The holistic and multidimensional nature of anthropological research results in an enormous amount of data, but the problem is how to organize it in such a way as to be useful for identifying complex patterns across different fields. This paper proposes a basic Framework for organizing metadata into categories: Space (where), Time (when), Matter (who and what), and Energy (how), and then separates these into two categories: empirical data and ideational data. This method reduces preconceptions by separating out the tangible evidence from the intangible and allows evidence to be understood and tested from different perspectives.