Excerpt:
Welcome to the Darwin-L Archives. The Darwin-L Archives contains the collected message logs and supporting materials of Darwin-L, a discussion group for professionals in the historical sciences that was active from 1993–1997. Darwin-L was established to promote the reintegration of a range of fields all of which are concerned with reconstructing the past from evidence in the present, and to encourage communication among researchers in these fields. The group had more than 600 members from 35 countries, and produced a consistently high level of discussion. In spite of its name, Darwin-L did not focus specifically on the work of Charles Darwin, but rather covered the entire range of palaetiology from an explicitly comparative perspective, including evolutionary biology, historical linguistics, textual transmission and stemmatics, historical geology, systematics and phylogeny, archeology, paleontology, historical geography, cosmology, and historical anthropology. Although the Darwin-L discussion group itself is now closed, this archive of materials generated by the group (more than seven megabytes of text in all) continues to serve as a valuable resource for researchers in the historical sciences.