Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The archaeological record is uniquely positioned to answer big questions about human cultural change due to the vast spatial and temporal scope of the data. As such, anthropologists are increasingly analyzing and building large comparative archaeological datasets. Such broadscale analyses and syntheses of existing work have been proposed as key to answering questions about human behavior and evolution that are well outside the domain of other scientific fields. However, this kind of approach presents novel challenges; from what theories should guide our research, to how data should be collected, to how data should be analyzed and stored for posterity. In this session we invite researchers taking macroscale approaches to studying human culture and behavior to present on new findings, challenges, and solutions. Our goal is to provide a summary about the state of the art of macroscale archaeological research.