This is a story about honest archaeological work and legacy, and no one should read too much into it. It is really just a story about a dinner party of sorts I had at the last meeting for the Society for California Archaeology (SCA) in Palm Springs in March 2026. For many of you, a dinner at a conference may not seem like much, but for me it was quite memorable. For one thing, it was my first regional conference in nearly a decade, and I had been uneasy about my talk, unsure how it had been received. For another, it was there that I encountered some curious practitioners of archaeology—people who provoked somber and sober reflections on our practice in a place and on a night I must admit most of us were neither.

It was the second night of the conference, and after retrieving my “complimentary” with-a-\$250-conference-registration-fee dinner, I walked to the bar, paid \$11.50 for a Michelob, and, already socially drained, found an empty table at which to sit. I pulled out my cell phone, pretending to engage in communication with someone so that I would not look like a man eating alone.

On the screen was the conference program and theme: “60 Years of Reflection.” A time frame marking not only the founding of the SCA but also arguably the genesis of our modern profession with the intellectual aftermath of the so-called New Archaeology of the 1960s; when folks such as Lewis Binford and Colin Renfrew insisted archaeology could be a science: question driven, methodologically rigorous, and theoretically self-aware. They were right.

I kept scrolling, though I was no longer reading. I was replaying my talk in my head.

I had argued that archaeologists were at an anxious inflection point—the kind we put ourselves in every decade or so—regarding what our archaeological contribution to the field will be and how it will be remembered. In my talk, I claimed that although the New Archaeology practice was driven by scientific curiosity and archaeological design, days long gone, the bulk of archaeological work today is driven by compliance: the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Section 106, the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). These laws, largely established beginning in the 1960s, now dominate archaeological practice in the United States.

The reasons behind these laws are laudable and, in many cases, were overdue. But their implementation has been uneven and has given rise to what some archaeologists term “compliance archaeology” (Sebastian and Lipe Reference Sebastian and Lipe2009). In practice, this legislation has produced a system in which most archaeological work is compliance driven and in which speed, cost, and deliverables increasingly outweigh inquiry, documentation, and care.

For better or for worse, and fairly or not, these laws also had the unintended consequence of further pitting academic archaeologists, who produce theory, against practicing CRM archaeologists, who produce data—separated not just by training focus but inerasably by institutional design.

This tension, far from imaginary, has even been observed by outsiders. Sociologist Tony Platt (Reference Platt2011), for example, documenting archaeological efforts in Humboldt County, California, describes how university programs expanded after World War II when the universities accumulated the personnel and resources to carry out campaigns away from their home bases. These new efforts came at the cost of relationships with local collectors, amateur archaeologists, and community-embedded researchers who had long been their collaborators of sorts—such as high-school teachers, dentists, civic enthusiasts, and others, who had amassed significant artifact collections and contributed local knowledge to the enterprise. The relationship between these groups and the emerging archaeology programs at various academic institutions eventually became untenable. As methodological standards tightened and concerns about collection practices grew, academics distanced themselves from amateur networks. Over time, the divide hardened. Today, most academic positions require a doctoral degree, whereas most fieldwork is conducted by archaeologists holding a master’s degree or less. The structural gap between those who produce theory and those who produce data has been a persistent source of professional friction.

The tension was not constrained to Humboldt County—nor was it stuck in time. Issues regarding archaeological practice in the context of CRM have been discussed for California starting in the 1970s (Glassow Reference Glassow1977, Reference Glassow and Woodall1990), and these issues were brought up for broader contexts early on (Raab et al. Reference Raab, Schiffer, Klinger and Goodyear1980). Perhaps most memorably, Kent Flannery (Reference Flannery1982) observed the same tension from within the discipline in his essay “The Golden Marshalltown,” which posed a question still worth asking: Who do you want in the field, the archaeologist who knows the material deeply or the academic who has rarely left the seminar room? The question stings precisely because it is not resolved cleanly. Both caricatures exist. Both contain partial truths. The productive version of this tension, where fieldwork informs theory and theory improves fieldwork, requires institutional conditions that have grown difficult—if not outright impossible—to sustain. Although difficult to quantify, a remaining impression is that practitioners of CRM archaeology think academic archaeologists are intellectually intimidating or snobbish and that academic archaeologists secretly envy the sheer amount of time their CRM counterparts get to be in the field having “the most fun you can have with your pants on” (Flannery Reference Flannery1982, 278).

My argument that morning was simple: the problem today is not compliance archaeology per se; the problem is the gradual surrender of quality control to business structures that do not value archaeological integrity.

I took a sip of my beer and wondered how badly I had failed to deliver that message. The silence at the end of my talk still echoed.

Then a voice interrupted my thoughts.

“May I join you?”

A young woman had already pulled out the chair beside me and set down her plate.

I nodded, half flattered, half resigned. There comes a point when one realizes one may have little in common with the company at hand. I wondered what I might say to my young companion. Fortunately, I did not have to say anything, because just then she introduced herself with a firm handshake.

Now, I am not going to tell you her actual name—and even if I did, it would not really matter, because my table companion represents something larger: a certain type of archaeologist I have come to recognize. But I will tell you a little bit about her. She graduated in the last five years from a major California university and, since shortly after graduation with a subscription to ShovelBums.com, has been working on a string of CRM-related jobs. She carries herself with confidence: a can-do attitude and field-ready boots—the kind that suggested she believed she could go anywhere. I will call her Eager Youngling (E. Y.).

“I really enjoyed your talk,” E. Y. said, tucking her hair behind her ear.

I chuckled. “That is kind of you. I thought it landed a bit flat.”

“It was actually kind of funny. It reminded me of my professors,” she said. “That’s who got me into archaeology.”

“Good professors will do that,” I admitted, glad to learn that at least one person had enjoyed my presentation. I signaled the waitress to bring another round of Michelob.

We discovered, by coincidence, that we shared an academic ancestor. We had both taken classes under the Born-Again Philosopher, who had inspired us both into archaeology—although it was years apart—at the same university. A small world.

“It’s just . . .” E. Y. hesitated. “My experience feels so far removed from those undergrad classes. I’ve been working in CRM for about four years now, and almost none of it matches what I learned at university.”

“That’s not uncommon,” I said. “Research universities don’t tend to emphasize field methods. Theory gets priority.”

“I’ll say. My university offered just one CRM course, and it mostly covered Section 106. I think it was taught by someone who had only spent a couple of years in CRM before getting the job,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ear again.

“You were lucky to have even that. Only a handful of universities emphasize CRM in any meaningful way. The field itself has changed dramatically over the past 40 or 50 years, but academic curricula haven’t kept pace. Graduate students are still trained as if there are endless academic positions out there, and that’s simply not the case.”

“There are plenty of jobs in CRM,” E. Y. replied. “Every major firm seems to be hiring field techs. But I don’t understand why I need a college degree just to monitor a bulldozer all day, hoping it turns up artifacts.”

“It’s a different kind of archaeology,” I said.

She nodded, resting her hand on her square pendant. “It’s like academic archaeologists are architects. Archaeology, to them, is a perfectly designed square. If you cut a corner, then you change the shape.” E. Y. paused for a moment and continued. “But CRM archaeologists feel more like builders or engineers. They are often frustrated with the design, critical of previous work, but still committed to keeping the square more or less a square. They might bend the corners, but they’re still trying to keep the square intact.”

“So maybe a parallelogram? That’s . . . astute,” I said. “Where did you say you work again?”

She replied with the name of some midsized CRM firm, but I did not catch it, because just then, the waitress came by with my Michelob. Before I could ask E. Y. to repeat herself, a man had pulled up a chair across from us.

“My friend, I see you’ve met E. Y.,” he said, smiling. “She’s one of our best. Working on becoming a registered professional archaeologist [RPA], like me.”

He extended his hand.

I will not tell you this person’s name either. This person will remain anonymous too because he also represents another type. I will call him Ambitious CRM Boss (A. C. B.). Although I did not catch his title, A. C. B. could have been a president or vice president at a typical midsized regional CRM firm with a few offices in the state. He was in his mid-forties, maybe early fifties and had been trained under Professor “Child of the Seventies” at a big Western state university. From his professor, A. C. B. had learned ambition and efficiency. He had also picked up a certain impatience with earning distinction in the field and had become skilled at managing projects, organizing workers’ field notes, and producing many reports that carried his name. His doctorate gave him the gravitas to rise quickly, and now he oversaw rotating field crews, drafted reports, and often attended conferences at which he rarely presented. A. C. B. liked handing out his business card: matte finish, company logo on one side, credentials on the other—clean, simple, and nearly interchangeable with all others of its kind.

I stretched out my arm, holding the card at a distance, looking over my glasses, trying to make out the letters.

“That’s what I look like when I am handed a business card,” he said, familiar with my arm movements, pointing at his round-cornered spectacles. “I refuse to get bifocals.” He cracked a smile, establishing commonality. “I like these conferences,” he continued. “It’s a nice break from all the report writing.”

“At least it’s not more DPR formsFootnote ¹,” teased E. Y., both of them not heeding the warnings of power dynamics and fraternization at the opening ceremony. But their interaction seemed innocent and platonic enough.

He laughed. “You can’t always copy and paste those.”

I stared at him.

“It’s the only way to stay competitive,” he added casually. “We think of it as bending corners.”

E. Y. shot me a look that conveyed, See? See what I mean?

I repeated the phrase quietly. “Bending corners.”

“I caught the end of your paper,” A. C. B. said. “But I didn’t catch where you work.”

“I do some consulting, but mostly I hide in small ivory towers,” I admitted.

He smiled. “Ah! Well, out here, we’re just trying to survive. If that means reusing background research or limiting interpretation, so be it.” My expression must have invited more. “Heck, we barely have time to finish proper reports,” he admitted. “We end up copying and printing half-baked interpretations, just so these reports can collect dust at the office of some construction company.”

“You do submit the reports to CHRISFootnote ² at least?”

Our eyes met in silence as he shook his head. “While CHRIS does require submittal of reports in their user agreement, enforcement can be lax by the information centers. It’s often an unpaid hassle.”

I paused. “Doing the right thing can be a hassle.” I pulled out my phone, looking for a recent photo. “But we still should do it.” I handed the phone to him.

“What’s that?” E. Y. said as she stretched her neck, trying to peek at the screen as the phone exchanged hands.

It was a photo of a boulder on my morning walking route, with jagged edges; it had been split in half before the city Parks office moved it to mark the trail (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

“Decorative” trail marker by my morning walking route. Photo by author.

“Wait, is that . . .” A. C. B. squinted his eyes, zooming in.

I nodded. “That’s a split bedrock mortar on a boulder, quarried out of who knows where, brought into a city park as a trail marker.”

He passed the phone to E. Y. Her mouth was agape. “That shouldn’t happen.”

We collectively shook our heads, in unison and in agreement.

“The city—the entity that should protect its resources—is the one that mutilated it.”

“How did that happen?” E. Y. wanted to know.

“I’m trying to find out,” I said. “The city hasn’t been particularly collaborative in answering me so far. I don’t think they knew what it was, but it might have been avoided if one of these reports had been published for a change, or even just filed through the proper channels.”

An uncomfortable silence fell over us.

“Do you ever publish your gray literature?” I asked.

“No. We don’t do that. If we publish our reports too soon, the big CRM firms would gobble us up.” He looked at me coldly, as if I were naive. He fixed his glasses before continuing, “We consider our reports proprietary information, keeping all but the final report out of circulation sometimes for 5, 10, or 15 years, depending on the project. And besides, we aren’t contractually obligated to publish. I’d rather move on to the next paid project than publish for free.”

I nodded, trying to fully comprehend.

“My friend, it’s worse than that,” he continued. “A client once sent me a competitor’s bid and flat-out asked if I could beat it.”

“That’s not how bidding works,” I protested.

He shrugged. “It might be how it is now.” He took a big bite of his food and continued with his mouth full. “The worst is bidding against those giant environmental firms—the ones with offices in multiple states or even international ones.” He swallowed what he had masticated in a way that suggested pain. “Their main revenue does not come from archaeological projects, so on occasion they can underbid us by three or four times!”

“One wonders what kind of archaeology they really do,” I pondered almost inaudibly.

“But we are one of the good ones,” E. Y. was quick to jump in, attempting to exculpate A. C. B. after observing me squirm in my chair. “You should have seen what kind of work they had me doing in my last firm. They were terrible! On occasion we were told not to look down during our pedestrian surveys . . . I never knew if that was in jest or not,” she said.

I was going to need another beer.

E. Y. continued. “One time we were encouraged to do surveys from the window of the truck as we drove by . . .”

“I thought those days were long gone,” I said, having heard similar stories from other parts of the United States. Both of my table companions avoided my gaze, opting to look at the ground instead.

“At my first company,” A. C. B. chimed in, “if we found a site, we were only allowed to spend 15 minutes on it.”

“What? How?”

“We could only map the perimeters of any artifact cluster, make an educated guess as to what was there, maybe take a photo, and then we had to move on!” he said, exasperated. “We were timed! Fifteen minutes. Max.” He fixed his glasses on his nose once more. “At other times, they would only have us survey half the area of potential effects [APE] in an effort to save time and money.”

“The jobs didn’t feel rushed? Did you say anything about it?”

A. C. B. looked at the floor and exhaled loudly, shaking his head with regret. “It was my first real job in archaeology, I had student bills to pay, and I didn’t really know better. I went with the flow. Nobody else said anything, so neither did I.”

We all nodded, empathizing with the familiar tension between corporate pressure and job security, especially with student loans to pay off.

“That would explain why so many project files contain gaps or incorrect DPR forms with site boundaries that are flat-out wrong, incomplete, or ridiculously off. Or Areas of Potential Effect that are only partly surveyed,” I said, reflecting on some projects I had been asked to clean up.

“And most firms have high turnover. Field technicians get limited training because ‘why bother’ when they get paid so little and burn out so often?” said A. C. B.

Both of my table companions nodded.

“And which firms are these?” I wanted to know.

But before they could respond, a third man, without being invited and without asking, pulled up a chair, scraping the heavy metal on the floor, which produced a grating sound that would have muffled any response.

We all recognized him immediately; we knew his type. No introduction was necessary. He was the Business-Oriented Executive—the project manager who was neither architect nor engineer. He was polished, confident, and entirely out of place yet completely at home. The kind of person who speaks fluently about margins, timelines, and deliverables but not about archaeology. He is excellent at proposals, excellent at contracts, and excellent at mingling and schmoozing with various stakeholders. Less excellent at estimating the time required to do archaeology—much less to do archaeology well—and he would be hard pressed to tell you the importance of context to save his life. For him, the only goal is throughput: as many compliance products as possible, as quickly as possible.

For the Business-Oriented Executive (B. O. E.), archaeological corners are not bent; they are cut. Archaeology might as well be a circle. No one invited this type of archaeologist to the table, nor to our discipline. They appeared in the late 1970s as CRM firms grew too large for informal self-regulation. At first, they were useful. Then they became prominent. Then they became somewhat parasitic.

He just plopped himself next to us. Then, he pulled out his phone to let us know that he did not need to talk to any of us. We shoveled food into our mouths and chewed in silence. I signaled for another drink, and when it arrived, having a solid guess as to what his response would be, I nevertheless broke the silence: “So, what kind of archaeology do you do?”

Seemingly irritated, he looked up from his phone. “I work for a firm in the Four Corners area,” he said. A. C. B., E. Y., and I exchanged glances. A. C. B. and E. Y. sat up in their chairs, backs straightened, leaning in to hear better.

I tried to draw B. O. E. out. “What do you do there?”

“Well, I don’t know how to say this, but I am kind of a big deal,” B. O. E. replied, puffing up his chest a bit. We all recoiled at his response.

“You sounded like a newscaster from San Diego just now,” I ribbed.

“San Diego? No. We aren’t there yet. I am the regional vice president at a major multistate firm based in a large city in the Four Corners region. I’m an RPA, and I’m in charge of some 600–800 people,” B. O. E. said matter-of-factly, my irreverent reference having gone over his head.

“So, you work for a CRM firm?”

He shook his head slowly. “We used to be one. We were absorbed by a large environmental or engineering corporation some 20 years back, and now we almost exclusively work under its umbrella.”

He handed each of us his business card. One side bore a simple, all-caps, generic one-word company name in muted greens or browns; the other, an equally generic landscape (think mountains, a road, maybe wind turbines) and his nondisciplinary title: “Regional Vice President,” which he tapped, smiling, as his round Rolex jingled on his wrist. The card informed nothing about expertise. It didn’t need to. People like him are rarely archaeologists.

“Isn’t the SCA a bit off the beaten track for a Four Corners state archaeologist?” I asked, taking his card.

He immediately shook his head. “Did you know there are roughly 36 registered CRM firms working from nearly 100 offices in California?”

We shook our heads.

“We are going to make it 37 companies soon,” he said, looking around and over our shoulders, vulture-like.

“You like California archaeology?” asked A. C. B., a bit territorially.

“I have never worked in California,” B. O. E. informed us, now turning his attention to E. Y. “Who do you work for?”

“She is with us,” said A.C. B., placing the palm of his hand on the table in front of her as a driver might outstretch an arm to protect the passenger during a violent and unexpected stop.

E. Y. nodded in affirmation. “But I am starting my master’s program next fall.”

“That’s too bad.”

“You don’t like archaeologists with master’s degrees?”

“No, not really.” He shook his head again. “We have to pay them more, and we would rather show them what we want with in-field training.”

“You do a lot of in-field training?”

“Me? Yeah . . . well, no, not me per se. I don’t actually go to the field anymore.” Sensing our confusion, B. O. E. added, “I haven’t been to the field since my master’s work, but I am very good at what I do. My talent is wasted in the field.”

“And what talent is that?”

“I am very good at making things efficient. Very efficient,” he said, ignoring his own boast. “We guarantee to find one site per contract. One consultation. Streamlined. Compliant.”

“One site?” I asked for confirmation.

“Guaranteed,” B. O. E. nodded. “And one consultation.”

“Just one? Project size doesn’t matter?”

B. O. E. nodded again, pretending not to have heard or understood me. “We are really good at streamlining the process,” he said, pressing his index finger to his lips as if to hush us. “Besides, fieldwork is overrated. We are experimenting with drones doing all our surveys already,” he said with his mouth full.

“All surveys?”

“ALL. Very efficient. Streamlined.” He looked over our shoulders, ravenously stuffing his mouth. “We don’t even do site field maps anymore. We just take a photo. And the reports? All AI-generated in about three to five years’ time,” he continued, not realizing he was portending his own demise. “Change is coming quick,” he said.

His comments made us all stop chewing. Perhaps, in that silence, we realized that AI-generated reports are really just a fancy version of cut-and-paste except with an added cost: the erosion of the professional talent pool. Experienced specialists may be laid off and replaced by generalists who, despite lacking the same depth of knowledge and experience, are expected to navigate old niches with unearned semi-expertise. Automation is not inherently the danger. But automation applied to a system already optimized for minimum-cost compliance? That is a hard realization to swallow. So was the food.

In a flash, half-baked thoughts came to my mind: Do we need an RPA union? Should we mandate legislation for human-only surveys in archaeology undertakings?

But A. C. B. was the first to speak up. “What about the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation [ACHP]?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” replied B. O. E.

“The aspirations of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation play a central role in implementing Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. It is meant to protect places of importance to the American people as a way of balancing economic development with historic preservation and using knowledge of the past to make a better society. Those things matter, right?”

B. O. E. chewed his food for a while, giving A. C. B.’s question some thought. “There is a popular running trail by my house,” he began. “I have been running there for years. Suddenly, one day, every runner, walker, and stroller is wearing a weighted paramilitary vest! Out of nowhere. And I was confused as to how that came to be, because everyone was running just fine before those vests came into fashion.” He swallowed, noting the confusion on our faces, before continuing. “Archaeologists can do archaeology with or without their weighted vests. In actuality, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation has a very small role in the day-to-day work of a CRM professional—just the implementation of Section 106,” B. O. E. explained as a matter of fact.

Seeing our blank faces and hearing our silence, he said, “You think we don’t care about archaeology? Many of us do care. But clients don’t pay us to write dissertations. They pay for us to get a project through Section 106 on schedule. And the academic types?” he looked around the room to point one out. “They just demand standards that aren’t economically or logistically possible in every CRM context.”

“What about the tribes?” I asked.

“We notify them,” he said. “Check the box. Not liable.”

I don’t know exactly what it was, but something about his brashness turned my stomach. Or maybe it was the Michelobs, or maybe the two straight days of talks had finally caught up with me. It was probably a combination of everything, but I felt unsteady. A little dizzy. I stood up and felt as if something heavy and unpleasant had jumped on my shoulders and was pressing me down—perhaps the weight of all the conversations all at once?

I excused myself and headed toward the restroom.

The hallway stretched longer than I expected. It was dim, winding, vaguely disorienting. I drifted more than walked, half-lost in its turns. And somewhere in that slow movement, my thoughts began to spiral in a whirlwind, disoriented between social universals and cultural particularities.

As I made my way down the corridor, I found myself thinking about the ways archaeologists have often tried to make sense of paths: where they lead, what they connect, what they tell us about the people who made and traveled them. I thought, too, about how easily we can impose our own meanings on someone else’s path, someone else’s landscape. I had seen plenty of examples of that over the past two days. And perhaps that was the better metaphor for what I was feeling: not following someone else’s cultural (or professional) path but trying to sort through the paths laid down by my own disciplinary elders and forebears, who were offering me hard-learned lessons, both positive and negative.

Three came into focus.

The first is this: compliance archaeology, when done without purpose, is insufficient. Yes, RPA ethics exist, but enforcement is minimal. There are few consequences for poor work and little incentive to correct it. Poor work persists because it can. And as my tablemates had made clear, there are often rewards for looking the other way.

I kept walking.

The second lesson is this: gray literature must be accessible, standardized, and usable. Certainly to archaeologists. If it represents the bulk of our archaeological output, then it must meet basic scholarly standards. Otherwise, we are no better than the amateur collectors and schoolteachers of Humboldt County, circa the 1920s–1940s, producing work that is insular, inaccessible, and ultimately lost. If contextual documentation is thin and incomplete, then the significance of evaluations is weakened. This can lead to fragmented archaeological knowledge, weaker academic research, and ultimately, to a loss or misinterpretation of cultural resources (there are exceptions; see Altschul and Rankin Reference Altschul and Rankin2008).

I slowed, turning that one over in my mind, deciding how I would tell A. C. B. when I got back.

The third lesson is the hardest: intentions do not matter; quality work does. Figures who were once exemplary—people such as Alfred Kroeber, positively viewed by both Native communities and anthropologists alike (until the 1960s, actually)—are viewed by later generations very differently; they are not so lofty. Similarly, the once-esteemed Margaret Mead, by the 1970s, had to defend her intentions forcefully against changing ethical standards at the Anthropology and the American Indian symposium at the 1970 American Anthropological Association annual meeting. In fact, Mead had to defend not just her work but her generation’s work, and not only from an expanding base of anthropology consumers but also from her own kind—other anthropologists. Both their legacies were shaped not by their intent but by how their work holds up over time. Their legacies shifted because the standards shifted. Their intentions, however well meaning for their time, did not fix the limitations of their work. If the “greats” are judged harshly for their methods today, how much more will the “corner cutters” be judged for having no method at all and for producing self-admitted poor-quality work?

That was the unsettling part. The same will be true for us. Our work will be judged by people who will never hear our explanations or our intentions. We are, paradoxically, an entire profession choosing what we leave behind. It behooves us, then, to wonder what future archaeologists will think of us when they find it. They will only see the work, not the intention. So it had better be good work. And the way to get there is not complicated: if we train students to think and work as good research archaeologists first, then they will become good CRM archaeologists.

At a minimum, two things have to change. First, academic training has to take the management side of CRM seriously—including compliance, consultation, and the realities of running projects and businesses—so that students are prepared to function as consulting archaeologists, not just field techs. Second, we need to learn how to actually do research within a CRM framework, where time, funding, and regulatory constraints shape the questions as much as the methods.

Otherwise, I worry that we will continue to witness the managed decline of a system that once aspired to balance development with preservation. CRM was never meant to be perfect, but it was meant to be serious. It was meant to produce knowledge—not merely to neutralize risk. When compliance becomes the goal rather than the means, archaeology loses both its scientific credibility and its moral authority.

These thoughts lingered as I reached the sink.

A different idea germinated just then, watered with Michelob, and, hours earlier, quietly seeded by David Whitley (Reference Whitley2026). His session on the Topock Maze had lingered with me. The site—a vast geometric arrangement of parallel rock alignments scraped into the desert floor near Needles, California—once covered perhaps over 50 acres(~200,000 m²), though much of it has since been lost to development, and the site itself was part of an even larger cultural landscape. It is poorly understood, and proper work was not done on it before its partial destruction.

Whitley (Reference Whitley2026) framed the maze through its cultural significance to the Fort Mojave (Aha Makav) people. He discussed an interpretation, drawn from Mojave accounts and ethnographic work, in which the parallel lines formed a sacred space associated with purification—a place where individuals could leave behind unwanted spirits encountered beyond their territory. The spirits, in this interpretation, would become disoriented within the maze, thereby allowing the individual to return home safely.

Somewhere between that talk and this moment, I began to wonder: what if, over the last two days, I had picked something up? Not literally, and certainly not a spirit, but something conceptual. Ethical. Professional. Maybe the pressure sitting on my shoulders had a shape after all. A familiar discomfort. A recognition. A quiet unease about where the field is headed and where, exactly, I stand within it.

It was not the thought that I had somehow experienced what the Fort Mojave people described/explained as the Topock Maze. I had not. Their cultural traditions belong to their history, their community, and their relationship with that place. However, Whitley’s discussion provided me with fodder for thinking about something more mundane and more personal—that is, how encounters can leave us unsettled, and how sometimes the first step toward resolving that feeling is simply recognizing what we have carried away from those encounters.

In my case, what I had carried away was not spiritual. It was professional. The weight of two days of conversations. The recognition that some of the practices I had accepted as normal were not good enough, because I am not just standing outside this system criticizing it. I am part of it. It was the realization that some of the people whose work had shaped the discipline had also left behind warnings about what happens when standards change.

At the sink, I washed my hands and splashed my face with very cold water. Twice for good measure. It was not a ritual. It was just cold water, a sink, and a man who needed to clear his head.

In that brief moment of clarity, I thought that several honest public symposia and discussions about our future as a profession at the Society for American Archaeology conferences between my table companions and their kin might be beneficial for our profession (scaled-up efforts such as those by the California Archaeology Collective might be a useful blueprint staring point; see Brown et al. Reference Brown, Scher and Whitaker2025).

I returned to an empty table, except for the half dozen bottles on top of it. I asked the staff where the people I had been talking to had gone. The barkeep and waitress exchanged a confused look.

“My friend, you were mumbling to yourself so long we were getting worried,” Luis, the barkeep, informed me from behind the counter.

Neena, the waitress, added, “It’s true. You were the only one sitting at that table.”

Tilting her head, she tucked her hair behind her ear. “Do you want me to walk you to your room, sir?” she offered.

I looked at the ground, mortified. “No,” I chuckled. “I’ll manage.”

I made it to the elevator in the lobby, got in, and went to press one of the three buttons, realizing for the first time that each was in a shape I had not registered before: a square, a rectangle with rounded corners, and a circle.

“Where was I going?” I asked nobody when the elevator doors closed. But there in the elevator’s mirror, I saw my tablemates. I understood they would only be with me for that one ride, so I told them what I had realized:

“Institutions are defined less by their stated missions than by what they repeatedly choose to tolerate.”

By that measure, the RPA, and indeed many of us, have tolerated far too much: mediocrity disguised as efficiency, consultation reduced to a checkbox, and stewardship reframed as liability management. If we continue to accept this, we should at least be honest about what we are doing: we are not preserving the past, we are processing it. And that is not good enough.