Volume II ● Issue 2/2011 ● Pages 81–82
Volume II ● Issue 2/2011 ● Pages 81–82
Editorial, IANSA 2/2011
Founding of the Advisory Board
John Chapman
I was able to attend my first IANSA Editorial Board meeting in Chvalovice in Southern Moravia, near Znojmo, in October 2011, where I could meet a good range of colleagues on the Board and taste an even wider range of home-produced wines. The Editorial Board had invited me to play the role of Chairperson of a newly-created Committee – the IANSA Advisory Board. After the usual horse-trading and intense discussion of roles and responsibilities, as well as careful consideration of Moravian hospitality, I agreed to take over this task. It would perhaps be helpful for readers of IANSA to understand the differences between the Editorial Board, chaired by Jaromír Beneš, and the Advisory Board, under my chairpersonship. Here is my reading of the runes.
As I understand it, the Editorial Board has the responsibility for the overall direction and policy of IANSA, with full control of the financial matters of the journal. The Editorial Board also seeks papers for publication, through the Executive Editor and its other members, and has the responsibility of checking them for internal consistency and coherence, language and academic content. There is also the key task of negotiating changes with potential authors through the peer-review system, which is gradually gaining ground in Central Europe as a fundamental mechanism for quality control of academic output. The Editorial Board is finally responsible for the production of the Journal through its publisher, Jaroslav Peška.
The members of the Advisory Board have no responsibilities in terms of editing papers and other contributions. Their work would be on a higher level and consist of (1) spreading word of this exciting new venture amongst their contacts; (2) encouraging colleagues to send appropriate articles to the journal;(3) suggesting contacts who may be able to raise funding for the journal (which has EU funding for two years but then is transformed into its own financial body); and (4) coming to Advisory Board meetings every year. In return, the journal would offer Advisory Board members bespoke advertising for themselves and their institutions, a network of great Central European contacts with whom their research networks could profitably expand and, when they come to Advisory Board meeting, some wonderful Central European hospitality.
As Chairperson of the Advisory Board, I have been asked to recruit Board Members from among a diverse range of academic talents in both the Old World and the New World. IANSA has had a few rebuttals from colleagues who are so busy that “it would save my sanity to refuse to join the Board” – as one particularly hard-pressed friend put it! But so far, we are happy to announce that five persons have agreed to serve on the Board, with one or two more colleagues still waiting to make up their minds. This reminds me of a quote in the novel “The Ingoldsby Legends” by Benjamin Disraeli: “I once was undecided but now I’m not so sure!” So we look forward to final decisions soon.
I thought that a short biographical sketch (or bio-pic) of each of the confirmed or almost-confirmed Advisory Board members would help you to get to know them, if you don’t know them already.
Professor Hermann Parzinger
Since 2008 Hermann Parzinger is the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz), Berlin. In the founding period of the Excellence Cluster Topoi, he was director of the German Archaeological Institute (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut). Being one of Topoi’s principal investigators, Hermann Parzinger is involved in the archaeological and geo-archaeological investigations in the Land of Seven Rivers, which lies in southeastern Kazakhstan. The conditions of its natural landscape and its favorable location made it an important living space for the peoples of the historical steppe region, for example for the Saks, as has been learned from numerous pieces of evidence from the Bronze and Iron Ages. In particular, the “pyramids of the steppe” (Hermann Parzinger), the cairns or “kurgans”, some of which are gigantic, provide information on the culture of the peoples of the steppes and on their living space.
Hermann’s doctoral thesis at the University of Munich concerned “Studies on the chronology of the Late Hallstatt and Early La Tène Period.” He went on to write a post-doctoral thesis on “Studies on the chronology and cultural history of the Late Stone, Bronze and Early Bronze Ages between Carpathia and the central Taunus.” In 1990, he became the Second Director of the Roman-German Committee of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Frankfurt/Main (German Archaeological Institute in Frankfurt/Main), directing excavation projects focusing on the Iron Age in northern Spain (Bureba) and on the Neolithic and Aeneolithic periods in Turkish Thrace (Kırklareli). He became the Founding Director of the Eurasian Department of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Berlin (German Archaeological Institute in Berlin) in 1993, later becoming President of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (German Archaeological Institute) in 2003. In 2008, he was appointed as President of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation).
Associate Professor Bryan Hanks
Now researching in the Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, Bryan K. Hanks received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2003. He is an archaeologist whose interests focus on the examination of Old World complex societies with a particular emphasis on the Eurasian steppe region.
His research interests include: tribal societies, settlement archaeology, nomadic pastoralist socio-political organization, zooarchaeology funerary studies and ritual practices, and archaeological method and theory.
His current projects include field excavations on Iron Age sites in West Siberia, and radiometric dating and stable isotope research on the Bronze Age period in the Southern Ural Mountain Region, Russian Federation. More information about his research can be found at: web.mac.com/bkhanks.
Dr. Alice Choyke
Researching in the Department of Medieval Studies, CEU, Budapest, Alice has worked in the field of bioarchaeology for thirty years, particularly in the field of archaeozoology and the study of worked osseous materials from animals. She is involved with a number of projects concerned with the way people in the past used material culture, especially objects derived from the animal body, in various forms of social discourse. She is also generally interested in multiple and often contradictory attitudes towards animals in the medieval past.
Since 1988, Alice has been the chief faunal analyst at the Aquincum Museum, a branch of the Budapest History Museum. She has run the archaeozoology/archaeobotany laboratory since 2000 and this year was made co-director of bio-archaeology studies at the Budapest History Museum for all archaeological departments. In addition to teaching research methodologies to first year PhDs at the medieval department, she has begun to offer courses introducing concepts in bioarchaeology to students in the department. As part of the environmental and landscape specialization, she is also involved in the development of the Medieval Animal Data-networks (or MAD). This WIKI-based project seeks to gather data from various multi-disciplinary sources, such as texts, images and archaeozoology. The intention is to bring a more complex approach to animal studies in the medieval period.
Alice is perhaps best known internationally, however, for her work on worked osseous materials, primarily from the Bronze Age but also from Roman and medieval contexts. She is liaison officer for the Worked Bone Research Group, a working group for ICAZ (International Council for Archaeozoology) and runs the mailing list for this group which was co-founded by Alice in 1998. She has published numerous articles and edited two volumes (to date) on how this class of material culture was exploited and fitted into various social narratives in the past.
Professor Miroslav Bárta
Professor Miroslav Bárta is one of the Czech Republic’s leading Egyptologists and works in the Czech Institute of Egyptology in the Charles University, Prague. Miroslav graduated in Egyptology and Prehistoric and Early Historic Archaeology at Charles University in Prague, with Ph.D. studies in Prague and Hamburg. He was Fulbroght Professor of Egyptology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003–2004.
His main fields of research include archaeology and history of the 3rd–2nd Millenia B.C., landscape archeology in antiquity, the rise and fall of complex societies, interdisciplinary research and the archaeological background of the Old Testament. Since 1991, he has been excavating in Egypt, including research in the Western Desert (2003–2008), the first detailed satellite mapping of the pyramid fields of Abusir, Saqqara and Dahshur (2002). Since 2005, he has been the PI for the 'Civilization of Ancient Egypt' project of the Institute.
Professor Mirosław Makohonienko
Professor Mirosław Makohonienko is the current Head of the Department of Quaternary Geology and Palaeogeography at Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU) in Poznań, Poland. After gaining experience in Lund University and Christian-Albrechts Universitet in Kiel, Germany, Mirosław held research scholarships in Kyoto, Japan (1998–2001 and 2005) as he continued his employment in Poznań. He became Vice-President of the Polish Association for Environmental Archaeology (2005–2007) and President in 2008.
His main research fields include the palaeoecology and environmental archaeology of Europe and East Asia, human/environment relationships and Quaternary Palaeoecology, with a special interest in Holocene environmental changes reconstructed from pollen, algal and micro-faunal remains. He is a PI of several major European projects, including „Environmental changes of the Central European Town – historical urban ecology of Poznań” (2011–2014) and „Modern diatom assemblages for the palaeoecological interpretation of the lakes in South Baltic coast” (2011–2014).
Dr. John Chapman
After completing a London PhD in Balkan prehistory with John Nandris, and working in provincial museums for 3+ years, I was appointed as a Lecturer in Archaeology (later Senior Lecturer) at Newcastle upon Tyne in 1980. My main fieldwork in the 1980s was the "Neothermal Dalmatia Project" in what is now Croatia. In the 1990s, I worked in Hungary on the "Upper Tisza Project" and transferred this project with me to Durham, where I was appointed as a Reader in Archaeology in 1996. Soon after the foundation of the Journal of European Archaeology in 1994, I was asked to be its first Editor, which I did until 2001. My current project – "Early urbanism in Europe?: a case study of the Tripillia mega-sites” is an AHRC-funded project with Dr. Mikhail Videiko (Kyiv), 2012–2016. Readers can find out more information about me from my web-page (via www.dur.ac.uk/archaeology/staff).
The further growth of the Advisory Board through enlisting the support of further leading archaeologists and archaeological scientists will provide great opportunities for making IANSA into a successful and thought-provoking journal with a broad financial base and widespread support in Central Europe and beyond.