In this article, the author shares his experiences in his undergraduate years and how he was influenced by his professors regarding human history. The author believes that social change very often arose from encounters with strangers who possessed some obviously superior skill or knowledge that locals could borrow and adjust to their own use. His…

This essay--a combination of authorial narrative and scholarly critique--examines a grassroots organization's (Friends of Historic Northport) campaign to preserve a site in west Alabama where a pivotal Choctaw-Upper Creek battle took place in 1785. The organization has faced opposition from city planners and business leaders intent on developing…

In north central Virginia there is a local tale--The Legend of Jump Mountain, which purports to explain the origins of the Hayes Creek Indian Burial Mound. A highly romantic legend, it immortalizes post colonial intertribal warfare during the early nineteenth century while ignoring the antiquity of the mound and the local descendants of its…

Negotiations over archaeological human remains have been complicated interactions spanning centuries of attempts to resolve differences of opinion with regard to the investigation, ownership, and disposition of early American Indian burials. Guilt, fear, power, politics, legitimacy, science, religion, and denial--all of these elements commonly…

Increasingly over the 20th century, nations, many of them newly formed as the result of the dissolution of empires, instituted those kinds of cultural-property laws and signed bilateral treaties and international conventions as means of strengthening them. Still the looting of archaeological sites continues. Iraq is but one example. Wherever…

A unique, interdisciplinary collaboration between chemistry and classics has led to the development of an experiment for nonscience majors. This instrumental analysis experiment was designed for use in an archaeology course to quantify the amount of lead in ancient bronze coins. The coins were corroded beyond visual identification, so provenance…

Israeli, Palestinian, and American archaeologists unveiled a draft agreement on archaeological and cultural heritage that they hope to see included in a future Middle East peace agreement. Presenting their proposal to an audience of archaeologists at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, they said it was the first time that Israelis and Palestinians…

According to Israeli archaeologist Yonathan Mizrachi, archaeology has become a weapon of dispossession. He was referring to the way archaeology is being used in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in the oldest part of Jerusalem, where, archaeological digs are being carried out as part of a concerted campaign to expel Palestinians from their…

James Scheurich argues that practices of policy--normalized over time through repetition--serve three purposes. They structure social problems for which policy is designed to address; construct certain people, implicitly or explicitly, as problem individuals; and shape policy solutions. Following Foucault, he offers what he calls Policy…

In this article the authors revisit the earlier studies of the role and importance of elders and pursue various lines of evidence--biological, archaeological, and cross-cultural/ethnographic--to build the fundamental argument that elders and the knowledge they have acquired from their ancestors, through social learning, have played a key role in…

Academic advising has emerged as a distinct interdisciplinary field and profession, but the description of its role has recently relied on analogies and metaphors. While helpful in clarifying practice, their continual use obscures the uniqueness of academic advising and masks the importance of the scholarship that underlies its practice. We use…

This article describes and explores the key elements of an approach to personalised learning which is rooted in student experience and choice. It is shaped by the learner's interest, driven by her curiosity and purpose, yet is capable of supporting the delivery of the valued outcomes of a publicly accountable curriculum. It is an approach which…

Introduction: A work roles and role theory-based approach to conceptualise human information activity, denoted information work analysis is discussed. The present article explicates the approach and its special characteristics and benefits in comparison to earlier methods of analysing human information work. Method: The approach is discussed in…

The current research proposes a mobile technology framework in cultural heritage setting for the dissemination of cultural memory among its visitors. The framework studies the complex concept of human memory and attempts to adopt the human information perception, as a learning process, on a mobile framework that will allow their users to interact…

The tension surrounding Barnard College's determination of whether to grant tenure to anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj was resolved this fall. Barnard reached a positive decision. The affair, however, leaves a number of important issues open. At the center of this controversy stands Abu El-Haj's first book, "Facts on the Ground: Archaeological…