Research infrastructures are facilities, resources and services used by the scientific community to conduct research. They include major research instruments, laboratories, databases, libraries and archival collections. Research infrastructures require digital infrastructure and services for information storage, management, processing, publication and access. In archaeology, data centres and repositories where researchers can deposit and access documentation and data from excavations, field surveys, laboratory analysis, etc. already exist in several European countries. The EU FP7 project ARIADNE (www.ariadneinfrastructure. eu) will set up a common interface to a digital infrastructure integrating archaeological information and datasets held by data centres, institutional and other repositories which are distributed across Europe. This paper addresses the following questions: What is an e-infrastructure for research? How will ARIADNE integrate digital resources on the European level? What are major challenges of the project? Beside the considerable semantic and technical challenges, particularly the need to facilitate a culture of collaboration and data sharing among a multi-disciplinary research community is emphasised.