Editor's Corner
We live in interesting times. As I write these words, there are major
challenges to the integrity of our field from a number of fronts:
social sciences at the National Science Foundation--including
archaeology and anthropology--have been deemed to be of no value and
have been labelled as "politically correct" by a now-powerful and
influential congressman; the Advisory Council for Historic
Preservation has been slated for elimination; and significant
reductions in funding for historic preservation activities have been
recommended for the National Park Service, Forest Service, Bureau of
Land Management, and other federal agencies. By the time you read
this, many of these recommendations will have been resolved for good
or ill, and I can only hope that you feel you have done everything in
your power to influence your legislators to minimize the effects of
these actions. I know SAA has long sought to educate elected
representatives and the public about the value of archaeology and
historic preservation. But given the portents from Washington, I feel
much like Steve Lekson, who asks elsewhere in these pages why
knowledge of our past has been so curiously diminished and
undervalued by our fellow citizens and further speculates how we can
rebuild for the public that sense of excitement and wonder that
archaeology has for many of us. As archaeologists know perhaps better
than anyone, while nothing lasts forever, there is yet intrinsic
intellectual and cultural value in what we do. Perhaps one of the
lessons to be learned from these times is that each of us must find
our own place, our own niche, from which we can validate our service
and scholarship to those who seek to cripple, through either
ignorance or ideology, our ability to learn about the past.
We now have the SAA Bulletin on World Wide Web (WWW). While I would
like to take credit for this, the hard work to get it online must be
credited to John Kantner and Doug Kennett, graduate students in
anthropology at UCSB, who got tired of my complaint that the Bulletin
was not yet up on the Web and decided to remedy it. To read it, you
must have true Internet access, a SLIP or PPP-type account, and a Web
client like Mosaic or Netscape (for graphical-interface users) or
Lynx (for text-based users). To access the SAA Bulletin with one of
these Web clients, you must know its address (or url, universal
resource locator):
http://www.sscf.ucsb.edu/SAA Bulletin/
Type it exactly as you see it. Once there, you may save the url as a
bookmark, and return to the Bulletin with ease. The WWW version of
the Bulletin doesn't quite match the printed version yet. Well be
experimenting over the next few issues with a number of products to
produce an exact copy in electronic form. We will also continue to
support the gopher version of the Bulletin for readers without access
to the Web. As always, I appreciate your comments. Good reading!