Financial institutions typically avoid projects that will have a significant adverse effect on cultural heritage because it creates unwelcome risk and can affect their reputation. For bank clients, adverse project effects on cultural heritage can result in reputation risk, impede access to finance and insurance, increase operational costs, and jeopardize on-time and on-budget delivery of projects. To address this risk, financial institutions implement environmental and social policy frameworks that include specific requirements for the consideration of cultural heritage. This article examines the place of cultural heritage in the lending practices of 25 of the world's largest private-sector banks and its relevance for heritage practitioners who may be retained to provide advice, review or undertake fieldwork, and prepare studies in keeping with the private-sector bank policies and external standards described. The article concludes with a recommended best practice for private-sector financial institutions, a call to action for heritage practitioners to advocate for robust safeguards, and a call for support of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals by both heritage practitioners and private-sector financial institutions.

I discuss my experiences using archaeology and anthropology to teach college-level students how to be interdisciplinary thinkers and doers. Although the number of students who complete archaeology and anthropology degrees is relatively small in the United States and worldwide, programs and courses in such fields offer any student important opportunities in active, interdisciplinary learning that contribute to effective problem-solving using multiple lines of information. Courses and learning activities can question stereotypes depicting archaeology as a “useless” discipline (Arendt 2013:79), and they can prepare students to engage in and adapt to countless personal and professional situations while also learning about archaeology, its benefits, and its potential for relationships with similar and different fields. Therefore, the active learning of multimethod, interdisciplinary archaeology can prepare college-level students to address change and uncertainty in their homes, communities, and professions.

After acquiring 91 km2 of lidar data from the Zacapu region, West Mexico, we confronted a series of issues that most archaeologists using this technology face. These include the large volume of data available, the limited training of potential “analysts,” the difficult development of a collective mapping tool and protocol, and the reliability of desk-based interpretation of archaeological features. In this article, we present an initiative conducted in 2015 and 2017 as an attempt to answer these methodological and pedagogical issues. We developed a web mapping platform to collectively interpret archaeological features using lidar-derived imagery and to train volunteer students to participate in this desk-based web mapping within a crowdsourcing framework. After evaluating the results of this initiative, we discuss the potential and limitations of this method for both lidar-based research and future training.

With the advent of the Web, increased emphasis on “research data management,” and innovations in reproducible research practices, scholars have more incentives and opportunities to document and disseminate their primary data. This article seeks to guide archaeologists in data sharing by highlighting recurring challenges in reusing archived data gleaned from observations on workflows and reanalysis efforts involving datasets published over the past 15 years by Open Context. Based on our findings, we propose specific guidelines to improve data management, documentation, and publishing practices so that primary data can be more efficiently discovered, understood, aggregated, and synthesized by wider research communities.

Integrating geophysical survey with the study of community settlement patterns can be challenging because of cultural and environmental factors including (1) site formation and house preservation, (2) the coordination of domestic tasks at extra-household scales, and (3) the survey environment of the study area. In this article, we present the results of a program of geophysical survey comprising magnetic susceptibility and magnetometry at Weeden Island (8Pi1)—a shell-bearing, wooded site with nearly pure sand soils on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Combining remote sensing techniques mitigated some of the challenges of surveying forested terrain while providing insight into community organization at a site with minimal preserved structural remains. Compared with previous traditional surveys of the area, the geophysical survey extended the recognized boundaries of occupational activity, provided additional definition to the spatial structure of deposits, and allowed us to identify specific domestic features. Excavations at each area of intensive occupation provided evidence about the organization of the domestic economy at the site and showed the potential of this approach to reveal significant patterns of community settlement.

As archaeologists expand the accessibility of legacy data, they have an opportunity to use these datasets to design future research. We argue that legacy data can be a critical resource to help predict characteristics of sites and socioeconomic systems. In this article, we present a combined geographic information system (GIS) and network analysis methodology that turns site location data into testable hypotheses about site characteristics and the organization of regional settlement systems. We demonstrate the utility of this approach with a case study: Bronze Age (2700–1100 BC) settlement patterns in the mining region of Hunedoara in southwest Transylvania, Romania. We leverage unsystematically collected site location information in legacy datasets to develop testable predictions about sites, regional networks, and socioeconomic systems that can be evaluated through future systematic surveys and large-scale excavations. Such testable hypotheses can inform archaeological research design by providing a quantitative basis for determining where to focus research efforts and can also help secure funding and fieldwork permits. The method developed here can be applied in diverse archaeological contexts to reinvigorate legacy data as part of future archaeological research design.

The value of new archaeological knowledge is strongly determined by how credible it is, and a key measure of scientific credibility is how replicable new results are. However, few archaeologists learn the skills necessary to conduct replication as part of their training. This means there is a gap between the ideals of archaeological science and the skills we teach future researchers. Here we argue for replications as a core type of class assignment in archaeology courses to close this gap and establish a culture of replication and reproducibility. We review replication assignments in other fields and describe how to implement a replication assignment suitable for many types of archaeology programs. We describe our experience with replication in an upper-level undergraduate class on stone artifact analysis. Replication assignments can help archaeology programs give students the skills that enable transparent and reproducible research.

With an ever-growing range of computational tools and applications now available for archaeological practice, the potential of digital archaeology is greater than ever before. Yet, archaeological curricula have not always followed suit, and many archaeologists are not up-to-date with the necessary digital skills. To fill this gap, online tutorials and learning platforms are being developed to familiarize archaeologists and students with the potential of digital media for archaeological research practices. Given the essential pedagogical role of these platforms, their quality is deserving of deeper interrogation. Here, I review three major platforms offering tutorials on digital archaeology: the Programming Historian, Project MERCURY-SIMREC, and the Open Digital Archaeology Textbook. These are evaluated and compared based on their goals, design (intuitiveness, ease of use), accessibility (use of jargon, required prerequisite knowledge, software requirements), scope (target audience, range of skills addressed, targeted level of improvement), and efficiency (whether or not they achieve their intended goals). The review concludes with a road map contextualizing the current state of available resources in light of the wider state of digital archaeology, and it considers pathways toward future development.