Photo by Trnava University

The long American century is over. Across the world, affiliations and institutions staked in blood and soil, faith-based (as opposed to empirically based) ways of knowing, and personalized, autocratic power are all in ascendance. Notions of linear, inevitable progress and conceptual frames that wall off modernity from what came before now seem more like pipe dreams or propaganda than a data-grounded record of humanity’s journey. Rather than being at the “end of history,” we are still mired waist-deep in it.

For the discipline of archaeology, the patterns, trends, and lessons visible in the global record of the past have never been more relevant. Not merely because our multiscalar visions of human history are geographically broader and more detailed than they ever have been, but because it seems clear that the myriad ways humans behave, interrelate, and aggregate today are not fundamentally out of range from the repertoire of behaviors that we as a species have practiced for many millennia.

Archaeology’s singular contribution to understanding people and their interactions with each other and the natural environment has always been its worldwide documentation of past lifeways over long time spans. The discipline offers otherwise hidden insights into populations for whom written records are lacking and an expanded lens into those that have such records, but leave many persons forgotten. Unlike texts, which are generally written by “the winners,” archaeology need not be subject to elite determinism. Through cross-cultural comparisons, it also reveals recurrent temporal patterns that are relevant to contemporary global problems, and unlike present-day parallels, archaeologists, with their vantage on the past, know the outcomes. Knowledge and debates concerning the past offer grounding and guidance for charting the future.

It is within this broader context that U.S. archaeologists currently confront a hinge point in research on humanity’s major episodes of change. From varying perspectives, generations of scholars have documented deep-time global shifts in population, mobility, food procurement, settlement size, leadership, trade, conflict, affiliative identities, and religious ideologies. And in doing so, they have shown that from place to place, such shifts did not occur in the same way, at the same tempo, or even in the same sequence. Efforts to synthesize these findings have sought regularities within embedded temporal and spatial scales.

But the recent convergence of two developments has created a critical juncture in how this research can proceed. Most obvious is the Trump administration’s abrupt cancellation of virtually all federal archaeological funding in early 2025 (Brown, 2025; Lidz, 2025) 1. Less recognized is an interpretive disconnect that has been percolating for decades between newly collected data and outdated ways of thinking about the past.

Here, we briefly describe this pivotal moment’s dual foundations and then propose strategies for moving forward. In the short term, the most easily implemented approach for circumventing federal cuts is to systematically mine previously collected data for recurrent temporal patterns. The companion issue of interpretive disconnect can be avoided if such efforts are question-driven, comparative, network-based, and processual. In the longer term, the likelihood of obtaining alternative financial support for new fieldwork can be increased by widely publicizing how temporal regularities in the human past offer lessons for resolving critical global problems today.

The Hinge Point’s Dual Foundations

The hinge point’s dual foundations of federal funding cuts and interpretive disconnect are linked by the recent proliferation of cutting-edge high technology methods. In the case of funding cuts, the instigating factor is cost. Various governmental agencies have, in recent years, subsidized multitudinous investigations related to humanity’s major transitions through academic projects worldwide and cultural resource management contracts in the United States. These efforts have increasingly relied on methods borrowed from the natural, life, and computational sciences to collect and analyze large arrays of archaeological evidence (Sinclair, 2022). Examples include highly refined dating techniques; sophisticated aDNA, archaeobotanical, phytolith, zooarchaeological, and compositional analyses; precise satellite and Lidar mapping; and, most recently, artificial intelligence.

Such work is expensive because it requires sophisticated equipment and well-trained personnel in both the field and laboratory. And when fieldwork involves excavation, which often destroys archaeological contexts, responsible research mandates detailed and time-consuming data recording. Because budgets are high, the loss of federal financial support cannot easily be replaced by grants from other sources, raising the question of how such research can proceed.

The hinge point’s second foundation is the interpretive disconnect between the reams of exciting data produced by cutting-edge high technology methods and the zombie-like persistence of 19th-century categorical thinking. In short, this persistence has had the pernicious effect of steering conclusions in established directions, thereby reifying traditional grand narratives. And in doing so, it has obscured novel aspects of new findings and discouraged creative thinking that could generate new conceptual approaches 2.

More specifically, the adoption of categorical thinking by 19th-century archaeologists conformed to prevailing modes of thought in anthropology, the natural sciences, and society at large. Archaeologists developed two classificatory frameworks: 1) culture historical charts to sort local and regional scale observations of ancient material remains into spatial-temporal units, and 2) unilinear evolutionary sequences to order ancient societies worldwide into stages. Despite substantial evidence to the contrary, both treated their constituent entities as internally homogeneous, discretely bounded, and changing in a stepwise fashion. Refining categories in ever greater detail remained the discipline’s paramount goal through the mid-20th century, with non-classificatory interpretations added only at the end of an investigation.

A major paradigm shift occurred with the advent of radiocarbon dating during America’s post-World War II embrace of the sciences. With chronology building no longer an all-consuming task and influenced by contemporary societal upheavals, some 1960s archaeologists adopted entirely new systems and processual models and applied more deductive logic. This was followed in subsequent decades by a succession of other approaches. But before proceeding with any state-of-the-art analyses, archaeologists must first situate their material remains in space and time and have a general sense of the kind of group being studied. To do this, they have continued to rely on culture historical schemes and cultural evolutionary sequences.

The consequence of this prerequisite framing for current applications of cutting-edge high technology methods is that new findings are inadvertently grounded in implicit assumptions about homogeneity, boundedness, and stepwise change. Bolstered by inductive reasoning, the ramifying effect is that interpretations remain generally consistent with what is already known. These issues are epitomized by the results of recent aDNA research. Despite revealing high degrees of mobility often over long time spans, interpretations have reflexively plugged into migrationist models that depend on presumptions about the mass movement of self-contained, homogeneous groups that suddenly replaced one another. The hinge point challenge is to develop unencumbered conceptual frameworks that are as sophisticated as the cutting-edge high technology methods they are applied to.

Moving Forward

For U.S. archaeologists, no matter where in the world they work and whether their careers are in academia, cultural resource management, museums, or government, the era of federally subsidized data collection projects has ended, at least for now. One strategy for moving research on humanity’s major transitions forward is to seek smaller grants from state, tribal, and private entities. Another is to collaborate with well-financed projects in Western Europe, China, or the Gulf States. A third is to systematically mine, compare, and synthesize extant data to elucidate temporal patterns, critical turning points, and recurrent relationships between key factors.

The last option is the easiest to implement in the short term. Reams of raw data relevant to the entire range of topics associated with humanity’s major transitions are waiting to be accessed and systematically compared. Potential sources include appendices in print and online publications, records housed in perhaps thousands of physical repositories and archives worldwide, and various digital platforms 3. The costs of locating previously collected data, collating it, and identifying recurrent patterns pale in comparison to even the smallest-scale field projects. As such, research based on existing information may be more likely to receive financial support from state, tribal, and private entities. It may also offer collaborative opportunities with well-funded colleagues in other countries, with whom communication can be sustained at a distance via email, Zoom, and other video conferencing tools.

Exemplifying the rich promise of extant raw data are two recent analyses of the development of economic inequality that compared house size measurements across roughly 1,000 archaeological sites worldwide (

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