Pofatu: An Open-access Database for Provenance Analysis of Stone Tools in the Pacific and Island Southeast Asia

Aymeric Hermann1* and Robert Forkel2

Archaeologists use provenance studies to uncover the origin and the life-history of artefacts, including those that are sometimes found very far away from their source or place of manufacture. To this end, reliable archaeometric data facilitates the reconstruction of technological, economic, and social behaviours of human societies over many thousands of years. In the Pacific region, geochemical sourcing has been particularly successful at locating sources of stone artefacts among the thousands of islands in the Pacific Ocean. In order to facilitate access to this growing body of data and to promote comparability and reproducibility in provenance studies, we designed Pofatu, the first online and open-access database presenting geochemical compositions and contextual information for archaeological sources and artefacts. The data repository includes a compilation of geochemical data and supporting analytical metadata, as well as the archaeological provenance and context for each sample. First launched and published in 2020 [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-0485-8], Pofatu data is available through a web application [https://pofatu.clld.org/] and open access repositories [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10090671]. Pofatu is an operational framework that enables data curation and data sharing in archaeometry, following the FAIR principles, and as such it won the Open Science Award for Research Data of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research in 2023. Here we show the structure and evolution of the database content over the years and showcase how it can be used with an example of geochemical sourcing of lithic artefacts from Polynesian outliers previously published [https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adf4487, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7848222].