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Archaeology on the World Wide Web:
a user's field-guide

Sara Champion

NOTE: Due to the age of this article, it is likely that many of the links included in the following text are no longer available.

Using the World Wide Web is not unlike visiting an unfamiliar place to look at the archaeology. You want to know if there is anything interesting to see, so you start in the library, looking for information; you read books and articles from journals; perhaps you contact colleagues who can tell you about the place; you want to know how to find the sites and to get to them; and once you are there, you want to visit the museums as well as the monuments, and to locate people who are working there, whether they are from academic institutions, government archaeological bodies or local societies. You will want to check that access arrangements have not changed since the last published information; you also want to ensure that as far as possible the information you have is accurate, so that you do not waste time looking at sites which are not relevant to your interests.

As for your unfamiliar place, so for the WWW: as the Web becomes the preferred medium of communication for everything from research papers to the latest news on field projects, from annual reports on the archaeological work of units and local government organizations to discussions on a wide range of archaeological topics, users will need to know what there is and how to find it. The purpose of this 'field guide' is to take you out and guide you round the sites, pointing out areas of particular interest, and providing you with the Web's equivalent of the grid reference (the URL or Uniform Resource Locator). It outlines some of the categories of information about archaeology on the WWW, illustrated by good examples; it introduces the 'official' places which centralize information and provide easy navigation; and offers, at the end of the guide, some tips for frustration-free searching to those looking for specific items of interest. All of the sites will be direct 'hotlinks' in the Web version of this guide, so for ease of access and to save typing in all the URLs, you should visit Antiquity's pages and set off on your field trip from there.

Virtual Libraries

These are the 'official' subject-based 'libraries' of the WWW, originating at CERN, Switzerland, and are the first place to look for information on any broad subject area. The full list of such libraries is at Stanford. There are currently three registered VLs for archaeology, one for archaeology generally, another for European archaeology and the third for German archaeology, all of which are regularly maintained and updated. They will not disappear: even if their URLs should change for some reason, there will be a message at the old address linking visitors to the new one, and the main list of VLs should always have an up-to-date link.

The Virtual Library for archaeology worldwide is called ArchNet, and is maintained at the University of Connecticut. The two main organizing principles for this VL are geographical and subject-based: the geographical regions are Africa, Arctic, Asia, Australia and Pacific, Central America, Europe, Near East, North America and South America, while the subject-tree includes archaeometry, botanical analysis, ceramics, cultural resource management, virtual classroom (on-line educational materials), ethnohistory and ethnoarchaeology, faunal analysis, geoarchaeology, historic archaeology, lithics, mapping and GIS, method and theory, software and site tours. There are also groupings of academic departments, museums, news and journals/publications. The maintainers of this VL do not claim to have every WWW site concerned with global archaeology registered with them, but there is an extraordinary range of material presented, from illustrated discussions of site sampling strategies to pages (including on-line research papers) on the fossil evidence for human evolution in China, and from the Upper Midwest Rock Art Research Associationto the Hittite Home Page.

The Virtual Library for European Archaeology is called ARGE - the Archaeological Resource Guide for Europe, currently maintained at the University of Birmingham but soon to move to Gröningen. This VL too is organized both according to European country and to subject area: all resources pertaining to individual countries are arranged in subgroups, such as academic institutions, museums, sites and monuments, governmental organizations, archaeology societies etc., while the subject tree has currently 62 separate listings from charters, treaties and legislation to landscape archaeology, and from experimental archaeology to the Vikings.

One stated aim of this VL is to counteract the anglo-centricity of the WWW by offering access to the index pages in a variety of European languages (currently piloted are versions in Norwegian, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian and Portuguese, and a Polish version is in preparation), by developing multilingual search facilities, and by linking to the original-language version of all pages, noting translations where they are available. As well as the official VL for German archaeology, those country 'buttons' which have their image 'hotlinked' lead to resource centres of VL type for those countries: ArchWEB for the Netherlands, ArchDATA for France and Irish Archaeology. There are two equivalent sites for the UK: UK Archaeology on the Internet maintained at Nottingham and British Archaeology on the Internet maintained at Durham. There are also period-specific collections of resources, such as ROMARCH for Roman archaeology, the original maintained at the University of Michigan but also mirrored at the University of East Anglia for quicker access from Europe.

ARGE is updated both by site owners offering their sites for inclusion and by the maintainers who make regular multilingual searches for new pages, and its intention is to be as complete as possible. Because of the wide variety of pages to which it makes links, which may be of varying length, content and quality, it also evaluates and comments on individual sites, giving some guidance for the visitor. Sites of particular interest will be listed in the sections below, but one useful subject area worth mentioning here is that concerned with national and international charters and legislation where the full texts of such items as the Malta Convention, the Venice Charter and the World Heritage Convention can be accessed, and easily searched for specific terms using the 'Find' button on whichever WWW browser you use. National antiquities legislation is still largely inaccessible, being frequently 'protected' from dissemination by the government departments which sell the texts; however, it is hoped that in the next couple of years, under pressure from Web-active archaeologists and in the interests of more widespread public understanding, the benefits of having such legislation on-line will persuade such bodies to allow Web versions.

Books, journals and articles

Whole books on archaeology, or Web versions in one form or another, are beginning to appear on the WWW. One of the first was Michael Greenhalgh's The Greek and Roman Cities of Western Turkey; this text was originally completely accessible free of charge, but now has only the first part of each chapter available, the images (and presumably the rest of the book) having become part of ArtServe's 'pay-to-view' cost-recovery service. Described as the first on-line archaeology textbook, Robert Dunnell's Systematics in Prehistory is heavy on text and light on graphics, but makes this seminal publication available free to any visitor. Roger Grace has published a Hypertext version of his book Interpreting the function of stone tools (BAR International series 474, 1989) at which contains the full text, photographs, graphics and tables - a must for lithics enthusiasts.Other recent books which have Web versions include Aedeen Cremin's The Celts in Europe (1992), which is an abridged Web version of her 1992 text (including parts of her 1997 revised edition); and Kevin Greene's Archaeology: an Introduction (3rd edition 1996), which has extracts from the paper-published edition accompanied by carefully chosen Web links which can be used to exemplify his text, and is an excellent educational tool.

Books of continuing interest which are out of copyright are beginning to appear, but Web editions of these take more work to produce because originals need scanning and tidying up: for example, there is William Wilde's Lough Corrib (1867) with descriptions and illustrations of many archaeological and historic monuments from this part of Co. Galway, Ireland; and Amelia Edwards' Pharoahs, Fellahs and Explorers (1891). Tuttle's The origin and antiquity of physical man scientifically considered (1866) is of particular interest to those concerned with the early development of the discipline and its relationship with developments in geology and evolutionary theory. Many of these books are hard to find in their original versions, and show how the Web can provide a genuine service to archaeology: we look forward to the Web version of Pitt Rivers' Excavations in Cranborne Chase without its antiquarian books price-tag (but sadly also without its gold-tooled blue covers).

Archaeology journals on the Web are divided into those which are purely electronic publications and those which have a Web presence in one form or another but continue to be published in the traditional manner. The first of the former to appear was Electronic Antiquity in 1993 (Chippindale, this volume p. 1060), which is concerned with classical subject material. This is still produced in a Gopher version (text only, no images), and has a consequently horrendous URL to type; it is best accessed via this link or from ARGE. This was followed in 1994 by two journals, Online Archaeology from the University of Southampton , still in an experimental phase, and the Journal of World Anthropology, edited by Zubrow & Jarvis at the University of Buffalo; the 5th issue of JWA, currently in production, will be its last, as it is to be succeeded by the Anthropology Review Database, a journal of reviews of anthropology and related scholarly books. Cyberarqueólogo Português began publishing in 1995; there are articles on Neolithic subjects including megaliths, on late Bronze Age and Roman sites and on prospection techniques. Forum Archaeologiae: Zeitschrift für Klassische Archäologie was started in Austria in 1996, and incorporates an active discussion forum alongside the papers on classical archaeology subjects; and in the same year, the first issue of the online rock art bulletinTRACCE was published from the Val Camonica team, which is now in its 8th issue, and contains short papers on rock-art from across the world. Perhaps the most significant electronic journal to appear in 1996 was Internet Archaeology, discussed more fully below (Heyworth et al., this volume pp. 1039­42), an electronic journal planned to take full advantage of the capabilities of the Web for linkage with a variety of files and data-bases, and to challenge the supremacy of print as the only acceptable medium for serious scholarly papers. A refreshing new venture begun in the same year is assemblage (sic), the Sheffield Graduate Journal of Archaeology which has a wide range of contents including serious papers as well as interviews, reviews and other lighter material.

Journals with a Web presence range from providing a single page with subscription details, through a listing of volume contents, to the publication of abridged or exemplary articles. In the latter category is Antiquity itself, which combines the extremely useful index of all volumes (a boon to late-night bibliography compilers!) with the first pages of some papers in more recent issues. The popular journal Current Archaeology does much the same thing, but the highlighted articles are abridged versions of the full text, and take advantage of the capabilities of the WWW for high-quality colour illustration to bring that magazine's photographs to a wide public: for example, the magnificent torcs from Snettisham. The Current Archaeology WWW pages include a range of other useful information, including the Directory of British Archaeology listing over 500 organizations concerned with archaeology in Britain. The Web pages of Archaeology, from the Archaeological Institute of America, include the full text of the journal's Newsbriefs section and selected articles, plus abstracts of other articles, and contents listings. Archaeology Ireland has full and abridged versions of a small selection of articles, and includes the 1993 Excavations data-base, detailing information from 231 excavations in Ireland in that year.

British Archaeology makes the text of each issue available on-line two months later; while the Journal of Roman Archaeology has full contents listings and selected full-text articles available. The World Archaeological Bulletin from the World Archaeological Congress has full contents and selected full articles on-line.

An increasing number of journals offer partial or full indices of their contents, sometimes with abstracts. These include the Journal of Field Archaeology, with contents and abstracts back to 1986, Archaeological dialoguesfrom the Netherlands, the Tipperary Historical Journal which includes many archaeological articles and the Derbyshire Archaeological Journal. A number of archaeological societies and organizations also produce regular newsletters on-line.

Research papers and articles can be found all over the WWW, some on the Web pages of academic institutions and some floating almost free in cyberspace. These latter occasionally disappear after a few months: they are the equivalent of cropmarks in the fields of the Internet. Of the former, there are now so many that no listing could do justice to their variety and usefulness: the best advice is to access universities through the Virtual Libraries and to take a look at what is there. They range from work on the classification of archaeological artefacts using shape to a reappraisal of the Hilversum culture, from a study of pottery and pigments in Arizona which uses the full potential of hypertext links and images, to Bulgarian archaeology from Berkeley). An unusual site is Constanze Witt's thesis proposal on the origins of Celtic art, called Barbarians on the Periphery?, unusual because, despite being a preliminary proposal, it is richly illustrated and takes the form of a discursive paper; her intention is to present the finished thesis in hypertext format. Many offerings from academic departments and other organizations are concerned with field-work, including interim reports on current projects: some of these are highlighted in the 'Sites and monuments' section below.

Communication

We have looked in the library, and found out where to get information for our virtual field-trip; and we have read some books and articles. So now it is time to get in touch with some colleagues.

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of archaeology on the Internet and the WWW is the possibility it gives to communicate with scholars world-wide who may never meet in real life (RL). The most immediate and personal communication is between individuals through email, an internet rather than a WWW service, though you can use the WWW to try and find someone's email address. With so many people joining the internet community every day, it is not surprising that there is no global, or even national, email directory, but there ways to find most, if not all, people. Some of the search engines have specialized search mechanisms for email addresses, for example WhoWhere and Infoseek, but these are by no means complete, and for the scholarly community it is usually easier eitherto access their home university's page and email directories (via one of the VLs) if you know where they work or to look at the membership list of likely email discussion groups (see below), if those membership lists are open to view (some are not). If all else fails, a message put out on a discussion list asking for the information will almost certainly result in a successful response from one or more people. It is not the place here to go into the intricacies and delights of personal email, but it is worth saying that it has opened the door to many successful archaeological collaborations which would have been extremely unlikely to occur otherwise. The maintainers of ARGE met, corresponded, developed the idea for ARGE, set it up, and wrote a paper about it entirely through a whole year of emailing, and first met in RL when they delivered that paper at the CAA conference in Oxford!

Discussion lists have proved to be immensely useful to the archaeological community, and are discussed in detail below (this volume, Carlson pp. 1049­51 and Younger pp. 1052­4). They work using email a message sent to the list will be automatically distributed by email to all listmembers but most lists have easily accessible, and usually searchable, archives on the WWW, so if you do not want to receive all the emails you can go and look at what has been discussed. There is now a considerable number of discussion lists dedicated to archaeology, from more general lists such as Arch-L (Carlson) and Arch-Theory to the much more specific, for example AegeaNet (Younger), ArcheoBotany, Arch-Metals, Lithics-L, Ind-Arch (industrial archaeology), BritArch (Britain), PortArch (Portugal) and AZTLAN (Pre-Columbian studies). Subscription to the lists is free, and is made by sending a message to the listserver/administrator, while to send messages for distribution on the list itself you write to the list address.

Subscription details are not all identical: lists based in Britain are as a rule maintained through Mailbase in Newcastle, elsewhere in the world they may be run using Listserv or Majordomo software, and require slightly different commands. As an example, to subscribe to a Mailbase list (including Arch-Theory, Arch-Metals, BritArch and Ind-Arch) you send a message with nothing in the subject line, and a single sentence in the body of the text reading 'join [listname] [yourname]' (no inverted commas). The system is automated, so you will rapidly receive a message from Mailbase confirming your subscription, and then you will automatically receive whatever messages are sent to the list. To send messages to, say, BritArch, you email to (britarch@mailbase.ac.uk). Information on how to leave the list, or to suspend your mail while you are away, is sent to you, but you can also find it by accessing the main Mailbase Website and following the menus. Here too you can access the archives of each list by going to your chosen list and clicking on the relevant link.

Listserv lists, which include many of the US-based examples, are subscribed to following the pattern described by Carlson (below, p. 1050), using the command 'subscribe' or 'sub' instead of 'join', and Majordomo lists work in a similar way. Moderated lists (Carlson p. 1051) and some others may require you to subscribe through the listowner. Details about the archives are usually available through the information sent to you when your subscription is acknowledged: one example is the archive for Arch-L. Many of the list addresses and subscription details can be found on the VL pages, or on John Younger's extremely useful compilation page.

Some of the discussions on these lists are kept as separate files where the input has been focused, useful and even ground-breaking, so that an interested archaeologist can see the full discussion together rather than tracking the thread through a long monthly archive. Similarly, discussion groups often work together to develop bibliographies on particular subjects, which are of great value to the archaeological community. An example of the latter is the Archaeo-Metallurgical Bibliography for 1996 compiled by the members of Arch-Metals.

In some cases major pieces of work come together in the form of an unmediated electronic journal, where papers in the pre-print stage (cf. Harnad, this volume p. 1045) can be read and downloaded. An example of this is the AZTLAN e-journal where a set of papers, including 'In Search of Nature: Imagining Precolumbian Landscapes of Ancient Central America an essay on past human alteration of the environment' by John Hoopes and 'The Mesoamerican Urban Landscape from Teotihuacan to the Aztecs report on the growth of cities in Central Mexico' by Michael E. Smith, make particularly interesting reading.

Newsgroups are rather different, as David Carlson explains (p. 1050); as well as having a different system for sharing discussion, operated through a Usenet news server and not through email, they generally have a different clientele. Though there are amateur archaeologists and interested members of the global public subscribed on most if not all the archaeology discussion lists, they are generally in a minority there, whereas the readers and contributors on newsgroups are much less likely to be professional archaeologists or students. This gives a different tenor to the discussions, and though serious archaeological subjects can be debated with ardour, there are just as likely to be 'threads' associated with more 'fringe' areas of the discipline. It is a salutary experience to read the discussion on these newsgroups from time to time, if only to see what the interested public is actually interested in: while archaeologists may sometimes despair, they perhaps have only themselves to blame if what they do does not interest or grip a public apparently eager to learn. John Younger's list (above) contains the names of all but one of the relevant newsgroups, wanting only the relatively new sci.archaeology.moderated referred to by David Carlson, which represents an attempt to curb discussion of subjects on the wilder fringes of the discipline.

The WWW comes into its own through Bulletin Boards and Hypermail discussion fora, which are the equivalent of message boards and seminar groups. In these systems people leave messages on a 'board' accessible through the Web, and can carry on a discussion without using email; the discussion is open for all to view as it develops. A good example of this is the Origins of Humankind Communication Center which has been on-line since 1995, and has been at times very busy. Recent changes to a new server which cannot support the 'old' message boards, resulting in the current absence of the discussion archives, make the site look thinly supported, but momentum is gathering again, and both the Bulletin Board and the Chat Room (where you can 'talk' to others in Real Time if you are logged in simultaneously) show how global discussions on a particular topic can take place in both real and delayed time unaffected by time difference. Hypermail fora are in their infancy in archaeology, but one is mentioned above in relation to the e-journal Forum Archaeologiae.

Institutions, organizations and societies

Now we want to find out what all sorts of archaeologists are up to when they are at work, so we set out to visit some universities, some international bodies, some national and local government or quasi-government organizations for archaeology, and to see what is happening in field units and in national and local societies.

Some departments of archaeology in universities have been very active in capitalizing on the global audience delivered by the WWW to advertise their academic programmes, their personnel and their research work, whereas others do not have departmental web pages at all. Those that have are accessible through the Academic Institutions links on the various VL pages, and the variety of information on offer ranges from course outlines and staff lists to detailed listings of curricula, support materials for RL courses, on-line courses for distance learning, illustrated staff lists with research interests, reports on field and other research projects, pages for student archaeology societies and even reports on departmental sports teams! Not surprisingly, those that have more to offer are much more interesting places to visit, and a selection of the best is presented here. The University of Iowa's Anthropology Department has not only course information for its archaeology modules, but also full sets of course notes and tests/exams on-line (read the notes for North American Prehistory an extremely useful experience), and is host to a much wider range of materials, such as sections on Public Education in Archaeology and South Dakota archaeology, and excellent pages of resources on repatriation and reburial issues. This site is well worth a visit.

The University of Calgary's Archaeology Department pages start off with a link to the current weather in Calgary, before offering a virtual slide show about archaeology in arctic Canada. With a click of the mouse you can then get a full colour-keyed plan of the two floors in which the department is housed (room numbers marked) before meeting the staff and finding out about the programme of courses. Then on to the pages of Chacmool, the Student Archaeological Association, with details of its famous annual student-run conference which has resulted in many well-known conference volumes, and a quick stop to play the Spot the Loony Faculty game, before returning to the Current and Recent Research Project pages which detail some 20 research projects from the Arctic to West Africa and the Caribbean to Quebec. This is almost like a RL visit to the Department!

The University of Southampton's Archaeology Department was the first in the UK to take full advantage of the Web, and has always acted as a key centre for archaeological resources, especially before VLs and other European departments set up their own pages. It still has one of the best sets of pages, detailing not only its courses and research and field projects (well illustrated), but also research papers from staff and students, the first issue of an e-journal (mentioned above), lively student Archaeology Society pages, details about the changing fortunes of the departmental cricket team, a virtual field-trip to Salisbury Plain, and many pages of archaeology resources on the Web. It also hosts the pages of the World Archaeological Congress and the Computer Applications in Archaeology Conference.

The Department of Archaeology and Prehistory at the University of Sheffield has a number of good pages, with much detail on research and field projects as well as on courses and the large number of academic staff and their interests. The Archaeology Department of the University of Cape Town is also well worth a virtual visit, particularly the work of its research groups which include the pages of RESUNACT, the ResearchUnit for the Archaeology of Cape Town, and its Public Archaeology programme. Their Archaeology Materials Laboratory page includes a useful index of the South African Archaeological Bulletin. The Archaeology Group of Bournemouth University has some interesting research projects running, from work on the Isle of Man and on Neolithic landscapes at Knowlton to several English Heritage projects, and hosts the pages of Wessex IFA and the Neolithic Studies Group.

Moving from universities to organizations, one of the most informative and wonderfully illustrated sites for heritage on the Web is the redesigned set of pages for World Heritage. All the legislation, the personnel, the lists are here on these good-looking pages, as well as an on-line newsletter and special features, and the photographs are stunning. The World Archaeological Congress has a set of pages with information about its activities, organization and statutes, the code of ethics as relating to indigenous people, the text of the Vermillion Accord on Human Remains, and the World Archaeological Bulletin (see above).

National archaeological organizations have not always been the most eager to expose themselves to the WWW, though in the UK English Heritage's Archaeology Division has been making up for lost time, and their pages now have a range of interesting material, from the 1995­6 Archaeology Review with its report on archaeological activities undertaken, to the project reviews and the Ancient Monuments Laboratory's Geophysical Survey reports. It also has the summary of the AML's work at Stonehenge, and the presentation of Virtual Stonehenge. Ireland's Discovery Programme has a wealth of information on its well-illustrated pages, with documentation and updates on its range of projects, including work at Tara, and useful explanatory sections on the technology used in survey and mapping.

At a regional level, the pages from the Denkmalpflege in Baden-Württemberg are packed with well-illustrated information on excavations, museums and exhibitions and protected monuments, including a good section on the Eberdingen-Hochdorf 'princely' grave. The Hereford and Worcester County Archaeological Service has a superb set of pages, with information and advice on everything from the Sites and Monuments Record to an introduction to environmental archaeology, and from advice on metal detecting and archaeology to well-illustrated descriptions of current surveys and projects. This is a model of its type, and will be a hard act for any other county archaeology service to follow. Nevertheless, the City of York Council's Archaeology Home Page is also an appealing site, with summaries of recent and current archaeological work in the city, as well as an introduction to York's archaeology policy and an on-line version of the York Development and Archaeology Study (in the process of being 'webbed').

Some of the UK excavation units have been on the WWW since the early days, and their sites show this very clearly in the sophistication of their content and organization. The University of Birmingham Field Archaeology Unit has pages on its commercial activities including excavation: the prize-winning Wroxeter Hinterland Project, for example, with its strong community involvement and bi-monthly newsletters. Other projects from South Cadbury to Old Bulawayo in Zimbabwe are documented, along with information on its education and training activities. The Trent and Peak Archaeological Trust also has detailed illustrated reports on its projects, which were the first in the UK to show that summary or interim reports could be suitably placed on the WWW. This site also has on-line extracts from Thomas Bateman's Vestiges of the Antiquities of Derbyshire (1848) and Ten Years Diggings (1861), being his reports on the excavation of more than 200 barrows; and it hosts the 'UK on the Internet' Resource Guide. The Museum of London Archaeology Service has a large amount of interesting information on its web pages, including a summary of all its 1996 excavations, and information on science, finds, environment and publications. In France, ArchéoNord, the archaeological service for the Département du Nord, presents its work on some very well-illustrated pages and includes the publication details in a separate bibliography.

Both national scholarly societies and local archaeological societies or associations can be found on the WWW. The Canadian Archaeological Association has documentation, including indices of its publications, available, and hosts a mirror of a Canadian Museum of Civilisation Virtual Archaeological Expedition on its pages, where its members can trace the steps in an excavation project and use technical and other reports to make their own judgements about the site. The Society for American Archaeology has a very full set of Web pages, offering more than just its programme of activities and details about its publications and conferences: there are 'outreach' sections where topics such as 'what is archaeology', and careers and academic programmes are discussed. It is a useful place for academics to find out where the SAA meetings will be in future years (current planning goes through to 2001), and some articles in its newsletter are available on-line.

The Archaeological Institute of America also has a strong Web presence, detailing current projects (including two electronic publishing experiments comparing black and white paper publication of images with Web colour images) and planned tours as well as the expected publications, meetings, and a history of the Institute itself.

The Council for British Archaeology's website is a mine of information on archaeology in Britain, having among its many pages one which deals with archaeology and parliament (listing any mentions of archaeology in the Houses of Parliament), an archaeology press-cuttings service, a set of press-release documents on legislation from the Department of National Heritage, a 'Stonehenge proposals' index page, a page concerned with portable antiquities, metal-detecting and archaeology and a series of factsheets on training, higher education and careers in archaeology. The CBA also hosts pages for Britain's period societies and the British Archaeological Awards. You could spend a very long time reading at this site!

One of the best-looking and most interesting local society Websites is that of the Birmingham and Warwickshire Archaeological Society: well-illustrated and nicely designed, it has details of lectures and excursions, and reports and photographs of fieldwork. An increasing number of smaller societies are using the WWW to advertise their presence and their activities, mainly in the UK and the US, though in many cases they have not yet capitalized on the graphic possibilities of the medium, and have fairly simple text-based information. However, you could use the search mechanisms to see if your own favourite is there.

Sites and monuments

It's time to go out in the field: but there are so many sites that could be visited that it is only possible here to point out a few as examples. There are three main categories of site presentation: interim reports on sites under excavation, detailed presentations of individual or groups of sites and tourist-type collections of pictures which have little explanatory text. Some of the material comes from 'official' institutional sources, while other sites are produced by knowledgeable amateurs or even tourist authorities. The 'official' sites are not invariably the best in terms of presentation or information.

The advantages of presenting interim site or project reports on the WWW are now familiar. There are no printing or dissemination costs after the initial production of the pages, they can be illustrated in colour and they tend to reach a much wider audience. The interim report on the University of Southampton's 1994 excavations at the Neolithic site of Pict's Knowe, for example, was able to present a number of colour photographs of the excavation and some vibrant colour contour plans along with the traditional plan of the site and text report (for the 1995 report, simply exchange the '4' for a '5' in the URL). Another example of this type is the University of Bradford's Crift Farm Project which includes in its annual reports some of the geophysical plots. The Birmingham Field Unit has placed on the Web the text and pictures of the report on the Lockington Barrow, destined also for Current Archaeology in advance of full publication in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society.

A project on GIS and remote sensing in Burgundy includes a range of remote sensing techniques (aerial photography, airborne thermal scanning, satellite remote sensing) along with GIS database development and analysis (historic map digitization, line-of-sight analysis and predictive modelling), all illustrated on the pages with good images (which, like all 'hot' images, can be clicked on with a mouse to enlarge them for better viewing). There is also a 'movie' fly-through (you may need to download the viewer, for free), something which would be quite impossible in print!

The multinational project at Mont Beuvray/Bibracte has a large number of illustrated pages about the project, including a tour of the site museum, newsletter, information about activities and a very useful bibliography. Ongoing work on the rock art of Val Camonica is linked with rock-art research elsewhere, and again shows the potential of presenting high quality photographs on the WWW.

Detailed work on individual sites includes the imaginative new presentation by the National Museum of Malta of the Hypogeum, which starts with suitably black backgrounded pages and allows good views of the site, as well as information on the history of its discovery and excavation. This is the only way you can visit the site at present, as it has been closed to the public for five years during restoration, but it may be open again by the time this issue of Antiquity is in print. A nice demonstration of the way the WWW can enhance a site visit is shown by the pages dedicated to Chetro Ketl, a kiva in Chaco Canyon. Here a three-dimensional reconstruction of the site based on the excavated records can be visited and 'walked around', using the mouse to click on the navigation buttons; you can even choose to see it dark and smoky! A here is alist of other sites to visit associated with the archaeology of Chaco Canyon. The Virtual Reality Stonehenge site has already been mentioned above, and is in the same category as these sites.

Excavation site archives are now available via the ADAP pages (Eiteljorg, below p. 1056) where currently material from prehistoric pueblo sites, Aegean early Bronze Age sites and data from the excavation at Ortu Còmidu, Sardinia can be downloaded. This promises to be a key resource for original archaeological data accessible via the WWW, as does the Archaeology Data Service from the UK (Richards, below p. 1058).

Perhaps you have never visited the 54 megalithic sites in the Netherlands? It is possible to do so by going to Hunebedden in Nederland, where you can click on individual sites on a distribution map of the area and jump straight to a photograph and description of each one. Where there has been excavation, details are included. This site is in Dutch, but has an English version just click on the waving Union Jack.

Two sites allow you to visit the ruins at Great Zimbabwe, both from commercial/tourist sources. The first has little text, but includes a clear plan of the site and some pictures. The second has much more detailed information and some close-up photographs. While neither of these could be considered 'academic' presentations, the text is accurate as far as it goes. A flavour of the site at Angkor Wat can be gleaned from 30 pictures of the monuments, presented in 'thumbnail' format (click on the blue captions to bring up a larger picture); but here there is no text at all, because the pictures actually come from an individual who visited the sites but was not doing an archaeological survey. Such sites are worth visiting for the images, but will naturally not give intellectual satisfaction, in contrast to the excavation reports with which we started.

There are many hundreds, probably thousands, of archaeological sites on the Web deriving from a variety of sources; you should use the search engines (see below) to find out what there is in your specific area of interest.

Museums

Having visited some sites, you may now want to look around some museums. As with the sites and monuments, there are hundreds of museums with a Web presence, almost all of them 'official' site (though there are pages deriving from tourism sources, which is sometimes the only available information on a particular museum). Many museum Web pages consist solely of a piece of short introductory text and the opening times and entry fees, but others have taken the opportunity to illustrate some of their finds, or to offer a plan and a 'walk-through' of the galleries. In one case it is possible to interrogate the collections data-base: this is the Hampshire Museums Service, where over 80,000 objects have been listed which can be searched for by keyword. There are no graphics on this site at all, but if you want to know how many Iron Age coins are in the collection, you can find out - surely the shape of things to come.

An example of interesting museum presentation is the Newcastle Museum of Antiquities, where alongside good information pages about the museum is featured an 'object of the month' with description and accession details. This museum also has an imaginative on-line exhibition called 'Flints and Stones', a Web version of a RL educational exhibition about the Palaeolithic which can be viewed with either a shaman or an archaeologist as your guide. Kilmartin House, a centre for archaeology and landscape interpretation, has a large number of excellently designed pages which offer a range of information from a quick tour to pages about prehistoric music (with sound clips) and artefacts; there is an interactive clickable map about local archaeological sites (with grid references), and details of educational programmes and research projects. Both these museums are well worth a virtual visit.

WebMuseen is a collection of all museums in German-speaking countries of Europe with Web pages, and the archaeology section leads to a long list of all such museums. As well as the information on the museums themselves, the right-hand column has clickable links to details of special exhibitions (in RL) which are often illustrated. This is a mine of information, particularly for anyone planning a trip to Germany, Switzerland or Austria. One of the museums in the list has used the WWW and its capabilities to the full: there is no better example of how to present a RL museum on the Web. It is the open-air museum of the Roman Villa at Hechingen Stein, (this link is to the English-language version, though you can choose to visit in German), a still-developing museum with partial reconstruction on the site. Excavation still continues on the site, and the pages start with an introduction to the project (click on Museum on the homepage). You are then invited to take a guided tour of 26 stops around the site, each view having a description, with a plan of the villa on the right-hand side showing where you are at each stop. There are then further pages of discussion, future plans and publications. The round trip gives a real sense of having visited the site, though interestingly it encourages one to go there in RL much more than simply hearing about it would do, which must be good for their already healthy visitor figures. A virtual visit to this site is strongly advised.

The absence of recommended visits to national archaeological museums may have been noticed in this section. There are plenty on the Web (though there are some glaring gaps), yet few that I know of have yet produced pages which use the opportunities that the WWW has to offer with any great imagination, unlike some of the not-specifically-archaeological museums such as the Natural History or Science Museums in the UK or the Smithsonian in the US. Perhaps they feel that people will come to them anyway, or perhaps they feel that virtual visitors will not feel the need to come in RL. In fact, the Smithsonian found the opposite: after it had a Web presence, its visitor numbers actually increased. So it is good to be able warmly to recommend a visit to the British Museum who were late into the Web scene (for more than the first year of ARGE we still had to use a page from a London tourist-guide website as our British Museum link) but who now have more than made up for their late start. Their excellent pages include clickable floor plans, extensive descriptions of new exhibitions, collection highlights, news, details of the education service, good information for disabled visitors and a helpful map with directions of how to get there.

Using search engines

It is possible that, having reached the end of this Field Guide, you still haven't found what you are looking for: so read on!

New users often find themselves deeply frustrated when trying to find useful archaeological information on the WWW through the many search engines, because of the large number of documents which are returned when entering a simple search term, many of which are irrelevant for their purposes (Antiquity's Editor complained of this in his editorial column, Chippindale 1996: 238­40; and see also this volume p. 1072). A few seconds spent mastering some of the key tricks which can be used to filter out unwanted document types saves all the frustration, and ensures that a manageable number of potentially useful links are returned as the result of a search. These hints are all explained on the 'Help' pages of the search engines, but people rarely read these in advance, so a couple of the most useful are outlined below.

Let us take as an example a search for useful archaeological information on 'Stonehenge' (the source of our Editor's frustration in 1996). Using one of the best (and this author's recommended) search engines, AltaVista, put in the word 'stonehenge'. You will be told that some 2665 documents have been found, of which the first 200 will be accessible via the AltaVista pages. You can immediately reduce this number of documents if, for example, you cut out everything except documents coming from UK sources (though there may of course be useful material on non-UK sites), by entering the search term in the following way: domain:uk +stonehenge (that is, domain, colon, internet country domain identifier, space, and a plus sign immediately followed by the search term). This reduces your number of hits to about 1635 links. You can then force the documents returned either to contain a particular word (e.g. a likely archaeological word) or not to contain one (e.g. a 'fringe' word like mystery or leyline or druids) by using further plus signs or minus signs, e.g.:

• domain:uk +stonehenge +neolithic returns 117 documents
• domain:uk +stonehenge +neolithic -druids returns 105 documents
• domain:uk +stonehenge +neolithic +henge -druids returns only 26 documents.

Being this specific may still result in the inclusion of a few 'rogue' links (e.g. a rather endearing piece of humour from Flanders & Swann about the building of Stonehenge: '. . . I don't know where you get that stone from anyway that's not local stone I can tell. You get it from where? The Preseli Mountains? In Wales? I know it's in Wales I've been abroad. Ooh, what'd'yer want to bring it all the way . . . You're bringing it the wrong way anyway: you want to bring it round the Chanctonbury Ring road, avoiding earthworks at Avebury . . .') and in the exclusion of others (e.g. the English Heritage Stonehenge pages because they do not include the separate word 'henge'); but anyway the 117 documents in the first listed example are easy to 'surf' through and include all those with serious information coming from UK sources.

Searching in a different language or country works in the same way: a search for the word 'musée' produces 7385 'hits'; using the domain:fr delimiter removes the Canadian, Japanese and other sources, leaving 5846 'hits'. The addition of +archéologie to such a search (domain:fr +musee +archeologie) reduces the list to a manageable 90.

Another helpful trick is to include within inverted commas any words which you wish to find in a document together in a specific sequence. Searching for references to Neolithic pottery by simply entering those two words will return an unmanageable 26,370 documents, the highest up the list being pages which contain both words somewhere in their text, together or separated, followed by pages which contain one or other word. Using the search term "neolithic pottery" reduces the list to 169 documents. A combination of this search string technique with the domain delimiter produces, for the UK (domain:uk +"neolithic pottery"), just 34 documents. Not all of these concern British Neolithic pottery: there are links to research theses in British universities dealing with pottery from non-British sites, and to exhibitions and UK stamp dealers' catalogues which feature non-British Neolithic pottery. But an intelligent use of these delimiters and word-grouping mechanisms will allow rapid searching and a satisfyingly manageable and 'noise-free' list of WWW documents.

There are many other search engines, not all of which have the same delimiting facilities, though most have versions of some of them. Because they search in different ways, they never produce identical results, and it may be worth trying more than one for completeness. There are also some overarching search sites, like Inference Find, which 'calls out in parallel all the best search engines, merges the results, removes redundancies, and clusters the hits into neat understandable groupings' which usually produces a neater but much smaller and less comprehensive number of hits. The fullest and most useful results seem always to come from AltaVista, however: searching for stonehenge AND neolithic on Lycos, our Editor's nightmare (Chippindale 1996: 238), produced 48 hits of far less relevance.

Enjoy your trip!

Reference
Chippindale, C. 1996. Editorial, Antiquity 70: 237­44.

Sara Champion, Southampton

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