At approximately 9,500 years old, two sets of human remains from La Jolla, California (W-12), known as the University House Burials due to the physical location of their discovery on property owned by the University of California, San Diego, are some of the oldest in the United States. These burials are central to a repatriation controversy…

The scrutiny of racism as a cultural practice is well established in scholarship and in American public discourse. The underlying problem of race itself is also a common topic in academic writings and is a matter of ever-increasing consensus in anthropology and biology. But the significance of race as an inherently flawed interpretation of human…

The practice of archaeology includes of a series of events in which a group of objects is transformed from their initial identities as household goods, religious objects, or detritus of everyday life into artifacts, or as the 1906 Antiquities Act describes them, "objects of antiquity." Frequently, artifacts are further re-identified as part of a…

Many Navajos, or Dines, and Native American people in general, are archaeologists or are becoming archaeologists. The distinction between "Native Americans" and "archaeologists" in academia, or elsewhere, is no longer accurate. This fact should not come as such a surprise. As the epigraph, a quote by Richard Begay,…

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…

This article features the museums of Oaxaca, the place where the community museum movement in Mexico got started. Oaxaca has the largest Indigenous population in Mexico, with about 36.6% of the population over five years old, or about 1.027 million people, speaking an Indigenous language. Tourists spend large amounts on group or personalized tours…

This article describes the 2004 summer field program, the Kashaya Pomo Interpretive Trail Project (KPITP), which is an extension of the Fort Ross Archaeological Project (FRAP). Both are collaborative projects involving UC Berkeley, the California Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Kashaya Pomo tribe. The project attempts to integrate the…

In British Columbia, Canada, the practice of archaeology has been strongly influenced by issues of First Nations rights and the ways government and industry have chosen to address them. In turn, this situation has affected academic (i.e., research-based) and consulting (i.e., cultural resource management) archaeology, which have had to respond to…

Archaeological methods of analysis, research directions, and theoretical approaches have changed dramatically since the early days of the discipline, and today archaeological research topics relate to various aspects of cultural heritage, representation, and identity that overlap with fields such as ethnic studies, cultural anthropology, art and…

In this article the authors discuss recent developments in the decolonization of Australian archaeology. From the viewpoint of Indigenous Australians, much archaeological and anthropological research has been nothing more than a tool of colonial exploitation. For the last twenty years, many have argued for greater control over research and for a…