Case Study: Stanford Archaeology Center achieves faster access to cleaner, collaborative data with Amazon Web Services

Stanford Archaeology Center - Customer Case Study

Stanford Archaeology Center, part of Stanford University, supports interdisciplinary research including the Çatalhöyük excavation in Turkey. The team struggled with a slow, manual geo-spatial database process—taking more than 20 hours a week to update records—which caused data inconsistencies and hindered collaboration across the many international researchers involved.

To solve this, the Center moved its GIS workload to AWS, running Esri’s ArcGIS Server on Amazon EC2 with a Microsoft SQL Server database hosted at University College London. The cloud-based system made digitized maps and site records accessible and editable by multiple researchers worldwide, eliminated the weekly data-entry bottleneck, improved data accuracy, and freed staff time for deeper analysis—accelerating collaboration and enabling clearer insights into the ancient site.

Stanford Archaeology Center

Lindsay Der

Candidate