Abstract

Provincial and territorial archaeological site inventories are increasingly used in regional land use and development planning, tourism and recreational planning, archaeological research and resource management, and elsewhere. In Saskatchewan, two developments in particular have helped increase the provincial inventory's utility and value: more exacting and consistent site recording standards which improved data quality and reliability, and database automation which made information retrieval significantly faster and easier. However, handling the increasing demand for inventory-related client services (with fewer and fewer operational resources) required shifting emphasis away from a full service approach, to enabling inventory users to serve thernselves. Saskatchewan's archaeological remote access system enables authorized individuals to directly access basic inventory data from virtually any micro-computer station. This paper briefly describes the technical specifications and current scope of this preliminary, largely experimental system. Prospects for enhancing the system to enable more sophisticated database analyses are also discussed.