Debates about the best means of preparing archaeologists continue. This article reviews data from 674 archaeological job postings to assess in-demand archaeological knowledge, skills, and abilities. The needs assessment reveals American archaeology's demand for dynamic, highly skilled professionals capable of identifying, preserving, and protecting the past. The skills demanded in archaeology job postings are the skills necessary to not only succeed as an archaeologist in any sector but also meet the challenges faced by the discipline more generally.

Traditionally, women have been perceived as the fairer sex with a moral compass and with less inclination towards gaining wealth and taking risks. Past research has posited that women consider crime due to need. Recently one piece of research has considered greed due to the development and empowerment of women, the opportunities and power accorded to them in line with governance frameworks, policies and regulations that cover crimes, penalties and punishments, and cultural and social norms. Social perspectives influence the moral values passed down within social and family units. A pilot survey of female participants exposed to investigation and law and from two age groups of 18–39 years and 40–61 years reflected a significant change in culture and values. The older group was critical of corrupt behaviour and that the choices were the “right thing to do”. The younger participants were selective in their choices, choosing to deny or be silent if there was insufficient evidence and protection or where there was the involvement of someone dear. This reflects the power of knowledge, empowerment and education. The author discusses case studies of women exposed to crime, including organized crime, via their family or social networks to assess abuse of power and trust.

In May 2010, Julián Miranda, an Indigenous Asháninka shaman, died hours after killing a jaguar-shaman. Despite knowing that it could kill him, he killed a jaguar-shaman to protect his cows, an investment to support the much-desired progreso (‘progress’) of his children and grandchildren through education. Julián's choice was one of personal sacrifice driven by the hardships he experienced in the degraded forests of the Bajo Urubamba valley in the Peruvian Amazon. My examination of his decision to kill the jaguar-shaman engages with the multi-disciplinary literature on how local peoples engage with the expanding extractive frontier in Latin America. The emphasis most literature places on social movements and – to a lesser extent – on the ontological characteristics of these conflicts needs to be counterbalanced by individual experiences like Julián's for a deeper understanding of the multiple local experiences of large-scale resource extraction and the different strategies through which people pursue their desired futures.

Corruption is an age-old issue. Although various mitigation measures have been developed over time, it persistently exists and transforms with the dynamic business environment. The development of corruption is linked to the skills of criminals to cover their tracks. Control mechanisms and other lines of defense are insignificant when persons of power override, bully or collaborate to carry out corruption. Since humans are perceived to be rational, educating individuals on the evils of corruption with its apparent negative connotations would have been a logical approach to disrupting corruption. However, the growing trend of corruption reflects otherwise. Human behavior is subjective and based on a person–situation complexity, relationships and associations around human life. This pilot study assesses the decisions of individuals based on various corruption scenarios, using 20 questions modeled around Corruption Dimensions and Prisoner’s Dilemma. Of the respondents, 92% had formal exposure to anti-corruption-related studies. Most respondents responded negatively to corruption-related scenarios in the Corruption Dimensions, with noted bias in their criticism when it involved a politician as compared with a businessman. Similarly, the Prisoner’s Dilemma questions also reflected selective reasoning when comparing those with personal relationships as compared with acquaintances. The strength of the evidence, the independence of the judiciary, the ability to escape, the reluctance to self-incriminate and the personal benefits affect the judgment of the respondents. However, in situations involving environmental issues, respondents selected to confess regardless of the situation stating that it was the right thing to do. Education creates awareness on individual rights, options and, to a certain extent, the moral and legal obligations. However, the subjectivity of the person’s associations and lifelong experience also plays a major role in the decision-making process.

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.

This paper presents a new dataset of enrolment rates and grade distribution ratios (GDR) in Brazil between 1933 and 2010, in addition to enrolment rates and GDR of Brazilian states from 1955 to 2010. To our knowledge, there are no previous estimates of enrolment rates by states for such a long period in Brazil. Enrolment rates and GDR in northern and north-eastern states were meagre and comparable to the lowest Latin American performers, and even the most advanced Brazilian states lagged behind the early leaders of the region, such as Argentina and Uruguay, until the turn of the century. Given a certain enrolment rate, Brazilian states were expected to present lower GDR compared to Latin American countries on average.

Due to the intellectual, physical, and emotional demands of field research, those doing this work need to strategies to monitor and maintain their own mental health before, during, and after a field season. Moreover, they should have a framework for supporting their colleagues. This review article will present a framework for assessing the mental health hazards and the reactions, both positive and negative, to fieldwork. First, it will use U.S. epidemiology to show that most field teams are at risk. Second, it will frame the field season both as a workplace and wilderness exposure event and discuss the elements of the field research environment that can be therapeutic for some but toxic for others. Third, it will discuss the psychological impacts of travel and reintegration as they are pertinent to the practice of archaeology. Research will be presented in order to guide evidence-informed policies for the field research team to improve the mental-health readiness and resiliency of the research team. Last, it will provide guidance on how to manage the anxiety caused by separating from social media platforms.

In the United States, deaccessioning is a poorly understood collections management tool. Archaeologists often view deaccessioning with what Robert Sonderman called “primal fear,” and this fear has caused them to overlook the opportunities that deaccessioned artifacts and collections may provide in the area of public archaeology education. Although deaccessioning without checks and balances can be problematic, when done properly and ethically, it offers previously untapped resources to the creation of educational programming, such as teaching trunk programs. This article discusses the process of deaccessioning and suggests that deaccessioned artifacts may be useful as content for teaching trunk programs. We discuss a case study from our own institution, where we implemented a trunk program in 2016 that was largely stocked with material from a deaccession we had performed the previous year. We also offer suggestions for anyone wishing to implement a similar program.

The Office of the Wyoming State Archaeologist has as one of its main objectives to actively engage the population of Wyoming in archaeological stewardship. To achieve this goal, in the past five years, we have launched the youth-oriented Summer Ventures program and the adult-oriented Wyoming Avocational Archaeology Training Program. Both programs were inspired by existing programs in other parts of the country and were launched following research and target audience surveys on how to best adapt them to Wyoming. Despite this preliminary research, our in-field experiences over the past few years have shown some patterns that are causing us to rethink both programs. This article discusses these initial in-field testing years, the issues we have encountered, and the ways we are redesigning both programs to better target the appropriate audiences in light of the different lifestyles of populations, particularly those of youths, in a rural state.

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.

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.

Using data from two national surveys (ENSA, 2000; ENSANUT, 2006) we assess the evolution of biological standards of living of the Mexican population born during the second half of the 20th century. Our results show that there was an improvement in living standards reflected in an increase in stature, but this amelioration was limited. We observe differences across socio-economic strata, across educational levels, and between men and women. Persistent structural inequality has been byproduct of a system of security and social protection that was limited, segmented and hampered the potentially positive effects of social-welfare policies. We corroborate the relatively modest improvement in heights by comparing outcomes in Mexico with other Latin American countries.

Regional economic differences in Colombia have persisted over time. The present study seeks to contribute to the debate on the territorial differences of the country through the identification of patterns of low coverage in both primary and secondary education between 1904 and 1958. The results, coinciding with other studies on income, show a tendency towards the formation of an educational cluster in the centre of the country and the existence of a human capital trap in the periphery. The results also suggest that there is a high correlation between fiscal capacity and enrolment rates. Finally, it can also be observed that territories with the highest enrolment rates are associated with high urban enrolment rates during the process of country-wide urbanisation.

Attempts to use schools to assimilate the Huichols into the Revolutionary nation-state prompted the development of divergent partnerships and conflicts in their patria chica, involving rival Huichol communities and factions, local mestizos, government officials and Cristero rebels. The provocations of teachers, the cupidity of mestizo caciques, rebel violence and Huichol commitment to preserving communal autonomy undermined alliances between Huichol leaders and federal officials, and led to the ultimate failure of the government's project. If anything, the short-lived Revolutionary education programme equipped a new generation of Huichol leaders with the tools to better resist external assimilatory pressures into the 1940s and beyond.

The Chávez government introduced a ‘Bolivarian’ national curriculum to promote radically different understandings of Venezuelan history and identity. We place the fate of this reform initiative within the broader study of state formation and nationalism. Scholars have long identified mass schooling as the key institution for socialising citizens and cultivating national loyalties, and many states have attempted to alter the nationalist content of schooling with these ends in mind. Venezuela constitutes an ideal case for identifying the specific conditions under which transformations of official national ideologies do and do not gain broader resonance. Using evidence derived from textbook analysis and semi-structured interviews with educational officials and teachers in Caracas, we highlight a new argument, showing that intrastate tensions between the central government and teachers, heightened by a well-established cultural machinery and by teachers’ increasing exclusion from the Chavista political coalition, explain the limited success in government efforts to implement Bolivarian nationalism through the school curriculum.

Many Guatemalan parents migrate to the United States with the intention of returning earned income to improve the human capital prospects of their left-behind children. This laudable goal is achieved by many – arguably benefiting girls more than boys. However, negative international migration externalities including migration failure, familial abandonment, psychosocial harms and a culture of migration that disproportionally limits the educational prospects of boys need to be considered. Based on qualitative field interviews in western Guatemala with parents and educators, this article presents a nuanced view of economic migration and left-behind children's education, capturing both its remittance-related benefits and parental absence harms.

Narratives of memory have received considerable attention in Argentina but rarely have these been examined in relation to the 1982 Malvinas War. This article focuses on national memory narratives of the war manifest in educational resources and explores how and under what conditions local ways of remembering can transform and/or reproduce such narratives, through research within secondary schools in Río Gallegos, a city in the south of Argentina. It shows how the city's connections with the military and the war generated sensitivities that influenced how the Malvinas was engaged in the classroom. The localised framings deviated from predominant national memory narratives by underplaying the broader context of state terror and overlooking histories associated with the Malvinas before 1982.

The power of the elites became the dominant explanation of the extension of the franchise and expansion of the provision of public services. Peru from 1876 to 1940 presents a contrasting case. Although restricting political participation through literacy requirements, Peru saw an increase in literacy and schooling. Nevertheless, the relative power of the national and local elites articulated the national policies resulting in unequal provision of education. Constrained political access of the economic minority, the indigenous population, translated into a widening gap in terms of educational attainment.

The historic process of fertility decline was interrupted during the central decades of the 20th century with an unexpected period of increasing fertility that has been called the baby boom. Normally it is considered a phenomenon exclusive to countries participating in the historic demographic transition. A recent study suggests that a similar trend change in fertility may have also taken place in a few developing nations at approximately the same time and with similar characteristics to the fertility boom in the developed world. The main goal of this paper is to examine the extent to which these trend changes took place in Latin America and whether or not their characteristics were similar to those holding in the developed world.

Studies on the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) have tended to emphasise popular support for the Cardenista regime while underestimating the domestic opposition to the president. The story of Enrique Rodríguez (‘El Tallarín’), a former Zapatista militant from the state of Morelos, reveals the breadth and complexity of the opposition to Cárdenas. The rebellion led by Rodríguez from 1934 to 1938 forced Cárdenas to renegotiate the terms of Zapatista loyalty to the federal government in order to secure peace in Morelos and represented a broad critique of the post-revolutionary state's advancement during the 1930s. Rodríguez stood as a defender of agrarian self-reliance, traditional chieftainship and pueblo religious liberty.