Archaeological Synthesis and CRM: An Odd Couple?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Refining Archaeological Data Collection and Management to Achieve Greater Scientific, Traditional, and Educational Values" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

According to the SRI Foundation, CRM accounted for 93% of the $367 million total expenditures on archaeological research in the US in FY 2020. While the percentage varies by country, I suspect that this trend holds worldwide. CRM research emphasizes field documentation and project interpretation. While individual archaeologists may wish to use CRM data from multiple projects to study broader aspects of the past, there is no outcry from the public pressing for synthetic research and thus little incentive for agencies to fund such research. I argue that the status quo is short-sighted and ultimately not in the best interest of the public or CRM. Contemporary society faces challenges on all sides—climate change, inequality, migration, food security, etc.—which demand long-term perspectives on underlying social dynamics that can only come from the archaeological record. As threats to heritage resources multiply, CRM’s project-by-project focus will become unsustainable. Regional or landscape-scale management solutions will follow, based on newly developed tools that allow the integration of results across projects. Future synthetic research in archaeology will increasingly rely on CRM results, and CRM will increasingly look to synthetic research to provide evidence-based results to base management decisions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Refining Archaeological Data Collection and Management to Achieve Greater Scientific, Traditional, and Educational Values

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32297