The logistics, costs, and capacity needed to complete extensive archaeological pedestrian surveys to inventory cultural resources present challenges to public land managers. To address these issues, we developed a workflow combining lidar-derived imagery and deep learning (DL) models tailored for cultural resource management (CRM) programs on public lands. It combines Python scripts that fine-tune models to recognize archaeological features in lidar-derived imagery with denoising QGIS steps that improve the predictions’ performance and applicability. We present this workflow through an applied case study focused on detecting historic agricultural terraces in the Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge, Georgia, USA. For this project, we fine-tuned pretrained U-Net models to teach them to recognize agricultural terraces in imagery, identified the parameter settings that led to the highest recall for detecting terraces, and used those settings to train models on incremental dataset sizes, which allowed us to identify the minimum training size necessary to obtain satisfying models. Results present effective models that can detect most terraces even when trained on small datasets. This study provides a robust methodology that requires basic proficiencies in Python coding but expands DL applications in federal CRM by advancing methods in lidar and machine learning for archaeological inventorying, monitoring, and preservation.

Cultural Property Agreements (CPAs) between the United States and foreign governments help to stop criminal activity at US borders by keeping looted and stolen art and artifacts out of American markets. Under US and international law, the United States can join CPAs to prevent looted and stolen antiquities and artifacts from entering the US art market, thereby fighting the illicit trade while allowing the legal trade to continue and even thrive. Moreover, bilateral agreements aim to lessen global demand for illicitly obtained or looted objects—especially because the United States makes up 42% of the legal global art market—while increasing responsible cultural exchange. The United States has signed CPAs with a growing number of countries around the world—generating mutual respect, strengthening global law enforcement, and protecting archaeological heritage in situ. From its inception, a key priority for the Antiquities Coalition (AC) has been shutting down markets to illicit antiquities, while increasing responsible cultural exchange. This article discusses the importance of barring antiquities traffickers from the multibillion US art market through legislation, international agreements, and executive orders—protecting both American consumers and our world heritage.

Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act requires US federal agencies and their applicants to consider historic properties affected by their proposed actions. Guided principally by architectural historians and archaeologists throughout the 1980s, Section 106 reviews focused on identifying discrete structures and sites and then evaluating them in terms of dominant society aesthetics, histories, and sciences. By the 1990s, Section 106 participation by consulting Tribes and other cultural resource stewards obliged federal agencies to address a broader spectrum of historic properties and values. Agencies soon began using cultural landscape studies and other research and consultation tools to “match” historic property identification and assessment processes to the scale and complexity of proposed undertakings. The Section 106 review for the SunZia interstate transmission line (2009–2024) shows that the federal government has yet to consistently meet mandates to identify and assess elements other than archaeological/architectural historic properties. Our surveys of historic preservation professionals and available cultural landscape studies underscore disconnections between practitioner preferences for and the federal agency conduct of cultural landscape studies. They also highlight standards to use in evaluating the adequacy of cultural landscape studies. We recommend six attributes as essential to all cultural landscape study designs, methods, and applications in the Section 106 process.

As I pass the 40-year mark of work in cultural heritage and cultural heritage law, I am grateful for the opportunity to reflect on how the field has evolved since the mid-1980s. This reflection acknowledges the contributions of those who influenced the early development of this field and the way their work continues today through the scholarship and activism of their successors. Evolution on the international level was matched with domestic legal accomplishments in the United States—the world's largest art market—with conclusive recognition of the principle of foreign state ownership to protect archaeological heritage, US ratification of the 1954 Hague Convention, and an expansion of US implementation of the 1970 UNESCO Convention. At the same time, threats to cultural heritage from armed conflict, other forms of violence, and climate-change-induced natural disasters continue, while the field has only started to reckon with the legacies of colonialism and imperialism often embodied in the large public collections in the European former colonial powers and those who purchased cultural objects from them. This article sets out four areas of cultural heritage law in which we have not succeeded sufficiently and the questions that remain for future generations to resolve.

This article builds a framework for understanding both the observable and unobservable features of art fairs and how those structures are created through material and sensorial elements. It draws on the concept of atmospheres and broader discussions of affect to analyze the transgressive thrill present at art fairs, presenting an art fair as a space of commerce masked in the appearance of a museum-like space. This article explores how emotions and lures are structurally produced within the fair and how people are encouraged to collect. Within this space, a desire is cultivated via an opportunity to transgress the familiar norms of the museum environment, which fosters the development of a relationship between a person and an object. In this deeply affective space, rational responses to objects with unclear origins may be suspended. Through focusing on why people collect and how desire is generated we can better understand markets, including criminal markets, for highly desirable objects.

This article contributes to the debate on illicit antiquities and deterrence. First, I briefly examine what has been written about deterrence in the literature on illicit antiquities. Second, I review the criminological research literature on deterrence to define the concept and explain its mechanics; that is, how, according to the best state of current knowledge, deterrence “works” to persuade people not to commit crime. Third, I consider what this criminological knowledge base means for deterrence in the field of illicit antiquities. Deterrence remains a developing idea, rich with practical implications for crime prevention but also harboring some profound unresolved questions about precisely what drives human action in certain contexts. Nonetheless, we can aim to gain a more rounded understanding of the concept than has previously been applied to illicit antiquities studies.

Cultural objects are sold via global, public networks, where market stakeholders rely on the services of other actors such as academics, authenticators, and restorers to facilitate and legitimate this trade. This article will build on Neil Brodie’s examination of the role scholarly facilitators play in the illicit trade in cultural objects by exploring the harmful consequences of such scholarship, using the case studies of Emma Bunker and Mary Slusser as examples. This article argues that those of us with intellectual authority and control interacting with cultural objects should reflect on the broader social context of our research and the consequences of our knowledge production—and reckon with the exploitative and colonial foundations of the knowledge we build on. Ongoing ethical awareness and reflexivity need to be integrated into our practice to support and foster social justice. The article ends with some recommendations on how to incorporate these ideas into academic practice.

This article explores archaeological practice as regards the study and publication of unprovenanced artifacts, particularly elements of ancient arms and armor. It describes the reasons why publication is thought to be prejudicial for archaeological research and considers the possible utility of some counterarguments by way of an examination of the publication policy of the European Association of Archaeologists. It concludes by arguing that archaeologists in favor of study and publication need to do more to validate their position.