Archaeological fieldwork in China commonly relies on short-term labor recruited from nearby villages, forming a long-standing mode of collaboration between state-employed staff and local workers. Drawing on sustained field engagement and interviews at the Chengcun City Site of the Han Dynasty, this research examines how locally recruited workers enter, sustain, and experience participation in archaeological practice. Community members often begin archaeological work during agricultural off-seasons and may accumulate decades of experience. Their trajectories vary: some obtain institutional posts, others return to farming, and many continue in project-based employment. These trajectories indicate that funding structures shape employment continuity and welfare access, while skills developed through long-term practice do not always translate into formal professional status. Archaeological labor constitutes a key mechanism in producing excavation knowledge, shaping professional roles, and structuring heritage governance in everyday practice. Viewed through labor trajectories, archaeological professionalization appears uneven, shaped by institutional arrangements, rural livelihood strategies, and localized opportunities. Based on the Chengcun case, this research points to broader dynamics: large-scale projects rely on localized labor regimes while maintaining differentiated forms of recognition and authority. Reconsidering archaeology through labor offers a perspective on knowledge production, participation, and governance.

This article draws on Roger Cotterrell’s framework for the sociological interpretation of the concept of trust to expound on, via examples from an empirical project in South Africa, methods for the empirical study of an informal environmental economy. Three distinct challenges encountered during fieldwork on the informal waste economy in South Africa are used to make a case for more robust empirical research methods – positionality, observation and the production of a documentary film, a non-traditional output. Each challenge concerns the relationship of trust between researcher and research respondent. The article concludes that these challenges can be addressed and managed via the appropriate socio-legal methodological framework. The article’s findings will have relevance for those embarking on an empirical study of the informal environmental economy, and for those interested in socio-legal methodology more generally.

An increasingly common theme in publications on ethical review in the social sciences is the burden that regulation places on researchers. But empirical findings of the extent of the problem are difficult to find, and much of the criticism of ethical review boards rests on anecdotal and individual reports. Within linguistics there has also been a greater focus on ethics, but discussion has focused on field research, and ethical regulation has not been systematically surveyed. In this report I present and discuss the results of an anonymous survey of linguistic fieldworkers and their responses to human subjects review. These results provide a snapshot of fieldwork regulation and its effect on field practices.

This article examines field experiences across archaeological sectors and demographics through the results of a survey aimed at understanding how the culture of toughness is manifest in archaeological fieldwork through the prevalence of discrimination and pressure to accept inappropriate behaviors and to push oneself physically, mentally, and emotionally. We selected these particular behaviors as they demonstrate ways in which archaeologists perceive expectations and how individuals prove they can endure, that they are tough enough. Our survey data demonstrate that women, noncisgendered, and entry-level archaeologists are the most vulnerable to negative experiences, that the pressure to push beyond one’s limits is universal, and that discrimination and harassment are factors increasingly considered by women as they decide whether to continue in the profession. We argue that many of these rules and social conditions are created and maintained inconspicuously through performative informality which is linked to the discipline’s culture of toughness. Through analysis of our quantitative survey results, we discuss how archaeology’s work culture shapes experiences in the industry and examine avenues for reform to promote equity in archaeology.

Foreign archaeologists working in the Maya region collaborated with the United Fruit Company during the first half of the twentieth century. In Guatemala, the Company funded research projects in Quiriguá (1910–1915) and Zaculeu (1946–1949). These collaborations supported the broad objectives of U.S. imperialism in the region, but comparing the projects suggests the fact of collaboration did not determine how they operated in the field. Drawing on theories of racialization, I suggest that the Company functioned as a conduit through which broader political economies of race and labor conditioned the practice of archaeology. In Quiriguá, archaeologists’ reliance on United Fruit’s administrative mechanisms led to the reproduction of the Company’s notorious labor practices and the exploitation of Afrodescendant labor in the context of a field site. In Zaculeu, a comparable dependence resulted in scientific methods being used to demonstrate Indigenous deficiency and racial continuity in the service of Company public relations and tourism development objectives. Despite wide-ranging changes in archaeological practice and governmental policy, comparing the cases illustrates how the operations of a corporate firm tied a field science into broader political economies of racialized labor. In so doing, I seek to shift analytical attention from the circulation of ideas about the past to the context of archaeological fieldwork, in which relationships of exploitation were renewed—and in which they might be contested today.

This study explores the implementation of critical thinking via metacognition in linguistics courses. It employs surveys to examine strategies used by students in two courses, Morphosyntax and Field Methods, devoted to the development of analytical skills in linguistics. We hypothesized that the application of metacognition surveys would enhance students' awareness of techniques that promote critical thinking and active learning. Two surveys built in as core components in each course were deployed at different points during the semester. Students' responses indicate that metacognition surveys can help students and instructors gain greater awareness of learning concerns and capabilities and identify areas for intervention.

Because of restrictions on in-person research due to COVID-19, researchers are now relying on remotely recorded data to a much greater extent than in the past. Given the change in methodology, it is important to know how remote recording might affect acoustic measurements, either because of different recording devices used by participants and consultants or because of the software used to make recordings. This study investigates audio signal fidelity across different inperson recording equipment and remote recording software when compared to solid-state digital audio. We show that equipment choice and software can have a large effect on acoustic measurements, including those of frequency, duration, and noise. The issues do not just reflect decreased reliability; some measurements are systematically shifted in particular recording conditions. These results show the importance of carefully considering and documenting equipment choices, particularly for crosslinguistic or cross-speaker comparisons. We close with a framework for researchers to use in deciding what types of recording may be most appropriate.

This article reports on the results of a broad crosslinguistic study on the semantics of quantity words such as many in the superlative (e.g. most). While some languages use such a form to express both a relative reading (as in Gloria has visited the most continents) and a proportional reading (as in Gloria has visited most continents), the vast majority do not allow the latter, though all allow the former. It is argued that a degree-quantifier analysis of quantity words is best suited to explain why proportional readings typically do not arise for quantity superlatives. Based on morphosyntactic evidence, two alternative diachronic pathways through which proportional quantifiers may develop from quantity superlatives are identified.

Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz's (2020) target article details the urgent need for linguistics as a field to develop its theoretical, analytical, and political engagement with issues of race and racism. We agree with Charity Hudley et al.'s assertion that the ‘hegemonic whiteness’ of linguistics as a field ‘has been profoundly damaging both for linguistic scholarship and for linguistics as a profession’ (p. e211). In this response, we wish to expand upon this point specifically in regard to how linguists and linguistics relate to Indigenous peoples and their languages. We outline key respects in which academic linguistics has, or might be seen to have, perpetuated harm against Indigenous peoples. We also outline strategies for mitigating harm and supporting the language work done by members of Indigenous communities.

Negative structures are generally assumed to be maximally accessible for verbal predicates, as evidenced by the requirement in many languages that nonverbal predicates be supported by a verb when negated. Indeed, the term ‘standard negation’ is used to refer to the negation of a declarative verbal clause, and yet this is at best highly restricted in Kusunda. We discuss the mood and nominalizing strategies that are employed to escape from the restrictions imposed by such a system.

There are often practical barriers to doing fieldwork in a novel, remote location. I propose a model for linguistic research designed to overcome such barriers: a linguistic field station. It is a centralized facility that coordinates scientific research by providing (i) research infrastructure, (ii) access to specific social, biological, or ecological systems that are not immediately available otherwise, (iii) training for students at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and (iv) access to local communities with the goal of obtaining data from them as well as training local specialists. Field stations are particularly important for research on and documentation of Indigenous languages, including contexts where colonial languages are supplanting Indigenous ones. Although the field station model is not new in research outside of language sciences, it has not yet been utilized widely in language research. I describe how the proposed model has been implemented in Guatemala and compare the field station there with other linguistic field stations.