A new year is upon us already and I thought I would write an editorial to give some news. Beginning immediately, Lithic Technology will stop using the American Antiquity reference style and we will begin using the American Psychological Association (APA) style. This, of course, departs from more than 40 years of convention for the journal and it is with some nostalgia that I have recommended this change. I'll get to the reasoning behind our thinking in a bit. First, this change seemed like a good occasion for some institutional history regarding the journal.
The journal Lithic Technology began as the Newsletter of Lithic Technology in 1972 under the editorship of Ruthann Knudson and Guy Muto. As they describe in the introduction to the first issue, the idea for the Newsletter grew out of the Don Crabtree knapping field school, or what they referred to as the “Crabtree Campfire Cult.” It was a way for the alumni of the Crabtree knapping school to keep in touch, to share ideas about their research, and to foster new ways of thinking about stone tools that grew out of their knapping experience. As the editors stated in their first editorial, the scope of the journal was rather limited to the western United States, but then so were the readers and the authors!
In 1974, Susanna Katz took over as editor of the Newsletter and in 1977 she oversaw its transformation into the more formal academic journal Lithic Technology. It is obvious that, by then, the Newsletter had grown enormously. Even in 1974, it had well over 500 subscribers in 19 countries, and its contents had expanded dramatically in terms of both scope and sophistication. It is clear that the time period around the journal's transition was its first heyday. Issues overflowed with great papers and the journal was published with a frequency it would not see again for more than three decades. This period of rapid growth, as well as the precociousness of much of the scholarship in the journal at this time, bespeaks the vibrancy of this community of scholars that made regular contributions to Lithic Technology at that time.
It is also fairly obvious that a lot of the operation of the journal was in flux in its early days. Even the name seems not to have been totally agreed upon, in some places being called the Journal of Lithic Technology and other places simply Lithic Technology. Stylistic conventions were variable, as were reference formats. Over the first few years, the use of American Antiquity style appears to have taken hold rather organically. My predecessor, the late George Odell, once quipped that American Antiquity style was commonly used in the beginning because it made it easier to (re)submit papers to Lithic Technology that had been rejected at American Antiquity! It is my perception that the early boom at the Newsletter and eventually Lithic Technology was the result of the fact that it was hard to find a more mainstream home for technical studies of stone tools, which were often castigated as being unappealing to wider general audiences. Interestingly, the eventual decline of Lithic Technology during the 1980s was probably at least partly due to the journal being a victim of its own success. By this time, many profoundly important studies of lithics were being published in top tier journals, while submissions to Lithic Technology dropped off progressively. Innovations that began in contexts like the “Crabtree Campfire Cult” had been integrated into the normal practices of the field of archaeology such that technical research on stone tools was no longer stigmatized as being of interest only to a select few.
In 1988, Lithic Technology basically died due to a lack of interest from authors. In 1993, it was revived under the auspices of George Odell, who guided the journal back to relevance over the next 17 years. While submissions remained sparser than they had once been, Odell kept the ship afloat by actively expanding both the geographical and the theoretical scope of the journal. While Lithic Technology retained a North American focus, papers covered all corners of the globe, and all manner of theoretical and methodological approaches were represented. These weren't always easy times, however, and the journal still teetered on the brink of nonexistence on several occasions. Lithic Technology made it through these rough patches in great part due to Odell's enormous personal energy, his charisma in dealing with authors and referees, and his general humanity.
I have had it comparatively easy since I took over as editor of Lithic Technology in 2011. On the one hand, it took considerable work to move the journal from an entirely hardcopy format to its modern state of online availability. I've also seen the journal move through the hands of three publishers in those six years (not to mention the expansive ranks of publishing staff that I have worked with)! And I still have literally hundreds of pounds of cardstock that I inherited from Odell, which was used for the journal covers in the old days and which I can't seem to bring myself to throw away.
On the other hand, my efforts to make Lithic Technology a truly international journal have been extremely uncomplicated, thanks largely to all of the fine submissions I have received during my editorship. It is now my perception that we have entered the journal's second major heyday, which owes mostly to the dramatic global expansion of archaeological interest in stone tools. Some of this is merely the growth and development of the field of archaeology in general, especially in its academic ecosystems. Some of it, however, is the emergence of a genuinely international community of scholars of lithic analysis with common interests, concerns, and approaches. In this sense, this current boom for Lithic Technology resembles that of the 1970s, writ on a much larger scale. And let me be clear: I take very little credit for all of this, other than being in the right place at the right time, and lightly steering the ship in the direction it was already going when I took the rudder.
Against this backdrop, it should be evident that the use of American Antiquity style had no great symbolic significance for Lithic Technology. It was actually a bit of an accident that we used this style in the first place, and it was partly the result of the fact that the journal's founders prepared most of their publication in that format for other reasons. In the journal's modern context, American Antiquity style has a number of drawbacks. First, it wastes space, and that wastes paper. Other reference formats are much more compact and use space more efficiently. Second, the use of a more universal reference format has benefits in compiling databases of references and citations, and in the use of bibliographic software. It is my hope that our switch to APA formatting will make it easier for authors to put together their bibliographies, and for publishers, search engines, etc., to deal with our references in the context of various online platforms. Finally, I chose APA style because it is at the evolutionary root of many of the reference styles used in the social sciences, and thus it should be at least somewhat familiar to most archaeologists.
It occurred to me recently when I was looking for something in one of the old issues of the Newsletter how similar the contents of the modern journal look to those early papers. Whenever we make changes that move us further from that starting point, it makes me a bit nostalgic. Yet Lithic Technology has come a long way in making up the scholarship of the field of archaeology and in becoming widely available and appealing to readers around the world. While it is sad to see some old traditions fade, I'm very proud of what Lithic Technology has become and I'm excited to see where it will go in the future.