Castles and Coprolites

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-la...

A nice bit of good news for the end of the year - I was recently appointed as assistant editor and social media editor for Landscape Research , the academic journal of the Landscape Research Group , which is published by Routledge. This means that in addition to normal editorial duties (assessing manuscripts, assigning reviewers, encouraging a quality and speedy publication process), I am also responsible for developing the social media profile of the journal. In particular, I hope to build the audience in the archaeological community, and encourage collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches to researching and understanding landscapes. I blogged recently about how I jump in between disciplinary pigeon-holes , and the study of landscape is an area that falls into many categories. The individual elements of a landscape are from the past and present, the natural and the cultural, the tangible and the intangible. In order to understand the landscape as a whole, we need to investigate th...

Advice for Owain? RT @OwainConnors : Anyone got any advice on what to do with my thesis once my corrections are signed off? #PhD #archaeology — Archaeology Postdocs (@archpostdocs) February 20, 2014 I am writing this post in response to this request on Twitter about how to go about publishing an archaeology PhD. As I am now fairly experienced in this area, I felt it would be a good idea to share my knowledge. Please do comment if you have different experiences! How to publish is something that I was never explicitly told about during my PhD, though in hindsight it’s this kind of information that would have been incredibly useful. I think sometimes the more senior we get into the academic hierarchy we can forget that the things that seem so obvious do not come naturally (at least, not without a lot of unnecessarily wasted time and potentially mistakes). So here is my quick guide to publishing a PhD. I will do more on this in a future post as there is a lot to cover. T...