The complex technical overburden of archaeology masks its unique role in today’s world. Historians working with documentary sources or oral traditions are limited to a mere five thousand years. Their currency is in centuries, years, even days, hours, and minutes. Archaeologists deal in millennia, in hundreds of thousands of years, and only occasionally in centuries or possibly generations. Our work is never limited by geography or time, for archaeology is what is sometimes called “deep history,” the past that extends far further back than the mere 5,000 years of written history. But the deeper human experience is just part of what archaeologists study. Spectacular finds come from more recent times, among them the celebrated terracotta regiment of 210 bc that guards the burial mound of Shihuangdi, China’s first emperor, near Xi’an. None other than Her Majesty the Queen inspected excavations that exposed early Colonial houses at Jamestown in Virginia. Other researchers investigate factory sites from the Industrial Revolution. Archaeologist Collen Hamilton recently investigated Cecil B. de Mille’s 10 Commandments movie set from 1923, unearthing its plaster sphinxes buried in the Guadalupe dunes by the Pacific in Central California.

Countless researchers are working on the quite recent history of non-Western societies. I myself spent six years excavating 1,000-year-old farming villages in southern Zambia many years ago. At the Isamu Pati mound, my trenches uncovered a once flourishing community living on a low mound occupied for at least five centuries by people with herds of small, humped cattle. Thanks to excavation, this forgotten village is now part of Zambian history. The archives of deep history and much of not-so-deep history are not documents, but material evidence of the past, such as tools, food remains like animal bones or seeds, inscriptions, art, temples, and the detritus of deserted human settlements. But we are far more than students of rubbish. Alone among all students of humanity, we study human biological and cultural change over the entire span of human existence.

Deep history has a startlingly broad scope, which covers a broad array of major questions about the past. How old were our remotest ancestors and where did they originate? Who were their closest primate relatives? How did human evolution unfold? We currently know of over twenty ancient hominin species, whose histories between 3 million and 300,000 years ago defy easy analysis. When and where did Homo sapiens appear in its African homeland at least 3000,000 years ago? How did our advanced cognitive abilities such as fluent speech and the ability to innovate, think, and plan ahead, develop and transform our world? We still know little of the complex migrations that took modern humans out of Africa to other parts of the world after 100,000 years ago. The fast-moving field of molecular biology has added DNA to the study of ancient, complex population movements and shows just how complex some of these population movements became. For instance, our forebears were in Australia by 45,000 years ago (perhaps as much as 20,000 years before that), in China probably even earlier. They settled the Americas from Siberia around 15,000 years ago, at the end of the Ice Age. By 12,000 years before present, modern humans had settled every corner of the world except the offshore islands of the Pacific and Antarctica.

The questions proliferate in later times. Agriculture and animal farming may seem mundane to some, but the development of food production in widely separated parts of the world after 12,000 years ago was one of the great catalysts of human history. Few other cultural developments assumed greater importance. Food production is known to us from subtle archaeological clues—changes in wild grasses that became the barley, wheat, maize, and rice that we recognize today, minute differences in the bones of wild and domestic cattle, goats and sheep, and major changes in human settlements. More importantly, what were the consequences of food production? What social and economic changes resulted? For the first time, people were tied to their land, which raises complex questions about changing male/female roles, inheritance, kin ties, and other issues. Above all, and of great relevance today, how did farmers and herds address the complex issue of sustainability? They were not always successful. In about 6,200 bc, the inhabitants of a large farming village, Çatalhöyük, who prospered off a trade in shiny obsidian (volcanic glass) for toolmaking, suffered through drier and cooler conditions for about 160 years, known from glacial cores and other sources over a wide area (Figure 1).

With Egypt and Mesopotamia, we cautiously enter the realm of written history, but archaeology still has a vital role to play in deciphering the past. History tends to deal with great leaders and major events. As we mentioned, archaeologists study all kinds of people, from slaves and commoners to skilled artisans, powerful officials, Maya lords, and pharaohs. A powerful member of the historical team, archaeology’s concerns extend beyond elite palaces and history’s obsession with the lives of kings and queens, to the doings of anonymous folk—farmers, fishers, merchants, priests, and the marginalized. New technologies are providing fascinating and unexpected insights into early civilizations. For instance, a new technology, laser altimetry (lidar—light detection and ranging), is helping transform our knowledge of everyday people in the past. Damian Evans and a research team have used lidar to peer down at the spectacular ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the huge palace and temple complex built by the Khmer ruler Suryarvarman II in AD 1113 (Figure 2).

More and more archaeologists are engaging closely with local communities, with the people who often have a direct relationship with those who lived there before. For example, a private organization, the Archaeological Conservancy, acquires and protects archaeological sites in the United States, working closely with local stakeholders. The Conservancy recently took over ownership of Amity Pueblo in the upper Little Colorado region of northeastern Arizona. This is an intensely significant ancestral village for the Pueblo of Zuni, a rubble mound that may contain as many as sixty rooms. The pueblo lies in an area that connects Zuni Pueblo with the people’s place of origin in the Grand Canyon. The Conservancy plans to develop a long-term management plan, consulting tribes, local property owners and government agencies, that will include both monitoring the site and providing access to the land for the tribes, who regard this as a sacred place.

Archaeology brings the experience of deep history to bear on the issues of today. Such a perspective has a startling relevance to our lives and to our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the changing world we live in. For example, humans have adapted to both long- and short-term climatic change for more than three million years. Increasing aridity in tropical Africa may have played a decisive role in human origins. Later prehistoric times unfolded against a background of glacial and warmer interglacial periods that culminated in the last Ice Age glaciation, at its height some 18,000 years ago. A revolution in the study of ancient climate over the past fifty years has transformed our knowledge of the dramatic coolings and warmings of the millennia since the end of the Ice Age. Fifteen thousand years ago, the world’s oceans were, on an average, some 300 feet (91 meters) below modern levels. A low-lying land bridge joined Siberia and Alaska; the North Sea was a maze of shallow lakes and wetlands, and open steppe extended from the Atlantic deep into Siberia. There were only a few millions of us around to adapt to these dramatic changes caused by persistent warming. At first, we were all hunters and foragers, living, for the most part, in small bands. We adapted to cold and water shortages simply by moving, or, in the case of the flooding North Sea, to higher ground.

A wide variety of increasingly fine-grained methods are providing startling insights into short-term climatic events such as prolonged drought cycles and El Niños. The latter events have a more profound influence on global climate than everything except the passage of the seasons. Glacial cores from Greenland ice sheets, deep sea cores, long tree ring sequences from sequoias, European oaks, and other species, and cave sediments are but a few of the ingenious ways in which climatologists have reconstructed annual, and even seasonal, climatic shifts, especially over the past two thousand years. For instance, very complete tree-ring sequences from the North American Southwest have chronicled the long drought cycles that caused the twelfth century Pueblo communities of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, to disperse to better-watered villages some distance away (Figure 4). Tales of such dispersals abound in Pueblo oral traditions, for movement, as well as careful management of sparse water supplies, were central to sustainability. Climate change did not, of course, “cause” people to turn to farming, or trigger the collapse of part of ancient Maya civilization during the tenth century ad, although a series of drought cycles certainly played a part. Many factors came together to cause traumatic developments such as the near-collapse of Ancient Egyptian civilization when the Nile almost dried up around 2200 bc. But there is no question that monsoon failures, caused in part by powerful El Niños, caused over a million famers to perish in India in 1877, and in northern China during the same year.

Climate change deniers claim in orgies of disinformation that recent warming is just a part of the natural fluctuations of climate we have lived through since the beginning. To claim this, often sometimes almost as an act of religious faith, flies in the face of overwhelming climatological data, which shows beyond all reasonable doubt that the current warming is humanly caused. According to experts, the future holds a much greater incidence of extreme climatic events like prolonged droughts and exceptional storms. Our forebears faced such, then rarer, extremes and provide a sobering chronicle of our increased vulnerability to climatic catastrophe. Thousands perished in the Ancient Egyptian droughts of four thousand years ago; cities like ancient Ur in southern Iraq were decimated when exceptional spring floods, triggered by melting snow and heavy rainfall far upstream, caused the Euphrates River to change course without warning. As urban populations climbed, our vulnerability to sea level rise, drought, and extreme tempests increased dramatically.

Our vulnerability in a world where tens of millions of us live at or near sea level is far greater than that of classical times or Ming China. One of the vital lessons from an understanding of ancient climate change is just how vulnerable we are today. What are our options? To evacuate millions of people in the face of impending hurricanes, to move entire cities to higher ground? How do we cope with the pressing issues of ecological refugees, fleeing from drought and food shortages? The lesson of history is simple. We have to think of climate change from a long-term perspective, and plan today for the changed world of our children and grandchildren.

Archaeology shows us that we are capable of adapting to major climate change, but the cost is rising rapidly as we look into the future. Perhaps the greatest climatic lesson from the past is that people do adapt, but often at a savage cost in lives. In the twenty-first century, we have a priceless asset: the expertise and technology to plan on a much longer term. Much of this planning has to be at the local level, where practical measures against, say, sea level rise, can be engineered with input from local stakeholders such as businesses and homeowners. Our inclination is to shrug and talk of catastrophic changes being far into the future. But the more forward looking actions we take now, the cheaper and more achievable our adaptations will prove. Unfortunately, we live in a society raised on short-term thinking and preoccupied with short-term election cycles. Fortunately, there are some individuals, local authorities, and governments who are thinking ahead. After all, sea defenses have been a priority in the Netherlands for over a thousand years. The Dutch plan for the long-term accordingly, but at vast cost.

Every nation has a past, which makes it was it is. The same past can be manipulated to justify its existence and its relationship to others. Inevitably, archaeology, like history, becomes involved in the agendas of politics, and its ideologies. The historian Eric Hobsbawm once remarked that historians were to nationalism what poppy growers are to heroin addicts. “We supply the essential raw material for the market.” Archaeologists do the same. Today, the modern nation-state is the predominant political form across the globe, with nationalism always at its side. As a consequence, many modern approaches to the past are permeated with nationalist ideologies. Very often such approaches invoke invented national mythologies and mysticism. Claims that the ancient Medes are direct ancestors of modern-day Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, or that the roots of Hindu nationalists lie in the Indus civilization of present-day Pakistan four thousand years ago, cannot be supported by conventional scholarship, but this is irrelevant to the people who create such tales of the past, like climate deniers, almost as religious belief. Similar stories are, of course, told in Europe and America.

Such accounts draw on the nation’s imagined ancestral past, linking past peoples with modern-day cultural, “racial”, or “ethnic” groups on the basis of belief rather than science. Archaeologists take it as their responsibility to highlight and challenge examples when the past is taken and warped to suit a political or religious agenda. For example, generations of authors, filmmakers, and scholars have described “The Vikings” as ferocious, rapacious warriors set on conquest and wealth, who emerged from their Scandinavian fjords on bold voyages of discovery and adventure. And, of course, all the heroes are men, with women nowhere to be seen, except as romantic interests. These lingering stereotypes go back to nationalist-inspired romanticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which envisaged a brave England whose people pulled together against relentless, evil foreign invaders. Fortunately, Scandinavian scholars are setting the historical record straight with far more nuanced, and accurate long-term research. Their portraits of Norse society include both peaceful trade and the roles of women.

Nation-states require a past, so it should come as little surprise that exploited and dominated countries were often denied theirs. To many people in the west, even in these increasingly global and multicultural days, history still begins with European contact—in South America with Hernan Cortés and his conquistadors as they gazed on Tenochtitlán, the stupendous capital of the Aztecs in the Valley of Mexico, in 1519. In the United States, perhaps a mention will be given to the Norse, but ultimately it all began with the Pilgrim Fathers. Even half a century ago, most history curricula in Britain started with William the Conqueror and the Norman Conquest of 1066. In Central Africa, the history books of the 1950s began with the statement that in 1855, the missionary explorer David Livingstone “discovered” the Victoria Falls and the peoples of the far African interior. Even archaeologists tended to think of a history of “them” and “us,” something that was long the case with studying the archaeology of ancient Native American societies in the United States and indigenous peoples in other countries. Circumstances have changed profoundly in recent years, with the passage of federal and state legislation that mandate the repatriation of Native American skeletons for reburial. My early career in Zambia involved excavating archaeological sites that chronicled the hitherto unrecorded history of people who lived there a thousand years or more before David Livingstone.

Today, however, a thriving approach to the past known collectively as “indigenous archaeology” works to develop active and meaningful collaborative relationships with descent groups and local communities as a way to build a more inclusive past. These collaborations unfold throughout a project, from the moment of the first idea, and last through to the conservation and sharing of archaeological findings. This works particularly well in former colonies whose indigenous histories were once ignored, dismissed, hijacked, or completely misinterpreted by westerners. There are many examples of such projects especially in the Americas, Australia, and Africa.

One example is the Chocolá Project in Guatemala, which involves excavations of a long-lived ancient Maya city, occupied between 1000 bc and ad 200. A traditional archaeological attitude to the Maya was that the society collapsed and vanished, but in fact—despite the recent genocides—an estimated six million Maya, with their distinct cultural and linguistic heritage, still live throughout Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and Honduras. The archaeologists of the Chocolá Project, like Jonathan Kaplan and his Guatemalan colleagues, work alongside the local Maya community, and seek to integrate local knowledge, perspectives, history and ideas into what is otherwise a science-based enterprise. Rather than charging into the area and taking away archaeological goodies, or even building a “park” for the enjoyment of western tourists, the project has community development, and uncovering the past for the benefit of the locals, at its core.

For all the political ideologies that divide us, we are all stakeholders in the past. Our stakes lie in the minute details of a suburban neighborhood or a cemetery of plague victims, or a long-forgotten disaster, which can inspire a special, sometimes passionate, and sometimes very personal, interest in what we unearth. But there’s another point that we often miss. All of us, wherever our ancestors come from, are participants in the broad sweep of the human past.

Cultural tourism has created major challenges for archaeologists. The cruise ship and the jumbo jet have unleashed a torrent of visitors on archaeological sites large and small, ranging from the stone circles at Avebury and Stonehenge to Egypt’s Pyramids of Giza, the Minoan Palace of Knossos on Crete, and the Parthenon. Group tours flock to the plazas and pyramids of Tikal in Guatemala. The terracotta regiment that protects the sepulcher of the first Chinese emperor Shihuangdi attracts tens of thousands of visitors annually (Figure 5).

Over two million visitors visited Cambodia’s Angkor Wat in 2018, the stupendous Khmer palace and temple that is on every ambitious traveler’s bucket list. Obviously, cultural tourism has major economic value to countries like Cambodia, Egypt, Guatemala, and Mexico, but, for all the will in the world, the amount these countries have to spend on conservation is inadequate. For instance, many of the pharaohs’ tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Upper Egypt are so saturated with crowds of sweating visitors filing through their narrow defiles that you can literally see the paint peeling off the carved and painted walls. Likewise, cave paintings in caverns like Altamira in Spain and Lascaux in southwestern France are much faded and have mold problems since their discovery thanks to similar human pollution. Elsewhere, childish graffiti adorn rock engravings in California, while San hunter-gatherer art on South African rock shelter walls—dating to the past 3,000 years or more—is endangered by neglect and a lack of funds for protective fencing. Our very presence, our breath and perspiration, as well as footprints, are creating long-term problems.

Managing what are often called “cultural resources” involves a difficult balancing act between contributing to world culture by exposing the public to these sites, while supporting national economies, while also ensuring the longevity of these unique locations. How should we manage these sites? Can the public enjoy their past without destroying it? Does one build replicas, or steer people to alternative, lesser known sites? Or does one close them forever? None of these options are attractive. The debate continues.

Cultural heritage is universal. It is much more than a single site, like Ireland’s New Grange burial mound, or even an entire abandoned city such as Amarna or Naucratis in Egypt. It’s not simply an interest in recording or protecting the material culture of a site such as the city of Teotihuacán or Colonial Jamestown, but it also extends to cultural or sometimes sacred places in the widest sense of the world. Different people, groups, societies, have profoundly diverse perspectives on the past and on what archaeology means to them. The Dreamtime cherished by Australian Aborigines is a classic example of the importance of conserving the intangible spiritual world of powerful forces and mythic creatures for future generations. Much of the Dreamtime has left no material trace, but the giant Uluru sandstone rock in Central Australia, sometimes called Ayers Rock, is a powerful symbol of the revered intangible. Uluru and its surroundings support numerous springs, waterholes, caves and rock paintings. Uluru is sacred to the local Pitjantjatjara Anangu people, who believe that the spirits of ancestral beings, Tjukuritja, still live around the rock. Generations of tourists have climbed Uluru, but the local people have now wisely closed it to visitors because of its powerful spiritual associations.

The past surrounds us on every side, offering guidance and precedents, warnings, and sometimes reassurance. Archaeology is not in the prophecy business, but it gives humanity a past. The fleeting, intimate glances of ancient times remind us that we modern people share many behavioral traits with our diverse ancestors. Our research provides some guidance, for understanding why we are different and why we are similar. It’s a powerful weapon against bigotry and doctrines of racial superiority.

Many of archaeology’s priorities will change significantly in the near- and long-term future. While a decent portion of archaeological work will still be driven by university research and building developments, there will likely be far greater overall global stress on heritage management and tourism, with all the conservation and outreach activities that this implies. We are in many respects fighting for archaeology’s survival.

Is archaeology important in today’s industrialized world? Surely it matters even more than ever. We are achieving understandings of ancient human behavior, and of diversity that were unimaginable a few decades ago. If we lose our priceless heritage to greed and vandalism, warfare and industrial activity or promiscuous construction, we lose our credibility as thinking human beings. We owe the past not only to ourselves and to still unborn generations, but to those who created it. The only way we can know ourselves is to understand our past. As the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould once remarked, we all come from the same human twig. Archaeology celebrates this reality, which is why it matters.