Presentation held at session S15: "Reproducing, Reusing, and Revising Code and Data in Archaeology" at the Annual Conference of Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) 2023, Amsterdam on 2023-04-05.We present our long-term experiences of (1) structuring and filling an interdisciplinary database about prehistory sourced from literature, (2) redirecting this database after 10 years to the FAIR principles, and (3) report some positive and sometimes unexpected cases of reuse that have evolved since.The research project “The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans” (ROCEEH, www.roceeh.net/) aims to develop a systemic understanding of the process to become “human” in Africa and Eurasia in the time frame from 20 thousand to 3 million years before present. As a long-term project, funded between 2008 and 2027 by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, it has the necessary capacities to experiment, develop methods and assemble time-intensive datasets. But it also requires to go with fast-paced developments in science and IT.The ROCEEH Out of Africa Database (ROAD) is at the core of the project and aims to address two challenges in the current research landscape. One is to enable a holistic and interdisciplinary view on prehistoric life by integrating archaeological, paleoanthropological, paleofaunal, palynological and geographical information in a common place. The process took about two years, during which the scientists exchanged concepts, taxonomies and structures of their diverse disciplines in order to develop a synthesis that could be formalized and implemented as a database model. The other challenge is to combine legacy data from diverse sources of literature with existing databases. More than 4,600 publications (comprising articles, books, theses, excavation reports and own research) in more than ten languages were manually screened by the project members and student assistants to excerpt relevant information. From the archaeological side, these include e.g. geographical coordinates of sites, stratigraphic layers, chronometric dates, archaeological finds, taxonomic interpretations, etc.. The use of forms for data entry and self-developed thesauri helped to do this in a systematic way and review circles ensure data quality. As a result, information about more than 2,200 archaeological sites with more than 20,000 archaeological assemblages were digitalized and are now available in a structured and machine-action...