Articles by William Kilbride

Europe is a very old and very small continent. The accession of ten new states to the EU in spring 2004 reminds us that the political boundaries we police and survey would have made little sense to the ancient populations who moved freely across our frontiers. Our disparate national and local heritage services represent different traditions and experiences of researching, recording, presenting and managing what should be among our principal assets. This diversity risks undermines research and conservation, it inhibits international strategies for heritage management and institutionalises anachronism. Can information technologies support the EU's stated aim of creating a single European research area for archaeology? This paper investigates the long-standing question of how different archaeological data sets in different parts of Europe may be aligned more closely to support research learning and teaching. It identifies emerging technologies to for resource discovery, integration and delivery, placing these in the context of organisational evolution. It asks how these organisations and technologies might work together to support archaeological information at a continental scale.