I spent three months on an editorial placement with Antiquity, one of the world’s foremost global archaeology journals, from October to December 2024. Antiquity publishes six issues annually of peer-reviewed articles discussing archaeological research, methods, and debates. The editorial office is based at the Department of Archaeology at Durham University, and I had the opportunity to move to Durham for the first month of the placement. Over the course of the month, I shadowed each of the journal’s team members and learned what their work consists of and how they carry it out, in the process getting to try my hand at almost the entire sweep of editorial work that passes through the office. This included proofreading typeset articles about to go into print, editing accepted articles, formatting articles about to go into peer-review to comply with the journal’s house style, drafting social media posts and press releases, identifying potential book review authors (more difficult than it sounds!), scouring lists of recent book publications to be included in the journal’s review section, and reviewing the journal’s ethics statement.
During the remaining two months of the placement I continued with some of these tasks, but I also began a research project into the journal’s publication history, sparked by the journal’s approaching centenary.
Getting to know the journal so well and gaining detailed insights into the behind-the-scenes of academic journal publishing in general was incredibly interesting and rewarding, as was the opportunity to witness the quality and breadth of articles currently processed by the journal. The articles I worked with discussed, among other topics, the new discovery of a massive Neolithic settlement in Morocco, where previously no settlements of this scale had been known; analyses of mineralised textiles from a large Iron Age Tomb in central France; the results of fieldwork in well-known but largely understudied hillforts in Republican central Italy; a study of pre-literate cylinder seal motifs from Uruk (modern Iraq) aimed at identifying concrete links between particular motifs and the world’s first writing systems; and new radiocarbon dates for some of the earliest lithic microblade technologies recorded from Palaeolithic north-eastern China. Travelling this far in time, space, and subject was a breath of fresh air after years of focussing solely on my doctoral research, and I found myself constantly inspired by what I was reading, proofreading, editing, or summarising! Going into the office in Durham for a month was also a very welcome change from solitary research.
I am endlessly glad that I took the plunge to reach out to the journal’s editor about organising a placement, and I would advise other OOC DTP students to not just rely on advertised placements, but to consider seriously designing a placement project for themselves.
