Nailing Colours to the Mast

J Mari Arch Jonathan Adams 0 0 Centre for Maritime Archaeology, University of Southampton , Southampton , UK - About 30 years ago, in the then rather small community that was maritime archaeology, there was often discussion about whether channelling the results of maritime archaeological research through specialist journals or conferences and their proceedings was the right strategy. Surely, it was argued by some, this just perpetuated our insularity and separation from the wider discipline? In order to break out of being a small, liminal, niche interest, we needed to get maritime research papers into a wider selection of journals or present them at land archaeological conferences, and even then not allow them to be bundled in maritime sessions but mixed into the wider thematic running order. This, it was thought, would raise the subjects profile across the piece. The opposite view was that a growing research area would inevitably do that in any case but also needed its own outlets to create critical mass and focus. I cannot remember the last time I heard this discussion and although I once subscribed to the first view, it is the latter that seems to have been proved correct. As the sector has gradually expanded, maritime research has indeed found its way into an increasingly wide variety of outlets but at the same time, specialist publications have also had their role. It was the belief that we needed another that led to the birth of this journal. In 2006 the Journal of Maritime Archaeology was launched in the hope that it would provide a vehicle for the publication of maritime research that was either not being published at all (the fate of many a conference paper) or which attracted little attention due to its relative isolation in the literature. We (the original Editorial Board) also defined an editorial policy that aimed to complement the few established outlets of maritime publication so as to avoid more of the same, as well as explicitly seek out and solicit papers on aspects of the subject that we felt were not prominent enough in the literature. These included interdisciplinary research, prehistory, theory and a general emphasis on the interpretative end of the archaeological trajectory rather than, or at least as well as, the descriptive and the methodological. The first issue brought together a range of papers that attempted to manifest this policy: Westley and Dix on global colonisation, Farr on the social aspects of skill and knowledge in prehistoric seafaring, Tomalin on the maritimity of Roman villas, and Noble on Neolithic monuments on Orkney and long distance contacts. In fact half the first volume (two issues) was devoted to prehistory. At the time it was not clear how freely such material would flow. The belief that there was an increasing volume of work requiring a publication output was difficult to substantiate without launching the new journal and seeing what happened. In 2006 established outlets were few, so what if they already catered for the majority of substantive material? The primary peer-reviewed publication was International Journal of Nautical Archaeology (IJNA) founded by Joan Du Plat Taylor in 1971. It had remained an established vehicle for the publication of a wide variety of maritime/nautical research and could justly claim to have represented the state of the art and kept the community well informed on the sectors activities. Many of the subjects major synthetic publications first appeared in IJNA as an interim report or indeed a series of them. JMAs policy was therefore to steer clear of the sorts of papers for which IJNA is an obvious magnet. There is no discrimination here in the sense of better or worse, simply a pragmatic placement of emphasis. The present author has himself had two papers published in recent issues of IJNA with no feelings of infidelity to JMA whatsoever! Many others also publish in both journals and so they should. On occasions papers have been diverted from one journal to the other and on another, at the suggestion of this editor, a long paper was divided in two, one going to JMA the other to IJNA. What is clear is that the launch of a new journal in 2006 had no adverse effect on submissions to IJNA or on any other established forum. Still less so in respect of other journals, especially those relevant to nautical archaeology and history such as Mariners Mirror (I use the term nautical archaeology in the Muckelroyan sense of a specific area of research within the wider remit of maritime archaeology). In a way there is more potential overlap between JMA and the series of proceedings of the International Symposium on Boat and Ship Archaeology (ISBSA), then being run by Sean McGrail at Greenwich in 1976. But here too, mutual impact is minimal or non-existent. The same seems to apply to the proceedings of the Conference on Underwater Archaeology, held annually as part of the Society of Historical Archaeology annual meeting, or for that matter the societys journal: Historical Archaeology. Beyond these maritime papers now regularly appear in a surprisingly large number of publications including Post-Medieval Archaeology, Medieval Archaeology, World Archaeology, Antiquity, Journal of Archaeological Science, Journal of Field Archaeology, Archaeometry and so on and so on. This is grounds for cautious optimism for as this journal enters its 10th year, it is increasing the number of issues from two to three per year. So the aspirations underpinning its foundation and manifested in its first issue have to a great extent been realised. But what of the state of the sector that JMA represents? I have noted elsewhere (Adams 2013: 5) that the volume of maritime publications has markedly increased in the last 20 years, and that these include substantive final publications (in the sense anything is ever final) of many major long term projects. This must indicate positive developments not just in the volume of work being done but arguable an increased intellectual maturity of the sector as a whole. But while it is gratifying to view the progress made in so many areas of maritime archaeological research, many challenges remain. Here I am not just referring to those regions of the world where to all intents and purposes, maritime archaeology does not exist, but to our own coasts where there are still serious shortcomings in the ways maritime cultural heritage is protected and managed (or not). This is partly a result of the total lack of conformity in the ways individual countries choose to develop and implement policy. In turn this is a result of their varying environmental and social circumstances and the point at which the need to protect and manage maritime cultural heritage was recognised. Until the second half of the twentieth century, many countries had no legislation to either protect or manage what was in the sea. As technologies to reach and exploit the seabed gradually improved, and especially with the explo (...truncated)