For a discipline whose entire raison d’être is the study of the past, the title of this edited volume might seem like an oxymoron, but of course the future of archaeology represents a topic about which every archaeologist should be very concerned. Most archaeologists, all the way from senior scholars to undergraduate students contemplating a career in the field, are probably aware of specific regional or worldwide challenges or concerns faced by archaeology and by archaeologists now and into the future. The editors of this volume are definitely aware of these issues, and they express their opinion that archaeology’s future depends not only on “how it responds to societal challenges but also on the questions we choose to address” (p. xv), and that their intention with this volume is therefore to provide archaeology with “some sense of need and direction” (p. xiii). It is not clear to me what other guidance the editors may have given to the authors, but most of them apparently saw their primary role as summarizing very current trends/developments in their particular area(s) of expertise, with only a paragraph or two at the end of each chapter explicitly addressing what might or should happen in the future. Implicitly, therefore, much of this volume works on the assumption that the future of archaeology is to be understood as an extension of the discipline’s current trajectory, with positive trends being encouraged and negative trends being deprecated.

The Future of Archaeology begins with a preface by T. Douglas Price and an introduction by Gary M. Feinman, followed by 14 chapters organized into four themes that are essentially geography, methodology, theory, and infrastructure. The interests of the authors are diverse, as are their chapters. An “about the editors” statement provides two paragraphs describing Feinman and Price’s interests and careers; given that we are told that the other 13 authors were deliberately of different ages and different career stages, it was a missed opportunity that readers are not provided with the same information about them. The differing ages and career stages are still a strength of the volume, and it is clearly evident in the content of several chapters. Authors are very aware of and explicit about the geographical/professional context that they each discuss—most of them focus on North American archaeology, but there are also chapters focusing on archaeology in Europe and Africa.

Recent and current trends that contributing authors explicitly or implicitly identify as positive and worth emphasizing in the future include adopting a multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary approach to understanding the past (at least five chapters), refining chronologies with new techniques and approaches (at least four chapters), engagement with descendant communities (at least three chapters), and the difficulty of ensuring adequate material and human resourcing for archaeology (many chapters). Several authors advocate making archaeological research and findings comprehensible and relevant to other scholarly disciplines (geography, political science, and economics are among those mentioned) in addition to the more common advocacy for making our findings comprehensible and relevant to the general public—both as a means of making archaeological findings more applicable and as a strategy to ensure archaeology’s continued existence as a scholarly discipline.

As noted above, almost all the chapter authors took it as their task to explore archaeology’s present as a way to think about its future. Archaeologists interested in the future of archaeology will benefit from reading these chapters as the basis for understanding the field in the present moment and then making up their own minds about what the future of archaeology will be, could be, or should be. There is a lot in this volume to ponder, and I learned a lot. However, I suspect that this volume is also a study in how difficult it is for researchers whose expertise is the distant past to consider the distant future. Archaeologists are accustomed to thinking of past time frames and time spans exceeding any individual’s lifetime, and I am convinced that it would be beneficial if they could apply that long-term perspective to archaeology itself so as to figure out how the finds and findings of 150 years, at this point, of scientific archaeological research of which we are the inheritors can be preserved and disseminated many centuries into the future. There is therefore already room for many more volumes about the future of archaeology to complement this one.