by Jon Lackman | 21 April 2006 | Ancient, Journals, Theory
In the latest issue of Antiquity, R. Alexander Bentley writes: “There is now a proliferation of new journals on almost every conceivable topic (e.g. Journal of Happiness Studies, Queueing Systems, Wear, World Pumps, with titles for archaeologists such as Anthropoetics, Archaeological Dialogues and Archaeoastronomy & Ethnoastronomy News), so that an author can publish almost any article by moving down the journal ranking far enough … As editorial control decreases, academic writing is free to become more and more subject to fashion, with authors copying each other in an effort to stay on top of the latest ideas … Through online journal citation databases, one can easily document the accelerating process with which terms or ideas catch on.” Bentley includes amusing graphs to back up his assertions.
Also in this issue, Ian Russell writes that archaeology must “engage with disciplines such as psychoanalysis to better understand the interaction between the individual and the archaeological object in modern society … [how we] consume archaeolgical objects as icons to fulfil modern psychological desires for identity.”
