If the quality of an academic organization's home page is an indication of the quality of academic work that organization is capable of, then the Japanese Archaeological Association ranks very low among archaeology associations in the world. First, The JAA's home page is not very attractive. Further, it is on a public server; it does not have its own domain address; there is only a mailing (snail mailing) address and a telephone number, no fax number or email address; and there is no indication that it is being maintained regularly -- and some indication that it is not being maintained well. And, finally, it contains very little useful information.

There are five links on the left margin of the JAA's home page.

• One link takes the viewer to a page with three links -- general meetings, symposiums, and talks -- none of which are linked to anything (July 30, 2001).
• The second link goes to a page with links to university courses on archaeology at all(?) universities in Japan. This list seems to be quite out of date.
• The third link goes to a page with three links to requests -- for new members, for research funds, and for manuscripts. The first two go to blank pages; the third one goes to a page that is 3 months out of date (July 30, 2001).
• The fourth link goes to "Database Archaeological Sources". This page has three links -- how to use the database, free-word search, and subject search. This "database" apparently is a bibliography. The free-word search turns up publications. But the subject search seems not to work (July 30, 2001).
• The fifth and final link goes to notices from the Association. There are five notices posted (July 30, 2001), all dealing with the validation process in the Early Palaeolithic hoax. The last one is dated April 15, 2001.

A further indication of the low priority the JAA gives its home page, and an explanation of its poor quality, can be seen in the Association's home page budget. In the recent Bulletin (No. 143, July 2001), the JAA reports the home page budget is only 200,000 yen, up 50,000 yen from the previous year (p. 20). At another point in the Bulletin (p. 15), the home page is listed under "miscellaneous" expenditures. The same Bulletin reports a separate budget of 4.8 million yen in 2000 and 5.3 million yen for 2001 for a "database" -- the report does not say what kind of a database, but it apparently is the bibliography on the home page.

The links below on this index page will allow comparison of the quality of the Japanese Archaeological Association's home page with the home pages of other professional academic organizations both in and outside Japan. The JAA's home page does not compare well to the others, and I feel that its poor quality is a reflection of the overall poor quality of the Association -- and that that in turn suggests (to me) that the Association is not up to the job of validating the Early Palaeolithic sites in Japan that are now under a cloud of suspicion because of acknowledged planting of artifacts on two of the 33 excavated sites in the country.

NOTE (June 2003): In the end, the Japanese Archaeological Association did in fact do a very good job of the validation work. Their conclusion that all the 186 sites that Fujimura Shin'ichi had worked on could not be used for research purposes is fully supported by the very good final report on the JAA's validation work.

• Charles T. Keally. (2006) Summary of the "Final Report"on Japan's Archaeological Hoax. Current Research in the Pleistocene, 23: 6-9. (published by the Center for the Study of the First Americans [http://www.centerfirstamericans.com].)

NOTE (July 11, 2010): Much has changed in the 9 years since I wrote this text. The text now reflects conditions in 2001, not in 2010. I am leaving the text as originally written in order that it reflect the context around the time of the hoax. But 8 (57%) (marked in red) of the 14 links below are now dead, so I am eliminating the link connections and leaving only the list of organizations I used for comparison. However, 9 years later, I still am not impressed with the quality of the JAA's web site. And 3 of the non-Japanese web sites have made their front pages so heavy that they take a long time to load into my computer. Attractive, perhaps, but they do not impress me favorably.

There are three reasons (purposes) for making and posting web pages or web sites. These are:

• inform
• entertain
• impress

Many of the web sites above very unwisely mix inform, entertain and impress. Getting all the lastest, greatest and geekest bells and whistles into a web page or web site just makes it too heavy and too complicated to inform, which would seem to have been the original purpose of these web sites on archaeology.

The purpose of my web site is to give the world general information about Japanese archaeology and prehistory, and to provide some specific information, to the extent I have the knowledge and the time to do so. Hence there is no entertainment in my web pages or web site (except the Japan Photos section, which is not on archaeology), and my HTML skills are 1990s intermediate, and I intend to keep my skills at that level.

I see other problems in the web sites on this list. Many have changed addresses (URLs), a few more than once. That makes keeping link pages up-to-date very difficult. (I changed my web site's address once, from the university's server to a commerial server when I retired.) And professional organizations should not use server addresses; that looks very unprofessional. They should pay for an organization address. (I use a server address purposefully -- so I do not mislead veiwers into thinking I am a professional fully capable of maintaining the content of this web site. I cannot keep it up-to-date.)

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