1986 - 2026: Looking Back Through Forty Years of Geoarchaeology journal

Over the past few weeks, I've been working on an editorial marking the forthcoming 40th anniversary of Geoarchaeology, which has been a great to chance to spend some time reading through the journal archive. I've been spending time revisiting classic papers that helped shape the field, while also discovering newer papers that slipped past my attention when they were first published (and of course, the first 14 years of the journal were published before I even started my academic career - the journal is only 4 years younger than I am!).

One of the joys of working through the archive is being reminded of the remarkable breadth of geoarchaeology. The journal's pages chart the development of approaches ranging from micromorphology and sedimentology to landscape archaeology, provenance studies, heritage science, geochemistry and isotopic analysis. Many of the questions that remain central to the discipline today including site formation processes, environmental change, human-landscape interactions and archaeological context, were already being explored in papers published decades ago. At the same time, new themes have emerged, reflecting both advances in analytical techniques and changing research priorities.

Geoarchaeology is the only journal dedicated entirely to our discipline, and I have followed it closely since I was a Master's student, when I made the shift from geographer interested in Quaternary Science, to geoarchaeologist. Some of my earliest introductions to geoarchaeological thinking came from papers published in its pages. I still remember reading the 25th anniversary editorial not long after I had completed my PhD and thinking about the generation of researchers whose work had built the foundations upon which my own research relied. It feels slightly surreal to now find myself contributing to the 40th anniversary editorial. That is perhaps one of the aspects of academia I find most fascinating, the sense of belonging to a long-running scholarly conversation, which in some cases extends for hundreds of years. Journals are often viewed simply as publication venues, but they are also records of disciplinary history.

Working on the anniversary editorial has also reminded me how many excellent papers remain hidden within journal archives. Our way of finding information has changed so much, and there is less chance of finding something just by browsing through a single volume. In an age of search engines and citation metrics, it is easy to gravitate towards the most famous or most frequently cited publications. But spending time browsing volumes year by year has led me to papers I might never otherwise have encountered, papers that remain insightful, innovative and surprisingly relevant to contemporary debates. I was pleasantly suprised for example, to find quite a diverse range of article types in the journal history, including this 'conversation' paper with George 'Rip' Rapp, one of the leading figures in the history of the discipline, and this paper by Elizabeth Leach on the definition of Geoarchaeology, and a friendly letter to the editor praising Leach's paper.

So I'd like to turn the question over to readers. If you have a favourite paper from the Geoarchaeology archive, I'd love to hear about it. Is there a classic article that influenced your thinking as a student? A paper that changed how you approach a particular method? A hidden gem that deserves to be better known? As I continue working on the editorial, I'm always looking for perspectives on which papers have had the greatest impact on the field, not just in terms of citations, but in terms of inspiring ideas, shaping careers and opening up new ways of thinking about the archaeological record. After all, anniversaries are not just about looking back. They are also about reflecting on how we got here, and imagining where the next forty years might take us...