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.