sey075

Vampires:  I just had a journal insist that my co-authors and I tone down some of our wording in a paper. Jason Ur, Gary Feinman and I will publish a paper in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research taking contemporary geographers and others to task for promoting the VERY incorrect opinion of Jane Jacobs that cities preceded agriculture in prehistory. I blogged about this some time ago , and I thought it was a settled issue (duh!). But then Peter Taylor published a paper in that journal touting Jacobs's ideas again. So we fired off a critique, which we are now revising for publication. But we were told to remove the vampire metaphor. Here is what we said: We view the historical part of Jacobs’ “cities first” model as a vampire. It normally sleeps, out of public view, only to emerge periodically and wreak havoc among the unsuspecting. Then it quietly returns to obscurity, leaving people to wonder whether something so contrary to normal experience can really live o...

I've been digging out some buried reading matter, and only now got around to reading the September, 2012 issue of the SAA Archaeological Record. I found the very interesting paper, "What I Learned from my Experience as Editor of American Antiquity (2009-2012)" by Alison Rautman. Alison makes a number of useful points, and her paper is well worth reading (if you haven't already). Here I want to focus on the question of quality control The paper is divided into sections,with each subheader starting out, "What I learned about....." (writing, publication, reviewing, etc.). The first section is called "What I learned about academic writing and re-writing," and the first sentence is "I found that the single most common problem that authors have involves connecting theory and data." Alison notes that while there are a variety of theoretical perspectives and approaches, "one does have to provide clear, logical connections between theory, met...