Alas, the most important development to hit archaeology in the last 25 years is one we archaeologists can be credited only with shamelessly (and sometimes naively) exploiting. THAT’S THE ADVENT OF ARCHAEOLOGY AT THE MOLECULAR LEVEL. Thanks to our brethren in genetics, chemistry, and physics, we can now track population lineages in ancient DNA, reconstruct diet and local environment from a suite of stable isotopes, and use particle accelerators to determine the age of specks of organic material with astonishing precision.

WHERE MOLECULAR RESEARCH MIGHT TAKE ARCHAEOLOGY in the next 25 years will depend in part on buffeting winds that have followed a global upsurge in native rights. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, and legislation like it in other countries with large indigenous populations, is changing the relationship between archaeologists and the people whose ancestors we study. In some high-profile cases this has prevented the application of techniques like the analysis of ancient DNA, which stands poised to finally answer questions we’ve been asking for a very long time, like: Who are we? And how do we relate to one another? Some argue that native rights will be the death of archaeology. I’m not that pessimistic. Our kind will be around 25 years hence. But I would soothsay that the business of doing archaeology will be very different.

David J. Meltzer, professor of prehistory,
Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University

IN THE LAST 25 YEARS
the discovery of Homo floresiensis, the miniature-size humans from the remote Indonesian island of Flores, is genuinely unique. Never before has a fundamentally different kind of human being been found who lived at the same time as our own species, Homo sapiens. That raises an intriguing question: Is there truth after all in the many stories from many lands of other humans, extralarge or extrasmall, living in the mountains or the forests, which have been dismissed as myths and fantasies? One can hazard guesses from past experience about

future discoveries, but those that change everything—like Flores—are unexpected. Of predictable discoveries, one can forecast several: another great Ice Age painted cave like Lascaux or Chauvet; a rich Egyptian burial, perhaps as fine as Tutankhamen’s; an ancient city buried under sediment in the valley of one of the great west Asian rivers; and a rich cache under the heart of a great Mesoamerican city.


Christopher Chippindale,
curator, University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

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