Archaeological data often come in the form of counts. Understanding why counts of artifacts, subsistence remains, or features vary across time and space is central to archaeological inquiry. A central statistical method to model such variation is through regression, yet despite sophisticated advances in computational approaches to archaeology, practitioners do not have a standard approach for building, validating, or interpreting the results of count regression. Drawing on advances in ecology, we outline a framework for evaluating regressions with archaeological count data that includes suggestions for model fitting, diagnostics, and interpreting results. We hope these suggestions provide a foundation for advancing regression with archaeological count data to further our understanding of the past.

Writing for publication will be central to students’ future careers, so learning this skill should be integral to their graduate training. In a recent graduate seminar, we set up an assignment for which students would write a digital review (DR) and receive periodic feedback on their work through an innovative mock peer-review roundtable workshop. Each student wrote a DR intended for actual publication in the journal Advances in Archaeological Practice. Students worked closely with the instructor and the journal editor on their individual topics, outlines, and abstracts. They also peer-reviewed each other's drafts and discussed their feedback as part of the roundtable workshop, which simulated real reviewers. Finally, each student wrote cover letters and prepared images for submission to the journal. This exercise demystified the peer-review process for students who had little prior knowledge about publication, prepared students for responding to reviewer comments from varying viewpoints, and helped students understand the additional steps involved in publication. Although it was challenging to scale this exercise to a large class, we hope that others will also try and share results from these types of authentic real-world training experiments to advance graduate pedagogy in our discipline and beyond.

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.

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.

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.

In the last decade, archaeologists have been using human-occupied interactive digital built environments to investigate human agency, settlement, and behavior. To document this evidence, we provide here one method of conducting drone-based photogrammetry and GIS mapping from within these digital spaces based on well-established methods conducted in physical landscapes. Mapping is an integral part of archaeology in the natural world, but it has largely eluded researchers in these new, populated digital landscapes. We hope that our proposed method helps to resolve this issue. We argue that employing archaeological methods in digital environments provides a successful methodological framework to investigate human agency in digital spaces for anthropological purposes and has the potential for extrapolating data from human-digital landscape interactions and applying them to their natural analogues.

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.

Digital tools are widely used in archaeology for excavation, research, and communication of results. Recently, due in large part to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a significant increase in the use of these resources in the classroom. The use of digital games for teaching undergraduate archaeology courses has been explored by a number of educators, but the majority of instructors continue to see this medium as lacking any particular educational merit. To combat this conclusion, in this article, the author explores some of the ways that unmodified digital games can be integrated into undergraduate archaeology courses to inspire critical discussions. She discusses two main types of games—conceptual simulations and realist simulations—to show how these can help students better understand theoretical approaches to archaeological interpretation and to consider the most effective form of archaeological reconstructions for different audiences. The author highlights her own experiences teaching with Assassin's Creed: Origins to show the benefits and challenges of working with this medium, and she includes student responses to the use of digital games in discussions. An example of a student assignment and an example of a project prompt are provided as supplemental materials to further encourage the use of digital games in the classroom.

Historic archaeological resources in the American West are increasingly at risk of loss because of prolonged droughts, wildfires, earthquakes, general deterioration, and the negative impact of increasing visitation. Casual visitors regularly remove objects from their original contexts in the landscape, either taking them home as souvenirs or bringing them to local staff because they are concerned about the items disappearing. As a result, many sites of cultural significance are losing the ability to convey the information required for scholarly interpretation and for drafting community and life histories of their past residents. We argue that citizen science and mobile apps specifically designed for site stewardship are viable tools for alleviating negative human impacts on cultural landscapes and enhancing our capacity to record and monitor sites of cultural heritage. We contend that our approach uses an innovative interface, the Citizen Preservationist app, an open-source hybrid mobile/desktop software we developed to foster both current use and protection of archaeological sites and historic parks. We demonstrated the viability of our app by conducting a user study at Bodie, California (ca. 1859–1942), that assessed how this software promotes a sense of stewardship and appreciation for the archaeological heritage of this beloved California State Historic Park.

Recent years have seen the rapid adoption of digital site recording strategies following the proliferation of GPS-enabled mobile devices and data collection apps. Much of the emerging literature on digital—or paperless—archaeology, however, has focused on excavation contexts, with fewer discussions of mobile-GIS solutions on archaeological survey. This article discusses the design and implementation of a site survey workflow based on Esri's ArcGIS Collector mobile app in the context of Project ArAGATS's Kasakh Valley Archaeology Survey in northwestern Armenia. The Collector app provides a simple, map-centric user interface that allows surveyors with little-to-no GIS experience to record site locations, enter attribute data on customized digital forms, and attach photographs. With a network connection, the Collector app instantly uploads site information as GIS data to the project geodatabase and refreshes the data across surveyors’ mobile devices. Although the Collector app lacks certain GIS features and requires an institutional Esri license, we found that the native integration with our project GIS and broad access to visualization and recording tools in the app made in-field decision-making and interpretation more collaborative and inclusive across the survey team.

As the role of digital methods in heritage and archaeology has increased in prominence, so has the question of capacity and community building. Who should receive training in digital methods? How should training take place? What concepts, platforms, technologies should be taught? These are relevant questions requiring careful planning and thoughtful implementation; yet beyond these questions, there is an issue of even greater importance: the planned development of communities of practice. The teaching of digital methods has a greater chance of success if it takes place in an ecosystem of scholars who are connected to one another through shared perspectives on those methods. This article presents and discusses the details of a model developed at Michigan State University that speaks to teaching digital archaeology and heritage methods, and to the development of communities of practice in which those methods are shared and relevant. The model is driven and informed by the activities of three projects: the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Institute on Digital Archaeology Method & Practice, the Cultural Heritage Informatics Graduate Fellowship Program, and the Department of Anthropology Digital Cultural Heritage Fieldschool.

The creation of digital repositories of human skeletal remains offers bioarchaeologists a variety of potential means of aiding efforts related to curation and analysis. We present a discussion of how issues of preservation and access can affect research and argue that digital repositories not only maintain a record of objects but that the digital format allows researchers to expand their studies to include otherwise inaccessible collections. Digital models can be utilized by bioarchaeologists to collect and analyze a wide variety of quantitative and qualitative data. We review several digital capture methods employed by bioarchaeologists, including CT scanning, laser scanning, and photogrammetry. While photogrammetry is underutilized by bioarchaeologists, we point out its many advantages over other methods.