Blogging Archaeology Ebook Available!

So, the fine folks from Dougs Archaeology and Digtech (as well as Landward Research and Succinct Research) asked me to contribute a paper for an ebook about blogging and archaeology. I did so, and it has been completed and is now available. I am working on ways to allow my readers to download the ebook, but in the meantime, you can read it here.

Edit: Courtesy of Doug's Archaeology (which you really should be reading) you can now download the PDF here.

Enjoy!

The Talk is Over, on to the Next One

By the time this posts, I will have delivered a paper at one of the symposiums (symposia?) at the Society For American Archaeology's 2012 meeting in Memphis Tennessee.  Hopefully, at the time that this posts, I will be sitting in a barbecue place with a former boss of mine who is originally from Memphis enjoying some ribs.

I deeply, deeply loathe public speaking, and yet I keep agreeing to do it.  I am always concerned that I am going to come off sounding like an idiot, especially in a case like this, where my actual paper topic diverges from the symposium topic (for the record, I checked the topic with the symposium organizer before I wrote it, and she said it was fine).  The truth of the matter is that very few people will likely hear the paper (I am the last speaker in my symposium, and all of the big name speakers will already have come and gone by the point that I end up at the podium), and those who do will likely forget it after they leave - I am picking on a little-known subject in southern California archaeology, which doesn't tend to lend itself to being memorable for anyone who doesn't share my particular interests and irritants. 

So, now that I have spoken, and hopefully not made myself look too terribly foolish, I am hopefully enjoying a nice lunch, and tomorrow I catch a late flight back to California, and a 3.5 hour drive back to Fresno from the San Francisco Airport. 

And then I start on the next project.  I will be speaking to the Fresno County Archaeological Society [http://www.scahome.org/about_ca_archaeology/fresno.html#fcas] on May 7th (anyone in the Fresno area should feel free to come see the talk).  I will discuss the history of research in the Santa Ynez Valley, in Santa Barbara County, California. 

And then?  Well, hopefully then I will have nothing pressing that needs be done for a while.  I have realized recently just how stressed-out and tired I have gotten lately, and I need some time to relax, especially considering that I am going to be a father come September and that I need to be able to devote my energies to that when the time comes. 

That being said, there are a few projects that I would very much like to do - some small writing projects, and a paper that I would like to publish on an abnormally old projectile point found in Yosemite.  But I think that I need to balance my research interests against my impending family life, my job, my non-research writing interests (such as this blog), and my non-archaeology interests, and the fact of the matter is that the research is probably the thing that can be most easily minimized without impacting the overall quality of my life. 

So, we'll see.  I'd like to publish more, but I may very well decide that it's not worth the effort when compared to other things that I could be doing with my time.

At Long Last, Publication!

So, finally, the paper that I had been writing and revising and re-writing for the last two years has seen the light of day.

Check it out!

My paper has the scintillating title of Exchange Links between the Coastal and Inland Chumash, and if you are interested in southern and central Californian archaeology, I hope you'll find it interesting...if you're not, it's guaranteed to be better than Sominex and have fewer side effects.

I was also informed by my boss that a paper she is writing for presentation at a conference will have me listed as a co-author as it will be based on a document that I originally wrote. So, on the whole, I'm doing okay on the "sharing information with my peers" front.

It's an important thing to me to do this. So much of the information that CRM archaeologists produce never gets any real circulation, languishing in government offices or regional information centers but unknown except to those who find it during a record search (and, in my experience, rarely read these documents) that one can reasonably wonder why we are bothering. Publishing papers synthesizing our results and speaking at public and professional conferences is probably the best way out of this particular pickle.

Anyway, I'm finally published, will soon have another paper at a conference, and am already working on another (hopefully to be published) paper.

Paper Publishing Stuff

So, after a couple of years of writing and revising and then sitting and waiting, then more writing and revising, followed by more sitting and waiting followed by several months of break-neck pace edits, changes, and reading the new books that (freakishly) appeared on the subject just months before my submittal date, followed by a period of several months in which I had been told that my paper was cut from the journal, followed by being asked to re-submit it, followed by more break-neck edits to get it in on time, followed by responses to a late-submitted peer-review response, followed by a panic when I was asked for further revisions but thought that my copy of the data that the revisions would need to be based on had gone missing, followed by a final submittal...I have received galley proofs of my paper for the journal California Archaeology today.

The damned paper is finally going to be published. It will appear in the journal's August issue.

This paper began as a portion of my Master's thesis. At the request of a friend who was putting together an edited volume - basically, a book of papers around a central theme - I revised several chapters and condensed them into one paper, and then handed it over. The first publisher fell through, and the editing team then found a second publisher, lined up the papers, got them all submitted, and then the second publisher fell through. This happened at least one more time, and then the project went on the back burner for a couple of years.

About a year ago, I was told that an agreement had been reached with California Archaeology to publish the papers, but after I had revised it one more time and responded to editorial comments, the publisher cut mine due to space limitations. And then it was put back in, and I had to rush to make the necessary changes. And then there was silence for a couple of months, and then requests for further changes. And then silence, and today I received the galley copy so that I can make a few minor changes and it will be off.

It's really quite satisfying.

Peer Review Blues

So, a while back I wrote that I had submitted a paper for publication and that it was undergoing peer review before it was published in the journal. A couple of months ago, I received an email notifying me that there were too many papers, and that mine was one of the ones being cut. This was disappointing, but given that the over submitals came from well-established researchers, and mine was my first publication, not too surprising. As frustrating as it was, it made the most sense for mine to be cut.

Then, about two week sago, I received an email asking me if I could trim ten pages from my paper so that it could be fit into the journal issue after all. I was doubtful of my ability to do this, seeing as I had already cut it down to 45 pages from 150+ pages. However, after some prompting from my friend (who was also one of the editors), I began to work at it again. However, the peer reviewer had not yet turned their comments in to the journal. So, in order to meet the deadline, I was cutting material out without knowing what the reviewer was going to request be changed...which is not precisely the best strategy, but there wasn't much other option.

Three days before the paper was due, I received the review comments. Most of them were pretty simple, essentially just requesting clarification of a few points, or asking that certain terms be defined more narrowly to allow for a better discussion. No problem. There was one comment that was open to interpretation, and may have been requesting that a larger body of data be added to the study (not reasonable, as the reviewer turned the comments in three days before the paper deadline), or may simply have been intended to inform me of a location where there was more data to be had.

Regardless, I got the changes made, cut as many pages as I could, and sent the paper off. Now, the waiting begins to see if it actually makes publication or gets cut again. If it gets cut, I will submit it to other journals. Now that I've put this much work into it, it's damn well going to get published.

Drowning in Data

I am preparing a chapter in an upcoming book on Californian archaeology. The purpose of the book is to provide a cross section of the northern portion of southern California (which the locals erroneously refer to as "central California" despite the fact that it's not central), from west to East, starting with the Channel Islands and ending at the Sierra Nevada. I am writing one of the two chapters on the inland valleys.

I had thought that the chapter was due in November, and so I have been concentrating on writing another chapter for anotgher book by the same editor that I had thought was due in October. Turn out I had the due dates turned around - the larger paper (the one on the inland valleys) is due in October, and the second paper is due in November. Meanwhile, I have had a project in which we normally get lodging at a dormitory (the Hell Hole project) turn into one where we are camping (because the facility is being rented out by a third party during the time that we will be there). So, I have lost two weeks of writing time.

In other words, updates here will likely be sporadic for a little while, while I get the papers finished and do the field work for this project.

Ugh.