D. Kurtz, The Beazley Archive database, «Archeologia e Calcolatori» 4, 1993, 263.

The database is now in its thirteenth year and available on line for direct interrogation by remote users in continental Europe, North America and Australia. Data are held on 40,000 clay figure-decorated vases, made in Athens in the 6th, 5th, and 4th centuries B.C. Documentation comes from more than 1200 publications in which the vases have been illustrated. Subsequent stages of documentation will be directed towards unpublished material. More than 100,000 vases of the type computerized are estimated to be housed in museums, private collections and excavation stores worldwide. The database at present occupies about 52MB storage.

Athenian figure-decorated pottery is idea1 for computerization because it is abundant and remarkably homogeneous over centuries. It has also been well studied. Sir John Beazley developed a system of classifying it in Oxford more than 70 years ago. His system was so regular and so consistent that his categories could become the fields and tables of a database with minimal alterations. Beazley also developed a controlled vocabulary even for the most varied field, the one which describes the pictures painted on the clay vases, and that vocabulary has become known to scholars worldwide through his numerous publications.

Unlike most painted pottery from antiquity Athenian vases were dominated by pictures of men, not animals or patterns, and these pictures illustrate stories from Greek mythology and from Greek life. They are the single richest archaeological source of information about classica1 antiquity and for that reason the range of potential users of the database is quite large. More than 200 remote users have consulted it by letter, E-mail, fax or through direct interrogation during the past few years.