Context is paramount. It is only when scientifically conducted excavations recover archaeological materials in their stratigraphic context that valid inferences can be made about the circumstances in which they were buried, about their chronology and about their function.
Unfortunately, however, most of the marble Early Cycladic figurines and vessels, and many other Early Cycladic atrefacts, now kept or exhibited in the world’s museums apart from the state museums of Greece (as well as nearly all those in private collections) are the product of clandestine excavations. Their findspots are unknown. The circumstances of their discovery are lost: in what circumstances they were found, with what materials they were associated at the time of their discovery are not recorded. Consequently they can add little to our knowledge and understanding of the distant Cycladic past. The looting of Cycladic antiquities represents a tragic loss of knowledge.
    The looting of the Early Cycladic cemeteries and the subsequent sale of their grave goods, marble figurines in particular, is an aspect of illicit activity which has had a continuous presence in the Cyclades since at least the late 18th century. The need of the great museums in Western Europe to form their collections resulted in the quest for art treasures in Greece. Along with the remains of the classical Greek world other antiquities, including Cycladic marble figurines, although sometimes described as ‘barbarian’ or ‘ugly’, were most welcome.
Early Cycladic sculpture was not greatly esteemed until the early twentieth century. Then, however, the modernist movements, as represented by such sculptors as Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, and Giacometti, created a new aesthetic, in which the striking simplicity of Cycladic sculpture came to be greatly appreciated. From that time these sculptures were no longer regarded as mere curiosities, but as works of art, and began to be priced accordingly. It has, indeed, been argued by Colin Renfrew that all Early Cycladic sculptures of unknown origin, and therefore lacking secure context, which have emerged on the market after the early 20th century, more specifically after the year 1914, should be regarded as of doubtful authenticity. Since that time it is clear that numerous replicas have been produced with the intention to deceive.
    Ιt was in Paris in the year 1970 that the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property was adopted. Although it was not ratified at once by all the participating nations, it has now been very widely ratified and accepted and establishes a number of fundamental principles.
    The world’s major museums, guided by the International Council of Museums (ICOM), have now gradually adopted ethical acquisition policies, but some still do not enforce them with rigour. One might have hoped that in the light of the apparent reform in museum ethics, this perspective would be communicated to private collectors, and that demand for unprovenanced Early Cycladic sculpture on the open market would recede. However such is not the case. Auction houses widely considered respectable continue to offer for sale Cycladic antiquities which certainly have no collecting history extending back as far as 1970. The implication must certainly be that these are illicit antiquities, illegally excavated.
When the public sale of illicit antiquities continues in auction houses in London and New York it is clear that the battle against looting is not yet won. Nevertheless, if museums and private collectors would refrain from acquiring any Early Cycladic material which has come to light since 1970, the year of the UNESCO Convention, ongoing looting might be diminished.

Archaeological practice is currently shifting in response to feminist, indigenous, activist, community-based, and anarchic critiques of how archaeology is practiced and how science is used to interpret the past lives of people. Inspired by the calls for a different way of doing archaeology, this volume presents a case here for a heart-centered archaeological practice.

This theme issue has the founding ambition of landscaping Data Ethics as a new branch of ethics that studies and evaluates moral problems related to data (including generation, recording, curation, processing, dissemination, sharing, and use), algorithms (including AI, artificial agents, machine learning, and robots), and corresponding practices (including responsible innovation, programming, hacking, and professional codes), in order to formulate and support morally good solutions (e.g. right conducts or right values). Data Ethics builds on the foundation provided by Computer and Information Ethics but, at the same time, it refines the approach endorsed so far in this research field, by shifting the Level of Abstraction of ethical enquiries, from being information-centric to being data-centric. This shift brings into focus the different moral dimensions of all kinds of data, even the data that never translate directly into information but can be used to support actions or generate behaviours, for example. It highlights the need for ethical analyses to concentrate on the content and nature of computational operations—the interactions among hardware, software, and data—rather than on the variety of digital technologies that enables them. And it emphasises the complexity of the ethical challenges posed by Data Science. Because of such complexity, Data Ethics should be developed from the start as a macroethics, that is, as an overall framework that avoids narrow, ad hoc approaches and addresses the ethical impact and implications of Data Science and its applications within a consistent, holistic, and inclusive framework. Only as a macroethics Data Ethics will provide the solutions that can maximise the value of Data Science for our societies, for all of us, and for our environments.

The decades following the Second World War saw the affirmation of a new generation of archaeologi-sts and were, among often unspeakable difficulties, a great opportunity for scientific and administrative renewal, also due to the bombings that propitiated discoveries, or to the need to rearrange the great museums of the island that had been turned upside down, and sometimes completely dismantled, due to the need to protect their masterpieces. The contributions in this volume outline these events, outli-ning events that are little known, if not completely unknown, which normally go as far as the years of the economic boom, and often much beyond, ending up asking us about the very meaning of the word "postwar" and its chronological limits.
Starting from Syracuse, whose historical archaeological superintendency came out of the war with the legacy of an immense institutional prestige, and touching counterclockwise the districts of the island, the volume outlines the roles and contributions of the individual actors, whether they are administrative or research institutions, Italians and foreigners, or simple scholars who in those years and in those territories completed or began their scientific research.
The topic is historically addressed for the first time, drawing on extensive archival documentation, so that the volume's contributions illuminate an organic light on the subject and lay the foundations for future debate.

and co-chair of the SAA Task Force on Decolonization. Dorothy Lippert (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) is a tribal liaison in the Repatriation Program at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Museum of Natural History and is co-chair of the SAA Task Force on Decolonization.

Based on a symposium held at the 2017 Midwest Archaeological Conference annual meeting in Indianapolis, this volume interprets SAA’s ethical principles as not merely permitting but practically requiring us to engage in constructive collaboration with responsible or responsive collectors in our role as stewards of all segments and contexts of the record. Volume contributors document the scale of regional collections and their value as a complement to professional research, showcase original research by nonprofessionals, and illustrate the challenges to comprehensive preservation that neglect of private collection engenders.

Here we introduce a set of well-characterized historical brick and geological specimens intended to aid the calibration of portable XRF (pXRF) instruments for archaeological ceramics. Known as the BRICC Bricks and Rocks for Instruments Ceramic Calibration sets, each of the ten matched sets consists of 20 specimens mounted in epoxy discs: 12 bricks and 8 geological specimens to use for calibration. Additionally, a certified reference material a shale standard measured by 85 labs is included with each set to assess the resulting accuracy, and a high-purity silica blank is included to check for spectral interferences or other calibration issues. The BRICC sets provide an open-source alternative to pXRF calibration approaches that are proprietary, were devised for oil shales instead of ceramics, and/or rely on expensive and often unavailable certified standards. A set can be tested at Yale or borrowed following loan policies of the Yale Peabody Museum. Publishing all information for the historical bricks and geological specimens from their origins to the data used to derive the recommended values fulfills the requirements of scientific transparency. Ultimately, these sets are intended and designed as a means to meet and exceed experts practices regarding accuracy, reproducibility, and scientific transparency when analyzing ceramics using pXRF and (2) to reduce siloed production of knowledge within established laboratories and, hence, facilitate integration of more diverse perspectives into elemental studies of archaeological ceramics.

The American Journal of Biological Anthropology is designed for the prompt publication of original and significant articles of human evolution and variation, including primate morphology, physiology, genetics, adaptation, growth, development, and behavior, present and past. It also publishes book reviews, technical reports, brief communications, and the abstracts and proceedings of the American Association of Biological Anthropologists.

Since approval of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, it has been widely and repeatedly claimed that a 'right to explanation' of decisions made by automated or artificially intelligent algorithmic systems will be legally mandated by the GDPR. This right to explanation is viewed as an ideal mechanism to enhance the accountability and transparency of automated decision-making. However, there are several reasons to doubt both the legal existence and the feasibility of such a right. In contrast to the right to explanation of specific automated decisions claimed elsewhere, the GDPR only mandates that data subjects receive limited information (Articles 13-15) about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of automated decision-making systems, what we term a 'right to be informed'. Further, the ambiguity and limited scope of the 'right not to be subject to automated decision-making' contained in Article 22 (from which the alleged 'right to explanation' stems) raises questions over the protection actually afforded to data subjects. These problems show that the GDPR lacks precise language as well as explicit and well-defined rights and safeguards against automated decision-making, and therefore runs the risk of being toothless. We propose a number of legislative steps that, if taken, may improve the transparency and accountability of automated decision-making when the GDPR comes into force in 2018.

Genome-wide ancient DNA analysis of skeletons retrieved from archaeological excavations has provided a powerful new tool for the investigation of past populations and migrations. An important objective for the coming years is to properly integrate ancient genomics into archaeological research. This article aims to contribute to developing a better understanding and cooperation between the two disciplines and beyond. It focuses on the question of how best to name clusters encountered when analysing the genetic makeup of past human populations. Recent studies have frequently borrowed archaeological cultural designations to name these genetic groups, while neglecting the historically problematic nature of the concept of cultures in archaeology. After reviewing current practices in naming genetic clusters, we introduce three possible nomenclature systems ('numeric system', 'mixed system (a)', 'geographic-temporal system') along with their advantages and challenges. Recent methodological advances including the advent of second generation short read sequencing technologies, the application of targeted hybridisation capture, and the recognition of petrous bones as rich sources for preservation of DNA, have transformed ancient DNA analysis into a revolutionary new tool for investigating the past 1–4. The exponential increase in the publication of ancient genomes, however, has not been matched by the development of a theoretical framework for the discussion of ancient DNA results and their contextualisation within the fields of history and archaeology 5. A particularly striking instance of this is given by two ancient DNA papers published in 2015 by Haak et al. and Allentoft et al. that detected fundamental changes in the central European gene pool during the 3 rd millennium BCE due to a massive gene influx ultimately deriving from the Pontic steppe region 6,7. They revived the discussion of large-scale migrations in prehistory, an idea that had been substantially dismissed in archaeology since the 1960s 8,9. The genetic evidence for large-scale movements of people became undeniable in light of the DNA data, and so the question was no longer about whether ancient DNA analysis can be trusted, but how the results should be interpreted and presented. For example Furholt 2016, Vander Linden 2016, and Heyd 2017 all accepted the genetic findings, but expressed concern that the studies did not sufficiently deal with the complexities of migrations in that they summarised their findings with simplified migration models involving groups of people (populations) moving