Revista do Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia

About Revista do Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia

Revista do Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia

The Revista do Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia (abbreviated Rev. Mus. Arqueol. Etnol., and often shortened to RevMAE) is a peer-reviewed, open-access academic journal of archaeology, ethnology and museology published by the Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia (MAE) of the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil. Founded in 1991, it is one of the longest-running Brazilian journals in its field and the flagship publication of one of Latin America's most important archaeology and ethnology museums. The journal appears twice a year, in June and November, publishes original work in Portuguese, Spanish, English, French and Italian, charges no publication fees, and makes its complete archive — every issue since 1991, digitised in 2016 — freely readable on the Portal de Revistas USP, the University of São Paulo's journal platform. Its print ISSN is 0103-9709 and its online ISSN is 2448-1750, the two linked under ISSN-L 0103-9709. Articles carry DOIs under the prefix 10.11606, and the journal is indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

History: A Journal Born from a Merger

The journal's own published history, set out on its official site, traces its origin to an institutional restructuring at the University of São Paulo. In 1991 the new Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia began publishing the Revista do Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia as the successor to the periodicals of the bodies that had been brought together in the museum's formation: Dédalo, the Revista de Pré-História (Journal of Prehistory, of the Institute of Prehistory) and the Revista do Museu Paulista (Journal of the Paulista Museum). The new title thus inherited the scholarly lineage of three earlier São Paulo publications in archaeology, prehistory and ethnology, some of them reaching back deep into the twentieth century, and unified them in a single journal attached to the merged museum.

For its first two decades the Revista was a print publication; institutional histories of the museum record that between 1991 and 2011 it appeared regularly in print with annual periodicity, before moving to a twice-yearly electronic existence. The turning point came in 2016, when — as the journal records — it became an electronic, semiannual journal, and its entire printed backfile was digitised and released in open access through the Portal de Revistas USP. The Directory of Open Access Journals likewise dates the journal's open-access publishing from 2016. That single decision transformed the journal's reach: a museum periodical that had circulated mainly through Brazilian university libraries and exchange agreements became freely readable worldwide, at the moment when Brazilian archaeology and museum studies were attracting growing international attention. Publication has continued without interruption into the present: the current issue at the time of writing is volume 46 (2026), a thematic dossier, discussed below, on contacts and networks in the Mediterranean world.

The Publisher: The Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia, USP

The Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia is a museum and research unit of the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil's largest public research university. The museum holds extensive archaeological and ethnographic collections — Brazilian prehistoric and historic archaeology, ethnographic collections from Indigenous peoples of Brazil and elsewhere, and classical and Mediterranean material — and combines curatorial work with graduate teaching, field research and public exhibitions. Its journal is therefore not a detached commercial title but the research organ of a working museum: the scholarship it publishes grows out of the same institutional world of excavations, collections documentation, laboratory analysis and exhibition-making that the museum itself pursues.

This institutional anchoring shapes the journal's character in several ways. Its editorial standards are those of a university museum embedded in USP's graduate system, including a formal editorial and scientific council structure. Its subject emphases mirror the museum's research strengths. And its publishing economics are those of a publicly funded university: the journal is free to read and free to publish in, a model the DOAJ record confirms — there are no article processing charges or other publication fees, authors retain unrestricted copyright, and articles are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal exists, in its own statement of purpose, to disseminate excellent scientific research in archaeology, ethnology and museology. Its geographic emphasis falls on Africa, the Americas (with South America at the centre), the Mediterranean and the Middle East — a spread that maps directly onto the MAE's collections and research programmes, from Amazonian and Brazilian archaeology to classical archaeology of the Greek and Roman worlds. Within that frame, the journal welcomes work across the full methodological range of the disciplines: excavation and survey reports, material culture studies, bioarchaeology and archaeometry in their archaeological settings, ethnographic research, studies of museum collections and their histories, heritage and cultural property questions, and theoretical and historiographical reflection on the disciplines themselves.

A distinctive and growing strand is the journal's engagement with Indigenous heritage and the politics of museum collections. Published articles have examined, for example, Amerindian cultural heritage held in ethnographic collections — the questions of ownership, rights, identity and recognition that such holdings raise, and the role of documentation and access in renewing intercultural dialogue between museums and the communities whose heritage they hold. Work of this kind, appearing alongside classical archaeology and Brazilian prehistory, is characteristic of the journal's breadth: few venues place Amazonian ethnology, Mediterranean archaeology and critical museology between the same covers as a matter of editorial policy.

The dossier format is central to how the journal organises debate. Thematic dossiers may appear as separate publications or within an issue's body, and recent issues illustrate the range: volume 46 (2026) is devoted to "Contacts and networks in the Mediterranean: the Northern Aegean from local, regional and global perspectives", presenting post-processual, materiality-centred studies of interaction between Greek foundations and local peoples in the northern Aegean, with contacts traced back to the Bronze Age among Greek, Phoenician and local groups. A journal whose dossiers move from the fifth-century BCE Aegean to contemporary Amazonian heritage politics is deliberately positioning itself at the intersection of regional specialisation and world archaeology.

Article Types and Languages

The journal publishes several distinct forms of contribution, organised in named sections (Artigos, Resenhas, Notas, Entrevistas, Dossiês):

• Articles — original research results, methodological developments, and extensive bibliographic or theoretical reviews.
• Reviews (resenhas) — critical reviews of books, theses, dissertations and other scholarly productions of academic relevance.
• Notes — preliminary and partial results of original research still in progress.
• Interviews — conversations with recognised professionals in archaeology, ethnology and museology.
• Dossiers — guest-organised thematic collections, published separately or within an issue.

Submissions are received in continuous flow rather than against fixed deadlines, and accepted articles and notes may be released ahead of print before the completed issue appears, so that approved work becomes citable without waiting for the June or November issue to close. Manuscripts are accepted in Portuguese, Spanish, English, French and Italian — a multilingual policy that reflects the journal's position between the Lusophone, Hispanophone and international scholarly worlds, and that distinguishes it from Brazilian journals that publish only in Portuguese and English.

Peer Review and Editorial Standards

Evaluation at the Revista do Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia follows a documented double-blind model. Each submitted article is assessed by at least two external reviewers chosen for their specialism or affinity with the manuscript's subject; reviewers must declare conflicts of interest to the editors and are expected to decline work they feel unqualified to judge. Reviewers work to a twenty-calendar-day deadline, extendable at the editorial committee's discretion, and may recommend rejection, acceptance conditional on revision, or revision with a further round of re-review of the amended text — revised manuscripts go back for re-evaluation of the changes. The journal's stated duties of editors, reviewers and authors track the mainstream international ethics framework: editors decide without regard to authors' race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, ethnic origin, nationality or political philosophy; manuscripts under review are confidential; and misconduct — plagiarism, citation manipulation, data falsification or fabrication, missing permissions, discrimination — is referred to the editorial committee and, where necessary, escalated within the university. Since 2020, similarity screening has been performed with Turnitin, with access provided by USP's library and digital collections agency.

The journal has also published a formal position on artificial intelligence in submissions, developed in line with discussions in the Brazilian association of university publishers (ABEU) and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE): chatbots cannot be listed as authors, generative tools must not be used to compose the text of a submitted article, and any supporting use of such tools — for systematising material, producing images or graphics, or collecting and analysing data — must be transparently disclosed in the manuscript, including the tool used and how it was applied. For a humanities journal to codify these rules in its public editorial policy places it among the more formally governed titles in its field.

Publication Model, Access and Indexing

The journal is a diamond open-access title in practical terms: readers pay nothing, authors pay nothing, and the content is financed as part of the public university's scholarly infrastructure. The DOAJ record for the online ISSN confirms no publication fees, an average of about twelve weeks from submission to publication, plagiarism checking, DOI assignment, a deposit relationship with Diadorim (the Brazilian directory of journal editorial policies, in which the journal's policies are also registered), and the CC BY-NC-ND licence under which authors retain unrestricted copyright and publishing rights. Readers may read, download, copy, distribute, print, search and link to full texts without charge, in line with the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition the journal explicitly adopts.

Bibliographic identity is doubly anchored. The print ISSN 0103-9709 dates from the journal's foundation era and remains the linking ISSN; the online ISSN 2448-1750 was registered for the electronic edition, with the ISSN Portal record (last modified in June 2023) confirming semiannual frequency, São Paulo as place of publication, the Universidade de São Paulo's Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia as publisher, Portuguese as the principal language and subject classification under archaeology and cultural anthropology/ethnography. The JournalsWorld record for this post lists exactly these two ISSNs and the Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia as publisher, in agreement with the international register and the journal's own site. Crossref-matched recent articles on the JournalsWorld page — including 2025 articles on contemporary artistic poetics and on artistic trajectories from Dakar, appearing under the journal's DOI pattern 10.11606/issn.2448-1750.revmae — confirm that the current electronic series is active and depositing standard metadata.

The Museum Behind the Journal

Understanding the journal requires a word about the institution whose name it carries. The Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia at USP was formed by bringing together older São Paulo collections and research bodies — the former museum of archaeology and ethnology, the Institute of Prehistory and the Paulista Museum's archaeology and ethnology holdings — and it operates simultaneously as a collections-holding museum, a research centre and a teaching unit. An institutional account of the museum describes how, alongside research, it built a public-facing programme from the early 1990s: a long-term exhibition at its headquarters opened in 1995, a continuing series of temporary exhibitions in São Paulo and other Brazilian cities, and an educational service running dissemination activities for schools and the general public. Publications were part of that mission from the start: the journal founded in 1991 sits within a broader publishing activity that supports the museum's research and outreach, and its pages remain the principal channel through which the museum's scholarly production — and that of the Brazilian and international researchers connected to it — reaches the academic community.

The museum's research profile explains the journal's otherwise unusual geographic range. A single issue may move between Amazonian ethnography, Brazilian prehistoric archaeology and the classical Mediterranean because the museum itself works on all three fronts: Brazilian archaeology and ethnology are its home territory, while its classical collections and its researchers' fieldwork sustain a genuine Mediterranean and Middle Eastern strand, and African material enters through both the ethnographic collections and the comparative study of the African diaspora in Brazil. The 2026 dossier on the northern Aegean — Greek foundations, Phoenician contacts and local peoples read through material culture — is not an exotic departure for the journal but an expression of one of its founding emphases, just as its articles on Indigenous heritage in museum collections express another. Few archaeology journals anywhere are structurally required, by their publisher's identity, to hold these worlds together; that requirement is the Revista's defining editorial fact.

How the Journal Is Organised and Read

Each issue is built from the journal's named sections — articles (ART), reviews (RES), notes (NOT), interviews (ENT) and dossiers (DOS) — and the mixture is deliberate. The research article carries the journal's scientific weight, but the review section keeps readers current with books, theses and dissertations in fast-moving fields; the notes section gives fieldwork and laboratory projects a citable outlet for preliminary results years before a final monograph; and the interviews preserve the voices of senior figures in archaeology, ethnology and museology, a genre of disciplinary memory that conventional research journals rarely accommodate. Dossiers, proposed around a unifying problem, bind several contributions into a single scholarly conversation and may be published within an ordinary issue or as a standalone number. Readers navigating the digitised archive on the Portal de Revistas USP can move freely across all of this material from 1991 forward, and the ahead-of-print mechanism means that the newest accepted articles and notes are readable, and citable, before the June or November issue that will contain them has closed.

Classification data underline the journal's disciplinary placement. The ISSN record classifies it under UDC 902 (archaeology) and 39 (cultural anthropology, ethnography, customs and traditions), while the DOAJ record assigns the Library of Congress subjects archaeology (auxiliary sciences of history) and ethnology/social and cultural anthropology, with the keywords archaeology, ethnology, museology, anthropology, heritage and ancient history. That double placement — archaeology first, anthropology and heritage alongside — accurately describes a journal in which an Aegean excavation report, an ethnography of Amazonian collections and a museological policy study are all core content rather than boundary cases.

Audience and Significance

The journal's readership spans archaeologists, anthropologists and ethnologists, museologists and heritage professionals, and historians of the ancient world, in Brazil first of all but increasingly across Latin America, Iberia and the wider field of world archaeology. Within Brazil it occupies a particular niche: it is the journal of one of the country's principal research museums, published by the university that anchors Brazilian postgraduate training in archaeology, and its three decades of continuous publication — from print successor of the Museu Paulista's journal to a multilingual, dossier-driven electronic title — make its archive a record of how Brazilian archaeology and ethnology have developed since 1991. The complete digitised backfile means that this record is genuinely usable: a researcher can move from a 1990s excavation report to the 2026 Aegean dossier in a single open archive. The journal's registration in the Diadorim directory of Brazilian journal editorial policies additionally places its governance within the national framework through which Brazilian editors declare and standardise their practices.

For authors, the journal offers a combination that is increasingly rare: a long-established, university-published venue with formal peer review and ethics governance, no charges at any stage, retention of copyright, multilingual publication including English, and subjects that range from Brazilian Indigenous heritage to Mediterranean antiquity. Submission is made through the journal's page on the Portal de Revistas USP, where the current author guidelines, the editorial policy in full and the complete archive are publicly posted, so an author can verify every claim made in this profile against the journal's own documents before submitting. Its constraints are equally clear: semiannual frequency means issues close on a June/November rhythm even with continuous submission and ahead-of-print release, and the CC BY-NC-ND licence is more restrictive than the CC BY terms some funders prefer. Neither qualification detracts from the journal's standing as one of the reference publications of Brazilian archaeology, ethnology and museology, and the natural first port of call for readers seeking the research output of the Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia of the Universidade de São Paulo.