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Scholarship for New York Archaeology Undergraduates

For New York state undergraduates interested in a career in archaeology,  the Daniel H. Weiskotten Scholarship Fund 2018 awards $750 and a 1 year membership in the New York State Archaeological Association

To apply for this award, a student must be a New York state resident enrolled in an accredited New York state college or university undergraduate anthropology or history program. The student applicant must have completed a minimum of 30 credit hours; be majoring in anthropology or history; and be intending to pursue a career in archaeology (prehistoric, historic, military, industrial, underwater archaeology or museology); and have a financial need.

Details are at New York State Archaeology

The Scholarship is administered by the William M. Beauchamp Chapter of the New York State Archaeological Association

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Nominate a Female Zooarchaeologist for the Dienje Kenyon Memorial Fellowship

Open to female zooarchaeologists currently enrolled in graduate school, the Dienje Kenyon Memorial Fellowship includes a $1,000 award and a plaque. Nominations for the award are due December 15, 2015.

The official description:

In honor of the late Dienje M. E. Kenyon, a fellowship is offered to support a female archaeologist in the early stages of graduate zooarchaeology training, Kenyon’s specialty. An award of $1,000 will be made. To qualify for the award, applicants must be enrolled an M.A. or Ph.D. degree program focusing on archaeology. Strong preference will be given to applicants in the early stage of research project development and/or data collection, under the mentorship of a zooarchaeologist.

Any submission for the Dienje Kenyon Fellowship is required to have 1) a 1500 word statement of proposed zooarchaeology research towards which the award would be applied, 2) a curriculum vita that clearly indicated when graduate studies began. These materials should be sent as an email attachment (Microsoft Word format) to the committee chair. Additional materials are described below.

For more information:

Dienje Kenyon Memorial Fellowship

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What Colleges Do NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Winners Come From, and Where Do They Go?

The National Science Foundation has just announced the winners of the 2015 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

The Fellowship provides three years of support for graduate study in science and engineering (this includes social sciences, such as economics and geography, as well as anthropology) at a university in the United States.

2,000 awards are offered, each of which includes tuition and a stipend of $32,000 per year (expected to be raised to $34,000 this year).

Of the 2,000 fellowships awarded, how many went to aspiring anthropologists? Just under 3%, or 57 fellowships. Among anthropology awardees, archaeologists won 11, or 19%, of the fellowships.  2,004 people achieved Honorable Mention (you don’t get a stipend or tuition remission with this honor, but hey, you can get access to supercomputers), and the stats are similar: 58 anthropology candidates, of which 17, or 29%, are archaeologists.

The list of graduate schools archaeology awardees and honorable mentions will be attending is diverse. Two awardees will be attending Syracuse University, but no other institution will have more than one awardee.

See the summary tables after the break for the breakdown by anthropology subdiscipline, graduate institution awardees will be attending, and the undergraduate school they are coming from.

Continue reading “What Colleges Do NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Winners Come From, and Where Do They Go?”

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Archaeology Journals and Impact Factors

Those in tenure-track positions care a lot about impact factors; other people, not so much.

Elsevier, which coincidentally also publishes academic journals, makes freely available  “three alternative, transparent and accurate views of the true citation impact a journal makes.” These are the Impact per Publication (IPP), Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), and ScImago Journal Rank (SJR). Each one is updated yearly.

For full information on how these are calculated and see the impact factor for any of thousands of journals, go to journalmetrics.com

Where do the journals devoted to archaeology rank? Generally speaking, well below more general science journals that frequently publish articles of archaeological interest.

The highest ranked journal of any kind, using any of the three rankings, are Nature (IPP 32.997) and Science (25.903), both of which publish occasional articles of archaeological interest.

There is quite a drop off in rank after that, with the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) having an IPP of 9.756, followed by Quaternary Science Reviews, Evolutionary Anthropology, and PLoS ONE.

Other journals well-known among archaeologists are the Annual Review of Anthropology, Quaternary Research, and Current Anthropology.

The highest ranked journal dedicated solely to archaeology is the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (2.27), followed closely by the Journal of Archaeological Science (2.237), and the Journal of Archaeological Research (2.192).

Trailing somewhat are the Journal of World Prehistory (1.724), Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory (1.519), Geoarchaeology (1.51), and a relative newcomer, Archaeological Prospection (1.478). The venerable Antiquity (1.352) is next, followed by Archaeometry, the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, the Journal of African Archaeology, and  Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

Considering its prominence among North American archaeologists, it may be surprising that American Antiquity just barely rates an IPP above 1.0 (actually 1.038), and is outranked by American Anthropologist, Australian Archaeology, the Journal of Field Archaeology, Archaeology in Oceania, and World Archaeology. The SAA’s sister journal, Latin American Antiquity, garners a 0.642

The SJR rankings seem to be comparable to IPP, although American Antiquity, for one, moves up in the rankings. Using the SNIP shakes things up: After Nature and Science is the Annual Review of Anthropology, outranking PNAS.  Two journals significantly increasing their rank are Medieval Archaeology and the Journal of Roman Archaeology.

 

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Economics and Adjunct Teaching

A building in Academia.

Pretty much nailed it:

Just say no. Don’t be an adjunct. Or rather, be an adjunct only if you have a day job, or you’re retired, or if you have a family to raise and a breadwinning spouse. If you love to teach, teach high school. Or get some other kind of real job. Let the law of supply and demand do its work, because drastically reducing the supply of academic victims is the only way colleges will stop victimizing them.

Charlotte Allen in the Los Angeles Times