Data Availability Statement
Per the policy of the SAA, “All publications of the Society for American Archaeology shall include a "Data Availability Statement" (DAS) in the published manuscript. The DAS is a paragraph that provides information on the disposition and accessibility of the physical and digital data on which the research is based." The DAS should provide the details necessary for readers to easily find and obtain data used in published articles. Generally, a statement stating that the data may be obtained by contacting the author isn’t sufficient. Data, both physical and digital, should be curated at a suitable institution. Occasionally, manuscripts may not be based on specific data. In these cases a DAS is still required but can state that original data were not used in the preparation of the article.
The Data Availability Statement is placed after the Acknowledgments, using a tertiary heading—Data Availability Statement.—placed flush left. It is intended to communicate to readers where the data are available or where the objects from which the data were derived can be obtained. Manuscripts that do not use original data should use this language: “No original data were used.”
SAA journals support practices that increase data access and research transparency. Authors are strongly encouraged to make their data available through resources such as institutional repositories, digital archives with access options, or other sites that support both data preservation and allow access as appropriate. If data are legally restricted, authors should share that information in this statement. Supplemental material is not an acceptable place to provide raw data related to publication, as this is not archived with the body of the journal article.