Getting archaeological publication right remains a challenge
In late 2017 a workshop in Oxford looked at challenges for archaeological publication in a digital age. It was part of a series run by the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists ( cifa) linked with a Historic England-funded project looking at 21st-century challenges in archaeology, and was facilitated by Sir Barry Cunliffe, a past Council for British Archaeology president.
Back in 1982 Cunliffe wrote that “It is axiomatic that the results of all archaeological excavation, fieldwork, and other research must be made available for scholars to consult. Furthermore, to be of value the results must be made fully available within a short time after the completion of the work.” This appears in what became known as the “Cunliffe
Report”, an outcome of another workshop on archaeological publication, arising from a joint working party of the cba and the Department of the Environment.
This key principle, of full and rapid publication, has been embedded in the cifa Code of Conduct: this states that members have “responsibility for making available the results of archaeological work with reasonable dispatch.” However, there are concerns that for archaeological work undertaken in advance of development, enough resources are not always allocated to writing up fieldwork – with an appropriate level of post-excavation analysis and the deposition of a suitably ordered archive in a relevant local repository.
So when we publish the results of fieldwork, what are we trying to achieve? In the 2017 workshop, Barry Cunliffe argued that we are digging to retrieve data and to construct historical narratives – our prime responsibility is to make all the data available and accessible. “Primary publication” constitutes archives, data, analytical reports and narrative summaries. Formal monographs and academic articles are “secondary publications”, for sites where there is significant public interest. But “Public benefit is always trumped by professional responsibility.”
This is in line with recommendations of the cba’s Publication User Needs Survey in 2003 ( puns, see end note), which consulted audiences for archaeological fieldwork reports across the uk and Ireland. Proposals included:
• Clarify vocabulary
• Let significance and scale of results govern form and scale of publication
• Use multiple forms of dissemination as appropriate
• Find better means for tracking work in progress and providing summaries of recent work
• Refocus funding and editorial policy to encourage more synthetic publications, integrating description and interpretation, including evidence for structures and artefacts, with more attention to narrative style
• Similarly encourage authors to consider electronic publication instead of or with print
• Publish detailed structural and specialist reports online
• Make archives available online
• Pay systematic attention to training editors, and consider paying them more
• Increase financial support for local, regional and national society journals
• Initiate a fundamental review of commercial assumptions
• National agencies should review their responsibilities for addressing the consequences of commercially driven archaeology
• Funding bodies and peerreview panels should acknowledge the significance of publication to the career development of scholars, and vice versa
• National agencies should develop management frameworks and funding structures to facilitate the production of regional, period and thematic works of narrative synthesis.
In 2017 it was agreed that very little progress had been made on these points. This was disappointing, especially as technology to help us disseminate the data and archaeological narratives had improved considerably in the previous 14 years.
The cifa 21st-century challenges project, which concluded earlier this year, recommended that the puns survey should be rerun, following a review of the present outcomes. The cba plans to take this forward later in 2019, and there will be an opportunity for colleagues across the discipline to take part.
Inevitably the landscape is changing, as much driven by technology as by the requirements of the archaeological process, and it is probably still true to say that “At the time of writing, we are in the midst of a debate on the nature of archaeological publication” – as Philip Barker wrote in his famous book on the techniques of archaeological excavation in 1982!
In the academic world barriers to knowledge remain a major issue for archaeology, particularly for people outside academia and without access to specialist libraries and online repositories. However, this is changing as pressure towards open access for publicly funded research is affecting where archaeological fieldwork can be published.
One major success has been the oasis project (Online AccesS to the Index of archaeological investigationS) run by the Archaeology
Data Service – soon to be upgraded through the herald project. This brings together thousands of “grey literature” reports of archaeological fieldwork in the new ads library (now searchable), along with bibliographic data on a wide range of publications going back several hundred years from the cba’s previous British & Irish Archaeological Bibliography.
Increasingly, as more material is published on open access, it will be possible to move from an entry i in a library c catalogue to the full online publication, providing all researchers with instant access to a wide range of research. However, to facilitate cross searching and comparative analysis we need better standards and guidance, for example in the use of consistent terminology for analysis and reports.
Exemplars are starting to appear which include a printed synthesis, and a digital detailed report underpinned by a digital archive of the data – for example the heHeyybridge Heybridge late IronAge Iron Age and Roman settlement site in Essex. However these are still exceptional, and archaeologists need to move further so that technological solutions for disseminating the results of archaeological fieldwork, and the narratives that derive from such work, become the norm. Only then will archaeological publications reach the widest possible range of audiences.
The cba’s Publication User Needs Survey is described in Internet Archaeology (2003) at https://doi.org/ 10.11141/ia.14.4. The Heybridge Internet Archaeology monograph is at https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.40.1 (2015). oasis is at https://oasis.ac.uk; ads at https://archaeologydataservice. ac.uk/library. Mike Heyworth is director of the Council for British Archaeology