Why Social Archaeology Matters

We currently find ourselves on the cusp of significant change, as tensions related to race, ethnicity, religion, and gender are currently at the forefront of today's social struggles. Archaeology, specifically social archaeology has the opportunity to inform and enrich current social movements. The goal of this session is to emphasize the contributions of archaeologists to understanding the social processes of the present. AAA president Leith Mullings (2015) recently outlined her vision of "why anthropology matters" by emphasizing anthropology’s relationship to recent social movements –we argue that archaeology has an important role to play in this conversation. Human agency is widely regarded as an important generative force of cultural change and archaeological research on gender, identity, class, power, religion, and ethnicity has exploded in the past two decades. In an effort to make archaeology relevant to the broader public, archaeologists have successfully emphasized the ecological implications for the study of archaeology, however, we have largely ignored the profound insights that archaeology can provide into understanding the role of human agency and social forces in generating wide-scale change. As a consequence, we may be missing opportunities to make archaeology relevant to events that are currently playing out in the modern world.