The extent to which archaeological or cemetery skeletal collections accurately represent the population from which they were drawn cannot be known. The creation of documented or forensic skeletal collections, derived from donation or autopsy, was intended to overcome many of the problems inherent in archaeological populations, yet it is misleading to assume such collections represent a specific or defined population. This study compares the documented skeletal collection curated at the Maxwell Museum to annual demographic information from three relevant populations: (i) the living population of New Mexico (NM), (ii) the deceased of NM, and (iii) the subset of decedents who undergo a medicolegal death investigation or autopsy. Results indicate that the Maxwell Documented collection differs significantly from all three populations in every variable examined: age, sex, ethnicity/race, cause, and manner of death. Collection development that relies on body donation or retention of unclaimed bodies under coroner/medical examiner statutes results in a biased sample, with significant overrepresentation of males, Whites, the elderly, those who die unnatural deaths and individuals with antemortem traumatic injury or surgical intervention. Equally problematic is the perception that the collection has documented race or ethnicity, when in fact only 17% was self-reported, while the affinity of the remaining individuals was determined by pathologists or other observers. Caution is warranted in how this and similar collections are used and interpreted by researchers. Although documented reference collections are useful in developing methods of estimating age or sex, they are not a proxy for modern or racially/ethnically defined populations.

In the last 15 years, the US Supreme Court has implemented major changes concerning the admittance of expert testimony. In 1993, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals superseded the Frye ruling in federal courts and established judges, not the scientific community, as the gatekeepers regarding the credibility of scientific evidence. In 1999, a lesser-known but equally important decision, Kumho Tire v. Carmichael, ruled that technical expert testimony needed to employ the same rigor as outlined in Daubert, but experts can develop theories based on observations and apply such theories to the case before the court. Anthropology has never been defined as a hard science. Yet, many recent publications have modified existing techniques to meet the Daubert criteria, while none have discussed the significance of Kumho to anthropological testimony. This paper examines the impact of Daubert and Kumho on forensic anthropology and illustrates areas of anthropological testimony best admitted under Kumho's guidance.

and the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona collaborated to host this fifteenth biennial conference to promote new ideas and directions in the archaeology of the US Southwest and the Mexican Northwest. Past symposia highlighted key research topics such as migration, mobility, demography, technology, identity, social change, ecology, interaction, connectivity, and regional archaeological cultures, to name a few. The 2010 Hermosillo symposium focused on archaeological practice and transnational archaeologies. The resulting volume (Villalpando and McGuire 2014) included papers on cross-border collaborations, public education and outreach, heritage management, and archaeological tourism. 2016 seemed the right time to revisit and expand that theme with special attention to collaboration with descendant communities, anthropologists beyond archaeology, and colleagues in the natural sciences.In this volume, based on the 2016 symposium, we again take the position that the way we practice archaeology shapes both our research questions and the results. Some archaeologists lament the current lack of unified theory in the discipline, as researchers draw from diverse theoretical and methodological toolkits to implement their projects. The choice to