Photogrammetry in Three Acts
In “Without a Roadmap: Reflections on the Emergent Methods of Community-Based Archaeology,” I examine the ways that working with community can shape and transform research design over the course of a project.…
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Advances in Archaeological Practice
(47)
Representation Matters in Archaeology
In January, my husband and I (Sam) took our six-year-old daughter to get a flu shot at a local pharmacy. As she became increasingly bored in the waiting room, she began to offer commentary, asking the closed door, “Doctor, when are you coming out?”…
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‘Are you tough enough?’: Rethinking the safety, culture and care of archaeologists in the field
From the old ‘Cowboys of Science’ adage to swashbuckling fictional characters like Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, the perception that fieldwork, and archaeology generally, is a job for tough people pervades both the discipline and public perception.…
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Community collaboration: My experience as an undergrad Production Assistant on ‘Advances’
My name is Adrianna Wagner, and I am a third-year student at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where I study English literature with minors in marketing and anthropology.…
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I just talked to a Stone Age priestess and it could change everything
In our new, game-based dissemination experiment, you can enter a mysterious Stone Age world with megalithic graves where life and death are more fluent concepts than today.…
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A Dialogue on Expanding Access to Archaeology Through Bilingual Digital Public Archaeology
The Edom Lowland Regional Archaeology Project’s (ELRAP) new article, “As if the Pieces of the Past were in our Hands”: Non-Linear Digital Public Archaeology with 3D Models on Sketchfab, presents a bilingual, interactive collection of 3D models based on years of digital excavation data from the Faynan region of Southern Jordan.…
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National Endowment for the Humanities-Funded Archaeological Archive of Huhugam Archaeology Delivers Lasting Impact in the Southwest
In an era of shrinking research budgets and political pressure to justify public investment, federally funded digital archives in archaeology are delivering measurable, lasting benefits to scholars, land managers, Indigenous communities, and the public.…
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What is Community Archaeology’s Value for Our Discipline’s Future?
Research programs that are deeply engaged with, and responsive to, communities require significant investment to build and sustain. Why, then, should archaeologists — often constrained by time and resources–commit to community archaeology?…
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Protecting Heritage in War: the Power of Local Action
Is it possible to protect cultural heritage during a war? And if so, how can it be done meaningfully and effectively?…
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Why Care About Culture When the World Is on Fire?
With the world facing war, climate change, pandemics, and civil unrest, it’s natural to question the importance of preserving culture. Why should we care about archaeology, monuments, traditions, art, and architecture when survival itself is threatened?…
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Representing Practice in Advances Covers
Advances in Archaeological Practice covers are most often experienced as a tiny thumbnail shot either on the Cambridge Core website, or perhaps on social media.…
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Saying Yes – to both Practice and Community in Archaeology
Chris Dore, our current Society for American Archaeology (SAA) president, was Advances in Archaeological Practice’s first editor, and in 2022, on the journal’s tenth anniversary he reflected on the journal’s origins.…
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The Next Phase of Advances in Archaeological Practice: From the Incoming Editor
I remember when Volume 1, Issue 1 of Advances in Archaeological Practice (AAP) was published in 2013. I was a graduate student at the time, undertaking dissertation research on the processes of inclusion and exclusion in the archaeological data collection process.…
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Archaeological Practice in the Southeast United States
As the Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC) begins, I examined Southeastern-focused articles in Advances in Archaeological Practice to identify emerging trends. Southeastern methodology may best be known for the 1950s Ford-Spaulding debate; however, this review shows that Southeastern methodology is still breaking new ground in archaeology.…
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Archaeological Repositories are Places to Train Future Archaeologists
As holders and curators of artifacts and their associated documentation and data, archaeological repositories are a place to learn about past and current excavation strategies, and an excellent training ground for future archaeologists.…
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How do you become an archaeologist?
Archaeological literature offers many answers that vary in their accuracy and utility. Alice Beck Kehoe writes, “How do you become an archaeologist?…
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Juneteenth in Denton
The joy was infectious. “Happy Juneteenth” we shouted to the trucks and people parading by Fred Moore Park in Denton Texas.…
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Why Archaeological Repositories and Data Publishers Care about being FAIR
Post Excerpt Archaeological data that are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (i.e. FAIR) enable all sorts of things that we can’t do with “hidden” or “siloed” data. As such, FAIR practices have clear impacts on archaeological data use and reuse.
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Academic publishing in 2023: what’s front of mind for archaeologists?
With 2023 on the horizon, and the landscape of academic publishing in flux, Cambridge University Press spoke to the Editors of the SAA’s journals to find out what topics and questions are currently front of mind – for archaeologists, researchers and publishers alike.…
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Monico Origins, a Bayesian Story
The acknowledgments section of the Monico Bayesian paper expresses gratitude to “Deb Nichols, John Watanabe, Sophie Nichols-Watanabe, Robert (Bob) L. Kelly, and the Dartmouth Coach for inspiring and facilitating the development of some concepts in this paper.”
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Teaching Data Reuse
In the spring semester of 2020, I developed and taught a class on archaeological data reuse and digital literacy at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.…
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Lidar in Mesoamerica since 2016: Acquisition, Ownership, and Accessibility
In 2016, we were privileged to edit a special section in Advances in Archaeological Practices on lidar in Mesoamerica and are delighted that the editors of AAP have invited us to provide an update to that special section in this blog. At that time, lidar acquisition was still uncommon, with only a handful of projects being fortunate enough to acquire the data that was revolutionizing settlement studies in tropical areas like Mesoamerica.
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A Complicated History of Collaboration with Collectors of Spirit Eye Cave, Texas
Research at Spirit Eye Cave did not take the course I envisioned. In the 1950s and 1960s, this cave, located on a private ranch in West Texas, was a pay-to-dig site. It was extensively dug, all too common with the vast tracts of private land that typify Texas. Initially, the goal of my research was to salvage any information about when the cave was occupied, and to examine the perishable collections.
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How a Rejected Article Started a Journal: The Origins of Advances in Archaeological Practice
Happy birthday! Advances in Archaeological Practice: A Journal of the Society for American Archaeology turns ten this year. You might not think that the birth of a journal is that big of a deal and certainly doesn’t warrant recognition a decade later.…
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Listening and Learning: Maximizing Information Recovery by Consulting with Descendant Native Americans and Collaborating with Landowners
Until 5 years ago, if asked my profession, I’d have said I’m a scientist engaged in basic biomedical research to combat viral diseases.…
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Identifying “Waste Places” – Charcoal Production in Pennsylvania
Authors Benjamin Carter, Jeff Blackadar and Weston Conner joined each other in conversation for this new blog post for Advances in Archaeological Practice.…
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Digital Methods for Archaeological Currents
Archaeology has long contributed new perspectives to past events, transcending written records through the interpretation of material culture. Applied to the present, archaeology has the potential to disrupt and nuance the memorialization of contemporary occurrences as they are inscribed.…
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Working Together to Find and Protect Unmarked Graves
Janvier, Alberta | 2019 It was a cold October morning in northeastern Alberta. I had been invited by the Chipewyan Prairie First Nation (CPFN) to conduct a small ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey of a historic burial ground on one of their reserves.…
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Testing Color Technology from the Bahamas to the Pandemic Bubble
In mid-March 2020, I stood in my lab and slowly scanned the shelves. The tables were covered in ongoing projects. We had just been told that the University of Florida campus was closing to non-essential personnel and to plan on working from home for at least two weeks (which turned into months).…
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Reflections on Directing My First Field Project: Safety, Logistics, and Preparation
Those of you who were born in the late 80s/early 90s may remember the movie “The Princess Diaries.” Remember the scene where Mia has a rough day, wants to cry, gets in her Mustang, the top won’t go up, and then it starts pouring while she sits drenched and dejected in her open convertible? Let me tell you the archaeology version.
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Health and Wellness in Archaeology: Improving Readiness and Response
One of the many things I love about the field of archaeology is how collaborations come together. A few years ago, a listserv delivered a survey to my inbox on the theme of field crew safety.…
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Student Views on Centering the Margins in Archaeological Knowledge Production
This is a transcribed conversation between two of the four authors of a new article in Advances in Archaeological Practice on why and how to revise introductory archaeology courses to better shape the discipline.…
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Keeping up with ‘Collector’: Further notes on mobile GIS data collection
New digital technologies have been a boon to archaeological field recording as attested by the growing literature on the use of mobile devices, GIS, satellite imagery, and other digital tools.…
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Creating a Curation Community of Practice in Archaeology: A Resolution for the New Year
As 2020—finally—comes to a close, the new year stretches out in front of us, full of possibilities. The long tradition of New Year’s resolutions offers each of us an opportunity to commit ourselves to learning more about curation, collections management, and the lifecycle of the collections we create through our work.…
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Digital Reviews Editor: Transitions
In issue 9(1) of Advances in Archaeological Practice we will transition our Digital Reviews editorship from Dr. Sara Perry (Museum of London Archaeology) to Dr.…
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Geomasking: approaches to obscuring sensitive archaeological site locations
Archaeologists have used maps for quite a long while, and with good reason. People, their communities, and their things are situated in places.…
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Micro Challenges for Archaeological Data Creation and Reuse
Behind every “grand challenge” there are 1000 “micro challenges” that need to be solved first. Digital technologies and services have become a normal part of everyday archaeological practice.…
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Human-Environment dynamics on the shore of Lake Cahuilla
My recent research along the relic shorelines of Lake Cahuilla has been somewhat of a tangent for me. I’ve spent most, if not all, of my professional career investigating archaeological shell middens along Pacific coastlines and offshore islands.…
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Born-digital photography: not all prints are created equal
A few years ago, I opted to take on the overwhelming task of organizing and digitizing the records associated with the legacy collections at the Natural History Museum of Utah.…
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How to make the data and code for your manuscript available to peer reviewers ‘before’ making it public
It’s no surprise to any internet user that the way we communicate is rapidly changing. For example, in the distant past, we learned the news of the world by reading a few paragraphs of tiny text in hard copies of newspapers.…
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A new approach to digital heritage and archaeology
We’ve entered a golden age in which digital methods and computational approaches have opened exciting new avenues for research, management, documentation, preservation, access, and public engagement in archaeology and heritage.…
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The Context and Consequences of Sexual Harassment in Southeastern Archaeology
Imagine you are a new field tech, right out of college. You decided to major in anthropology, specifically archaeology, against your parent’s wishes.…
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What does it mean to do good archaeological interpretation?
If you’re new to the field of archaeology, still learning the basics of the discipline, the chances are that your experiences of archaeological interpretation are relatively limited.…
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How researchers can solve the bottle-opener problem with compute capsules
Imagine a group of people playing a sport together on a hot day. Although it’s a friendly match, they play vigorously and at the end of their game they’re hot and thirsty.…
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Can we learn to reuse? Digital Literacy, Data and Open Science in Archaeology
The Society for American Archaeology’s paper of the month for May comes from Advances in Archaeological Practice and is entitled: ‘Teaching Open Science: Published Data and Digital Literacy in Archaeology Classrooms‘.…
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Planning for international travel with “high-tech” field equipment
The Society for American Archaeology’s paper of the month for February comes from Advances in Archaeological Practice and is entitled: ‘Strategies for International Travel with “High-Tech” Archaeological Field Equipment’.…
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Meet the Editors of Advances in Archaeological Practice
The editors of Advances in Archaeological Practice are delighted to share with you the first issue in the journal’s sixth volume year.…
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The 33%: Q&A with Dame Anna Dominiczak
Q&A with Editor-in-Chief of the Precision Medicine Journal, Dame Anna Dominiczak, for International day of Women and Girls in Science
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Sluts, Bitches, and Battle-axes: women and insults
The English language contains a wealth of insults and terms of abuse. Personal insults attack the core and immutable aspects of a person, such as their race, ethnicity, appearance, age, or a disability.…
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The need of an ethics of planetary sustainability
How long will humankind survive? Besides the fact that we have been able to eliminate ourselves with nuclear weapons for decades, even without a third world war, the challenge to take care of the resources of our planet remains; we need to use them in a way that our children and their children can have a place on Earth as well. In this blog post Andreas Losch discusses his recent review article in the International Journal of Astrobiology, The need of an ethics of planetary sustainability
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Manhood, Money and Survival: Rethinking Child Soldiers in Somalia
Why understanding contemporary youth militancy demands history Al-Shabaab fighters patrolling Afgooye-Mogadishu road (2025) In civil war-era Somalia in the early 1990s, global media headlines about ‘stoned teenagers’ cruising Mogadishu on jeeps mounted with machine guns became synonymous with the construction of Somalia as a ‘chaotic African country’ in which one could be killed for nothing more than ‘the clothes on your back’ (New York Times, 1992).…
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Race Isn’t Biological — So Why Do So Many Still Think It Is?
Even though findings from genetics and other sciences unequivocally refute biological conceptions of race, this erroneous viewpoint remains widespread among the general public.…
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Representation Matters in Archaeology
In January, my husband and I (Sam) took our six-year-old daughter to get a flu shot at a local pharmacy. As she became increasingly bored in the waiting room, she began to offer commentary, asking the closed door, “Doctor, when are you coming out?”…
Read more
How did Down syndrome get its name?
Some disability-related names have dropped out of usage, because they are now considered to be offensive due to their origins. Down Syndrome (Trisomy 21) is one example.…
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Most Read
The need of an ethics of planetary sustainability
How long will humankind survive? Besides the fact that we have been able to eliminate ourselves with nuclear weapons for decades, even without a third world war, the challenge to take care of the resources of our planet remains; we need to use them in a way that our children and their children can have a place on Earth as well. In this blog post Andreas Losch discusses his recent review article in the International Journal of Astrobiology, The need of an ethics of planetary sustainability
Read more
Nothing-Burger? U.S. Obligation to Defend the Philippines in the South China Sea – Part 1
It is an article of faith among ordinary Filipinos that American troops will die with Filipino troops defending Philippine claims to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea (SCS).…
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The 33%: Q&A with Dame Anna Dominiczak
Q&A with Editor-in-Chief of the Precision Medicine Journal, Dame Anna Dominiczak, for International day of Women and Girls in Science
Read more
The impact of parasite infection on mental illness
More and more research is finding inflammation as a potential contributing factor towards to the development of various mental illnesses. A systematic review was conducted to determine the association between parasitic infection and mental illnesses in various African populations. Two parasite groups were evaluated; helminths and protozoans, and four mental illness classifications; depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, schizotypal disorders and unspecified mental illnesses.
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Conversations with Authors: Institutionalized Police Brutality
This is the first post in our new series: “Conversations with Authors.” For our inaugural post, we asked Dr. Vesla Weaver to meet (virtually) with Dr.…
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Reflections on House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths
The March article of Muses – the arts blog from BJPsych International is the first blog of the series. The blog is written by Dr Dami Ajayi, Specialty Doctor, Barnet Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust and Trainee/Blog Editor, BJPsych International.…
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Sluts, Bitches, and Battle-axes: women and insults
The English language contains a wealth of insults and terms of abuse. Personal insults attack the core and immutable aspects of a person, such as their race, ethnicity, appearance, age, or a disability.…
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