Physical Anthropology collections are held in a great number of museum and university collections world-wide. They are important because they are the basis of our understanding of human evolution and diversification. Specimens range from the fossil remains of hominids and pre-hominids right up to recent remains of modern people. In addition to the expected bones, teeth and skulls, there is a wide range of other anthropological material including mummies, preserved tissues, genetic samples, models, facial reconstructions, images, census datasets, pathology collections and molecular data. Many of the specimens are associated with artefacts ranging from stone tools to elaborate grave goods and some specimens may also have known biographical data.

The ABCD schema includes many of the elements needed to document anthropological specimens and the EFG extension provides elements to handle the fossil material. There are, however, a number of types of data that will require their own elements and it was therefore proposed to develop an anthropological extension to the ABCD schema within the framework of the European SYNTHESYS project.

An international workshop was organised in Budapest (August 2006) to develop a preliminary data model and schema for Physical Anthropology collections, building on the existing ABCD and EFG models. The requirements for an extension for Anthropology were documented in a subsequent report in November 2006 (Zsuzsanna Guba, Standardisation of anthropological collection data NA-D 2.52). The Hungarian Natural History Museum, Budapest and the Natural History Museum, London then commissioned the author to develop an integrated XML schema based on the findings of the report. The first draft of the resulting schema is now complete and will be placed on the SYNTHEYS website, along with full documentation, for comment in time for the TDWG 2007 conference.

One issue in creating the anthropology schema is that the specimens, their associated artefacts and collecting context can link them closely to ethnographic and archaeological data, which could have a major impact on the size of the schema. The development of an archaeological schema with full coverage of excavation methodologies or the full description and analysis of cultural artefacts are major efforts in their own rights, requiring wide consultation. It is possible to limit the links into these other domains by restricting the information recorded or limiting it to simple text elements, but this could undermine the extensibility of the schema and miss the opportunity to provide the greatest scope for data interchange. The solution adopted in the preliminary schema has been to create extensible and replaceable elements that allow the schema to be developed further as needed. An example extension for pottery artefacts was developed as a proof of concept.