65
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      Grand Challenges for Archaeology

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisher
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology’s most important scientific challenges? Starting with a crowd-sourced query directed broadly to the professional community of archaeologists, the authors augmented, prioritized, and refined the responses during a two-day workshop focused specifically on this question. The resulting 25 “grand challenges” focus on dynamic cultural processes and the operation of coupled human and natural systems. We organize these challenges into five topics: (1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behavior, and identity; and (5) human-environment interactions. A discussion and a brief list of references accompany each question. An important goal in identifying these challenges is to inform decisions on infrastructure investments for archaeology. Our premise is that the highest priority investments should enable us to address the most important questions. Addressing many of these challenges will require both sophisticated modeling and large-scale synthetic research that are only now becoming possible. Although new archaeological fieldwork will be essential, the greatest pay off will derive from investments that provide sophisticated research access to the explosion in systematically collected archaeological data that has occurred over the last several decades.

          Resumen

          Este artículo representa un esfuerzo sistemático para responder a la pregunta: ¿Cuáles son los retos científícos más importantes de la arqueología? A partir de una consulta masiva dirigida ampliamente a la comunidad profesional de arqueólogos, los autores aumentaron, priorizaron y refinaron las respuestas que surgieron de esta encuesta, durante un taller de dos días el cual se centro específícamente en esta cuestión. Los 25 grandes retos que emergen, se centran en los procesos culturales dinámicos y en el funcionamiento de los sistemas humanos y naturales en su conjunto. Para presentarlos aquí, organizamos estos desaflos en cinco temas: (1) surgimiento, comunidades y complejidad; (2) resiliencia, persistencia, transformatión y colapso; (3) movimiento, movilidady migratión; (4) conocimiento, comportamiento e identidad; e (5) interacciones humano-medioambiente. Cada pregunta va acompañada de una discusión y una breve lista de referencias. Un objetivo importante en la identificatión de estos retos es el de informar las decisiones sobre las inversiones en infraestructura para la arqueologia. Nuestra premisa es que las mayores inversiones prioritarias deben ser aquellas que nos permitan abordar las cuestiones mas importantes. Responder a muchos de estos desaflos requerird adoptar tanto la elaboration de modelos sofisticados, como investigaciones a gran escala sintetizadoras que apenas ahora estdn siendo posibles. Aunque sera fundamental llevar a cabo nuevos trabajos de campo arqueológicos, la mayor recompensa se derivard de las inversiones que proporcionen a las investigaciones sofisticadas acceso a la multitud de los datos arqueológicos recolectados sistemáticamente que se ha producido en las últimas décadas.

          Related collections

          Most cited references80

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Book: not found

          The operated Markov´s chains in economy (discrete chains of Markov with the income)

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: not found

            "Economic man" in cross-cultural perspective: behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies.

            Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model - based on self-interest - fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Late Pleistocene demography and the appearance of modern human behavior.

              The origins of modern human behavior are marked by increased symbolic and technological complexity in the archaeological record. In western Eurasia this transition, the Upper Paleolithic, occurred about 45,000 years ago, but many of its features appear transiently in southern Africa about 45,000 years earlier. We show that demography is a major determinant in the maintenance of cultural complexity and that variation in regional subpopulation density and/or migratory activity results in spatial structuring of cultural skill accumulation. Genetic estimates of regional population size over time show that densities in early Upper Paleolithic Europe were similar to those in sub-Saharan Africa when modern behavior first appeared. Demographic factors can thus explain geographic variation in the timing of the first appearance of modern behavior without invoking increased cognitive capacity.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Journal
                American Antiquity
                Am. antiq.
                Society for American Archaeology
                0002-7316
                2325-5064
                January 2014
                January 20 2017
                January 2014
                : 79
                : 1
                : 5-24
                Article
                10.7183/0002-7316.79.1.5
                d9b33805-9311-4cf5-85e4-e9fbfa56a025
                © 2014

                https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms

                History

                Comments

                Comment on this article