“You get in, you get out, and you get the job.”

That line from a recent The CRM Archaeology Podcast (Ep 315) about academia’s responsibility to CRM and vice versa stuck with me. It resonated because it echoes a broader shift happening across higher education, especially in new career-readiness initiatives across the California State University system (Inside Higher Ed). Debates have long circled around how university programs can serve as better pipelines to land students jobs in CRM. Yet the same conversation keeps repeating itself, and there is continued disappointment on both ends: academics want to offer more than job training, and industry still calls for graduates with stronger job-ready skills.

Now, however, this long-standing issue has become more complicated and more urgent because archaeology is at a transformative moment.

In California, new legislation from Assembly Bills 226 and 389 has rewritten the rules on what can be taught and studied. These bills, authored by Assembly member James Ramos (Serrano/Cahuilla), require the return of ancestral remains and all belongings (including ancestors’ cultural items and ecofacts) from state universities and prohibit their use for teaching or research. This call for repatriation represents a real turning point in archaeological practice and education because it requires a reconsideration of the authority, ownership, and responsibility for the materials of the past in ways that many archaeology educators have never fully confronted before.

My colleagues and I wanted to know how these reforms might influence the job market that so many archaeology programs are built to serve. Our article, “Training for Transformation: Building a Responsive Archaeological Workforce in California and Beyond,” draws on one of the largest surveys of CRM employers in California. We found that CRM here prioritizes what has always been deemed significant, including, first and foremost, field experience, followed by laboratory work, knowledge of local material culture, technical skills such as report writing and GIS, and strong interpersonal skills. Yet the context surrounding how universities teach these skills  has changed significantly. For example, fieldwork can no longer mean excavating on tribal lands without meaningful consultation and consent. The same holds true for lab work to help students become familiar with the types of artifacts they would likely encounter in a CRM field context.

While technical training remains important, meeting both CRM workforce needs and students’ demand for meaningful, real-world experience requires a broader approach. It calls for what we describe in the article as a new public archaeology that blends workforce preparation with collaboration, ethics, and care. Across California, new programs are emerging that center Indigenous perspectives, integrate ethnographic and community-based methods, and build mentorship networks for students who have long been excluded from the field. Statewide initiatives such as the California Archaeology Collaborative (CAC) are part of this broader movement (Brown et al. 2025). The CAC draws inspiration from the Airlie House 2.0 discussions (see Banks et al. 2025), but sees California as a distinctive cultural landscape that must be understood and approached through its own particular circumstances, and that calls for forward-thinking solutions.

While this may seem local to California, the change happening here is already expected to bring about national shifts. The recent Duty of Care amendment to NAGPRA uses the same language of responsibility and repatriation of all Native American cultural items, signaling a broader movement toward accountability in heritage work across the nation (see also Haas et al. 2025).

We argue that archaeology’s future depends on building a profession worthy of the communities it serves, including the next generation of archaeologists themselves. As Acebo et al (2025) have noted, this calls for a fundamental reckoning with the discipline’s history and its exclusionary structures, as well as the pursuit of repair and reconciliation within archaeological practice. Achieving this means that academia and CRM must evolve together, foster open dialogue, and embrace forward-thinking approaches to training and practice. Ultimately, Training for Transformation is about equipping students to become meaningful leaders who understand and can navigate the changes shaping the field today.

The article, “Training for Transformation: Building a Responsive Archaeological Workforce in California and Beyond” by Kaitlin Brown, Kaely Colligan, Annamarie Guerrero, Albert D. Gonzalez and Anthony Ramirez, is out now open access in the SAA journal Advances in Archaeological Practice.

References:

Acebo, Nathan P., Wade Campbell, Edward González-Tennant, Alicia Odewale, Emily Van Alst, William A. White, Stephen A. Mrozowski, Lindsay M. Montgomery, Craig N. Cipolla, Anna S. Agbe-Davies. 2025. Questions Worth Asking: Un-disciplining Archaeology, Reclaiming Pasts for Better Futures. American Antiquity (3):395-418. doi:10.1017/aaq.2024.88

Banks, Kimball, Terry Childs, John Douglass, Rebecca Hawkins, Alexandra Jones, Terry Klein, David Lindsay, et al. 2025. Visioning Future Directions in CRM Archaeology. The SAA Archaeological Record 25(1): 36-43.

Brown, Kaitlin M., Naomi Scher, Adrian Whitaker, Alexis Boutin, Emily Castano, Martha N. Diaz-Longo, Robert Geary, et al. 2025. The California Archaeology Collaborative: Building a Shared Future for Archaeology in California. SCA Proceedings 38:255-263.

Haas, Jennifer R., Brooke Morgan, Ellen Lofaro, Jayne-Leigh Thomas, Sarah O’Donnell, Nina M. Schreiner, Miranda Panther. 2025. NAGPRA in Archaeological Practice: Implementing Duty of Care. Advances in Archaeological Practice 1-11. doi:10.1017/aap.2025.14