Full spectrum archaeology (FSA) is an aspiration stemming from the convergence of archaeology’s fundamental principles with international heritage policies and community preferences. FSA encompasses study and stewardship of the full range of heritage resources in accord with the full range of associated values and through the application of treatments selected from the full range of appropriate options. Late modern states, including British Columbia, Canada, nominally embrace de jure heritage policies consonant with international standards yet also resist de facto heritage management practice grounded in professional ethics and local values and preferences. In response, inheritor communities and their allies in archaeology are demonstrating the benefits of FSA and reclaiming control over cultural heritage. Archaeology and heritage management driven by altruistic articulation of communal, educational, scientific and other values further expose shortcomings and vulnerabilities of late modern states as well as public goods in and from FSA.

Canada is not just a patchwork of varying heritage governance delineated by provincial and territorial boundaries but a maelstrom of contesting and overlapping practices and processes originating from state and non-state actors. Since the 1990s, this patchwork of governance has increasingly diffused into Indigenous and local spheres through the negotiation of formal (treaties, legislation) and semi-formal (memoranda of understanding) agreements. Ideological tensions persist between the design aspirations of resurgent Indigenisms and Canadian late modern state processes. The resurgence of Indigenous capacities and institutions with a heritage management mandate has also created Indigenous jurisdictions not premised in any nation-to-nation agreement.

Lanjān is an ancient and fertile plain along the Zāyandeh Rūd river in south-west of Iṣfahān. Due to favorable environmental conditions, such as direct access to the Zāyandeh Rūd river, fertile agricultural lands and also ancient highways, the region has long been worthwhile and a key area of Iṣfahān. Moreover, due to the existence of prestigious and thriving town, Khān Lanjān and its mountainous castle, there are numerous mentions about Lanjān region in written sources of the early and medieval centuries of Islam. In this study, according to archaeological survey and written sources, the author is going to consider dynamic changes of Lanjān by cultural landscape archaeology approach. This project investigates different aspects of settlements, agricultural lands, water, and their relationship in the cultural and administrative geography of Lanjān during the Islamic period.

For over four decades, archaeological education in Nigeria has been confined to university education curricula with little or no attention paid to teaching the subject at primary and secondary school levels. This paper puts forward some viable concepts and methods needed for the introduction and teaching of archaeology at these levels in Nigeria. These include both formal and informal teaching methods. This paper highlights some problems or challenges that may arise during the implementation process and gives some recommendations. The paper concludes that archaeological education should not be for adults alone. It should also be made available to the young ones.

This paper examines Irish social identity (‘Irishness’) in a nineteenth century, working class Irish community based at Baker’s Flat, Kapunda, in the mid-north of South Australia. The research centers on the concepts of identity and power, specifically, how the Baker’s Flat community expressed identity through material culture, and what this tells us about the community and its power relations. An existing collection of metal artifacts, as well as archaeological data resulting from a site survey, are analyzed to determine the relationships of power and Irishness.

In this article, I build on critiques of the “local” trope in archaeology by suggesting that the scalar dimensions of the “local“ are worth considering in terms of recent thinking on scale in human geography, particularly in the work of Richard Howitt. Employing Howitt’s conception of scale as size, level, and relation, I develop a case study centered on the archaeological site of El Tajin. A scale-sensitive analysis yields federal administration, local intervention, and archaeological practice as topics for study, and I trace their developments and contestations over the course of the 20th century with reference to Howitt’s categories. I conclude by arguing for closer attention to scale in locally oriented archaeology.

A recent study into the archaeological profession in 21 European countries resulted in recognising gender equality as a major topic that needs attention. The overall trend is that women will form the future majority of workers in archaeology. However, the conditions under which women work differ by country, and in several countries, women are paid less and are not well represented in leadership positions. Gender equality needs to be put on the agenda and each country should take measurements to close the gap.

Cultural Heritage Management in Victoria has bonded archaeologists and Aboriginal people to the logic of profitability. In this article, I argue that this approach to heritage neutralises and/or discourages any political or social interpretations relevant to aboriginal peoples, and undermines subsequent protest movements. I advocate that archaeology, as it is framed in Victoria, is participating in making the heritage ‘industry’ a profitable activity for Aboriginal communities, giving them an illusion of empowerment, ironically achieved through the destruction of their own non-renewable heritage. This process of commodification is consented to in exchange for financial compensation, presented as the key to emancipation. I intend here to demonstrate that this belief might in reality be detrimental to Aboriginal Australians.

This article explores the construction and representation of “Ottoman” heritage in Old Acre, Israel by examining one of the major texts guiding its conservation: its UNESCO World Heritage nomination file. By analyzing how this text has been animated for the tourist public through the Hammam al-Pasha tourist attraction, I demonstrate the ways in which the recognition and celebration of “Ottoman” heritage in Old Acre may actually reinforce Jewish-Israeli sovereignty over Israel/Palestine. I show how these conservation practices may undermine claims to Palestinian indigeneity at the exact moment that they acknowledge, protect, and memorialize the heritage of Israel’s cultural other.

The analogical use of Biblical, archaeological and historical discourses on ancient Semitic religious, social and economic practices to interpret aspects of modern Palestinian cultural expressions does not seek to establish a homologous relation. Rather the use of analogical argument is of a typological order which points to mutually shared patterns, regularities, attributes or functions that have survived from ancient times to modernity. The dynamic process of ecological adaptation to the environment, the cultural diversity of which the Canaanite nascent city–states were composed, and the influences of the various peoples with whom the Palestinians came into contact have never ceased. Ethnographic fieldwork reveals a tapestry of life that has witnessed continued adaptations that structured and conditioned the unique socio-economic system, religion and spiritual legacy that the diverse Semitic and non-Semitic ethnic later settlers adapted themselves to. The concept of an authentic, fixed Palestinian identity is a myth. There was never a period of true identity, a genuine moment that encapsulates a ‘cultural essence’ or ‘cultural core’. Palestinian cultural identity has been produced within the context of Palestinian geography and bears structural continuity with primordial Semitic categories of thought. Throughout history, each period was merely a fleeting moment that in its transient fragility represented a momentary socio-economic dynamic adaptation of the culture to the available resources, thus ensuring the survival of the family within the tribe. Palestinians remain a tribal people whose elementary kinship unit was dynamically structured by the early pattern of cave dwellings that formed the ancient cities and hamlets that remained inhabited well into the twentieth century. In modernity the locus of the extended family, the sub-unit of the tribe (hamuleh) in the Palestinian village, is invariably the hosh, the four-generation family-living courtyard.