About

Welcome to The Fieldwalker.org!

This website was founded to host informative and critical commentaries of an accessible nature on archaeological survey practices, particularly systematic and intensive pedestrian survey, and how they connect with other forms of investigation of ancient landscapes. Where relevant the site will also provide or point to guides on good practices, tools and sources of open data for survey.

The main part of the site is the articles or essays which deal with ancient landscapes and survey archaeology in particular. These essays focus on methods, policies and research agendas of archaeology on ancient landscapes as well as how these landscapes are conceived in local and international imaginations. Some essays are project specific, while others deal with cross-project issues.

In addition, the website hosts a database of landscape projects, designed to allow easy comparison and location of any associated published data.

It also lists selected events and interest groups pertaining to landscape archaeology and survey archaeology in particular.

Website release history

• Version 1.1.1 - 16th November 2020: update to projects database
• Version 1.1 - 18th August-20th September 2020: publication of article by Loy; Survey of Surveys pages.
• Version 1.0 - 10th August 2020: first release; articles by Huy and Weissova, Koparal.

Organisation of the website: articles and projects

Articles on this website are organised by region. The inaugural articles refer to study in the Aegean, but articles which reference other regions are also welcome.

Each article is tagged with keywords which allows navigation between case-studies in different regions.

Projects are listed on the project database page, and linked to relevant articles. Each project page provides basic information about the project, including links to the projects’ own webpages (where they exist), the approximate or precise location of the survey, the project leaders, the dates of the project and links to open data sources or publications of results.

The database provides a source for trends in archaeological survey which will be made available online for further study once it has reached a certain level of maturity.

Submitting projects to the database

The editors welcome submission of new and old projects to the project database as well as corrections or updates to projects already listed. In the case of new projects, it is expected that project leaders may want to be responsible for submission of the relevant data. For older projects, especially those which have been published in the past, projects can be submitted to the database by others.

To submit a project to the project gallery database (or update data a project which is already there), fill out the Basic Survey Questionnaire:-

Submitting articles to the e-journal

Please contact the editors (email address at bottom of page), before submitting an article to the website.

Relevant topics for submission

The focus of articles to be found here is on the methods, policies and research agendas of archaeology on ancient landscapes, space and culture, and also how they are affected by administrative, scholarly and political legacies.

The following constituent relevant topics for articles:-

• short summaries of the aims, methods and results of particular survey projects
• short comparative articles reviewing methods
• short comparative articles answering research questions at the landscape scale
• short visually appealing guides to good practice for field methods
• short discussions on public archaeology in respect to landscape archaeology
• short discussions on the social, political or practical contexts of study

Given the digital nature of the publication, articles should be written in an accessible academic style and a concentration on visual material, slides or figures, is preferred over long texts as appropriate for the medium.

Articles without any visual supporting aspects are unlikely to be accepted.

Practical submission guidelines / checklist

The editors welcome contributions to this website relevant to the topics discussed above, whether single articles or collected essays resulting from workshops etc.

Note that the final submitted article will be closely copy edited for clarity and style as appropriate for the more informal web format. The article may be sent out for review by third-parties where the editors feel they need the opinions of other experts on particular topics. If there are particular reasons why an article should not be read by particular reviewers, this should be discussed with the editors.

Articles should be prepared while keeping the following guidelines in mind:

• Article texts should be short, 2000-3000 word articles are preferred and a maximum of 5000 words (not including bibliography).
• Articles should include striking images or graphs as figures that are integral to the article.
  • Rights to publish these images online should be secured by the authors
• All articles should be submitted with:
  • A short title (maximum ~8 words), and optional longer sub-title title: ‘Worryscapes’ description: ‘An innovative new way to read ancient landscapes’
  • All author names in format Firstname SURNAME authors: [‘Jenny SMITH’,‘Victor HUGO’]
  • One ‘headline’ image to be used as the main banner image for the article (the image should be at least 1400 pixels wide and 600 pixels in height) headline_image: ‘Headline.jpg’ (Caption)
  • In text citations should be made using the Pandoc citekey format, and bibliography provided in an associated BibTeX file.
    • Pandoc citations appear in the text as [@Smith2000, 34-2; @Hugo1812, fig. 1] where Smith2000 is a citekey in the submitted BibTex file - see https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#citations for codes to use for in text references.
    • BibTex (.bib) files containing full information about references can be managed using open source software such as Jabber, BibDesk; or else exported from reference managers such as EndNote, Mendeley and Zotero. If you include DOI or URL links in the BibTeX, then the bibliography on the article page will include direct links to the referenced articles.
  • Spellings should follow UK/Oxford rules where uncertain (e.g. colour not color; but -ize ending allowed as long as consistently used)
  • Figure position and captions: the text should clearly indicate where images/figures appear and their captions with the following: r shortcode_o("figurei", figno="1", src="Fig1.jpg") Caption goes here, and can include citekeys, @Smith2012. r shortcode_c("figurei")
  • A short 50-100 word abstract to summarize the content of the article abstract: …
  • A list of 5-6 keywords to allow linking between articles tags: [‘Aegean’,‘islands’,‘Minoans’,‘digital recording’]
  • Papers which focus on particular projects should list the referenced projects at the top of the paper using the project id or project name as listed on the projects page: https:///www.fieldwalker.org/projects/ OR a webpage/reference if project is not yet in the database projects: [‘prap’,‘keos’] + https://www.wickednewproject.com/
  • Articles which are directly associated with particular projects should include their own Project entry submission (see above).
• Articles will be published in HTML format, not in PDF, but the page design will also allow printing (e.g. images will not break over pages)
• The primary language should be English, but bilingual texts may occasionally be accepted provided they have been suitably copy edited and that the content is the same in each language, and the editors or their reviewers feel comfortable in the second language.

If you are unable to use BibTex-style citekeys (e.g. @Author2021) for some reason, then you should use the Author-Date references in the text (e.g. Smith 2000, 2-10). The relevant bibliography which following the Chicago Manual of Style Author-Date citation format should be included: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html.

Submission file formats

The preferred format for submission is Markdown (.md or .Rmd), with Pandoc/BibTeX cite keys and a separate BibTeX file for references. A template for this can be seen below.

Texts in Word .doc or .docx, RTF, LibreOffice .odt will also be accepted, but please use Pandoc/BibTex style citation keys without creating final formats. All texts will be converted to ®Markdown format for publication on the website and archiving.

See the pandoc citation format for information on how to cite using citekeys: https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#citations

Images should be submitted in .JPG, .PNG or .TIF, format (NOT .docx, .xlsx or .pdf).

Images should be of a sufficient high quality for web-publication, e.g. minimum of 1400x1400 pixels.

Markdown template

You can download a markdown template from here. We recommend you edit Markdown format files with a good plain text editor such as Atom.app or Sublime Text:

• page_template.md

The Markdown template looks like this:

---
title: "Headline Title of the Article"
description: "Subheadline or Subtitle"
draft: true
date: 2019-05-26T12:00:00-05:00
featured_image: 'Header.jpg'
authors: ['Author NAME', 'Fred SMITH']
tags: ['Aegean', 'Pottery Studies', 'Other Keywords']
abstract: |
  This is for the abstract.
endmatter: |
  This is for acknowledgements. It can include *Markdown* notation.
projects: ['myproject']
bibliography: mybibliography_file.bib
---

## Introduction
Content goes here using Markdown format, with references cited using pandoc
style citekeys [@Smith2012, 454].

`r shortcode_o("figurei", figno="1", src="Fig1.jpg")`
Caption goes here, and can include citekeys, @Smith2012.
`r shortcode_c("figurei")`

## Another Section

More text goes here.

### A Subsection

With further paragraphs.

## Conclusions

note: The bibliography will be automatically appended using the submitted BibTex file. Do not include bibliography in the text, only the citekey references.

Submitting events

The editors welcome submission of brief reports or announcements of relevant events. Formats for the report should broadly follow guidance as for submission of articles, but reports should be shorter, definitely no more than 1000 words and with a maximum of 3-4 images.

Access to the content and archiving

The content of this website will be permanently free to read, i.e. open access.

Plans to archive the papers for long-term-preservation are currently being explored.

Contacting the editors

The current editor board consists of:

• Toby C. Wilkinson (Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology, Spain)
• Anja Slawisch (University of Edinburgh, Scotland)

Please contact the editors using the following email address:

• editors@fieldwalker.org