Who owns our archaeology?

[Unitof1]

I think that the EU might want them one day what ho

[P Prentice]

i'm not really concerned about the material remains as much as i am about the actual archaeology, the study, the stuff we need to forward the ideas and the discipline

my life is short and i want to know stuff before i die and i want to say stuff about what i know because that is what makes it worth while

i want the information that selfish people wont allow me to see and i dont care if it isn't fully formed and perfectly rounded

i want everybody to publish straight to the www

[Comarch]

Archaeology produces knowledge of the past and knowledge cannot be 'owned'. Knowledge exists because it is shared. If it is not shared it does not exist. The features and artefacts found on a site are a means to an end not the end in itself. The question is who deseminates this knowledge to be shared in the community and how much of the community will be able to access it? Will it be professional field archaeologists? Will it be academics? Will the people accessing it be the usual suspects? It is no good just dumping the information on the web. Just like civilians cannot be 'protected' by bombing tanks. We have to get 'boots on the ground' and someone has to pay for this so that engagment with the community is constant and prolonged. The past will only then be part of the present within the fabric of our communities.

[P Prentice]

Archaeology produces knowledge of the past and knowledge cannot be 'owned'. Knowledge exists because it is shared. If it is not shared it does not exist. The features and artefacts found on a site are a means to an end not the end in itself. The question is who deseminates this knowledge to be shared in the community and how much of the community will be able to access it? Will it be professional field archaeologists? Will it be academics? Will the people accessing it be the usual suspects? It is no good just dumping the information on the web. Just like civilians cannot be 'protected' by bombing tanks. We have to get 'boots on the ground' and someone has to pay for this so that engagment with the community is constant and prolonged. The past will only then be part of the present within the fabric of our communities.

i think you will find that in law knowledge can be owned and that it does exist even if it isn't shared but i think i get what you are saying. clearly we agree on 'the means to an end' and i will take community to mean 'everybody'. i think 'dumping' is perjorative although i will concede publishing straightaway was unhelpful when i'm advocating an open accessable archive which everyone can engage with. this in no way detracts from community archaeology but enhances it.

[Comarch]

i think you will find that in law knowledge can be owned and that it does exist even if it isn't shared but i think i get what you are saying. clearly we agree on 'the means to an end' and i will take community to mean 'everybody'. i think 'dumping' is perjorative although i will concede publishing straightaway was unhelpful when i'm advocating an open accessable archive which everyone can engage with. this in no way detracts from community archaeology but enhances it.

I take your point re: knowledge. I think you understand what I mean; unless knowledge is shared it has little or no 'value' except to the person 'owning' it to themselves. A bit like onanism :0. I take back 'dumping' but unless the material caters for all, and is written in various ways for different audiences, the dry, technical, 'grey literature' will not surfice. This is not dumbing down. There would be no point going to a school and giving a university lecture for example. By all means get it all out there, but be flexible.

[P Prentice]

but unless the material caters for all, and is written in various ways for different audiences, the dry, technical, 'grey literature' will not surfice. This is not dumbing down

dry and technical is what is commonly churned out the end of the process 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 to wait years and years and years if ever to see a report. clearly there would be temptation for extraneous interpretation which might sometimes be misguided or misplaced but equally the work of the people who excavated it wouldnt be wasted

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

[Jack]

i'm not really concerned about the material remains as much as i am about the actual archaeology, the study, the stuff we need to forward the ideas and the discipline

my life is short and i want to know stuff before i die and i want to say stuff about what i know because that is what makes it worth while

i want the information that selfish people wont allow me to see and i dont care if it isn't fully formed and perfectly rounded

i want everybody to publish straight to the www

I want never gets

[P Prentice]

I want never gets

you have never met my daughter then!

and i think that net publishing is inevitable, the sheer volume of output has nowhere else (accessable) to go

[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

[Sith]

Web-based publication of the results and considered interpretation of a site for a variety of audiences i can understand, but the whole archive down to the last dog-eared context sheet? Why? Only two groups of people could possibly be interested:

Later archaeologists wanting to check specific details and who would probably be happy visiting an archive to see them; and
Pedants who want to shout 'Gotcha' becuse a context has been mis-represented somewhere in the report or because they want to prove that a WSi wasn't followed to the nth degree.

Either way, the numbers who could realistically be expected make use of this is so small that it would just be clogging up a chunk of bandwidth that could be better used for something else (like better on line reports).