Grand Challenges for Archaeology

Abstract

This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology’s most important scientific challenges? Starting with a crowd-sourced query directed broadly to the professional community of archaeologists, the authors augmented, prioritized, and refined the responses during a two-day workshop focused specifically on this question. The resulting 25 “grand challenges” focus on dynamic cultural processes and the operation of coupled human and natural systems. We organize these challenges into five topics: (1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behavior, and identity; and (5) human-environment interactions. A discussion and a brief list of references accompany each question. An important goal in identifying these challenges is to inform decisions on infrastructure investments for archaeology. Our premise is that the highest priority investments should enable us to address the most important questions. Addressing many of these challenges will require both sophisticated modeling and large-scale synthetic research that are only now becoming possible. Although new archaeological fieldwork will be essential, the greatest pay off will derive from investments that provide sophisticated research access to the explosion in systematically collected archaeological data that has occurred over the last several decades.

Teotihuacan

“…Research on Teotihuacan is important not only for what we learn about the city but also its state system, its foreign relations, and its legacy. Teotihuacan is a key site for comparative studies of urbanism and state formation-one of archaeology's ''grand challenges'' (Kintigh et al 2014;also Smith 2012). Research on Teotihuacan has shaped and been shaped by significant theoretical and methodological developments in archaeology.…”

Whither Digital Archaeological Knowledge? The Challenge of Unstable Futures

“…The concept of pursuing innovation through the medium of grand challenges has seen several attempts in the general area of digital research in the UK and Europe (for examples, Huggett 2013: 18-19;Huggett 2015a: 81), as well as in nondigital areas. In archaeology, the best-known application is the American National Science Foundation-funded crowdsourcing project Planning Archaeological Infrastructure for Integrative Science which developed 25 challenges surrounding cultural processes and human/natural systems, and concluded that these were underpinned by a digital challenge: the need for online access to documented primary research data (Kintigh et al 2014;Kintigh et al 2015).…”

Bioarchaeology and Kinship: Integrating Theory, Social Relatedness, and Biology in Ancient Family Research

“…Within academia, a bioarchaeology of kinship as social identity would be ideally positioned to contribute to one of the 25 most important scientific challenges for archaeology presented by Kintigh et al (2014). One of their 25 challenges (Challenge D2) concerns how people form social identities; specifically, the authors state that a critical aspect of future research will be understanding ''how human identities (vs. the modes of affiliation among other species) form with respect to biological and emotional bonds'' (Kintigh et al 2014, pp.…”