Reporting Salvage Excavations On-Line: How Fast Can We Go? Rachel Kudish-Vashdi and Yuval Baruch Hundreds of salvage excavations are conducted in Israel each year. These are, for the most part, small-scale excavations that are initiated due to public works, private construction or governmental request. As the location of these excavations is accidential, and the greater part of them is going to be either covered or destroyed, it is especially important that they be documented as well and as accurate as possible. This is done today by a printed journal, Hadashot Arkheologiyot – Excavations and Surveys in Israel, published by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) both in Hebrew and in English. The amount of information that has accumulated just in the past three years in the IAA can provide for at least four printed journals. The establishing of a digital publication for salvage excavations is thus urgent. Salvage excavation reports differe from the larger site reports in that they are short compositions of excavations with meager finds. Therefore, the salvage excavation reports should not be dealt with in the same manner as the large-scale excavations, as their main importance is their inclusion in a journal which will provide a wide data base, arranged according to regions, periods and subjects. An e-journal publishing salvage excavation reports will create a wide data base that is badly needed to keep the archaeological research updated and open to all scholars around the world. The printed version of such a data base is available since 1961 (in English – Excavations and Surveys in Israel [ESI] - since 1982), and is for years a major reference in works concerning the archaeology of the Holy Land. It goes without saying that a digital form of this journal, which is going to replace(!!) the printed one, will be widely refered to and will be more convinient thanks to easy searching abilities and technological advantages, such as interactive maps and internal links. The availability of such a large-scale data base of salvage excavations on the web will be the first of its kind in the archaeology of the Holy Land. The data - which is relevant to a wide range of scholars in various fields, such as archaeologists, Bible scholarts, egyptologists, historians and art historians – will finely be digitally catalogued on computer with the option of conducting elaborate word searches according to sites, periods and topics, as well as by geographical searches according to regions and map references. The E-journal www.hadashot-esi.org.il is now in its last stages of QA and will be aired at the end of October 2004.
