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I must admit that reading the Guardian article my first thought was "Leaping lizards Mr Science!!!" - anyone who knows a bit about IT knows that delete is not the same as erase. Equally there have been companies around for years getting data off of dead hard drives - in principle I assume that you can, even if the electronics have failed, actually extract the physical disc and put it into another enclosure. However, there is I think a more interesting point here which is also raised by Mulholland's letter. That is that the kind of thing we are talking about here is intangible culture. I first started thinking about this while writing a chapter on the Web for John Schofield's forthcoming "Defining Moments" book (plug plug). As a case for archaeological study the web itself is entirely intangible. Yes there are physical computers and the communications technology that connects them, but the web consists of web pages and server software. This seems to me to be in a similar ball park to the work on acoustic archaeology; the physical conditions; structures and for that matter the earths atmosphere; create necessary conditions, but the actual acoustic is an intangible product of vibrating atoms. EH, judging from recent Conservation Bulletin's have been working on the intangible, but my feeling is that its still somewhat under theorised. For example, both UNESCO and ICOMOS have conventions and standards on the intangible, but these seem to relate only to things like oral tradition and skills, not the intangible that surrounds material things. My own feeling is that in our endeavours to get to grips with materiality over the past few years we have failed to get to address, as yet, its corroloaries, such as the intangible, ephemerality and absence. end of rant P G-B David Gordon wrote: > Very thought-provoking article in today's Guardian on the archaeology > of computer drives (although archaeology is not what they call it). > See > http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/14/security.computerforensics. > Also relates to Bernard J Mulholland's letter in British Archaeology > 101 and my reply in the current edition! > > David > -------------------------- contemp-hist-arch is a list for news and > events in contemporary and historical archaeology, and for > announcements relating to the CHAT conference group. ------- For email > subscription options see: > http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/archives/contemp-hist-arch.html ------- For > CHAT meetings see: http://www.bris.ac.uk/archanth/events/chat.html > -------------------------- > -------------------------- contemp-hist-arch is a list for news and events in contemporary and historical archaeology, and for announcements relating to the CHAT conference group. ------- For email subscription options see: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/archives/contemp-hist-arch.html ------- For CHAT meetings see: http://www.bris.ac.uk/archanth/events/chat.html --------------------------