Whither Archaeology?
Sander VAN DER LEEUW1,2
Editor’s note

As JJA has just passed its ﬁfth-volume mark and is heading to the next ﬁve years of its existence
as the ofﬁcial English language journal of the Japanese Archaeological Association, we arepleased to publish an article written by one of our editorial board members, Professor Sander
van der Leeuw, one of the most prominent researchers and thinkers of the interface between
archaeology and other scientiﬁc disciplines and between archaeological pasts and futures. In
this paper, from the perspective of complexity science, Professor van der Leeuw shares withus his insights on the core nature and content of archaeology as a scientiﬁc discipline and hisforesights as to how archaeology may or should develop for the future.

Introduction
After 25 years as an active archaeologist, in the Near East and in Europe, for the lasttwenty-odd years I have used my archaeological background to focus on the future of ourplanet and its societies, as an active member of the sustainability scholars community.
When the editor of this Journal asked me to reﬂect on the future of archaeology as adiscipline, I therefore ﬁrst responded that I was no longer an archaeologist, and would
have a hard time writing something useful about that topic. But after some discussion
and reﬂection Prof. Misoguchi convinced me that a contribution along the lines hewished could be useful.
In particular, he argued that because I no longer was active as an archaeologist, I
might be able to say something pertinent because the future of any ﬁeld of study is not
only determined by its practitioners, but also by other disciplines and ﬁelds of study towhich it might contribute, and by society in a wider sense.
I will therefore try to present a view on the actual and potential roles of archaeology
in a society that is increasingly rapidly changing and encountering novel, unheard of,challenges under the impact of such developments as climate change, the information
technology revolution and a series of phenomena that increasingly point to theinsufﬁciency of our current institutions and customs.
Much of that vision is not clearly based in speciﬁc experiences or observations
that can be described in scientiﬁc terms, but is the cumulative sediment of personal
experiences in different countries and as part of large trans-disciplinary teams. But it
1 School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287–2402

USA (vanderle@asu.edu)
2 Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Rd, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501, United States of America
Category: Original Article (solicited) Received: 28 September 2017
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is to an important extent inﬂuenced by my early years in archaeology, and may thus, I
hope, contribute something useful to the readers of this Journal.

Some of archaeology’s strengths and weaknesses
There has for a long time been a debate whether archaeology is actually a discipline
in its own right. It is in so far as there is a community of archaeologists who identify
themselves as such, but on the other hand it does not have a speciﬁc, unique, corpusof theories and hypotheses of the kind that characterizes other disciplines. Instead,
it uses a wide range of ideas from other ﬁelds in its interpretations. I would argue
that the undisciplined intellectual nature of archaeology can also be one of its major
strengths. Archaeologists often have an education in the humanities and social sciences
as well as in the natural and life sciences. The ﬁeld uses ideas and techniques as wellas instruments and metrics from all these groups of disciplines in original ways. It is
one of the few ﬁelds of current intellectual endeavor that reaches as widely across theknowledge of mankind to interpret its ﬁndings, and, what is more, uses both quantitativeand qualitative data. Archaeologists are thus as likely to understand the principles ofatomic physics, as those of tectonics and genetics, mathematics and the humanities. Thatgives archaeologists often an advantage in working in trans-disciplinary teams. And it
gives them huge freedom in the range of intellectual efforts they undertake. On the other
hand, it imposes certain approaches and techniques that I have outlined in a recent paper(van der Leeuw 2017).
That freedom is further enhanced by the fact that archaeology has a very long
veriﬁcation/falsiﬁcation cycle compared with many other disciplines. That begins withthe fact that when excavating, archaeologists study the phenomena that they either
recognize or, if they are novel, cognize. But many other phenomena that could beobserved in the soil are simply destroyed because they remain uncognized. Then it takes
a very long time to bring together all the data (glue the potsherds together, etc.), do
the analyses and then come up with interpretations, so that scientiﬁcally contradicting
the work of archaeologists often takes a very long time. Finally, no two archaeologicalsites are exactly the same, so that it is virtually impossible to compare results between
excavations. Even with very thorough excavation and post-excavation work, there is
therefore a degree of uncertainty about archaeological interpretations that is both aweakness and a strength, as it accords more importance than other disciplines to theinternal coherence of the explanations offered and gives more latitude to archaeologists
in interpreting their results than is current in many other disciplines. One of thestrongest assets of archaeology is the fact that it is the only approach that is able to go
as far back in the history of human-environmental relations as several millions of years.
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There is often a debate about the usefulness of that perspective, as many people argue
that the world has changed so much that knowing more about the distant past does nothelp us understand the present. I take issue with that point of view because, as I haveargued with John Dearing and others (2010), it is based on a misunderstanding about
how to draw lessons from the past about the present and for the future.
Most people use observations about the past as analogues to the present (or the
future). That never works, as the present is indeed so different from the past that it isvirtually impossible to project the one onto the other. However, an evolutionary approachthat looks for the emergence of the trajectories that have ultimately led to the present,
and may lead to the future, is indeed valid as it studies how changes that have occurred
throughout history have transformed the distant past into the present. To achieve thatgoal we must complement our ‘ex post’ approach of looking at the origins in the past ofthings observed in the present with an ‘ex ante’ one that looks throughout the past, in the
direction of the arrow of time, for the emergence of novelty and change.
Archaeology contributes substantially to the satisfaction of the desire to have a vision
about the past, about the origins of the present. That desire is at the origins of thediscipline, in the Renaissance and subsequent centuries, when the leisurely classes began
excavating relics from ‘classical’ antiquity. In Europe the emergence of archaeology as a
specialized ﬁeld of study is part of a slow but important shift, from one in which mostphenomena were explained by automatically invoking the past as in “… it has always
been like that …,” to one in which the novel category “nature” became increasingly
important in explaining the present, and the focus of society shifted from the past to the
future (Girard 1990).
It often seems to me that the blossoming of archaeology is a compensation for theincreased focus of our society on the future, on rapid change, and novelty. One of thequestions that we therefore need to consider concerning the future of the ﬁeld is whether
this trend will continue or not. Humans live a process of transforming the future into thepast. Can they conceive of and live a future without a past, or vice-versa?
In the last 100 years, we have seen a major shift in the rationale for, and the roleof, archaeology. In the ﬁrst part of the 20th century interest in the archaeological past
was predominantly scientiﬁc, and conﬁned to a relatively small community. The goalof archaeology was to know more about the past. In the 1970’s, that shifted. Becauseof the rapid expansion of cities, infrastructures and similar ventures that destroyed thesubsoil, the preservation of archaeological remains themselves became increasingly
important. Relatively rapidly that changed the nature of the funding of the discipline bylinking it no longer to scientiﬁc priorities, but to the nature and extent of contemporary
development. The activities the profession invested in changed as a result, often under
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remains became more important, analysis, post-excavation work and scientiﬁc publication
less so. But this trend also affected the kinds of objects that were being excavated, andthe overall archaeological research strategy. The ﬁeld as a whole lost some of its early
focus on understanding the past in favor of preserving it. Is that a continuing trend, or
will the future bring changes in this respect?
An incredibly striking characteristic of archaeology over my lifetime has been its
increasing incorporation of techniques and ideas from other ﬁelds, in particular thenatural, earth and life sciences. The community of archaeologists has been very openminded and quick to see the advantages of adopting novel inventions. Will that trend
continue? As our world is increasingly driven and enabled by “big data,” what are thechallenges and opportunities this development offers to archaeology? And how aboutmachine learning, artiﬁcial intelligence and developments related to these innovations?
Can some of archaeology be automated, or not?
There are major “tectonic” trends active under the surface of the wider scientiﬁclandscape. One of them is the increasing loss of trust in science and scholarship. Willthat trend affect archaeology? Another trend is the rapid explosion of novel ways totreat and communicate information. How might that trend affect the nature and status ofour discipline? As part of that trend, the conventional distinctions between “signal” and“noise” in information processing are disappearing, and this is likely to ultimately affectwhat is considered “scientiﬁc” or accepted as “true.” It gives rise to what are currently
called “alternative truths”—multiple simultaneous perspectives on our world, on the pastand on the present that are competing for the attention of the wider public.

The context
My answers to most of these questions are closely tied to the vision that I have onsocietal and environmental developments over the next few decennia. Of course thatvision is both partial and biased. It distinguishes three major trends for the remainder ofthis century.
One of these is the need to overcome the current, consumerist, resource-to-waste
economy controlled by “the market,” and in many ways even more narrowly by theworld of ﬁnance. That transition will be forced upon us by climate change, resource
depletion and major changes in the biochemical cycles of the Earth system such as ocean
acidiﬁcation. But the changes it will entail will require major transformations in our
institutions, our governance and, more profoundly, our mindsets.
The second major trend is the rapid evolution in the way in which societies deal withinformation processing. We are in this domain, worldwide, at the beginning of changes
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impact will completely change our civilizations; it will be of an order of magnitude
comparable to the discovery, for example, of ﬁre, of agriculture and herding, of the useof fossil energy at other moments in the human past.
The third change that I postulate is dependent on the outcome of the ﬁeld of tension
between increased and decreased integration across societies and political entities. On
the one hand we observe in current debates a drive towards increased integration ofmultiple societies into larger economic or political entities based on treaties and othermeasures to facilitate trade and exchange. But on the other hand we see in many places
a strong reaction against this that is rooted in the need for local and regional societies tohave their own identities, to determine their own futures. Part of this is a ﬁeld of tension
between ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up,’ between rich and poor, but it goes much deeper
than that, touching on the fundamental values of people. For the moment we cannot see
the outcome of this tussle, or how it might affect the future of our societies.

Archaeology in the Anthropocene
The easy part of looking into the future of archaeology is its relationship to theincreasing concerns about the Anthropocene—the advent of an era in which humansocieties essentially control so many of the natural dynamics of the Earth system that
we need to change our way of looking at the nature-society relationship. Redman
and I argued already in 2002 that the growing interest in the long-term evolution ofhuman-environmental relationships offered a major opportunity for archaeology to
expand into a growing area of new research with direct and important relevance forour understanding of the present. Archaeology is, as mentioned, the only disciplinethat is focused on improving our understanding of the long-term evolution of humanenvironmental dynamics on the planet. Knowledge of those dynamics over the very longterm contributes insights no other discipline or ﬁeld of study can contribute.
It allows us to monitor and describe the very slow socio-environmental processes thatcan only be observed on millennial or longer timescales, such as micro-tectonics, longterm climate change or millennial cultural developments. It also allows us to monitor theinteraction between societies and a much wider range of environmental conditions thanwe can possibly do by studying the present. It further enables us to study the evolution
from a nature-dominated environment to a human-dominated one. And last but not least
it allows us to study the second-order changes in socio-environmental dynamics—thechanges in the ways dynamics change.
Modern archaeological techniques allow us to monitor so many aspects ofenvironmental dynamics through time, including those of non-human living organisms,
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our efforts to understand the emergence of technologies, institutions, societies and theirenvironments in the pre-historic past.
As we are only at the beginning of studying the Anthropocene in an integrated
way, it seems to me that archaeology has, in this domain, an important and productive
future in front of it. In the process, our community will integrate yet more and different
methods and techniques from physics, earth sciences, biology and related ﬁelds. But
to be successful our community will also have to explore novel ways to build bridges,
and create intellectual fusion, between the various disciplines involved, such as thehumanities and the natural sciences. It will in that area hugely proﬁt from further
expanding and deepening a systemic, evolutionary perspective on the trajectories thathave led different societies from the distant past to the present.
By combining the detailed measurement of environmental dynamics through timewith the knowledge that is gained in archaeology, history and anthropology, our ﬁeld ofstudy can develop a unique vision on the long-term co-evolution of socio-environmental
systems, but it can also present important insights in the societal dynamics that have,after two millennia, driven western society to its current unsustainable relationship withthe environment. Other important insights it can provide concern the ways in which
many societies on Earth, after a considerable period of blossoming, have disintegrated.
In this context it is of fundamental importance that sustainability in the Anthropocene
be viewed as a societal challenge rather than an environmental one. After all, societiesdeﬁne what they consider their environments, what might be the things in thoseenvironments they see as challenges, and also what might be solutions to deal withthem. They do not do so in interaction with their environment, but entirely among themembers of society themselves. Until now, much of sustainability science is considering
its issues as either environmental or as part of the relationship between society andthe environment. They are not—the core of the sustainability conundrum concerns theways in which our current societies have developed themselves, and transformed theirenvironments in the process. The long-term perspective of archaeologists, as eminently
trans-disciplinary scholars with credibility in the natural, life, and social sciences, canbring this point home and point in directions that can help the transition towards asustainable Anthropocene.

Archaeology and the Information and Communication Technology(ICT) revolution
There are two aspects of the rapid evolution of digital technologies that I think will
have a major impact on the future of archaeology. The ﬁrst of these is the fact thatnumerous new methods and techniques have been—and will continue to be—developed© Japanese Archaeological Association

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that can help archaeologists manage the huge quantities of data they gather, process andinterpret. The other major impact of the ICT revolution, which is much more difﬁcult toconceptualize except in the sketchiest of terms, is on our own societies and their internaland environmental dynamics. In this section, I will try to sketch my vision on some
aspects of both.
Beginning with the development of innovative techniques of data processing that canbe used in archaeology, allow me ﬁrst to point to some relatively simple ones that have
had a major impact on our data processing in excavations. My favorite example is theintroduction of the barcode (and more recently the QR system), which has had major
consequences for the processing of samples and artifacts during excavations. Coupledwith the increased use of electronic data processing, from the use of total stations toground-penetrating radar and CAD-CAM techniques, the last twenty-ﬁve years haveseen a true revolution in archaeology. But I suspect that that is only the beginning.
Archaeology will soon, if it is not already, hit the edge of the “big data” revolution thatis in the process of transforming all domains of science by introducing ways in whichliterally everything can be measured. In the process, techniques are being developed
to store and process the massive quantities of information that are thus gathered andstudied.
Those techniques are in my opinion a major domain of development that can be ofuse to archaeology, but where archaeology can also help information technology byprompting it to contribute to solving some of its challenges. In the domain of data
storage and treatment, archaeology is particular in that it involves data and informationof many different kinds, both quantitative and qualitative, both narratives and images.
As a result, in a society that is increasingly driven by “big data,” and in which it isprobable that more and more research will be based on data stored in databases, andless and less on new (and costly) ﬁeld research, archaeology will for example in a major
way be confronted by the need to improve understanding of the epistemologies, methods
and techniques involved in the collection of different data-sets that originated in otherdisciplines.
The development of tools to more easily create, access and interpret huge databases
containing many such different kinds of data is an ongoing challenge, whicharchaeologists are trying to meet in several places. In the USA, for example, the Digital
Antiquity project at Arizona State University does so. But there is much more to bedone in that domain. The introduction of 3-D imagery and 3-D modeling software, forexample, will add new dimensions to this work by enabling virtual storage of 3-D objects
in ways that are easily searchable, while 3-D printing will facilitate the production ofcomplex physical models of anything from artifacts to sites.
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up archaeological data processing are pattern recognition and machine learning. Recent
years have seen a major turnaround in this domain. Rather than create systems in which
expert knowledge was programmed to help recognize patterns, recent developments haveenabled the acquisition of understanding from data by confronting complex, multi-layer
network computers with raw data and ‘training’ them to recognize patterns in those data,thus transforming very large quantities of data into manageable quantities of information.
Here again archaeology poses its own challenges, but these can be turned into advantages
by stimulating new technologies.
As a last example in this domain I want to mention the development of a wide rangeof techniques to model various kinds of processes, relationships and interactions. Thesefacilitate for us the use of “in silico” (computer) experiments in which we can constructcomplex dynamic relationships and study how they play out over time. This is a rapidly
growing and very important ﬁeld that in my opinion is not yet used to capacity. Recent
developments in computer hardware and software have enabled us to go far beyond thevery primitive models that were being advocated in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s of the last century.
Currently, complex interactions between millions of networked agents can technically bemodeled. Once archaeologists have developed better ideas of the many ways in which
individuals in groups, societies and populations can interact, for example by building on
developments in cognition and individual and collective decision-making, I do believe
this is another area in which we will quickly see quantum jumps in our understanding.
But let us now turn to the other topic of this section—how the ICT revolution is likely
to change our societies themselves. Seeing how much unanticipated change has occurredin the last twenty years, I do this with much hesitation and aware that two, three or ﬁve
years from now all that I can say on this topic may be outdated. However, there is one
major point that I think stands out, and will do so for some time: the loss of the clear
distinction in societal information processing between signal and noise.
Until very recently (in terms of human evolution) individual societies had ways todistinguish between what they esteemed as ‘signals’ in communication and all those otherimpulses that they relegated to the status of ‘noise.’ The ICT revolution has changed thatby enabling anyone to communicate with anyone and everyone in the world. That loss ofcontrol over information processing has changed the status of ‘information’ itself, which
is of course dependent on that distinction between signal and noise.
In due course, this will result in changes in the relationship between data andobservations on the one hand, and knowledge or understanding on the other. Knowledge
or understanding enables someone to interpret patterned data and observations, relatingthem to ideas, but the fact that the data never completely ﬁt the extant ideas exactly
allows the person interpreting them to enhance his or her knowledge and understanding.
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between observations and knowledge or understanding.
But the reciprocity between the two can also facilitate the reverse: to use personal
insights or opinions to elaborate presumed ‘data’ and ‘observations.’ In our societies (andour sciences) we have thus far generally adopted the ﬁrst of these interactions, gaining
knowledge and understanding by observing patterns in the realm of phenomena. Now,
however, there are people and places on the Internet where the reverse is done, whether
deliberately or by default. They present ‘data’ or ‘factoids’ that are constructed basedon their worldview. In itself that is nothing new—the rumor mill has always, in every
society, had this effect. But in the global information society it is often much more
difﬁcult, or even impossible, to ﬁnd out how any piece of “information” has emerged,
and what its relationship to the realm of phenomena is. In due course that could
fundamentally undermine the existence of all social institutions, and of the societies thathave created them.
History has in many societies played an important role in anchoring the distinction
between ‘signal’ and ‘noise’ in the past, in the process shaping the identity and the values
that distinguished different societies. In societies where there was no conscious andexplicit concept of ‘our past’ the same role was fulﬁlled by beliefs reﬂected in narratives,
myths or other means (such as the Australian Aborigines’ “dreamtime” for example).
Archaeology may therefore have a role to play in shaping one or more pasts for humanitythat could help anchor our societies.

Archaeology, identity and globalization
Looking back over the past of our western societies, but also over the history of otherpolitical entities throughout history, one observes, at different spatial scales, a ﬁeld of
tension between the geographic growth of such entities, and their reduction into numerous
smaller entities. To understand what is going on from an information-processing
perspective it is interesting to look at the current interaction between ‘globalization’ and‘populist’ or ‘nationalist’ trends. The former have, over the last century for example,
on several occasions brought about some form of internationalization: intensiﬁcation ofinteractions (trade, tourism, etc.) between different societies with different cultures. Partof that trend has been a growing (and often forced) adhesion to speciﬁc values that werebeing promoted by a dominant (part of a) society. In our present case, this has led tothe predominance of wealth and money as the main value in terms of which differences
between people, groups or whole societies are measured. The many other values of eachof the societies involved were downgraded to lesser importance in the process. Essentiallythe same process has enabled the emergence of what we call “the Roman Empire” or any
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set of (more or less) shared values, which are essentially those of the dominant sociopolitical entity. Following an approach ﬁrst suggested by the economic anthropologist
Polanyi (1944), I think that in each such situation there comes a time when this triggers asocio-cultural and political reaction among the people concerned.
In the simplest of terms, people have two major social needs: to be part of a group,and to be able to distinguish themselves within that group. Those two needs can only
be satisﬁed simultaneously if (a) the society has a value system with which individuals
can identify, and (b) that value system has so many dimensions that individuals can feelvalued if they excel with respect to one or more of those values. All coherent social
systems must therefore be rooted in a high-dimensional shared value system so that
individuals can distinguish themselves differentially within that value system. Oncea process such as globalization begins to reduce the dimensionality of value systems,
this creates major tensions in the societies concerned. Rather than accept the (culturally
impoverishing) changes imposed “top down” by the dominant society, class or culture,people will revive their own values and resist the “globalizing” trend. That is what weare currently seeing in many parts of the world, where societies are withdrawing fromglobalization.
How is this relevant for archaeology? Well, archaeology has emerged in many places as
a discipline that contributes in major ways to the creation of an identity for socio-culturalgroups or nations. In the 19th century, archaeology played a major role in the creation ofidentities for France, Germany, and Greece, for example, and currently it is playing thesame role in such different nations as Egypt, Mexico, the indigenous nations of North
America, etc. And in the 20th and 21st century in many places in Europe the shift fromscientiﬁc archaeology to cultural resource management has subtly transformed the roleof archaeology from enhancing and deepening a universalist scientiﬁc perspective on theworld to one that is rooted in, and strives to preserve, different cultures by protecting andpreserving their remains.
In an essay with profound implications for our community, Olivier (2011) has pointed
out that because archaeology interacts both with the present and the past, it projects andanchors in the past certain values that are dominant in the present. Once thus anchored,
these values are difﬁcult to change, exactly because they are located in the past. Hence,archaeology will play a major role in the outcome of the tussle between globalizationand localization, between larger and smaller socio-political units and value systems,by contibuting to the creation of identities for the individuals, groups and societies
concerned.

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Conclusion
In this short paper, I have tried to word some of my 30,000 feet (10 km.!) high perspectiveon the context in which I think archaeology will evolve in the next few decades. As inany exercise in thinking about the future, much is unclear. But one thing stands out: likeour societies more widely, our archaeological community will have to integrate, evenmore than it is doing to date, the fact that everything we observe and do is subject toincreasingly rapid change. I would argue that that entails another major change for us.
Thus far, generally, archaeology assumes stability and explains (or tries to) change.
It has still very much a ‘staircase’ model of past evolutions. That stems from the wider
Aristotelian assumptions to that effect in our culture and our science. In as far as I cansee, one of the imperatives of future work is that we let go of those tenets and adopt
Heraclitus of Ephesus’ perspective: “Everything changes, nothing ever remains thesame.” Thus, we may need to assume change as ubiquitous and begin to explain why atcertain times in the past stability dominated. That would require very different ways ofdesigning and using theories in our work!
But as I have tried to outline in the ﬁrst section of the paper, I think there arecharacteristics of archaeology as a ﬁeld that make it eminently suited to play a majorrole in the kinds of intellectual and societal transitions that are going to be required:
openness, trans-disciplinarity astride all disciplines, focus on internal cohesion of
explanations, rapid adoption of new techniques and methods…

References
Dearing, J., A.K. Braimoh, A. Reenberg, B.L. Turner II, & S.E. van der Leeuw. 2010.
Complex land systems: the need for long time perspectives to assess their future.
Ecology and Society 15(4): 21. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/
iss4/art21/
Girard, R. 1990. Innovation and Repetition. SubStance 19(2/3): 7–20.
Olivier, L. 2011. Le Sombre Abîme du Temps (English edition: The Dark Abyss of Time:
Archaeology and Memory, Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press)
Polanyi, K. 1944→2001. The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins ofour time (2nd Edition). Boston: Beacon Press.
van der Leeuw, S.E. 2017. It is all a question of discipline…, in L. Manolakakis, N. Schlanger& A. Coudart (eds.) Europe: Identités et migrations/Europe: Identities and migrations
31–42. Leyden: Sidestone Press.

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