Repatriation of human remains and associated funerary objects under NAGPRA and the increased use of culturally informed curation practices for sacred, religious, and ceremonial objects are important steps toward restoring control over cultural patrimony to Native Nations in the United States. Many museums holding Indigenous belongings have begun a collaborative care approach involving Indigenous community voices and improving access to collections. However, this framework has not been applied to many animal remains curated in American archaeology museums, which remain broadly beyond the care or administrative purview of Native people. Because many Indigenous worldviews do not hold a clear separation between the human and animal spheres, common practices applied to animal remains are not congruent with the idea of respectful or culturally informed care. Here we outline steps to shift the treatment of animals through the application of Indigenous knowledge to museum collections.

People experience heritage at historic sites as landscapes that include both environmental and cultural meaning. Heritage as social action overcomes the dichotomies of nature versus culture and past versus present, which are obstacles to resiliency and sustainability in this era of rising sea levels. That insight is exemplified by a program addressing climate change on the Florida Gulf Coast. The program includes community conversations on climate change and initial steps at multiscalar research using techniques from archaeology, environmental studies, and biology. At the broadest scales, the approach reconstructs the distribution of coastal heritage locations from the decades preceding human-caused sea-level rise to the present. At finer levels of temporal and spatial resolution, research documents vegetation, marine invertebrates, and material changes. At the finest scales, studies of microorganisms that inhabit historic and archaeological sites are inventoried. Integrating those scales through community-based archaeology offers the social meanings for coastal heritage under threat of rising sea levels, both to motivate actions to preserve the past and to prepare the public for the coming landscape transformations as an avenue for community conversations.

The articles compiled here offer examples of how the impacts of anthropogenic climate change in coastal settings are monitored and measured, how the broader public can be involved in these efforts, and how planning for mitigation can come about. The case studies are drawn from the southeastern United States and the British Isles, and they indicate the great potential that cooperating communities of practice can offer for addressing climate-change impacts on cultural heritage.

At coastal archaeological sites, measuring erosion rates and assessing artifact loss are vital to understanding the timescale(s) and spatial magnitude of past and future site loss. We describe a straightforward low-tech methodology for documenting shoreline erosion developed by professionals and volunteers over seven years at Calusa Island Midden (8LL45), one of the few remaining sites with an Archaic component in the Pine Island Sound region of coastal Southwest Florida. We outline the evolution of the methodology since its launch in 2016 and describe issues encountered and solutions implemented. We also describe the use of the data to guide archaeological research and document the impacts of major storms at the site. The response to Hurricane Ian in 2022 is one example of how simply collected data can inform site management. This methodology can be implemented easily at other coastal sites at low cost and in collaboration with communities, volunteers, and heritage site managers.

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.

Mobile apps provide archaeologists a way to engage the public and local communities in efforts to protect heritage at risk. This article discusses community engagement apps used by archaeologists who specialize in collecting data about climate change and its impact on cultural sites. It provides an overview of the process by which the Florida Public Archaeology Network (FPAN) developed various workflows over the last few years to engage community member–scientists using digital tools. FPAN based this work on examples from cultural heritage management practice in Scotland. Because we were unable to directly adapt Scotland's app to our US context, we experimented with multiple other apps and tools to implement our workflows, including Arches, Solocator, ArcGIS Field Maps, and the Arrow GNSS receiver.

The impact of microbiologically influenced corrosion on underwater archaeological sites has spurred recent advancements in research examining the link between microorganisms and historic preservation. Although the microbiomes of steel shipwreck sites have been the subject of DNA sequencing studies and other interdisciplinary investigations, aluminum submerged aircraft wrecks, a prominent symbol of World War II, have yet to be the focus of similar research. This article represents the initial attempt to fill this void by describing a biofilm collection method used to obtain samples for DNA sequencing from World War II aircraft sites off Hawaii. Rather than relying on proxies for microbial growth on wrecks or on destructive sampling, the focus is on a methodology that is productive but minimally intrusive. The protocols resulted in the successful collection of in situ biofilm samples from four submerged aircraft wrecks. The methodology was found to be affordable, time efficient, and reproducible, thus feasible for archaeological site management. The development of viable in situ collection methods for biofilm should aid efforts to empirically assess the relevancy of microbiologically influenced corrosion to submerged aircraft while enabling longitudinal studies of microorganisms that potentially affect site preservation.

Community Coastal Zone Assessment Surveys (CCZASs) conducted on the Scottish coast aim to characterize and assess the significance, condition, and vulnerability of coastal archaeology and to prioritize assets most at risk. Two key differences from earlier coastal zone assessment survey methods are the use of coastline vulnerability models to target fieldwork and the involvement of the public in the surveys. This article details the methodology used to plan for, carry out, and disseminate results of the surveys, including the following: evaluating and targeting coastlines in a GIS framework to focus new coastal surveys in areas most susceptible to erosion, using SCAPE's coastal archaeology recording mobile application as our survey tool, managing data through SCAPE's Sites at Risk portal, involving local volunteers, and disseminating findings and data flow into regional and national historic environment databases. We discuss results and reflections from surveys of the Highland, Moray, and Aberdeenshire coastlines conducted in 2022 and conclude with general principles applicable beyond Scotland.