I’m writing to announce briefly a few personnel changes at the journal. First, I am very pleased to announce that Rachel Horowitz (Appalachian State University) will be joining our editorial board. Next, I must offer my heartfelt thanks to Shane Miller, who is departing as our book review editor. I am extremely grateful for Shane’s dedicated service to the journal, and I am also happy to say that he will be staying on as a member of our editorial board. Finally, I am very happy to announce that Justin Pargeter (New York University) will be taking over as our new book review editor. Justin was recently the guest editor of one of our special issues on bipolar knapping, and he has been a longtime stalwart referee for the journal. I am thrilled to have him as a new member of our crew!
While we are on the subject of book reviews, I wanted to take a brief moment to mention that we will be adding a list of books available for review to the journal website. In addition, if you have a book in mind for a review, please feel free to contact either Justin or me. While it occurs to me that the prominence of book reviews in journals has been declining over the years, I think that they still play an extremely important role in our academic discourse. We need thoughtful reviews and criticism of the books in our field for a number of reasons: for one thing, no one can read it all, and we need book reviews to help us focus our reading efforts; for another thing, this kind of criticism serves a key dialectical function in establishing intellectual positions on the controversies that comprise our book-length scholarship. Without book reviews, it’s all a bunch of trees falling in the forest but making no sounds.
It may be that the overall importance of books in our field is waning as the landscape of the academic publishing industry changes. Yet, I can’t help but feel that this is a bit of a loss when I think about all of the books that have shaped our field over the last half-century. As an editor, I obviously deal mostly with journal articles, and I recognized that these are really the lifeblood our field. Yet, I sincerely hope that archaeologists keep writing and reading books. And, for that matter, I hope that you, our readership, will keep reviewing books and that you will send your book reviews to Lithic Technology!