Skip to content

Source Family Matrix

This matrix is the repository-wide balance sheet for the source families. It does not try to rank them from "best" to "worst." It makes a different point: each family has a different job, a different geographic reach, and a different burden of explanation before it can be trusted in public outputs.

Comparison Matrix

Family Main material Strongest public use Geographic reach What it cannot do alone
LandClim pollen sequences and REVEALS context explain broad environmental setting and vegetation patterns broad, reusable pollenomics context prove a local archaeological or aDNA claim by itself
Neotoma paleoecological pollen-site records compare pollen-site context across places broad, but shaped by source coverage stand in for all pollen context or erase differences from LandClim
SEAD environmental archaeology records add wider archaeology context around landscapes and sites broader than one local registry replace sample-backed locality, chronology, or coordinates
RAÄ Sweden-specific archaeology records deepen Swedish and Nordic interpretation where coverage is dense intentionally local and Sweden-weighted serve as a universal archaeology layer
Boundaries country and regional framing layers make map scope, filtering, and geography legible broad framing utility function as scientific evidence
AADR human aDNA release material provide a broad human ancient DNA comparison layer broad, release-based human context answer non-human recovery questions or replace animal review
Animal source intake project, paper, supplement, and sample recovery records show what supports or blocks non-human aDNA publication depends on tracked species and recovered projects pretend that incomplete intake work is already publication-ready evidence

How To Read The Matrix

Two things are easy to miss if you only skim the table.

First, broad reach is not the same as strong local proof. A source can travel well across geographies and still be best used for framing rather than for a direct claim.

Second, visibility in a public atlas does not mean equal maturity. Some source families are stable contextual layers. Others, especially animal intake, remain partly a record of ongoing recovery and review.

Why This Matters For Trust

The public product becomes misleading if every source family is described with the same voice. The matrix keeps that from happening by making four things explicit:

  • what the source materially contains
  • what kind of question it answers best
  • how far it can travel across geography
  • where readers should become more cautious

That is the difference between a repository that merely collects sources and a repository that interprets them honestly.

If you want the repository-owned audit surfaces behind this page, start with:

Important Boundary

PalaeOpen matters to this repository, but it is not listed in the comparison table above because it is not a direct source family. It is a collaboration and interoperability network that can improve how source families travel across repositories without becoming evidence on its own.