Women in Antiquity: An Analysis of Gender and Publishing in a Global Archaeology Journal

Studies of archaeology publishing demonstrate a persistent imbalance in the ratio of male and female authors. We present an analysis of the world archaeology journal Antiquity using submissions and editorial decisions data (2015–2020). We identify a recurrent ratio of one female for every two male authors across measures including all listed authors, solo and first-named authors, and team authorship. Disaggregating author gender by country and region of corresponding author, however, reveals substantial variation, opening a new avenue for understanding of global trends in archaeology publishing. We also assess peer review and editorial decision-making in relation to author gender, finding no evidence of bias and, using the 2020 data, we look for any potential gendered impact of Covid-19, finding solo female authors may have been more affected than those working in teams. We contextualize the results in relation to initiatives to diversify authorship, including capacity-building programs for early career researchers. [ FROM AUTHOR]

Women in Antiquity: An Analysis of Gender and Publishing in a Global Archaeology Journal

Studies of archaeology publishing demonstrate a persistent imbalance in the ratio of male and female authors. We present an analysis of the world archaeology journal Antiquity using submissions and editorial decisions data (2015-2020). We identify a recurrent ratio of one female for every two male authors across measures including all listed authors, solo and first-named authors, and team authorship. Disaggregating author gender by country and region of corresponding author, however, reveals substantial variation, opening a new avenue for understanding of global trends in archaeology publishing. We also assess peer review and editorial decision-making in relation to author gender, finding no evidence of bias and, using the 2020 data, we look for any potential gendered impact of Covid-19, finding solo female authors may have been more affected than those working in teams. We contextualize the results in relation to initiatives to diversify authorship, including capacity-building programs for early career researchers.

Editorial

One day, hundreds of years in the future, archaeologists digging an early twenty-first-century rubbish dump will come across a sharp stratigraphic interface between a thick deposit of disposable paper cups and a layer of vinyl gloves and plastic aprons. [...]although ‘plague columns’ were once a common sight in European cities, today our collective memories concentrate on moments of national origins, greatness or sacrifice. [...]thinking is embedded in archaeology's ‘grand challenges’, a series of questions intended to prioritise archaeological research on the interaction of past human and natural systems, and to encourage other disciplines to make use of our insights.1 Of the 25 questions defined back in 2014, two assume particular resonance for our current predicament: ‘what factors drive health and well-being in prehistory and history’;and ‘can we characterise social collapse or decline in a way that is applicable across cultures, and are there any warning signals that collapse or severe decline is near?’. Recently, for example, a group of ecologists has advanced the concept of the ABCD conference, intended to address the same range of concerns that challenge archaeologists.2 (ABCD stands for All continents, Balanced gender, low Carbon transport and Diverse backgrounds.) The format mixes in-person and pre-recorded talks with live-streamed presentations to encourage a wider range of participants while reducing the environmental impact.

Editorial

[...]with many, if not all, countries lifting restrictions and international travel reopening, the 2022 in-person archaeology conference calendar looks particularly full, including EAA (Budapest), WAC (Prague), PanAf (Zanzibar), SEAA (Daegu, South Korea) and IPPA (Chiang Mai, Thailand). Sadly, the renovation of the Native North America Hall was not quite complete in time for the SAA meeting, though the curators were on hand in the gallery space to greet delegates and discuss the plans;the new displays subsequently opened at the end of May (Figure 1). The use of remotely sensed data for the detection and assessment of looting and other damage to archaeological sites has frequently featured in the pages of Antiquity.1 Much of this work has focused on the arid landscapes of the Middle East;Kirsty's research investigates the densely forested landscapes of Central America and makes the case for the wider application of lidar in this very different environment to help combat the persistent and widespread looting of sites across the region. Evaluating nearly 70 000 s drawn from 41 annual meetings, the authors identify very limited discussion of racism-related topics over the past 50 years, although they do note an uptick over the past decade. [...]the results suggest that most of the attention to racism documented in the s relates to the research of historical archaeologists working on the last few centuries, with much less discussion amongst specialists of other, earlier periods.

Editorial

Native American descendants, archaeologists, non-profit organisations and environmental activists have joined forces to call for landscape-scale studies before government agencies allow further leases. Perhaps the most obvious of these new materialities relates to personal protective equipment, or PPE—plastic face masks, gloves and aprons—as well as the vials and syringes now used to deliver life-saving vaccines. With billions of items of plastic waste generated since the start of the pandemic, the authors argue that archaeologists can bring a distinctive perspective to the problem—one that threatens to reverse recent trends away from single-use plastics—by working with other specialists to influence public policy (Figure 1). In Islands of abandonment: life in the post-human landscape, Cal Flyn travels to a series of places around the world, from Pripyat near Chernobyl to Paterson, New Jersey, which have been abandoned for a variety of reasons.5 Surprisingly, she finds these deserted towns and industrial complexes full of life;in the absence of humans, even the most toxic and polluted of built environments have been recolonised by animals and plant life.

Editorial

No such caveats, however, are deemed necessary around the report's starting premise: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land” (Figure 1).2 The following 4000 pages make for grim reading: “Global mean sea level has risen faster since 1900 than over any preceding century in at least the last 3000 years (high confidence)”;“Global surface temperature has increased faster since 1970 than in any other 50-year period over at least the last 2000 years (high confidence)”;“Temperatures during the most recent decade (2011–2020) exceed those of the most recent multi-century warm period, around 6500 years ago (medium confidence)”;and “In 2019, atmospheric CO2 concentrations were higher than at any time in at least 2 million years (high confidence)”. Climate change is already having deleterious effects on the archaeological record, and these will increase in number and severity, whether due to wildfires, melting ice, rising sea levels or falling water tables. In many cases, the response has been mobility—an option that is ever harder to contemplate in the contemporary world, although one that will surely be necessary.5 But we can look to other adaptations too, such as types of architecture and building materials that are better suited to mitigating the effects of storms, heat or flooding, and to types of farming that are less damaging to soils.6 A recent study of the Asian summer monsoon, for example, integrates palaeoenvironmental and archaeological data to examine human responses to changing temperatures and precipitation across the Holocene.7 Critically, it also considers future climate change and how we might make use of adaptive strategies of the past, such as crop diversification and the revival of landraces that preserve water and soil fertility. Some climate scientists, for example, are looking to the social sciences and humanities for ways to communicate with non-specialists.10 As professional narrative-builders, archaeologists are well positioned to explore how we use the power of ‘storytelling’ to reach wider audiences. [...]with expertise on the artefacts, sites and landscapes that are integral to peoples’ identities, we also have the means through which to engage and motivate action.

Editorial

[...]broad and humanistic ideals of citizenship are anathema to the financial accounting of individual academic institutions, driven as they have been by successive governments to engage in a zero-sum-gain competition for students. [...]because of the discipline's small size compared with English or history—which have also experienced declining student numbers—the situation is particularly dangerous, as there is a risk that the subject becomes unsustainable at any individual institution. [...]the deed is done, the precise impact on the archaeology jobs market remains unclear, not least as COVID-19 has clouded the picture;the anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that many EU citizens have left the UK over the past year, exacerbating the labour shortage.6 Most telling is the inclusion of archaeologists on the government's official list of skilled jobs with a shortage of workers available in the UK and hence eligible for recruitment from overseas (though still with significant restrictions).7 Categorising archaeology as “high-cost non-strategic” in order to cut training funds at the same time as adding archaeologists to the skilled worker shortage list might suggest a lack of joined-up government thinking. While large amounts of government funding go into this system through commercial archaeology, environmental and archaeological evaluation and mitigation are frequently portrayed as costly and bureaucratic brakes on the construction industry, and mechanisms have increasingly been found to bypass planning permission. A newly published report by the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, which has scrutinised the proposals with the help of expert witnesses, is highly critical of the government's plan and the lack of detail about the potential impact on protected areas and undesignated archaeological sites and landscapes.8 All of which brings us a long way from events in Sheffield.

Editorial

See PDF] Long COVID In the novel Cold earth a group of archaeologists on fieldwork in a remote part of Greenland find themselves isolated after a global pandemic severs communications with the wider world.1 At first, the lack of news allows the team to focus on their excavation of a Norse settlement. In the real world, the current pandemic may have caught a small number of archaeologists in isolated locations, but for most of us—as for the wider population—the experience of a global virus outbreak has been the exact opposite of that of the novel's protagonists: we have been socially and physically isolated at home with an excess of news flooding in from all around the world. The COVID decade: understanding the long-term societal impacts of COVID-19 identifies a series of psychological, social, cultural, economic and political consequences of the spread of the virus that will define the decade to come.2 Many of these issues are familiar from pre-pandemic times: mental health, loneliness and the need for better skills and training, social care and community cohesion. [...]the Continuing Bonds project uses archaeological case studies as the basis for workshops with end-of-life care professionals to explore contemporary attitudes to death and to facilitate discussion with patients and families around dying and bereavement.4 Meanwhile, a number of museums and heritage sites, such as the Beamish Living Museum of the North, located in northern England, have developed dementia-friendly programmes, using their collections to enable people living with the condition to visit with confidence and to improve physical and mental health.

Editorial

According to ethnohistorian Alice Duncan Kemp (an early twentieth-century archivist of the Mithaka), these were places where Aboriginal people asked for the influence of the spirits. In addition to the well-preserved remains of St Cuthbert was another skull, attributed to the Northumbrian king Oswald, and an assemblage of children's bones passed off, Raine claimed, by the monks as “relics of children slain by Herod”.2 He also found Cuthbert's original seventh-century wooden coffin, his gold-and-garnet pectoral cross and a wealth of other objects, many of which are today on show in the cathedral's ‘Open Treasure’ exhibition. In their investigation of the rediscovered cast in the Duckworth collection, Story and Bailey3 relate how Thurnam considered the skull to lack the expected characteristics of an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cranium, an observation at odds with both Bede's identity and Thurnam's association of Anglo-Saxon ancestry with superior intellect. [...]even if the bones interred in Durham Cathedral today are not those of the Venerable Bede, they have nonetheless been venerated as such for at least nine centuries.