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Preparing your materials

Supplementary materials

Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.

Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.

Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.

Policy on prior publication

When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record. 

ORCID

We encourage authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:

  • Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
  • Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
  • Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.

See our ORCID FAQs for more information. If you don’t already have an iD, you can create one by registering directly at https://ORCID.org/register.

ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information. 

Authorship and contributorship

All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.

Author affiliations

Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated. 

For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.

Competing Interests

All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.

Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.

If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors. 

Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”. 

Author Hub

You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.

English language editing services 

Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.  

In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services – including language editing – delivered in partnership with American Journal Experts. You can find out more on our Language Services page.

Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal. 

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools

We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content. 

In particular, any use of an AI tool: 

  • to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s) 
  • to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements. 
  • to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript 
  • must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission 

Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article. 

Style

Abbreviations

  • Limit the use of abbreviations
  • Do not use abbreviations to denote institutions; write their name in full
  • In general: A.D. and B.C. (not AD and BC); ca (not ca.); cf. (not cf); ed. (not ed); eds (not eds.); e.g. (not eg); et al. (not et al); ibid. (not ibid); Ph.D. (not PhD); P.O. Box (not PO Box); pp. (not pp); 1990s (not 1990's); viz. (not viz). And we prefer C14 method; but 14C (element).


Quotations and quotation marks

  • Quotations up to four lines should be included in the running text. 
  • Quotations exceeding four lines are to be separated from the text by means of a hard return before and after the quotation. 
  • Use single 'quotation marks', not " (except for quotations within quotations).


Numbers

  • Spell out numbers one to nine; express all numbers greater than nine with arabic numerals.
  • Spell out million and billion
  • Spell out numbers that begin sentences
  • Spell out numbers used in a general sense ('thousands of sherds')
  • For dates and time: 40 hours; 30 October 1984; 20th century (but if used as an adjective, 20th-century architecture); 18th Dynasty; 1990s (not 1990's); 1933-34 (not 1933-4)


Measurements

  • Distance, area, volume, and weight must be expressed in the metric system.


Radiometric dating conventions

Following established convention the authors should use the following abbreviations: 

  • B.P. for uncalibrated dates; 
  • Cal. B.P./B.C./A.D. for calibrated dates; 
  • B.C. and A.D. for historical dates. B.P. and B.C. follow the date (1235 B.C.); 
  • A.D. precedes the date (A.D. 476; but the fifth century A.D.). 


Please give laboratory abbreviations and number if the radiocarbon age is published for the first time. Identify, and if necessary define the calibration standard and correction factor used.

Spelling

  • British, not American: artefact, not artifact, medieval, not mediaeval, but follow original in a direct quote;
  • -ize spellings when permitted if preferred, but watch for words like advertise, precise, revise where there is no -ize option;


Use of capitals and lower case letters

  • In general: Keep capitalization to a minimum. You will generally find that when the definite article (the) precedes the noun you use upper case and when the same noun is used adjectivally, lower case is correct (the Government, government policy, the Orient, oriental, the West, western, the Army, the British army).
  • additional examples: to the North, the north-west region, southern Europe, north-east England
  • Concerning archaeological jargon: use upper case for specific, recognised, historical and person based names and lower case for general, common or mundane things. Proper names of periods of time or natural phenomena, historical eras and events take a capital if they have a definite archaeological significance as shown by a consistent usage (Paleozoic era, Carboniferous, Tertiary, (New) Stone Age, Bronze Age, Beaker Folk etc.). Cardinal points and other adjectives are lower case except when they form part of a recognised geographical region, period of time, institution or movement (Low Countries, Old World, House of Commons, Middle English, First World War).


Some examples:

  • Latin, French, etc. (substantive),
  • Dutch, European, Romano-British, Near Eastern etc. (adjective),
  • Quarternary, Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Iron Age, Beaker etc. (substantive); use of early/Early, late/Late etc. depends on (in-)definite archaeological significance as shown by (in-)consistent usage; the modifying word is in lower case: Upper Paleolithic period, Anasazi culture, etc.),
  • bronze age site, early bronze age sword etc. (adjective; however Palaeolithic era),
  • the Magdalenian, the Natufian, etc. (substantive),
  • magdalenian, natufian, etc. (adjective),
  • bandceramic pottery, etc. (adjective),
  • New Archaeology,
  • the Renaissance, the Dark Ages, the Mediterranean, (substantive, specific usage; however: the renaissance of ..., mediterranean climate, general usage),
  • names of rivers, mountains, oceans: these names are capitalised along with the generic name (lake , mountain, river, valley etc.) when they are used as part of a name (River Thames, Lake Michigan, Mount Cook etc.). When a generic name is used descriptively rather than as part of a name it is lowercased (the valley of the Mississippi, the Thames river, the Mississippi River valley etc.)
  • title of book: a title of a (non-German) book mentioned in the text should be written with a capital letter for the initial letter of title and for the initial letter of (proper) names.


Italics

  • Italics are used to mark all non-English words and concepts: Bandkeramik (bandceramic, no italics used), Annales, limes. 
  • Abbreviations of Latin phrases however (ibid. etc.) should not be italicised.
  • Use italics to mark titles of books and articles which are cited within the text in full.


Some additions

  • Never use the ampersand (&): please write out the word 'and'.
  • Words in non-Roman alphabets should be transliterated if possible.


Notes

  • The use of notes must be limited as far as possible. Essential notes should follow the text (endnotes).


References

    • within the text: (Myhre 1990) or (Myhre 1990, 12-121) or (Myhre 1990, 21-24) or (cf. Myhre 1990, 34-36) or 'advocated by Myhre (1990; 1996)'. Use 'and' between two authors: (Roymans and Theuws 1990) or (Besteman, Bos and Heidinga 1990). Use 'et al.' for more than three authors (Kolen et al. 1995). (Do not use 'et al.' in the references however.) Use a, b, c etc. for titles published within one year (Waterbolk 1982a; 1982b). If used within parentheses, the above citations do not change parentheses to square brackets: (see the innovative study recently produced by Van der Veer (1994))
    • within References follow the conventions evident in published issue
    • in non-German titles, use a capital letter only for the initial letter of the title and for the initial word of (proper) names.
    • title and subtitle of a book or article are separated by a full stop (not :) and a space.

Some examples:

- Bakker, J.A., 1992: The Dutch hunebedden, Ann Arbor.

- Renfrew, C., M.J. Rowlands and S.A. Segraves (eds), 1982: Theory and explanation in archaeology, London.

- Webmoore, T., and C. Witmore, 2008: Things are us! A commentary on human/things relations under the banner of a 'social' archaeology, Norwegian Archaeological Review 41, 53-70.

- Hermann, F.R., and A. Jockenhövel, 1975: Bronzezeitliche Grabhügel mit Pfostenringen bei Edelsberg, Kreis Limburg-Weilburg, Fundberichte aus Hessen 15, 87-127.

- Kristiansen, K., 1984: Ideology and material culture. An archaeological perspective, in M. Spriggs (ed.), Marxist perspectives in archaeology, Cambridge, 72-100.

- Ingold, T., 1992: Culture and the perception of the environment, in E. Croll and D. Parkin (eds), Bush base, forest farm. Culture, environment and development, London, 39-56.

- Pollard, J., 2004: A 'movement of becoming'. Realms of existence in the early Neolithic of southern Britain, in A. Chadwick (ed.), Stories from the landscape. Archaeologies of inhabitation, Oxford (British Archaeological Reports, International Series 1238), 55-70.