Repatriation of human remains and associated funerary objects under NAGPRA and the increased use of culturally informed curation practices for sacred, religious, and ceremonial objects are important steps toward restoring control over cultural patrimony to Native Nations in the United States. Many museums holding Indigenous belongings have begun a collaborative care approach involving Indigenous community voices and improving access to collections. However, this framework has not been applied to many animal remains curated in American archaeology museums, which remain broadly beyond the care or administrative purview of Native people. Because many Indigenous worldviews do not hold a clear separation between the human and animal spheres, common practices applied to animal remains are not congruent with the idea of respectful or culturally informed care. Here we outline steps to shift the treatment of animals through the application of Indigenous knowledge to museum collections.

People experience heritage at historic sites as landscapes that include both environmental and cultural meaning. Heritage as social action overcomes the dichotomies of nature versus culture and past versus present, which are obstacles to resiliency and sustainability in this era of rising sea levels. That insight is exemplified by a program addressing climate change on the Florida Gulf Coast. The program includes community conversations on climate change and initial steps at multiscalar research using techniques from archaeology, environmental studies, and biology. At the broadest scales, the approach reconstructs the distribution of coastal heritage locations from the decades preceding human-caused sea-level rise to the present. At finer levels of temporal and spatial resolution, research documents vegetation, marine invertebrates, and material changes. At the finest scales, studies of microorganisms that inhabit historic and archaeological sites are inventoried. Integrating those scales through community-based archaeology offers the social meanings for coastal heritage under threat of rising sea levels, both to motivate actions to preserve the past and to prepare the public for the coming landscape transformations as an avenue for community conversations.

Community Coastal Zone Assessment Surveys (CCZASs) conducted on the Scottish coast aim to characterize and assess the significance, condition, and vulnerability of coastal archaeology and to prioritize assets most at risk. Two key differences from earlier coastal zone assessment survey methods are the use of coastline vulnerability models to target fieldwork and the involvement of the public in the surveys. This article details the methodology used to plan for, carry out, and disseminate results of the surveys, including the following: evaluating and targeting coastlines in a GIS framework to focus new coastal surveys in areas most susceptible to erosion, using SCAPE's coastal archaeology recording mobile application as our survey tool, managing data through SCAPE's Sites at Risk portal, involving local volunteers, and disseminating findings and data flow into regional and national historic environment databases. We discuss results and reflections from surveys of the Highland, Moray, and Aberdeenshire coastlines conducted in 2022 and conclude with general principles applicable beyond Scotland.

Mobile apps provide archaeologists a way to engage the public and local communities in efforts to protect heritage at risk. This article discusses community engagement apps used by archaeologists who specialize in collecting data about climate change and its impact on cultural sites. It provides an overview of the process by which the Florida Public Archaeology Network (FPAN) developed various workflows over the last few years to engage community member–scientists using digital tools. FPAN based this work on examples from cultural heritage management practice in Scotland. Because we were unable to directly adapt Scotland's app to our US context, we experimented with multiple other apps and tools to implement our workflows, including Arches, Solocator, ArcGIS Field Maps, and the Arrow GNSS receiver.

The North American Heritage at Risk (NAHAR) collaborative, which formed during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowed for heritage-at-risk partners to shift from reactive to proactive strategies. The result was the creation of the NAHAR research pipeline to respond to landscapes at risk. The pipeline includes modeling of environmental changes to the landscape; monitoring sites to verify location and assess condition; meeting with the public, descendant community, land managers, and transdisciplinary experts in their field to discuss climate change impacts to their heritage in the next 10 years; methodizing by means of a workflow organizer using data from the modeling, monitoring, and meeting; and when appropriate, mitigating areas identified during the methodizing process. In 2020, the Florida Public Archaeology Network—along with partners in Georgia, South Carolina, Washington, Texas, and Louisiana—began the Science Collaborative People of Guana project at the Guana Tolomato Matanzas Estuarine Research Reserve (GTM NERR) north of St. Augustine, Florida. Using a collaborative science mindset, the project team applied the NAHAR pipeline to gain a better sense of how resources were used in the past and how they currently are being used by communities to ensure responsive resource management and relationship building with visitors, descendants, and other community stakeholders, such as the Gullah/Geechee Nation. This article will provide the building blocks for other collaborative teams to follow the NAHAR pipeline and share lessons learned from the two-year project.

The articles compiled here offer examples of how the impacts of anthropogenic climate change in coastal settings are monitored and measured, how the broader public can be involved in these efforts, and how planning for mitigation can come about. The case studies are drawn from the southeastern United States and the British Isles, and they indicate the great potential that cooperating communities of practice can offer for addressing climate-change impacts on cultural heritage.

Large datasets, combined with modeling techniques, provide a quantitative way to estimate when known archaeological sites will be impacted by climatological changes. With over 4,000 archaeological sites recorded on the coast of Georgia, USA, the state provides an ideal opportunity to compare methods. Here, we compare the popular passive “bathtub” modeling with the dynamic Sea Level Affecting Marshes Model (SLAMM) combined with the Marshes Equilibrium Model (MEM). The goal of this effort is to evaluate prior modeling and test the benefits of more detailed ecological modeling in assessing site loss. Our findings indicate that although rough counts of archaeological sites destroyed by sea-level rise (SLR) are similar in all approaches, using the latter two methods provides critical information needed in prioritizing site studies and documentation before irrevocable damages occur. Our results indicate that within the next 80 years, approximately 40% of Georgia's coastal sites will undergo a loss of archaeological context due to wetlands shifting from dry ecological zones to transitional marshlands or submerged estuaries and swamps.

Over the last decades, archaeology has experienced a transformative revolution in the wake of the digital that has shaped the ways in which it is researched and published. A key concept, openness, has emerged from this shift. This article explores digital approaches to data management conducted within the framework of the PERAIA project, which provides a comprehensive open database and a web application that integrate data on archaeological heritage spanning from late prehistory to antiquity, covering the Aegean area (Crete) and northeastern Libya / northwestern Egypt (Marmarica). We used a methodology that integrates legacy data with historical aerial and satellite imagery to identify archaeological features in the landscape, thereby enriching them with associated environmental and historical (meta)data. Our open data practices reflect a commitment to open science, in which digital technology and the LOUD+FAIR principles have been at the core of the project to achieve data openness, fair access to information, and enhanced data reusability potential.

The use of programming languages in archaeological research has witnessed a notable surge in the last decade, particularly with R, a versatile statistical computing language that fosters the development of specialized packages. This article introduces the tesselle project (https://www.tesselle.org/), a comprehensive collection of R packages tailored for archaeological research and education. The tesselle packages are centered on quantitative analysis methods specifically crafted for archaeology. They are designed to complement both general-purpose and other specialized statistical packages. These packages serve as a versatile toolbox, facilitating the exploration and analysis of common data types in archaeology—such as count data, compositional data, or chronological data—and enabling the construction of reproducible workflows. Complementary packages for visualization, data preparation, and educational resources augment the tesselle ecosystem. This article outlines the project's inception, its objectives, design principles, and key components, along with reflections on future directions.

There is an urgent need for climate change–informed decision-making and adaptation actions for cultural heritage. Challenges arise in incorporating and balancing multiple considerations, including robust understandings of climate change vulnerability, the objectives of current management paradigms, the need for meaningful engagement, the risk of maladaptation, and constrained resources to implement. We offer a conceptual framework and guide to integrate climate science and cultural heritage management to produce a range of adaptation actions for cultural heritage, categorized as Acclimate, Dislocate, Abandon, Protect, and Tell the Story (ADAPT) approaches. The ADAPT framework is intended to aid archaeologists and other cultural heritage managers in developing and evaluating possible adaptation actions that directly respond to findings from climate change vulnerability assessments, critically integrating management postures and constraints, and coproducing climate change adaptations with Indigenous rightsholders and community stakeholders.

Field schools are foundational training for archaeologists and the corresponding methods for instruction are largely consistent within the discipline. The expectation is that at some point early in their careers students will enroll in a field school. To participate, students must pay summer tuition, dedicate a minimum of four weeks (usually longer) to full-time fieldwork, and in many cases travel to remote locations. The reality is that for many students such expectations make field school participation an impossibility—and ultimately make archaeology a nonviable career option for students from historically underrepresented backgrounds. Offering local field opportunities within the context of a regular school year alleviates those problems. A recent field school in north Idaho demonstrated how traditional field school structure excludes many students and how archaeologists can adjust instruction to make field training more accessible to students.

For thousands of years, humans have been entertained by board games. The earliest documented game boards date to at least 6000 BC in the Near East (Sebbane 2001), and we know the name, Senet, and rules of a board game from Egypt dating to 3500–3100 BC. Aspects of inequality are omnipresent in the dynamics of the competition and cooperation inherent in games. In this review, I assess the digital version of the board game Catan, which is also called Catan Universe, discussing how anthropological theories such as human behavioral ecology are recognizable in the digital game. Playing this game provides a unique way to test models of inequality.

Archaeological data often come in the form of counts. Understanding why counts of artifacts, subsistence remains, or features vary across time and space is central to archaeological inquiry. A central statistical method to model such variation is through regression, yet despite sophisticated advances in computational approaches to archaeology, practitioners do not have a standard approach for building, validating, or interpreting the results of count regression. Drawing on advances in ecology, we outline a framework for evaluating regressions with archaeological count data that includes suggestions for model fitting, diagnostics, and interpreting results. We hope these suggestions provide a foundation for advancing regression with archaeological count data to further our understanding of the past.

In the summer of 2022, Tulane University, in collaboration with archaeologists from other institutions, began excavations at the site of Pompeii. The archaeological work was focused on Insula 14 of Region 1, located in the southeastern sector of the site. To overcome the challenges of recording a complex urban excavation, and of working with a collaborative team, we designed and implemented a unique workflow that combines paperless and 3D data-capture methods through the use of GIS technologies. The final product of our documentation workflow was a robust and easy-to-use online geodatabase where archaeologists can revisit, explore, visualize, and analyze each excavated context using virtual tools. We present our workflow for digitally documenting observational and spatial data in the field, and how we made these data available to project archaeologists during and after the field season. First, we describe the development of digital forms in ESRI's Survey123. Then, we explain our procedures for 3D documentation through SfM photogrammetric methods and discuss how we integrated the data and transformed it into an accessible format by using interactive dashboards and online 3D web scenes. Finally, we discuss the components of our workflow that are broadly applicable and that can easily be adapted to other projects.

With its promise of nondestructive processing, rapid low-cost sampling, and portability to any field site or museum in the world, portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) spectrometry is rapidly becoming a standard piece of equipment for archaeologists. Even though the use of pXRF is becoming standard, the publication of pXRF analytical methods and the resulting data remains widely variable. Despite validation studies that demonstrate the importance of sample preparation, data collection settings, and data processing, there remains no standard for how to report pXRF results. In this article, we address the need for best practices in publishing pXRF analyses. We outline information that should be published alongside interpretive results in any archaeological application of pXRF. By publishing this basic information, archaeologists will increase the transparency and replicability of their analyses on an inter-analyst/inter-analyzer basis and provide clarity for journal editors and peer reviewers on publications and grant proposals for studies that use pXRF. The use of these best practices will result in better science in the burgeoning use of pXRF in archaeology.

Web scraping, the practice of automating the collection of data from websites, is a key part of how the internet functions, and it is an increasingly important part of the research tool kit for scientists, cultural resources professionals, and journalists. There are few resources intended to train archaeologists in how to develop web scrapers. Perhaps more importantly, there are also few resources that outline the normative, ethical, and legal frameworks within which scraping of archaeological data is situated. This article is intended to introduce archaeologists to web scraping as a research method, as well as to outline the norms concerning scraping that have evolved since the 1990s, and the current state of US legal frameworks that touch on the practice. These norms and legal frameworks continue to evolve, representing an opportunity for archaeologists to become more involved in how scraping is practiced and how it should be regulated in the future.

Archaeogaming is an area of increasing interest within archaeology. As archaeogaming's theory and practice are being fleshed out, it is worth considering if there are parallels to traditional archaeological methods within the study of video games. Here, we examine one such possibility: is there an archaeogaming equivalent to experimental archaeology? As a case study, we explore the system used for the mid-1980s development of an unreleased video game prototype for the game company Activision. Through examining this development system, whose use would be otherwise invisible in the finished software artifact, we demonstrate how we have both reconstructed a seemingly lost piece of the system virtually and used this reconstruction for experiments. The methodology we describe can be applied to digital artifacts within contemporary archaeology beyond the scope of video games, and it illustrates some key differences between studying physical and digital artifacts.

This article describes a series of steps to integrate multiple modes of archaeological mapping in arid and agricultural settings. We use the coastal region of Peru as a case study and share our recent field experience at Cerro San Isidro, a multicomponent hill site located in the agriculture-intensive and mid-elevation (about 500 m asl) Moro region of the Nepeña Valley. In June and July 2022, we spent eight weeks deploying a combination of drone aerial imagery, pedestrian GPS reconnaissance, and GPR survey to map the surface and subsurface features at the site and in the adjacent agricultural fields. Our efforts suggest that the ancient settlement extended over an area of at least 50 ha, well beyond the visible surface architecture. Using a multimodal approach to confirming the partial destruction of archaeological vestiges by modern agricultural encroachment is both time-effective and noninvasive. The article offers insights from our experience, including the sequence of field operations, technical troubleshooting, and the collection and integration of datasets. We discuss the methodological potential and implications of this combination of multimodal mapping and its deployment in coastal Peru, a region that, like many others in the world, is increasingly subject to rapid agricultural expansion and other anthropogenic developments.

Archaeology in the United States is caught in a “curation crisis” (Childs 1995; Childs and Warner 2019; Marquardt et al. 1982; SAA Advisory Committee on Curation 2003; Trimble and Marino 2003) and a “digital data crisis” (or “deluge”) more specifically (Bevan 2015; Clarke 2015; Kansa and Kansa 2021; Katsianis et al. 2022; Kersel 2015; McManamon et al. 2017:239–240; Rivers Cofield et al. 2024). Recent estimates suggest that, collectively, over 1.4 billion dollars are spent annually to support archaeological work that is mandated by federal law (SRI Foundation 2020). Although substantial efforts are underway to generate and provide mechanisms for managing, curating, and sharing the resultant digital data, we suggest that a critical step that has yet to be taken is to describe and visualize the components, connections, and causal dynamics of the US digital data system as it currently functions. Here, we specifically apply a “systems thinking” approach to produce such a high-level model of this system. We argue that understanding and visualizing this system will help us all “think bigger” (Heilen and Manney 2023); identify sources of knowledge, opportunities for critical analysis, collaboration, and capacity building; and increase much-needed archaeological digital literacy (Kansa and Kansa 2022). We conceptualize this as bringing “equilibrium” to the system, and in this article, we make several suggestions on how to bring this about. These insights can enable practitioners to better understand their roles in and contributions to the overall system and to evaluate efforts to improve data sharing, management, and curation practices not only within their organizations and departments but beyond.

This theme issue has two primary goals: to illuminate the underdeveloped or faltering areas of the discipline as they relate to archaeological collections and to offer tangible paths forward to address the systemic problems identified as they impact the future of archaeology. Present-day archaeology is complicated due to its many sectors of practice: academia/faculty; cultural resource management; federal, state, and local government; tribal governments and communities; descendant communities; students; the general public; and different types of archaeological repositories. Given this complexity, it can be difficult to identify the expectations (and realities) of each sector, which, if better understood, would help illuminate the nuances of preservation, accountability, discoverability, and use of archaeological collections across the discipline. Without a solid understanding of these nuances, efforts to advance the discipline are undermined. This introduction provides an overview of the articles that address emerging and urgent issues and offer viable steps forward. These challenges include the interrelationships between ethics, collaboration, and training; the preservation and management of digital records and data; collections discovery and reuse; collections-based research; training in material culture; making collections knowable to constituencies outside archaeology; preparing for repatriation from a management perspective; and the intricacies of the archaeological digital data system.