Open Archaeology

Peter J. Cobb

Peter J. Cobb

Peter J. Cobb is a field archaeologist and a ceramics specialist who has worked in Armenia, Laos, and Turkey. He currently serves as an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong, where his classes include Emerging Societies: an Introduction to Mesopotamian Archaeology, The Graeco-Roman World: From Homer to Augustus, The Connecting Sea: an Introduction to East Mediterranean Archaeology, and Dead People's Things: Excavating the Past with Archaeology.  Prior to HKU, he taught in the Penn Museum's Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) and as a lecturer in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania for two and half years.  He remains a Consulting Scholar for CAAM at the Penn Museum.  Peter examines the past through landscape archaeology and ceramics analysis frameworks.  He also brings a digital humanities approach to his archaeological fieldwork, emphasizing the direct digital recording of archaeological evidence during excavation and surface survey with the goal of publishing these data open access online in order to enable reuse and reevaluation at the highest level of detail. With more data available at higher accuracies, it will be possible to apply data science approaches to help address archaeological questions and thus improve our understanding of the human past.

Peter was a 2014–15 fellow at Koç University's Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in Istanbul, Turkey.  From 2016-2018, he was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities.  In the fall of 2018, he received a Structured Active In-Class Learning (SAIL) grant to develop new methods for teaching archaeology.  Peter is a Kolb Society Archaeology Fellow at the Penn Museum.
 
  • PhD, University of Pennsylvania (Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World)
  • Masters, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Bachelors, Dartmouth College

Select publications:

Centimeter-Level Recording for All: Field Experimentation with New, Affordable Geolocation Technology [lead author]
https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2019.21

Mapping Historical Texts in the Classroom: The Anatolian Travelers Project [lead author]
https://doi.org/10.14714/CP93.1488

Collaborative Approaches to Archaeology Programming and the Increase of Digital Literacy Among Archaeology Students [lead author]
https://doi.org/10.1515/opar-2019-0010

Virtual Desktops: A Practical Solution for Data Collaboration in Archaeology
http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?i=455593&ver=html5&p=21

Relational Databases for Archaeology
http://openarchaeology.org/methods_exchange/relational-databases-for-archaeology-2019-01/index

Excavation is Destruction Digitization [second author]
https://doi.org/10.1179/2042458215Y.0000000004

Composing communities: Chalcolithic through Iron Age survey ceramics in the Marmara Lake basin, western Turkey [corresponding co-author]
https://doi.org/10.1179/2042458215Y.0000000009

Kenan Tepe Online Database [co-editor]
https://opencontext.org/projects/3DE4CD9C-259E-4C14-9B03-8B10454BA66E