Stuart Jeffrey (ADS) and Jonathan Bateman (University of York)

Taking as its starting point the original formulation of Moore's law with its commentary on economics: "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year...", this paper will look at a number of important issues that flow from this law when it is considered in tandem with the notions of collection and storage (selection and retention) that, conceptually at least, underpin much of archaeological practice. We will examine misconceptions regarding what Moore's law means for our ability to enact the preservation of records, let alone the highly contentious process of 'preservation by record'. At the core of these issues are the motives and objectives of collection generally, but especially the collection of data about the past, as an intellectual and physical process. In discussing these points we will pay particular attention to how narratives of the past are constructed, their relationship to the data that they are apparently constructed from, and the contested notion that such data can be used to construct a further challenging or confounding narrative at some point in the future. Time depth and maturation are critical components in making this analysis and understanding the reuse or lack of reuse of such data, and analogies with other forms of constructed knowledge highlight the wide-eyed naivety that sometimes accompanies new technological processes and their outcomes. We will argue that an analysis of these issues in conjunction with an agent-focussed rather than purely technological reading of Moore's law results in some interesting perspectives on both the broad meaning and the utility of technology driven recording techniques.