Tribal Engagement Best Practices: Lessons from Arizona and New Mexico

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Tribal Engagement Best Practices: Lessons from Arizona and New Mexico" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For a variety of structural and traditional reasons, Tribes have historically been situated on the margins of meaningful involvement in the myriad levels of archaeological study from identification to mitigation. With increased awareness by agencies and private project proponents on their cultural heritage obligations, combined with increased capacity by Tribal cultural departments, the involvement of Tribes in all phases of cultural resources planning and permitting in steadily increasing. This symposium explores the methods that Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (THPOs), tribal advisory teams, State Historic Preservation Offices (SHPOs), other agencies, project proponents, and CRM companies are taking to increase meaningful, transparent, and honest discussions on cultural resources in the American Southwest. The individual presentations will explore a variety of topics related to tribal engagement best practices that are pertinent to agencies, tribes, and consulting archaeology companies in 2025