Now more than a year into the revised NAGPRA regulations, practitioners are carefully considering how best to respond to the amendments, especially newly added components such as duty of care (§10.1[d]). Because associated records are not a defined category under the Act, however, practitioners have no guidance on how best to move beyond the return of Ancestors and cultural items to the long-term preservation and curation of the records that may remain once repatriation is complete. Since associated records play such a significant role in NAGPRA compliance, and since digitizing archaeological records has become commonplace in repositories across the country, we propose that curatorial facilities adopt a policy prior to digitizing records that contain information pertinent to NAGPRA. Considerations about Indigenous data sovereignty, privacy concerns, and sensitivity of certain themes or types of data should be factored into the decision-making process. This article provides a review of the relevant context and a step-by-step guide to creating a policy for your institution.

Since 2018 the Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH) has actively engaged in Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) compliance work. During this time, the agency developed new perspectives and policies on NAGPRA and Indigenous collections care through consultation with Tribal partners and participation in the NAGPRA Community of Practice. Based on experiences at the ADAH, the authors identify challenges in implementing culturally sensitive collections care and suggest pathways forward. Topics of discussion include building institutional commitment and capacity, identifying and implementing culturally sensitive practices, stewarding sensitive information, and navigating a variety of stakeholder positions on NAGPRA and repatriation. We conclude that prioritizing the integration of Indigenous perspectives into collections care can positively affect the culture of our workplaces and disciplines at large.

Since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, university museums and academic units have struggled to accomplish the volume of collections work necessary for compliance with available personnel. Simultaneously, students pursuing collections management careers rarely receive adequate compliance training in classroom settings. Involving students in collections documentation is a possible solution for helping practitioners manage archaeological collections and addressing the NAGPRA education gap; however, there are ethical concerns with including students in NAGPRA teams. In this article, we discuss challenges associated with employing students, the need to consult with Tribal Nations about involving students in NAGPRA projects, and safe ways to incorporate student workers into collections management workflows that support repatriation. Ultimately, we argue that employees with student status can be valuable members of a NAGPRA team when their roles are defined through consultation with Tribal Nation partners. Institutions with archaeological collections provide a unique opportunity to train students in proper procedures for documenting NAGPRA collections, cultural sensitivity, and the decolonization of collections management practices. Involving students in NAGPRA initiatives is an important way to teach the next generation to be respectful, well-rounded, and collaborative archaeologists.

The passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 ushered in a new era in museum and Tribal practices. Faced with new and unprecedented legislative mandates, early NAGPRA practitioners were challenged to put a set of principles and statutory language into practice. Museum and Tribal representatives faced numerous challenges and unexpected barriers to implement the law. In this retrospective, we discuss the reality of implementing NAGPRA between its passage and the inventory deadline in 1995, focusing on four areas: the law, professional archaeological and museological codes of ethics, the state of collections, and capacity to do the work. The substantial accomplishments of the first five years created a foundation for work that continues today. Parallels to contemporary NAGPRA implementation, especially under the 2024 regulations, include tight deadlines, requirements that were not previously contemplated by practitioners, and the changing understanding of what it means to comply with the law. Practitioners will get a better understanding and awareness of their NAGPRA obligations, practices that are respectful of Tribal practitioners’ time demands and priorities, appreciation for the technological capacities available today, the need to support for consultation partners, and the importance of taking time to build empathetic relationships.

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.