The Once and Future Archaeology

The Forum article “Grand Challenges for Archaeology” (Kintigh et al. 2014) defines a number of leading research topics derived from a crowd-sourcing report and parsed by a panel of archaeologists. The questions focus on scientific subjects with high funding potential, amenable to addressing contemporary problems. Although the grand challenges put forth do represent many of the key issues being pursued by archaeologists today, I argue that they will impact a more limited audience than envisioned by the authors due to their emphasis on transhistorical processes and their lack of emphasis on the larger social and political implications of our research.