Category: academia

Study Cats in Italy; Ph.D. Required

Curious about cats? Completed your Ph.D? Competent in either aDNA or stable isotope analysis? Two postdoctoral positions are available at the Centre of Molecular Anthropology, University of Rome Tor Vergata to:

unravel how the increasing bond with humans across a wide spectrum of socio-cultural contexts, from prehistoric farming communities to the ancient Egyptian and Medieval societies, shaped the cat genome and nutritional behaviour while adapting to anthropized ecosystems. 

The two-year jobs pay about €2,500 a month. More details at:

FELIX – Palegenomics and Population Genomics of Ancient Cats

FELIX – Stable isotope analysis for the study of cat-human interactions in the past

Featured image: V. Sauvaget, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Academic Publishers Make Resources Available to Cope with COVID-19

The Penn Libraries have assembled a list of academic publishers who are making educational resources more readily available for researchers and teachers who are dealing with teaching or working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Access varies by publisher but includes textbooks and some articles. Annual Reviews, for example, is making all their articles freely available, while other publishers are expanding access to their current subscribers.

Thanks to ZOOARCH-L for publicizing this!

A Career in Classics and Anthropology, in and out of Academia

One person’s experience in and advice on combining classics, anthropology, and human osteology in a career: The Skeleton in My Closet by Kristina Killgrove. There’s some weird-sounding situations, like the quote below, that make me wonder what else was going on, but the advice is pretty solid.

While there was interest among the students in a Roman archaeology offering, my archaeology division head didn’t allow it: a regular semester course would take away from the “real archaeology classes,” and that would be unfair to other faculty’s enrollment, I was told

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

Archaeology Images from Peterson Farm, Minnesota

The University of Minnesota is conducting a field school at a historic site in Carver County first occupied in 1855 by Swedish-American farmer Andrew Peterson. Local newspaper the Chaska Herald has a photo essay showing the site and the tools of the trade.

Bucket of trowels
Source: Mark W. Olson, The Chaska Herald

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

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?

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.