The BIAD Standards: Recommendations for archaeological data publication and insights from the Big Interdisciplinary Archaeological Database

We present a series of recommendations for the publication of archaeological data to facilitate efficient databasing. These recommendations were collated by data experts who mined thousands of publications for different types of archaeological data during the construction of the Big Interdisciplinary Archaeological Database (BIAD). We include data harmonisation vocabularies utilised for the integration of data from different recording systems. These recommendations initiate a move towards creating a unified and integrated framework for all types of archaeological data to ultimately sit within a single relational structure. We anticipate that use of the BIAD Standards will increase the visibility, usability and longevity of published data and also increase the citations of those publications from which data was mined.