In the next 10 years, the US cultural resource management (CRM) industry will grow in terms of monies spent on CRM activities and the size of the CRM labor force. Between US fiscal years 2022 and 2031, annual spending on CRM will increase from about $1.46 to $1.85 billion, due in part to growth in the US economy but also to an added $1 billion of CRM activities conducted in response to the newly passed infrastructure bill. The increased spending will lead to the creation of about 11,000 new full-time positions in all CRM fields. Archaeologists will be required to fill more than 8,000 positions, and of these, about 70% will require advanced degrees. Based on current graduation rates, there will be a significant MA/PhD-level job deficit. Accordingly, there is a compelling need to (a) stop the trend to close or decrease the size of current graduate programs, (b) reorient academic programs to give a greater emphasis to the skills needed to be successful in CRM, and (c) better integrate academic and applied archaeology to leverage the vast amount of data that will be generated in the next decade to best benefit the public.

This introductory article foregrounds the articles in this special issue, “Professional–Collector Collaboration: Global Challenges and Solutions,” complementing the special issue “Professional–Collector Collaboration Moving beyond Debate to Best Practice,” also published in Advances in Archaeological Practice. The articles that we introduce here cover examples and case studies from European settings such as Norway, the Czech Republic, England, Wales, Finland, and Belgium—places that have been exploring how to respond to the challenge of working meaningfully with collectors and finders of archaeological artifacts, especially metal detectorists. These are joined by examples from Australia, Mexico, Uruguay, and even the United States, in the context of handling—at first glance—problematic collections originating from elsewhere. The articles are diverse in their settings and the challenges they describe, but they point to the need for participatory and democratic approaches to archaeological heritage and the different publics that engage with it.

There is a lack of broad representation in archaeology generally, and in a specialized field such as underwater archaeology, this issue is only exacerbated. Underwater archaeological sites are often “out of sight, out of mind,“” creating a general lack of awareness of underwater cultural heritage and career prospects in many communities. Coupled with a lack of education and the additional demands of working in a submerged environment (e.g., scuba diving), there is a striking lack of diversity in underwater archaeology. Overall, underwater archaeologists are a largely homogeneous group, particularly along the lines of race and wealth—categories that often overlap. In the context of asking broader questions such as “Why are there so few underwater archaeologists of color?” and “How can we do better?” this article outlines the barriers to inclusivity writ large in underwater archaeology and provides solutions for increasing diversity and accessibility in the field, including specific opportunities and resources for underrepresented groups to “get their feet wet.”

This article considers the relevance of the Society for American Archaeology's 2018 “Statement on Collaboration with Responsible and Responsive Stewards of the Past” for imported antiquities (specifically, “classical” ones—that is, from Mediterranean regions). Various practical, legal, and ethical differences between collecting imported versus domestic objects make it difficult to identify “responsive and responsible stewards” of the former. An obstacle to responsible stewardship of privately owned classical collections—and to collaboration between classical archaeologists and collectors—is the 2008 acquisition guidelines issued by the two leading professional organizations in the museum field. I argue that the best home for unprovenienced and poorly provenienced antiquities collections is in university museums, where their complicated object biographies can be fully researched, taught, and displayed.

The goal for many PhD students in archaeology is tenure-track employment. Students primarily receive their training by tenure-track or tenured professors, and they are often tacitly expected—or explicitly encouraged—to follow in the footsteps of their advisor. However, the career trajectories that current and recent PhD students follow may hold little resemblance to the ones experienced by their advisors. To understand these different paths and to provide information for current PhD students considering pursuing a career in academia, we surveyed 438 archaeologists holding tenured or tenure-track positions in the United States. The survey, recorded in 2019, posed a variety of questions regarding the personal experiences of individual professors. The results are binned by the decade in which the respondent graduated. Evident patterns are discussed in terms of change over time. The resulting portraits of academic pathways through the past five decades indicate that although broad commonalities exist in the qualifications of early career academics, there is no singular pathway to obtaining tenure-track employment. We highlight the commonalities revealed in our survey to provide a set of general qualifications that might provide a baseline set of skills and experiences for an archaeologist seeking a tenure-track job in the United States.

This article introduces the first of what will ultimately be two collections of case studies in archaeologist–responsible/responsive artifact collector collaboration. Focused on the United States, the articles in this issue of Advances in Archaeological Practice share the thoughts and experiences of archaeologists representing diverse employment sectors (compliance, agency, museum, and university), artifact collectors, and members of descendant communities. Research areas extend from California to Virginia and from Ohio to the Texas/Mexico border. The breadth of the writers' backgrounds and their focal regions reinforce the wide applicability of collaborative best practices. Every author explicitly treats two subjects: (1) the intersection of their work with the Society for American Archaeology's (SAA) recently published guidelines for ethical professional–collector collaboration, and (2) their own practical suggestions for establishing and nurturing those relationships. This introductory article provides an overview of each of the other contributions, notes how the contributions articulate with the SAA guidelines, and offers its own, mostly philosophical suggestions for prospective members of professional–collector collaborations.

Archaeological compliance is defined by state and federal legislation and the constrained, precise language in which it is written. Rules and policies operationalize the law but provide some flexibility in its interpretation and implementation. The pronounced use of “legal” and “scientific” language in archaeological compliance can be considered insensitive or offensive to some tribal members when discussing the disposition and care of the remains and belongings of their ancestors. The language we use constructs our reality and defines how we interpret our interactions of the lived experience. It is therefore necessary to revise the language employed in archaeological compliance to ensure that it reflects the values of the communities that these laws define to determine treatment and ultimate disposition of their ancestral remains and belongings. This article describes and encourages the use of a respectful terminology, developed in conjunction with compliance professionals and tribal representatives, to restructure the language we use and redefine our interactions as more considerate of tribal concerns for repatriation.

This article briefly outlines underwater cultural heritage artifact management in Australia from an unregulated collecting environment in the 1940s–1960s to the increasingly regulated environment of the present. In 1993, in conjunction with new legislation, an amnesty was declared in order to inventory artifacts collected from now-protected historic shipwrecks that were in private hands. The amnesty period concluded with approximately 20,000 artifacts notified at a time when information was being stored in a range of formats and to different standards. Today, the Australian Government manages the possession, custody, and control of approximately 500,000 underwater cultural heritage artifacts, most of which are in collecting institutions, with one-tenth in public custody. This article highlights the contemporary legislative, policy, and administrative framework for the management of underwater cultural heritage artifacts in Australia, particularly those that remain in the possession of private individuals and are subject to trade.

Recent absorbed residue studies have confirmed that ceramic and shell containers were used for consuming Datura in precolumbian times. Until now, no one has identified what tools precolumbian people used to produce a concentrated hallucinogenic concoction. In this study, we used mass spectrometry to identify Datura residues (a flowering plant with hallucinogenic properties) in two late precolumbian composite bottles from the Central Arkansas River valley. Unlike the construction of most Mississippian bottles, the bottles in this study are unique because ceramic disks with a series of concentric perforations were incorporated in the bottles at the juncture of the bottle neck with the globular portion of the body. The organic residue analysis revealed Datura residues in both bottles. We argue that the internal clay disks served as strainers that allowed Datura producers to separate the hallucinogenic alkaloids from the Datura flower to produce a powerful liquid beverage.

The year 2020 was an awakening for some. For others, it reiterated the persistent social injustice in the United States. Compelled by these events, 30 diverse individuals came together from January to May 2021 for a semester-long seminar exploring inequity in archaeological practice. The seminar's discussions spotlighted the inequity and social injustices that are deeply embedded within the discipline. However, inequity in archaeology is often ignored or treated narrowly as discrete, if loosely bound, problems. A broad approach to inequity in archaeology revealed injustice to be intersectional, with compounding effects. Through the overarching themes of individual, community, theory, and practice, we (a subset of the seminar's participants) explore inequity and its role in various facets of archaeology, including North–South relations, publication, resource distribution, class differences, accessibility, inclusive theories, service to nonarchaeological communities, fieldwork, mentorship, and more. We focus on creating a roadmap for understanding the intersectionality of issues of inequity and suggesting avenues for continued education and direct engagement. We argue that community-building—by providing mutual support and building alliances—provides a pathway for realizing greater equity in our discipline.

This article attempts to bring Indigenous voices into the ongoing conversation about collecting practices and the archaeological record. The issue editors solicited responses to open-ended questions about those subjects from members of their own and issue contributors' networks of Indigenous collaborators and contacts. Alan D. Kelley (Deputy Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska), Angela J. Neller (Curator, Wanapum Heritage Center, Washington), and Carlton Shield Chief Gover (PhD student in archaeology at the University of Colorado and member of the Skiri Band of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma) offered the answers reported here. We do not pretend to reflect the innumerable and highly varied Indigenous perspectives on the collection of their ancestors' material culture, but we do hope to plant the seeds of a more inclusive conversation than has been the norm in archaeology.

This article focuses on the production of archaeological knowledge within the fieldwork archive. Archaeological archives do not always reflect the reality of evidence uncovered during fieldwork processes or even the fieldwork processes themselves. This includes the many different agents and agencies, which are crucial to the construction of archaeological knowledge and their representation—or lack of representation—in the archive. Archaeological archives impose restrictions on how knowledge is included in a collection, the way it is recorded, and the fieldwork processes used. Therefore, this article considers the way in which the processes of archival documentation produce, transform, and construct archaeological knowledge. The main examples are from the British School of Archaeology in Egypt's excavations at Abydos between 1921 and 1922, often referred to as the Tombs of the Courtiers and directed by Flinders Petrie. Looking at the different contexts of an excavation archive, from before its creation to its ongoing curation and use, can reveal significant aspects not just of the history of archaeology but also on many of the ongoing recording methods and processes still used in the field today.

Recovering Archaic period history of Native Americans such as the Rappahannock Tribe of Virginia is problematic because most of their rich, riverfront lands were taken by European colonists. Remaining archaeological material culture is now the property of current landowners. I collaborated with farmers along the Rappahannock River to evaluate their previously unstudied lithic collections as archaeological data sources. I tested landowner collections made by decades of repeated surveys for reliability by comparing independently made collections from the same site. The collections were significantly similar in abundance and composition through time, indicating they were representative samples of the underlying population. Comparison of collections including ground-stone tools from two different sites gave evidence of demographic changes and shifting settlement patterns through the Archaic periods and informed narratives of long-term Indigenous cultural change. I consulted with present-day Rappahannock Tribe members, who consider these collections important for tribal history, to develop research questions and evaluate shared results. Although private collections often lack documentation, proactive collaboration with responsive collectors as described allowed essential information to be recovered, documented, and preserved for the archaeological record. Building bridges of trust and information transfer among collectors, archaeologists, and tribe members is key to maximizing the information value of private collections.

Archaeologists frequently use probability distributions and null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) to assess how well survey, excavation, or experimental data align with their hypotheses about the past. Bayesian inference is increasingly used as an alternative to NHST and, in archaeology, is most commonly applied to radiocarbon date estimation and chronology building. This article demonstrates that Bayesian statistics has broader applications. It begins by contrasting NHST and Bayesian statistical frameworks, before introducing and applying Bayes's theorem. In order to guide the reader through an elementary step-by-step Bayesian analysis, this article uses a fictional archaeological faunal assemblage from a single site. The fictional example is then expanded to demonstrate how Bayesian analyses can be applied to data with a range of properties, formally incorporating expert prior knowledge into the hypothesis evaluation process.

In Uruguay, there are records of archaeological collections at least since Darwin's visit in 1832. Since then, the role of collections and collectors has been changing in relation to official institutions, researchers, and professional archaeologists. In the years following the creation of the university degree in anthropology, during the 1980s and 1990s, academic and official speeches considered collectors one of the greatest threats to the development of the discipline in the country. Their collections were seen as useless for research, and it was argued that they had no context. New generations of archaeologists have been reversing this situation, redefining the research of archaeological collections and reviewing the relationships and interactions with nonacademic stakeholders. We present some of our experiences here, based on students’ training in this line of work, the integration of responsible and responsive collectors in the research process and site conservation, the collaborative register of archaeological sites, and the promotion of donation or conservation of collections (avoiding commercialization). We propose possible work methodologies at the national level, such as the formation of research groups, which involve the coparticipation of different stakeholders, the development of a professional code of ethics, and changes in legislation.

This article presents a case study detailing the difficulties and results of collaborating at a privately owned cave site. For many years, Spirit Eye Cave—a privately held cave system—was a pay-to-dig site, with detrimental effects on the archaeological deposits. The pay-to-dig chapter had impacted this important site, but professional archaeologists had not tried to piece together this destructive history. After months of sleuthing, it was determined that some of these pay-to-dig patrons had recovered and owned or sold Indigenous ancestors from the cave. This discovery was unexpected and shocking, but it focused the efforts at the site on the recovery of these ancestors from private collections. These conversations have been uncomfortable but have demarcated responsible and responsive stewards (RRSs) from bad actors, resulting in the recovery of multiple artifact collections and ancestors that have produced significant research results and opened previously nonexistent dialogues with modern descendant communities.

In Mexico, archaeological heritage belongs to all members of society, according to section XXV of Article 73 of the Mexican Constitution and Article 27 of the federal law on monuments and archaeological sites. The Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) was founded in 1939 as a federal government agency for the research, protection, and dissemination of archaeological heritage. Although this heritage belongs to all, stringent rules and procedures create an unequal relationship between career professionals and the diverse communities interested in the past (i.e., collectors, local museums, descendant communities). It is long due to begin practicing an inclusive archaeology that considers all the various knowledge systems (i.e., academic, technical, local, and traditional) of the communities interested in the past. Here, we describe case studies from Sonora, Mexico, to propose the implementation of several far-reaching activities with artifact collectors, Indigenous communities, researchers, archaeologists, and INAH Sonora authorities. Our pilot proposal needs to be implemented in other areas of Mexico that continue to prioritize archaeological narratives over other narratives about our past.

This article outlines a model for teaching undergraduate and graduate archaeology students the skills for working with open-access archaeological data and using digital tools for analysis. Due to the often limited opportunities for students to learn methods directly for data reuse, large archaeological datasets remain stagnant and unused in digital archives. The bloat of unused data stands as a major ethical hurdle in heritage fields. This article explores an approach for addressing this issue, which is to incorporate data and digital literacy training into standard archaeological curricula. This approach consists of covering a wide range of topics that contribute to digital and data fluency that include both practical digital skills and discussions aimed at contextualizing the tools into larger, ethical, and sociopolitical frameworks. This article offers summaries of the activities and tutorials developed for this project and provides open access to all of the resources for future use.

The development of large reservoirs in the western United States during the twentieth century inundated a diverse array of archaeological sites and other cultural resources. Land managers, cultural resource specialists, and other stakeholders have long been aware of the effects of inundation on archaeological sites, and they have sought to mitigate them by using various means at their disposal. In modern times, drought and climate change in the western United States have reduced the pool sizes of many reservoirs, including one of the largest, Lake Mead, which straddles the Arizona and Nevada border. This research presents the results of a two-year effort to study the direct and indirect effects of lacustrine-based processes at Lake Mead to a large eleventh-century prehistoric village, Pueblo Grande de Nevada. What are the processes that are most likely to damage archaeological sites and, conversely, what are those that may serve to preserve or protect them? The results of pedestrian inventory throughout the village, limited subsurface tests at certain loci, and intensive mapping at one habitation complex are used to evaluate and synthesize these effects.