Some Fragments on the Future of Archaeological Publishing

David Pettegrew and I are working on an article that we intend to submit to the Journal of Field Archaeology for its 50th anniversary issue. You can read our abstract here. The theme of this issue is “Looking to the Next Half Century.” We thought that we might use David’s soon to be published volume, Corinthian Countrysides: Linked Open Data and Analysis from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey, as a case study for exploring what the future of archaeological publishing could look like. 

While the core of this paper will likely be the Corinthian Countrysides case study, it will still require a certain amount of historiography (or perhaps better, a kind of literature review). I’ve been re-reading the recent work that has helped to shape my own thinking about publishing and trying to figure out how to organize them in a meaningful way.

Right now, I think I can organize our contribution as part of three major threads. First, there is a longstanding interest in the relationship between archaeological writing and epistemology. Gavin Lucas most recently brought this to the fore in his book Writing the Past (2018; my post here), but any number of older works and contemporary works likewise reflected on the role of narrative, description, illustration, and photography in creating archaeological knowledge. This work informs the approach that Pettegrew took with the EKAS book in that he was interested in framing the “data” from the project in a way that both supports his analysis (and narrative), but also that supports different interpretations.

The second thread involves the vibrant conversations surrounding digital archaeology and digital publishing in archaeology. The contributions to this debate are so well-known (at least to readers of this blog) that they hardly require introduction. These scholars have worked on things ranging from the use of new tools and technologies for in-field data collection to the practices associated with the publication of digital data and linked open data standards. Of course, any number of these scholars have shown how rigorous digital data policies support equally rigorous epistemology (supported, in turn, by rigorous ontologies). The best example of this might be Giorgio Buccellati’s A Critique of Archaeological Reason: Structural, Digital, and Philosophical Aspects of the Excavated Record (2017). Scholars like Eric and Sarah Kansa, Jeremy Huggett, Rachel Opitz, and others have produced compelling arguments for the structure and organization (as well as distribution) of digital archaeological data. Many of these same scholars have shown how well collected, curated, and analyzed data is the backbone for good archaeology full stop. 

Finally, the third group of scholars have started to engage critically with the character of scholarly publishing both in the past and in the present. These range from critiques of peer review and research into authorship patterns in the field to studies of early history of archaeological publishing and considerations reflections on the potential of scholar-led publishing.

As near as I can tell, there has been no scholarship focused at the intersection of these threads in archaeology and as near as I can tell, nothing prominent on scholar-led publishing in archaeology. Our paper seeks (wait for it…) to thread the needle (see what I did there), by showing a connection between new ways of organizing publishing as a process, ways of presenting linked and open archaeological data, and the potential of open date to offer a plurality of interpretations.