The roguish archaeologist Doctor Aphra apparently has an interest in artifacts from the High Republic Period--the most recent part of the Star Wars timeline to be explored. Ever since Disney acquired the franchise, most Star Wars stories have taken place within the approximate timeline of the main Skywalker Trilogy up to this point. The High Republic stories are set approximately two centuries before the Galactic Civil War, a period that even the Legacy-era Expanded Universe stories barely touched.
Doctor Aphra is another addition to the franchise created in Disney's new canon timeline. As an archaeologist, she has explored the secret histories of the galaxy's lost past, and now her interest in the High Republic is quite literally saving her life.
Created by Kieron Gillen and Salvador Larocca, Doctor Aphra first appeared in issue #3 of 2015's Star Wars: Darth Vader. In the first story of her new series by writer Alyssa Wong and artist Marika Cresta, she is approached by a young graduate student named Detta Yao who wants to find a pair of legendary artifacts, the Rings of Vaale, two pieces of jewelry rumored to be cursed but supposedly capable of granting a person great powers while wearing both at the same time. The two recruit a third archaeologist, Doctor Eustacia Okka, whose credentials have been stripped but who is the only other scholar to write about the Rings of Vaale.
Throughout the series, there are numerous references to the High Republic, the first of which is seen in a flashback of Aphra and Okka's time at university, when they were young lovers still working to earn their doctorates. To study for her dissertation, Okka was reading a book entitled Lost Legends of the High Republic.
In the present, Doctor Okka leads the group to the planet Dianth where they find the lost City of Vaale, the place where a secret society of artisans known as the Artisans of Vaale supposedly made the rings. Given the topic of her dissertation involved researching the High Republic's lost legends and the fact that Okka is the only other expert who has published academic writings about the legendary Rings of Vaale, it seems likely that Artisans were active during the High Republic Era. The group move through the abandoned city, passing ornate and creepy bone-wrought art unlike anything any of them have ever seen, and as they venture into the depths of the city, murals on the wall contain images about the rings that Doctor Aphra immediately recognizes as "High Republic iconography."
When her ship is destroyed by enemies later in the story, Aphra finds a High Republic ship amid the debris outside the city, which she instantly recognizes (and which still operates after centuries of disuse). Her knowledge of High Republic history literally saves her life as she flies the ship off-planet. Additionally, the finds she and Okka made on Dianth lead to the latter's credentials being reinstated, demonstrating that even in the world of Star Wars, knowledge most definitely is power.