I am a long-term admirer of the journal Antiquity. Every couple of months, a new copy appears in my department mailbox and I keenly look at the table of contents for my next reads. I never knew the founder and first editor, O G S Crawford, but count all six subsequent editors as colleagues and friends. I have been on the editorial advisory board for over 30 years, and it has been most rewarding. Glyn Daniel succeeded Crawford as editor in 1958, and remained at the helm for nearly 30 years. I remember well visiting his Cambridge home – the front door embellished with a stag’s head presented by another of his students, the Prince of Wales – to find him and Ruth working on the latest issue. Long before we had Photoshop or FreeHand to do our illustrations, she would draw the maps, and I would find Glyn at his desk in a sea of manuscripts and proofs.
Getting an article published then required jumping through far fewer hoops than today. In 1982, I submitted a paper on irregular earthworks in North-east Thailand, and Glyn’s editorial response could never happen today. He rang me and said, simply, ‘Charles, we don’t need referees for this, do we? Let’s just go ahead.’ I would like now to contrast this with my latest contribution, written with ten colleagues and published in August this year, which also incorporates one of those fascinating irregular earthworks.
The long or short of it
In 2012, I received funds from the Marsden Fund in New Zealand to radiocarbon date the later prehistory of south-east Asia and southern China. It made it possible, at last, to get the basic chronology sorted. For years I had contributed to a heated debate over the merits of either a long time span, which pushed for early dates that supported the notion that major innovations, such as the domestication of rice or copper-base metallurgy, were significantly early, or a short time span, which rejected these claims.
