Rejected by Science !!

I just got a rejection for a manuscript sent to the journal Science. That's strike two for me with Science (I sent them my paper on agricultural terraces, back in the early 1990s; it ended up in JFA). I have something else up my sleeve for Science; maybe the third time will work. Because so many papers are submitted to Science, they have a bulk system for evaluating them. Each manuscript gets a quick once-over by one of a small number of editors, who say "no" to most papers. If they say "yes," then the paper gets sent out for peer review. This means that rejections come fast - it took them just a few days to reject my paper. I have to admire that efficiency.

This experience got me thinking about how the Science review process affects the kinds of archaeology papers published in the journal. If you pay attention to the journal, you will know that they tend to favor high-tech methods, archaeometry, fancy quantitative methods, and reports about "the earliest" this or that. While I can only recall one or two papers in Science that I thought were incompetent (a much better record than most archaeology journals, some of which are full of incompetent articles), their selection of archaeology papers is definitely biased in a certain direction. I think one way of expressing this might be that Science publishes archaeology articles that will appeal on methodological grounds to non-archaeological scientists. My guess is that papers that are more synthetic or less methods-heavy don't make it through the initial review (which is done by non-archaeological scientists).

This suggestion links up with the issue of what does "science" mean in archaeology. Not in some big ontological sense, but in practical terms. What kinds of archaeology can be called scientific, and what kinds of archaeology are recognized by other scientists (such as editors at the journal Science) as being scientific in nature? "Scientific method" in archaeology has two meanings. (1) On the one hand science means research done following a scientific epistemology (empirically testable, logically coherent, done with a critical spirit, etc.), whether it employs high-tech methods or not. (2) Scientific methods in archaeology also means the use of non-archaeological scientific techniques: archaeometry and the like. Now ideally, these two meanings of "science" go together, but often they do not. Much research that is epistemologically scientific does not use jazzy methods (as in the paper that was recently rejected by Science). And scientific methods (sense #2) are often used in non-scientific research (sense #1).

What do I mean by that last observation? Consider two examples. First, there are post-processual archaeologists who explicitly reject a scientific epistemology for archaeology, yet they embrace archaeometric methods. This is science of definition #2, done in opposition to science of definition #1. Would this kind of research get by the editors of the journal Science? Good question. Second, there is research that would claim to follow a scientific epistemology, but is too sloppy to be considered good science. Many archaeometric sourcing studies fit here. The archaeologists picks a bunch of artifacts of type X, and subjects them to technical provenience analyses. But if those artifacts were not selected with a rigorous sampling scheme, then this is simply not a good scientific research design. The results cannot be generalized beyond the sample that was analyzed (although archaeologists who are sloppy in picking their samples tend to also be sloppy in overgeneralizing their results). Now this kind of work can easily get past the editors and reviewers of journals, which always puzzles me and bugs the heck out of me. I have pissed off a number of authors and editors over the years with my complaints about the publication of such papers.

So, what's a scientific archaeologist (definition #1, whether or not using methods from definition #2) to do? I guess try another journal. For the sake of the discipline, one can only hope that these powerful editors at Science are not too often fooled by science #2 that does not conform to science #1.