The relevance of archaeology

Archaeology can be relevant to people and issues outside of the archaeological community in a number of diverse ways (Table 1). Four types of relevance are arranged in order from a local, place-based focus at the top of the table to abstract and broader perspectives at the bottom.

1. (1) Heritage or descendant concerns are usually localised to a specific area (Watkins Reference Watkins2005).

2. (2) Local practical topics include work—often labelled ‘applied archaeology’ (Isendahl & Stump Reference Isendahl and Stump2019)—that revives ancient farming systems or other technological features for use today (Erickson Reference Erickson, Whiteford and Whiteform1998; Stump Reference Stump2013). Much of the impact of these two forms of relevance derives from collaboration between archaeologists and local communities (Little & Shackel Reference Little and Shackel2007). The term for such collaborations in the scientific literature is the ‘coproduction of knowledge’ (Kirchhoff et al. Reference Kirchhoff, Lemos and Dessai2013; Mach et al. Reference Mach2020). As the above citations show, archaeologists have some experience in these two crucial types of relevance construction, and they are currently both targets of extensive and ongoing research.

3. (3) Middle-range empirical and conceptual issues—that form the focus of this article—are an area where archaeologists seem to be struggling: eager to contribute to global issues, but unable to comprehend how this might work in practice. Here, I use the term ‘middle-range’ to refer to the sociologist Robert Merton's (Reference Merton1968) concept of that name, rather than Lewis Binford's (Reference Binford1983) alternative definition that involves formation processes. Merton's approach to theory is summarised by Sampson (Reference Sampson and Calhoun2010: 72) as “not mindless empiricism and not abstract theory or theory about other theorists. Merton developed theory about how the world works”. The middle-range issues listed in Table 1 are subjects of large bodies of research in the social sciences, to which archaeological contributions are only nascent.

4. (4) Abstract conceptual topics relate to relevance on a highly abstract, even philosophical, level. In most epistemological hierarchies, abstract theory and concepts are very general, pertaining to a broad range of phenomena, but are uninformative about the specifics of individual settings or cases (Sampson Reference Sampson and Calhoun2010; Smith Reference Smith2017). Any discussion of archaeological relevance at this level must, by necessity, be very general and abstract (e.g. Nelson et al. Reference Nelson, Cooper and Sheets2012).

Table 1.

Types of relevance for archaeology, with examples.

This article highlights the role of three factors in creating and maintaining our current impasse on middle-range constructions of relevance: a naïve view of how ‘relevance’ works; insufficient emphasis on rigorous, scientific methods; and a confusion about target audiences and how to reach them. My primary message is that articles—such as this one—published in archaeology journals for an audience of archaeologists, will solve none of these problems. Within a discipline, authors, reviewers, editors and readers construct the relevance or usefulness of knowledge jointly, but in moving from one discipline or domain to another, the construction of relevance becomes a very different process. Briefly, one cannot judge one's own relevance to a different domain. Kieser and Leiner (Reference Kieser and Leiner2011) find that, in the field of management, the nature of relevance differs between researchers and practitioners. Here, it is the users of knowledge—the practitioners—and not the producers of knowledge—the researchers—who decide the relevance of research: “Only practitioners are in a position to authentically attribute relevance to knowledge” (Kieser & Leiner Reference Kieser and Leiner2011: 897).

Suppose I think that archaeological findings—on ancient urban neighbourhoods, for example (Smith Reference Smith2010b)—ought to be relevant for understanding urban neighbourhoods in contemporary cities. Nobody working on present-day neighbourhoods cares what archaeologists might think about the possible relevance of their research. But if a sociologist were to interact with archaeologists and learn a little about ancient neighbourhoods, then he or she might decide that archaeological findings do have relevance to some domain of knowledge on modern cities. If so, they might cite the relevant archaeological publications and use archaeological results in their own research. Only they can judge the relevance; the archaeologists of ancient cities cannot.

Consider the opposite situation: is research on contemporary Chicago neighbourhoods relevant to understanding ancient cities? If a sociologist were to claim some archaeological relevance for these Chicago neighbourhoods, most of us would just shrug our shoulders—what does a sociologist know about the distant past? But if I were to read modern neighbourhood research, and find it relevant and useful for my own studies of early cities, then such relevance can make a difference: it might motivate a new type of analysis or interpretation. Put simply, one cannot judge the relevance of one's own research to other domains. The relevance of our work as archaeologists can only be determined from the non-archaeological domains to which such relevance may apply.

The creation of relevance relies on the communication of scientific or scholarly findings across disciplines; this is a well-studied process. Fischhoff (Reference Fischhoff2013: 14033–34), for example, has written that “Because science communication seeks to inform decision making, it must begin by listening to its audience, to identify the decisions that its members face—and, therefore, the information that they need”. Hence, archaeologists need to stop seeking to convince one another that our work is relevant to vague, unspecified, external domains, and start doing what needs to be done to inform others about our research, and to allow them to appreciate the existence and nature of any relevance.

If archaeologists are going to help establish our relevance for confronting global challenges (Kintigh et al. Reference Kintigh2014), we must communicate with scientists working in the target areas, and/or with policy-makers. In either case, the first requirement is that archaeologists conduct rigorous research that is recognised as valid by other scientists. While approaches that lack a scientific epistemology are acceptable for many archaeologists, scientists in other fields and policy-making establishments are looking for reliable results, backed up by rigorous methods and an explicitly scientific research design (Kohler & Rockman Reference Kohler and Rockman2020). Those external parties do not care about, for example, currently fashionable post-humanist theory in archaeology.

I have previously argued that archaeologists should look to the social sciences for models of how to become more rigorous and scientific (Smith Reference Smith2017). In contrast to the cartoon-like caricature of science promoted by some archaeological theoreticians—in which science consists of experiments and covering laws (Smith Reference Smith2017: 521–22)—the social sciences have scientific methods and epistemologies designed for disciplines studying human society. Social science methodologist John Gerring cautions against using unscientific methods when the goal is to understand and change society:

In the field of sustainability science, the type of knowledge needed to effect change is referred to as ‘usable knowledge’ (Clark et al. Reference Clark, van Kerkhoff, Lebel and Gallopin2016) or ‘actionable knowledge’ (Kirchhoff et al. Reference Kirchhoff, Lemos and Dessai2013). Current consensus is that such knowledge must be credible, salient and legitimate (Cash et al. Reference Cash, Clark, Alcock, Dickson, Eckley, Guston, Jäger and Mitchell2003; see also Koyama Reference Koyama2015; Kohler & Rockman Reference Kohler and Rockman2020). Do we, as archaeologists, produce usable knowledge relevant to the ‘grand challenges’ of today? And, can we produce such knowledge in a manner that is both ethical (Hakenbeck Reference Hakenbeck2019) and rigorous?

Moving forward

If we assume that archaeologists can produce rigorous scientific results that researchers and practitioners in other disciplines are likely to accept as reliable, how can such results be communicated to those other fields? How will urban sociologists learn about archaeological work on ancient neighbourhoods? How will ecologists or climate scientists find out about archaeological research on specific environments? One promising approach is through transdisciplinary research. As this term has multiple definitions, and as archaeologists have yet to agree on a common meaning, it merits brief discussion. The term ‘interdisciplinary’ usually refers to bringing knowledge from one discipline into another. When I consult with specialists, for example, about the ancient vegetation or rocks at my archaeological site, this is considered ‘interdisciplinary’ research. ‘Transdisciplinary’, however, refers to research for which individuals collaborate deeply and learn elements of one another's discipline. Erich Jantsch (Reference Jantsch, Apostel, Berger, Briggs and Michaud1972: 104) describes transdisciplinary work as “a mutual interpenetration of disciplinary epistemologies”. In contrast to my site-based interdisciplinary consultations, my transdisciplinary research has required many months—even years—of discussion and analysis in order to achieve the kind of common understanding that can lead to conclusions not possible in the constituent disciplines (York et al. Reference York, Smith, Stanley, Stark, Novic, Harlan, Cowgill and Boone2011; Lobo et al. Reference Lobo, Bettencourt, Ortman and Smith2020).

Transdisciplinary research is crucial, because many serious and challenging issues—from climate change adaptation to growing wealth inequality—cannot be answered by individual disciplines: “many, if not all, of the traditional approaches, as well as many heterodox tactics, fail to answer the most pressing issues plaguing the world” (Polimeni Reference Polimeni2006: 2). I have observed two types of confusion about transdisciplinary research among archaeologists. First, a minority of authors employ the term transdisciplinary to indicate research that is relevant to society and that involves collaboration with stakeholders (e.g. Richer et al. Reference Richer, Stump and Marchant2019; see also Pohl et al. Reference Pohl, Krütli and Stauffacher2017). The appropriate term for such research in the sciences, however, is the ‘coproduction’ of knowledge (Kirchhoff et al. Reference Kirchhoff, Lemos and Dessai2013). Second, many archaeologists confuse transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research, claiming, for example, that as most archaeological projects are interdisciplinary this will somehow help archaeologists to achieve transdisciplinary results with scholars in other fields (e.g. Kerr Reference Kerr2020). If that were really the case, however, why have we not seen more examples of cross-disciplinary collaboration related to global challenges? The answer is that transdisciplinary research is difficult and time-consuming. In my own experience, interdisciplinary collaborations on fieldwork projects provided almost no help in initiating or conducting transdisciplinary research projects.

Transdisciplinarity requires archaeologists to learn what is going on in other fields. We need to read the journals, go to the conferences and—most importantly—talk to the social or natural scientists in the target field. If scientists from different disciplines want to collaborate ‘deeply’ with one another, they must learn what the others consider important and essential about a phenomenon of joint interest. Furthermore, they need to agree both on a question and on what would constitute an adequate answer. A lesson learned from decades' of transdisciplinary research at the Santa Fe Institute is that this kind of collaboration—and the breakthroughs that can result (e.g. West et al. Reference West, Brown and Enquist1997)—requires researchers in divergent fields to use a common language. For most of the questions in complexity science, for example, that language is mathematics. Economic historian Mark Koyama (Reference Koyama2015: 586) takes the authors of The history manifesto (Guldi & Armitage Reference Guldi and Armitage2014) to task for making outdated and erroneous claims about other fields: “If historians are to play an important role in shaping attitudes towards inequality and climate change they must come to grips with what other social scientists say on these issues”. Archaeologists must also educate scholars in other disciplines about our work, and a productive way of doing this is to publish in their journals; this is now a growing trend that should pay dividends (e.g. Barthel & Isendahl Reference Barthel and Isendahl2013; Jackson et al. Reference Jackson, Dugmore and Riede2018; Lobo et al. Reference Lobo, Bettencourt, Ortman and Smith2020; Riede et al. Reference Riede, Barnes, Elson, Oetelaar, Holmberg and Sheets2020).

What if an archaeologist thinks that his or her results might be relevant to policy-making? Unfortunately, many archaeologists adhere to what van Langenhove (Reference van Langenhove and Papanagnou2011) calls the ‘limestone model’ of knowledge transfer. If we just publish our results in a readable fashion, they will eventually penetrate society, like water seeping through limestone; someone, somewhere, may find them and put them to work (e.g. Chase & Scarborough Reference Chase and Scarborough2014). Research and practice relating to social-science policy, however, indicate that the road from scientific results to social policy-making is long and complicated. In the words of policy expert Vivian Tseng (Reference Tseng2012: 3), “Without a strong understanding of the worlds ‘on the other side’ of the gaps [between research and policy], however, scholars’ efforts to make research more useful and to communicate it more effectively run the risk of missing the mark”.

‘Evidence-based policy’ is one of the major approaches to the research-policy interface (Stoker & Evans Reference Stoker and Evans2016). Followers of this approach strive to incorporate research results into the policy-making process. Although the idea that policy should be based on research may sound unexceptional to scholars, research results rarely play a large role in the formulation and implementation of social policy. Critics of evidence-based policy do not denigrate the role of research, but instead point out that research is only one factor among many in the creation of policy. Nick Black (Reference Black2001: 276), for example, has written that “Clearly, research has only a limited role because governance policies are driven by ideology, value judgments, financial stringency, economic theory, political expediency, and intellectual fashion”. Given this situation, policy experts such as Tseng (Reference Tseng2012) and van Langenhove (Reference van Langenhove and Papanagnou2011) suggest a more active role for researchers in the policy process. Tseng (Reference Tseng2012: 5) identifies the following policy-oriented users of social science research:

• • Federal policy-makers.

• • Frontline practitioners.

• • State and local agencies.

• • Mid-level administrators and programme managers.

• • Advocacy groups and think tanks.

These users rarely obtain evidence and ideas directly from researchers. Instead, they source their information from intermediaries or translators. Researchers rarely have the skills or inclination—much less, the resources or professional rewards—to present their results in a format that can be interpreted and used by policy-makers. In the words of Tseng (Reference Tseng2012: 12):

Unfortunately, archaeology lacks the relevant intermediaries who can translate our research for the types of users listed above. Professional associations, such as the Society for American Archaeology or the European Association of Archaeologists, do not perform this service. While university public-relations offices and journalists translate archaeological results for non-professional audiences, they tend to emphasise sensationalist issues; they are not equipped to translate archaeology for policy-makers.

For archaeology, a potentially productive approach is to focus on the scientists in the target domains, rather than the policy-makers. This makes sense for both policy and science. Policy-makers on social issues are not going to pay attention to archaeologists. A local politician looking to design policy on, for example, urban neighbourhoods will look at work by sociologists and economists. If archaeologists can convince scholars in these fields that our data are relevant and useful, we can play a small, indirect role in policy-making. Furthermore, the intellectual benefits of collaborating with scientists rather than policy-makers can be tremendous. This strategy can lead to transdisciplinary advances.

For archaeology, this approach—targeting scientists in other domains for collaboration in order to advance questions based on global challenges—has advanced furthest in the field of climate change and global warming. Kohler and Rockman (Reference Kohler and Rockman2020) detail the nature of involvement of archaeologists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (see also Jackson et al. Reference Jackson, Dugmore and Riede2018; Rockman & Hritz Reference Rockman and Hritz2020). While archaeology has made some contribution, its role is smaller than many archaeologists would like. A key observation made by Kohler and Rockman (Reference Kohler and Rockman2020) is that archaeologists must improve methodologically to be taken seriously by climate scientists in other disciplines. Minimally, we must contribute rigorous data—usually quantitative—based on adequate sampling and analysis.