This article attempts to bring Indigenous voices into the ongoing conversation about collecting practices and the archaeological record. The issue editors solicited responses to open-ended questions about those subjects from members of their own and issue contributors' networks of Indigenous collaborators and contacts. Alan D. Kelley (Deputy Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska), Angela J. Neller (Curator, Wanapum Heritage Center, Washington), and Carlton Shield Chief Gover (PhD student in archaeology at the University of Colorado and member of the Skiri Band of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma) offered the answers reported here. We do not pretend to reflect the innumerable and highly varied Indigenous perspectives on the collection of their ancestors' material culture, but we do hope to plant the seeds of a more inclusive conversation than has been the norm in archaeology.

The 2018 SAA statement encouraging collaboration between archaeologists and “responsible and responsive stewards” included recommendations epitomizing decades of established practice at the University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist (OSA), a research center housing the State Archaeological Repository of Iowa. At the time the SAA statement was published, OSA staff were actively implementing a grant supporting transfer to the State Repository of the John and Phil Palmquist Archaeological Collection. This grant was designed to provide hands-on research experience for undergraduate students interested in archaeology and collections management while recording improved site locational data and artifact specific documentation, including on relatively rare (for the area) red pipestone artifacts. Although modest by some standards, the Palmquist Collection includes 860 artifacts from 26 locations recorded through 40 years of surface survey by the family in a portion of Iowa that is rarely the focus of professional archaeologists. This article provides a case study of responsible archaeological practice implementing SAA recommendations, including treating collector-collaborators with respect, encouraging collector assistance in the recording of finds, capturing research data from a private collection, and facilitating curation of privately owned materials. We include brief consideration of the impact of the Palmquist Collection on the understanding of southwestern Iowa archaeology.

There is a lack of broad representation in archaeology generally, and in a specialized field such as underwater archaeology, this issue is only exacerbated. Underwater archaeological sites are often “out of sight, out of mind,“” creating a general lack of awareness of underwater cultural heritage and career prospects in many communities. Coupled with a lack of education and the additional demands of working in a submerged environment (e.g., scuba diving), there is a striking lack of diversity in underwater archaeology. Overall, underwater archaeologists are a largely homogeneous group, particularly along the lines of race and wealth—categories that often overlap. In the context of asking broader questions such as “Why are there so few underwater archaeologists of color?” and “How can we do better?” this article outlines the barriers to inclusivity writ large in underwater archaeology and provides solutions for increasing diversity and accessibility in the field, including specific opportunities and resources for underrepresented groups to “get their feet wet.”

The objective of this article is to share how professional archaeologists can leverage their knowledge and influence to develop collectors and amateur archaeologists into responsible and responsive stewards (RRS). This approach furthers the primary purposes of the National Historic Preservation Act as well as the ethics of the Society for American Archaeology. I share my own journey about finding artifacts in the Texas Panhandle, yearning to understand more about them, and how a poster in a gas station led me to visiting a local Stone Age Fair where I met a professional archaeologist. This archaeologist mentor was willing to answer my questions and guide me to greater understanding of archaeological ethics and practice, which prompted me to document everything I had found. In turn, I have shared my experience with many other nonprofessionals. Archaeologist mentors can have great influence if they are willing to meet collectors and amateur archaeologists on their level. Ultimately, collectors and archaeologists share a love of artifacts and a passion for the history behind them.

In locales where much of the archaeological record has been destroyed or heavily impacted by pothunting and development, engaging with collector informants—including those who legally excavated sites on private property in the 1980s—can help fill crucial information gaps. However, such collaboration can pose ethical, and potentially legal, challenges. In this article, I outline research goals and results from a survey project in southeast Arizona's York-Duncan Valley, discuss the legal and ethical implications involved in working with former pothunters, and offer a critical evaluation of project practice. Finally, I offer a set of recommendations for those considering similar collaborations. I argue that the rejection of individuals who are knowledgeable about damaged or destroyed archaeological sites effectively silences the sites forever. Data acquired from former pothunters led to the identification and recording of 25 of 87 archaeological sites in the York-Duncan Valley. These individuals also served as interlocutors with others in the local community, helping us foster the trusted relationships necessary to promote site preservation on private property. A long-term engagement strategy that incorporates an assessment determining whether collector informants are responsible or responsive and that nurtures community involvement in preserving local archaeology offers a more productive course of action.

Full-coverage pedestrian survey to record cultural features on unexplored archaeological landscapes is costly in terms of time, money, and personnel. Over the past two decades, researchers have implemented remote sensing and landscape data collection techniques using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to combat some of these burdens, but the initial cost of equipment, software, and processing power has hindered the ubiquitous implementation of UAV technology as an accessible companion tool to traditional archaeological survey. This article presents a free and open-source, technology-independent analytical framework for the collection and processing of UAV images to produce high-resolution digital terrain models limited only by the equipment available to the researcher. Results from the free and open-source protocol are directly compared to those produced using proprietary software to illustrate the capabilities of freely available data processing tools for UAV-collected images. By replicating the methods outlined here, researchers should be able to identify and target areas of interest to increase fieldwork efficiency, decrease costs of implementing this technology, and produce high-resolution digital terrain models to conduct spatial analyses that pursue a deeper understanding of cultural landscapes.

From 2016 to 2019, the University of Hawai‘i West O‘ahu conducted archaeological field schools at Honouliuli National Historic Site to teach our students basic archaeological skills. Because the site was the largest Japanese and Japanese American concentration camp on O‘ahu, the field school initiated a program related to social justice and democratic principles for the imprisonment of US citizens and legal residents based on racial and national profiling. The demography of O‘ahu created a special bond to the incarcerees’ stories and the students of Asian and Hawaiian descent. Through field trips, student discussion, and curriculum development, we focused on the pedagogical benefit of experiential learning. Field trips to the National Park Service's World War II Valor in the Pacific Park System on O‘ahu, King Kamehameha V Judiciary History Center, and the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i allowed the students to see and understand the historical context of the Japanese internment from the mid-nineteenth century, with the development of plantations and early colonialism, to the beginning of World War II and the internment of the more than 300 Japanese and Japanese American—as well as European and Okinawan—civilians and the imprisonment of over 4,000 prisoners of war.

This article shows how to record current events from an archaeological perspective. With a case study from the COVID-19 pandemic in Norway, we provide accessible tools to document broad spatial and behavioral patterns through material culture as they emerge. Stressing the importance of ethical engagement with contemporary subjects, we adapt archaeological field methods—including geolocation, photography, and three-dimensional modeling—to analyze the changing relationships between materiality and human sociality through the crisis. Integrating data from four contributors, we suggest that this workflow may engage broader publics as anthropological data collectors to describe unexpected social phenomena. Contemporary archaeological perspectives, deployed in rapid response, provide alternative readings on the development of current events. In the presented case, we suggest that local ways of coping with the pandemic may be overshadowed by the materiality of large-scale corporate and state response.

This research employs machine learning (Mask Region-Based Convolutional Neural Networks [Mask R-CNN]) and cluster analysis (Density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise [DBSCAN]) to identify more than 20,000 relict charcoal hearths (RCHs) organized in large “fields” within and around State Game Lands (SGLs) in Pennsylvania. This research has two important threads that we hope will advance the archaeological study of landscapes. The first is the significant historical impact of charcoal production, a poorly understood industry of the late eighteenth to early twentieth century, on the historic and present landscape of the United States. Although this research focuses on charcoal production in Pennsylvania, it has broad application for both identifying and contextualizing historical charcoal production throughout the world and for better understanding modern charcoal production. The second thread is the use of open data, open source, and open access tools to conduct this analysis, as well as the open publication of the resultant data. Not only does this research demonstrate the significance of open access tools and data but the open publication of our code as well as our data allow others to replicate our work, to tweak our code and protocols for their own work, and reuse our results.

For tribes whose preservation values and mitigation strategies for managing cultural heritage are built on an ethic of avoidance and minimal disturbance, geophysical technologies can be key components of the research design. These technologies, most notably ground-penetrating radar, have been used with great success in identifying and evaluating the depth, extent, and composition of some of those resources for heritage research and management purposes, easing tensions when working with sensitive ancestral places. Additionally, research in archaeological geophysics has shifted from feature finding in order to excavate targets of interest to the recognition that geophysical survey can provide data and interpretations for whole sites and landscapes complementary to or beyond that of excavation, especially regarding the intactness and sensitivity of cultural heritage sites. This use of geophysics as a primary method for research rather than a precursor to archaeological research has empowered tribes with another tool to advocate for low-impact investigation of ancestral sites and landscapes that position tribes as pro-science. Geophysical technologies provide scientifically rigorous yet minimally impactful strategies for investigating heritage while satisfying the requirements of academic and compliance archaeology in ways that can also be culturally appropriate for a much broader spectrum of tribal cultural heritage under consideration.

The documentation and analysis of archaeological lithics must navigate a basic tension between examining and recording data on individual artifacts or on aggregates of artifacts. This poses a challenge both for artifact processing and for database construction. We present here an R Shiny solution that enables lithic analysts to enter data for both individual artifacts and aggregates of artifacts while maintaining a robust yet flexible data structure. This takes the form of a browser-based database interface that uses R to query existing data and transform new data as necessary so that users entering data of varying resolutions still produce data structured around individual artifacts. We demonstrate the function and efficacy of this tool (termed the Queryable Artifact Recording Interface [QuARI]) using the example of the Stelida Naxos Archaeological Project (SNAP), which, focused on a Paleolithic and Mesolithic chert quarry, has necessarily confronted challenges of processing and analyzing large quantities of lithic material.

As the use of large-scale radiocarbon datasets becomes more common and applications of Bayesian chronological modeling become a standard aspect of archaeological practice, it is imperative that we grow a community of both effective users and consumers. Indeed, research proposals and publications now routinely employ Bayesian chronological modeling to estimate age ranges such as statistically informed starts, ends, and spans of archaeological phenomena. Although advances in interpretive techniques have been widely adopted, sampling strategies and determinations of appropriate sample sizes for radiocarbon data remain generally underdeveloped. As chronological models are only as robust as the information we feed into them, formal approaches to assessing the validity of model criteria and the appropriate number of radiocarbon dates deserve attention. In this article, through a series of commonly encountered scenarios, we present easy-to-follow instructions for running simulations that should be used to inform the design and construction of chronological models.

This article explores the use of specially trained canines to detect the location of human burials in nonmodern archaeological contexts. It discusses the history of the discipline, training and field methods, the importance of developing a working relationship with descendant communities, project examples, an assessment of canine detection effectiveness, and ways to select a canine detection team. The article highlights how the application of canine detection training and protocols to the archaeological record makes it possible to locate potential precontact Native American burial areas without ground disturbance. In some cases, probable burial areas located by canines can be confidentially mapped to ensure avoidance during upcoming construction projects. For a variety of reasons, many Native American communities have been wary of embracing this new method to locate ancestral burials. Today, however, canine detection is widely accepted by many tribal groups in California to locate ancestral burials that might be impacted by construction. Although additional controlled studies and rigorous field laboratory experiments are needed to understand the range of variation in efficacy fully, available results in both North America and Europe demonstrate that specially trained canines can often accurately locate human burials that are more than a thousand years old to within a few meters.

This article introduces datplot, an R package designed to prepare chronological data for visualization, focusing on the treatment of objects dated to overlapping periods of time. Datplot is suitable for all disciplines in which scientists long for a synoptic method that enables the visualization of the chronology of a collection of heterogeneously dated objects. It is especially helpful for visualizing trends in object assemblages over long periods of time—for example, the development of pottery styles—and it can also assist in the dating of stratigraphy. As both authors come from the field of classical archaeology, the examples and case study demonstrating the functionality of the package analyze classical materials. In particular, we focus on presenting an assemblage of epigraphic evidence from Bithynia (northwestern Turkey), with a microregional focal point in the territory of Nicaea (modern Iznik). In the article, we present the internal methodology of datplot and the process of preparing a dataset of categorically and numerically dated objects. We demonstrate visualizing the data prepared by datplot using kernel density estimation and compare the outcome with more established methods such as histograms and line graphs.

As lidar becomes a regular part of surveying, ground-based platforms (handheld, mobile, and terrestrial lidar) and airborne platforms (piloted aircraft) are being joined by unpiloted aerial vehicle (UAV)–acquired lidar. We present a method for leveraging UAV-acquired lidar data with data collected using different lidar platforms (terrestrial and piloted aircraft), at a range of resolutions (1 to +1,000 points per m2) and geographic scales. We use these instruments to document a dry-masonry stone wall enclosing a religious precinct within the royal center at Kealakekua, Kona District, Hawai'i Island. Prior to European contact in AD 1779, Kealakekua was the center of the island-wide polity during the annual Makahiki festival. Results of this study suggest that when the wall was constructed around AD 1640, it was the largest structure ever built on the island of Hawai'i as well as a strong material expression of the power of state religion and the Makahiki rituals.

Universities struggle to provide meaningful education and mentorship to Native American students, especially in STEM fields such as archaeology and geography. The Native American Summer Mentorship Program (NASMP) at Utah State University is designed to address Native student retention and representation, and it fosters collaboration between mentors and mentees. In spring 2020, as university instruction went online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, NASMP mentors were faced with adapting hands-on activities and face-to-face interaction to an online format. Using our Water Heritage Anthropological Project as a case study, we show how virtual archaeological, archival, spatial, and anthropological labs can be adapted for online delivery. This approach may be especially useful for reaching students in rural settings but also for engaging students in virtual or remote research in the field sciences.

Wilderness medicine classes are widely available to archaeologists and field scientists, but because wilderness medicine is an unregulated field, knowing what the various courses and products mean can be difficult. Based on the education chapter in the recently published textbook Wilderness EMS, this article—written by same two authors as the book—explores a number of topics relevant for the field scientist, program director, or administrator seeking to obtain wilderness medicine training for archaeologists. The article first explores the history of wilderness medicine products and certificates available to interested parties. It then differentiates between the various products available today along with their benefits and limitations for the end user. Products and trainings described include certifications (including Wilderness First Aid [WFA], Wilderness Advanced First Aid [WAFA], Advanced Wilderness First Aid [AWFA], and Wilderness First Responder [WFR]), as well as single use or continuing education trainings (including Stop the Bleed, CPR, conference courses, and field schools). Particular attention is paid to the specific and actionable needs of a field scientist in remote areas.

Graduate schools provide students opportunities for fieldwork and training in archaeological methods and theory, but they often overlook instruction in field safety and well-being. We suggest that more explicit guidance on how to conduct safe fieldwork will improve the overall success of student-led projects and prepare students to direct safe and successful fieldwork programs as professionals. In this article, we draw on the experiences of current and recent graduate students as well as professors who have overseen graduate fieldwork to outline key considerations in improving field safety and well-being and to offer recommendations for specific training and safety protocols. In devising these considerations and recommendations, we have referenced both domestic and international field projects, as well as those involving community collaboration.

Wilderness medicine is plagued by myths and dogmatic teachings not supported by evidence. This article focuses particularly on those teachings and tools that would be most likely used in archaeological fieldwork. It lays out 10 of the most common and concerning myths taught in wilderness medicine and wilderness emergency medical services, both in terms of first aid and preparation of medical kits. The myths described are provide a structure for the main purpose of the article: to explain interventions and medical kit contents that are more evidence based and supported by modern understandings of wilderness medicine and fieldwork risk management. The list of top 10 myths includes (1) the use of medications other than epinephrine for anaphylaxis and (2) the availability and proper use of epinephrine auto-injectors, (3) the use of suction devices and tourniquets for snakebites, (4) the use of spinal immobilization for neck injuries, (5) the identification and treatment of heat illnesses, (6) the use of CPR in remote areas, (7) the appropriateness of dislocation reduction in remote areas, (8) the use and choice of tourniquets for arterial bleeding, (9) the initial definition and management of drowning patients, and (10) wound management myths.

For many years, archaeologists have relied on Munsell Soil Color Charts (MSCC) as tools for standardizing the recording of soil and sediment colors in the field and artifacts such as pottery in the lab. Users have identified multiple potential sources of discrepancy in results, such as differences in inter-operator perception, light source, or moisture content of samples. In recent years, researchers have developed inexpensive digital methods for color identification, but these typically cannot be done in real time. Now, a field-ready digital color-matching instrument is marketed to archaeologists as a replacement for MSCC, but the accuracy and overall suitability of this device for archaeological research has not been demonstrated. Through three separate field and laboratory trials, we found systematic mismatches in the results obtained via device, including variable accuracy against standardized MSCC chips, which should represent ideal samples. At the same time, the instrument was consistent in its readings. This leads us to question whether using the “subjective” human eye or the “objective” digital eye is preferable for data recording of color. We discuss how project goals and limitations should be considered when deciding which color-recording method to employ in field and laboratory settings, and we identify optimal procedures.