Intellectual Property Issues in Archaeological Publication: Some Questions to Consider

For the past 4 years, in concert with a growing number of colleagues, we have been examining intellectual property issues within archaeology and the larger realm of cultural heritage. This topic is garnering increased attention as archaeologists, descendent communities, and other stakeholders grapple with difficult questions about the uses and abuses of cultural knowledge and research data. Our work seeks to identify the issues, examine the circumstances under which they arise, and disseminate policies and practices that lead to a better understanding of what is at stake and how to approach a resolution. Here we are commenting on what questions might be considered in a situation in which photographs portraying tribal members or cultural sites taken during the course of a project conducted on tribal land in the United States are to be printed as part of a public site report or other publication. Thinking through these issues beforehand can result in positive resolution and also promote increased awareness of and sensitivity to actual or potential intellectual property issues related to archaeological practice.     

Virtual zooarchaeology: building a web-based reference collection of northern vertebrates for archaeofaunal research and education

Osteological reference collections are a crucial tool in archaeofaunal analysis, but few are comprehensive; most lack a broad range of taxa or multiple individuals per taxon. This problem is especially prominent in arctic zooarchaeology, where difficulty in obtaining, transporting, and processing northern taxa has led to a dearth of appropriate reference collections. The Virtual Zooarchaeology of the Arctic Project, or VZAP, seeks to develop a comprehensive virtual comparative assemblage for the skeletons of northern vertebrates. VZAP (http://vzap.iri.isu.edu) is designed to assist with identifications in the lab or field and provides significant educational value, for both classroom demonstration and personal consultation. The VZAP website presents high-resolution digital photographs and 3D models of skeletal elements via an intuitive graphical user interface, designed to mimic the visual experience of working with a real comparative collection. This custom-built interface, the Dynamic Image Engine, represents a new way to present heritage media in an interactive and engaging format. VZAP also implements unique 3D scanning protocols to increase the realism of 3D models, and delivers them on a platform that allows for point to point measurements, cross-sections, morphological labels, and anatomical orientations.     

Country Roads: Travel,Visibility, and Late Classic Settlement in the Southern Maya Mountains

Mayanist archaeology has long been concerned with creating and evaluating explanatory models for the locations of ancient sites relative to one another and to the physical geography of the Maya world. This study combines epigraphic data and spatial analyses to explore motivations for settlement location and to interrogate territorial strategies in Late Classic (a.d. 600–830) kingdoms in the southern Maya Mountains, around the modern towns of Dolores and Poptún, Guatemala. Least-cost path analyses were used to model natural travel corridors and their relationship with site location was assessed. In conjunction, viewshed analyses were applied to evaluate the importance of visual connections to likely travel routes. The results are considered in the context of the socio-politics and economics of the region, and raise questions about the character of and interconnections between travel, exchange, settlement location, and mechanisms for reinforcing territorial claims in the Late Classic Southern Maya Mountains.     

Human rights and sorcery in East Java (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Human rights acquires different meanings in different contexts. In this article, I demonstrate how a local interpretation of human rights was linked to an outbreak of ‘sorcerer’ killings.