About Jordan Journal for History and Archaeology

Jordan Journal for History and Archaeology — A Complete Profile

At a Glance

Identity and Overview

The Jordan Journal for History and Archaeology — JJHA in its own pages and citations — is the University of Jordan's refereed research journal for history and archaeology. The university's Deanship of Academic Research describes it as an international academic journal that publishes refereed articles specialising in history and archaeology, supported by the Scientific Research Support Fund and by the University of Jordan in Amman, and publishing work by Jordanian and international researchers in Arabic and English three times a year, in February, June and October. Its home is the university's journals platform at jjournals.ju.edu.jo, where it sits among the university's family of scientific journals, and its articles carry DOIs under the journal code jjha — citation records show the forms 10.54134/jjha and 10.35516/jjha across its recent volumes. The journal is identified by the single ISSN 1996-9546, which appears on this Journals World record and on the OpenAlex source record resolved from that ISSN (S4306515139), which places the journal in Jordan and records works in the source from 2010 onward.

The journal's position is best understood from its setting. Jordan holds one of the densest archaeological landscapes on earth — Petra and the Nabataean world, the Roman and Byzantine cities of the Decapolis, Umayyad desert palaces, Crusader and Mamluk castles, and a continuous documentary history in Arabic from the early Islamic centuries to the Ottoman and modern periods. A national university journal of history and archaeology in Amman is therefore not a marginal outlet: it is one of the standing venues in which that landscape is excavated, documented and argued about, by the scholars who work in it and by the international researchers who study Jordan from abroad. JJHA's pages move between those two readerships, in Arabic and in English, and that bilingual, locally rooted and internationally addressed character is the journal's defining feature.

This profile is anchored to sources fetched directly for this record. The stored Journals World record supplied the title, the slug, the ISSN, the Jordanian origin, a coverage span of 2019 to 2025 in Scopus-derived data and an h-index figure of 3. The University of Jordan's own Deanship of Academic Research page and journals portal supplied the journal's description, support, languages, frequency, review practice and indexing list. OpenAlex supplied the bibliometric picture in the metrics section. Where the sources stop — for example, on publication fees — this profile says so plainly rather than filling the gap.

History and Institutional Setting

JJHA belongs to the University of Jordan's stable of scientific journals, issued under the university's Deanship of Academic Research with the backing of Jordan's Scientific Research Support Fund, the national fund attached to the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. That dual support — a flagship public university and a national research fund — is the standard Jordanian model for serious scholarly periodicals, and it explains both the journal's durability and its form: an editorial office inside the university, anonymous refereeing by specialists, and publication through the university's own open platform rather than through a commercial house.

The journal's volume numbering tells its chronological story in outline. Citation records show volume 16, number 3 in 2022, volume 17, number 3 in 2023 and volume 18, number 2 carrying a study published from a university research project of 2022–2024 — an annual volume rhythm that reaches back into the late 2000s. OpenAlex's coverage of the source begins with works from 2010, and the Scopus-derived span in this directory covers 2019 to 2025; both are database windows onto a run that the volume numbers show to be longer. The honest summary, and the one this profile gives, is of a journal well into its second decade by the mid-2020s, publishing three substantial issues a year of refereed history and archaeology, and still appearing on schedule in the university's portal in 2025 — its platform feed shows editorial activity dated June 2025.

Two features of the journal's institutional life deserve emphasis. The first is its ethics framework: the Deanship's description records that articles are evaluated by procedures established by the journal and that it follows COPE publishing ethics rules — the Committee on Publication Ethics standards that govern questions of authorship, plagiarism, duplicate submission and correction in serious journals worldwide. The second is its copyright practice, stated on the journal's own privacy page: the journal retains copyright in the papers it publishes, and an author who wishes to republish a paper elsewhere needs the written permission of the editor-in-chief. Authors used to the author-retains-copyright model of commercial open access should note that difference before they submit, not after.

Scope and Subjects

The journal's remit, in the university's words, is original topics of scientific and practical value concerned with history and archaeology, and its commitment is to original, high-quality scholarly research that provides solid insights into all aspects of those two disciplines. In practice the contents define a Levantine and Arab-Islamic centre of gravity inside a general history-and-archaeology brief. Recent and representative work in its pages includes a study of food and its etiquette in the Mamluk period, built from the social history of the kitchen, its workers, its equipment and the Mamluk state's control of food; a study of the UNESCO contribution to safeguarding and preserving Jordan's cultural heritage; a survey of teaching and researching the history and archaeology of Jordan during the Bronze and Iron Ages; and a methodological project, published across the journal, that builds a framework for measuring social conditions and life expectancy from Arabic biographical dictionaries, applied to seventh-century-AH Damascus. That spread — material culture and social history, heritage policy, Bronze Age archaeology, and quantitative method applied to classical Arabic sources — is a fair map of what the journal publishes.

OpenAlex's topic classification of the source, fetched for this profile, points the same way: archaeology and historical studies, Islamic studies and history, medieval history and the Crusades, Ottoman history and society, and historical Turkish studies are its leading topics. A manuscript for JJHA should therefore be prepared to meet readers who know the region's sources at first hand — Arabic chronicles and biographical dictionaries, Ottoman records, excavation reports, inscriptions and museum collections — and who will judge a paper by its handling of that evidence. The journal also publishes the archaeology of Jordan itself, period by period, so field reports, site studies and object studies from Jordanian excavations sit naturally in its pages beside documentary and historiographical work from the wider region.

Language is part of the scope. The university's portal states that manuscripts are published mainly in Arabic or English, and that other languages approved by the editorial board may be considered as well. For the large community of Arab historians and archaeologists, an Arabic-language refereed journal indexed in Scopus is a significant piece of scholarly infrastructure; for international scholars of Jordan, the English-language stream is the door into the same conversation. Authors should write in the language in which they can be most precise, and should expect the journal's abstracts and presentation to carry their work across to the other language's readers.

Peer Review and How to Submit

The university's descriptions are explicit about the review model: research manuscripts presented for publishing are anonymously and blindly refereed, and submitted papers are evaluated anonymously by specialists in their field. That is double-anonymous review in the standard form — the referees do not know the author's identity and the author does not learn the referees' — applied by an editorial board that works to the COPE ethics framework noted above. Submission is made through the journal's site on the University of Jordan journals platform, jjournals.ju.edu.jo, where the journal's current issue, archive, author guidance and contact addresses are published; the platform lists the journal's editorial email addresses for correspondence.

The sources fetched for this profile do not publish an article processing charge or other author fee for JJHA, and they do not publish a promised review timeline. This profile therefore records both points honestly: fees could not be verified from the journal's published pages consulted here, and authors who need cost or timing certainty — for a grant report, a promotion file or a thesis deadline — should ask the editorial office directly through the platform before submitting. What the record does support is the journal's regularity: three issues a year, in February, June and October, on the university's own schedule, which gives accepted authors a predictable path into a numbered issue.

Metrics and Indexing

The University of Jordan's Deanship page states the journal's indexing plainly: JJHA is indexed in Scopus, in Ulrich's Periodicals Directory, in Google Scholar and in EBSCO. Scopus is the consequential entry in that list — it is the database on which Arab universities' promotion and evaluation systems most heavily rely, and it is what makes an Arabic-and-English journal from Amman countable in those systems. OpenAlex, in the source record S4306515139 resolved from the journal's ISSN and fetched for this profile, records 383 works and 105 citations for the journal, with an h-index of 5 and coverage from 2010 to 2025. The h-index of 3 carried in the stored directory record is a snapshot from Scopus-derived data; a secondary summary of Scopus data likewise places the journal in the third quartile of its Scopus categories. Each figure should be quoted with its source, and none of them should be read as the journal's worth: with 383 counted works across a decade and a half, JJHA is a mid-sized regional journal whose citation totals are held down by the simple facts that much of its readership cites in Arabic, in books and in Arabic-language journals that the international databases count thinly.

For an author weighing the journal, the metrics that matter are therefore the structural ones. The journal is in Scopus and still being published on schedule by a national university with national fund support; it is read by the community that excavates, curates and teaches Jordan's past; and its articles carry DOIs and appear in full text on an open platform, so a piece published there can be found, read and cited by anyone with an internet connection, in Amman, in Irbid or in Indiana. In heritage and regional-history fields, where the scholarly community that must see a result is small and specific, that combination is worth more than a larger journal's raw citation count.

Reading the Archive

The journal's archive, held on the university's platform, rewards reading by theme as much as by chronology. A reader who follows the heritage thread will find the journal returning repeatedly to the question of what Jordan does with its past: the study of the UNESCO contribution to safeguarding Jordan's cultural heritage, in volume 16, treats the country's World Heritage inscriptions and conservation practice as a subject of critical history rather than celebration, and it sits in the archive beside site-based and period-based archaeology that supplies the evidence such policy discussion needs. A reader who follows the social-history thread will find the Mamluk food study in the same volumes: a reconstruction of cooking, kitchen work, equipment and state control of food in the Mamluk period that shows how far the journal's history writing reaches beyond rulers and battles into the material life of households. And a reader interested in method will find the biographical-dictionary project, in which a University of Jordan research group built and tested a framework for extracting social statistics — life expectancy, mortality, causes of death — from the great Arabic biographical collections, applied to Damascus at the end of the Ayyubid period and the start of the Mamluk. Together these pieces show the journal's range in a single sweep: field archaeology and heritage, social and material history, and new quantitative method applied to the classical Arabic sources.

The Bronze and Iron Age survey by Zeidan Kafafi, in volume 17, makes a different kind of point about the journal's role. Kafafi is one of the senior figures of Jordanian archaeology, and his subject — how the history and archaeology of Jordan in those periods is taught and researched — is the discipline reflecting on itself, in its own national journal, for the benefit of the students and younger scholars who will carry it forward. Journals earn their place in a scholarly ecosystem by carrying exactly this kind of writing alongside research reports: the stock-taking, the teaching reflection and the agenda-setting that a commercial journal, organised around novelty alone, has less room for. That JJHA carries such pieces, in English, where the international field can read them, is part of how Jordanian archaeology speaks to the wider discipline and not only to itself.

Similar Journals

Readers of JJHA work in a well-defined neighbourhood of journals. Within this directory, Syria — the French-led journal of the archaeology, art and history of the Semitic Near East, published since 1920 — is the senior regional counterpart for the ancient and early Islamic periods, and Paléorient serves the prehistory and protohistory of Southwest Asia from its Paris base. The Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies carries the modern history and politics of the southern Levant from Edinburgh University Press, and the university's own sister titles in the University of Jordan journals family cover the neighbouring humanities and social sciences from the same Amman platform. An author with a Jordanian excavation report, a Mamluk documentary study or an Ottoman Levant paper will usually be choosing among exactly these venues, by period, by language and by the audience — regional, European or Anglophone — that the work most needs to reach.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of the Jordan Journal for History and Archaeology?
1996-9546, the ISSN given by this directory record and by OpenAlex.

Who publishes the Jordan Journal for History and Archaeology?
The University of Jordan, Amman, through its Deanship of Academic Research journals programme, supported by the Scientific Research Support Fund. The bare number “8628” in the old directory field was a garbled code, not a publisher.

How often does it appear?
Three times a year — February, June and October — according to the University of Jordan's Deanship of Academic Research.

In which languages does it publish?
Mainly Arabic and English; the university's portal adds that other languages approved by the editorial board may be considered.

Is the journal peer-reviewed?
Yes. The university records that manuscripts are anonymously and blindly refereed by specialists, and that the journal follows COPE publishing ethics rules.

Where is it indexed?
In Scopus, Ulrich's Periodicals Directory, Google Scholar and EBSCO, according to the University of Jordan's Deanship of Academic Research.

What are its metrics?
OpenAlex (source S4306515139, at checking time): 383 works, 105 citations, h-index 5. The stored directory record carries a Scopus-derived h-index of 3. Quote each figure with its source.

Does it charge authors a fee?
No fee could be verified from the journal's published pages consulted for this profile; ask the editorial office through the journals platform before submitting if cost certainty is required.

Sources and Verification

This profile was built from: the live Journals World record for this post (title, slug, ISSN, Jordanian origin, coverage span and stored h-index); the University of Jordan Deanship of Academic Research page for the journal (its description, its support by the Scientific Research Support Fund and the university, its three-issues-a-year pattern in February, June and October, its indexing in Scopus, Ulrich's, Google Scholar and EBSCO, and its COPE ethics commitment); the University of Jordan journals portal listing (its refereed character, its Arabic-and-English publication with other languages possible, and its anonymous specialist evaluation); the journal's own platform pages and feed at jjournals.ju.edu.jo (its OJS platform, editorial contacts, 2025 activity and its copyright and privacy statement); citation records for its recent articles (volumes 16–18 across 2022–2024, and DOIs under the jjha code); a University of Jordan research-group record of a study published in volume 18, number 2; and the OpenAlex source record S4306515139, resolved through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint (works, citations, h-index, country and coverage years), fetched directly. The DOAJ search API returned an HTTP 502 error during this batch, so this profile makes no claim about a DOAJ listing. Figures are reported as they stood at checking time and are attributed to their sources in the text.