Aloha all,
To my mind the central issue here is whether or not archaeologists are
really interested in sharing data.
My sense of the new push for e-journals in the experimental sciences is
that those scientists *really* want to share data and are very much alive
to the potential of the Internet in this regard. It matters to them what
their colleagues around the world are finding. Archaeology is a bit
different. If I am working on reconstructing diet in traditional Hawaii,
say, then results of faunal analyses from Roman Britain, which might be
intrinsically interesting and carried out with methodological rigor and
statistical panache, are pretty much beside the point. I don't need
access to the Roman Britain data to do my work, although I might borrow
some techniques and benefit from knowing how archaeologists there went
about their work. Conversely, archaeologists working on Roman Britain can
probably do quite well without ever seeing my Hawaii data.
Perhaps the difference is one of scale. Physicists and biologists work on
problems that are universally applicable. Our work tends to be more
parochial. It might be that the archaeology journals best-suited for the
internet are those put out by local archaeological societies and the like,
rather than ones that are broader in scope. At this scale the benefits of
sharing data are readily apparent, and the internet is the best way to
accomplish this.
I think archaeologists will eventually use the internet in pretty much the
same way physicists and biologists are using it. The network topology is
likely to be much different, though.
Tom
Thomas S. Dye
http://www.tsdye.com
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