Since my last status report, the pace of developments, it's incredible to say, has quickened still more. The Archaeology Channel (TAC) has continued to expand in content, audience and features as well as contributions from our generous Members and Underwriters. We have seen important breakthroughs and are poised to take even bigger steps as we "bootstrap" our way up from relative obscurity to a position as a leader in the public Internet community.

Now we have 13 videos on TAC, which is twice as many as we had in early December. We left North America for the first time with The Akha Way, produced by Yellow Cat Productions of Washington, D.C., to explore the effects of globalization on the Akha, a hill tribe in northern Thailand. We covered historical archaeology for the first time with Uncovering a Past: Champoeg Park, provided to us by Oregon State University and Oregon State Parks. Gray Warriner of Camera One displayed his characteristic generosity in contributing the exclusive Mesa Verde Burns, about the tragic aftermath of last summer's fires at Mesa Verde National Park. The Polynesian people of the small Pacific Ocean island of Taumako thrilled our visitors with a ride on a traditional voyaging canoe in Vaka Taumako: The First Voyage. The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, in their Not Just Stones and Bones, showed how Native Americans are taking charge of managing their own archaeological and cultural resources. Machu Picchu Revealed, from Educational Video Network, Huntsville, Texas, artfully displayed the mystery and breathtaking scenery of Machu Picchu, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Most recently, we've had lots of fun with Mrs. Leigh Ludington's 4th grade students of Creekview Elementary School, Price, Utah, creators of Nine Mile Canyon: Under Construction, as they guided us through 90 million years of natural and cultural changes. 

These are just a sample of what is to come. Within the next weeks and months you will see vastly expanded geographic coverage, including much more from outside North America, and a great diversity of subjects and video makers. Our own productions, the work of our video producer partner, David Bogan, will soon be introduced with a multi-media presentation on the Popham Colony, a failed English colony of the early 17th century in Maine. But wait--- there's more! Soon we will unveil our Endangered Language Project, which will feature audio clips of languages from around the world that are under threat of extinction. Other features are in the planning stages as well. Keep checking back to see what we're up to.

We have been very excited about the growth in our website traffic, which seems to prove that we're on the right track! The greatest thrill was to witness the dramatic traffic numbers in January, when the hit count reached 187,000. Although the numbers fell back from that peak in subsequent months, our traffic in the first quarter of 2001 still amounted to a 250 percent increase over the last quarter of 2000. And if you really want to see dramatic changes, consider that our daily traffic for May 2001 (measured in terms of hits) so far is nearly double the entire month of May 2000!

After having penciled out a list of other important new developments, I realize that I can't give you more than a capsule treatment of each without making this update much too long. So here's a quick summary. Our Membership list is growing steadily and now stands at 43 individuals and organizations. Our Underwriting Program has advanced to the point where five of our 13 videos currently have sponsors (of these, two underwriters are yet to decide which videos they wish to sponsor). Our Volunteer list has swelled to 17 individuals, including recent additions Maria Edwards (Executive Assistant), Cassie Hemphill (Listserve Coordinator), and Wendy Spadafino (Volunteer Coordinator). Laura Pettigrew (my daughter), now lives in Marseilles, France, where she has established our European office and serves as our volunteer European Liaison.

The count of pending grant requests to foundations and corporate giving programs now numbers ten and amounts to $205,445. Our fundraising program received a big boost in February when we brought on board our new Development Officer, Moshe Immerman. Moshe and I represented ALI during a very pleasant site visit to us on 3 March by a representative of the Oregon Community Foundation, who soon will decide whether to fund our grant request to them.

Strategic partnerships and associations are an important part of our game plan. We now have forged an agreement with Educational Video Network of Huntsville, Texas, providers of educational videos to teachers and schools, that gives us access to their wonderful video collection for our video content (as an example, see Machu Picchu Revealed, a recent addition to our lineup), a share of proceeds from sales of EVN videos to our website visitors, and the domain name archaeologychannel.com. WebMagic, an Internet company in southern California, has donated to us three domain names (archaeological.com, archaeologists.com, and dated.com). We now have replaced our previous streaming media hosting company, iBEAM, with our new hosting partner, eSynch, saving lots of money in the process. At the same time, we have become a content partner for eSynch's on-line ChoiceCaster Network. Similarly, TAC has also become one of the channels for the Internet program guide, Yack.com. We now are featured on the first page of the Archaeology section on Yahoo! and About.com has added a link to TAC along with a feature article that praises our website as "The Internet as it was meant to be". A very pleasing new development is the addition of TAC to the listings posted by the Open Directory Project, used by many search engines as an authoritative Internet guide.

I have been attending a variety of meetings and conferences to present information about ALI and TAC and to make important contacts valuable to our future. In January I attended the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and was invited to participate in the first annual AIA Kids Fair, where I put on a demonstration of TAC. In February I participated in the Grant-makers/Grant-seekers Forum at the Hilton Conference Center here in Eugene, Oregon. A live radio interview on Eugene public radio station KLCC later in February was a spin-off from that conference. The Society for American Archaeology (SAA) Public Education Committee invited me to a working dinner at their April meeting in New Orleans to explore ways we can work together to further our common education interests. As a spinoff of my New Orleans trip, I have been invited to the Governor's Wisconsin Educational Technology Conference to be held October 2001 in Green Bay to make a presentation on TAC and its classroom applications. This is strong validation of our efforts to create value for educators.

Another important connection with educators is our planned Summer Field School for Teachers, scheduled for 25 June-3 August and held in conjunction with the University of Oregon Summer Field School in the Fort Rock Valley of eastern Oregon. Also soon to begin will be our internship programs. Student and indigenous interns will work with us to help develop our public education program and get on-the-job training in video production. The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, an indigenous group in Oregon, has agreed to sponsor our first intern, a tribal member interested in developing video production experience.

The increasing pace of developments speaks volumes about the exciting future in store for TAC. Every day brings new and pleasant surprises. Expect to see regular changes and upgrades for TAC as we move forward. Many thanks to those of you who have become supporters of our valuable work and we look forward to hearing from those of you who wish to participate through our Membership and Volunteer programs.

Rick's Status Report (6 December 2000)

(A special message from Rick Pettigrew, President and Executive Director of ALI)

The three months since my last status report have sped by like the landscape viewed from an express passenger train. As I look back on what has transpired, I am amazed at how far we've come. At the same time, the challenges and the opportunities ahead appear greater than any we have encountered thus far. 

The Archaeology Channel (TAC) itself has progressed in dramatic fashion. We were pleased three months ago to have one video up on one player in one bandwidth. At that time it appeared that we would soon have the kinks worked out of our encoding process, but we discovered that the borrowed equipment at our disposal was not up to the task. We needed some powerful new equipment to make encoding an easy process rather than an obstacle, so on 2 October we purchased a new Pentium III 733 mHz PC with 256k RAM and a 30 MB hard drive and a CD-RW drive. Along the way we convinced Real Networks to donate their Real Producer Plus encoding software (worth $150) and induced Winnov to contribute their $200 video capture board. We installed both on the new PC, which is dedicated to video encoding, and began encoding all five Camera One videos that had been listed on TAC. Within a few days, all five videos (meaning 30 video files, for the two players and three bandwidths) were encoded and uploaded to iBEAM's server. Murphy's Law struck when we discovered persistent bugs in the video pages then under construction, so it was 28 October before all five videos were fully operational on TAC. Despite the delays, getting those first complete videos up on the website was truly a breakthrough, followed on 13 November by the addition of Echo of Water Against Rocks: Remembering Celilo Falls, the fine video by University of Oregon graduate students Ian McCluskey and Steve Mital. Now we are just about to add a seventh video, The Akha Way, about a hill tribe in northern Thailand struggling to preserve their cultural traditions in the face of globalization. More videos are lined up and will appear with greater frequency as our experience promotes improved efficiency. 

We have learned over the past three months that website traffic does not follow a simple trend line. Although it appeared in early September that we would reach 60,000 hits, our traffic leveled off and declined in the latter half of the month (possibly owing to the Olympics and the delay in getting new videos up) and we ended up with about 45,000 hits. Then traffic in the first part of October was quite weak and by mid-October it appeared we would reach only about 15,000 for the month. Near the end of the month, however, just as we activated the full slate of five videos, our traffic jumped dramatically and we ended up with nearly 20,000 hits. That trend continued into November and was reinforced after 13 November when we added the Celilo Falls video, so that our November hit count reached a more respectable 38,000 hits. In early December our traffic seems to have leveled off again. Clearly our traffic is affected by forces outside our control, but responds significantly whenever we add new content (especially if we tell people about it!). We will continue to add more videos and find ways to make our presence known in cyberspace. Within a year it is reasonable to expect that monthly traffic will increase by an order of magnitude (i.e., to 300,000 or more) as our content and our reputation grow. We must be making some progress in our Web presence, because we are now the top-ranked member-submitted archaeology website on NBCi.com. 

Besides adding videos, efforts over the past three months have included promotion of TAC and its mission, development of the website, expanding partnerships, creating a volunteer program, and fundraising. The Smithsonian Institution held their teacher symposium in September as planned and shipped the videotapes of the proceedings to ALI for webcast (accomplishing the webcast will require fundraising--more on that below). I wrote an article about TAC that was published in the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) Bulletin in late September and prompted some statements of interest and support from the professional archaeological community. More recently, I was interviewed by Mammoth Trumpet, the newsletter of the Center for the Study of the First Americans (Oregon State University), for a feature article to appear in early January. 

In the realm of partnerships, we have developed a relationship with Art and Archaeology Magazine, an on-line magazine of Paris-based Culturekiosque.com, which featured TAC in a recent article. Prominent articles about TAC have also appeared in the website for the Society for East Asian Archaeology (based in Tokyo) and in Serindian, a leading archaeology website in India. Another will appear in the January-February issue of the International Newsletter on Rock Art, edited by Dr. Jean Clottes, conservator of Chauvet Cave in France. Web links to TAC are appearing in websites all over the world, including recently on the website for Flinders University in Australia and the Ontario Archaeological Society (Hamilton Chapter) in Canada. 

Special relationships have grown in the past three months with a number of organizations and individuals. The people at the Smithsonian Institution Anthropology Outreach Office (headed by Ann Kaupp) are very excited about having the teacher symposium webcast on TAC and are interested in expanding the partnership in the area of K-12 education. Discussions about K-12 education have also taken place with representatives of the Bureau of Land Management (Megg Heath, Heritage Education Manager), the SAA Public Education Committee (Beverly Chiarulli, Chair-Elect), the Archaeological Institute of America (Jane Waldbaum, First Vice President), and the Eugene 4J (Oregon) School District (Ginny Berkey, middle school social studies teacher and coordinator for the statewide Geography Awareness project). Letters of support to be used in grant applications have been received from Brian Fagan (renowned archaeologist and author, UC Santa Barbara), Simon Holledge (Editor, the Society for East Asian Archaeology website), Ann Kaupp, Jim Manion (General Manager, Warm Springs Power Enterprises, an agency of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Indians of Oregon), David Hurst Thomas (Curator of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History), and Jean Clottes. More such letters have been pledged but not yet received. Assistance in working bugs out of our website was received from John Davies of AdventureTV.com, Karl Benedict of ArchaeoWorld, Tom Gilman of iBEAM and Brian Hintz of Real Networks.

Our volunteer program was fairly unstructured until September, when Dr. Guy Prouty responded to a posted announcement and volunteered his services to coordinate our underwriting program. We moved more systematically in November, when we listed a volunteer web developer position in the classified section of Guidestar, an organization devoted to assistance for nonprofits. Six web developers have responded so far and we have begun utilizing their talents in upgrading our website. Inspired by this development, we have begun crafting job descriptions for additional volunteers, most recently for the position of Avocational Group Liaison, which is being distributed to the memberships of the Oregon Archaeological Society and the Archaeological Society of Central Oregon. More such announcements are in the works and will be distributed locally and via the Web, where a number of websites exist to promote and facilitate volunteerism. 

Fundraising has taken on greater urgency in the past three months as expenses have drained our cash reserves and bills are coming due. To date we have received $6600 in personal cash donations, $550 in personal in-kind donations, and $350 in corporate in-kind donations. Among the personal donations was a contribution from Jean Auel, author of Clan of the Cave Bear. In September we replaced the Web-a-thon program, which yielded no results, with our new Membership program, which has generated both interest and proceeds. One of the biggest breakthroughs of the last three months was the agreement by Dr. Linda Jerofke, anthropologist and professional grant proposal writer, to prepare grant proposals for us on a contingency basis. Linda began work on this activity in November and has completed two grant proposals (to the Coca-Cola Foundation and the Campbell Foundation) already and is working on a list of 11 more proposals over the next three months. Since October, I have completed three proposals that are still pending, to Symantec Corporation, Hyundai Semiconductor of America, and the National Science Foundation. Currently, then, we have five pending grant proposals amounting to more than $220,000 and expect this number to grow in the coming months. No grant money from these proposals will be forthcoming, however, until February at the earliest. 

In the meantime, bills that are due this month will consume our remaining cash reserves. It is essential, then, that we raise the funds needed to pay for needed services in the coming weeks and months. Payments to iBEAM for video streaming and to our web developer will amount to about $1000/month. We must raise at least that much just to just to maintain an active website. Memberships are our best short-term source of funding. Annual membership rates are $50 for individuals, $25 for students, and $250 for organizations; Lifetime memberships are $1000. Those of you who would like this project to succeed are urged to step up and join as TAC Members. Not only will your contributions help pay the bills, but by expanding our membership roll you will also help us convince granting organizations, who like to see broad public support for prospective grantees, that we are worthy of their backing. 

You will see the TAC website grow and evolve in the coming weeks and months as we continue to make it a more valuable and useful tool for all. Your input can be instrumental in making this possible, not just financially but with your ideas and volunteer time. I encourage you to offer your feedback via e-mail. Many thanks for your support.

We offer this new "Status Report" feature to keep you abreast of the latest developments in the evolution of The Archaeology Channel. Many of you, I am sure, wonder what goes on behind the web site, when to expect the listed videos to be available, and how this project is coming along. Believe me, although changes to our web site do not appear every day, we are busy working to make this venue the valuable resource we all know it can be!

From my perspective, the creation of The Archaeology Channel has followed a long and winding road, much of it now behind us but plenty still ahead between our destination and us. Looking back, we've overcome some major obstacles and passed some important mileposts. When ALI was founded in October 1999, I naively expected that we would be streaming videos early in 2000. This was not to be, largely because of unexpected delays in choosing a broadcasting host (which ultimately became our valued partner, iBEAM Broadcasting, raising the needed funds, building our web site, and securing our IRS tax-exempt status.

We had good reason to feel confident early on about a fast startup. Thanks to the volunteer efforts of ALI Board of Directors member John Waters, the first version of our web site, announcing our plans, appeared in December 1999. Finding suitable content to broadcast proved to be surprisingly easy, especially when Camera One of Seattle (to whom we are eternally grateful) agreed to make their slate of excellent archaeology videos available to us. Later, as soon as we made our presence more widely known, other video producers with potentially suitable material contacted us. We readily accepted David Bogan's enthusiastic offer to partner with us in producing new videos of current field research to be shown this fall.

However, at every step of the way, choices have been constrained by a lack of funds, which has required us to find no-cost or low-cost solutions. In almost every case, and not too surprisingly, these choices have stretched the time needed to get our work done. For example, we thought we had a big problem licked when a volunteer web developer last March offered to build the new streaming video version of our web site. In June, three months later, after sending many pages of instructions and receiving many promises but seeing few results, I relieved him of his duties and retained the paid services of our current and very able web developer, Nicole Cullar of NetPages .

Securing our IRS tax-exempt status could not even begin until we raised the required $500 application fee from a generous donor last February. That was just the start of a long and complex process. The application was sent back to us several times for revision, the last time in May, before we finally received our IRS letter of determination on May 24.

After reviewing the offers of four prospective broadcasting hosts, discussions with iBEAM for hosting our videos began in January, but we could not sign an agreement with them until our web site was ready, we had some content encoded and ready to show, and we had enough money in the bank to pay for the first several months of broadcasting. The greatest breakthrough of the first half of the year happened in early May when we received a $5000 contribution that enabled me to attend the Broadband Media Conference in San Francisco and provided a fund we could count on to pay the initial streaming costs. Another key contribution was the very generous offer by John Davies of AdventureTV.com in early June to encode a short video segment and host it for us to demonstrate the potential of streaming video for archaeology. The demo was linked to our web site on June 15, the first day streaming video appeared on The Archaeology Channel.

By early June, when we thought our web site soon would be ready and that we would soon have some videos encoded, we signed a hosting agreement with iBEAM. Our expectations were dashed, however, when the new version of the web site proved to be far from ready and we had to restart that process with our new web site developer, Nicole. Then it became apparent that encoding our first set of five videos, which we had in hand on digital tape, was going to be much more troublesome than we expected. Of course, to save money we had avoided contracting with specialists to have the work done for us, assuming we could readily encode the videos using volunteer time and borrowed equipment. For the rest of the summer, we worked diligently, as our volunteer time and equipment availability permitted, to design and construct the new web pages and climb the learning curve of video encoding. Camera One of Seattle generously loaned us a mini-DV camcorder for playing our videotapes to a video capture card. Crashing computers, wiping and reformatting hard drives, and troubleshooting numerous web page designs occupied our time through the hot days of July and August. Finally, on August 31, as soon as we had one complete video encoded and uploaded to iBEAM's server, we launched the new streaming video version of our web site.

With the unveiling of our new format, we were excited to see our web site traffic leap immediately to levels never seen before! We had seen just over 1000 hits in April and again in May. Adding our demo had boosted the traffic to 5000-7000 hits each month during June-August. September, however, has just blown us away. We are on track to record 60,000 or more hits this month. We see a new daily record about every three days the last was 5186 hits on September 11. This response is very gratifying and we thank you all for your support!! Please keep spreading the word and visiting our site, because the growth in our traffic will attract underwriters and donors and thereby generate a cash flow we so desperately need.

Our growing popularity makes it even more important for us to upgrade our program offerings and our web site. We are working the kinks out of our encoding process so we can more quickly bring you the videos listed on our home page and add the other 15-20 videos we have available on the shelf. At the same time, video producer David Bogan is still shooting new footage of ongoing research, most recently a historical archaeology project in Maine, for a series of short videos to be presented here in the coming months. An exciting new development is an opportunity for us to demonstrate the power of this venue in the education arena by bringing you a teacher symposium, "Teaching the Past through Archaeology," scheduled for September 22-23 at the Smithsonian Institution and cosponsored by the Smithsonian and the Society for American Archaeology. Lectures and workshops at this symposium will teach ways to introduce archaeology into school curricula and emphasize protecting our cultural heritage. The Smithsonian has agreed to videotape the proceedings and supply the tape to us for broadcast on The Archaeology Channel. We will add the teacher symposium to our programming as soon as we can raise the necessary funds for the broadcast, ideally this fall. We will also continue to solicit programming from a variety of sources worldwide, including indigenous peoples as well as archaeologists.

Our web site will continue to change as we add enhancements and new features. Soon we will add an "Acknowledgments" page to thank all those who have contributed to our development, including donors, volunteers, and partners. We will continue to add links to other web sites that we feel can benefit our visitors. We will add a special information page for Camera One and another for David Bogan, our highly valued content partners who as yet have no web sites of their own. As our video offerings grow, we will organize them by category to permit visitors to quickly find videos of interest.

We have some pretty concrete ideas about how we can make this service valuable to our visitors and are moving to implement them. As noted above, however, we can accomplish only what we have the resources to do. Funding for this effort is essential and we ask you to think about how you can help. Please consider supporting the Archaeology Channel by becoming a Member or becoming an underwriter through our Sponsor-a-Video Program. We also accept in-kind donations, particularly computer equipment and software and digital video equipment, and we are actively seeking volunteers to perform a variety of tasks. Together with you, our friends, we can make The Archaeology Channel a highly valuable resource for people everywhere who care about the human cultural legacy.

If you have ideas or questions you want to send our way, please do so by e-mail. Thank you again very much for your support.