General Notes on Submissions

Submitting a work to assemblage implies that the article has not been published or accepted for publication elsewhere.

All academic submissions to assemblage will be subject to peer review. Assessment is generally done by members of the editorial team in conjunction with advanced postgraduate students and lecturers in archaeology at the University of Sheffield and other British universities. assemblage uses double-blind refereeing; that is, neither the author nor the referee is told the other's identity. The referee may, however, waive anonymity, and if both parties desire it, the editors will facilitate direct communication between referee and author.

Authors are free to suggest referees who would be able to evaluate their work, but the editors are not bound to accept them.

Submissions which are not adequately prepared or do not conform to our guidelines in terms of subject, length, or style, may be summarily rejected, or we may request that they be revised and corrected.

Contributors are encouraged to seek the help of colleagues in the preparation of submission, and to check their work carefully. An article makes a poor impression if it is written in a sloppy manner, if there are errors in spelling, or if the citations do not match the listed references, and so forth.

Contributors will be informed as soon as possible whether their submission has been accepted, requires revision and reconsideration, or has been rejected. The process usually takes one or two months, but may take longer, depending on the availability of referees.

Initial Submissions

Are you interested in writing for assemblage? Please send us an abstract, or very brief proposal for an article, outlining your intentions, as soon as possible.

First drafts should generally be 4-8,000 words in length, and should be submitted to via email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Electronic documents should be in MS Microsoft Word (.doc) or Rich Text Format (.rtf) formats. Do not send us HTML documents—you would not be doing us a favour, if you did, regardless of what you might think.

For the initial submission, please do not include original artwork, photographs, etc. High-quality images of figures will suffice at this stage.

We regret that type-scripts and related materials cannot be returned.

Final Submissions

If a draft has been accepted, and once all required revisions and corrections have been made by the author, authors will be required to submit an electronic version (see above for formatting instructions; again if email is not an option, one hard copy by post will suffice).

If possible, please submit scanned illustrations as interlaced GIF, progressive JPEG or PNG files. (That means no BMP, PCX, PICT, or TIFF files, inter alia.) Otherwise, submit via post, high-quality hard copies, such as photographs, suitable for scanning. Please do not send colour photocopies of photographs.

With all articles, please include a short note (c. 100 words) about the author(s). This should include place of study/work, research interests, postal and email addresses, and may also include other interests and previous publication.

Authors will be given the opportunity to proofread their articles once they have been converted into web documents (HTML). Proofreading may be done on line or on paper. Proofs should be promptly and carefully read, and the editors should be notified of any necessary changes. Only corrections and very minor revisions may be suggested at this stage.

If contributors do not have access to the Internet themselves, the editors will supply them with a printed copy of the issue in which their work appears.

Important Note: Authors must have the permission of anyone whose unpublished work (including items in-press, manuscripts on file, personal communications, etc.) is cited or used in their paper. Authors must also have permission to reproduce any previously published figures, illustrations, etc., and must clearly indicate the source in their paper. Authors, and not assemblage, are responsible for their paper's contents, and for the legal right to publish any material submitted.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright is retained and managed by the author. However, by submitting work to assemblage authors agree that their work will be distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License, where attribution is afforded to both the author and assemblage. This supercedes our previous copyright conditions, which can be seen in our Copyright Notice.

Authors should assume that some readers will print copies of specific articles from the Wordwide Web for their own research, just as they would make photocopies of printed material.

If the author publishes her or his submission again elsewhere, after it has appeared in assemblage, s/he is requested to cite the assemblage version of the paper, including the full URL.

A plea from the editors

We would appreciate contributors' assistance in the following matters.

Since the journal is produced on a stringent budget, we prefer to communicate with contributors by email when possible. Of course, you can telephone, fax, or send regular post if you like, but we prefer to email our responses to you.
Please help ease rapid and simple publication by carefully adhering to all the guidelines which follow. Full-time graduate students cheerfully volunteer their time to produce this journal as a service to the archaeological community, but do not revel in fixing bad grammar and spelling, incomplete referencing, and careless mistakes. The reason for insisting on certain conventions and reference styles, etc., is not to torment contributors, but to make sure the text is easily converted to the online format, and to ensure consistency within the journal.

STYLE GUIDE

Organisation

The manuscript should have page numbers and should be ordered in this way (all elements should be begun on new pages):

1. Title page, including the paper title, author's name, the sentence 'DO NOT CITE IN ANY CONTEXT WITHOUT PERMISSION OF AUTHORS', author's affiliation and mailing address, including email and telephone number.

2. 200-word abstract and 3-7 keywords (for scholarly articles only).

3. Text—three levels of headings may be used.

4. Appendices.

5. Acknowledgements.

6. Notes.

7. References.

8. Figures, tables, numbered.

9. Figure and table captions, numbered.

References

Citations in the text should be in the form of '(Bloggs 1987: 14)' (space after the colon), lists of authors in the text should appear as '(Bloggs 1992; Whimsy 1996)', or as '(Bloggs 1992: 13; Whimsy 1996: 45)' (separated by semicolon), multiple works by the same author should appear as Bloggs (1992, 1987) (separated by comma). As a rule, citations should be in the same order as they appear in the appended list of works cited: first in alphabetical order, then in chronological order.

In this form of referencing, 'ibid.' and 'op. cit.' should not be used.

The list of works cited should use the following forms:

Harley, J.B. 1988. Maps, knowledge and power. In: Cosgrove, D. and Daniels, S. (eds.). The Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 177-312.

Taylor, R.E. and Berger, R. 1980. The date of 'Noah's Ark'. Antiquity 54: 34-36.

Henson, D. 1982. Flint as Raw Material in Prehistory (Emphasis on Lincolnshire and Yorkshire). Unpublished MPhil thesis 5358. University of Sheffield.

Augé, M. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (trans. John Howe). London: Verso.

If the original edition of a work is much older than the edition cited, indicate the original date of publication thus (Rousseau 1968 [1762]).

Personal communications ('pers. comm.') should be only used when absolutely necessary, i.e. when the point is essential and there is no published reference for the information.

If an unpublished manu/type-script is cited, give full information as to where it may be located (e.g. name of archive, 'in possession of author', etc.).

For more detailed guidelines on the Harvard Referencing Guide see:

University of Sheffield Library (2000). Harvard Referencing Guide. [Online]. Sheffield: University of Sheffield. Available from http://www.shef.ac.uk/~lib/libdocs/hsl-dvc1.html. [Accessed: 02.05.2003].

Electronic Publication

Cessford, C. (2001). The archaeology of the clay pipe and the study of smoking. In: assemblage 6 [Online]. Available from: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~assem/issue6/Cessford_text_web.htm. [Accessed: 02.05.2003].

For citing more obscure Internet sources, guidelines can be found at:

University of Sheffield Library (2000). Citing Electronic Sources of Information. [Online]. Sheffield: University of Sheffield. Available from http://www.shef.ac.uk/~lib/libdocs/hsl-dvc2.html [Accessed: 02.05.2003].

Style

Contributors are asked to write in clear and concise English with a minimum of jargon.

· Use 'and' instead of '&'.

· Use 'percent' instead of '%' .

· Accent and diacritic marks should be clearly marked, accurate, and consistent.

· Do not use hyphenated word breaks at the end of lines.

· Do not indent paragraphs; instead, leave an extra line between them.

· Do not use underlining for emphasis. Use italics instead. Italics should also be used for species names, uncommon foreign words, and book titles.

· Notes should be used sparingly; where they are essential, use endnotes instead of footnotes.

· The abbreviations 'e.g.', 'i.e.', and 'etc.', 'et al.', 'c.', 'cf.', and 'vs' should be lower case and not italicised. (Note that 'cf.' means 'compare with', not 'see'.)

· Quotations over three lines long should be indented. Single quotation marks should enclose quotations included within the main body of the text and for emphasis; double quotation marks should be used for quotations within quotations, and quotation marks should not include final full stops and commas (all of this the opposite of the American convention).

· Full stops should not be used in abbreviations or acronyms such as 'IFA' or 'WAC' An abbreviation or acronym which may not be widely and internationally known, should be introduced first, e.g. 'the Sites and Monuments Record (SMR)'.

· For temperature, units, chemical notation, etc. -- international notation and metric units should be used.

· Use British spelling, but do not alter spelling in quotations, references, and the names of institutions.

· Capitalisation: Only capitalise north, south, etc. if part of an actual place name, e.g. 'South Africa', but 'the south of France', 'Central America' but 'central Mexico'.

· Internet anchors: underline the text which should be anchored, and include the URL for the anchor immediately afterwards, in angular brackets. E.g. 'The mailbase archive <http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists-a-e/arch-theory> is useful for checking on past Arch-Theory conversations'.

· Official site numbers should be included with site names whenever possible.

Dating Conventions

Please follow the conventions outlined in World Archaeology's notes to contributors (October 1995), reproduced here.

· In accordance with international convention, radiocarbon dates should be expressed as mean and standard deviation, together with the number of the issuing laboratory.
e.g. a date of 3600 +/- 600 BP (AA-50)
or: the date was: K-3921 5540 +/- 65 BP

· Calibrated dates should be indicated as follows: cal. AD 200; 250 cal. BC; a date in the range cal. AD 90-440. It may be useful to insert the phrase '(calibrated date)' after each first occurrence in a paper, to make the meaning perfectly clear. Note that after calibration ranges will often be used, since deviations may not be symmetrical about the mean.

· Calibrations should be made using the calibration curves of Stuiver and Pearson (1986) or Pearson and Stuiver (1986), depending on period. Both curves are published in Radiocarbon, 28, 2B. (Any suitable curve can be chosen for calibrating the period older than 5000 BP.)

· In order to maintain continuity with older literature, it may sometimes be necessary to present uncalibrated dates in terms of 'ad' or 'bc' (where 1950 BP = 0). We do not encourage this because dates presented in this way may not correspond closely with the calendrical AD/BC scale.

· Dates obtained by other methods, e.g. TL, Uranium Series, or Fission Track, are best referred to in years 'before present' or 'years ago', rather than by radiocarbon conventions.

· Old dates: Ma for 'millions of years' and ka for 'thousands of years' are advised as abbreviations recognized internationally.

For further queries, please do not hesitate to contact us!