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Archaeology in context

Straight from the excavations an assembly of archaeological journals have arrived to ScienceOpen today as a result of our new partnership with Equinox, an independent academic publisher of books and journals in Social Sciences and Humanities.

Although these journals thematise different subfields, areas and periods, a common denominator in their approaches is that they all take an anthropological view of archaeology. Their aim is to extract meaning structures from the material remains of ancient cultures in order to reconstruct past lifeways and rituals in everyday life, document knowledge production, and to explain changes in human societies through time in general. Such thick descriptions are achieved through the interpretation of anthropological phenomena in multiple contexts – be it parallelisms with another ancient culture, large(r)-scale investigations of the same tendencies, global warming or theoretical frameworks like gender studies – rather than in their isolation.

One source of the diversity in contexts comes from the multidisciplinary character of the journals. Contributions have been submitted from around the world and they encompass disciplinary perspectives from art, architecture, sociology, urban studies, cultural studies, design studies, history, human geography, media studies, museum studies, psychology, and technology studies. Are you interested urban development, arts, or ritual acts in ancient cultures or the frozen artefacts being conserved by ice patches? Below you can find the journals now indexed on our site, and a teaser from their selected articles. Take a peek!

1. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology

This journal has the longest history among the selection. It deals with the entire multicultural world of Mediterranean archaeology and covers issues from amongst others, the social, political, economic and ideological aspects of local or regional production and development, and of social interaction and exchange in the Mediterranean. Diving into the volumes, you can read about:

2. Journal of Islamic Archaeology

Another journal with a particular cultural-geographical focus studies Islamic societies, polities, and communities, wherever they are found. The journal exhibits a wide range of ancient Islamic cultures related topics, including:

3. Journal of Glacial Archaeology

The journal is dedicated to unique archaeological finds that remained frozen and well preserved for hundreds and even thousands of years in the cryosphere and recently became accessible as a consequence of climate change. The journal aims to report on archaeological discoveries from glacial, permafrost, polar and high‐altitude frozen contexts around the world with special emphasis on the interpretation of frozen artefacts in the with regard to climate change and the social, political and ethical consequences of the inquiry. In the 2 volumes published so far you can read about:

4. Journal of Skyscape Archaeology

 

The journal aims to expand the horizons of archaeology by adding another –“scape” to the scope of archaeological investigations. It brings together findings from disciplines of archaeoastronomy, archaeology, cultural astronomy, anthropology and history and facilitates further multidisciplinary collaborations under the aegis of skyscape archaeology. Their main focus of interest is the relationship between material culture, the sky, and society. Articles published so far are centred around two main topics:

  • The relationship between sites and the landscapes in which they are situated in different contexts

5. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology

The term contemporary in the title refers to the assessment of the current situation and future prospects of the discipline on the one hand and archaeologies of the recent past and present on the other.

  • Another thread of discussion focuses on the socio-political implications of doing archaeology in the contemporary world in different cultural-geographical contexts and drafts future research agendas.

The 5 journals together demonstrate the diversity of viable perspectives on the practice of archaeology (and VR glasses and drones are yet to come!) as well as give us an insight of what is it like doing archaeological research today. In addition to the multiple contexts in which they are interpreted, these archaeological findings are now placed into a context of more than 28 million articles through our citation and recommendation network.

 

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