Using Kart and GitHub for versioning and collaborating with spatial data in archaeological research

Distributed Version Control Systems are one of the common ways through which scientists collaborate and keep track of different versions of their work. Moreover, scientists, programmers, etc., have been using platforms such as GitHub to host and share their resources versioned through Git. While not as widely adopted as in other disciplines, Git has also been used in archaeological research. In fact, DVCS allow scholars to collaborate remotely and offer the transparency necessary to align with Open Science and reproducible research practices. However, Git is highly inefficient when versioning GIS data. Kart, described as «an open source DVCS for geospatial and tabular data built on git», is a software addressing the need for collaboration and finer incorporation of geospatial data, providing also an integration with QGIS. Kart and code-hosting websites offers unique resources for archaeologists, from collaboration to more efficient workflows. In this paper, an example of how the authors are using Kart, QGIS, and GitHub in the project ‘Governance Policies and Political Landscapes in the Southern Levant under the Neo-Assyrian Empire’ will be presented. With this case study, the authors hope to provide a solution to the current gap in the workflow of documentation and collaboration among archaeologists using GIS.