In recent years, digital access to unpublished archaeological reports (so-called ‘grey literature’) has become increasingly transformational in archaeological practice. Besides being important as a reference source for new archaeological investigations including pre-development assessments (the origin of many of the grey literature reports themselves), they also provide a resource for regional and national synthetic studies, and for automated data mining to extract information about periods of sites, locations of sites, types of evidence, and so on. Despite this, archaeological grey literature itself has not yet been closely evaluated as a resource for the creation of new archaeological knowledge. Can the data embedded within the reports (‘grey data’) be re-used in full knowledge of their origination, their strategies of recovery, the procedures applied, and the constraints experienced? Can grey data be securely repurposed, and if not, what measures need to be taken to ensure that it can be reliably reused?

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