World Archaeology

Debates and Emerging Issues in Archaeology

World Archaeology offers a critical venue to encourage topical discussion and debates on archaeological issues that will have a broad relevance within and beyond the discipline across the chronological span of the human past, and the myriad of archaeological subdisciplines and themes operating across the globe. The journal also welcomes papers offering original perspectives on articles previously published in World Archaeology

In the late 2020s, Archaeology finds itself challenged to redefine its priorities and perspectives in the context of many worldwide challenges. The global climate change, conflicts and genocides, attacks on funding and support for public institutions, educators and cultural resources, as well as the digital transformation of our work, lives and media, together frame the character and composition of our shared human story and its perceived relevance to today’s world. The nature of the discipline investigating the deep-time human journey, and how and to what extent it is regarded as relevant to people today, is rapidly fluctuating and hotly contested.

This global polycrisis frames our relaunch of the annual Debates and Emerging Issues Special Issue Call for Papers. We invite timely, rigorous and innovative contributions to address archaeologists’ roles and responsibilities, theories and methods, ethics and politics, collaborations and interdisciplinarities, as well as our relationship and dialogues with wider publics, at a time of pressing and interactive change.

Papers can relate to important new sites, finds, themes or methods, or offer novel insights on, or counterpoints to, previous work. We would expect submissions to be more than review papers of current topics, however, and contain original material or distinct viewpoints to those available elsewhere. Where papers specifically counter previous publications published within the journal, it will be normal practice to invite replies from the authors of the original work.