Comment on “Towards a Biocultural Synthesis of the Peopling of the Americas”

This paper serves as a commentary on the special issue entitled "Towards a Biocultural Synthesis of the Peopling of the Americas". This special issue grew from an invited symposium organized for the 90th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Biological Anthropologists, held virtually in April 2021. The special issue is aimed at bringing together a collection of articles that exemplify and advance biocultural perspectives on the origins and diversity of Indigenous populations in the Americas. I comment on the types of research (uni-disciplinarity, multi-disciplinarity, inter-disciplinarity, and trans-disciplinarity) that can be found in this special issue, and on the necessity of reinforcing co-led and co-managed research from the initial steps of the project in collaboration with the Indigenous communities involved. Finally, I argue that these efforts should not rely solely on researchers at the individual level, but need to be supported mainly by institutions.