Editorial

Abstract

Welcome to the new issue of the Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage. So much is happening right now, and we are excited to announce an issue full of insightful and thought-provoking reflections and papers. First, however, we need to share some news about both staff and journal management. First, Suzie and Carol are delighted to welcome Sarah De Nardi as a new Co-Editor of JCAH. Sarah’s commitment to the ethics of collaboration and decolonization has meshed well with JCAH since our beginning – indeed, her contribution to our inaugural issue arguably set the tone for the journal’s approach since then, and she has been a terrific Assistant Editor for several years as well. Welcome, Sarah! Our next news is sad, however –it is with heavy hearts that Carol and Sarah announce the impending departure of Founding Co-editor Suzie Thomas from the editorial helm, as of the end of 2019. We are very sad to see Suzie go – she has been the major force behind the journal from the initial proposal that led to its creation. We are incredibly proud of Suzie’s many accomplishments, even though they are understandably pulling her away from the heavy workload that journal leadership requires. Although she will step away from her Co-Editor role soon, she will join the Editorial Board and continue to have an important role in JCAH development. In a final piece of sad news, we are also reluctantly bidding farewell to our Assistant Editor, Kaeleigh Herstad. We are deeply indebted to Kaeleigh for her energy, enthusiasm and professionalism, as well as her excellent editorial skills, and we will miss her. Happily, however, she too will be joining our Editorial Board. We wish Suzie and Kaeleigh the best in their future endeavours! Finally, especially with these changes at the helm, we are extremely grateful that team members John Jameson, James Gibb, Marta Lorenzon, and Rick Bonnie will remain as Assistant Editors. We also have news about a technical aspect of journal management which may be in place by the time you read these words. We are soon transitioning to using our publisher’s automated ‘Editorial Manager’ (EM) system for journal submissions. This system, used by many international journals, will, we hope, help us to manage our increasingly robust submission rate, and enable us to move papers through the pipeline more efficiently than is possible with the current manual system. This transition will be challenging, in part because of the deeply collaborative nature of our editorauthor interactions, driven in turn by our mandate to include many varied voices in our pages. We are determined to marry our particular hands-on approach with an automated computer submission system, and our publisher is patiently helping us figure out how we can ‘have it both ways’! We can now move on to this final issue of 2019, which includes a selection of papers and reflections that explore the spectrum of humanity and compassion through the lens of archaeological and historical inquiry. First, we have a rich array of contributions expertly curated by Kaeleigh and her colleague Daniel Trepal, as Guest Editors of a ‘Special Series’ of three papers entitled ‘Post-industrial Landscapes, Communities, and Heritage’. They have provided detailed introductions in their ‘Guest Editor’s Preface’, but here is a glimpse. In ‘Heritage making through community archaeology and the spatial humanities’, by Dan Trepal Sarah Fayen Scarlett and Don Lafreniere, the authors construct a powerful assemblage of theory and practice that bridges geographical and heritage sensibilities through the prism of community engagement and outreach. In ‘Shaken apart: Community archaeology in a post-disaster city’ by Katharine Watson & Jessie Garland, we step into the fragile materialities of a place that has been damaged by natural disaster