Aims and Scope
American Antiquity is a peer-reviewed, quarterly journal and is considered the premier journal of North American archaeology, devoted to the archaeology of the New World, method and theory pertinent to the study of New World archaeology, and closely related subjects.
Types of Papers Accepted
Authors submit manuscripts to the editor for consideration as ARTICLES, REPORTS, COMMENTS, or FORUM essays.
The categorization of a manuscript as an ARTICLE or a REPORT is left to the editors’ discretion. ARTICLES are usually longer than REPORTS and address topics of major importance in a way that reaches out to a broad audience of professional archaeologists and the informed public. REPORTS, on the other hand, may be more technical, address a specific topic, and be of primary interest to relatively fewer readers. Authors are encouraged to contact the editor(s) of the journal to which they plan to submit if they are unsure about the status of their work as an ARTICLE or REPORT. Moreover, the editors reserve the right to determine this status.
COMMENTS correct major errors of fact or provide new information directly relevant to a paper published previously in either AAQ or LAQ; differences of interpretation or opinion may accompany such demonstrations but may not be the primary motivating factor for a COMMENT. Those whose work is being commented on are given the opportunity to reply to the specific points raised in the COMMENT. The COMMENT and accompanying reply are usually published together, at which time the exchange ends. Authors of COMMENTS in excess of ~1,000 words should contact the editor of the respective journal before submitting. COMMENTS may be subject to peer review at the discretion of the editors.
A FORUM contribution is an essay of opinion on current issues or topics of immediate significance to a broad audience. Exclusive to AAQ, FORUM essays are occasionally solicited by the editor. Unsolicited essays are welcome but authors are encouraged to contact the editor before submitting. Like ARTICLES, REPORTS, and COMMENTS, submissions for the FORUM category, whether solicited or not, are subject to peer review and the article word limit.
BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS, REVIEWS, and BOOK NOTES are solicited by the journal’s Book Review Editor; volunteered manuscripts for this section are rarely accepted. For further information, contributors should contact the book review editor listed in the most recent issue of the journal.
Article Length
AAQ has a fixed limit of 10,000 words for ARTICLES and 3,000 words for REPORTS.
Tables & Artwork
Tabular presentation of data should be used sparingly. Data in a very short table, for example, can often be included in the text with no loss of clarity. Large numbers of individual, similar facts, however, are best presented in a table. Data tables should be submitted in .xls, .doc, or similar commonly used formats. They may not be submitted as image files. Consult Chapter 3 of the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition, for detailed information on planning and constructing tables; also see recent issues of the journals. Authors should submit each table as a separate file. For more information, please check the style guide.
Information on submitting artwork can be found here.
Seeking permissions for copyrighted material
Authors can find guidance on seeking permission for copyrighted material here.
Competing Interest Statement
Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual, or personal relationships or situations. If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.
• Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing Interests: Author A is employed at organization B. Author C owns shares in organization D, is on the board of organization E and is a member of organization F. Author G has received grants from organization H.”
• If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing Interests: The author(s) declare none.”
Acknowledgements
The Acknowledgments section of a manuscript is inserted at the end of the text, using a tertiary heading Acknowledgments. placed flush left and immediately preceding the Data Availability Statement. Support for completion of a project and manuscript should be cited: financial, institutional, intellectual, and technical (e.g., drafting of figures, translation of abstract), but this section must be brief. Verbose acknowledgments will be edited prior to publication. Phrases of the sort “all errors are the sole responsibility of the author” should be omitted. If you would like to thank your editors, please do that by e-mail, not in your published acknowledgments. Not all authors thank the editors, and we do not want to create any perception of favoritism.
The Acknowledgments section must contain a statement regarding the permits needed for the work described. This should include the permit number(s), year(s), and the name of the permitting agency or agencies. If no permit was required, this should be noted.
Data Availability Statement
The Data Availability Statement is placed after the Acknowledgments, using a tertiary heading—Data Availability Statement.—placed flush left. It is intended to communicate to readers where the data are available or where the objects from which the data were derived can be obtained. Manuscripts that do not use original data should use this language: “No original data were used.”
SAA journals support practices that increase data access and research transparency. Authors are strongly encouraged to make their data available through resources such as institutional repositories, digital archives with access options, or other sites that support both data preservation and allow access as appropriate. If data are legally restricted, authors should share that information in this statement. Supplemental material is not an acceptable place to provide raw data related to publication, as this is not archived with the body of the journal article.
Supplemental Materials
The Supplemental Materials list is placed after the Data Availability Statement, using a tertiary
heading—Supplemental Materials.—placed flush left. It begins with the following statement: “For supplemental material accompanying this article, visit www.journals.cambridge.org/[Journal].” The link will be replaced by your article’s DOI during the production process. See Section 3.13 of the Style Guide for more information on supplemental materials.
English language editing services
Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.
In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services – including language editing – delivered in partnership with American Journal Experts. You can find out more on our Language Services page.
Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.
Policy on prior publication
When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
Author affiliations
Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.
For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.
Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools
We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.
In particular, any use of an AI tool:
- to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s)
- to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
- to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript
- must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission
Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.