Critical Issues in Contemporary Archaeology & Historical Archaeology: Limits, Opportunities, Challenges
Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2025
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Critical Issues in Contemporary Archaeology & Historical Archaeology: Limits, Opportunities, Challenges," at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.
This session will examine a variety of critical issues concerning the distinction between contemporary archaeology and historical archaeology, including:
The temporal limits of what is defined as contemporary and historic beyond legal/legislative definitions
What it means to work with communities while doing contemporary archaeology
The alliances/mergers/departures between the field of contemporary archaeology and historical archaeology
Cross-cultural definitions of time and how these might be incorporated into archaeological research
The challenges of doing contemporary archaeology and the archaeology of more recent times (for instance, the emergence of mass-market commodities like plastics)
Methodologies – how do our methods in contemporary archaeology align or deviate from historical arch, ethnography, and archaeology more broadly speaking?
Other Keywords
contemporary •
Landfill •
Significance •
Capitalism •
Soil Chemistry •
Legislation •
CRM •
Methods •
Archives •
Culturally Modified Tree
Geographic Keywords
North America •
Midwest •
Great Lakes •
United States •
PORTUGAL •
US •
Northeast US, New Jersey •
Tucson Basin, USA
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-11 of 11)
- Documents (11)
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The Contemporary Archaeology of a Transnational Family: Between the Pearl River Delta and the Tucson Basin (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Issues in Contemporary Archaeology & Historical Archaeology: Limits, Opportunities, Challenges", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper re-examines the history of a family from the Gin clan through letters and material remains collected in-situ from the rooms of male Chinese migrants who had lived in the Ying On Association compound before the 1968 Tucson Urban Renewal (TUR) project in Arizona....
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Contemporary Archaeology, Indigenous Communities, and the French Absence from the Upper Mississippi Valley (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Issues in Contemporary Archaeology & Historical Archaeology: Limits, Opportunities, Challenges", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper examines a locale of Ho-Chunk and Oceti Ŝakowiŋ territory in the late seventeenth century in the area now called western Wisconsin, along the upper Mississippi River. Place-names there reflect the significance of French explorers in settler colonial mindsets of...
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Cultural Resource Management and Contemporary Archaeology: Challenges In Recognizing Traditional Cultural Places (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Issues in Contemporary Archaeology & Historical Archaeology: Limits, Opportunities, Challenges", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeology conducted for compliance and review comprises the majority of all work conducted in the field within the United States. Unfortunately, the Cultural Resource Management industry has primarily focused on site-level investigation without considering cultural...
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Disrupting Time Post-Disaster: Using Speculative Archaeology as Restorative Justice in Contemporary Archaeology (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Issues in Contemporary Archaeology & Historical Archaeology: Limits, Opportunities, Challenges", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Contemporary archaeology and speculative fiction merge reality and possibility, allowing one to time travel from living in present inequities to imagining more equitable futures. Combining this with disaster archaeology allows a critical lens on the notion of returning to a...
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Glitter in the Dirt: Using Mardi Gras Beads to Document Modern Plastic Pollution (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Issues in Contemporary Archaeology & Historical Archaeology: Limits, Opportunities, Challenges", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This presentation looks at Mardi Gras beads as a representative “artifact” to demonstrate the ways in which historical archaeological methods can be used to document contemporary environmental issues, with a focus towards plastic pollution. An overview of the history and...
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"I promise you, it’s not that." The Challenges of Conspiracism for Historic and Contemporary Archaeology (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Issues in Contemporary Archaeology & Historical Archaeology: Limits, Opportunities, Challenges", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. A significant challenge faced by archaeologists today is the proliferation of pseudoarchaeological conspiracist content across all sorts of media spaces, from television, to books, to digital and social media. Conspiracism creates challenges for archaeologists and...
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The Materiality of Toxicity: Contemporary Archaeology of a Superfund Site in Northern New Jersey (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Issues in Contemporary Archaeology & Historical Archaeology: Limits, Opportunities, Challenges", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. First listed in 1982, the designation of the Ringwood Mines superfund site was the formal documentation of the illegal dumping of industrial waste by the Ford Motor Company in the 1960s and 70s. The primary pollutant was paint sludge, a waste product from Ford's...
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Null Heritage and 20th-Century Archaeology as an Excluded Curriculum (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Issues in Contemporary Archaeology & Historical Archaeology: Limits, Opportunities, Challenges", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. 20th-century municipal dumps and even informal, community refuse dumps seem to fit ambiguously when we apply our values to sort significant and non-significant archaeological resources. This activity of gathering refuse for landfill or disposal produces a variety of...
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"Outlaw Archaeologists": Doing Contemporary Archaeology in Portugal (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Issues in Contemporary Archaeology & Historical Archaeology: Limits, Opportunities, Challenges", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This presentation explores the specific challenges contemporary archaeologists face in Portugal, where much of the work conducted on recent chronologies is not officially recognized as archaeology, leading to a form of "outlaw archaeology." This marginalization also seems...
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Reconceptualizing Native American Boarding School Material Culture (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Issues in Contemporary Archaeology & Historical Archaeology: Limits, Opportunities, Challenges", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. According to the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report (2022), between 1819 and 1969, 408 federal Native American boarding schools operated in 37 states. Considering the extensive spatial and temporal scale of these institutions, the amount of...
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Trees as Cultural Resources: Contemporary Landscape Features that Transcend Time (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Issues in Contemporary Archaeology & Historical Archaeology: Limits, Opportunities, Challenges", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In this paper, we discuss trees as contemporary landscape features that transcend time. Trees may gain historic significance through a variety of cultural mechanisms. For example, trees may be culturally modified as part of an altered landscape of resource procurement,...