Survey in southwest Macedonia provides a new field record of the pattern of Neolithic settlement. It prompts a further opinion in the enduring debate about the nature of the diffusion of agriculture, discussed most recently in ANTIQUITY by van Andel & Runnels (1995).

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.