Volume 1, Issue 1

Antiquity's centenary is still a couple of years hence. With this issue, however, the journal reaches the milestone of 400 issues. How Antiquity: A Quarterly Review of World Archaeology has reached this number in fewer than 100 years is explained by the change, in 2015, from four to six issues per annum. No doubt the 100th anniversary will be an occasion for some sustained reflection. Here, more modestly, we look back to the first issue of Antiquity and to a selection of other content published over the subsequent 98 years. To counterbalance such indulgence, the next editorial will look resolutely forward and introduce initiatives that, we trust, will usefully serve Antiquity's authors and readers for the future.

O.G.S. Crawford's first editorial set out his much-cited mission statement: to publish articles by “specialists who will contribute popular but authoritative accounts […] Each article will be but a tiny facet of the whole; for our field is the Earth, our range in time a million years or so, our subject the human race” (Figure 1).Footnote ¹ In the context of archaeological publishing in the 1920s, this was a statement of bold scope and ambition. The fact that Antiquity so quickly became indispensable attests both to the demand for global breadth and the absence of any rival for several decades. And Crawford's vision has endured as the journal's guiding philosophy, even if content now reaches far beyond even his expansive terms of reference: recent articles, for example, extend beyond the Earth to consider the International Space Station, push back to at least 2.6mya and embrace post-humanism.Footnote ² Consequently (and because archaeologists are prone to ancestor worship), it is easy to cast Crawford as a man ahead of his time. But he was also a man of his time. That first editorial, like the dozens that followed, is strongly shaped by a modernist narrative of progress (notwithstanding his antipathy to cars and typewriters, if not aeroplanes) and of civilisation. The geographical range of the content in that first issue is also telling. Beyond the core focus on British archaeology among the research articles, Crawford's editorial cited work in the Indus Valley, Egypt, China, West and southern Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. Yet, the selection of places—and sometimes their names, including British Honduras and Rhodesia—is a reminder that Antiquity was born in a time of high empire. Indeed, in 1927 the British Empire was at its maximum extent and the discipline of archaeology was integral to that and other European colonial projects. However avowedly anti-nationalist in his beliefs, could Crawford's ‘world archaeology’ have been anything other than colonial in the context of his times?Footnote ³

Certainly, some of the ideas discussed, and the language used to express them, would not make it into print in a scholarly journal today. That first editorial, for example, discusses the idea that “primitive communities” make “good archaeologists” because of their familiarity with the tools and objects recovered from the archaeological record. The articulation of the idea is jarring to the modern audience. Yet, Crawford's commitment to “not confine ourselves too rigidly within the conventional limits of archaeology” and to embrace diverse forms of information—including what we would now call traditional knowledge—chimes with recent initiatives, such as the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (https://www.emkp.org), that seek to document and learn from craft practices that are threatened by the march of progress. Crawford's wide-ranging approach to the past is also reflected in the choice of books selected for review in that first issue, including scholarly syntheses and popular accounts. Again, to contemporary eyes there are some alarming choices (some positively received), including Crawford on H.J. Fleure's Presidential address on ‘The regional balance of racial evolution’ and Fleure's own review of R.N. Bradley's Racial origins of English character. Such language and ideas have rightly been discarded by subsequent generations. The development of ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis, however, has stimulated debate that must contend with the legacy of such early twentieth-century thinking (more on aDNA later).

These issues are raised here to acknowledge that a rounded perspective of the journal's early years cannot be a matter of unalloyed hagiography. Antiquity's longevity means that its record spans seismic shifts in political and cultural contexts: from world wars, decolonisation, economic recessions, the rise of nuclear and digital technologies, and a global pandemic to name just a few. As a mirror to such rapidly changing times, we should expect not only the theories and methods deployed by the journal's contributors (and editors) to have shifted—from culture history to new materialism and from aerial photography to lidar—but also their objectives, language and wider worldviews. Future retrospectives will rightly find their own points of critique of current content.

Figure 1.

Antiquity cover, volume 1, issue 1.

Following the editorial, the first issue proceeded with an article by none other than Crawford, a piece that might be construed as somewhat quirky on the veracity of a traditional story that there once existed, between the tip of Cornwall and the Scilly Isles, a prosperous land called Lyonesse that was subsequently submerged by the sea. Combining aerial photography and ground survey to identify built structures, Crawford concluded that the legend contains “an echo of times past, however faint”.Footnote ⁴ Bearing in mind Antiquity's mission, stated just pages earlier, to tackle pseudoarchaeology, his willingness to consider and take such legends seriously is striking—as is the longevity of the article's thesis. In recent years, stories of inundated lands preserved in oral cultures have received renewed attention. Could these legends really contain memories of postglacial sea-level rise transmitted over hundreds of generations? One recent study of coastal sites in Australia suggests traditional stories of submerged lands might reach back five to ten thousand years.Footnote ⁵ Such approaches form part of a wider re-evaluation of Indigenous knowledge and worldviews, and their potential to inform a better understanding of the past.Footnote ⁶

As well as Crawford's article on Lyonesse, other contributions in that first issue addressed, Stonehenge as an astronomical instrument, the formation of lynchets and hollow ways, Maori hillforts and the Roman frontier in Britain. V.G. Childe's article on ‘The Danube thoroughfare and the beginnings of civilisation in Europe’ was a particular scoop, appearing as it did at the height of his scholarly output, between the publication of The dawn of European civilization (1925) and The Danube in history (1929). So too was the article on prehistoric timber circles by M.E. Cunnington, then in the midst of her excavations at Woodhenge—and the lone female archaeologist featured in the pages of that first issue.

A short century of Antiquity

Much more could be said about the contents of that first issue, but what of the subsequent 100th, 200th and 300th issues? The 100th issue (December 1951) was the occasion for a reflection by Jacquetta Hawkes on ‘A quarter century of Antiquity’. Rarely, she observed, can a subject area have been “so strongly marked by a single personality”—that of Crawford. It was not unalloyed praise, however. Crawford's “confident 19th-century rationalism” and his criticism of others' shortcomings was gently mocked: “It is so infuriating that men are not perfectly rational”!Footnote ⁷ As well as Crawford, there was also the cast of early-twentieth-century figures he had assembled. “One can watch”, Hawkes noted, “for the first appearance of the names of young men who are now among the leaders of the subject: Richmond, [Christopher] Hawkes, Clark and Piggott make their entrances. Meanwhile those already firmly established in 1927 can be kept in view as they gallop towards their knighthoods, Sir Leonard Woolley and Sir Cyril Fox being among the first home” (p.171). Perhaps proving that nostalgia never goes out of fashion, however, Hawkes also reflected that archaeology generally, and therefore Antiquity as its mirror, had experienced “a decline since the high old times of the late twenties and thirties” (p.173) and the great excavations at Mohenjo-daro, Knossos, Kish, Ur and Skara Brae to name but a few. Certainly “wartime strains” (p.173) had had their effects on Antiquity, as evidenced by the slim 1951 volume running to just 224 pages compared with the bumper 1927 volume of 522 pages.

Similar strains were still apparent at the time of the 200th issue in 1976. In fact, this was a rare double issue (199 September/200 December), the result, Glyn Daniel explained in his editorial, of inflationary pressures (indeed, the journal published only three times a year from then until 1987). Financial woes aside, that issue, like the first, featured contributions by grandees such as Stuart Piggott, Brian Hope-Taylor and Gordon Willey and even the ‘young man’ (in Hawkes's term) Colin Renfrew was already onto his fifth Antiquity article. Much like the first issue, the 200th also included only a single article by a female author—Beatrice de Cardi on Ras al Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates. In addition, there were two articles honouring the ancestors: Crawford and Gertrude Bell. Yet, if some things hadn't changed, other contributions, on radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dating for example signalled an eye to the future. The tension between old and new is poignantly captured in the editorial, which records the passing, within the space of one month, of David Clarke and Sir Mortimer Wheeler “the most brilliant of our younger archaeologists, and the greatest of the older ones”.Footnote ⁸ By contrast, while much had changed by the time of the 300th issue in June 2004 (colour printing, online publication, etc.), the occasion did not even merit editorial mention, presumably on account of the special section that had recently marked the 75th anniversary in 2002. Even a journal that is as keenly aware of its own legacy as Antiquity can only mark so many milestones.

Distributions and demographics

In that 75th anniversary issue, a contribution by former editor Christopher Chippindale examined the shifting geographical focus of Antiquity articles and speculated on the content likely to be found in Antiquity 25 years hence.Footnote ⁹ Almost a quarter of a century later, we can now observe what was actually published—illustrating why the past is not always a perfect guide to the future. Noticeable divergences from Chippindale's predictions are a steep decline in the percentage of articles on Britain and Ireland with a concomitant increase in coverage of Asia and the Americas. Such shifts are due in no small part to Chippindale's own efforts, and those of his editorial successors: Caroline Malone and Simon Stoddart, Martin Carver, and Chris Scarre. Today, Antiquity is more global in its coverage than ever before. Yet, the geographical distribution of the articles—and of its contributors—is still far from evenly spread around the world or fully representative of the discipline. Indeed, the regional distribution of content published since 2018 (under the present editor), though encompassing every continent including Antarctica, is still skewed: large parts of West and Central Africa, South America and, perhaps unexpectedly Australia, are underrepresented (Figure 2). In fact, the overall distribution (if not the relative proportions of articles) still broadly resembles that documented by Chippindale in 2002. It also mirrors the distribution of research published in several other major archaeology journals—a topic to which we will return in the October editorial.

Figure 2.

The geographical distribution of Antiquity research and Project Gallery articles, plus other editorial content, 2018–2023 (image by R. Witcher).

Perhaps as important as where archaeological research is happening, is the related question of who is doing the work and writing about it. For example, despite the contributions of Cunnington, Hawkes, de Cardi and others, male authors have historically outnumbered female authors in the pages of Antiquity. It is a situation common to nearly every archaeology (and indeed every scholarly) journal and the question of author demographics, especially gender, has become a topic of significant interest.Footnote ¹⁰ Reflecting this concern, we recently undertook work to evaluate the proportions of manuscript submissions by female and male authors between 2015 and 2022. Interested readers can follow up the details (and the important caveats) elsewhere.Footnote ¹¹ Here, by way of illustration, we compare the percentages of male and female authors in the first and current issues, with some select recent volumes (each of 4–6 issues) for context (Figure 3). The results, shown as percentages of all listed authors and of first-named authors, trend firmly in the right direction, and in this issue there is parity in the numbers of female and male first-authored articles. But there is no room for complacency; it will be important to sustain these sorts of figures long term, not just across a few issues. Again, we will have more to say on developments in this area in the October editorial.

Figure 3.

Percentages of female and male authors listed on Antiquity research articles in the first and most recent issues, and in volumes from 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2020; left: all authors; right: first authors only (image by R. Witcher).

Most-cited articles

With several thousand articles spanning all periods and regions of the world, the Antiquity archive is a rich resource. But without systematic bibliometrical analysis it can be hard to see the bigger trends. Pending such work, one way to assess broader patterns is consideration of some key articles, such as those listed on our publisher's website as the most cited (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/most-cited). The current top two are: ‘A calibration curve for radiocarbon dates’ published in 1975Footnote ¹² and, from 1995, ‘Beyond lifetime averages: tracing life histories through isotopic analysis of different calcified tissues from archaeological human skeletons’.Footnote ¹³ In the former, R.M. Clark presented a new and improved radiocarbon calibration curve, contributing to a fast-moving and technical debate around how best to model radiocarbon dates.Footnote ¹⁴ In the latter, Judith Sealy and colleagues introduced the principle that different skeletal elements preserve evidence for diet and mobility at different life stages—a simple discovery that, along with aDNA, has opened the door for the realisation of richer biographies of past people.

Many of the other most-cited articles listed on our website are also of a scientific persuasion. It is well known, however, that citation indices such as Web of Science and Scopus that are used to generate these lists are less effective at capturing references in the humanities and social science literature.Footnote ¹⁵ In contrast, Google Scholar draws on a wider range of publications to identify more citations. For example, R.M. Clark's calibration curve article has 240 citations listed in the Crossref database and 534 in Google Scholar—more than double the number. Citations of David Clarke's 1973 article, ‘The loss of innocence’, jump from 222 in Crossref to 922 in Google Scholar—four times as many. If based on Google Scholar results, therefore, ‘The loss of innocence’ would easily leapfrog to the top of Antiquity's most-cited list.

One reason the ‘The loss of innocence’ may have racked up so many references is that is has maintained currency. Unlike some more scientific contributions, inevitably overtaken by technical developments, conceptual contributions such as David Clarke's manifesto may continue to speak to new generations. This is illustrated by the fact that, in Google Scholar, R.M. Clark's radiocarbon article has attracted 24 new citations since 2018, but David Clarke's ‘The loss of innocence’ has racked up more than 10 times that figure. The diversity of archaeological literature that positively cites the latter article is also striking: compare, for example, the ‘macroarchaeology’ of Charles PerreaultFootnote ¹⁶ and Kristian Kristiansen's third science revolutionFootnote ¹⁷ with the antiracist archaeology of Ayana Omilade Flewellen and colleaguesFootnote ¹⁸ and the argument by Tim Flohr Sørensen and colleagues in support of the discipline's “mandate for speculation”.Footnote ¹⁹

All of which is to say, however impartial and skewed the view, Antiquity is a unique resource for understanding the evolution of archaeology as a discipline—whether explored via specific finds and debates, from ‘sexy handaxe’ theory to the king in a car park,Footnote ²⁰ or using wider bibliometrical analysis. The latter, in particular, offers the opportunity for tracking theoretical and methodological developments, shifting chronological and geographical foci, and the waxing and waning of interest in topics from warfare, inequality and migration to technology, social identities and climate change. It's all in the pages of the first 400 issues. But enough retrospection, what of the future and the next 400 issues? The October editorial will look ahead to some initiatives we have put in place to help Antiquity as it looks forward to its next century.

In this issue: aDNA

Research articles in this issue span from the late Pleistocene through to twentieth-century archaeology and present-day heritage protection issues. Geographically, they range from East and Southeast Asia through Central Asia and the Middle East, onwards through North Africa and Europe and across to North and South America—very much in line with the distribution in Figure 2. No fewer than three articles make use of aDNA analysis, to illuminate the personal lives of individuals. Karin Bruwelheide and colleagues present insights from a combination of hi-tech science and good old-fashioned archival detective work. Their article explores the genomic identity of two individuals—Sir Ferdinando Wenman and Captain William West—buried in the early seventeenth-century church at colonial Jamestown. In pursuit of the answer to a different research question, the authors identified an unexpected genetic link between the two men. Standard genealogical research produced no explanation; instead, the answer lay with court documents from legal proceedings following West's death. The men's shared mitochondrial haplogroup was the result of a case of illegitimacy. This discovery leads the authors to a wider consideration of social mores among high-status families of early modern Britain and its colonies.

Meanwhile, Jakob Sedig and colleagues focus on Paquimé (or Casas Grande), in Chihuahua, Mexico, using aDNA to identify a different kind of consanguinity. The site, dating to AD 1200–1450, lies geographically and culturally between Mesoamerican groups to the south and Ancestral Puebloans to the north. Here, the authors examine the burial of a child, aged around two to five years, found wrapped around the centre post of a room in the so-called ‘House of the Well’, a multi-storey structure stuffed with imported objects including seashells and copper ore, polychrome pottery and macaws. Ancient DNA analysis reveals evidence for the close relatedness of the child's parents, who were probably second-degree relatives such as half-siblings or uncle/niece. Such consanguinity is attested elsewhere in the world, for example ancient Egypt, but is unprecedented to this degree of closeness elsewhere in the Americas. Combined with isotope evidence indicating a local origin, and the unique nature of the burial, the authors argue that this child was born of a close-kin union intended to consolidate an elite lineage as part of competition to establish power at Paquimé.

Going back further in time, our third aDNA article takes us along the Camino de Santiago to Galicia. There, in 1955, a tomb, inscribed with the name of Teodomiro and containing the skeleton of an older man, was discovered beneath the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. This find was eagerly accepted as that of the bishop who had discovered the tomb of St James in the early ninth century AD following a divine revelation. Subsequent work, however, suggested that the individual was female and therefore unlikely to have been the bishop. Recent renovation work has provided the opportunity to reopen the tomb and make new osteological observations, as well as to make use of previously unavailable techniques including radiocarbon dating and multi-isotope and aDNA analyses. In their article, Patxi Perez-Ramallo and colleagues present the results, arguing that the new data lend renewed support for the identification of the individual as bishop Teodomiro. More than simply confirming his identity, however, the results also shed new light on his life, including evidence for significant north African ancestry.

In this issue: old debates and new data

Several articles in this issue link back to places or topics previously explored in these pages. Research on the colonisation of the Pacific has regularly featured in Antiquity;Footnote ²¹ in this issue, Dylan Gaffney and colleagues present the earliest evidence, from some 50 000 years ago, for the arrival of Homo sapiens in the Pacific. Focusing on the Raja Ampat Islands, the authors argue for the importance of rainforests, not just maritime environments, in the success of human expansion across this region. Another article returns us to a long-running debate about the interpretation of infant cremations from the tophet, or sanctuary/cemetery complex, at Carthage.Footnote ²² Jessica Cerezo-Román and colleagues present new findings from the excavation of the tophet at the Neo-Punic site of Zita in Tunisia. Moving beyond the question of sacrifice (no evidence of violent death is identified though this does not exclude the possibility), the authors adopt a life-course approach to reconstruct the brief lives, health and post-mortem treatment of 12 infants and children. In the context of the early Roman empire, the authors draw a contrast between the children's poor diet and health with Zita's productive hinterland—the effects of the extraction of agricultural surpluses to supply imperial Rome was written into the bones of this province's youngest inhabitants.

Some 2000km east from Zita, in Egypt's Fayum region, another article closes an arc that extends back to the first volume of Antiquity. Early issues included regular news about ‘Forthcoming excavations’, providing a valuable if selective record of the major field projects underway at the time. The December 1927 issue includes news about the forthcoming 1928 season at the Greco-Roman site of Karanis in the Fayum.Footnote ²³ The site was excavated using an innovative recording system and phased using ceramic finds, becoming one of the best-known sites of the ancient Mediterranean. But, a century later, Laura Motta and colleagues ask, how reliable is the chronology established for the site? Here, they combine a re-evaluation of the excavation archive with radiocarbon dating of archaeobotanical finds retained in museum collections to create the first absolute chronology for Karanis. Rather than declining from as early as the third century AD and being largely abandoned by the fifth century, the new dates indicate that activity continued well into the sixth and seventh centuries. Such redating relocates debate about the demise of the site from a period characterised by environmental deterioration, including repeated failure of the Nile floods, to a period of political and military instability during late antiquity.

Among the other content featured in this issue, two articles use compositional analyses to identify the provenance of beads and the social and economic networks through which they passed: Jelmer Eerkens and colleagues examine Neolithic and Bronze Age shell beads from Ban Non Wat in Thailand, and Heather Walder and Alicia Hawkins track the use of European glass beads by Indigenous communities in eastern North America, identifying down-the-line exchange and population movement into the Western Great Lakes region prior to the arrival of colonial settlers. We also feature an exploration of intestinal parasites at medieval Leiden (Sophie Rabinow et al.) and an investigation of a unique thirteenth-century AD shipwreck off the Dorset coast (Tom Cousins). To explore these and all the other research and Project Gallery articles plus book and exhibition reviews featured in this issue, head online to our website—new look, new features, same old URL: www.antiquity.ac.uk.

In signing off, we invite you to come along to the Antiquity exhibition stand at this year's EAA meeting in Rome on 28–31 August. The 2024 conference motto is “Persisting with change”, selected to acknowledge the endurance, continuity and renewal of the past and its study.Footnote ²⁴ It might also serve as a good motto for Antiquity. But before Rome, I head off to explore the archaeology of Malta guided by a recommendation from bon viveur Glyn Daniel. His March 1978 editorial recounts a recent trip to the Mediterranean and a picnic of “cheese-stuffed burreks accompanied by delicious Gozitan wines” consumed at one of Malta's famed megalithic sites.Footnote ²⁵ I feel it incumbent to recreate this scene; I can think of no better setting to toast Antiquity's next 400 issues!