Cite this as: Vince, A. 1997 Editorial, Internet Archaeology 3. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.3.7
Issue Three of Internet Archaeology is now complete. It contains several new features whilst continuing the wide scope of the first two issues.
We have taken the opportunity of the closure of the second issue of the journal to review our readership, since one of the most common questions we are asked is "who reads the journal?". This paper should make it clear to readers why we have been asking for details of their occupations and places of origin as part of the registration process. Internet Archaeology is funded as part of the eLib project which is primarily concerned with the higher education sector in the United Kingdom and we therefore need to know to what extent we are reaching this audience. Having said that, however, we are still very clear that Internet Archaeology exists to further the discipline of archaeology as a whole, regardless of nationality or professional status.
For the first time (but certainly not the last), we have a paper in a language other than English. Stéphane Pradine's paper describes and discusses the ceramic cultures (style zones) of parts of Senegal, and the distribution of funerary monuments in the same area ranging in date from the 4th to the 20th centuries. With the exception of an English summary the paper is published in French.
Issue Three also sees the first American author in Internet Archaeology, Chris Snyder. However, Dr Snyder has very bravely tackled an extremely contentious issue in the archaeology of the British Isles. This is the archaeological evidence for the people(s) who occupied Britain between the withdrawal of the Roman army in the early 5th century and the arrival of Germanic peoples (or, at least, people with a Germanic culture) at various points in time between the 5th and the 7th centuries. Even the terminology of this period can cause offence since "sub-Roman" implies some sort of decline from the preceding centuries and of people living under the shadow of the Roman occupation. Archaeologically, almost every statement about occupation at this period is questionable - and there is a vast academic industry involved in picking over the bones (and potsherds) of a very small number of excavations. Dr Snyder is to be congratulated on picking up this thorny topic, and we look forward to being able to publish annotations to his paper as people start to use the gazetteer and question the assumptions and conclusions inherent in the work. We will also give the author a change to answer his critics and look forward to seeing this paper evolve into a new type of publication, created across the Internet by the combined intellects of the academic community.
Issue Three sees the first of a series of collections of papers edited by Andrew "Bone" Jones and Rebecca Nicholson based on papers presented at a conference on fish remains held here in York. Although this first trawl could have been published on paper (however, as the editors say, this would have been ecologically unsound) future catches will include audiovisual material recorded during the conference which would otherwise probably never have seen the light of day. The Internet Archaeology editorial staff would like to thank Ehren Milner for his hard work preparing these papers for Internet publication.
Finally, we are happy to be able to announce the publication of a new section in which we review software and multimedia publications. Software authors and multimedia publishers are asked to submit material for review and should note that these reviews are published as soon as the reviews are received and can include full-size screen shots. Please note, however, that at present we are not including reviews of web homepages or other Internet resources of a transient nature.
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URL: http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue3/edit3.html
Last updated: Wed Sep 3 1997