The Watermark Archive is produced by Robert W. Allison
Assoc. Prof of Religion, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine

and

Research Fellow Ektaktos , the Patriarchal Institute for Patristic Studies, Thessaloniki
© 1996 Robert W. Allison. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION TO THE WATERMARK ARCHIVE

This is a journey to "a time when people invented or reinvented images of every sort to discover in them recondite and revelatory meanings. It sufficed to see, I will not say, a beautiful flower or a crocodile, but merely a basket, a ladder, a sieve, or a column, and one would try to build around it a network of things that at first glance nobody had seen there."

Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before, 1994, pp. 345-46

Welcome to the Archive of Papers and Watermarks in Greek Manuscripts. The Watermark Archive was designed to be a research tool for scholars who work with Greek manuscripts. It is, at the same time, intended to serve as a vehicle for scholarly publication of watermarks and papers discovered in Greek manuscripts. Its purpose is to facilitate --

• dating of Greek manuscripts
• establishing the provenance of Greek manuscripts
• identifying scribes of unsigned Greek manuscripts
• reconstructing the productivity of later Byzantine and post-Byzantine scribes and centers of Greek book production from the evidence of paper
• research in the history of paper production and use

As a working model for a WWW-based centralized database, the Watermark Archive is a prototype only, and is maintained here for historical purposes. It was adopted by the Roanoke Conference (The First International Conference on the History, Function and Study of Watermarks, Roanoke, October 1996) as a prototype for a more comprehensive Watermark Database. You are invited to compare this model with the more comprehensive one now being developed as The Watermark Initiative.

The Guide remains useful as a repository of substantive information regarding methodology for paper description, digital imaging and the like. These materials may be accessed by the Guide button (below).

This present prototype Watermark Archive consists of:

• an archive of watermark images
• a corresponding database of paper descriptions
• a bibliographical database (a resource for finding watermarks and papers published in scholarly books and periodicals) [not yet functional]
• a News Page with news clips about current developments related to the history of paper
• tools for searching the databases
• facilities for submitting new watermarks and paper descriptions for publication in the Watermark Archive
• A Guide to the Watermark Archive (lots of "how to do it" and product info as well as historical and other background information)