PA Retrospective: Bill and Jeanne's Excellent Adventure

Abstract

It's been a very short six years since we received the PA mantel from then-editor Sandy Ervin. In that time we've seen changes in technology, from 3 1/2 inch floppy submissions to almost exclusively email attachments. Like Human Organization, PA will soon be available on the web, with even those early newsprint issues scanned into PDF files. We are pleased that during our editorship submissions to PA increased each year, especially as we began to contact participants at the annual meeting to remind them of how easily their papers could be converted into PA articles. Our acceptance rate remained high, however, since one of our editorial policies has been to work with authors to turn their submissions into well written PA pieces. We believed that this could be a mentoring process for young scholars learning how to write for a more general audience. We began our editorship by introducing some new features. Teaching Practicing made it though the first four years, and we hope that it was a useful aspect for those who use the journal in their Applied Anthropology classes. In the end, we decided to use the space for additional articles or commentaries.