Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: We thank both Sarah Kerr and Christian Isendahl for their insightful and constructive comments to our debate article (Davies & Lunn-Rockliffe 2026), as well as the three anonymous reviewers and several colleagues whose feedback greatly strengthened the article.We are pleased that our contribution has been received positively and we thank the editors of Antiquity for providing an important platform for this and related debates.Here, we respond to the useful comments from Kerr (2026) and Isendahl (2026) by clarifying four core elements of our argument.We frame these as four challenges for the future of usable archaeologies and hope they prove helpful in refining how archaeology might contribute meaningfully to contemporary global issues. Challenge 1: make the case, don't state the caseWe reiterate that we are not calling for all, or even most, archaeology to engage with contemporary grand challenges.While dissemination, preservation and multiple forms of public engagement are productive disciplinary requirements, we also recognise that most archaeological research has very little to say about major contemporary challenges, nor should it be obliged to do so.As Kerr quite rightly notes, any expectation that all archaeologists pursue such relevance "may simply not make sense to vast numbers of colleagues" (Kerr 2026: 221).Yet, it is becoming increasingly routine, at least in the UK, for papers and fellowship/grant applications to gesture toward contemporary significance and impact, often by asserting that studies of deep-time sociopolitical systems or ecologies can analogously inform challenges of the present.This tendency reflects a disciplinary (and perhaps wider structural) pressure, especially on early-career researchers, to state the relevance of their work in order to publish, secure funding or justify their research.Such statements frequently fall flat, not necessarily because they lack clear mechanisms linking archaeological data to contemporary issues, but because primary data is usually produced to reconstruct and understand particular historical contexts, only to be later retrofitted to 'speak' to the present through analogous reasoning.Analogy of this kind, in our opinion, risks producing lazy statements of relevance and undermines archaeology as a broad discipline in which most practitioners should feel free to produce
Source: Antiquity
Authors: Matthew Davies, Samuel Lunn-Rockliffe
Institution: University of Cambridge
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W7128586665