Hutchins, Leke2026-10-272026-10-272026-10-28https://hdl.handle.net/10289/18722Ancient environmental DNA and crop genomics can reconstruct past environments, trace crop histories, and recover genetic variation relevant to contemporary environmental and agricultural challenges. These possibilities also raise questions about who may authorize access, whose histories and stewardship are represented in genomic data, and how benefits should be shared. This report examines those questions through access and benefit sharing (ABS), Indigenous Data Sovereignty, and Indigenous data governance. The central argument is that responsible research requires governance throughout the full research lifecycle. Initial access agreements and eventual benefit sharing leave a “missing middle” in which samples become sequence data, analyses produce interpretations, and outputs enter repositories, breeding programmes, or commercial applications. Consent, mutually agreed terms, provenance, data governance, attribution, and accountability must remain active through these stages and into subsequent reuse. Neither the age of a sample nor its environmental character removes its relationships to living peoples. Soil, water, permafrost, archaeological materials, and historical specimens may remain connected to Indigenous territories, ancestors, cultural practices, and continuing systems of responsibility. Human genetic bycatch creates additional concerns about privacy and consent. Describing materials as ancient should therefore prompt attention to their histories and relationships rather than presume that they are culturally unclaimed. The discussion of kalo demonstrates why globally circulating crops can retain specific genealogical and cultural significance. A layered approach to benefit sharing distinguishes direct responsibilities to project partners, enduring responsibilities to wider communities of stewardship, and broader responsibilities when genomic value circulates through international research and commercial systems. These layers also inform research on barley, rice, and wheat, whose useful diversity reflects long histories of cultivation, exchange, and farmer innovation. For ancient eDNA and crop genome research, the practical task is to establish continuing community authority, clear conditions for materials and data, and benefits defined with the people whose lands, knowledge, and stewardship make the work possible. Genomic interventions should be assessed in relation to equitable governance, farmer and community autonomy, ecological responsibility, and the restoration of relationships disrupted by extractive research and industrial agriculture.enReport10.15663/yhrp.8653