This paper sets out to consider anew the sculptural landscape of imperial Gabii by integrating newly examined evidence with the city’s archaeological record. Long portrayed in ancient sources as a city in decline after the Middle Republic, Gabii yielded an extraordinary assemblage of more than thirty life-sized statues during the excavations of the eighteenth-century antiquary, Gavin Hamilton. A previously understudied inventory from the Borghese Archives attests additional, largely fragmentary sculptures, ranging from imperial portraits to mythological figures, that expand our understanding of the city’s civic and cultic environment. By situating the archival material within the city’s archaeological context, the civic, imperial and religious display of the city comes more sharply into view, and contributes towards a more nuanced understanding of this liminal city in the imperial period.

Photographs of a previously unpublished Maya vase, smuggled out of Belize in 1979, reside in the Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. This vase, alongside dozens of others that I cataloged in the Dumbarton Oaks archives, is an example of the so-called “Holmul Dancer theme” in Maya ceramics. Re-examining this tradition in light of the new information from the vase, and from other recent discoveries, reveals how ceramic artists of the early ninth century used the dancing maize god as an allegory for the political landscape they witnessed rapidly changing around them. The vase also provides a case study in the potentially salubrious outcomes of archival and provenance research on looted materials. Should the vessel ever re-emerge, this research provides supporting evidence necessary to repatriate it to Belize.

Archives are essential vehicles for both historical research and memory practices like genealogy. The sheer volume of documents produced via digital infrastructures, however, has posed a challenge for traditional archival processes that rely on human judgments. Some archivists have responded to this challenge by engaging with research in natural language processing (NLP), a subfield of AI that offers practical tools for working with large corpora of text. In this paper, we review applications of NLP methods in archival processes in order to surface fundamental tensions between archival values and automation. NLP can be used to classify materials as sensitive, recognize names in documents and facilitate new kinds of search, among other applications. Our discussion of these issues follows the journey of a document through an archive, from acquisition to interpretation. We find that sensitivity to context, transparency, resource limitations and maintenance appear as recurring challenges that are complicated by automation. The benefits that NLP technologies lend to managing large archives, however, suggest that these tools should be considered, not discarded. Turning to a more forward-looking discussion of generative AI and archival infrastructure, we argue that the narrative and dialogic potential of contemporary large language models has an especially contentious relationship with conventional archival desiderata.

Seven specialists in Central and East Central European history have come together to discuss the state of the field of gender studies in their subfields. Much emphasis is placed on thinking about how the current political situation in the 2020s is affecting what historians do, what is taught in the classroom, and how it relates to the larger political environment. This forum is based on the 2026 American Historical Association (AHA) Central European History Society (CEHS) presidential panel of the same name. The contributors collaborated to produce a forum accessible to non-specialists and for use in the classroom. It serves as a resource for anyone interested in the historiography of gender studies for the region, which includes the lands east of France and west of Russia.

Se presentan fragmentos de la biografía de la Estela 6 de Aguateca depositada desde hace casi 45 años en el Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, ubicado a 6.000 km de su lugar de origen en la selva de Guatemala. La investigación sintetiza la historia de la estela desde su descubrimiento hasta su estado actual a través del estudio de archivos inéditos, entrevistas, publicaciones y un análisis imagenológico. Los resultados muestran que la estela fue mutilada en varias partes y trozada de distintas maneras para sacarla desde el sitio arqueológico y transportarla hacia Chile mediante métodos y técnicas características de los “esteleros” locales y con la ayuda de las redes internacionales del mercado del arte precolombino. Se repasan las cicatrices y reparaciones de la estela en tanto evidencia material de dichas prácticas ligadas al coleccionismo. Los resultados invitan a reflexionar acerca de cómo ciertos museos ocultan la historia reciente de las piezas que resguardan y exhiben como una manera de omitir algunos de los capítulos más oscuros y reprochables de la historia del legado material de las culturas nativas de América.

This paper presents a brief history of archival provenance and its shifting role across different paradigms of archives, considering how this past work can provide insights into current trajectories of AI. It explores what archival provenance does, or can do, differently than current imaginations of data provenance in AI. It proposes three “lessons from archival provenance” that challenge the present focus of existing approaches in AI, in particular highlighting how narrowly this work structures and models evidence, authenticity and creatorship of data. These lessons can be used to identify new opportunities for applying concepts of archival provenance by presenting a roadmap for future work where AI research might align and converge with related work in archival theory. It concludes by asserting that grounding AI datasets in this perspective of archival provenance can realize a new paradigm of “data as archives,” serving to envision responsibilities to a range of data creators, determine needs for documentation of context and establish a crucial role for “data archivists.”

This article addresses the historical and ongoing exclusion of descendant and local communities, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), from digital archaeological archives. We contend that current digitization practices often perpetuate colonial-era biases through limited, monolingual metadata that fail to reflect or engage with local histories and knowledge systems. Noting the insufficiency of current FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) data frameworks for this specific context, we propose a shift toward reparative, co-stewardship models. Drawing on practice-led pilot projects within digital archaeological archives using Linked Open Data (LOD) and community-facilitated annotation, this article demonstrates practical pathways for integrating diverse, multilingual perspectives to enrich archive metadata. In so doing, it demonstrates how digital interventions have the potential to destabilize power dynamics and work toward reparative practice. Ultimately, we advocate for conscious professional collaboration and institutional reform to transform archives from static repositories into dynamic spaces of equitable engagement, actively combating digital colonialism.

Motivated by the existential threat of Ottoman expansion, Vienna required a constant flow of information from Constantinople as early as the first half of the sixteenth century. Following the establishment of a resident embassy in the Ottoman capital in 1547, Vienna soon built a dense network of diplomats, Sprachknaben, and other agents, enabling the Habsburg monarchy to develop a sustained system of information production on the Ottoman Empire. By the early eighteenth century, the original urge to achieve, through diplomacy, a near certainty about prospective political or military developments in the Ottoman Empire evolved into a full-fledged knowledge ecosystem, which I term the “Habsburg diplo-Wissen regime.” As this article demonstrates through three case studies of record-keeping and archival preservation from 1682, 1699–1700, and 1719–20, the distinctive quality of this diplo-Wissen regime lay in an asymmetrical flow of information from Constantinople to Vienna, which remained unmatched on the Ottoman side until the early nineteenth century.

This article brings together two stories of 1970s Mexico that are often narrated separately: the story of the PRI’s attempts to reform itself, specifically through the right to know, and the story of activists’ mobilizations against disappearances. Epistemic struggles surrounding the right to know and disappearances created a shared discursive arena in which activists and state officials contested the nature of information, the authority to produce it, and the seemingly unbridgeable gap between evidence and the state’s recognition of wrongdoing. Debates in the legislative and activist realms often occurred in parallel without necessarily intersecting. Nonetheless, they engaged similar questions: What would it mean to entrust the public and media with sensitive information? What strategies could move state actors to produce information and what effects would doing so have on public life? This article contends that the struggle over information and recognition became the central battlefield for negotiating state violence and opening in Mexico.