Forty years and still growing: Journal of Archaeological Science looks to the future

doi:10.1016/j.jas.2015.03.001

Journal of Archaeological Science

Volume 56, April 2015, Pages 1-8

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2015.03.001 Get rights and content

Highlights

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Papers honour Richard Klein's editorial contributions to archaeological science.
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Archaeological science integrates theory and method to study the human past.
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Advances across archaeological science are critically reviewed.
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Future challenges include rigour, significance, sustainability and social responsibility.

Abstract

This special issue honours Richard Klein's outstanding contributions to archaeology through his seminal role as a senior editor for the Journal of Archaeological Science (JAS). The papers presented here assess achievements in archaeological science during the 40 years of research since JAS began, and scope the future within evolutionary and social theory in archaeology and across the fields of dating, aDNA, environmental reconstruction, diet, subsistence, artefact technology and function, and provenancing. Science is shown to be integral to archaeology as a whole, but challenges are identified particularly in the continuing search for new methods to answer key questions and the maintenance of rigour, significance, sustainability and social responsibility.

Section snippets

Honouring achievements

For forty years the Journal of Archaeological Science (JAS) has played a major role in shaping the discipline of archaeology as a whole. Despite the important contributions of Archaeometry (founded in 1958), when JAS was initiated sixteen years later, scientific techniques were still often envisaged as something additional, practiced by specialists largely placed outside the field, and whose expertise was only called on when required -- or as an entertainment for curious scientists towards the

Integrating theory

One of the themes underscoring the bulk of the contributions to this special issue is that the current prosperity (if not maturity) of archaeological science is in large part due to a closer integration between theory and data (Martinón-Torres and Killick, in press). In his review, Killick (2015) applauds the fact that the old reluctance, even suspicion, against archaeological science is now largely overcome, mainly because the purposes and results of scientific analyses are increasingly

Framing human behaviour

Perhaps the most widely shared methods among archaeologists are those that create the essential chronological framework for observing change in human behaviour and the environments in which they live. In this volume leaders in the fields of radiocarbon (Wood, 2015), optical (Roberts et al., 2015), and uranium–thorium and uranium–lead (Pickering and Hellmstrom, 2015) dating provide accessible, up to date reviews of their discipline with an emphasis on identifying the conditions under which these

What's new?

An important theme that emerges from the papers is the creative way that archaeology has taken concepts and methods from other fields and, through reworking as well as genuine innovations, has shaped these to answer questions of archaeological importance. In some cases the basic methodology of the parent discipline has been maintained (e.g., identification of plant microfossils or faunal remains) and in others principles have been borrowed (e.g., from geology or pedology), but all have had to

Challenges

Inevitably, some ‘teething problems’ occur after the inflated expectations that come with every new technique, as, for example, discussed in these papers with reference to aDNA (Horsburgh, 2015), environmental reconstructions using starch (Barton and Torrence, 2015), or with research on palaeodiets using stable isotopes (Makarewicz and Sealey, 2015). Thankfully, however, archaeology has witnessed the end of an era where samples were sent from the field to the lab in cigarette boxes labelled

Geographical distribution of archaeological science

A detailed analysis of publication trends in archaeological science journals would be a highly informative way to illustrate the growth and development of the field (cf. Pollard, 2008, Rehren and Pernicka, 2008, Killick, 2008), and in this issue useful data has been drawn together on pollen and starch by Edwards et al. (2015) and Barton and Torrence (2015) respectively. Even a broad examination of the geographical source of authors is highly relevant because it shows that archaeological science

JAS in the future of archaeological science

Twenty-five years ago, Julian Thomas (1991: 33) detected ‘a polarisation within archaeology which is likely to increase in the foreseeable future’, and saw little scope for reconciliation between the humanistic aims of archaeology and science. Thankfully, his gloomy prediction has not come to pass. The challenges we have outlined above are not exclusive to archaeological science, but are broadly shared within archaeology as a whole. This is partly because they reflect fundamental concerns with

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful for the special efforts made by authors and reviewers to meet the tight deadlines; Ilaria Meliconi, Rashika Venkataraman and the production team for their support and skills at turning the issue around so quickly; Razina Miah for assistance with data; Judith Sealey for helping locate photos and Anne Horsburgh for the original picture of Richard Klein; Kindi Al Jawabra for help with preparing Fig. 1; Bojana Živković and Razina Miah for assistance with generating Fig. 2,

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