been extracted manually, and then geocoded using a Python script. The data are most appropriate for national-scale analysis. Additional information on these investigations include the year of investigation, the kind of investigation (survey or excavation), the investigating institution and archaeologist(s). These data are available as CSV. They are available as a Web map
The following provides an overview of MINA:
Gupta, N., Rajesh S.V, S. Chatterjee, Abhayan G.S. (2021). MINA | Map Indian Archaeology: opening post-colonial archaeological research in the Indian context through Web-based geovisualization. *LivingMaps Review* [https://www.livingmaps.org/neha-gupta]