About

Focus and Scope

The Bulletin of the History of Archaeology (BHA) was inaugurated over 20 years ago as a forum to exchange research, information on on-going projects, and resources devoted to a growing interest in the histories of archaeology. As this interest has grown, BHA has become global in reach, and has taken an increasingly expansive definition of its subject matter and its place within wider historical contexts. To this end, the journal publishes research not only on the histories of archaeology strictly defined, but also on the subject as it intersects with related histories like those of collecting, colonialism, exploration, fieldwork, heritage, and museums. At the same time, BHA is particularly focused on building interdisciplinary collaborations, and publishes work that takes its methodological cues from fields including anthropology and historical anthropology, archaeology, art history, colonial and postcolonial studies, gender studies, global history, and the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. Please contact the editors if you are unsure as to whether your research is suitable for submission to the journal.

Publication Frequency

The journal is published online as a continuous volume and issue throughout the year. Articles are made available as soon as they are ready.

Special collections of articles are welcomed and will be published as part of the normal issue, but also within a separate collection page.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. There is no embargo on the journal’s publications. Submission and acceptance dates, along with publication dates, are made available on the PDF format for each paper.

Authors of articles published remain the copyright holders and grant third parties the right to use, reproduce, and share the article according to the Creative Commons license agreement.

Authors are encouraged to publish their data in recommended repositories. For a list of generic and subject specific repositories that meet our peer review criteria, see here. Authors are also encouraged to submit a data paper to our sister journal, Journal of Open Archaeology Data (JOAD) to increase the findability of your dataset. JOAD maintains its own Dataverse available here.

Journal Archiving

The Bulletin is indexed by the following services:

The Web of Science (Emerging Sources Citation Index), the European Reference Index for Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIH PLUS), the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Cengage Learning/Gale, Chronos, Center for Open Science, OpenAIRE, ExLibris, academia.edu, Journal TOCs, CNKI, sparrho, CrossRef, JISC KB+, SHERPA RoMEO, EBSCOHost, and Google Scholar. In addition, all journals are available for harvesting via OAI-PMH.

The BHA's Journal Citation Indicator for 2021 is 0.51 (Archaeology) up from 0.40 in 2020.

To ensure permanency of all publications, this journal also utilises CLOCKSS, and LOCKSS archiving systems to create permanent archives for the purposes of preservation and restoration.

If Bulletin of the History of Archaeology is not indexed by your preferred service, please let us know by emailing editorial@ubiquitypress.com or alternatively by making an indexing request directly with the service.

Journal Statistics

Core journal statistics for the 2023 volume:

Submissions received¹	20
Reviews requested²	77
Reviews received³	49
Total Rejections⁴	22
...of which, Desk rejects⁵	15
Acceptances⁶	11
Acceptance rate⁷	33%
Time from submission to publication⁸	332 days

Definitions
¹Number of new articles received by the journal
²Number of peer review invitation emails that were sent out
³Number of completed peer review reports received
⁴Total number of articles rejected (including desk rejects)
⁵Number of articles rejected prior to peer review
⁶Number of articles that received a 'Accept for publication' decision
⁷Number of acceptances, as a percentage, against the total number of final decisions
⁸'Mean' average from submission to publication for all publications in the volume

Advertisement Policy

The journal only displays advertisements that are of relevance to its scope and will be of interest to the readership (e.g. upcoming conferences). All advertising space is provided free of charge and the editor and publisher have the right to decline or withdraw adverts at any point. Adverts will include a text heading to make it clear that they are adverts not related to the journal.

If you wish to propose a potential advert then please contact the editorial team. All advert images will have to be provided to the publisher.

Annotation and post-publication comment

The journal platform permits readers to leave comments and in-browser annotations via hypothes.is. Readers will require a hypothes.is account to create annotations, and will have the option to make these public or private. Comments may be moderated by the journal, however, if they are non-offensive and relevant to the publication subject, comments will remain online without edit.

Journal History

The Bulletin of the History of Archaeology (BHA) was inaugurated nearly 19 years ago as a forum to exchange research, information on on-going projects, and resources solely devoted to the history of archaeology. The BHA grew out an acknowledged interest in the history of archaeology by many archaeological practioners and the plan for the BHA was hatched after a meeting between Douglas Givens, Alice B. Kehoe, and Donald McVicker in Chicago in 1990. The idea of the BHA was well received during an Advanced Seminar on Writing the History of Archaeology which was held at the School of American Research (Santa Fe, New Mexico) during the summer of 1992. Since that time, the BHA has enjoyed a growing following and many scholars and interested researchers from many disciplines have sought out the BHA as one of the primary sources of up-to-date work know going on in the history of archaeology.

Originally conceived as an international forum for the exchange of information related to the history of archaeology, the BHA sought to involve on its editorial board scholars from around the world who were devoting some of their time to the writing of the history of archaeology. Such a diverse set of interests in many facets of the history of archaeology has led the BHA over the years to expand its coverage of the history of archaeological practice outside the United States.