Three positive developments in archaeological publishing

Here are several recent positive developments in archaeological publishing (not counting the paper I just had accepted by CAJ):

(1) Left Coast Press has bought out the old archaeology list from Academic Press and is re-issuing some classic books with new introductions. The following is from Left Coast Press:

• Having just obtained much of the old Academic Press archaeology list, we are re-releasing them, many in paperback for the first time and all a lot cheaper than they've been in recent years. In addition, several of these titles have been updated.

• Kent Flannery's The Early Mesoamerican Village, one of the classic works of archaeology, is back in print with a new foreword by Jerry Sabloff.

• Flannery has also provided a new Foreword for his volume Guila Naquitz with recent radiocarbon data and a reassessment of some of the original claims.

• There will be recent reflections on Debating Archaeology from Lew Binford when we release it this summer.

• The monumental Histories of Maize book will be accompanied by a paperback abridgement containing the chapters relevant to Mesoamerican archaeology. And new edition is expected soon of George Frison's high plains textbook.

• For question, please contact Caryn M. Berg at: archaeology@lcoastpress.com

These and other old Academic Press books were important contributions to archaeology (in spite of awful indexes and ridiculously expensive prices), and this is a very nice development

(2) Latin American Antiquity has finally abandoned its policy of not publishing more than one paper by a given author within a three-year period. I know of at least one good paper, accepted by LAA, whose author withdrew the paper and published it (quickly) in another top journal when informed that LAA was going to sit on the manuscript for three years to comply with this very bad policy (well, LAA didn’t use the phrase “very bad policy;” that is my own interpretation). That policy said, in effect, that spreading authorship around among archaeologists was more important than publishing quality work in a timely fashion. It was a wrong-headed policy from the start. When I took on the Book Review Editor position for LAA a number of years ago, someone mentioned this policy, suggesting to me that it applied to book reviews as well as articles. I replied that I had no intention of following any such practice while I ran the book reviews. In my mind, quality should be the first criterion for publishing policy.

(3) JSTOR is thinking about increasing its coverage of archaeology journals. I can’t say much about this now. A colleague was contacted about this by JSTOR, and this person asked some of us for suggestions of important journals not included yet in JSTOR.

A nice title for a work

Spence, Thomas
1775 The Real Rights of Man. A lecture read at the Philosophical Society in Newcastle on November 8th, 1775, for Printing of which the Society did the Author the Honour to Expel Him.

This has got to be one of the best titles I've seen. Thomas Spence was a late eighteenth century social critic who believed that wealthy individuals should not be permitted to own large plots of land while the poor were landless (this was the age of enclosures). He argued for collective land ownership through local parishes. Spence was a tireless campaigner for his views, which, needless to say, were not popular among the wealthy and powerful of the time. His political activities had various consequences, from a stint in prison for sedition to his expulsion from the Philosophical Society. For more information on Spence, see:

Bonnett, Alastair
2007 The Other Rights of Man: The Revolutionary Plan of Thomas Spence. History Today 57(9):42-48.

Wordle

I've just been playing with Wordle, the internet java program that makes word images. You've seen these - they represent all of the words in a document or domain, with the size of the word proportional to its frequency of usage in the document. This is both fun and instructional. Here are a couple of images: my CV, my Calixtlahuaca blog, and a paper I am writing on neighborhoods in preindustrial cities:

What about conference proceedings?

My prior judgment that most edited volumes in archaeology are close to worthless does not apply to conference proceedings. These are collections of papers from a conference, published soon after the session. Papers are short and timely, focusing on the issue at hand without extra space for the kind of posturing that most archaeologists can't seem to avoid. There is little editing and little effort to produce a nice-looking book. Proceedings serve the very useful purpose of making research available in print (and/or on the web) quickly and easily. There should be more, not fewer, such volumes in archaeology.

Unfortunately I can't think of any examples of published proceedings in my field, Mesoamerican archaeology, The Chac Mool conference publications at Calgary fit this genre, but the publication lag makes them less useful than they could be. I've given papers at several conferences in Mexico where the organizers claimed that the proceedings would be published (they insisted in receiving the papers quickly), but none have appeared after several years. My impression is that there are more such volumes published in Europe, and in America for Old World archaeology, but I could be wrong.

With easily available page production software (Adobe Indesign, Quark, Pagemaker, even some low-level Microsoft programs), one would think that conference proceedings could be done conveniently on the internet, with papers posted as pdfs as they are received and processed.