The fields of archaeology and museology are working to encourage and enforce research methodologies and policies that center reciprocity and respect among archaeologists, institutions, and Native Nations. This shift in approach is grounded in part by the inclusion of the Duty of Care clause in the revised NAGPRA regulations and partly by a revised awareness of ethical standards. Policy-level changes around research access are the most impactful but can also be the most challenging to initiate. In this article, we address shifts in both institutional research policies and researchers’ approaches and practices that actively incorporate Native perspectives. The framework presented was developed as a complement to the Indigenous Collections Care Guide and is grounded in case studies from three institutions that have changed their research policies. The resulting prompts, tips, examples, and challenges are provided for both researchers and institutions to evaluate research and access practices and how they intersect with Native perspectives. Seeking input and consent from Native Nations adds challenging layers to research, but the depth, quality, and impact of the research and the strengthening of relationships and trust with the communities significantly outweigh the extra time and effort.

Legacy collections frequently originate from Indigenous archaeological sites with extensive histories of investigation and removal by numerous institutions and individuals. These “split” collections complicate institutional compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA; 25 U.S.C. § 3001-13) , in part by hindering the identification of cultural items, including associated and unassociated funerary objects. In aligning with the spirit of NAGPRA and following guidance received during consultation with Tribal Nations, institutional NAGPRA practitioners strive to repatriate the Ancestors removed from these locations whole, both in body and cultural items, facilitating a respectful return to living communities. Moreover, collaborating across institutions and in coordination with Tribal Nations has the potential both to lessen the burden on Tribal Nations and minimize repetitive trauma brought about by multiple repatriations of Ancestors and cultural items from the same site. Accomplishment of this repatriation goal often requires cross-institutional collaboration to reconcile these legacy “split collections.” In this article, we present the roadmap developed and used by the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee for repatriation with split collections, with some considerations for fruitful interinstitutional collaboration.

This article is an introduction and guide to investigating past relationships between climate and human behavior. Improving understanding of these relationships is essential as humanity confronts the challenges of our warming world. However, how to investigate potential climatic influences on human behavior in the past is rarely presented or discussed as a distinct mode of inquiry. This article aims to fill this gap by providing a practical tool kit for students, archaeologists, anthropologists, and other historically focused social scientists. It is structured as a series of seven key steps to creating a research design for a climate and human behavior study, from identifying research questions to presenting results. Most of the conceptual models, methods, data, and examples provided have worldwide relevance and are informed by the long history of climate and human behavior studies in the North American Southwest. By expanding competence in this domain, we can enrich documentation and interpretations of the past and insights will emerge that will contribute to preparing for and responding to our warming world.

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.