Search

A new, interdisciplinary high school geoarchaeology curriculum unit, titled "Living with Volcanoes," was created and tested in two pilot lessons with 30 high school students total studying geography and classical civilization in northern England. Students were highly engaged during the curriculum unit and showed positive learning gains and favorable shifts in perceptions as measured immediately before and after its implementation. Geoarchaeology combines disciplinary knowledge from geoscience and archaeology to construct novel approaches to past human inhabitation and environmental interaction. The curriculum unit was designed to introduce this field to high school students, following guidelines from interdisciplinary studies, and it was modified iteratively, based on interviews with four high school teachers of relevant classes. It combines short lectures and group work in a 90 min, interactive format to address a variety of questions surrounding the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and its impact on the town of Pompeii and other nearby areas. Pilot survey and observational data, combined with feedback from students and teachers, were used to modify the curriculum unit. Restructured case study questions now provide better scaffolding for students, and teachers are provided with an answer key to better support facilitation. "Living with Volcanoes" has the potential to be utilized in cross-disciplinary recruitment for both geoscience and archaeology, at the high school and introductory postsecondary level. This broader, interdisciplinary approach to curriculum development may be applied to other fields of geoscience that transcend common disciplinary boundaries.

As first voiced by activists in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s and then sustained by other Native American leaders throughout the rest of the twentieth century, many Native American communities object to archaeological excavations and the wanton destruction of their traditional cultural places. In this article, the author discusses her views on archaeology in relation to Native American communities. In her research, she describes her interactions between members of Wana Pa Koot Koot and Payos Kuus C'uukwe. She discusses four essential cognitive psychology concepts, whom she considers as hindrances to the building of successful relationships, and these are: (1) naive realism; (2) the fixed pie myth; (3) loss aversion; and (4) status quo bias. (Contains 58 notes.)

The effect of law on research and scholarship is amply illustrated by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and other statutes, which, when they impel reburial of archaeological discoveries, result in a very real sacrificing of our past. In this case, the Act seems driven by a misguided notion that anthropology is not the dispassionate pursuit of knowledge, but the persistent urge of powerful white men to oppress Indians. The claim that tampering with prehistoric relics disturbs spirits is much too eagerly embraced by our judges and bureaucrats from the legal briefs of native activists and entrepreneurs, who could have no ancestral or any other ties to the remains. James W. Springer laments the crucial scientific data lost through such folly. (Contains 104 notes.)

This paper examines the role of history in power relations which suppress Indigenous knowledges. History is located as being about power and about how the powerful maintain their power. The paper further examines the Bering Strait theory/myth and ways that discourses in history combine with discourses in science to devalue Indigenous knowledges. The "truth" of science is challenged and examples of manipulation of scientific knowledge are provided, including discussions of a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation made for television production "A people's history" and an Internet website provided by the American government. These production activities supported by the Canadian and American governments are considered educational activities engaged in the practice of cultural representation in which dominant discourses about Indigenous peoples are presented. The paper challenges dominant misrepresentations of discourses about Indigenous peoples in a discussion of educational practices emphasizing the need of Indigenous peoples to control education and cultural representations. The paper concludes that it is a responsibility of society to educate all students to understand that any portrayal of history comes from a particular vantage point and to understand that dominant society privileges some representations and disadvantages others. If we teach in a critical way and challenge dominant discourses we can begin to create a society in which all persons in Canada and the USA, including Indigenous peoples, have a role to play.

In lawsuits pending in federal courts in Boston and Chicago, Americans harmed by terrorist attacks linked to the Islamic Republic of Iran are asserting claim to artifacts they believe belong to that nation, in their quest to win more than $4-billion in damages. The institutions that hold the artifacts, which include Harvard University and the University of Chicago, have been joined by an unlikely set of allies--the Iranian government, the U.S. Justice Department, and the National Iranian American Council--in arguing against using the archaeological finds to settle the lawsuits' claims. The lawsuits are expected to drag on for several more years, and some legal analysts familiar with them believe the U.S. Supreme Court will eventually be asked to weigh in, especially since the disputes involve questions related to the federal government's power to grant or deny foreign nations immunity from having their assets here seized. The confiscation of artifacts could set a troubling precedent, some scholars say. Other countries might become reluctant to lend cultural objects to institutions in the United States, and the United States could become more vulnerable to having its own cultural objects seized when they are on loan in foreign countries. The controversy appears to be putting a damper on efforts by U.S. institutions to borrow cultural materials from other nations. Jennifer Anglim Kreder, a professor of law at Northern Kentucky University and a co-author of an analysis of the litigation in a forthcoming issue of the "Washington University Global Studies Law Review," says the loss of access to such artifacts would hamper American universities' efforts to teach students about the Middle East. Thomas Fortune Fay, a lawyer representing one set of plaintiffs' families of the victims of the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, argues that his clients are owed compensation for damages. Some claims against relics at the University of Chicago, by Americans affected by a 1997 bombing attack in Jerusalem, are pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Among the questions at issue there is whether a lower court erred in handing down a default judgment against Iran after its government claimed immunity from such legal proceedings and did not show up in court to defend itself.

In early 1916, the legendary Yale University archaeologist Hiram Bingham III completed his third and final expedition in southern Peru. He shipped home 74 boxes of artifacts from Machu Picchu, a spectacular site in the Andes that is believed to have been the last major settlement of the Inca empire. Those boxes were supposed to be on temporary loan and sent back to Peru by July 1917, according to the government decree that authorized their export. But toward the end of 1916, Bingham, who would soon be pulled into service as a pilot in World War I, began to worry that he would not have time to study the artifacts. In a letter to a colleague, he confessed that he had thought about cheating on the deal and let the Peruvians "whistle for it." The Peruvians are whistling for it now. Arguing that Yale improperly holds thousands of objects from all three of Bingham's Machu Picchu expeditions, the government of Peru filed a federal lawsuit against the university in December, just over a year after the parties appeared to have settled the dispute. Yale now has moved to dismiss the case, saying that Peru filed in the wrong court and that its claims would be "stale and meritless" in any venue. Peru must respond by April 20. Museum directors and archaeologists around the world are watching the case with intense interest. A victory for Peru, some believe, might encourage other nations to try to take back artifacts that are now valuable parts of collections. Few observers expect the Machu Picchu lawsuit to move very far toward trial. Most say they expect Peru and Yale to reach a final negotiated settlement sooner rather than later. But a peace treaty has seemed in sight before: In September 2007, Peru and Yale announced a resolution to the dispute--only to see it collapse under pressure from Peruvian activists. As in other conflicts about antiquities, scholarly inquiry, and national patrimony, passions about Machu Picchu can run very high.

In the United States, many archaeological excavations focus on precontact era Native American sites, and for the majority of American archaeology's existence, these have included a vast number of burial and sacred sites. When the human remains of Native American Ancestors, or remnants of sacred and ceremonial objects, are found, what implications does this have for the soil in which they rested? In addition to exploring questions regarding how backdirt is defined and assessed, we consider how backdirt may be interpreted as ecofact, as material culture, and even as NAGPRA-eligible funerary material or human remains. We hope to demonstrate that backdirt, as an example of some of the most insignificant archaeological material, poses interesting questions relating to interpretations of context, as well as consultation and collaboration with Indigenous communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overview: Archaeology in the United States is caught in a "curation crisis" (Childs 1995; Childs and Warner 2019; Marquardt et al. 1982; SAA Advisory Committee on Curation 2003; Trimble and Marino 2003) and a "digital data crisis" (or "deluge") more specifically (Bevan 2015; Clarke 2015; Kansa and Kansa 2021; Katsianis et al. 2022; Kersel 2015; McManamon et al. 2017:239–240; Rivers Cofield et al. 2024). Recent estimates suggest that, collectively, over 1.4 billion dollars are spent annually to support archaeological work that is mandated by federal law (SRI Foundation 2020). Although substantial efforts are underway to generate and provide mechanisms for managing, curating, and sharing the resultant digital data, we suggest that a critical step that has yet to be taken is to describe and visualize the components, connections, and causal dynamics of the US digital data system as it currently functions. Here, we specifically apply a "systems thinking" approach to produce such a high-level model of this system. We argue that understanding and visualizing this system will help us all "think bigger" (Heilen and Manney 2023); identify sources of knowledge, opportunities for critical analysis, collaboration, and capacity building; and increase much-needed archaeological digital literacy (Kansa and Kansa 2022). We conceptualize this as bringing "equilibrium" to the system, and in this article, we make several suggestions on how to bring this about. These insights can enable practitioners to better understand their roles in and contributions to the overall system and to evaluate efforts to improve data sharing, management, and curation practices not only within their organizations and departments but beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over five decades historical archaeologists conducting research in the United States have produced important scholarship detailing how the material products and precedents of interactions among people from a multitude of cultural backgrounds created a distinctive plural American society. The American Experience in Archaeological Perspective (AEAP) book series was launched by the University Press of Florida in the early 2000s with the aim of focusing attention on the materiality of the United States as it is differentiated from other nation-states by circumstances of migration, race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, and other sociohistorical phenomena. A major goal of the series is to reveal how archaeology can interrogate formative aspects of American history and culture—events, institutions, places, practices, and processes—and evaluate their legacies with respect to the country's present-day social and political circumstances. This essay reflects on the AEAP series and the scholarship produced by its authors over the past two decades. As examples drawn from more than two dozen volumes in the series illustrate, archaeological investigations of the detritus and landscapes associated with core American values and activities—in all their diversity—provide insights into the foundations of the American experience and what it means to be an American. These studies also provide broad comparisons with historical and anthropological inquiries into lifeways, identity, and national character throughout the world. We conclude with a discussion of the directions the series editors plan to take in publishing the next generation of scholarship in American historical archaeology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies in the sociopolitics of archaeology have shown patterns of inequality in publishing. Because this inequality affects the richness of perspectives on the past, the extent of unevenness requires continual documentation. This article explores gendered and institutionally based patterns of authorship in prominent archaeology journals, archaeology papers in general science journals, and Sapiens, a public-facing web magazine, from 2016 to 2021. We find that the representation of women is similar across these two types of journals, for authors both in the United States and abroad. Men still publish significantly more than women though the gap is narrowing due to the publication activity of recent PhDs. Using a large database of PhDs as a baseline for comparison, we find that women publish less in these venues than expected, resulting in an imbalance. Some archaeology programs have a larger presence in journal publishing than others, but this imbalance is not as pervasive as what has been observed in hiring practices. Archaeology journals exhibit healthier measures of diversity, compared to Science, in terms of the institutional affiliation of authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author lays out the problems and questions that prompted this special issue on "uneasy dialogues" across art history, archaeology, and contemporary art practice in the Americas. The art and visual culture of the Pre-Hispanic Americas is contested terrain. This essay discusses the temptation of "settler moves to innocence" in scholarship and in the contemporary art world. The author traces a surprising opportunity that emerges in a work by artist Gala Porras-Kim that, by accident, provides an ancient Moche captive bottle with conceptual liberation - not through return to bondage in northern Peru, but as escape to Yucatán. This text concludes by introducing the contents of this special issue that take the reader from the desert of New Mexico to the streets of Santiago de Chile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most archaeological investigations in the United States and other countries must comply with preservation laws, especially if they are on government property or supported by government funding. Academic and cultural resource management (CRM) studies have explored various social, temporal, and environmental contexts and produce an ever-increasing volume of archaeological data. More and more data are born digital, and many legacy data are digitized. There is a building effort to synthesize and integrate data at a massive scale and create new data standards and management systems. Taxpayer dollars often fund archaeological studies that are intended, in spirit, to promote historic preservation and provide public benefits. However, the resulting data are difficult to access and interoperationalize, and they are rarely collected and managed with their long-term security, accessibility, and ethical reuse in mind. Momentum is building toward open data and open science as well as Indigenous data sovereignty and governance. The field of archaeology is reaching a critical point where consideration of diverse constituencies, concerns, and requirements is needed to plan data collection and management approaches moving forward. This theme issue focuses on challenges and opportunities in archaeological data collection and management in academic and CRM contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overview: Spatial data, under the broader umbrella of digital data, is becoming increasingly integral to all stages of archaeological research design and dissemination. As archaeologists lean toward reuse and interoperability, with ethics on their minds, how to treat spatial data is of particular importance. This is because of the complexities involved at every life-cycle stage, from collection to publication, including black box issues that may be taken for granted, and because the size of spatial data can lead to archiving difficulties. Here, the "DIY" momentum of increasingly accessible spatial methods such as photogrammetry and handheld lidar is examined alongside forthcoming changes in publication policies that will impact the United States in particular, framed around a conversation about best practices and a call for more comprehensive training for the archaeological community. At its heart, this special issue seeks to realize the potential of increasingly digitized—and increasingly large amounts of—archaeological data. Within cultural resource management, this means anticipating utilization of data through widespread standardization, among many interrelated activities. A desire to enhance the utility of archaeological data has distinct resonances with the use of spatial data in archaeology, as do some wider challenges that the archaeological community faces moving forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year 2020 was an awakening for some. For others, it reiterated the persistent social injustice in the United States. Compelled by these events, 30 diverse individuals came together from January to May 2021 for a semester-long seminar exploring inequity in archaeological practice. The seminar's discussions spotlighted the inequity and social injustices that are deeply embedded within the discipline. However, inequity in archaeology is often ignored or treated narrowly as discrete, if loosely bound, problems. A broad approach to inequity in archaeology revealed injustice to be intersectional, with compounding effects. Through the overarching themes of individual, community, theory, and practice, we (a subset of the seminar's participants) explore inequity and its role in various facets of archaeology, including North–South relations, publication, resource distribution, class differences, accessibility, inclusive theories, service to nonarchaeological communities, fieldwork, mentorship, and more. We focus on creating a roadmap for understanding the intersectionality of issues of inequity and suggesting avenues for continued education and direct engagement. We argue that community-building—by providing mutual support and building alliances—provides a pathway for realizing greater equity in our discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal for many PhD students in archaeology is tenure-track employment. Students primarily receive their training by tenure-track or tenured professors, and they are often tacitly expected—or explicitly encouraged—to follow in the footsteps of their advisor. However, the career trajectories that current and recent PhD students follow may hold little resemblance to the ones experienced by their advisors. To understand these different paths and to provide information for current PhD students considering pursuing a career in academia, we surveyed 438 archaeologists holding tenured or tenure-track positions in the United States. The survey, recorded in 2019, posed a variety of questions regarding the personal experiences of individual professors. The results are binned by the decade in which the respondent graduated. Evident patterns are discussed in terms of change over time. The resulting portraits of academic pathways through the past five decades indicate that although broad commonalities exist in the qualifications of early career academics, there is no singular pathway to obtaining tenure-track employment. We highlight the commonalities revealed in our survey to provide a set of general qualifications that might provide a baseline set of skills and experiences for an archaeologist seeking a tenure-track job in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A focus on institutions frames this examination of the archaeology of African America. While initially emphasizing the institution of slavery and theories of Black difference, the field today has a much wider scope. Researchers engaged in this work critically examine past and present-day institutions. As such, this review also considers the place of African American archaeology in engaged scholarship, critical theory, and self-reflexive practice. As in past reviews, the emphasis is on the United States, with occasional references to important work in the rest of the African diaspora. African American archaeology is shown to be inextricably interwoven with scholarly work in North American archaeology, African American studies, heritage studies, and social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about the artifacts found in Whites Creek, Louisa County, Iowa, and Graham Cave, United States which include Notch, Agate Basin, and knife blade. It addresses the findings of the Hopewellian Culture mound site in Louisa County and humans and details of the excavation.

Shell ring archaeological sites are one of the most visible site types along the lower South Atlantic Coast of the United States. These cultural sites are large, circular to arcuate piles of mollusk shells with some reaching over three meters in elevation and over 100 m in diameter. They are comprised largely of mollusk shells (e.g., Eastern oyster, Crassostrea virginica), but also contain early pottery, nonhuman faunal remains, and other artifacts. Our work establishes that they represent the earliest widespread Native American villages occupied year-round in the Eastern Woodlands of North America. Significantly, our results from sea-level modelling and isotope geochemistry on mollusks establish that the inhabitants of these earliest villages (ca. 5000-3800 yrs. BP) lived within a fluctuating coastal environment, harvested certain resources year-round, and targeted diverse habitats across the estuaries. Both the growth and decline of these earliest villages are associated with a concomitant rise and lowering of sea level that impacted the productivity of the oyster reef fishery along the South Atlantic Coast. Despite these large-scale environmental changes, this research indicates that Native American fishing villages persisted along the coast for over 1000 years., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

We conduct a synthetic archaeological and ethnohistoric dating program to assess the timing and tempo of the spread of peaches, the first Eurasian domesticate to be adopted across Indigenous eastern North America, into the interior American Southeast by Indigenous communities who quickly "Indigenized" the fruit. In doing so, we present what may be the earliest absolute dates for archaeological contexts containing preserved peach pits in what is today the United States in the early to mid-16 th century. Along with our broader chronological modeling, these early dates suggest that peaches were likely in the interior prior to permanent Spanish settlement in the American Southeast and that peaches spread independently of interactions with Spanish colonizers. We further argue that that eventual spread of peaches was structured exclusively by Indigenous communities and the ecologies produced through long-term Indigenous land management and land use practices, highlighting and centering the agency of Indigenous societies in the socioecological process of colonization., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Over the past few years our body politic has become increasingly polarized: Republicans versus Democrats, conservatives versus liberals. That polarization filters down to governmental actions, policies, and decisions, evidenced in disagreements over regulation versus deregulation and fossil fuels versus renewable energy. Such polarization—whether legislative, administrative, or judicial and whether at the federal, state, or tribal level—can and does impact the management of our archaeological resources and the way cultural resource management is practiced in the United States. Given that most archaeologists in the United States are employed in cultural resource management, these actions affect their employment. Consequently, it is more critical than ever that archaeologists become cultural resource management and historic preservation advocates. This article discusses the whys and hows of preservation advocacy. Active, science-based advocacy by preservationists can engage governmental decision-makers to give due consideration to cultural resources and their management when making decisions or drafting and voting on legislation. Although the discussion focuses on advocacy at the federal level, the observations and suggestions are applicable at the state and local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeology is in a period of change, a point of inflection in which the discipline strives to reject its colonial roots. Embracing the "ontological turn," archaeologists are applying diverse worldviews within their interpretations, yet these worldviews continue to reintroduce colonial ideals as they emerge out of Western philosophical schools. Using Native American philosophy, a recent addition to the academy, several key themes are identified and applied to the study of Late Archaic shell rings found along the Southeast United States coastlines. Through these themes, these sites are interpreted as places where Native Americans established communication with non-human forces and eventually socialized the newly formed coastline. The use of Native American philosophy is provided as a counter-balance to the use of Western philosophy as a means of further decolonizing archaeology [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the archaeology of the Japanese diaspora in the United States as a discrete area of investigation over the past 15 years presents a timely intervention into how xenophobia has contoured the lives of migrants. It is not merely an area of study detached from contemporary politics, but rather a subfield that is forcing archaeologists to engage with the public in novel ways. This work requires scholarly collaboration that puts the interest of descendant communities at the forefront of academic investigation. This work also involves managing archaeological data in a systematic fashion and making data accessible online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Publicly available Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) datasets have become widely accessible in the northeastern United States and beyond in the past 10 years. The increase in dataset availability and accessibility coupled with a number of publications detailing the types of cultural features that can be identified has made it necessary to explore and discuss positive impacts and risks to cultural features on this landscape. Access to detailed, documented locations of archaeological resources at state or federal agencies in the United States is typically limited to those with certain credentials, yet many locations of features and sites, both documented and undocumented, are now available to anyone who can access these datasets and effectively interpret them. This presents a challenge for cultural resource management professionals and the field of archaeology; for while LiDAR datasets have had many positive impacts, it is not yet obvious what the unintended impacts of feature exposure might be. Risks to sites are worth considering in the northeastern United States, where (1) region‐wide LiDAR data are publicly available and accessible, (2) many cultural features are widely accessible and not well monitored and (3) case studies have been published that provide guidance on how to identify specific types of cultural landscape features using LiDAR data. We discuss the nuances of those topics here, provide examples of how the datasets have impacted archaeology in the northeastern United States and explore possible mitigation strategies to maintain data accessibility while also protecting important cultural features in this region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teaching introductory archaeology courses in U.S. higher education typically falls short in two important ways: the courses do not represent the full picture of who contributes to reconstructing the past, and they do not portray the contemporary and future relevance of the archaeological past. In this article, we use anti-colonial and decolonial theories to explain the urgency of revising the introductory archaeology curriculum for promoting equity in the discipline and beyond. We detail the pedagogical theories we employed in revising an introductory archaeology course at a small liberal arts college in the United States and the specific changes we made to course structure, content, and teaching strategies. To examine the impacts on enrolled students and on who chose to enroll in the revised archaeology curriculum, we analyze student reflection essays and enrollment demographics. We found that students developed more complex understandings of the benefits and harms of archaeological knowledge production and could articulate how to address archaeology's inequities. We also found that enrollment in archaeology courses at the college shifted to include greater proportions of students of color. These results support the notion that introductory archaeology courses should be substantially and continually revised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This forum builds on the discussion stimulated during an online salon in which the authors participated on June 25, 2020, entitled "Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter," and which was cosponsored by the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA), the North American Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG), and the Columbia Center for Archaeology. The online salon reflected on the social unrest that gripped the United States in the spring of 2020, gauged the history and conditions leading up to it, and considered its rippling throughout the disciplines of archaeology and heritage preservation. Within the forum, the authors go beyond reporting the generative conversation that took place in June by presenting a road map for an antiracist archaeology in which antiblackness is dismantled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Skousen and Aiuvalasit critique our article on the post-Mississippian occupation of the Horseshoe Lake watershed (White et al. 2020) along two lines: (1) that our findings are not supported due to a lack of archaeological evidence, and (2) that we do not consider alternative hypotheses in explaining the lake's fecal stanol record. We first respond to the matter of fecal stanol deposition in Horseshoe Lake and then address the larger issue, the primacy of archaeological data in interpreting the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical cemeteries across the United States are endangered due to development, neglect, and vandalism. Cemeteries of historically oppressed groups, specifically African, African American, and Hispanic populations, are even more susceptible to destruction or damage due to systematic, institutionalized racism; neglect; segregation; and unique mortuary patterns that often result in these cemeteries being ignored, damaged, or "lost." A specific example is provided by historical cemeteries in Texas going "missing" from maps. Several cemeteries were known and marked on historical maps, but were later omitted from modern maps. This discrepancy is significant and leaves these "lost" cemeteries vulnerable. Minority cemeteries, particularly African and African American cemeteries, have a history of being damaged or destroyed during construction projects, only to be located on historical maps after the fact. Interdisciplinary research, including examinations of historical maps and an anthropological/archaeological understanding of mortuary customs, can help to preserve these unique and often underrepresented sites in American history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I discuss my experiences using archaeology and anthropology to teach college-level students how to be interdisciplinary thinkers and doers. Although the number of students who complete archaeology and anthropology degrees is relatively small in the United States and worldwide, programs and courses in such fields offer any student important opportunities in active, interdisciplinary learning that contribute to effective problem-solving using multiple lines of information. Courses and learning activities can question stereotypes depicting archaeology as a "useless" discipline (Arendt 2013:79), and they can prepare students to engage in and adapt to countless personal and professional situations while also learning about archaeology, its benefits, and its potential for relationships with similar and different fields. Therefore, the active learning of multimethod, interdisciplinary archaeology can prepare college-level students to address change and uncertainty in their homes, communities, and professions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeologies of internment present unique challenges and benefits. Myriad aspects of human behaviour that stretch over temporal scales of generations and centuries at other archaeological sites are visible in ephemeral traces of short-term occupation at sites of internment such as prisoner of war (POW)camps; resistance, domination, the structure and scaffolds of authority, agency and identity are created, cast, and discarded into the soil. The paper examines some of these stories from the earth through military prisons of the American Civil War, and the ephemeral archaeology of selected case studies: Camp Lawton, Andersonville, and Johnson's Island. Themes explored are globalization and the intersection of the global at the local in prison camps, resistance, its forms, and function within POW camps; and how resistance intersecting with systems of structural violence within internment camps spurred the development of a masculinity in the 19th century during, and after the American Civil War, different from societal norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public archaeology was born in the United States in the 1970s. Since then, public archaeology has been considered as a new field of research with many topics related to theory and practice that need to be discussed besides traditional archaeology. These discussions mainly lie in the difference in the interpretation of the relationship between "archaeology" and "public/community" in the diversity of context and archaeological practice taking place across the world. This article aims to introduce and analyze the basic concepts, origin and development as well as the theory of the public archaeology approach in archaeological heritage studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public archaeology was born in the United States in the 1970s. Since then, public archaeology has been considered as a new field of research with many topics related to theory and practice that need to be discussed besides traditional archaeology. These discussions mainly lie in the difference in the interpretation of the relationship between "archaeology" and "public/community" in the diversity of context and archaeological practice taking place across the world. This article aims to introduce and analyze the basic concepts, origin and development as well as the theory of the public archaeology approach in archaeological heritage studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article summarizes my experience at Baltimore AlienCon in 2018. The programme offered a curious blend of themes explored in Ancient Aliens and similar programming, alongside other domains of 'pseudoscience', 'rogue' archaeology, and conspiracy theory, with an added touch of science-fiction fandom and marketing for Prometheus Entertainment. Framed by the event, this article considers aliens, heritage, and belonging in the United States at a moment of unprecedented misinformation campaigns and historical racial reckoning. It explores how archaeological expertise is implicated, invoked, and rejected in such forums and their associated media; and questions how anthropologists and archaeologists might reckon with the often-troubling widespread public uptake of their knowledge into influential conspiracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cahokia is the largest documented urban settlement in the pre-Columbian United States. Archaeological evidence suggests that the city, located near what is now East St. Louis, Illinois, began to rapidly expand starting around AD 1050. At its height, Cahokia extended across 1000 ha and included large plazas, timber palisade walls, and hundreds of monumental earthen mounds. Following several centuries of occupation, the city experienced a period of gradual abandonment from about AD 1200 to 1400. Here, we present geochemical data from a 1500-year-old sediment core from nearby Horseshoe Lake that records watershed impacts associated with the growth and decline of Cahokia. Sedimentary analysis shows a distinctive 24-cm-thick, gray, fine-grained layer formed between AD 1150 and 1220 and characterized by low carbonate δ13C, elevated sorbed metal concentrations, and higher organic matter δ15N. The deposition of this layer is contemporaneous with archaeological evidence of increased agricultural activity, earthen mound construction, and higher populations surrounding the lake. We hypothesize that these human impacts increased soil erosion, producing new sediment sources from deeper soil horizons, and shifted dissolved transport to the lake, producing lower carbonate δ13C values, higher concentrations of lead, copper, potassium, and aluminum, and increased δ15N, likely due to contributions of enriched nitrogen from sewage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Child labor has been called an archaeological "enigma" because its expression varies with age, gender, social organization, and economy. There are negative connotations in Western societies, especially given the abuses of the industrial revolution, and for hunter-gatherers it seems to contradict the notion of original affluent societies. Yet the adoption of tasks marks progress toward adulthood. There is no reason to assume that children were not willing participants, or that labor is onerous. Child labor is an expected and natural element of growing up. This paper examines foraging behavior with a specific focus on the collection of mollusks at the Main Street Kronprindsens Gade (KPG) site, St. Thomas, USVI (circa cal. 400 CE). It is argued that an abundance of small, rocky intertidal and shallow seagrass inhabiting mollusks reflects foraging by children. General characteristics of these food items and the behaviors they represent are proposed as a model for identifying one aspect of labor by children. The association of mollusk collecting with children also helps to explain what would appear to be non-optimal foraging by adults, and the social relations of production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the book "Explorations of the Aboriginal Remains of Tennessee" by Joseph Jones that discusses archaeology in Tennessee. It mentions that the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution and most of its collection moved to Washington D.C. to be held by the NMAI.

ABSTRACT: With modern ruins, there may be diverging perspectives about whether the sites or objects are unsightly waste or artifacts. Among the local communities who routinely come into contact with such ruins, this viewpoint is often actively negotiated, and with it, so is history itself. Scholars of contemporary archaeology discuss the value of tracing these negotiations to understand the wider political and cultural process of historical creation, or negation. The situation becomes more complex in the wake of tragedy or disaster. Here, I explore the relationship of stakeholders on the Arizona–Sonora international border to the material culture of undocumented migrants, the objects left behind along the clandestine wilderness routes of migrant travelers abandoned en masse to ruin, as if in the fallout of disaster. But this disaster is human made, the product of US border policy. I consider these objects as a form of modern ruins that occupy a politically laden dialectical space between trash and heritage, a negotiation with ramifications for border policy. [contemporary archaeology, ruins, trash, heritage, US‐Mexico border] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]