Unauthorized cultural resource alterations range from looting and grave robbing to contract violations and wildland fires. Such alterations degrade cultural resources’ spiritual, communal, ecological, economic, and scientific values. Alterations often violate communal senses of place, security, and belonging. Alterations complicate jurisdiction-specific management, which is premised on up-to-date information on resource sizes, conditions, and significance. Cultural resource damage assessment protocols based on proven forensic practices distil to eight fieldwork steps: verify the alteration, assemble the team, survey the scene, document the evidence, gather the evidence, assess the archaeological value and the cost of repair and restoration, prescribe emergency remediation, and confirm evidence documentation and custody. The eight steps give special consideration to local communities and Indigenous Territories, where unauthorized alterations are as common as they are elsewhere, whereas impacts to spiritual and cultural values are generally greater. Adapted to jurisdiction- and incident-specific circumstances, the steps will guide responses to alterations by community leaders, land managers, regulators, law enforcement agents, and archaeologists, including preparation of excellent damage assessment reports. Damage assessment practitioners and land managers should refine these practices to deter alterations, engage Tribes and other affected communities, halt postalteration degradation, ensure accountability, and enable jurisdiction-scale curation of cultural resources and their unique value constellations.

Most archaeological investigations in the United States and other countries must comply with preservation laws, especially if they are on government property or supported by government funding. Academic and cultural resource management (CRM) studies have explored various social, temporal, and environmental contexts and produce an ever-increasing volume of archaeological data. More and more data are born digital, and many legacy data are digitized. There is a building effort to synthesize and integrate data at a massive scale and create new data standards and management systems. Taxpayer dollars often fund archaeological studies that are intended, in spirit, to promote historic preservation and provide public benefits. However, the resulting data are difficult to access and interoperationalize, and they are rarely collected and managed with their long-term security, accessibility, and ethical reuse in mind. Momentum is building toward open data and open science as well as Indigenous data sovereignty and governance. The field of archaeology is reaching a critical point where consideration of diverse constituencies, concerns, and requirements is needed to plan data collection and management approaches moving forward. This theme issue focuses on challenges and opportunities in archaeological data collection and management in academic and CRM contexts.

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.

In 2006, the World Bank's private sector lending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), introduced eight Environmental and Social Performance Standards (PSs) to define IFC clients’ responsibilities for managing their environmental and social risks, including those related to cultural heritage. Since their introduction, the PSs have evolved into a de facto global standard that other development banks and many private sector banks, insurers, and development proponents have voluntarily adopted to help manage their own risk exposure. Although the widespread adoption of such policies can be viewed positively as a reflection of good governance, the PSs were never designed with this purpose in mind. This article traces the development of cultural heritage policy within the World Bank Group, then critically examines the IFC PSs as they relate to cultural heritage, drawing attention to the elements in need of revision to better reflect internationally recognized good practice for the management of cultural heritage. Equally important, we recommend the development and implementation of a bespoke cultural heritage framework for the private sector.

Despite advocacy of landscape approaches in cultural resource management (CRM) and critiques of the site concept, CRM data collection methods in the western United States continue to focus on individual archaeological sites as units of observation, analysis, and management. The transect-recording unit (TRU) method strikes a balance between conventional site-based recording methods and site-less survey approaches by dividing survey space into a grid of uniformly sized cells for recording all cultural manifestations observed across a survey area. TRU survey generates site boundaries required by CRM regulations while retaining a fine-grained spatial framework for landscape-level research and management. This article discusses the technical requirements of the TRU system and its potential for improving landscape-level research and management. Advances in digital recording technologies and analysis techniques render the method efficient and effective in identifying cultural resource distributions and characteristics otherwise obscured by conventional approaches. The research and management potential of the TRU system is illustrated through identification and interpretation of precontact foot trails in New Mexico's Tularosa Basin. These trails are essentially invisible during pedestrian survey but are readily identifiable as linear patterns using aggregated landscape-scale TRU survey data from multiple survey projects, providing novel insight into precontact routes of movement and exchange.

This article provides an introduction to the theme issue “Archaeology of Service.” We explore how performing service in archaeology articulates with the concepts and practices of community-based archaeology, collaborative archaeology, and the Archaeologies of the Heart projects and their larger purposes of approaching work through a lens of social and environmental justice. We introduce seven articles that describe working in communities around the world, including the Bininj of the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation in the Northwest Territory of Australia; the Bunun of the Lakulaku River Basin in Taiwan; the Passamaquoddy Nation in Maine (USA); people from 21 First Nations in the province of Ontario, Canada; the diverse communities of Oklahoma (USA); the African American community in Bolivar, Texas (USA); and the people of San Cristóbal Island in the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador. The articles are tied together by the common theme of collaborative work that is built through relationships of trust and is conducted in ways that strive to change the institutional and educational structures in which archaeology is practiced.

The transnational networks of the illicit and illegal antiquities trade are hard to perceive. We suggest representing the trade as a knowledge graph with multiple kinds of relationships that can be transformed by a neural architecture into a “knowledge graph embedding model.” The result is that the vectorization of the knowledge represented in the graph can be queried for missing “knowledge” of the trade by virtue of the various entities’ proximity in the multidimensional embedding space. In this article, we build a knowledge graph about the antiquities trade using a semantic annotation tool, drawing on the series of articles in the Trafficking Culture Project's online encyclopedia. We then use the AmpliGraph package, a series of tools for supervised machine learning (Costabello et al. 2019) to turn the graph into a knowledge graph embedding model. We query the model to predict new hypotheses and to cluster actors in the trade. The model suggests connections between actors and institutions hitherto unsuspected and not otherwise present in the original knowledge graph. This approach could hold enormous potential for illuminating the hidden corners of the illicit antiquities trade. The same method could be applied to other kinds of archaeological knowledge.

In much of the Western world, collaborative research undertaken by settler archaeologists readily lends itself, at least in part, to a continuation of the colonial project. Yet, against this backdrop, Australia's First Nations’ peoples continue to work with researchers and to drive systemic change in research practice. Community-engaged archaeology, defined here as codeveloped studies of ancestral places (following Schaepe et al. 2017), is directed to improving relationships between Indigenous peoples and archaeologists. Even so, the practice of archaeology with and for nonsettler communities remains underdeveloped with regard to institutional priorities and funding agency bureaucracies. Here, we (Mirarr Traditional Owners, Mirarr employees, and settler archaeologist researchers) reflect on these issues as part of our ongoing research on the ochres and bim (rock art) of the well-known Madjedbebe rockshelter in the Alligator Rivers region, Northern Territory, Australia.

The three authors research surface archaeological records dominated by low-density scatters and isolated artifacts, archaeological phenomena frequently encountered during cultural resource management (CRM) projects in areas of the United States and Australia. We each began researching surface artifact scatters for different reasons but converged on approaches that emphasize the formation of these forms of archaeological deposits. Through a variety of projects, we asked a common set of questions about the processes that both buried and exposed these materials, the methods needed to obtain a chronology in different regions, and the ways we might interpret artifacts found together in different densities. Answering these questions led to the collection and analyses of datasets in innovative ways and the questioning of a number of archaeological categories often thought of as fundamental for archaeological research. Here, we review examples of our respective research and consider the implications for CRM projects dealing with surface lithics.

For much of its history, archaeological research has relied on site-specific projects, regional comparisons, and theory building from case studies. However, recent research themes concerning the emergence of complex social-ecological systems and long-term land-use legacies require a new approach to archaeological data. Large-scale syntheses of archaeological data provide an effective way forward to address these new research themes. In more concise terms, “big questions” require “big data” to help answer them. The archaeological information collected by the USDA Forest Service is one such “big dataset” and represents an incalculable investment in time, resources, and expertise. This article explores this concept and presents an R package (ArchaeoSRP) designed to extract archaeological information from USDA Forest Service site record files. We demonstrate the functionality of this R package through a case study examining the archaeological data for the Cle Elum Ranger District, within Central Washington's Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. Our results reveal the efficiency of using automated methods to extract, organize, and synthesize district-level archaeological data, which, in turn, reveal patterns of precontact and historic land use that were otherwise not distinguishable.

Software now allows archaeologists to document excavations in more detail than ever before through rich, born-digital datasets. In comparison, paper documentation of past excavations (a valuable corpus of legacy data) is prohibitively difficult to work with. This pilot study explores creating custom software to digitize paper field notes from the 1970s excavations of the Gulkana site into machine-readable text and maps to be compatible with born-digital data from subsequent excavations in the 1990s. This site, located in Alaska's Copper River Basin, is important to archaeological understanding of metalworking innovation by precontact Northern Dene people, but is underrepresented in the literature because no comprehensive map of the site exists. The process and results of digitizing this corpus are presented in hopes of aiding similar efforts by other researchers.

Many Indigenous groups in Taiwan, including the Bunun, inhabited remote mountainous regions. Beginning in the 1930s, all mountain settlements were relocated to lower-lying areas by the colonial authorities. These groups lost the territories where they used to hunt, practice slash-and-burn agriculture, and carry out other social and cultural practices. Having being separated from their ancestral lands for decades, their knowledge of their former settlements and traditional ways of life is gradually disappearing. In recent years, there is a tendency among the younger generation of Indigenous people to organize and participate in roots-seeking expeditions. As their knowledge about the former settlements is limited, they seek help from the elderly—and archaeologists. Since 2014, I have collaborated with Bunun communities, recording their ancestors’ lands in the Lakulaku River Basin by joining archaeological surveys on roots-seeking trips. During these surveys, I had to learn Bunun values and gain knowledge of the Lakulaku River Basin via the bodily experience of moving through and being in the landscape with its traditional inhabitants. By applying remote-sensing technologies such as airborne lidar in our surveys, our team managed to identify and record settlements that were unfamiliar to the Bunun.

Culturally significant landscapes, which evoke and promote strong feelings of attachment among their constituencies and advocates, pose a management challenge for federal agencies. Current cultural resources laws and policies focus largely on the physical characteristics of individual sites and features. I call here for a management approach that differs from current practice in several important ways. First, it recognizes the power of landscapes and landscape character. Drawing from both wilderness and park management, it calls for the identification and preservation of landscape characteristics, and the development of landscape-level inventories that can identify current landscape condition. Finally, it recognizes that how a landscape is experienced by its constituencies and advocates is a measure of management effectiveness. For management to succeed, management approaches must recognize and respect the core values and experiences that are at the heart of culturally significant landscapes.

Archaeologists tend to produce slow data that is contextually rich but often difficult to generalize. An example is the analysis of lithic microdebitage, or knapping debris, that is smaller than 6.3 mm (0.25 in.). So far, scholars have relied on manual approaches that are prone to intra- and interobserver errors. In the following, we present a machine learning–based alternative together with experimental archaeology and dynamic image analysis. We use a dynamic image particle analyzer to measure each particle in experimentally produced lithic microdebitage (N = 5,299) as well as an archaeological soil sample (N = 73,313). We have developed four machine learning models based on Naïve Bayes, glmnet (generalized linear regression), random forest, and XGBoost (“Extreme Gradient Boost[ing]”) algorithms. Hyperparameter tuning optimized each model. A random forest model performed best with a sensitivity of 83.5%. It misclassified only 28 or 0.9% of lithic microdebitage. XGBoost models reached a sensitivity of 67.3%, whereas Naïve Bayes and glmnet models stayed below 50%. Except for glmnet models, transparency proved to be the most critical variable to distinguish microdebitage. Our approach objectifies and standardizes microdebitage analysis. Machine learning allows studying much larger sample sizes. Algorithms differ, though, and a random forest model offers the best performance so far.

For 15 years, the University of Idaho has conducted chemical testing of excavated materials from historical sites throughout North America. The most common artifacts tested are sealed containers. Some come from current excavations, but most are from repository shelves. The immediate purpose of the archaeochemistry work is twofold: to identify the contents of the containers for researchers and to provide training for students in analytical chemistry. After testing more than 500 items, project personnel have recognized some unexpected outcomes that have implications for institutions housing the artifacts. Specifically, tested materials identified the small, yet consistent, presence of certain artifacts that can have health implications for personnel working with the items. The article concludes with general guidance on identifying and assessing those risks.

Indigenous communities globally are challenged by threats to heritage resources due to residual effects of colonization, outsider encroachment on traditional spaces, and economic and political inequities. The effects of climate change add another dimension to these challenges, not only by altering familiar ecosystems and landscapes but also through the destruction of Indigenous heritage spaces. The University of Maine's Northeast archaeology program supports Indigenous resilience to climate change through community-engaged approaches to archaeological research. Recent shell heap research at the Holmes Point West site in Machiasport, Maine, exemplifies these efforts by blending archaeological science with service through Passamaquoddy language preservation and community engagement. This article discusses the University of Maine's partnership with the Passamaquoddy Nation and reflects on the nexus of Indigenous archaeology, heritage protection, and climate change resilience.

Recent years have seen the rapid expansion of airborne and spaceborne remote-sensing products adopted by archaeologists for interpreting ancient landscapes and managing heritage resources. A growing and increasingly specialized literature attests to the promise and availability of commercial and publicly funded satellite imagery, as well as UAV-mounted sensors across a range of resolutions and price points. In the South Caucasus (including the countries of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia), a growing commitment to landscape approaches in archaeology is stimulating the adoption of satellite remote sensing as an important new tool for identifying and managing archaeological resources while tracing the impact of historic land-use alterations in survey areas. Nevertheless, budgetary challenges and a lack of training opportunities among international partners and heritage organizations outside of the funding streams of large academic institutions can lead to widening technological gulfs in the discipline that reinforce colonial relationships. Building on recent technical articles covering specific imagery datasets, this article aims to address this by providing a general review of free or low-cost remotely sensed datasets available to archaeologists, with the aim of broadening awareness of these important tools and their vocabularies, and illustrating them with recent published examples from the South Caucasus.

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered the adoption of online education across all sectors worldwide, which was particularly challenging for disciplines that rely on hands-on learning such as bioarchaeology. Although the impacts of this rapid transition have been well investigated in fields such as anatomy and forensic anthropology, there has been little research into its effects within bioarchaeology. We address this deficit by investigating two common perceptions around online learning from a bioarchaeological perspective: (1) online techniques are inadequate for teaching practical skills, and (2) online learning environments lack a sense of community, thereby negatively affecting learner experiences. To gauge learner perceptions around online practical education in this field, we conducted a qualitative survey of participants in a bioarchaeology masterclass series. Results suggest that students perceive online learning to be as effective for practical training as in-person alternatives and that online learning may engender a sense of community when offered using a collaborative, interactive approach. Based on our results we provide several key recommendations for online education in bioarchaeology, including an active emphasis on social engagement and relationship building, culturally appropriate teaching, and the use of resources to encourage flexibility in learning. A Thai-language abstract is available as Supplemental Text 1.

Despite making great strides over the past 50 years, cultural resources data management and synthesis continues to be elusive and nonstandardized, with each state and agency developing disparate systems that do not easily mesh. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has embarked on a national initiative by creating a National Cultural Resources Data Standard (NCRDS) that works to address many long-standing data organization issues. The NCRDS allows for the application of more rigorous data management principles that facilitate landscape-level planning and data modeling on BLM-administered lands across the western United States. The NCRDS and associated National Cultural Resources Information Management System (NCRIMS) contains normalized data from 11 western State Historic Preservation Offices (SHPOs) and BLM data stores. NCRIMS is a web-based application hosted by the BLM's National Operations Center (NOC) Enterprise Geographic Information System (EGIS). NCRIMS allows for high-level planning during local, regional, and multistate project analyses and undertakings, facilitating consideration of cultural heritage values early in the planning process versus late stages as has been traditional. This allows the BLM to more proactively, effectively, and efficiently answer data calls and inform agency decision-makers on possible impacts to cultural heritage resources by proposed or ongoing agency actions.