ABSTRACT
The findings of archaeologists, derived from industriously sorted potsherds and beads and laboriously excavated ruins, are more likely to be communicated to other archaeologists working on comparable problems in other parts of the world than to technicians who are attempting to make the desert bloom again and are not immediately concerned with questions of time depth. The fantasy has taken a variety of forms, the simplest of which is the deposition, deep underground, of complete records of our most complex achievements so they can be replicated by other men in some postdisaster period. By facilitating communication at every level, from the most abstract to the most concrete and multidimensional, the thinking of such a group would take on some of the mastery that is now found in a single mind with the added gain of diversity and the advantage of rapid, structured criticism and elaboration of each idea.
