The North American Heritage at Risk (NAHAR) collaborative, which formed during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowed for heritage-at-risk partners to shift from reactive to proactive strategies. The result was the creation of the NAHAR research pipeline to respond to landscapes at risk. The pipeline includes modeling of environmental changes to the landscape; monitoring sites to verify location and assess condition; meeting with the public, descendant community, land managers, and transdisciplinary experts in their field to discuss climate change impacts to their heritage in the next 10 years; methodizing by means of a workflow organizer using data from the modeling, monitoring, and meeting; and when appropriate, mitigating areas identified during the methodizing process. In 2020, the Florida Public Archaeology Network—along with partners in Georgia, South Carolina, Washington, Texas, and Louisiana—began the Science Collaborative People of Guana project at the Guana Tolomato Matanzas Estuarine Research Reserve (GTM NERR) north of St. Augustine, Florida. Using a collaborative science mindset, the project team applied the NAHAR pipeline to gain a better sense of how resources were used in the past and how they currently are being used by communities to ensure responsive resource management and relationship building with visitors, descendants, and other community stakeholders, such as the Gullah/Geechee Nation. This article will provide the building blocks for other collaborative teams to follow the NAHAR pipeline and share lessons learned from the two-year project.

Although we, as archaeologists, recognize the value in teaching nonprofessionals about our discipline and the knowledge it generates about the human condition, there are few of these specialists compared to the number of archaeologists practicing today. In this introductory article to the special section titled “Touching the Past to Learn the Past,” we suggest that, because of our unique training as anthropologists and archaeologists, each of us has the potential to contribute to public archaeology education. By remembering our archaeological theory, such as social memory, we can use the artifacts we engage with on a daily basis to bridge the disconnect between what the public hopes to gain from our interactions and what we want to teach them. In this article, we outline our perspective and present an overview of the other three articles in this section that apply this approach in their educational endeavors.