Opening the Palace

Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’m currently in Albuquerque visiting my mom, and while I’m here I figured I read up on the archaeology of the Rio Grande Valley and do some posts on it. I’ve read some interesting articles from the journals I have access to, and I’ll have some substantive posts soon based on that, but one thing that has limited me so far is that so much of the early archaeological literature on this region was published in El Palacio, the magazine of the Museum of New Mexico (named after the Palace of the Governors, the original location of the museum). Today this is basically a glossy (but serious and substantive) magazine aimed at a popular audience, but in its first few decades it functioned more like a scholarly journal and was the primary venue for publication of research on the archaeology, anthropology, and history of northern New Mexico.

The problem with this for someone like me had been that, unlike other major publication venues for this kind of research that have evolved into (or been created as) peer-reviewed scholarly journals, El Palacio is not included in any of the major academic databases, and it could only be found on paper in libraries that happened to subscribe to it. This made it effectively impossible for me to access it, given geographic and time constraints, so I was at a distinct disadvantage in understanding the archaeology of this region.

That’s all changed, however. I discovered today that, apparently as part of the commemoration of the magazine’s centennial this year, El Palacio has put its entire archive online. The interface is a little clunky, and it looks like it’s only possible to download pdfs of entire issues rather than individual articles, but this is still a fantastic resource that has suddenly become vastly more accessible. Given my general interest in open access publishing and making data broadly available, I figured it was worth doing a post to point this out. I’ll have some more posts on the actual archaeology of the northern Rio Grande soon.