At the annual meetings of the Society for American Archaeology in Memphis (2012) and Honolulu (2013), Phyllis Mauch Messenger and Susan J. Bender assembled groups of scholars and educators to reflect on the pedagogies archaeologists use to teach and communicate about heritage. History and Approaches to Heritage Studies and its companion volume, Pedagogy and Practice in Heritage Studies, emerged from the conference symposia and ongoing conversations afterward. Both volumes articulate particular aims and challenges archaeologists face in aligning discipline-specific teaching with the interdisciplinary field of heritage studies.

History and Approaches reflects on the evolution of heritage scholarship over the past few decades. Its case studies explore shifts in practitioners’ strategies of knowledge dissemination away from top-down management models and toward de-centered, community-involved, and collaborative practices. Pedagogy and Practice builds from the standpoints of the first volume and looks to the future of heritage education with 11 examples of novel teaching practices. Within the volumes’ combined 24 case-study chapters, contributors demonstrate how archaeologically based heritage studies effectively engage a variety of audiences about the roles of the past in the present and future (e.g., university students, descendant communities, elementary school students, colleagues in other fields, and the general public). Although the volumes include a couple of internationally based contributions, the case study settings and authors are predominately based in North America, and they represent the English-speaking world. As such, the volumes merit recognition as foundational contributions to the scholarship of archaeological heritage studies in and of North America, which, contributors note, lags considerably behind counterparts in the U.K. and Europe.

The first volume in the set, History and Approaches to Heritage Studies, includes a standalone introduction by Messenger and Bender and 13 chapters by contributors. Midway through the book, a brief excerpt by Kate Clark called “Further Explorations” appears as an interlude. It presents 10 principles of values-based heritage practice. History and Approaches is intended to situate the present state of heritage studies within archaeological practice. Consequently, it is more general and theoretical in its scope and aims than the companion volume. To underscore the importance of flexibility and diversity in heritage studies, the editors’ introduction guides readers through the myriad scholarly definitions of “heritage” that have emerged, primarily in the U.K. and North America, over the past three decades.

The first two chapters of History and Approaches orient readers to the recent evolution of heritage studies. Paul Shackel (Chapter 1) discusses his experience preparing students for careers in cultural resource management (CRM) at the University of Maryland. He argues that heritage education and engagement programs are vital components of professional training because they have the potential to instill values of civic responsibility in the next generation of CRM practitioners. In Chapter 2, Elizabeth Chilton charts the trajectory of how heritage has been redefined in light of various social and policy changes from the late twentieth century to the present. Departing from material-centered definitions, she envisions heritage as a “process of contemporary activities, meanings, and behaviors” (p. 29). Chilton also considers the extent to which the collaborative practices that underlie heritage practice have the capability to change power relationships between practitioners and communities. M. Elaine Franklin (Chapter 3) follows suit by enlisting Piaget's notion of disruption to consider the role that pedagogical innovations play in reconfiguring the power dynamics and procedures of learning in heritage education (e.g., flipped classrooms, virtual excavations, online courses).

The next four chapters focus on various groups of stakeholders. Messenger evaluates the role of gender in archaeology within the scope of heritage education. Her discussion is based on interviews she conducted with a dozen mid-career women leaders in the heritage sector (Chapter 4). Eleanor M. King (Chapter 5) exposes the lack of diversity among heritage practitioners using statistics gathered from federal agencies and professional organizations. She counters this disparity with an example of Howard University's Warriors Project, a field-based project involving both Mescalero Apache and Howard students. The project is a poignant example of a hands-on heritage program that prepares a diverse base of students for careers in heritage. In a chapter that would be a useful assigned reading for students, April Sievert and her coauthors (Chapter 6) provide an informative overview of NAGRPA, the debates surrounding it, and changes made to the legislation since the 1990s. Joe Watkins (Chapter 7) reflects on his experiences teaching indigenous archaeology to multiple constituencies. He draws contrasts between students in Native American studies and archaeology courses, and he discusses the different stereotypes and perspectives that each group of stakeholders brought into the classroom.

The final six chapters of History and Approaches present new directions in the organization of heritage education. In Chapter 8, Katherine Hayes and colleagues detail the creation of a new graduate program and teaching collaborative in Heritage Studies and Public History at the University of Minnesota, in conjunction with the Minnesota State Historical Society. Robert MacDonald (Chapter 9) recounts the successes of the graduate program in public issues anthropology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, which since 2007, has trained students to build skills and an anthropological sensibility that can be applied in careers beyond the university. Bonnie Clark (Chapter 10) discusses the University of Denver's Amache Field School, whose success she attributes to the diversity of age groups, participants, and descendants who participate in the field school and enable a network of collaborative engagement that extends well beyond the sites of study. Hannah Cobb and Karina Croucher (Chapter 11) recount the challenges facing British archaeology and heritage studies in light of recent cutbacks and structural changes in U.K. higher education. Arkadiusz Marciniak offers the volume's only chapter focused explicitly on engagement via online-teaching and e-learning environments (Chapter 12).

Larry Zimmerman (Chapter 13) concludes the History and Approaches volume from a constructively critical position, questioning the utility of a pedagogy of heritage and its relevance to archaeological teaching. With the exception of Zimmerman, the contributors to this volume operate from a shared stance that archaeology and heritage are inherently intertwined topics, so there are no substantive debates or examinations about why archaeology and heritage should be taught in the same setting—or even by archaeologists. Zimmerman does not take the relationship between the two for granted. Instead, he observes archaeologists’ tendency to conflate archaeology and heritage, despite the existence of notable disparities between them. He contends that for most people, archaeology has “little to do with their daily lives,” while heritage “is central to identity, self-esteem, and to daily life” (p. 216). Suitably, the volume concludes with Zimmerman's call for archaeologists to recognize and critically evaluate the divide between archaeology and heritage in practice.

The companion volume, Pedagogy and Practice in Heritage Studies, is a more pragmatic set of narratives about heritage education in action. It includes an introduction by the editors, a “Further Explorations” interview by Bender about uses of imagery in classrooms, and 11 chapters, each of which provides a different case study about teaching heritage in various circumstances. As noted in the introduction, Bender and Messenger asked each contributor to Pedagogy and Practice to demonstrate how teaching heritage fits into the context of archaeology curricula. Contributors met this charge with reflections about the need for more thoughtful attention to teaching philosophies, learning outcomes and objectives (Moe, Chapter 1), assessments (McGill, Chapter 3), communication processes (Henderson and Laracuente, Chapter 8), and articulations of social relevance (Lerner and Effland, Chapter 10).

Several chapters provide useful ideas about curriculum design, course structure, and working with diverse audiences. Contributors examine differences in teaching heritage to different classroom groups, including K–12 students and teachers (Moe, Chapter 1), faculty from multiple disciplines (McGill, Chapter 3), and homeless communities (Kryder-Reid, Chapter 7). In Chapter 5, Ricardo Elia and colleagues emphasize the importance of applied and hands-on experiences during both fieldwork and heritage coursework (see also Pluckhahn, Chapter 4; Scham, Chapter 6; Henderson and Laracuente, Chapter 8). Others provide examples of particular assignments and experience-based learning exercises that readers might find useful to integrate into their own teaching (White, Chapter 2; Messenger, Chapter 9; Bender, “Further Exploration”; Hayashida, Chapter 11).

On the whole, the processes and outcomes of the case studies in Pedagogy and Practice were presented as successful and uncontroversial. As models of best practice, they will undoubtedly serve to inspire new projects among the volume's readership. But for readers who might be looking to develop or improve their own heritage pedagogies and collaborative practices, more revealing accounts of how contributors navigated the obstacles and learning curves they encountered during their initiatives would have strengthened the volume's applicability. One notable exception appears in Kryder-Reid's discussion of the difficulties she and her colleagues faced when they involved their students in ethnographic fieldwork among the homeless community of Indianapolis (Chapter 7). Her candid discussion of the challenges she faced as an educator and the differential experiences among her students revealed room for improvement and gaps in her own expertise. These transparent revelations speak powerfully to the iterative, and often uneven, processes of heritage pedagogy and collaborative practice.

A recurring theme throughout both volumes is how heritage studies has evolved as a discipline and practice over the course of the past generation—from a field driven by “expert” voices to one that privileges collaboration, inclusion, and the needs of local stakeholder communities (Clark, p. 150 in History and Approaches). The contributors are well attuned to the nuances of twenty-first-century engaged heritage practices, and the two volumes demonstrate learning objectives and outcomes that, as Shackel puts it, have the potential to “deconstruct the knowledge and power of the privileged and rebuild a new paradigm about the past” (p. 20 in History and Approaches). In their effort to position these volumes as a baseline for heritage pedagogy, the editors foreground “a cadre of well-established heritage scholars,” most of whom occupy senior academic positions within the field (Shackel, p. xi in History and Approaches). As a result of this editorial decision, the volumes’ case studies are deeply rooted in academia and informed by the decades of scholarship, teaching, and community-based engagements that the authors have accumulated from their long-term positions as educators. Those readers who occupy similar positions—in which they might have the relative time, freedom, and creativity to develop new heritage-based pedagogies—will benefit most from the content of these volumes.

In their emphasis on dialogue and collaboration, History and Approaches to Heritage Studies and Pedagogy and Practice in Heritage Studies engage well with issues of diversity, and they expand the scope of heritage education for archaeologists. As examples of heritage practice in the early 2010s, the volumes foreshadow some of the needs of the present in higher education but stop short of addressing more controversial issues that are the focal point of heritage studies and pedagogy today—especially dialogues about race, human rights, gentrification, access, and extremist politics, as well as the shift in higher education to online learning. More engagement with related scholarship emerging from critical heritage studies, contemporary archaeology, dark heritage, and cultural anthropology, as well as the inclusion of more voices from junior scholars, would have tempered the resulting contrast between the state of heritage studies nearly a decade ago and the challenges many of us face as scholars and educators now.