Introduction

An ideal pottery archive would preserve both the total collection and all of the data relating to the pottery from an excavation or field project in such a way that it was physically stable, secure and allowed an instant response to any query concerning its contents. The reality has been, and often still is, far from this. Until recently it was common practice for an archaeologist to regard a pottery collection as having fulfilled its purpose once a publication had been produced. It would at that stage be passed across to the care of a museum whose storage and retention policies would govern its fate. There is now, however, a joint realisation by the archaeological and museum professions that they have a duty together to produce a usable archive. After all, a vast amount of money and time will often have been spent on it up to that point, and it is wasteful of a potential resource not to curate it properly and make it accessible for use. There is a further development in that the specialised needs of archaeological archives and collections have led, in the UK, to the foundation of archaeological resource centres such as the London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre (LAARC), which holds information on more than 7,500 archaeological sites, and the Archaeological Resource Centre (ARC) in York.

Uses of Archives

When designing a pottery archive, one really wants to know how it is to be used in the future. However, with a permanent archive the sorts of questions which might be asked of it may not even have been formulated at the time the archive was created and all one can really do is to look at the ways in which you yourself might want to use someone else's archive.