The Future of Humanity’s Past: U.S. Archaeology Confronts a Research Hinge Point
December 17, 2025
Photo by Trnava University
The long American century is over. Across the world, affiliations and institutions staked in blood and soil, faith-based (as opposed to empirically based) ways of knowing, and personalized, autocratic power are all in ascendance. Notions of linear, inevitable progress and conceptual frames that wall off modernity from what came before now seem more like pipe dreams or propaganda than a data-grounded record of humanity’s journey. Rather than being at the “end of history,” we are still mired waist-deep in it.
For the discipline of archaeology, the patterns, trends, and lessons visible in the global record of the past have never been more relevant. Not merely because our multiscalar visions of human history are geographically broader and more detailed than they ever have been, but because it seems clear that the myriad ways humans behave, interrelate, and aggregate today are not fundamentally out of range from the repertoire of behaviors that we as a species have practiced for many millennia.
Archaeology’s singular contribution to understanding people and their interactions with each other and the natural environment has always been its worldwide documentation of past lifeways over long time spans. The discipline offers otherwise hidden insights into populations for whom written records are lacking and an expanded lens into those that have such records, but leave many persons forgotten. Unlike texts, which are generally written by “the winners,” archaeology need not be subject to elite determinism. Through cross-cultural comparisons, it also reveals recurrent temporal patterns that are relevant to contemporary global problems, and unlike present-day parallels, archaeologists, with their vantage on the past, know the outcomes. Knowledge and debates concerning the past offer grounding and guidance for charting the future.
It is within this broader context that U.S. archaeologists currently confront a hinge point in research on humanity’s major episodes of change. From varying perspectives, generations of scholars have documented deep-time global shifts in population, mobility, food procurement, settlement size, leadership, trade, conflict, affiliative identities, and religious ideologies. And in doing so, they have shown that from place to place, such shifts did not occur in the same way, at the same tempo, or even in the same sequence. Efforts to synthesize these findings have sought regularities within embedded temporal and spatial scales.
But the recent convergence of two developments has created a critical juncture in how this research can proceed. Most obvious is the Trump administration’s abrupt cancellation of virtually all federal archaeological funding in early 2025 (Brown, 2025; Lidz, 2025) 1. Less recognized is an interpretive disconnect that has been percolating for decades between newly collected data and outdated ways of thinking about the past.
Here, we briefly describe this pivotal moment’s dual foundations and then propose strategies for moving forward. In the short term, the most easily implemented approach for circumventing federal cuts is to systematically mine previously collected data for recurrent temporal patterns. The companion issue of interpretive disconnect can be avoided if such efforts are question-driven, comparative, network-based, and processual. In the longer term, the likelihood of obtaining alternative financial support for new fieldwork can be increased by widely publicizing how temporal regularities in the human past offer lessons for resolving critical global problems today.
The Hinge Point’s Dual Foundations
The hinge point’s dual foundations of federal funding cuts and interpretive disconnect are linked by the recent proliferation of cutting-edge high technology methods. In the case of funding cuts, the instigating factor is cost. Various governmental agencies have, in recent years, subsidized multitudinous investigations related to humanity’s major transitions through academic projects worldwide and cultural resource management contracts in the United States. These efforts have increasingly relied on methods borrowed from the natural, life, and computational sciences to collect and analyze large arrays of archaeological evidence (Sinclair, 2022). Examples include highly refined dating techniques; sophisticated aDNA, archaeobotanical, phytolith, zooarchaeological, and compositional analyses; precise satellite and Lidar mapping; and, most recently, artificial intelligence.
Such work is expensive because it requires sophisticated equipment and well-trained personnel in both the field and laboratory. And when fieldwork involves excavation, which often destroys archaeological contexts, responsible research mandates detailed and time-consuming data recording. Because budgets are high, the loss of federal financial support cannot easily be replaced by grants from other sources, raising the question of how such research can proceed.
The hinge point’s second foundation is the interpretive disconnect between the reams of exciting data produced by cutting-edge high technology methods and the zombie-like persistence of 19th-century categorical thinking. In short, this persistence has had the pernicious effect of steering conclusions in established directions, thereby reifying traditional grand narratives. And in doing so, it has obscured novel aspects of new findings and discouraged creative thinking that could generate new conceptual approaches 2.
More specifically, the adoption of categorical thinking by 19th-century archaeologists conformed to prevailing modes of thought in anthropology, the natural sciences, and society at large. Archaeologists developed two classificatory frameworks: 1) culture historical charts to sort local and regional scale observations of ancient material remains into spatial-temporal units, and 2) unilinear evolutionary sequences to order ancient societies worldwide into stages. Despite substantial evidence to the contrary, both treated their constituent entities as internally homogeneous, discretely bounded, and changing in a stepwise fashion. Refining categories in ever greater detail remained the discipline’s paramount goal through the mid-20th century, with non-classificatory interpretations added only at the end of an investigation.
A major paradigm shift occurred with the advent of radiocarbon dating during America’s post-World War II embrace of the sciences. With chronology building no longer an all-consuming task and influenced by contemporary societal upheavals, some 1960s archaeologists adopted entirely new systems and processual models and applied more deductive logic. This was followed in subsequent decades by a succession of other approaches. But before proceeding with any state-of-the-art analyses, archaeologists must first situate their material remains in space and time and have a general sense of the kind of group being studied. To do this, they have continued to rely on culture historical schemes and cultural evolutionary sequences.
The consequence of this prerequisite framing for current applications of cutting-edge high technology methods is that new findings are inadvertently grounded in implicit assumptions about homogeneity, boundedness, and stepwise change. Bolstered by inductive reasoning, the ramifying effect is that interpretations remain generally consistent with what is already known. These issues are epitomized by the results of recent aDNA research. Despite revealing high degrees of mobility often over long time spans, interpretations have reflexively plugged into migrationist models that depend on presumptions about the mass movement of self-contained, homogeneous groups that suddenly replaced one another. The hinge point challenge is to develop unencumbered conceptual frameworks that are as sophisticated as the cutting-edge high technology methods they are applied to.
Moving Forward
For U.S. archaeologists, no matter where in the world they work and whether their careers are in academia, cultural resource management, museums, or government, the era of federally subsidized data collection projects has ended, at least for now. One strategy for moving research on humanity’s major transitions forward is to seek smaller grants from state, tribal, and private entities. Another is to collaborate with well-financed projects in Western Europe, China, or the Gulf States. A third is to systematically mine, compare, and synthesize extant data to elucidate temporal patterns, critical turning points, and recurrent relationships between key factors.
The last option is the easiest to implement in the short term. Reams of raw data relevant to the entire range of topics associated with humanity’s major transitions are waiting to be accessed and systematically compared. Potential sources include appendices in print and online publications, records housed in perhaps thousands of physical repositories and archives worldwide, and various digital platforms 3. The costs of locating previously collected data, collating it, and identifying recurrent patterns pale in comparison to even the smallest-scale field projects. As such, research based on existing information may be more likely to receive financial support from state, tribal, and private entities. It may also offer collaborative opportunities with well-funded colleagues in other countries, with whom communication can be sustained at a distance via email, Zoom, and other video conferencing tools.
Exemplifying the rich promise of extant raw data are two recent analyses of the development of economic inequality that compared house size measurements across roughly 1,000 archaeological sites worldwide (Feinman et al., 2025; Kohler et al., 2025). A major finding was that although potential for inequality generally increased over time, it was not always realized, and when it was, the sequences were highly variable. Moreover, domestication did not lead to an immediate uptick in inequality, and increased inequality did not correlate in any regular way with polity-wide population thresholds or additional tiers in the political hierarchy.
Published studies are another resource that can be mined for recurrent temporal patterns. Illustrating this strategy’s value is recent synthetic research on the mobile to sedentary transition (Feinman and Neitzel 2023; Feinman and Thompson 2025). The results have shown that increasing settlement permanence followed highly divergent and fluctuating pathways within embedded temporal and spatial scales. This variability was the consequence of personal decisions about the costs and benefits of denser, more stable communities. As the intensity of social interaction increased, people’s cognitive limitations for managing interpersonal relationships at key demographic thresholds were met by either fissioning or instituting new social arrangements. How such arrangements were funded was a key factor in determining whether they were autocratic or collective.
These disparate studies also exemplify two prerequisites for successful analyses of extant data. First, to avoid the interpretive difficulties caused by an overreliance on inductive logic, the research must be problem-directed. This is a relatively straightforward task, since most comparisons are prompted by a question, which is typically followed by investigative decisions about the specific kinds of data to be considered and how they should be compared.
The other prerequisite is to excise latent assumptions about cultural homogeneity, boundedness, and stepwise change. This task can be accomplished by adopting a network perspective (Brughmans et al., 2024; Holland-Lulewicz, 2021; Holland-Lulewicz, 2025; Mills, 2017). From that perspective, patterned variability in the material record reflects affiliation choices made by people in the past. The consequent, nested webs of different kinds of social relationships varied in their internal structures, geographic ranges, permeability, durability, and congruence, all of which fluctuated as personal priorities and circumstances changed. Fine-grained dating techniques can track these shifts, revealing multiscalar spatial and temporal patterns that lie at the heart of humanity’s major transitions and why they played out the way they did in different contexts.
Broader Implications
In addition to expanding our understanding of the human past, recurrent temporal patterns also offer practical insights into some of today’s most critical worldwide problems. For issues such as the recent rise of authoritarianism and the human impacts of climate change, archaeologists can see ancient parallels and their outcomes over different time spans. With this information, they can make a unique contribution in assessing which present-day interdisciplinary and policy-focused efforts can have the greatest, most equitable effects and increase future resiliency.
With the recent global rise of authoritarianism, archaeology vastly augments the findings of political scientists, historians, journalists, and activists. The discipline has documented tremendous deep-time variability in governance for the entire range of past societies, including those with similar population levels and degrees of organizational complexity (Caraballo and Feinman, 2024). But all manifested a dynamic push/pull between collective versus power-centered actions as different constituencies sought to balance their respective priorities. Shared access to resources and infrastructure promoted collective governance, whereas inequities fostered centralization.
These regularities offer lessons for today. They show how power-sharing arrangements and leveling mechanisms can undermine or check authoritarianism at any point in its ascendance. They also illustrate the effectiveness of marshalling the intersecting interests of disparate familial, community, local, and regional populations, especially if the focus is on the unequal allocation of resources. And finally, they discourage expectations of quick results. The cumulative impacts of coalition building and collective actions may not be seen for generations.
Archaeology’s unique perspective can also guide researchers from other fields of study—policymakers, activists, and citizens—as they address the human impacts of modern-day climate change. Working with colleagues across disciplines, archaeologists have amply documented the effects of past episodes at different temporal scales, in varied ecological settings, and for societies ranging from the simplest to the most complex. Across this complicated mosaic of conditions, ancient peoples coped with displacement in diverse ways. But several commonalities offer lessons for today.
The most striking is that the combination of collectively based governance with the equitable distribution of resources produces the best short- and long-term outcomes both biologically and culturally (Blanton and Fargher, 2008; Blanton et al., 2021; Feinman and Carballo, 2018). Also, effective preparations for and responses to climate change disasters depend on cooperative connections within and between societal levels. Integrated strategies will vary considerably depending on the kind of disaster, its timing and geographic setting, and the number of affected people. But in all circumstances, the most successful practices and policies are directed toward a broad-based common good. Even with the best intentions and ample funding, those that are centralized and strictly top-down tend to disproportionately benefit the wealthy and powerful, thereby heightening the long-term risks for everyone.
Recurrent temporal patterns in the ancient past also offer lessons for a host of other contemporary, worldwide problems, involving population movement, economic inequality, urbanization, and environmental degradation. This far-reaching practical relevance suggests another strategy for propelling research on humanity’s major transitions beyond the current hinge point. That is, widely publicizing the discipline’s unique contributions to understanding and resolving critical issues confronting people today. Well-planned outreach efforts can increase support for archaeology grant proposals and open new opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration.
The potential audience is vast. Most reachable are those already interested in archaeology—fellow professionals, students, avocationalists, readers of popular publications, and the curious public. Further afield are colleagues in history and political science, disciplines that are the most prolific training grounds for future leaders, policymakers, and social studies teachers. Archaeologists should also actively engage with research and policy think tanks, legislative advisory committees, current events forums, and activist groups. Higher visibility outlets include documentary films, museum exhibits, opinion pieces, topical websites, short YouTube videos, and social media.
Sustained, multi-targeted messaging about archaeology’s contemporary relevance can have the auxiliary benefit of countering the discipline’s traditional tropes of the oldest, biggest, and weirdest discoveries. Linking all the lessons is the key role of collective action within dynamic social networks. This theme counters popular views of the ancient past as an amorphous, unitary category within which, if they are considered at all, people were primitive automatons that reflexively fostered the cultural groups to which they belonged. It instead replaces stereotypical perceptions of the past with a sense of our common humanity.
Similar to us, ancient people mediated their innate tendencies for selfishness and cooperation throughout their daily lives as they made choices about aligning with others. Such relationships were inherently fragile and often transitory, just as ours are today. This understanding honors our ancient forbearers. It encourages continued investigations of the global past and recognizes that the lessons learned can help us address contemporary, real-world problems and chart more equitable, resilient futures for our descendants.
Final Thoughts
Here we have argued that U.S. archaeologists currently confront a hinge point in their research on humanity’s major transitions. The dual causes are the Trump administration’s budget cuts and conceptual stasis. At other global centers of archaeological research (for example, Western Europe, China, and the Gulf states), funding continues unabated. But they are also hindered by interpretive difficulties caused by an overreliance on induction, culture history, and its ingrained assumptions about homogeneity, boundedness, and stepwise change. For U.S. archaeologists, we have proposed several mutually reinforcing strategies for moving forward. Although their feasibility varies with the particular interests, priorities, and circumstances of different investigators, their cumulative impacts will ensure that in the face of present-day challenges, archaeology becomes a more vibrant and widely appreciated field of study.
1. These cuts were just one small part of an unprecedented tsunamic assault on all scientific research. For other examples, see James Briscoe et al., 2025, Virginia Gewin, 2025, Taryn MacKinney, 2025, Jonathan Mahler, 2025, Hannah Richter, 2025, and James Temple, 2025.
2. This self-perpetuating pattern is not unique to archaeology (see Max Kozlov, 2023, Michael Park et al., 2023.
3. Easily accessed digital platforms include Archaeological Data Service, Comparative Archaeology Database, Data Archiving and Networked Services, Open Context, The Digital Archaeological Record, and the GINI Project.
This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
