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Alphabet Soup 331
JMA may be the most editorially vocal of our sample, with
periodic public updates on perceived progress towards these
goals. What continually stamps these editorial statements, however,
is a deep-seated anxiety over the journal’s actual diversity
of representation. A systematic review in 1994 of all JMA
articles published six years into the journal’s life noted several
positive achievements, but also acknowledged: ‘At the same
time, we note some gaps that need filling, and some biases in
need of correction, if JMA is to achieve its mission of being a
journal of use and importance to all sorts of archaeologists with
Mediterranean interests.’ The journal, it would seem, tends
powerfully to attract submissions from certain quarters (notably
prehistory in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean—
the fields of the two co-editors) to an editorially dismaying
degree: 17
. . . we have so far published nothing (since nothing has been submitted
to us) from the African shores of the Mediterranean, other than
Egypt . . . We would gladly welcome the opportunity to include more
articles dealing with the Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, Ottoman, Medieval
and Early Modern archaeology of the Mediterranean world.
Certainly, the editors wish to counter emphatically any impression
that JMA is a journal aimed primarily at archaeologists with interests
in the pre- and protohistory of the eastern Mediterranean.
Improvements have been charted since that appeal, but not to
the total satisfaction of the editors: ‘And so—somewhat wearily—we
would remind all potential contributors of this journal’s
editorial goals, unchanged since its first issue. . . . ’ 18 We will
return below to the reasons why those Mediterranean serials
principally concerned with archaeological research may face
especial difficulties representing the Mediterranean in all facets.
Anxiety about the politics of representation is also evident
in the most recent of these four serials to appear—the Journal
of Mediterranean Studies: History, Culture and Society in the
Mediterranean World, a fully interdisciplinary venture launched
in 1991 from the Mediterranean Institute of the University of
Malta. That journal’s first editorial foreword possessed more
than a tinge of romance to it:
17 Knapp and Cherry, ‘Editorial Comment’, 3.
18 Ibid. 12 (1999), 5.