Any field team, regardless of the professionalism of the leadership, will eventually experience a critical event. Some events will result in a subtle degradation of the team's work; others will cause emergent threats to the safety of the team. A team's sustained performance during a field season depends partly on such chance events and partly with the team's ability to plan for and respond to the dynamic environment of the field. The duty of a field leader is to conduct clear-eyed conversations and ensure that solid preparations are laid for both the group as a whole and the individual team members. Some of these plans need to be manifested by material preparations, some of which require months of forethought. This article walks readers through a two-hour exercise, giving them frameworks from business continuity and military field doctrines to understand risk. Readers will conduct a SWOT analysis, define emergencies within their organizations, and then apply risk management practices of qualitative risk assessment and all-hazards planning to develop planning priorities. By the end, readers will have built specific action plans for improving field season readiness.

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.

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.

This article deals with the presence of physicians, surgeons and apothecaries in the early modern Portuguese empire and the dissemination of medical knowledge there. In Portugal itself, the health care sector had been the target of considerable royal interference since the final years of the fifteenth century, during the construction of the early modern state. Regulatory frameworks were established to harmonise health care practice throughout the country and to control the organisation and distribution of the available health care practitioners among local communities. As this was also the time when Portugal was investing heavily in its colonies, how were these policies reflected in the empire? Did health care feature in the Portuguese government’s colonial strategies? How did the official policy to send medical personnel overseas work on the ground? Did it operate at a large enough scale to transform local practices?

Through the biographies of a dynasty of practitioners who were active in some of the mountainous villages of the Venetian Terraferma the article brings to light unknown aspects of the professional world of surgeons. Their activities were profoundly influenced by the economic and geographic peculiarities of the territory where they lived and worked. Provincial towns and their territories offered professional opportunities both to licensed and to non-university trained practitioners. However, it was generally in small villages, especially those situated in border areas and part of the main commercial networks, that surgeons preferred to establish their practices, thus supplementing the medical services supplied by the town. Normally their knowledge was largely empirical and was transmitted from father to son. The apprenticeship-based training does not appear alternative to the academic education typical of learned practitioners: much evidence points to the existence of ‘scientific autodidacts’, self-taught practitioners who possessed and read medical texts or had attended academic courses, even if only in part. Practising surgery in this area was a highly mobile activity, stretching from the village to the neighbouring valleys, and even to areas outside the boundaries of the city and across the border of the Venetian state. Surgeons, furthermore, were able to transfer their skills and knowledge across a range of different occupations such as shoemakers, leather workers and tailors, a fact that confirms their close ties with the local artisan milieu.

This article discusses an under-researched group and provides an analytical overview of the comparative experiences of African, Indian and Coloured doctors at South African universities during the apartheid era. It probes diversity of experience in training and practice as well as gendered differentiation amongst black students before going on to discuss the careers and political activism of black doctors as well as the impact of recent transformational change on their position. It briefly assesses how singular this South African experience was.