1.0 Editorial Policy

American Antiquity is a quarterly journal that publishes original papers on the archaeology of the New World and on archaeological method, theory, and practice worldwide. Because the Society for American Archaeology supports another journal dedicated specifically to the archaeology of Latin America (see below), American Antiquity publishes papers on Latin American archaeology only if they address broad methodological, theoretical, or comparative issues that extend beyond Latin America. Authors submit manuscripts to the editor for consideration as ARTICLES, REPORTS, COMMENTS, or FORUM essays. BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS, REVIEWS and BOOK NOTES are solicited by the journal's associate editor for this section; volunteered manuscripts for this section are rarely accepted. For further information, contributors should contact the associate editor listed in the most recent issue of the journal. OBITUARIES are published in The SAA Archaeological Record.

Latin American Antiquity is a quarterly journal that publishes original papers on the archaeology, prehistory, and ethnohistory of Latin America—Mesoamerica, Central America, and South America—together with culturally affiliated adjacent regions. The journal publishes contributions in method and theory, field research, and analysis that use a Latin American database. REVIEWS and BOOK NOTES are solicited by the associate editor for that section and volunteered manuscripts are rarely accepted. Contributors should contact the associate editor listed in the most recent issue of the journal. Except where circumstances dictate otherwise, all submissions should be in English or Spanish.

In both journals, the categorization of a manuscript as an ARTICLE or a REPORT is left to the editors' discretion. ARTICLES are usually longer than REPORTS and address topics of major importance in a way that reaches out to a broad audience of professional archaeologists and the informed public. REPORTS, on the other hand, may be more technical, address a specific topic, and be of primary interest to relatively fewer readers. COMMENTS correct major errors of fact or provide new information directly relevant to a paper published previously in either journal; differences of interpretation or opinion may accompany such demonstrations but may not be the primary motivating factor for a COMMENT. Those whose work is being commented on are given the opportunity to reply to the specific points raised in the COMMENT. The COMMENT and accompanying reply are usually published together, at which time, the exchange ends. A FORUM contribution is an essay of opinion on current issues or topics of immediate significance to a broad audience.

The editors reserve the right to reject (with or without peer review), or return for revision, any material submitted on the grounds of inappropriate subject matter for the scope of the journals, or on the grounds of poor quality or of excessive length. Manuscripts may also be returned for reformatting when they do not comply with the journals' style provisions.

Both journals adhere to the 1973 American Anthropological Association statement on gender language, which discourages the employment of male third-person pronouns and the use of generic "man" in reference to non-sex-specific semantic categories. More comprehensive terms (e.g., "one," "person," "humans," "humankind," "they"), in grammatically correct constructions, are preferred as a matter of equity.

Before a manuscript can be published in either journal, the author must submit written permission from anyone whose unpublished works (e.g., papers presented at meetings, and personal communications) are cited or used in the paper in question. (Faxes of such permissions, or e-mails originating from the person whose permission is needed, will be adequate proof.) For multiauthored papers, the communicating author must submit written evidence that all coauthors are willing to release for publication the draft accepted by the journal editor.

Neither journal will knowingly publish manuscripts that rely on archaeological, ethnographic, or historical period objects that have been obtained without systematic descriptions of their context; that have been recovered in such a manner as to cause the unscientific destruction of sites or monuments; or that have been exported in violation of the national laws of their country of origin. It is the author’s responsibility to provide justification for the publication of information that might be in conflict with this policy and the editors’ and reviewers’ responsibility to determine the validity of the justification. As noted in SAA’s Ethical Principle No. 3, the Society strives to balance the goal of not adding monetary value to such objects with the goal of generating knowledge about the past and the archaeological record.

Neither journal pays authors for manuscripts, nor do they provide manuscript retyping, copying, preparation of illustrations, abstracting, translations, or other such services, which are the responsibility of the author.