Climate change is impacting archaeological sites around the globe, and Arctic sites are among the most vulnerable because the region is experiencing particularly rapid change. In the face of this threat, archaeologists, heritage managers, and northern communities need to develop strategies for documenting and monitoring Arctic sites and prioritizing them for further investigation. Using three case studies from Banks Island in the western Canadian Arctic, we demonstrate how magnetometer survey could assist in this process, despite the region's poorly developed soils, widespread glacial tills, and periglacial geomorphology, which pose challenges for the technique. The case studies illustrate the utility of magnetometry in mapping both archaeological and permafrost features in the Arctic, allowing it to rapidly investigate site structure and assess the level of threat due to climate change.

Chipped-stone projectile points are used to mark the passage of time and cultures in the record. Archaeologists often recover points in surface survey, yet we do not know how many were found by private collectors before or after professional work. In a 1975–1977 Michigan probabilistic survey, professional archaeologists documented 30 private collections from 20 sample units. In those units, points found by private collectors outnumber professionally recovered ones by a factor of about 32. The survey region's point population estimated separately from the professional and private-collection samples differs by nearly an order of magnitude in favor of private collections, despite highly conservative assumptions about the latter. The number of points found in professional survey is inversely correlated with the number found in private collections, and the professional sample is more sparsely and randomly distributed. However, proportions of several common types are similar between professional and private collections. To the extent that large, reasonably complete samples of points are important for research and preservation, archaeologists must document private collections compiled in and near their survey areas.

Archaeologists’ newfound ability to access vast digital collections creates opportunities but also presents challenges when those collections are from varied sources, including public institutions and private collectors. We illustrate these challenges by comparing two analyses of gender in Mimbres pottery images. Both analyses used the same procedures, but one included material in private collections, while the second drew on a smaller but more controlled sample. Gender distinctions and division of labor were revealed by the first analysis, but the results were not duplicated in the reanalysis using the controlled sample. We consider reasons for the difference, addressing how collectors’ interests may skew collections and suggesting that some particularly desirable Mimbres pottery designs were created using modern paint. The article concludes with recommendations for how archaeologists can best use mixed collections. These include considering how collections might be skewed and designing analyses to counterbalance likely issues, more chemical analyses with representative samples to gauge the extent of modern manipulation of Mimbres vessels, collecting data on the provenance (i.e., collection history) of material in order to try to trace the likelihood of post-excavation modifications, and studying the process of collecting as a means of understanding the authenticity of artifacts.

The rapid pace of economic, political, and social change over the past 150 years has framed and reframed archaeological practice in Ontario. Indigenous groups have become increasingly involved in and critical of archaeological research. Indigenous peoples who value archaeological investigation of ancestral sites, but also desire to protect their buried ancestors, have restricted archaeological excavation and the analysis of remains. Over the last decade, research and consulting archaeologists in Ontario, Canada, have worked collaboratively with Indigenous peoples with an eye to developing sustainable archaeology practices. In the spirit of sustainable archaeology, a comprehensive research project and field school run by Wilfrid Laurier University is training the next generation of archaeologists to adopt investigative techniques that minimize disturbance of ancestral sites. Here we present the results of our surface, magnetic susceptibility, and metal detecting surveys of a Huron-Wendat village site, which pose minimally invasive solutions for investigating village sites in wooded areas. The water-sieving of midden soils in an attempt to recover 100 percent of cultural materials, and the analysis of archived collections also honor the values of Indigenous descendant communities by limiting additional invasive excavation.

We describe the development of an open-access database for Swift Creek Complicated Stamped ceramics, a type of pottery common to Georgia, eastern Alabama, and northern Florida in the Middle and Late Woodland periods between ca. cal A.D. 100 and 800. The characteristic stamped designs on Swift Creek pottery, created by impressing a carved paddle into a clay vessel before firing, provide unique signatures that enable archaeologists to identify paddle matches—multiple vessels, sometimes hundreds of kilometers apart, stamped with a single paddle. These paddle matches potentially allow archaeologists to trace social interactions across hundreds of kilometers with high spatial and temporal resolution. To date, however, this potential has been hindered by the limited accessibility and fragmented nature of the dataset of reconstructed designs. The database we describe integrates paddle designs with other pertinent data for identifying paddle matches and their context, including the results of sourcing and technofunctional analyses and absolute dating. We view this database not only as a critical component of our own research, but also as a platform for collaboration among researchers that will facilitate broad syntheses of the region.

Oxtotitlán Cave paintings have been considered among the earliest in Mesoamerica on stylistic grounds, but confirmation of this hypothesis through absolute dating has not been attempted until now. We describe the application of advanced radiocarbon strategies developed for situations such as caves with high carbon backgrounds. Using a low-temperature plasma oxidation system, we dated both the ancient paint and the biogenic rock coatings that cover the paint layers at Oxtotitlán. Our research has significantly expanded the time frame for the production of polychrome rock paintings encompassing the Early Formative and Late Formative/Early Classic periods, statistically spanning a long era from before ca. 1500 cal B.C. to cal A.D. 600.

Since initial applications of strontium isotope human sourcing in the early 1990s, the use of the method has steadily increased in archaeology and in anthropology more broadly. Despite this trend, the collection of necessary baseline environmental data has not been standardized and sometimes does not occur at all. A thorough environmental sampling strategy will ensure that all the variability within a selected region is documented, which is a critical step to improving the accuracy of sourcing studies. Furthermore, shared strontium baseline data collections are needed to improve the intercomparability of datasets and results. This paper provides a case study from a semiarid region in northwestern New Mexico, USA, highlighting the need for a bottom-up approach to baseline data collection (from bedrock to animal) and describes the methods of pre-field planning and collecting, including rationales for what samples to collect for Sr isotope baseline data. The authors hope that this paper will lay a foundation for the implementation and standardization of Sr isotope baseline data collecting, which does not currently exist.

Archaeological researchers and compliance review officers need to know whether or not a research plan will yield sufficient information to meet research objectives. Despite the need, a key question is often not addressed in proposals or reports: how many flotation samples are sufficient to adequately characterize the food procurement practices at an archaeological site? This article reviews the relationship between ubiquity and statistical probability. By considering the relationship between theoretical ubiquity, measured ubiquity, population ubiquity, and statistical probability, archaeological researchers and compliance officers may assess how many samples must be analyzed in order to adequately characterize the paleoethnobotanical assemblage from a site. These considerations generally apply to any other archaeological data in which presence-absence measures are commonly used and are especially relevant to diet-breadth models in the interest arena of behavioral ecology.

As professional archaeologists and avocational detectorists increasingly collaborate in field research, professional archaeologists must consider how the use of avocational detectorists may bias data. The potential biases may include the following: highly diverse discovery rates; underrepresentation of certain classes of artifacts, especially ferrous items; work rates less than those of professional archaeologists; and amplified areas of negative data due to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Archaeologists are encouraged to collect the information needed to help recognize such biases and to regiment data collection to minimize biases.

Video games are one of today's quintessential media and cultural forms, but they also have a surprising and many-sided relation with the past (Morgan 2016). This certainly holds true for Sid Meier's Civilization (MicroProse & Firaxis Games 1991–2016), which is a series of turn-based, strategy video games in which you lead a historic civilization “from the Stone Age to the Information Age” (Civilization ca. 2016). Sid Meier's Civilization VI, the newest iteration of the series developed by Firaxis and released on October 21, 2016, allows players to step into the shoes of idealized political figures such as Gilgamesh, Montezuma, Teddy Roosevelt, and Gandhi. Via these and other leaders, you aim to achieve supremacy over all other civilizations. This is done through founding cities, creating infrastructure, building armies, conducting diplomacy, spreading culture and religion, and choosing “technologies” and “civics”—philosophical or ideological breakthroughs—for your civilization to focus on.