A FAIR-er digital archaeological ecosystem? Experiments in decolonial intervention

Abstract This article investigates how digital colonialism and coloniality of knowledge are reinforced within the digital information ecosystem of ‘Big Dig’ archaeological sites in the Middle East, using the Syrian site of Dura-Europos as a case study, and proposes a practical intervention model to address these asymmetries. The research uses a practice-led approach to map the fragmented digital landscape (databases, archives) related to Dura-Europos, identifying ‘microcolonialisms’ in metadata and shared infrastructure. It then details an ethically grounded, collaborative model that utilizes the multilingual Wikimedia/Wikidata ecosystem to co-curate a Linked Open Data (LOD) dataset and facilitate multilingual, cross-border collaboration with Syrian heritage professionals. The digital footprint of colonially entangled sites is fragmented and unconsciously reproduces linguistic and epistemic biases from the Global North, excluding local professionals and communities. The experimental intervention demonstrates that flexible, open-source LOD platforms can be leveraged to enable bottom-up metadata enrichment and provide a mechanism for rebalancing widely used interoperability resources (gazetteers, controlled vocabularies). This work provides an original practice-led model for decolonial intervention in digital archaeology. It shifts the focus from merely digitizing collections to actively revising the shared LOD infrastructure that drives global discoverability, specifically bridging the Western European/Arabic linguistic and epistemic divide. The article offers a replicable framework for using LOD infrastructure as a co-authorship space, transforming colonial archives into sites of connection and co-curation. This moves beyond traditional FAIR data principles to empower historically marginalized professional communities to reshape their own digital heritage.