The Post Hole accepts submissions from both undergraduate and postgraduate students from any academic institution. Below is information for authors, including details on how The Post Hole uses content provided by authors, the terms under which it uses that content and the ways in which it may and may not make use of it.
Please contact us at theposthole@yorksu.org with any queries relating to your submission.
Submission
Papers of any conceivable topic will be considered as long as they relate to archaeology, archaeological science, heritage or the past. Please email submissions to theposthole@yorksu.org. Submissions must be sent as a Microsoft Word file and accompanied by images as separate JPG or PNG files. It is highly recommended that the submission includes relevant, high-quality images.
Please email submissions to theposthole@yorksu.org, from your institutional email address. Contributors using personal email addresses will be asked to provide proof of association with an academic institution.
Word Limits
Articles should be between 1500 and 3000 words. This includes all text except the title, headers and footers, text within images (but image captions count) and the bibliography.
Deadlines
We aim to publish at least one issue of the journal annually, although the frequency with which articles are submitted plays a critical role in that estimation. We accept submissions at any time of the year, and so cannot guarantee the issue in which your work is published. After your article has been edited, you will receive a copy to read over and you will need to return an updated version to us within two weeks.
Ethics
Submissions with ethical implications must demonstrate ethical approval from the individual’s institution, dated to before the research took place. Any research conducted before ethical approval has been granted will not be deemed valid and cannot be published.
Some examples of research that would commonly require ethical approval are:
- Qualitative methods including interviews, surveys, and use of social media as a data source; or any approach which systematically captures special category data
- Work involving vulnerable groups such as children, the elderly and those with learning disabilities
- Research involving sensitive topics/illegal activities
Ethical approval requires evidence of ethical approval by the University of York's ethics committee (or similar institutional panel), production of information sheets and consent forms for participants. Other documents such as a copy of survey questions or a risk assessment may be required. If you think your research may fall into these categories and please contact the editor prior to submission to discuss these requirements.
For additional information on research ethics, please refer to the University of York’s Arts and Humanities Ethics Committee’s webpages: https://www.york.ac.uk/hrc/ahec/apply/. If your submission may require ethical approval, or if you have any other questions, please contact theposthole@yorksu.org and we will advise on next steps.
Regulations for Submission
All submissions must meet with the following requirements before being considered for publication. The decisions of the editors are final.
- Referencing. All sources used must be fully referenced. Please use Harvard Referencing, and avoid the use of footnotes or endnotes. For online resources that are not also catalogued publications, a URL (accompanied by the date the URL was accessed for the purposes of writing the article) are required. Articles which have not referenced using this style will be returned to the author for alteration.
Examples of some common formats are provided below, but any referencing queries should be sent directly to theposthole@yorksu.org.
Book
Balme, J. and Paterson, A. (2006) Archaeology in practice: a student guide to archaeological analysis. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Drewett, P.L. (2011) Field archaeology: an introduction, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.
Chapter in an edited book
Albarella, U. (2007) The end of the sheep age: people and animals in the Late Iron Age. In: C. Haselgrove and T. Moore (eds), The Later Iron Age in Britain and beyond. Oxford: Oxbow Books, pp. 389-402.
Journal article
Banks, W. E., d’Errico, F., Peterson, A. T., Kageyama, M., Sima, A. and Sánchez-Goñi, M. F. (2008) Neanderthals extinction by competitive exclusion. PloS ONE, 3(12), 1-8.
Hutton, R. (2011) Why does Lindow Man matter? Time and Mind, 4(2), 135-148.
Online resource
Celestin, J.M. (2012) Django Unchained: Hollywood Belittles Slavery to Make a Slick Flick. Haitian Times. Available at: http://www.haitiantimes.com/django-unchained-slavery-hollywood/ [Accessed 13 February 2014].
Lewis, S. K. (2006) Tollund Man. Available at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/tolland-man.html. [Accessed 2 May 2014]. - Plagiarism and reproduction permission. No plagiarism. It is the author or authors' responsibility to secure permission to reproduce any material where required. Although reproduced material is acceptable, it should not make up a significant proportion of the submission, must be fully referenced and it must be explicitly indicated in the text that permission has been sought and granted by the owner of the original material.
- Original material. Reproduced information (see above) withstanding, submissions must consists of original material only. "Self-plagiarism" (simply regurgitating something you have published elsewhere) is not of interest to The Post Hole. Authors are requested to respect the spirit of this condition, rather than the letter of the law.
- No slander.
- Formatting. Submissions should be formatted as follows: Arial font; size 11; titles in bold; text justified; line spacing set to 1.5. Please refrain from using page breaks or additional sections as this interferes with the final formatting of the full issue.
- Images. Authors are expected to illustrate their articles with relevant photographs, plans and graphs wherever possible. All article images must be supplied separately as high-quality JPEG or PNG format files in addition to being placed within the article document. These should ideally be no smaller than 1000px along the longest dimension to ensure visual clarity when displayed online.
Captions should also be included for all images. References and attributions must be provided where appropriate. - Links. Links to web resources and downloadable documents are acceptable. However, the full URL and date of access should be included in brackets after the link itself (see referencing examples above).
- Footnotes. We do not accept the use of footnotes or endnotes in submissions.
- Submission details. Please supply your full name as you would like it to appear, a valid email address and the address of your institution (if applicable) with all submissions.
- Submissions should be an original piece of work and NOT work from a university assessment. It is also advisable to get your academic supervisor to look over your article prior to submission.
Authors will be notified that their submission has been accepted for publication before it is published and will be contacted by the Editor-in-Chief, to approve the edited paper.
Copyright agreement
The following terms apply to any material you submit to The Post Hole for publication, including, but not limited to, text, images or multimedia material.
- By submitting material to The Post Hole you grant The Post Hole editorial team exclusive and perpetual rights to make use of that content in the following ways and as governed by the editorial standards. Here "material" refers to the text of a submission, any supplied figures/multimedia and the author(s)' biographical information.
- To publish the material in any media format as part of an issue of The Post Hole.
- To publish an abridged version in print if an article is excessively long. Where possible, this will be undertaken in consultation with the author. Articles will always be made available in full in the journal's online version, and the vast majority of articles will be published in full in print.
- To publish and archive the material in any relevant media format including, but not limited to, offline digital formats, online/web hypertext (HTML) and in print.
- To use elements of material submitted (eg. figures/multimedia) in promotional material for The Post Hole.
- To authorise the use of the submission by third parties provided the terms for third-party re-use of material published in The Post Hole are met (see above).
- Authors must agree to be bound by the all the above terms upon submitting any work for publication in The Post Hole. While these terms may change over time, work published will continue to be bound by the version of terms contemporary to that work's date of publication. Authors will always be contacted if uses of the material outside of the respective binding terms are proposed.
- Authors retain copyright over their submissions, but should note that once published an article is often ineligible for publication elsewhere: other (academic) publishers usually require sole rights to a published piece. The Post Hole does not specialise in fully referenced academic papers, but rather thoughts, comments, and observations on aspects of archaeological theory, practice and experience. You are thus free to submit any kind of content to The Post Hole, but if you plan to publish something similar in an academic journal we would suggest you write a separate, paper for us.
- Where a submission is reproduced in full (i.e. in the print or online version of The Post Hole) author(s) will always be given full credit for their work and may provide additional biographical information if they wish. Where elements of a submission (e.g. "sound bites" or parts of figures) are reproduced as part of promotional material we reserve the right to include reduced or no citational information. If materials are promoting a particular article then author(s) details will typically be included.
