The networking and internationalisation of the existing academic resources, historical and cultural achievements, as well as the research efforts of the academic community in the field of Archaeology using computer, information and communication technologies is a recent trend with a rapidly growing impact on archaeological research, management and education. The reason for this is twofold: on the one hand, the international character of the archaeological material itself, and, on the other, the ability of these technologies to overcome the difficulties of sharing these resources beyond the national borders. One additional reason (although this development is still in its infancy) is the ability of these technologies to simulate group collaboration.

Academic WWW facilities are increasingly being used by professional archaeologists in the European Union for a variety of purposes. Over the past 3 years an informal but truly pan-European virtual research network in the field of archaeology has grown up, which maintains its own virtual space of shared resources, personal forums, international organisations, and electronic journals. It was established in 1994, emulating its North American counterpart ArchNet, co-ordinated at the University of Connecticut. The current state of European trends toward virtual research collaboration can be listed on the basis of the information technologies used:

• The Archaeological Resource Guide for Europe (ARGE, maintained primarily at the University of Birmingham and now - at the University of Groningen) is the WWW 'Virtual Library' for European Archaeology, providing one-stop access to over a thousand sources of information. It is jointly implemented by the British and Dutch partners in the current project consortium, with support from the EU project 'Archeonet' (SOCRATES programme), and it connects to other European servers acting as national hosts of the virtual European Archaeology Web (EAW), allowing the sharing of different resources over the Internet: public domain software, public presentations of information materials of common interest, educational and research materials in Archaeology, notice board for public announcements, etc.
• Professional archaeologists, including the European Association of Archaeologists, have their own international mailing lists, which allow networking of researchers on a personal basis. Most of these are currently hosted by the UK mail server mailbase (Newcastle, UK; URL: mailbase.ac.uk). One specific list, dedicated to the build-up of Europe-wide information services for archaeologists, is supervised by P.M.van Leusen from the University of Groningen (Coordinator of the ArchTerra project).
• International availability of research results is promoted by the publication of several electronic journals, published over the Internet, such as the journal Internet Archaeology (York, UK; URL:intarch.ac.uk ) and the Archaeological Research Repository (Sheffield, UK; URL:www.shef.ac.uk). These are based on maintenance of dynamic access to databases and files from the WWW.
• Public and professional access to archaeological objects and databases is promoted through virtual museums of archaeology, such as the Virtual Magna Graecia and Virtual Pompeii, and by libraries such as the Internet Amber Virtual Library (Milano). These employ contemporary technologies for 3D modelling, multimedia and interactive programming (HTML, CGI, VRML, and Java).

The informal nature of this network has meant that its services depend on, and are limited by, what services happen to be made available from external sources, and what spare time and effort can be input by a relatively few archaeologists. Crucial elements of the transnational information infrastructure, such as the provision of multilingual search engines and the hosting of list services, thus cannot be realised, and inequalities between countries are emphasised rather than removed. In addition, ignorance of the possibilities (potential or realised) of the WWW is still pervasive among many professionals, and this is compounded by the virtual absence of basic network access for archaeologists from Central Europe. Although the Central European Countries have an important place in the historical and cultural development of Europe, they therefore do not currently have a substantial participation in the exchange of information and expertise regarding European archaeology.

The ArchTerra project aims to help redress the current imbalances in access to European networking facilities for the CEC academics and to provide the impetus for an active expansion of archaeological communication and information services both within CEC and between EU and CEC through Internet. Its objectives are:

• To establish the technical infrastructure and software tools needed to allow researchers in the field of IT in Archaeology from CEC to join the EAW, in the form of national WWW hosts of the ArchWeb network in the three participating CEC (Bulgaria, Romania, Poland). These hosts will be located at the major research organizations responsible for archiving, maintenance and supplying of information in these countries. Our aim is to make direct access to these facilities a reality for all researchers employed at the participating organisations, and to make dial-up access a reality for the hundreds of other researchers in the three countries mentioned;
• To provide practical demonstration of the trans-national nature and urgency of archaeological research and management, and the benefits and efficiencies of Internet use, to professional and general users alike. End users will be able to access both the presently available on-line electronic resources and a core set of demonstration resources from CEC (including Web-pages, museum-databases, live presentations and virtual tours). The creation of the latter, for which the subject of Mining was chosen, is a core objective of the project. Three different pilot virtual museums of Regional Archaeology - in Sofia, Poznan and Bucharest. They will be implemented using one unified generic information system for Internet access to relational databases to be developed by joint efforts of programmers and museum workers.
  
• To strengthen existing scientific relations between EU and CEC and to foster long-term joint initiatives for collaboration, demonstrating the richness and fragility of the European archaeological heritage, by bringing together partners and collections from across Europe (including the Danube and Vistula basins in particular). To this end, a scientific list server service similar to Mailbase will be established for serving the regional scientific cooperation in Central Europe, and complex solutions to specific hurdles to international collaboration (translation schemes for languages with different alphabets, multilanguage and multicultural thesauri of terms and articles, international heritage legislation) will be explored.
  

International collaboration in the study and preservation of our common archaeological heritage, the goal of this project, is not currently operating very well across Europe and hardly at all between European Union and Central European Countries. This is partly due to lack of (technical and financial) means, but of greater importance has been the lack of a focused drive to exploit modern Information Technology. And even though they may be aware of the benefits IT could bring, archaeology as a profession does not have either the means or the technical know-how to bring this about on its own.

One important advantage of the relatively small size of the European archaeological research community is that it is possible for the proposed project to make a major impact on working practices. In effect, the project can remove the current problems of lack of infrastructure and experience in the CEC; the availability of a range of freeware WWW tools has already removed the problem of user friendliness. The project will have a real impact on the safeguarding of the RTD potential of the CEC, by allowing researchers to work more effectively in their own countries, contacting their international colleagues without cost or delay. In this, the proposed project closely follows the ideas and recommendations of the second CEC/EU Forum in Prague, thus in effect preparing the CEC for the Global Information Society in the field of Archaeology.

The proposed research project has yet another valuable European dimension, since it will open for the rest of Europe some of the less well known achievements of the academic community in CEC. Due to the present economic difficulties and the existing language barriers these are largely unknown outside specialist circles.

Lastly, the project will make the process of archaeological research, education and management in the CEC more intensive and more effective by latching on to the powerful methods and technologies employed and by the direct contact with partners from all over Europe. Thus, it will be a powerful force for the study and preservation of Europe's cultural heritage

The objectives of the proposed project require four different activities to take place:

• technical installation (hardware, software, networks)
• transfer of expertise (workshops, visits, lists)
• creation of new content (data mining, software development, WWW publishing)
  
• dissemination (international conference organization, guides printing, web hosts maintenance) This complex set of different activities requires dedicated methodology, which is capable to cover all dimensions of the project work. It should be organizied in a goal driven scheme which fully acomplish the complementary nature of the partners' expertise and allows splitting of the work into non-interleaving clusters. For this purpose the general methodology chosen under the project can be characterised as a non-interleaving workflow of separate workpackages, implemented by research teams established by the project partners especially for this project, a methodology also known in Computer Science as CSP, from Communicating Sequential Processes. It is an organizational form for graduate stepwise transferring and further expanding of the intermediate results towards reaching the final effect: establishing of a research network in the form of common resources (unified and interconnected infrastructure, multilanguage glossaries and technical guides), end technical products (databases, interfaces, servers) and mutual scientific cohesion (long-term research contacts, mutual visits, joint teams) - see Fig. 1. In order to be operational, this methodology badly needs continous, reliable and well coordinated communications between the teams as well as supporting technologies
  

The computer and information technologies which support the project are rooted entirely in the changing ways in which computers are used in the last decade: from desktop information processing throughout client/server architectures of local networks to full external WWW access from the Internet. The technologies in question for the consortium can be regarded on relatively separated although not fully independent layers:

• Infrastructural layer - computer networking and building underlying hardware infrastructure of the local networks, based on a unified Internet/Intranet concept; under the project it will be based on two different and cheap solutions: local PC's directly connected to the local servers, and indirectly connected to Internet via leased lines throuhgout the servers located at the main partners in the three countries (Sofia, Bucharest and Poznan) and remote PC's with dialup access to the servers via modems and thereon to Internet
  
• Commmunications layer - running communication protocols, necessary for implementing of the services envisaged within the network; it will be reached through maintenance of single servers at the main Archaeological partners from the three CEC combining list serving, mail serving and WWW serving (TCP/IP, POP3, HTTP protocols)
• Information layer - different file and database formats containing relevant data (text, images, tables,charts, etc.)
  
• Acquisition layer - authoring of materials for public presentation based on the expertise of the participating archaeologists through writing, translation, drawing, filming, animating, scanning etc.
• Presentation layer - database storage and Web publishing of the prepared materials through joint efforts of informaticians and archaeologists; designing of virtual tours, exhibitions and models of events and sites of interest for Archaeology

This stratification of different level information technologies requires creation of interdisciplinary work groups which each are able to cover the full scope of these layers. The present text is a short presentation of the project at its starting point. The preliminary results will be presented at the CAA_2000.