Balancing Data Storage and User Functionality: The 3D and Archaeological Data Strategy of the Tracing the Potter’s Wheel Knowledge Hub

The Tracing the Potter’s Wheel (TPW) project is designed to identify and assess the appearance of the potter’s wheel as a technological innovation within the Bronze Age Aegean through the integration of experimental, analytical and digital archaeological approaches. A major output of the project is a technologically-focused archive that collates, presents and enhances research data about forming technology for archaeological and experimental ceramics. Another important project aim is to untangle relational and contextually-rich data storage for 3D models, with a particular focus on both metadata and paradata. Moreover, by disentangling the 3D models and treating them as an integrated part of the archive rather than a separately presented class, the project’s active, multivocal knowledge base explicitly integrates the often-separated complementary perspectives on archaeological datasets, dubbed the TPW Knowledge Hub. To reach these divergent yet intricate objectives, TPW introduces the approach of designerly thinking into digital archaeological practice for the design of a user-focused interface to share information and knowledge with peers and the general public. Ultimately, the TPW archive serves as a dynamic learning tool uniting archaeological data storage with additional open-access publications and resources.