Digital technologies, including 3D digitization and replication, are increasingly integrated into repatriation-related work by museums and Indigenous communities. Repatriation laws began being adopted in the United States at state level in 1976, followed by federal repatriation laws in 1989 with the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Act, which applies only to the museums of the Smithsonian Institution, and in 1990 with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Early repatriation, therefore, was in the predigital age, but the use of computers and databases, including digital imaging, email, and file-sharing, has had a significant impact, first with 2D digital technologies and more recently with the incorporation of 3D digitization. These, and the creation of surrogates of archival and object collections, have led to an explosion of information-sharing between museums and Indigenous partners. 2D digitization and 3D digitization and replication, in consultation and collaboration with Indigenous communities, are emerging as important tools alongside repatriation efforts—not in lieu of repatriation but as supplements to mutual interests that go beyond it. Here, the experiences of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and others are offered as examples of such new applications of 3D in the context of repatriation and beyond.

Three decades after the initial five-year deadline for compliance, federal agencies and museums have once more been called to account for their failure to return Ancestors and cultural items to Tribal Nations under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA). In April 2024 more than 70 practitioners collaborated in forums and paper and poster sessions to produce the first ever “Day of NAGPRA” at the 89th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in New Orleans. The overwhelming success of this effort is as clear a barometer as any for the current need in the discipline for more conversation, better resources, increased opportunities, and—above all—the chance at a truly collaborative push for a complete return of all Ancestors and their belongings to their communities. In this article, we set up our thematic issue by introducing readers to the various contributions concerning duty of care, education, and policy implementation inspired and informed by the “Day of NAGPRA.”

This article presents the results of excavations in Early Bronze Age levels at the site of Hamoukar in northeastern Syria. During the 2008 and 2010 field seasons, excavations in the lower town at Hamoukar uncovered evidence for three distinct architectural phases dating to the second half of the third millennium B.C. Prior to these excavations, attention had been focused on the final phase of Early Bronze Age occupation in the lower town, when the settlement was violently destroyed and then abandoned. It is now possible, however, to provide a backstory for the settlement’s violent end and also a more complicated––if still preliminary––account of exactly how the urbanisation process played out at the site. This article presents a summary of the Early Bronze Age stratigraphic sequence in the lower town at Hamoukar and, at the same time, a description of new evidence for the evolution of social, economic, and ritual practice across three phases of urban development. A brief comparison with urban trajectories at two other contemporary sites highlights the heterogeneity of cities and urban dynamics in Early Bronze Age northern Mesopotamia.

In this paper, I use examples from the Roman past and the Brexit present of the UK to discuss the links between practices, identities and the changing dimensions of imperial power. In both the traditional archaeological context of later Roman Britain and in excavating the roots of Brexit in post-War British politics, analysis of the practical semiotics of identity is the most fruitful way to understand the social processes under way. In each context, the meaning of different practices, articulated through the concepts of identities and boundaries, is crucial to the structuration of, respectively, a late imperial and a post-imperial society. The tensions between imperial and local identities are manifest across a wide suite of practices, the investigation of which provides a dynamic method for understanding how these tensions play out, with consequences for the fragmentation of the Roman Empire, on the one hand, and of the UK, on the other.

Huainanzi 淮南子 contributes a model of sage rulership as, among other things, rule through wuwei 無為, or “non-action.” Through analysis of several concepts core to the text’s political cosmology of governance by wuwei—qi 氣 (vital breath, energy-matter), resonance (gan-ying 感應), and sincerity (cheng 誠)—this article suggests that Huainanzian sagely wuwei refers to an act that seemingly straddles a patterned level of reality of distinct forms, on the one hand, and a primordial, chaos-like reality, beyond the bounds of form, on the other. In an effort to grasp, first, how a singular Huainanzian cosmos may present two seemingly structurally antithetical faces, and second, how the sage-ruler’s program may not only embrace, but put to powerful political effect, the paradoxical union of these two “faces,” this paper draws on a heuristic of fractal and Euclidean geometries, simplified from modern mathematics. The article thereby contributes a further representational modality for thinking through Huainanzi’s extensive, multi-faceted political cosmology, joining in discourse a recent swell of research interested in the same.

For pedestrian archaeological surveys in agricultural regions, field plowing and crop cultivation are essential mechanisms for bringing artifacts to the surface and making them visible. Although agricultural land use can affect plowzone assemblages, few studies have tested the relationship between how frequently agricultural land is cultivated and the quantity of artifacts recovered. Such an evaluation would require a multiyear record of land use across extensive survey areas, thereby presenting numerous obstacles and challenges. Yet the ever-expanding availability of high temporal and spatial resolution satellite imagery datasets, combined with the accessibility of new tools for analyzing such datasets, makes studies of land-use intensity increasingly feasible. To demonstrate, we present our remote sensing–based evaluation of land-use intensity within the Province of Oristano (west-central Sardinia, Italy), where the Sinis Archaeological Project (SAP) has worked since 2018. Drawing on Sentinel-2 satellite imagery from the past six years, we investigate what factors may explain the modern-day distribution of land-use intensities, which areas SAP has targeted, and what effect land-use intensity has on artifact distribution. We find that modern-day land-use intensity is largely a legacy of recent land reclamation efforts and find no correlation between the intensity of surveyed fields and the quantity of materials recovered therein.

This article examines two ruined monumental architectural complexes in ancient Oaxaca: the Main Plaza of Monte Albán and the acropolis of Río Viejo. I consider how the material vibrancy of these ruins differed in ways that both brought together and destabilized communities. After its abandonment, the ruins of the Main Plaza, as well as the mountain on which it was built, continued to assemble substances important to human well-being, including rain, clouds, sky, mountains, ancestors, and deities. People periodically journeyed to the plaza to make offerings and bury their revered dead, thereby constituting a broader identity and community. In contrast, the earthen architecture of the acropolis, located in the center of Río Viejo, rapidly decayed in the tropical lowland climate. The reemergence of hierarchy at Río Viejo in the Late Classic period activated material memories of rupture held in the ruins that threatened and resisted new forms of community and political authority.

With this paper, we aim to bring the history of the rural landscapes and communities of the ancient (‘Classical’) Mediterranean back into the limelight, drawing attention to their contributions to and pivotal roles within the multifaceted structural transformations of the Mediterranean in the first millennium bce. To do so, we focus on two case studies from one particular region that looms large amongst those heavily exploited by ancient colonial powers: the island of Sardinia. In chronological terms, our focus is on the so-called Punic and Roman periods, roughly spanning between the fifth century bce and the fifth century ce. Long overlooked, if not outright dismissed, in conventional accounts of the ancient Mediterranean, the rural communities of Punic-Roman Sardinia were not only vital economic producers, but also formed large and culturally distinct social groups. They actively maintained their own traditions, ways of living and practices in the face of the ruling classes’ disruptive initiatives. Their actions to shape their identity and history resonate closely with the theory of the ‘history of subaltern groups’ formulated in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, particularly Notebook 25. We draw upon a semiotic understanding of Gramsci’s notion of subalternity to strengthen archaeology’s ability to foreground the materiality of those communities unaccounted for by history. Our goal is to discuss comparatively the material signs of rural life of Punic and Roman-period Sardinia, to outline an alternative decolonial perspective on the island and to consider its implications for the wider ancient Mediterranean.

The Paleolithic period encompasses the oldest material in the archaeological record and spans some three million years. Because of its antiquity, competition for the earliest evidence of behaviors or phenomena can be intense. Paleolithic archaeology has therefore been seen as having a competitive atmosphere that was often hostile to female practitioners. In addition, female archaeologists who choose to undertake the role of field director—one of the most visible and influential roles in Paleolithic archaeology—face significant hurdles such as sexism and impediments related to motherhood. In this article, we investigate whether the perception of male bias in Paleolithic archaeology is valid. To do this, we assessed the gender demographics of Paleolithic archaeologists in tenure-track positions in North American institutions, publication rates by gender for articles on the Paleolithic, and the gender of archaeologists identified as “experts” in human evolution documentaries aired on PBS from 1994 to 2023. We found that gender demographics in Paleolithic archaeology follow that of the larger field of archaeology, with a stark imbalance at the rank of full professor but increasing gender parity at the lower ranks. Men outpublish women in all five journals we studied, but there is a positive trend over time. In contrast, the percentage of women “experts” featured in documentaries on human evolution never rose above 23%, with very little change over time.

In the early nineteenth century, foreign explorers traveling throughout Mexico and Central America began documenting sites, structures, and monuments then unknown in the United States and Europe. These explorers depicted the ruins they encountered as deserted and lifeless and suggested that the passage of time had rendered them ineffective. This article challenges such a Western, Romantic understanding of Maya ruins. Drawing on ruination studies and the material turn, it argues instead that Maya ruins are affective, consequential, and shape human actions. To do so, the article briefly considers the utility of assemblage theory and Indigenous ontologies to archaeological interpretations of ruins. It then takes as a case study an intrasite sak-be at Punta Laguna, Yucatán, México, and interprets it as a kuxansum—an Indigenous Maya concept of a living rope of blood that, even when seemingly severed, continues to connect spaces, human and other-than-human entities, and various temporalities. This interpretation encourages scholars to question whether broken or seemingly abandoned ruins such as roads must always be interpreted as functionally obsolete or whether new meanings are often made from the old.