Shadowing effects in deep-inelastic lepton-nucleus scattering probe the mass
spectrum of diffractive leptoproduction from individual nucleons. We explore
this relationship using current experimental information on both processes. In
recent data from the NMC and E665 collaboration, taken at small x << 0.1 and
Q^2 < 1 GeV^2, shadowing is dominated by the diffractive excitation and
coherent interaction of low mass vector mesons. If shadowing is explored at
small x > 1 GeV^2 as discussed at HERA, the situation is
different. Here dominant contributions come from the coherent interaction of
diffractively produced heavy mass states. Furthermore we observe that the
energy dependence of shadowing is directly related to the mass dependence of
the diffractive production cross section for free nucleon targets.Comment: 12 pages Latex, 8 figure