This VRE was conceived to support the ARIADNE project (funded by the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme.). ARIADNE brought together and integrated existing archaeological research data infrastructures so that researchers could use the various distributed datasets and new and powerful technologies as an integral component of the archaeological research methodology. There is now a large availability of archaeological digital datasets that, together, span different periods, domains and regions; more are continuously created as a result of the increasing use of IT. These are the accumulated outcome of the research of individuals, teams and institutions, but form a vast and fragmented corpus and their potential has been constrained by difficult access and non-homogenous perspectives.
