Jennifer Schansberg wrote on Aug. 30, that: "This only goes to show how differently museum people and archaeologists feel about objects!" I don't think that is a fair characterization. This particular archaeologist, on the advice of a museum conservator, stopped using whiteout some ten years ago b ecause of its apparent instability. I think that most archaeologists make an eff ort to keep up with current views on conservation of materials, but few conserva tors seem interested in publishing in the archaeological journals. One exception to this was Curt Moyer's column on Archaeological Conservation published in the quarterly Society for Historical Archaeology Newsletter. Did any other conserva tor from a museum ever alert the archaeological community that whiteout was not a good medium to use? If this was such a problem then there should have been a n otice published in each of the main journals. Was there? If so, I missed reading it. Is there any empirical evidence of whiteout's failure, or is this simply an educated opinion? If whiteout really is unstable, then the conservators have a real problem on their hands. ! I used whiteout on artifacts from 1971-1984 and have put tens of thousands of ar tifacts into "permanent" curation. Whiteout was the standard used in archaeology for several decades. Seems to me that a dialogue between conservators and archa eologists needs to be improved. What else are we doing wrong? If you care to cha nge things then let us have a dialogue. There are several archaeologists on this list who are networked well with the archaeology listservers, so we can cross-p ost the more interesting comments. William H. Adams P.O. Box 1177 Philomath, OR 97370-1177 USA 503-929-3102 -3264 fax [log in to unmask]