ArchaeoGRID Science Gateways for Easy Access to Distributed Computing Infrastructure for Large Data Storage and Analysis in Archaeology and History

This article describes how archaeological and historical research grew as a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary activity due to availability of larger amount of data within the reconstruction of global historical and archaeological contexts at a global spatio-temporal scale. The increased information, also integrated with data from the Earth Sciences, has had an effect on the exponential increase of complex sets of data and of refined methods of analysis. For such purposes, this article discusses the ArchaeoGRID Science Gateway paradigm for accessing ArchaeoGRID Cyberinfrastructure (CI), a Distributed Computing Infrastructure (DCI), that can supply storage and computing resources for managing and analyzing large amount of archaeological and historical data. In fact, ArchaeoGRID Science Gateway is emerging as high-level web environment that makes easier the access, in a transparent way, to DCI, as local high-performance computing, Grids and Clouds, from no specialized Virtual Research Communities (VRC) of archaeologists and historians.