Voices in Conversation: Assessing 36 Years of Demographics in a Professional Archaeology Newsletter

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Documenting Demographics in Archaeological Publications and Grants" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Academic research is comparable to a conversation. As in all conversations, certain voices are amplified while others are underrepresented. Much of this academic conversation happens in peer-reviewed journals and academic books, but informal conversations outside of these arenas are often overlooked. We are studying the conversation of a specialized academic community—archaeologists working on the Late Pleistocene of the Americas—to elucidate its demographic structure. Our dataset is the *Mammoth Trumpet, the newsletter of the Center for the Study of the First Americans. This newsletter, published quarterly from 1984 to the present, is aimed at a professional and avocational audience and provides regular diachronic snapshots of the state of the field over a 36-year period. This phase of the project consists of collecting data on each individual mentioned in the newsletter, documenting the frequency of mentions, the context, and basic demographic data. This data will be used to examine the structure of this unique academic conversation and how its demographics have changed over time. We hope to provide insight into the practice of archaeology over the last 36 years and to demonstrate the value of professional academic newsletters for documenting the demographics of academic conversations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Documenting Demographics in Archaeological Publications and Grants

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32658