Our new publication in JAMT: over half a million pot sherds from Jerash and simulation

Really delighted to announce that our latest paper was recently published open access online in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. It’s the result of years of collaborating between excavators, ceramics specialists and simulation experts. We analysed over half a million ceramics sherds from Jerash (ancient Gerasa, in Jordan), and identified that over 99% of the stuff was locally produced. What really excited me in this collaboration was the discrepancy between this proportion and the tendency for classical archaeologists (including myself) to always focus on imports.

Read the open access paper here.

The proportion of locally produced, regional and imported pottery for (left: ‘total’) all excavated ceramics (n = 625,063; excludes 133,584 topsoil entries), (middle) three securely dated trenches closed by the earthquake event of AD 749 (K n = 10 006; P n = 2184; V n = 10 614) and (right) three trenches consisting of ancient olive oil press installations filled in with ceramics (B n = 58 751; J n = 144 390; N n = 71 555)

Caption feature image: The Jerash Northwest Quarter excavations with trench letters (© Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project)

Why are there so many locally produced ceramics in Jerash, and so few regional and imported ones? This new publication quantitatively analyses the more than half a million sherds that were recorded by the Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project, and discusses different answers to this question. I applies innovative simulation techniques to evaluate whether personal preference for local Jerash products might have played a role. The result? The authors show that three ways of conceptualising preference for the local product might explain the ceramic data pattern, but other theories of preference are less good explanations.

Abstract

The Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project revealed a robust and striking pattern of the extreme dominance (>99%) of locally produced ceramics over six centuries and across different depositional contexts (in total over half a million pottery sherds). The archaeology of Jerash points towards an exceptional degree of self-sufficiency in craft products: why? The project team implemented a full quantification approach during excavation, manually and digitally recording and counting all pottery and other classes of artefacts. This enabled a full analysis of trends in production and use of ceramics throughout the archaeologically documented history of Jerash and revealed the unexpected pattern of the extreme dominance of local pottery. Archaeologists formulated a set of hypotheses to explain this pattern, and we developed an agent-based model of simple customer preference driving product distribution to evaluate several explanatory factors and their potential interactions. Our simulation results reveal that preference for locally produced ceramics at Jerash might be a plausible theory, but only if its intrinsic value was considered rather high in comparison to other goods, or if it was preferred by a majority of the population, and there was a tendency to follow this majority preference (or a combination of these factors). Here, we present a complete research pipeline of a full quantification of ceramics, analysis and modelling applicable at any archaeological site. We argue that transparent methods are necessary at all stages of an archaeological project: not only for data collection, management and analysis but also in theory development and testing. By focusing on a common archaeological material and by leveraging a range of widely available computational tools, we are able to better understand local and intra-regional distribution patterns of craft products in Jerash and in the ancient eastern Mediterranean.

Results of different simulation experimental setups. Each boxplot represents how close the simulated proportions of local, regional and imported ceramics are to the archaeologically observed ceramics (100 repetitions; 500 time steps; 100 agents)

The Connected Past special issue of Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory out now!

I am super massively chuffed to announce that The Connected Past special issue of the Journal of Archaeological Method and theory is out now. It aims to provide examples of the critical and innovative use of network science in archaeology in order to inspire its more widespread use. What’s even better, the editorial is open access! And it’s accompanied by a glossary of network science techniques and concepts that we hope will prove to be a useful resource for archaeologists interested in network concepts.

My fellow editors Anna Collar, Fiona Coward, Barbara Mills and I are extremely grateful to all the authors of this special issue for their great contributions. You can read in the editorial the details of why we think these contributions are great. We would also like to thank the editors of Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory for offering us great support throughout the process, and to Springer for agreeing to make the editorial open access.

Original papers in this issue (Gotta read ’em all!):

Networks in Archaeology: Phenomena, Abstraction, Representation
by the editors Anna Collar, Fiona Coward, Tom Brughmans, and Barbara J. Mills

Are Social Networks Survival Networks? An Example from the Late Pre-Hispanic US Southwest
by Lewis Borck, Barbara J. Mills, Matthew A. Peeples, and Jeffery J. Clark

Understanding Inter-settlement Visibility in Iron Age and Roman Southern Spain with Exponential Random Graph Models for Visibility Networks
by Tom Brughmans, Simon Keay, and Graeme Earl

Inferring Ancestral Pueblo Social Networks from Simulation in the Central Mesa Verde
by Stefani A. Crabtree

Network Analysis of Archaeological Data from Hunter-Gatherers: Methodological Problems and Potential Solutions
by Erik Gjesfjeld

Procurement and Distribution of Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican Obsidian 900 BC–AD 1520: a Social Network Analysis
by Mark Golitko, and Gary M. Feinman

The Equifinality of Archaeological Networks: an Agent-Based Exploratory Lab Approach
by Shawn Graham, and Scott Weingart

Remotely Local: Ego-networks of Late Pre-colonial (AD 1000–1450) Saba, North-eastern Caribbean
by Angus A. A. Mol, Menno L. P. Hoogland, and Corinne L. Hofman

The Diffusion of Fired Bricks in Hellenistic Europe: A Similarity Network Analysis
by Per Östborn, and Henrik Gerding

I got a top cited article! What does that mean?!?

Yesterday the Research Excellence Framework results were published, and it was therefore a nice coincidence to be notified by Springer yesterday that my paper is one of the top cited papers in Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory of 2013/2014. You can see it on this picture:

I am really happy and grateful about this. However, it did make me wonder what it means in numbers to have a top cited article. The answer is rather sobering: not much! In this blog post I will have a little look around citation land, and share some take-home messages about citation and impact in archaeology with you. Read on until the end, and you might find a call for revolution in the academic publishing world! 🙂

The source mentioned is ISI/Thomson Reuters database, and luckily I can access their metrics through Web of Science. A quick search revealed this paper has 8 citations on Web of Science (all databases), see the figure below:

That’s a sobering eyeopener! Especially considering one of these 8 citations is by a paper I wrote myself. This tells me quite a lot about the impact of the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, about the bit of archaeology that I am specialised in, and about that part of archaeologists’ citation behaviour represented by Web of Science.

Let’s start by that last one. Web of Science only indexes publications (mainly journals) with a long and consistent editorial board and publication history, focusing almost exclusively on English as the language of science. It defends this policy by stating the fact that the majority of all citations (about 60% or so) cite papers in a minority of journals (I believe about 20%, but don’t cite me on this). So there’s a clear tendency here to include high impact publications. Archaeology does not have many journals of high impact with a long tradition and a stable editorial history, whilst English is definitely NOT the only language of academic archaeology which is mainly due to the need to publish excavation reports in the local language. From my citation network analysis work I get the impression that less than half of all citations are included in Web of Science.

Why do I know that? Well let’s compare my 8 citation in Web of Science with how many this paper got according to Google Scholar:

So according to Google Scholar this paper was cited 16 times. Now Google Scholar does not care so much about the language or format of publication, so a much larger number of publications is indexed. But these citations also include those that are usually not included in any impact scores, such as citations mentioned on presentation slides or poster uploaded to the internet.

Take-home message number 1: check the citations to your paper on multiple citation databases before bragging about your impact (Web of Science, Google Scholar, Scopus).

What about the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory? It is not the highest rated journal in archaeology, but I do think it’s up there in the top ten or so. But the top ten of what? Journals are usually ranked by their impact factor, which is the measure introduced by the Institute for Scientific Information using the data you can access through Web of Science. It represents the average number of citations in the last few years per paper in a journal. Here some Impact Factor results of the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory:

In 2013 ISI gave it an impact factor of 1.389 which ranked it 18th in Anthropology, just below Antiquity and just above American Antiquity. These rankings are published yearly by ISI as the Journal Citation Reports. But there are more measures than just the Impact Factor. Google Scholar uses the h5 index to rank journals in disciplines: “the h5 index is the h-index for articles published in the last 5 complete years. It is the largest number h such that h articles published in 2009-2013 have at least h citations each”. In the category of Archaeology the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory has an h5 index of 13 and ranks 15th: lower than American Antiquity and dwarfed by the scores of Journal of Archaeological Science (38) and Antiquity (21).

These measures of impact give you an idea of the number of citations on average a paper in a journal receives. This is not solely a result of a paper’s own merit or infamy. It should at least in part be seen as an effect of the journal itself being widely read, so papers published in well-known journals attract more citations because they adopt the visibility of the journal they are published in.

But citation practices differ greatly between disciplines. A quantitative measure of impact might therefore not be particularly relevant for all disciplines. For the humanities a more qualitative interpretation of impact is available: the European Reference Index for the Humanities. The site was down when I wrote this blog post, but the idea is simple. It gives a journal one of three ratings: of importance to a subdiscipline, of national importance for a discipline, of international importance for a discipline. But essentially this is just a low level classification based on a quantification of who publishes, cites, and reads each journal.

Take-home message number 2: impact is relative. Compare multiple measures as presented by multiple institutions. Visibility to your subdiscipline is more important than overall visibility/impact.

So my paper might not be cited by many, and it might not be published in the highest impact journal, but it is a piece of work I am pretty pleased with and it seems to reach the few people around the world who have the same niche interests I have. Having many citations according to ISI in my discipline really does not mean much. Way more impressive is the number of views and downloads this paper gets on sites like Academia.edu. We publish our work because we want to share it with those who are interested, and we want to provoke discussion with the final aim to advance human knowledge. Who cares about high citation counts? Just make sure your paper is out there, freely available, actively promote it, send it to those who might be interested in discussing it with you. That’s what you want, not a high impact factor. All these numbers, and especially the Research Excellence Framework, make us forget sometimes that it is science we are doing.

(PS: as a young academic I realize my own career will be enhanced by playing this numbers game. I am sure it will, for now. But I also think things are changing with resources like Academia.edu, which will hopefully push entities with empty prestige like Science and Nature off their pedestals. Scientific quality control is not guaranteed by prestigious publishers, and there are other models of publishing that allow us to debunk bullshit science and keep the good bits)

Special issue Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory: The Connected Past

This is a quick reminder of the 23rd June deadline for extended abstracts for The Connected Past special issue of the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. The call for submissions to this special issue is now open. So don’t hesitate any longer and send us that awesome networky paper you have been working on! As you can gather from the CFP below, we want to have a focused special issue with solid case studies that illustrate how network analysis can be useful in archaeology. However, we are really keen to publish really innovative approaches, things that have not been tried before by archaeological network analysts. We look forward to reading your abstracts!

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Connected Past: critical and innovative approaches to networks in archaeology

A special issue of Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory

Edited by: Anna Collar, Tom Brughmans, Fiona Coward and Barbara Mills

Over the last decade the number of published archaeological applications of network methods and theories has increased significantly. A number of research themes deserve further exploration, however. How do particular archaeological research contexts drive the selection and adaptation of formal network methods from the wide range of existing approaches? What is the role archaeological data can play in network methods? What are the decisions we are faced with when defining nodes and ties, and what assumptions underlie these definitions? How can our theoretical approaches be expressed through formal methods incorporating empirical data? Are network theories and methods compatible? How can materiality be incorporated within existing network approaches? How can we deal with long-term network evolution within archaeological research contexts?

This special issue aims to illustrate through innovative and critical archaeological case studies that these problems can be overcome, and that by doing so the role of archaeological network analysis within the archaeologist’s toolbox will become better defined.

This special issue invites well-developed archaeological case studies in which a network-based method is formulated as the best approach to an archaeological research question. A key conviction of this special issue is that theoretical and methodological concerns should be raised through practice. As such, papers are expected to either develop a critical and detailed archaeological analysis through commonly applied network-based approaches, or to illustrate how archaeological research contexts can require the development or adoption of innovative network techniques. Such a collection of case studies will illustrate that the network is not an end-product; it is a research perspective that allows one to ask and answer unique questions of archaeological relevance.

Please send extended abstracts (1000 words) to connectedpast@soton.ac.uk by 23 June 2013.

Notification of acceptance: July 2013.

Submission of full papers for peer-review to guest editors: 22 September 2013.

Submission of revised papers for peer-review to JAMT: 24 November 2013.

Please note that the acceptance of extended abstracts and peer-review by guest editors is not a guarantee that the paper will be published in the special issue. Individual papers will have to successfully go through the JAMT peer-review process before publication can be guaranteed.