Does a unique eroded prehistoric carving on one of the sarsen uprights at Stonehenge link the most famous of English megalithic monuments to Brittany?

Comment is offered on the ‘post-processual’ approach to excavation in the field advocated in the September Antiquity.

For centuries, the right place to look, when in search of the best archaeological knowledge, has been in some kind of printed book. There will once have been a manuscript, and if the book never materialized, a manuscript may substitute, but what usually matters is the better truth that has the authority of print.

In a now-standard joke, a wizard of a yet-newer information display system is described: hugely flexible in size and in format and in what it can present, made of cheap and common materials, wholly recyclable, and — best of all — requiring no screen or display device of any kind whatsoever. At some point you realize the miracle being described is a book. But the book is for many purposes deservedly obsolescent, and archaeological research is in truth already in the age beyond the printed book. Specialist illustrated publications have high fixed costs in the print, and low circulations mean there are too few copies to spread the costs over. When the first new technology of cheap reprographics came in a generation ago, the ‘grey literature’ of field reports began to grow, soon reaching a point at which no library and no individual could be relied on to possess the ‘collected literature’ on any topic of large range. Now an increasing amount of archaeological knowledge is only or better made accessible electronically.

Using the World Wide Web is not unlike visiting an unfamiliar place to look at the archaeology. You want to know if there is anything interesting to see, so you start in the library, looking for information; you read books and articles from journals; perhaps you contact colleagues who can tell you about the place; you want to know how to find the sites and to get to them; and once you are there, you want to visit the museums as well as the monuments, and to locate people who are working there, whether they are from academic institutions, government archaeological bodies or local societies. You will want to check that access arrangements have not changed since the last published information; you also want to ensure that as far as possible the information you have is accurate, so that you do not waste time looking at sites which are not relevant to your interests.

In recent years traditional print publication has become increasingly limiting for archaeology. The limitations are well known and include: small and expensive print runs; high distribution costs; declining library subscriptions; and a tiny readership. As a consequence greater selection is required and ‘full’ publication is rarely possible. Some publishers adopted microfiche as a method of distributing supporting information and specialists reports, but this has proved consistently unpopular and has its own limitations. Archaeological fieldwork generates huge quantities of data (or should it be capta?) and with developments in information technology much of this data is now captured in a digital format. Why not distribute the data electronically to overcome the limitations of print technology? Archaeological reports arc wellsuited to multimedia publication which allows access to colour images and large data-sets, as well as permitting several possible journeys through the hypertext.

I should begin by defining some of the metaphors I use in this paper. By the ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’ I mean the world of print on paper. Thus the ‘PostGutenberg Galaxy’ is its successor, the virtual world of bytes on tape, disk and screen — and especially dispersal in the fibreoptic cables enmeshing the globe and transmitting them everywhere at the speed of light. I also use the term ‘Skywriting,’ for the dissemination of the written word in the PostGutenberg Galaxy is very much like writing it all up in the sky, for everyone to see and to append their own scribblings onto, rather like the serial graffiti in public toilets, except on a galactic scale. Or perhaps a global Hyde Park, with the orations and cat-calls all delivered graphically rather than orally.

The barriers to communication between scholars and between scholars and the public have been falling as the Internet has grown. Although most of the publicity goes to the web, surveys show that the email is used by more people. Since it is based on characters rather than graphics, bandwidth and modem speed are less problematic than they are for web pages. In addition, while the web is the best way to disseminate information on the internet, electronic conferences and newsgroups are still the best way to interact on the internet. Electronic conferences for archaeologists began in 1986 when Sebastian Rahtz and Kris Lockyear created the ‘Archaeological Information Exchange.’ Four years later AIE begat ARCH-L and the number of archaeologists participating has grown steadily. Today ARCH-L has about 1800 subscribers in 44 different countries; most subscribers are in the US and the UK. ARCH-L now averages about 16 messages a day; just under 3000 messages were posted in the first 6 months of 1997. In addition to ARCH-L, there now are at least 40 other electronic conferences and newsgroups covering different aspects of archaeology.

I became acquainted with email discussion lists when I subscribed to my first one, ‘ANE’ (ancient Near East), in September 1993; the discussions were so lively and informative that my colleague Paul Rehak and I thought there should be an Aegean counterpart for the Minoan-Mycenaean world. ‘AegeaNet’ was thus born on 1 December 1993, ‘a discussion and news group on the pre-classical Aegean world from Palaeolithic to Homer and beyond’. Three and a half years later, it is still growing with over 780 subscribers, archives (as of November 1995), and plans for more sophisticated services like digest and moderated versions.

An archive is a collection of materials intended to be kept safe for the long term. Those materials are gathered by some responsible agency, but they were created originally by others. They were made in the forms and with the methods chosen by their creators. That is, an archive contains materials that have been created by others, that have been formed and informed by the judgements of others and that are intensely idiosyncratic. An archive is not simply a collection of facts or ideas or objects; it is a collection of other peoples’ individual or collected facts and ideas and objects. As a result, the contents of an archive are disparate in the extreme, from books to diaries to maps to photographs. A digital archive is at least as chaotic as any other, probably more so. Its contents may include text files, data-base files, images, CAD files, GIs files and more.

Archaeologists have always been good at creating huge quantities of data, but not so good at arranging to preserve them in ordered, accessible and public archives, or at re-using other peoples’ data themselves. The Information Age presents particular problems for the preservation of digital data (Eiteljorg above, pp. 1054-7) but also provides unique opportunities for their re-use. Within the Higher Education sector in the United Kingdom there is now a national initiative to establish an Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS). This paper will describe the role of the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), one of the services embraced by the AHDS, and will indicate how it proposes to provide access to other peoples’ data.

A conventional print publication, like ANTIQUITY has a choice in an electronic era: to remain print-only, to convert wholly to electronic format, or to find some hybrid or combination inbetween. ANTIQW has chosen to stay primarily in a print format (a conventional sewn paperback quarterly book) that is paid for by subscribers, and to develop alongside that a modest web presence that is free to anyone. Our circumstances are typical; so are both our uncertainty as to the future and the nature of our response so far. Very few publications – whether journals, magazines or newspapers – have left print to go fully electronic; many have a web presence, and those that have chosen to have none begin to appear as if they are thereby marginalizing themselves. This brief note reports why we tried, what we have done, how, and with what result.

Some five months have elapsed since I was invited to write this paper and, as seems always to be the case, the continued rapid change in applied computing and available technology has transformed my view of the potentials offered by CD-ROM (Compact Disk-Read Only Memory) as a publishing medium. The paper I now offer is substantially different in content; the conclusions, however, are the same.

I would like to start with the contentious assertion that there is very little special about CD-ROMs; they are little more than overgrown floppy disks with a long shelf-life, and uncertain sell-by date. A CD-ROM can contain about 650 Mb (Megabytes) of digital information, the equivalent of 450 high-density floppy disks, A CD-ROM is much more durable than a floppy disk, if kept away from small children and dogs, and is certainly more convenient to transport and handle than 450 floppy disks. A floppy disk will fade and its contents will become unreadable after about 4 or 5 years. A shiny CDROM on the other hand will last physically for at least 30 years, we are promised. Unfortunately the CD-ROM is already headed for the scrap heap of our technological past and is set to join the burins and scrapers. Yes, the Digital Versatile Disk (DVD) is coming our way. It can contain up to 17 Gb (Gigabytes) — that’s 17 with nine zeros after it, the equivalent of 11,805 floppy disks full of data. Fifteen years ago, back in 1982, a 10-Mb hard disk was considered an expensive technological marvel with more than enough capacity (equivalent to 25 of the lowercapacity, 400-Kb floppy disks of the ‘80s). Nowadays, the CD-ROM, given away on the front of glossy magazines, and costing Sop to produce, contains 65 times that amount of information. My point is that I don’t think we should become obsessed with the technology and the means of delivery of data on some kind of disk. What is far more important is what is actually on the disk — the message not the messenger.

For centuries, scholarship in the western tradition has centred on printed books as the defining medium by which it expresses and preserves knowledge. Ask in the rare-books library for a source of scholarly understanding about Stonehenge which is a full five centuries old, Caxton’s Chronicle of England of 1482, and you find a printed volume which as a physical object astonishingly resembles a book about Stonehenge of 1982 or of 1998 — in its alphabet of standardized letters adapted from hand-written forms, in its black ink on folded paper, in its binding, in the size, the shape and the number of pages, in the type-size, the line spacing and the margins to the page, in the divisions by paragraphs and chapters, in the ordering, indexing and conventions of its contents. Already old in the 15th century — for these conventions derived from the habits of the copied manuscripts — that standard format shapes scholarly knowledge to this day.

Unlike many regional archaeologies the study of Egypt has always had widespread appeal, from archaeologists to Afrocentrists, orientalists to occultists. According to one web-site, ‘Egypt dominates the history of the world.’ This ever-popular fascination has spilled over into the electronic media since the inception of the Internet. Thus, Egypt proves to be a telling casestudyin net politics and potentialities. Simply typing the word ‘Egypt’ into a Web searcher elicits over 1 million sites, and the content of that material runs the gamut from scholarly resources closely matching those known in print to fringe sites and sci-fi web pages. This makes electronic Egypt an intellectual and ethical minefield for the uninitiated, especially as there proves often little to differentiate between this panoply of sites in terms of presentation and professionality. It palpably illustrates the homogenization of knowledge on the net and prompts us to consider the construction of archaeology and archaeological knowledges.