Anonymity ain't what it used to be

(NOTE: I just found that this post was sitting around, not submitted. So here it is)

Sometimes scholarly anonymity is not upheld by journals, even if they promise this. A while ago I reviewed a manuscript for Journal A (I am being anonymous here to protect the guilty). The paper in question had a lot of problems and I did not recommend publication. Recently I saw that the paper (presumably a heavily revised version) had been published in Journal B. Then a colleague emailed me with some remarks on the paper, and made an offhand remark that I must have seen the paper and provided help or comments to the authors. But I don't know the authors and had never communicated with them! I checked the paper, and I was indeed thanked in the acknowledgements for my comments. I went back to my original review and confirmed that I had indeed submitted it anonymously (sometimes I sign my reviews, and sometimes not; when I DO sign a review, I make it very clear that I do not want to remain anonymous).

I contacted the editors of Journal A, who did not know what had happened. I contacted the lead author, who sent along a copy of my review. It was the review I had submitted to the journal, but an extra line had been added at the top: "Reviewer: Michael Smith." This was supposed to be a single-blind review system (that is, the names of the authors are known to the reviewers, but the names of the reviewers are not supposed to be revealed to the authors). Hmmmmmmmm. I was pretty angry at the journal, and slightly miffed at the authors. I think the authors should have contacted me, acknowledged that they saw my review, and ask if they minded if they cited me in the acknowledgements. That might have led to a more lengthy correspondence, and perhaps a more beneficial use of my advice to them. But this is a minor point. Another consideration is that the authors (presumably) used my review to improve the paper, so I am happy to have contributed in that sense.

I started off my career, back in pre-email days, writing reviews on university letterhead, a BIG mistake! One time a publisher asked me to review a couple of chapters from a new textbook (by a colleague I knew pretty well) and promised me anonymity. I thought the chapters left a lot to be desired and said so. The next time I talked to the author, they thanked me for my "frank" review. "How did you know it was me?" I asked. Well, it seems the publisher had covered up my signature but not the university letterhead! I was teaching at Loyola University of Chicago, and I was the only archaeologist on the faculty. It was pretty clear to the author that I must have written the review. That was when I switched to writing reviews on a separate sheet with no identifying marks. That seemed to work, until now.

So, what is the lesson here? Although I often feel that anonymity should be avoided in the interests of collegiality and collaboration, it does have its uses. If a journal claims to use blind peer reviewing, then they should adhere to their standards and not compromise them. And if you are writing a review and really want to remain anonymous, consider the reputation of the journal and its editor. You can always contact the editor to mention your concern about anonymity; that might reduce the chances of slippage as in my case today.

For more information about anonymity in peer review (in relation to double-blind reviewing), see my older post on this. Both of those older posts have some bibliographic citations on types of peer review and their implications.

From: PhD Comics

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.

New Online Anthropology "Journals": Semi- Quasi- or Pseudo- ?

Since this is open access week, here are some thoughts on a couple of new online "journals" or journal-like entities, in the field of anthropology. They are Anthropologies, and Anthropology of this Century. I've published in the first, but not the second. Each has published some interesting papers. They seem to favor works relating to contemporary issues or contemporary disciplinary concerns.

This is the blurb for Anthropologies:

"This goal of this site is to explore contemporary anthropology through essays, short articles, and opinion pieces written from diverse perspectives.  There is no single way to define the field, hence "anthropologies."  By presenting various viewpoints and positions, this site seeks to highlight not only what anthropology means to those who practice it, but also how those meanings are relevant to wider audiences."

For Anthropology of This Century, the description is:

"ANTHROPOLOGY OF THIS CENTURY (AOTC) publishes reviews of recent works in anthropology and related disciplines, as well as occasional feature articles. There are three issues per academic year – in October, January and May."


This is not a full analysis of these two things, just some random thoughts and queries. Should we call them journals? Each has a name that sounds like it could be the name of a journal, and each is arranged in numbered volumes or issues, each with several papers (often on a theme). So outwardly these look like journals. Anthropologies calls itself variously a "site" and a "collaborative online project." Does that collaboration refer to the three members of the "Editorial Team," or to all the authors? Perhaps I am a collaborator in this project by virtue of the inclusion of my article; I'm not sure about this. AOTC does not call itself anything, perhaps on purpose. It has a list of people as "Our Authors," and one person is listed as "Publisher and Editor."

Semi-Journal ("half journal" or "partial journal") might be an appropriate name for these things. That is, they have some attributes of journals (editors, articles by scholars, numbered volumes), but not others (peer review; clear submission guidelines, editorial boards). Or perhaps Quasi-Journal (almost a journal, as if it were a journal)? I wouldn't call them Pseudo-Journals (false or fraudulent journals), since they do not claim to be academic journals. And they aren't blogs or wikis.

This name issue is not as trivial as it might sound. What is the intellectual and professional status of these things? When I mention my article in Anthropologies, I am never sure what to call it. ("Yes, I published something on that topic in an online _______" WHAT??). What should I call this on my CV? It is certainly not a peer reviewed journal article. I couldn't remember what I did with it, so I just checked my CV. Guess what - I forget to add it to my CV! And there is no appropriate category there to include it! Hmm, I will have to modify or add to the categories of written work on my CV to accommodate this article.

My confusion here is part of the general situation of flux in the online production of intellectual work throughout the disciplines. I must admit here, I am one of those old fashioned academics ("fossilized" some will say) who sees the value of peer-reviewed journals as much greater than things like blogs and online semi-journals. This and my other blogs are all well and good, a way to let off steam, but as a scholar I want to be known and appreciated for my scientific and scholarly publications. This issue came up in discussion on Neuroanthropology and other anthropology-related blogs recently. Greg Downey argued that blog writing should be taken more seriously by tenure and promotion committees, and judged as true intellectual production. I disagreed, suggesting that blogging is better viewed as a service activity, separate from intellectual contributions like peer-reviewed articles, books, grants, etc. Some other folks supported Greg (e.g., Jason Anstrosio; see posts on his very nice blog, Living Anthropologically), and praised blogs that discussed real scholarly topics, combining citations to the peer-reviewed literature with links to blogs and other internet venues (like semi-journals).

Perhaps one part of the disagreement here has to do with disciplinary differences. Blogs like Neuroanthropology often take on real scientific issues and discuss them in a sophisticated way, with citations to the relevant research. The archaeology blogs I am familiar with, on the other hand, mostly communicate to non-specialists, or else discuss disciplinary issues (like this one), but rarely take on serious intellectual issues. The papers on Anthropologies and AOTC are closer to the serious end of this spectrum, and perhaps they deserve more status or consideration than the typical archaeology blog. Nevertheless, they are not peer-reviewed. Say what you like about the criticisms and problems of peer-review; it is still the best filtering method available for maintaining the quality of academic production in scholarly disciplines.

I wouldn't mind calling Anthropologies and AOTC and other similar things "semi-journals," or literally, "half-journals." But I would emphasize that the half that they lack includes the most important thing for science and scholarship -- peer review. That said, these are interesting and important new venues, and it is hard to predict where internet scholarship will be 5 or 10 years from now. Check these out, especially Anthropologies, which is quite good and exciting.

PNAS peer review issues

The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) publishes papers in all the sciences, including archaeology. I have long wondered whether the peer review process of PNAS us up to snuff. It seems that a good number of papers published in the journal fail to cite relevant sources on prior research. PNAS members can publish in the journal, and I'm not sure if their papers are peer reviewed or not. Non-PNAS members evidently can have their papers reviewed by a single PNAS member, who may be a good friend. Hardly a rigorous review process, but then perhaps that is not the goal.


I just read John Hawks's blog entry on this (from January, 2011), "Membership has its privileges." He takes a paper by Erik Trinkaus on Neanderthals in the PNAS to task for ignoring prior research very similar to Trinkaus's. Interestingly, Hawks publishes his own email correspondence with Trinkaus about the issue. It is worth reading.


A similar case occurred more recently, when a paper in PNAS on agricultural intensification failed to cite the literature on the topic. Sam Bowles shows that agriculture is calorically less efficient that hunting, something I learned as an undergrad more than thirty years ago. I complained to some people in the NAS about this, and had a short email exchange with Bowles. There is quite a large literature on this in anthropology, archaeology, and geography, much of it in the 1970s and 1980s (Boserup and her implications, pretty basic stuff in archaeology), but Bowles presented his findings as if he were the first to figure out the energetic costs of intensification:


Bowles, Samuel
2011    Cultivation of cereals by the first farmers was not more productive than foraging. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108:4760-4765.

I was tempted to fire off a letter to the journal, but desisted for two reasons. First, intensification is not my own specialty, and I thought there might be complexities and literature I am not aware of. Second, my previous letter to the editor was not very satisfying. In that case, I criticized a PNAS paper by economic historians for sloppy terminology and concepts:


Basu, Sudipta, John Dickhaut, Kristy Towry, and Gregory Waymire
2009    Recordkeeping Alters Economic History by Promoting Reciprocity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106:1009-1014.

The authors claimed that the results of a modern economic game explained past developments in economic history. I pointed out that several intermediate inferential steps had been left out; one cannot read ancient history from the results of a modern game. This is my letter:


2009    Modern Behavioral Experiments are not Economic History (response to S. Basu, J. Dickhaut, K. Towry, & G. Waymire, “Recordkeeping Alters Economic History by Promoting Reciprocity,” PNAS 106: 1009-1014). Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (16), p. E39. 


Like John Hawks, I am dismayed that prominent scholars are permitted to publish papers in a prestigious journal like PNAS without citing the relevant literature. If I tried to do that in a basic archaeology journal, I'd almost certainly be shot down by the reviewers.

Peer review and anonymity

I am sometimes asked about the anonymous nature of peer reviewing, whether this is always or sometimes maintained, whether to reveal the names of reviewers to authors, and related issues. I just responded to one such request, and below is my slightly edited reply. A colleague was in the processes of reviewing a manuscript for a journal when the paper's author asked the colleague to participate in a symposium related to the topic of the paper. The reviewer saw some holes in the paper's argument, but basically seemed to like the paper and was going to recommend publication. This person was wondering whether to reveal their identity to the author. Here was my reply:

Some journals and agencies take a very hard line on anonymity in peer review, offering lots of warnings not to violate anonymity. In my experience this is more common with grant reviews than with journals, although I've seen it with both. But if that is NOT the case, I would do whatever seems most comfortable to you. In archaeology, reviewers sometimes sign their reviews and send copies of the review directly to the author. I do this sometimes. It can help the author in doing revisions by getting the review quicker, and it establishes a professional collaboration between author and reviewer, always a good thing. Scholarly production, whether books, journal articles, grants, whatever - is ALWAYS a collaboration between individuals (authors, reviewers, editors, administrators), and collaboration is almost always more valuable and more enjoyable if it is open and frank.

Sometimes sending a review to an author starts an email conversation. And one time, after a reviewer me sent their review of a paper of mine, the journal lost the reviews (!), and I ended up forwarding the review to the journal! But I'm sure XXX  is much more efficient than the journal I'm referring to!

In a case like the one you describe I would consider things like: what is the best solution to advance scholarship and the discipline? What is most helpful to the other person? How helpful is it to come clean about reviewing a manuscript (helpful to personal relationships, helpful for scholarship, careers, etc.).

Personally I believe strongly in openness, so I'd probably let them know you are a reviewer. Although I often sign reviews, I don't always do this. I may refrain from signing a review if it is a bad paper/proposal by a friend or colleague and I'm not anxious for them to know I am panning it.

In sum, I think the important issue here is collaboration. Although the main purpose of peer review is to serve as a gatekeeper to main quality of published papers, another purpose is to stimulate collaboration between the reviewers and author. The goal of that collaboration is to improve the quality of published work, thereby benefiting scholarship in general. Students sometimes look at reviewers as mean people whose goal is to reduce the number of papers that are published. But it is more realistic and beneficial to look at reviewers (and editors) as collaborators who want to help you improve your paper. And if one knows their names, this can benefit additional and other kinds of collaboration.

If you want to read more in peer review, try some of these sources:

British Academy
2007    Peer Review: The Challenges for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The British Academy, London.  http://www.britac.ac.uk/reports/peer-review/report.pdf.

Chubin, Daryl E. and Edward J. Hackett
2005    Peer Review. In Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics, edited by Carl Mitcham, pp. 1390-1394. Macmillan, New York.

Lanata, José Luis, Mark Aldenderfer, and Michael A. Jochim
2007    The Peer-Review Process for American Antiquity and Latin American Antiquity. SAA Archaeological Record January 2007:12-15.

Odlyzko, A. M.
2003    Peer Review and Non-Peer Review. In Peer Review in the Health Sciences, edited by F. Godlee and T. Jefferson, pp. 309-311. 2nd ed. BMJ Books.

Suber, Peter
    2007    Open Access Overview (focusing on open access to peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints).  http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm.

Open Access in the news

Greetings from lovely Fort Scott, Kansas.
There have been a bunch of recent posts on open access in anthropology. Here I want to point to John Hawks's entry, "Why don't universities cut out the middleman?" The middleman in question is the group of commercial journal publishers. Right now, I work for Elsevier, Sage, Blackwell, and other commercial presses for free. I put in unpaid time doing scholarly work so that these large corporations can make profits from my efforts. Sometimes I feel like a fool; why should I divert my time and efforts from my own research in order to enrich these companies? The answer, of course, is that this unpaid labor consists of reviewing manuscripts (peer review), and I consider such reviewing a fundamental professional duty. So I do this work willingly, but every once in a while I get steamed up about it.

John Hawks asks what would happen if the whole system of funding scholarly journals were transformed such that journals were all online and open access (gold OA), sponsored by universities. University libraries would pay for editing and page production of these journals instead of paying for costly subscriptions to commercial print (and electronic) journals. Ignoring for now the complexities and difficulties in such a transformation. If this change were to come about, then my unpaid labor writing reviews (and writing articles, for that matter) would benefit my university, not a commercial press. I would feel much better about that. Hawks has a variety of interesting comments; take a look.

Savage Minds also has had some interesting recent posts on open access and the AAA; with some good discussion in the comments:

• AAA director condemns really stupid business models (Sept 1)
• Gourmet vs. All Things Considered: The Anthropological Edition (Sept. 2)

Now I half expect Steven Harnad to come swooping down and point out that the kind of massive transition Hawks discusses is really pie in the sky - its not going to happen soon, if it happens at all. But in the meantime, we can all promote open access and all of its benefits if we self-archive our publications. Harnad is completely correct here, and well worth listening to.

Incredibly quick journal review turnaround

A few months ago, I expressed my surprise (and appreciation) for the rapid turnaround time for a paper I submitted to the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. I was "flabbergasted" that the review process only took five and a half weeks. Well, now I must be more than flabbergasted, because the (positive) review of a paper by the journal Urban Studies only took 22 days! I am one of a long list of authors on the paper, which presents some preliminary findings of a transdisciplinary research project on urban neighborhoods. Yes, 22 days after submitting the paper, it was accepted (with some minor revisions, I think).

Now I am excluding from consideration here a paper I once submitted to the journal Science, which took them only a couple of weeks to reject. But then Science has a very different review process from other journals. Manuscripts go to an editor, who skims them and decides yes or no. Most papers get a "no," and these are rejected immediately. Those that get a "yes" are then sent out for peer review. Obviously that paper didn't pass the first test (it was later published in an archaeology journal).

How can these journals review manuscripts to quickly? Most of my experience with archaeology and anthropology journals has been with reviews taking from three months to two years (I will refrain from naming the guiltiest journal here).

(1) The online submission systems obviously helps; both JAA and US have very efficient electronic journal submission and review systems, thanks to their commercial status (Elsevier and Sage, respectively).

(2) The editors or editorial staff are obviously on the ball, getting the manuscripts out quickly to reviewers. In the case of JAA, the editor managed to find reviewers who are highly qualified and relevant. I haven't seen the US reviews yet.

(3) The reviewers are obviously taking care of their duties in a timely manner.

I am not in a position to say whether there are any lessons here. Maybe journal reviewing is changing on all fronts, and my experiences merely reflect the general trend. Or maybe I happen to have found two journals here that are quick and efficient compared to others. Or perhaps these are idiosyncratic cases, a lucky combination of factors for these particular manuscripts. I suspect that there are cultural factors at play here — that is, some scholarly groups (disciplines, subdisciplines, or other thematic groups) may have a culture of speed and efficiency among editors and reviewers, while others lack such notions. But whatever it is, I think it is great and these experiences portend well for journal publishing in archaeology.

Hoax paper accepted by Benthan Publishers OA journal

One of the new mass-produced Open Access journals published by Benthan Scientific accepted a bogus hoax paper. A Cornell grad student and an editor from the New England Journal of Medicine submitted a paper to the “Open Information Science Journal” titled “Deconstructing Access Points.” The text is complete gibberish; the authors (acting under pseudonyms) listed their affiliation as the “Center for Research in Applied Phrenology” (C.R.A.P. for short).

This hoax is all over the internet; see:

The original exposé by one of the authors, Philip Davis, in the Scholarly Kitchen blog.

An article in New Scientist

Peter Suber's reporting and comments in an entry called "Hoax exposes incompetence or worse at Bentham AO journal..

In subsequent news, the journal's editor resigned, and members of the Editorial Boards of other Bentham OA journals are also resigning.

I have blogged on Bentham's journal "Open Access Anthropology" before: (my post from June 22, 2008). I can't say for sure that this journal would not accept a bogus nonsense paper, but I wonder if it may accept low-quality papers (I say this very tentatively, since none of the papers published so far are close to my own areas of competence).

It is possible that this event may give ammunition to some ignorant people who think that Open Access means lack of peer review. But the problem here is not open access, but rather the LACK or peer review. Peer review is peer review, whatever the kind of journal. Bad peer review exists in respected print journals (I'm sure anyone reading this can think of some examples), and the problems are not open access or peer review in general, but rather poor scholarly implementation of these processes. In many cases, the lapses can be attributed to commercial factors, whether Elsevier's drug-company publicity rags masquerading as scientific journals, or fake fee-generating conferences (see below), or fee-paying OA journals like Bentham's.

One final note on this affair. The authors used SCIgen to produce their bogus paper, a text generator that produces context-free prose in computer science in article format, complete with tables, graphs, and references. In other words, the paper produces gibberish that is gramatically correct and looks like scientific prose at first glance. (the SCIgen page also has information on bogus for-fee conferences that accept all papersfor a large fee, including hoax, nonsense papers; I've been invited to a few of these and you may have been invited also, if you ever received in invitation for a large conference that seemed too broad and strange in its coverage). Now SCIgen will not produce papers that look at all archaeoelogical, but the Post-Modern Text Generator may be closer. When you visit the site, hit the refresh button to generate new meaningless postmodern papers.

I am very tempted here to try an experiment, but I really dont have time for such fun and games right now.....

Double-blind peer review

Double-blind review is a method of peer review used by some scholarly journals. Most journals use single-blind review, in which the identity of the reviewers is not (necessarily) revealed to the authors of manuscripts. In double-blind reviewing, the author(s) of the manuscript are not revealed to the reviewers. This requires editors to cut out the author name and perhaps the acknowledgements section. This is presumably done to improve the objectivity of the peer review process, but I have my doubts.

The reasons for keeping the names of reviewers hidden from authors (single-blind reviews) are pretty clear. I am more willing to be critical of the manuscripts of friends and colleagues, or of prominent scholars, if I know that my identity will not be revealed to them. There are criticisms of blind reviewing: reviewers can be petty and nasty and hiding behind anonymity does not help the overall process. But single-blind reviewing is a standard procedure in archaeology. Some journals today give reviewers the choice of remaining anonymous or revealing their name. I usually sign my reviews with my name. But sometimes (maybe 20% of the time) I don’t want to do this. I feel it is my duty to be rigorous and critical in my reviews, and sometimes friends and colleagues submit shoddy papers that I must criticize. Keeping anonymity can help avoid unpleasant personal repercussions, while maintaining professional standards.

I am less enthusiastic about trying to hide the names of authors from reviewers. There are both logistical and professional reasons for this. On the practical side, I have never reviewed a “blind” manuscript without knowing exactly who wrote it. I typically know who is doing what in my field, and even if that isn’t clear, there are usually telltale signs in the text that the journal editors overlook. Both of these factors were present in a manuscript I recently reviewed using the double-blind method.

But there is a larger professional and scientific reason to question double-blind reviewing. Manuscripts do not exist in a professional vacuum. Published papers are almost always part of a body of work (by an author or authors, or by a project or a group), and part of the evaluation of a paper focuses on its role within that body of work. If one really doesn’t know the identity of the author, then it is difficult or impossible to place the paper in its context.

Suppose I am reviewing a boring and not particularly rigorous or enlightening paper on obsidian production at a Mesoamerican site. If that paper were authored by an important obsidian analyst (say, Ken Hirth or John Clark), my reaction as a reviewer would be to tell the author to go back and improve the paper. There is no reason to accept shoddy work by these people (in point of fact, I don’t know of any shoddy papers by John or Ken, whose work is very good). On the other hand if the paper is by someone of questionable ability with a poor record of publication who happened to excavate an important obsidian assemblage years ago and is on the point of retiring, then perhaps a shoddy manuscript should be published. It would be much better for the discipline to have a low-quality publication from such a person than to have no publication at all.

There is a nice new British report on peer review: British Academy (2007) Peer Review: The Challenges for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The British Academy, London.

Peer Review

I just read a useful paper on peer review in archaeology in the January 2007 SAA Archaeological Record:

Lanata, José Luis, Mark Aldenderfer, and Michael A. Jochim
2007 The Peer-Review Process for American Antiquity and Latin American Antiquity. SAA Archaeological Record January 2007:12-15.
http://www.saa.org/publications/theSAAarchRec/jan07.pdf

Yes, I know its 6 months old, but I am only now starting to catch up on journals and such after fieldwork in Mexico from January to July. I did a little checking, and there are quite a few good resources on peer review on the internet, quite a change from the situation when I was a grad student and then new PhD and had trouble finding good information on professional practices in archaeology. Here are a couple of sources to check:

Kris Hirst has a nice discussion on her About.com site:
http://archaeology.about.com/od/pethroughpg/a/peer_review.htm

The Wikipedia even has a very good discussion of peer review in general:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review

(Why can’t they get good entries on really important topics like the Aztecs?)

My primary reference was always this book, which is still very good due its continuing updated editions:

Luey, Beth
1995 Handbook for Academic Authors. 3rd ed. Cambridge University Press, New York.

I recommend Luey to any young academic (grad student, junior faculty); she give very useful information on journals, book publishers, editing, etc.