Chris Dore, our current Society for American Archaeology (SAA) president, was Advances in Archaeological Practice’s first editor, and in 2022, on the journal’s tenth anniversary he reflected on the journal’s origins. Chris and his editorial team, the SAA board and staff established the journal’s mission, which included publishing innovations in approach, technique, method, technology, business models, collaboration, compliance, process, ethics, public engagement, stewardship, and training (Dore 2013). And, they created the structure of the journal that remains today – the born digital, quarterly journal, that publishes research and how-to articles, and began publishing theme issues in Volume 2. Then, Advances was self-published by the SAA on Metapress.

In the fall of 2015, we began our transition into the editorship that now we are transitioning away from, working on issues from 4(2) to 13(4). We are grateful that the SAA allowed us the extraordinary opportunity to work with the journal, and what we mean by “journal” is “the people.” Every article and every issue of Advances is the result of working together with authors, peer reviewers, our editorial board, the editors and staff at Cambridge University Press, and the SAA publications director.

The journal was still becoming established when we began and had (and has) a world of possibilities ahead. Advances is not the SAA flagship journal. There were no statistics to measure up to and its purpose was to serve a membership need. For us, it was a place to experiment. In our first days as editors we created a digital review editorship, first held by Sara Perry and now by Peter Cobb, and the reviews have ranged from product reviews of  heritage bots, Assassin’s Creed,  and Tik Tok to conceptual considerations of digitally informed practice like data literacy  and machine learning. In our last days as editors, we became the SAA’s first gold open access journal, thanks to CUP’s transformative read and publish program, and we formalized our commitment to open science with the implementation of the Associate Editor for Reproducibility– Ben Marwick – and systematic application of digital badges.

As authors offered us their creativity through articles, we tried to say ‘yes’ to their sense of practice and the need to improve it. We didn’t want to limit what practice might be: it is academic and applied, for the professional and the avocational, practiced by scientists and humanists, and resulting from work in international heritage frameworks that variously define the value of the past to the present. We’ve been fascinated by the steady submission of archaeogaming articles that seek to understand human behaviors in these contemporary environments that so many of us engage with.  Better practice needs to consider all these views.

We asked authors to write to “you” to try to create a sense of community, as authors provided each other with the resources born of their experience. In our time we published 385 papers, with the help of 1540 people in 40 countries who said ‘yes’ to serving as reviewers. Those on the receiving end of peer review might not, in the moment, feel the same appreciation we did, but we came to realize what a selfless commitment reviewers make to our practice every day, and we are grateful for the assistance of people who already had too much on their plate.

Our 21-person editorial advisory board – some of whom inadvertently found they’d said yes to nine years of service (our work was renewed in 3-year increments) – lived in nine time zones from Hawaii to the continental US and Caribbean, to Europe, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Australia. These people, a quiet list on the journal webpage, had our back at every moment. They expanded our view of practice beyond what was familiar to US-based audiences offering us their time, experience, evaluating papers and proposals, brainstorming with us, setting high standards for our journal, and connecting the journal to their students and colleagues, as authors, reviewers (and emergency reviewers when we got ghosted), advisors, and readers.

Together, we’ve guest edited 20 theme issues or special sections. Theme issues helped us show what was possible in Advances. In 2018 Meyer’s and her colleagues in Southeastern US published their work on The Context and Consequences of Sexual Harassment in Southeastern Archaeology and 2020 Carol Colaninno and her coauthors published Creating and Supporting a Harassment- and Assault-Free Field School. Carla Klehm, Kurt P. Eifling, Becca Peixotto anchored this new trend with an issue on Health and Wellness, Response and Readiness, a series of papers built on a survey of medical preparedness that focused on keeping individuals, students, staff, and field school mentally and physically safe. This issue was completely practical with papers by doctors of emergency medicine who worked with the outdoor wilderness community and marked a transition in our articles that was occurring from more methods-based practice to a recognition that the health of the profession is built on care for the people we work with.

Theme issue topics serve the entire life cycle of an archaeological project, from planning and collaboration, to approaches to discovery, interpretation, and management. Underrepresented in other mainstream journals, Advances has published, to date, seven theme issues devoted to topics of conservation, collections management (x2), data practices, and archival work, with issues about repatriation soon to come.

There is synergy in editing a journal like Advances. We had the chance to work with people we’d never otherwise get to know.  We liked to help authors hone their ideas, assisted by peer reviewers, and shape them for publication. We like connecting with the authors behind the papers when, maybe late for a deadline, they’d note a dissertation defense, a field season, a lecture abroad, a new litter of puppies being fostered in the garage, or maybe just a sense of shared ‘overwhelmedness’.

We have loved being part of this world of ideas and being able to support creativity with the belief that, each in our roles, we can keep our profession dynamic, relevant, respectful, pragmatic, and inspirational. We look forward to Allison and her team helping authors, repeat and new, steer their energy to elicit all that is the best in archaeology.