Archaeology

Increasingly within archaeology, the Web is used for dissemination of datasets. This contributes to the growing amount of information on the ‘deep web’, which a recent Bright Planet study estimated to be 500 times larger than the ‘surface web’. However Google and other web search engines are ill equipped to retrieve information from the richly structured databases that are key resources for humanities scholars. Important archaeological results and reports are also appearing as grey literature, before or instead of traditional publication.

Where is knowledge generated? How does that knowledge replicate and spread? Where is it consumed? Who owns knowledge, and who may access it? Under what circumstances, and in what places, does it flourish or die out? How are its transmission and reception influenced by social and political factors? These are central questions in the history and sociology of science today.

Silver coins formed the backbone of currency in the Roman Empire and are likely to have been the main media for long-distance monetary exchange. Imperial fiscal policies and financial problems can be detected through metallurgical analysis of imperial silver coinages. Roman emperors manipulated the silver content (fineness) of the coinage to solve short-term financial problems frequently caused by government overspending. For the most part, this manipulation involved the reduction of the silver content of the coinage – debasement - in conjunction with a drop in weight.

The Epidoc Aphrodisias Project was launched in 2002 to develop and apply tools for presenting ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions on the Internet. With support from the Leverhulme Trust, as part of their Research Interchange Scheme, researchers from Europe, the U.S. and the U.K. pooled their experience and launched a pilot project.