A space at the table? Global challenges and contemporary archaeology as plural transdisciplinary design for the future

Abstract

Archaeologists often proclaim that they have much to contribute to the ‘global challenges’ of the twenty-first century, yet they find little space at the policymaking table. In this debate article, the authors argue that archaeologists seeking practical relevance must start with a critical, expanded understanding of the contemporary, including how communities, stakeholders and complex policy structures operate to navigate unfolding socioecological crises. They propose a reversed historical directionality grounded in transdisciplinary research design that integrates contemporary challenges and community-defined priorities from the outset to foster a dynamic, future-facing dialogue that more readily informs pathways to tangible impact.

Introduction

Archaeologists often proclaim that their discipline, with its unique methods, temporal perspectives and ability to straddle the social and natural sciences, has much to contribute towards addressing present social, economic and ecological challenges. However, while our discipline has had many positive impacts, from public and community archaeology to heritage preservation, it has yet to establish a space at the policymaking table or contribute fully to the ‘global challenges’ of the twenty-first century (Smith 2021). This article offers a critique of how archaeology has approached this contribution in the past and offers new strategies for how archaeologists might demonstrate practical relevance in the future. We argue that while the creation of robust datasets and models remain valuable for informing existing policy science (see Smith 2021), they must be accompanied by an expanded understanding of the contemporary moment that critically yet constructively questions policymaking processes and generates insights into the different temporal processes through which diverse communities navigate unfolding socioecological crises. Applied archaeologies should work from the present, examining current policy frames and using a reversed historical directionality to trace temporal phenomena that can inform future building agendas as identified through transdisciplinary research.

Global challenges, relevance and impact

Repeated debates amongst archaeologists indicate continued dissatisfaction with the discipline’s limited ability to achieve certain forms of relevance and real-world impact (Smith 2021). Although not always explicitly stated, these often relate to the global challenges of the present day: sustainable development, climate change, biodiversity loss, inequality and global health. Such problems are exceedingly complex, defy simple definition and have no clear-cut solutions due to their unpredictable or ‘wicked’ nature (Incropera 2016; Moore et al. 2023; Schofield 2024). Unsurprisingly, the pathways towards addressing such problems are diverse and highly contested, coloured by context, wider political agendas, sociohistorical milieux and the economic interests of different actors positioned across intricate webs of hierarchy, influence and power (Ferraro et al. 2015).

These tensions can be seen in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which attempt an ambitious, holistic framework for addressing the planet’s social, economic and environmental futures. To be applied equally to the Global North and South, the SDGs seek to highlight the interconnectedness of challenges and solutions, for example by linking the climate and biodiversity crises with fragile food systems (SDG 2), poverty (SDG 1), decent work (SDG 8) and human health (SDG 3; Rockström & Sukhdev 2016). Yet, while the SDGs represent a positive endeavour, they have faced criticism for their vague targets, weak accountability and marginalisation of voices, and for a dearth of new policy innovations (Moore 2015). Collectively, these criticisms suggest the SDGs fall short of creating genuinely new pathways to sustainable and prosperous futures, instead reintroducing and/or reinventing existing policy systems with greater rigor and co-ordination (Moore 2015). Free-market economic growth is the most potent example of this and remains a cornerstone of international development initiatives (e.g. SDG 8). While calls for ‘Green Growth’ and the ‘decoupling’ of growth from natural resource depletion have found traction, they largely reinforce the status quo by failing to address core issues of inequality and overconsumption on a finite planet (Rockström et al. 2009; Raworth 2017). Similar patterns are evident in poverty alleviation, where mainstream models continue to prioritise lifting rural populations in the Global South out of ‘traditional’ lifeways by integrating them into global markets (Spann 2017). Likewise, SDG targets for gender equity focus on women’s economic empowerment through market integration, irrespective of whether these markets support environmental goals or respectfully uphold cultural diversity and identity (Esquivel 2016).

Within the fiendish complexity of global challenge responses, it is unsurprising that archaeology has struggled to make a vocal contribution. Such challenges are more social, political and economic than scientific. This is not to say, however, that archaeology has been entirely absent. A prominent entry point into the global challenges policy arena has been through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As Kohler and Rockman (2020) demonstrate, IPCC reports have used archaeological data to establish environmental baselines and historic climate response strategies, as well as to address risks to archaeological heritage. Yet IPCC reports are not exactly lavished with archaeological insights. The possible reasons for this are multiple, including the suspicion that archaeologists have a naïve understanding of policy relevance (Smith 2021) and that other disciplines might view archaeological data as too coarse, localised or analogically detached to offer any practical guidance on future human-environment relations (Ortman 2019; Kohler & Rockman 2020: 642).

Amid wider concerns over the limited resolution and quantity of archaeological contributions (Kerr 2020; Rockman & Hritz 2020), it has been argued that the discipline must address ‘known unknowns’ (Lane 2021), enhance temporal precision and improve quantitative modelling to better predict relationships between climatic variability and socioecological change (Ortman 2019; Smith 2021). However, robust data alone may not deliver the real-world impact that many seek. As Chirikure (2021) contends, primary archaeological data should be collected in ways that are directly grounded in the lived realities of local communities, policymakers and industry actors. In other words, relevance and impact must start with a deep engagement with real-world problems and the complex relational dynamics of policymaking and implementation beyond academia (Mosse 2005), including the power imbalances between academic authority, national and international governance and local communities confronting global challenges. As we argue below, this requires an expanded understanding of the present, including a critical approach to the policymaking frames deployed in other disciplines and sectors.

Reversing archaeology’s temporal directionality

Amid mounting global challenges, a range of alternative theories of change are emerging that, while diverse, collectively challenge mainstream narratives of global development in both the Global South and North (Escobar 2018; Moore et al. 2023). This shift responds to the persistent reliance on economic models and policy logics that assume a historical directionality of human progress—one that transfers people from ‘traditional’ pasts toward ‘modern’ lifeways and the growth-based economies of the ‘Global North’. The epistemological consequence of such thinking is that any knowledge and practice deemed contradictory to this historical directionality is itself marginalised (de Sousa Santos 2014). Without critical attention, work on traditional and Indigenous knowledges, and even some framings of heritage, potentially reinforce, rather than challenge, these positions since they risk placing non-Western epistemologies into separate categories, as forms of knowledge that are either ‘from the past’, and therefore need preserving from modernity’s eroding qualities, or of value only when assimilated into modernising agendas rather than as foundations for alternative futures (Todd 2016; Moore et al. 2023).

Rather than reinforcing top-down frameworks for change, an applied archaeology can interrogate mainstream policy logics by beginning with a critical understanding of contemporary socioecological challenges and the power dynamics that shape them. This approach works from the present into the past, tracing how the lived realities of communities, practitioners and policymakers in global-challenge contexts are formed by multitemporal processes. The now established fields of contemporary archaeology, historical ecology and applied archaeology have shown that the discipline offers the theoretical and methodological tools to do this—expanding our understanding of the present by examining the world as a process of sociomaterial ‘becoming’ through shifting relational webs across multiple temporalities (Graves-Brown et al. 2013; Isendahl & Stump 2019; Crellin 2020).

Our work with smallholders in Elgeyo Marakwet here serves as a practical example. Contrary to mainstream development initiatives that portray Marakwet farming as static and vulnerable to climate change, the agricultural landscapes of the region are better understood as a resilient socioecological assemblage that has supported three-fold population increases and weathering major climatic episodes over the last two centuries (Davies & Moore 2016). These landscapes are constantly in motion, where short- and long-fallow field systems, complex patterns of soil fertility maintenance and the propagation of diverse landrace crops are supported by over 300km of irrigation channels, which are themselves opened, closed and diverted on daily, seasonal and yearly cycles to enable soil and vegetation regeneration (see Figure 1). At the same time, contemporary landscapes bear the traces of over 80 years of externally driven development interventions aimed at improving food-system efficiency and livelihood security through irrigation modernisation, cash-cropping incentives and market integration. Some of these interventions have seen partial success, but many have failed, collapsed or been absorbed into existing practices in ways unanticipated by their designers (Davies et al. 2024). Such failures often stem from the assumption that development can be deployed through objective scientific, technological and engineering feats in a straightforward and ahistorical manner without recourse to local forms of knowledge and practice.

Figure 1. Marakwet agricultural landscapes. A) Shifting cultivation irrigated via recently opened furrows; B) semi-permanent field irrigated via recently opened furrows; C) cement and stone aqueduct channelling furrow water across steep terrain; D) aqueduct undergoing repair using wood and brush; E) damaged piping and pressure valve from a defunct Red Cross-funded irrigation project; F) abandoned water tank from a government-funded project (figure by authors).

Temporally engaging with these contemporary contexts helps to understand the successes, challenges and solutions associated with the localisation of global challenges within the Marakwet lifeworld. Our research indicates that sustainable livelihoods in the region emerge through a palimpsest of temporally attuned, situated practice: farmers continually experiment and innovate with old and new technologies, techniques and knowledge to foster place-based forms of resilience, for example by sowing saved landrace crops passed down by elders alongside modern hybrids advertised via social media and sourced from agribusinesses. Understanding these practices requires tracing a range of phenomena backwards through time across multiple scales, from seasonal land-use cycles and decadal shifts in material culture, technology and consumption, to centennial patterns of climate and landscape change (Davies & Moore 2016; Logan et al. 2019). Though beyond the scope of this article, it is important to acknowledge a growing body of research from the Global South that is concerned with such approaches, for example challenging historical narratives of food insecurity in Ghana (Logan 2020), documenting the temporality of terracing practices in Ethiopia’s Konso region (Stump & Richer 2017) and understanding the role of social memory for sustaining livelihoods in the hypervariable environments of Madagascar (Douglass & Rasolondrainy 2021).

Working from the present into the past stands in contrast to the common assertation that archaeology’s relevance lies in its ability to bring lessons, knowledge and technologies from the past into the present (e.g. Guttmann-Bond 2019). The logic of such approaches suggest that a future-facing pedagogy can be built by drawing on millennia of human-environment interaction to analogously and/or heuristically inform best practice (Pikirayi 2019). We do not deny that analogy-based contributions can be valuable for raising awareness, invoking reflection or offering commentary on future human-environment potentialities. A problem arises, however, when attempting to translate these narratives into practical and measurable impacts. Richer and colleagues (2019) highlight this issue, noting that despite genuine interest from farmers and extension officers in their work on the historical ecology of precolonial agricultural resilience in Engaruka, Tanzania, there has been little, if any, response from personnel outside the heritage sector. They note that, framed as analogy, their archaeological research struggled to connect with the lived realities of current populations and the priorities of policymakers, largely because contemporary stakeholders and their specific challenges were not meaningfully integrated into the research design or implementation from the outset.

As this example suggests, we see the creation of more impactful forms of applied archaeology not so much as questions of analogy or data (though we certainly do not reject these), but rather as a wider issue of methodology and epistemology. As we explore below, our framework proposes an approach rooted in transdisciplinary research design and a form of creative pluralism that allows diverse knowledge systems to collaboratively shape policymaking, research agendas and actionable solutions, across contexts in both the Global North and Global South.

Transdisciplinary research and creative pluralism

Our argument has thus far considered how archaeologists, by adopting an altered temporal directionality, can deepen our understanding of the intersecting nature of contemporary socioecological challenges and existing policymaking procedures. From this perspective, archaeologists wishing to contribute to future-building strategies should engage with a renewed conceptualisation of contemporary design, both in how research programmes are developed and in how futures are shaped through policy at multiple levels. We argue that our role should not be limited to demonstrating the relevance of archaeological data within existing expert-led policy frameworks. Instead, archaeologists, with our unique multi-temporal perspectives, can act as key facilitators, interlocutors, curators and initiators in co-creating projects that empower communities and other stakeholders in pursuing transformative change on their own terms.

What does this mean in practice? Many archaeologists looking to demonstrate real-world relevance now see transdisciplinary research as a primary pathway (Milek 2018; Isendahl & Stump 2019; Richer et al. 2019; Smith 2021). Transdisciplinary work encompasses an enormous breadth of approaches (Bernstein 2015), and in many cases has been developed as a method for deepening disciplinary interaction for the creation of new knowledge (Smith 2021). However, transdisciplinarity has increasingly come to signify research that actively integrates academic disciplines with non-academic partners, including local community members, business owners, policymakers and non-governmental organisations. This expanded understanding is now mainstream, particularly in sustainability sciences (Lang et al. 2012; Dedeurwaerdere 2024) and global policy institutions—such as UNESCO (2018), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO 2022) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD 2020)—precisely because it combines researchers’ expertise with diverse stakeholder perspectives to holistically address complex global challenges.

The frameworks established through such transdisciplinary approaches create spaces that are particularly conducive to new forms of knowledge co-production and policy impact—spaces in which archaeology can play a central role. Although beyond the scope of this article, an example of such can be found in the engagement platforms of the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which now include multiple stakeholder, Indigenous and local community voices (https://www.ipbes.net/stakeholders). Similarly, the Centres of Distinction on Indigenous and Local Knowledge (https://cod-indigenouslocalknowledge.org/index.php) span the Global North and South and offer alternative routes into policy impact where archaeologists and communities might find common ground.

In view of the above, we argue for a more explicit model of community-embedded research design, where archaeological questions, research programmes, data and outputs are collaboratively produced with the view of questioning and refining existing policy discourse and driving meaningful future change. This framework draws upon recent research trends in citizen science, which move beyond recognising community members as participants or collaborators, to being active researchers at the nexus of developing core questions, methods and interpretations in light of locally identified policy challenges (e.g. Davies et al. 2023; Davies 2024 and forthcoming policy outputs; Moore et al. 2023). Here the engagement and participatory elements of research designs are ‘flipped’ (Milek 2018: 41), such that impact-oriented outcomes and community priorities guide the research process from the outset rather than being treated as final dissemination activities. Practically speaking, this may involve co-developing research designs with communities well before any funding application, continuing this deep collaboration through data collection, interpretation, write up and dissemination activities, and to then actively build change out of the contemporary archaeological knowledge produced. The foundations of this are temporalised understandings of contemporary issues, drawing on archaeological data as routine as mapped settlement patterns, soil micromorphology or archaeobotanical assemblages, but where the end product may look nothing like ‘archaeology’ as we currently understand it; less oriented towards peer-reviewed papers and more towards mechanisms for change on the ground, such as community organisations, businesses, activist groups, policy white papers or knowledge-sharing platforms (e.g. Stump & Richer 2017; Douglass et al. 2019: 323–27; Lunn-Rockliffe et al. 2020; and forthcoming policy outputs based on Davies 2024).

Fundamentally, this form of transdisciplinarity ensures that a wide range of knowledge is engaged with, valued and generated, in what de Sousa Santos (2014: 190) refers to as an ‘ecology of knowledges’, to foster what we might call a ‘creative pluralism’ that moves beyond simply reinforcing or interrogating the interaction between archaeological and local epistemologies/ontologies of the past. Instead, it seeks to position archaeologists and community members, be it in the Global South or the Global North, as co-producers of knowledge oriented towards shaping sustainable and equitable futures.

Conclusion: rethinking relevance and impact

The above sets out some potential pathways to reframe how archaeologists might readily realise relevance and impact in the face of global challenges. Our approach undoubtedly has limitations, not least around scalability, the time and energy required to network across academic disciplines and among diverse communities, and in the fact that consensus is not always achievable. Nevertheless, we have aimed to present an argument that foregrounds a critique of current policymaking and highlights archaeology’s role in enabling the inclusion of other voices in policy design. Specifically, we have posited that an archaeological contribution is not necessarily about just having the right data at the policymaking table, but rather about starting with the critical premise that policymaking and its outcomes are themselves emergent phenomena negotiated through complex relational processes. The outcome of this emergence, as seen in the SDGs, are empirically informed yet politically designed artefacts grounded in certain presuppositions around the nature of societal change and future directions of travel. These provide the scaffolding for future policies that aim to shape our actions in ways that we currently understand, rather than questioning how and why we should act in certain ways.

Rather than accepting existing frameworks, we argue that a reinvigorated contemporary archaeology should begin with an expanded understanding of the present, examining how diverse ways of being and knowing intersect with global-challenges policy, and then work backwards to trace the entangled temporal processes shaping quotidian world-building. Crucially, archaeological projects should embed engagement and impact from the outset, co-designing these with stakeholder communities to support their own self-directed transformations. In this role, contemporary archaeologists can act as facilitators within transdisciplinary collaborations, rendering archaeological knowledge relevant precisely because it is positioned alongside other epistemologies to foster new forms of sustainability and resilience.

Ultimately, and perhaps most radically, if such work is successful and such engagements improve the lives of communities who are confronting the localisation of global challenges on their own terms and by their own metrics, then the process of engagement itself, rather than a precise causal link between archaeological data and positive impact, may be the most important outcome.