This workshop focuses on the ROCEEH Out of Africa Database (ROAD), an online source of information which brings together data from such varied fields as archaeology, anthropology, paleontology and paleobotany (http://www.roceeh.uni-tuebingen.de/roadweb). The purpose of this workshop is to learn about the structure and content of ROAD by entering data from selected publications into the database. An additional purpose of this workshop will be to learn how to perform a search using predefined queries on the database and then to visualize the search results on maps and in graphs using several tools developed especially for ROAD. ROAD was conceived to support the interdisciplinary research project called “The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans (ROCEEH)”, which aims to study cultural aspects associated with the human expansions of the last 3 million years (http://www.roceeh.net). The database stores published descriptions of material culture, human fossils, animal and plant remains, as well as geographical information about the localities where these finds were discovered. The description of finds as they are entered in ROAD relies on a standardized vocabulary applied to the project and subsequent publications. The database allows the standardized querying of the database using SQL queries on the back-end of the database. We hope that the participants will gain an overview of ROAD that will motivate them to use ROAD for their own research and to collaborate with the ROCEEH project in the future.
