Since the foundation of this journal in 1993, our editorial team largely has been stable. T. Douglas Price and I coedited the publication, Linda M. Nicholas has been the journal’s Editorial Assistant, and our Board of Associate Editors, occasionally expanded over the years to broaden thematic and geographic diversity, mostly served the journal from the outset. Over the journal’s first 27 years, only Eliot Werner, who helped spawn the publication, and Teresa Krauss, who was instrumental in helping broaden the journal’s impact, editorially represented the Publisher.

Now, in 2020, as we begin a new year and decade, some changes are on the horizon for the journal. T. Douglas Price will step down from the role of Coeditor, although he graciously has agreed to remain an Associate Editor. I thank Doug for the many contributions he has made to the success of the Journal of Archaeological Research and will miss the collegial communications that peppered our editorial collaboration across many years. At the same time, I am thrilled to announce that William Parkinson will be joining the journal as Coeditor. Bill already has injected new ideas and perspectives into our editorial meetings and plans, and I very much look forward to working with him to maintain and improve the quality of the journal’s content. Timed with this change, the Coeditors are enthused to announce the addition of a number of new Associate Editors, Jennifer Birch, Michael Galaty, Svend Hansen, Barbara Horejs, Cameron Monroe, and Johannes Müller. We also express deep appreciation to those Associate Editors who have agreed to continue in their roles. In addition, we offer great thanks to the Associate Editors who rotated off their service at the start of this year. Beginning in 2020, Linda M. Nicholas will assume the role of Managing Editor while, following Teresa Krauss’s well-deserved promotion, Stephanie Cohen will represent our publisher, Springer/Nature.

In the first issue of the journal, the editors prepared an Introductory Statement (Feinman and Price 1993, p. 1), writing that “(t)he principal aim of the Journal of Archaeological Research is to address the realities of inevitable specialization in archaeology that has come about through geometric expansion in the number of practitioners and the even more accelerated growth in the published literature.” Through the solicitation and ultimate publication of broad synthetic works that synthesized and defined debates for key archaeological topics, themes, methods, and regions, the goal of the journal’s editors was to encourage comparative and synthetic efforts that both marshaled volumes of data and harnessed those findings toward theoretical conceptualization, testing, and advance. The authors who prepared and published in JARE collectively helped us work toward those aims, and the journal’s impact grew over time. Now, 27 years later, we suspect that globally the challenges outlined years back are both more severe today and more in need of remedies than was the case almost three decades ago as the pace of data collection accelerates, while theoretical advances stall.

Our editorial team remains committed to addressing the original aims and to the continued encouragement and publication of comprehensive, problem-focused manuscripts that have been the mainstay of the Journal of Archaeological Research for 27 years. We will continue the practice of soliciting such papers as we have done since JARE’s beginning, but we also invite suggestions of topics and self-solicitations by authors who have the intent to craft such overviews. We urge you to communicate with our editorial team early during the manuscript preparation process to ensure that our efforts work toward manuscripts that will be of mutual interest.

At the same time, we are searching for new kinds of essays in accord with the mission of the journal. Specifically, we soon plan to explore the inclusion of debate-defining position statements on key issues in the spirit of Science’s Perspective pieces or Nature’s News and Views, but the essays in JARE would be longer than those works, in the range of 10,000–15,000 words (all-inclusive). Such pieces might either appear individually or sometimes in tandem or sequence across several issues of the journal as a basis to underpin or call attention to disciplinary debates or divergent perspectives on broadly relevant themes in archaeology. If you would like to propose topics or wish to write an essay on a theme of consequence, please contact us. The editorial team remains committed to sharpening debate and fostering synthesis and comparison in archaeology to enhance the relevance of the human histories that we are able to elicit through archaeology, but now through more pointed essays in addition to the more standard comprehensive fare of the Journal of Archaeological Research.