As archaeology increasingly intersects with digital technologies, the need for effective communication tools that convey complex spatial and cultural information to diverse audiences has become critical. This presentation demonstrates how a collaborative research firm uses ArcGIS Experience Builder to create interactive, web-based applications that enhance workflow and engagement with clients, heritage agencies, and local communities.

Experience Builder provides a flexible platform for integrating maps, narrative content, multimedia, and real-time data into cohesive, user-friendly experiences. It has become a vital tool for project management, evidence collection, result reporting, and data export in a manner accessible to non-specialists while maintaining the detail required by professionals. These are instrumental tools for improving project transparency, accelerating client approvals, and supporting public outreach initiatives.

The approach has implications for cultural resource management, collaborative research, and community-based archaeology, offering a model for how digital platforms can map the plan between data and collaboration.

Through a case study exploring the circulation of mailed early 20th century postcards with images of Native American boarding schools, this paper will demonstrate how literacy with an open-sourced mapping software, Leaflet, can facilitate innovative engagement with historical materials for research and public education through the creation of an interactive map populated with digitized content. There will be an emphasis on how to develop literacy with Leaflet (and open-source software in general!) as a non-techy researcher.

From the early 80s to the late 90s, we Peruvians experienced an internal armed conflict between the military and the Communist Party of Peru -Shining Path. Although the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established that gross violations of human rights were committed by both sides, different narratives about this complicated past co-exist. One of the results of this conflict over the truth about the past is the ongoing stigmatization of victims, many of whom were high school students. This work presents a Story Map focusing on young students who were tortured at the Cabitos military base and finally disappeared at the Hoyada mass graves. Digitizing data on disappearing students and memory sites, and finally displaying it on a Story Map, will help make the findings of national entities more accessible, shareable, and transformative. More importantly, it will honor the victims from Ayacucho and foster new paths toward the pursuit of justice.

Frost Town Archaeology has been carrying out excavations and programming with community members in the rural Finger Lakes region of New York since 2017, focusing on the industrial logging and agricultural history of the 19th-20th century site. We have given numerous local talks and held many public archaeology days where members of the community participate alongside our team, ask questions, and help us steer the project’s research. When community members ask about data, they rarely want access to our site logs, our inventories, or even our objects. Their interests often correspond to their lived experience, ranging from very specific material culture to remote sensing imagery, despite how we might consider these data contextually incomplete. This paper will discuss data access at a rural site and what that engagement looks like with inconsistent digital infrastructure and limited stakeholder experience with archaeology, discussing our alignment with local interests along with our disconnection.

This paper explores an immersive and Virtual Reality supported method for reconnecting historical African objects in U.S. collections with their source communities. Through projects with the National Museum of Liberia and the Material History Lab at Northwestern University, elders and custodians of Indigenous cultural practices in Liberia and Nigeria intimately engage with 3D digitized object collections, recording affective interpretations that are archived alongside 3D models to foster accessible, community-generated material culture data.

Historical archaeologists have rich data sources that can help K-12 students understand social and personal issues by linking the past and present. Many schools and teachers actively work to teach issues surrounding social diversity and Social Emotional Learning (SEL). As archaeologists work to share digital data we should consider the needs of educators and how to reach them, allowing us to more effectively disseminate our research. This paper combines recent research on how K-12 educators in Northern California use external resources, like museum and websites, to teach topics surrounding diversity and SEL with an examination of existing digital historical archaeological resources to consider how we can meet teacher needs and increasing student understandings of historical archaeology.

As is apparent within broader AI discourse, our profession is grappling with the pressure to adapt rapidly to emerging technology with circumspection. Archaeological dialogues concerning AI are further underscored by a deep sense of urgency: urgency to understand how to employ it efficiently; how myriad closed and open AI systems utilize sensitive archaeological data when fed into a chatbot; and how we analyze information developed through and from AI engagement. We may perceive young professionals as natural tech pioneers, particularly when we assume that they are emerging from rich AI engagement in the classroom setting, but to what extent is this true? This paper will highlight specific applications for training students on using AI for archaeological labwork, fieldwork, legacy collection management, and research development. In it, I review the challenges in harmonizing archaeological ethics and AI pedagogy, ranging from basic digital literacy issues to enhanced data management protocols.