Trust you Denis to put the cat among the pigeons. I look forward very much
to the responses. As an Australian (but very isolated Western Australian
archaeologist) can I put my two cents in?

On the accessibility front I seem to have more contact with our US
colleagues
then my other Australian colleagues. That has happened primarily through the
list and through the internet by looking up research interests listed for
university staff and searching for frontier connections. The list is an
important avenue of contact but there does not appear to be many of us
Australians on it, or at least who speak up. Through this contact I have
used American CRM studies for comparative purposes and have provided some of
my material to others. I have also sought and received advice on various
subjects.

Also on the accessibility front it's hard to find out about CRM reports,
even
those written in your own city. Our New Zealand colleagues had a great idea
once and listed a great number of reports along with details of cost and
where to get them in the ASHA journal (or was it the newsletter). Following
that ASHA also did a bibliography of reports for a while but the idea
dropped off. I don't know why, too much work for one person I expect. But
couldn't CRM and Uni. researchers list their own reports and send the list
in
regularly for publication in either ASHA or AACA newsletters. That would at
least let Australian and New Zealand archaeologists know the current and
continuing state of play and not incidentally make the source newsletter
more
important to the work of the archaeologists receiving it. Which would help
internally but would not help international perceptions.

Pertinent question: who on the list has heard of the ASHA and AACA journals
and does anyone apart from us read them? As these journals are our main
avenue of expression if their usage is mainly insular then it would be no
wonder that the international world don't know we exist.

Another great point of contact is conferences but most in Australia would
not be able to attend the SHA conferences or any others come to that. Also
others can't come here for the same reasons. I know that I had to turn down
an expression of interest in me writing a paper for the Long Beach
conference because I could not get there. I have had a paper accepted at the
SMPA conference on the development of cities. But it is in Southampton and I
had to make certain before I put in the abstract that they could use the
paper without my being there.

This constrains us because we are only writing for ourselves. I think as a
group we are always going to have trouble physically turning up at
conferences but in this day and age surely there are other ways?

 Having papers read for us, particularly at conferences where the
proceedings are then published is better then nothing. ICOMOS also ran an
internet
conference which was very successful and could be adapted for archaeological
papers. Along the lines of publishing a set of papers on a web page in much
the same way they would be presented at a conference and setting up a chat
line question and answer format. In that way archaeologists all over the
world could read the papers, think about them and then ask questions of the
writer. The writer also has a chance to think about their reply before
posting it. What do you think? The ICMOS conference was only meant to be
Australia wide but we ended up having people from all over joining in.

On the research interest front my area of research is frontiers and USA is
relevant to me and hopefully my work will be relevant to them. But I have
only published so far in the AIMA and ASHA journals and given papers at
Australian conferences. Does anyone outside of Australia know of my work? I
would think not many. I guess we need to think hard about either getting the
ASHA journal more prominent internationally or of publishing elsewhere.

In terms of general research interest I get flak from Western Australians
for doing archaeology here where "there is no heritage because its all so
recent". But I tell them that WA was founded in a very interesting time
period for historical archaeologists. Right in the change over time from
industrial capitalism to industrial democracy. All sorts of interesting
things took off in the 19th century, consumerism, globalism, intensive
urbanisation, mass markets, mass production. WA is a good place to study the
effects of such processes on society precisely because we don't have a great
depth of history here distorting the patterns. Surely that should interest
some eager beaver researcher?