About 30 years ago, in the then rather small community that was maritime archaeology, there was often discussion about whether channelling the results of maritime archaeological research through specialist journals or conferences and their proceedings was the right strategy. Surely, it was argued by some, this just perpetuated our insularity and separation from the wider discipline? In order to break out of being a small, liminal, niche interest, we needed to get maritime research papers into a wider selection of journals or present them at ‘land’ archaeological conferences, and even then not allow them to be bundled in ‘maritime’ sessions but mixed into the wider thematic running order. This, it was thought, would raise the subject’s profile across the piece. The opposite view was that a growing research area would inevitably do that in any case but also needed its own outlets to create critical mass and focus. I cannot remember the last time I heard this discussion and although I once subscribed to the first view, it is the latter that seems to have been proved correct. As the sector has gradually expanded, maritime research has indeed found its way into an increasingly wide variety of outlets but at the same time, specialist publications have also had their role. It was the belief that we needed another that led to the birth of this journal. In 2006 the Journal of Maritime Archaeology was launched in the hope that it would provide a vehicle for the publication of maritime research that was either not being published at all (the fate of many a conference paper) or which attracted little attention due to its relative isolation in the literature. We (the original Editorial Board) also defined an editorial policy that aimed to complement the few established outlets of maritime publication so as to avoid ‘more of the same’, as well as explicitly seek out and solicit papers on aspects of the subject that we felt were not prominent enough in the literature. These included interdisciplinary research, prehistory, theory and a general emphasis on the interpretative end of the archaeological trajectory rather than, or at least as well as, the