Some Fragments on the Future of Archaeological Publishing 2

I’ve been dancing around a writing project over the last couple of weeks and putting fragments of thoughts in my new notebooks as part of my effort to developed more discipline in handwriting. 

Yesterday, I began to think more seriously about the relationship between scholar-led publishing and disciplinary practice in archaeology. In previous work, I’ve argued that scholar-led publishing reinforced a view of archaeological knowledge making that extends from the edge of trench (or survey unit!) to the published page. As I blogged about last week, any number of scholars have shown how writing about archaeology (and history and the past more broadly) shapes what we know about the past. This extends to the images that we produce in photography, illustration, and maps, of course, and the character of “final publications” as definitive products.

In our piece for the JFA 50th anniversary, I wonder whether we might extend some of the ideas that I have explored with punk and slow archaeology to unpack the way that scholar-led publishing can establish new forms of conviviality between publishers and scholars. It goes without saying that many academic publishers with dedicated, professional staffs already do much to cultivate these forms of convivial relationships. Indeed, there are a number of professional publishers who have background and experience in archaeology. That said, small scale, scholar-led publishers provide the kind of structure that allows for greater conviviality across the entire knowledge making process. 

What scholar-led publishing tends to lack is efficiency and scalability. This is all the more visible in current trends in publishing which has seen the accelerated production of template based series — whether very short introductions, companions, or handbooks — that seek to maximize profitability (and presumably underwrite the less profitable practice of publishing academic monographs!). In contrast, scholar-led publishing prioritizes the relationship between author and publication in ways that marginalize efficiency (and by extension scalability) in the name of conviviality and collaboration in the production of knowledge.

In this way, scholar-led publishing is part of a slow approach to knowledge making that rejects efficiency necessarily as part of the process. The emphasis on conviviality and cooperation reinforces an approach to archaeological knowledge that is pluralistic and situational. This coincides well with the goals of the Corinthian Countrysides volume. This book offers less of a definitive final statement from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey, and more as invitation for dialogue with both the material results of the survey (as presented in digital form) and in the analysis provided by Pettegrew in the volume. In short, then, the model for publishing and the outcome of the volume shared an open-ended model of knowledge making across its open access format, scholar-led design, and its desired outcome. The book, then, was an exercise in slow archaeology not so much because of the time it took to come to publication, but because of the emphasis on convivial practices that laced its entire production process.   

Of course, these things also resonate with punk practice. The cooperative and collaborative approach to publishing celebrates an embrace of amateurism and a disinterest in standards of efficiency and professionalism at the core of contemporary academic publishing. The rise of AI and the role of large language models in the future of scholarly work puts additional pressure on efficiency and scalability in publishing. The future for academic publishers may well be in aggregation, curation, and AI aided research built on the back of hyper efficient publishing models that serve to feed computer models as much (if not more) than the academic public. These tools — as powerful as they may be — further emphasize the need for efficiency in publishing and exacerbated the gap between the scholar as creator and the publisher as disseminator of knowledge. By collapsing that distinction and blurring lines developed to serve efficiency, we create new opportunities for convivial practices that recognize the plurality of archaeological knowledge.

To be clear, this isn’t meant to suggest that there is only ONE future of archaeological publishing, but rather to propose that the future of archaeological publishing holds forth a wide range of alternatives that reflect the changing character of archaeology as a discipline and our changing understanding of archaeological knowledge making.