The premise of this lecture is that there is far more that can be routinely accomplished with archaeological data and knowledge than is currently the case. I illustrate this claim with three brief examples from my current research. With respect to the past, archaeology has entered the “large” (if not “big”) data realm given the vast quantities of data that have been acquired over the past several decades. If these data and their associated metadata were made readily available to researchers, old questions could be addressed in new ways and entirely new questions of greater temporal and spatial scale developed. I illustrate this point with a recent project on turkey intensification in the US Southwest.

With respect to the present, as anthropological archaeologists we know a great deal about people, and a good deal of this knowledge is relevant for people living today. Our challenge is linking our robust understandings of certain aspects of human belief and action to relevant contemporary issues with appropriate collaborators. A recent collaborative project with my sustainability colleague, Professor Rimjhim Aggarwal, exemplifies this point. We have been working to include household-scale food storage in the portfolio of strategies aimed at improving food security among smallholder farmers in India.

With respect to the future, archaeology’s unique understanding of long-term social processes allows us to investigate how socio-ecological systems develop and transform. We are well-situated to contribute to contemporary analyses of social transformation. I illustrate this point with a current collaborative project on early warning signals of threshold change in the US Southwest.

Although I am by no means the first archaeologist to use increasingly accessible bodies of data for large- scale analyses, or to argue that archaeological insights and knowledge have relevance to the present, there has yet to be the sort of expansion in archaeological perspectives and practices that I advocate here.