about the registry

anonymousmaterials.com is an informal public catalogue of unattributed material samples. It exists to give a stable, citable identifier to specimens whose provenance is incomplete, disputed, or deliberately withheld, and to make their basic analytical data retrievable by interested third parties.

The catalogue has no institutional backing. It is maintained by a small group of volunteers on a non-commercial basis and operates from donated server capacity. Decisions about what is accessioned, what is retained, and what is withdrawn are made internally; there is no review board.

scope

Submissions are accepted for any solid inorganic material that can be physically retained at one of the registry's intake addresses, or for which the submitter can supply enough analytical detail that an independent verifier could re-acquire the specimen. Organic compounds, biological material, and items judged to be of likely cultural-heritage concern are out of scope and will be returned without indexing.

history of the public mirror

The registry has been in continuous operation since 2007-04-22. The current public mirror at anonymousmaterials.com has been operational since 2025-11-23; prior to that, the public face of the registry had been hosted on a sequence of academic and institutional subdomains, the identities of which are no longer maintained at the request of the contributing parties.

The relocation to a self-hosted domain was carried out to consolidate the public index, to remove dependencies on hosts whose continued availability could no longer be relied upon, and to shorten the chain of administrators with access to unredacted submission packets. Internal accession identifiers, analytical data, and proof-hash chain were carried over without modification; the genesis-hash of the indexing integrity chain (see methodology) is bound to the registry's founding date and is therefore unchanged across the relocation.

Reverse-DNS and WHOIS records for anonymousmaterials.com therefore reflect only the date of the most recent move, not the duration of the underlying registry. Researchers wishing to cite older records may continue to use the AM-YYYY-NNNNN identifier without qualification; older URLs of the form …/registry/AM-YYYY-NNNNN[-X] from previous hosts will not resolve and should be replaced with anonymousmaterials.com/sample/AM-YYYY-NNNNN-X.

contact

Public correspondence: cite the full accession identifier in the subject line, include any prior reference numbers, and send via the form linked from methodology. Expect replies on the order of weeks rather than days.

this interface

The current public interface (ui-2014.04, patched 2021.11) is in the process of being replaced. A small number of legacy records may render incorrectly in this version; please refer to the printed accession books for the canonical text.