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fortieth volume, for March 1976, is as follows: editorial, six long reports (“Prehistoric Archaeology in Thailand,” “The Origins of Writing in the Near East,” “The Destruction of the Palace of Knossos,” “Ugarit,” “The Ezero Mound in Bulgaria,” and “The Vix Mound”), eleven short reports including an air-photographic report, and twelve book reviews.
During the long Daniel era, which lasted until 1986, it became harder for Antiquity to maintain its established role. The “general readers,” people with a broad interest in archaeology among many other things, seemed to be disappearing (if they had ever existed), and the publication could no longer be part journal, part popular magazine. About half of the circulation of Antiquity went to libraries, mostly in universities, and the balance to individuals who were often in some way in the business of archaeology. The world of archaeology continued to expand in every way, but Antiquity did not. Production costs reduced it to three thinner issues a year instead of four, so it began to have too few pages to cover that larger world with any fullness.
I was appointed editor in 1987 in succession to the Daniels, again in partnership with the editor’s spouse, Anne Chippindale. Antiquity was switched to the then-new printing technology of desk-top production. In 1988, it was again published quarterly with a total of about 1,000 pages a year. The content has remained the same—a personal editorial, research reports of varied length, and a strong review section—and so has the commitment to lively and novel work, to rapid publication, and to good presentation. Various devices have been created with its review editors, first Timothy Taylor and then Cyprian Broodbank, to cover new publications well in the review section, it being quite impossible to keep up with all that is new.
Archaeology is becoming more specialized and more subdivided, as other sciences have before it. Nearly all the general journals of science have disappeared, leaving only Nature and Science—the two heavyweights—and I think the same will be true in archaeology. Antiquity has been able to cover a broad field of archaeology only by becoming larger. As I envisaged it, inside each larger number of Antiquity there is a smaller number, different for each single reader, of those contributions that are of telling interest. [Editorial note: Christopher Chippindale was editor of Antiquity until the end of 1997.]
References
Crawford, O.G.S. 1955. Said and Done: The Autobiography of an Archaeologist. London: Phoenix House.
Anyang is one of the most significant sites of the Shang dynasty in china (approximately thirteenth century b.c.). Excavated by archaeologist li chi between 1928 and 1937, Anyang comprises a royal cemetery of massive shaft graves and a diversity of major public buildings, residences, and workshops. Anyang has been a major source of information about Shang material culture and burial practices, and the scale of the remains has been thought to demonstrate that the site was the capital of late Shang China.
The Arabian peninsula is an area in which archaeological research has always been conditioned by a host of political, economic, religious, and social factors over which individual researchers have had little or no influence. The relative isolation of the region until recently has meant that the constraints affecting archaeology have remained obscure to all but those actually engaged in fieldwork there. Indeed, Arabia is, generally speaking, obscure in most people’s imaginations—a land of harsh climatic conditions, ultraconservative religious movements, and oil; a land without the obvious heritage of Persia, mesopotamia, or Egypt; a land in which little of archaeological interest or value is thought to exist. The experience of the last few decades in particular has proved these assumptions wrong, but few people are aware of the reasons why it took so long for this change in awareness to occur.
Histories of Arabian exploration abound. The pre-twentieth-century exploration of the peninsula
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