Cuneiform on baked clay tablets may not stand up to rampaging looters,
but otherwise is eternal--IF the clay has been baked hard enough.  Stone
tablets are the most durable of all, but are hard to interface with any
sort of computer--dropping them onto a scanner plate from, say a two
foot height tends to cause an absolutely irretrievable device crash.
Where's that paleo-bird with the very sharp beak, once found inside Fred
Flintstone's camera, when you need it?

D. Babson.


-----Original Message-----
From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Joe
Roberts
Sent: Monday, April 24, 2006 12:41 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Archival Storage of Digital -Major social problem

James Brothers wrote:

My source also said at this point just about nothing beats a good
quality archival hard copy. So much for technology.

*********

When I came back to graduate school after a 20 year vacation, I unpacked
some old article photocopies that had been sitting in a hot Texas garage
for 15 of those years.

When I picked up some of them, the letters fell clean off the page and
made a little pile on the table. I could still make out the individual
letters laying there.

I am now of the opinion that for longevity nothing beats documents
copied out in longhand on vellum with a quill pen, except perhaps
incised copper scrolls.

Forward into the past,
Joe Roberts


PS: There is a sobering discussion of the archival drawbacks of digital
in Alexander Stille's 2002 "The Future of the Past." The irony is that
much of the information we have been generating in the "Information Age"
is under threat--or already unretrievable due to obsolete formats and
media decay.

One instance among many: reportedly 300 million pages (75k
records/page)of US Census raw data prior to 1989 is lost because of
storage in obsolete formats and use of ad hoc data compression schemes.
Fortunately for the culprits, these records are sealed for 72 years
after collection, so many of us won't live to know for sure!