Who owns our archaeology?

[Marcus Brody]

dry and technical is what is commonly churned out the end of theprocess but what i want to see is the field documentation and drawings on line,the specialist reports on line so that everybody can see them and not have towait years and years and years if ever to see a report. clearly there would betemptation for extraneous interpretation which might sometimes be misguided ormisplaced but equally the work of the people who excavated it wouldnt be wasted

interprettingthe results for a diverse audience is a skilled and time consuming task whichshould be properly funded and reported but where better than the www?

I think that you're advocating two separate things here, the first being the wholesale publication of the unmediated site archive on the internet, the second the interpretation of this archive for a diverse audience in the form of material tailored to suit specific age groups, education levels or interest. Is this correct?

I don't think there's any reason why site archives couldn't be made available wholesale on the web in the form of scanned documents (or in the future, as material that has been captured digitally), but I think there may be a couple of possible obstacles to overcome. When dealing with material that is not originally created in a digital format, there'll be a cost (in both time and money) for converting it into a format that can be accessed over the web. This is most likely to be achieved either by scanning the original paper context sheets or drawings, or by re-keying text from these into database or word-processing software. Either of these approaches can be surprisingly time-consuming, and so would involve a cost for the archaeologist which would need to be funded from somewhere. This issue is likely to decrease over time, however, with a greater up-take of digital recording methods - for example, ten years ago any site archive would have contained physical photos or slides, which would also need to have been scanned, but digital photos could be uploaded directly.

The second potential problem would arise once the archive is available in a digital format, whether this is achieved by scanning physical material or by native digital capture, and this is where the material should be mounted. The obvious place would be on the website of the company that undertook the work, but this would not necessarily guarantee its availability in the long term. Companies can go bust, merge, move their web address or redesign their website, any of which could result in the link to the archive material being broken or lost. Uploading to a commercial host may have similar problems, and would also need to involve a commitment on behalf of the company to pay for this hosting in perpetuity, which is virtually impossible to guarantee. It?s difficult to avoid the conclusion that there?d need to be some agreed digital repository that was charged with holding this material in a secure format, migrating it to take account of changing software standards, and ensuring its accessibility over time.

While the wholesale publication of unmediated site archives would certainly have benefits in terms of democratising access to the original material, allowing anyone to draw their own conclusions about the results, I also think that the audience for material of this type would likely be fairly small and specialised. When there are already complaints about the dry and technical nature of many professional archaeological reports, I can?t imagine that there will be a huge clamour to view the original context sheets describing the fills of twenty near-identical post-holes. That?s not a reason not to make the information available, simply an acknowledgement that for the casual reader with an interest in archaeology, a well-written and engaging popular publication is likely to be more accessible and enjoyable. There?s a place for both approaches, but I?d say that it may be better to put more effort into producing a range of material aimed at engaging with as wide a variety of people as possible