Editorial

Abstract

With the first issue of the new volume of the Journal of Conflict Archaeology, there have been a few changes. Professor Tony Pollard has stepped back from active editing of the Journal and has joined the editorial panel. He retains an interest in reading the incoming work and will remain active in ensuring that the Journal maintains its track record for publishing conflict archaeology in all of its many forms. Furthermore, as we realised that our editorial panel was entirely male, we have started to address this issue. Our panel now includes Dr Natasha Ferguson and we will be approaching other women working in conflict archaeology. Given that somuch interesting work is being undertaken by female scholars involved in initiatives such as War Through Other Stuff, this is long overdue. In 2016, at Fields of Conflict in Dublin, we presented a paper that looked at the demography of conflict archaeology. This was drawn frompapers given at the Fields of Conflict conferences since the inaugural meeting in Glasgow in 2000, and by the papers published in the Journal; wewere looking back across 10 years of the Journal and it seemed an appropriate moment to take stock. That paper analysed the nationalities of the authors, the topic of the papers, and the identified gender of the authors. What the analysis showed was that there was a substantial gender imbalance where less than a quarter of authors of papers in either arena came from or involved women; the figure is far worse if looking at lead authors. This imbalance does not reflect the levels of women working in the field. There are clearly a lot more women working on conflict through archaeology, history, museum studies, art history and so forth than the figures represent. There is also a lot of doctoral research being carried out by female scholars. Over time, the imbalance will hopefully fade away; however, as was expressed at a recent War Through Other Stuff meeting at the National Army Museum in London, in the lifetime of the Journal, no papers have been submitted to the Journal looking at women’s experiences or giving a female perspective. It is high time that changed and we are definitely looking for papers to remedy that omission. Things are changing, of course. The forthcoming Sixth Post-Graduate Conference in Conflict Archaeology in Glasgow in October will have a little under 40% of the speakers being female scholars; we are also hoping that there will be many more papers from women in the 2020 Fields of Conflictwhichwill be in Edinburgh in September 2020. As noted above, it is also to be hoped that there will be papers covering women’s experiences and perspectives. The literature on conflict can be lacking in nuance and diversity at times – it is easy to accept the popular perception ofWWI being essentially aboutwhitemen killing each other. What has become ever more clear over the past few years of intensive research into the First World War as the centenary years came round is that such a perception is wrong. While the majority of deaths were of white men, it ignores the substantial contribution of men from around the world and completely forgets about the large numbers of women who were impacted by the conflict. Looking at the non-white involvement, Britain benefited from the sacrifice of West Indians (from the West India Regiments); of men from the Indian sub-continent (the Sirhind JOURNAL OF CONFLICT ARCHAEOLOGY 2019, VOL. 14, NO. 1, 1–3 https://doi.org/10.1080/15740773.2019.1655697