In addition to our general issue, which has open submissions throughout the year, the JCAA also publishes themed special collections. If you would like to submit to any of your forthcoming collections, please follow the instructions in the below calls.
Unless stated otherwise, the following applies to all collections:
Open submission, prospective titles and abstracts due by 1 May 2022
Joan Anton Barcelo, Dept. of Prehistory and Quantitative Archaeology Lab. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Joshua Emmitt, School of Social Sciences, University of Auckland
Peter McKeague, Historic Environment Scotland
Nicole Smith, School of Humanities, University of Glasgow
CAA started as an annual event hosted in Birmingham in the early 1970s and became an international conference in 1992 with its event in Aarhus Denmark. Since then, the community has grown to over 500 active annual members, and 16 national chapters, working on a wide variety of applications of digital and computational approaches to archaeological research.
As the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) community approaches 50 years, this volume aims to critically assess the development of digital and computational archaeology and its contributions to the broader archaeological discipline and interdisciplinary research through the lens of the CAA community’s activities.
The special issue will be a combination of specially commissioned contributions and contributions solicited through an open call that may reflect on three core questions:
To address these broad questions, this special issue will be structured around two collections of papers, and we welcome contributions addressing aspects of the themes outlined above from members of the CAA community.
The first collection will focus on understanding the role of the CAA community in the development of methods and applications, and will include contributions which review the history of practice. Through historical overviews drawing on CAAs proceedings, archival material and interviews with key figures in the community, it will explore the typical applications at its origin in the 1970s: from computerised site recording, over data management systems, to statistical analyses. It will explore trends of how these and other applications changed through time: increasing diversification of computer applications, the emergence of GIS, the impact of the internet. This inward-looking overview will be guided throughout by the following key questions. To what extent did the CAA community develop and pioneer computational applications and to what extent did it follow existing trends? What was the role of the annual event in creating an international network to facilitate the coming together of different ideas, and how did this inspire original developments to emerge from the community? This call is also an opportunity to critically assess the make-up of the community and set out directions for our future.
The emphasis of the second collection of papers is outward facing, exploring the impact of work related to the CAA community on wider archaeological practice and on interdisciplinary work, where it intersects with data science, digital humanities and computer science. It will draw on published surveys, bibliometrics data, and qualitative assessments of key publications, individuals and communities. This section frames digital computational archaeology as a community of practice and provides focused explorations of overlaps with cognate communities of practice. It will assemble contributions to address a more diverse set of questions: Does computational archaeology form a coherent community, or does it bring together topical specialists that primarily contribute to substantive debates? Are computational archaeologists central or peripheral to their academic communities, and how are their contributions to fieldwork projects formally recognised? How does digital and computational archaeological work serve as a driver for interdisciplinary efforts, and do its challenges encourage the development of new computational techniques, that are recognised as innovations in computer science, digital humanities, or the emerging domain of data science? And, most crucially, how, if at all, have computational approaches fundamentally changed the way in which different aspects of the archaeological process is done, from fieldwork, through analysis, to publication and outreach?
The JCAA is committed to supporting diversity and improving access to research and practice around archaeological computing. We aim to promote inclusive working and publishing within the CAA community. The editorial team particularly welcomes authors from diverse backgrounds to propose submissions. We also encourage contributions from researchers in under-represented countries that describe the particular situation in their countries.
We are looking for prospective contributors to any of those collections. Please, send us a prospective title and a tentative abstract (around 500 words) for your contribution before May 1st. Accepted proposals will be negotiated with editors to give coherence to the final volumes.
Abstract submissions should be sent to Peter McKeague peter.mckeague@hes.scot
We are aiming to have the Special Collection completed by the time of the CAA2023 conference.
If you have any questions about this call, please contact Nicole Smith Nicole.Smith@glasgow.ac.uk