Planning Archaeological Infrastructure for Integrative Science

科学的一个基本挑战是理解形成人类社会如何相互作用的过程，并解释社会如何同时受到其所处自然环境的制约并改变其所处自然环境。由于相互作用的复杂性，实现这些理解必须被视为一项广泛涉及社会、行为和经济科学以及一系列自然科学的共同事业。其中一些过程受到可以在几天、几个月或几年的时间里很容易观察到的事件的强烈影响。其他重要的过程运行缓慢——需要几个世纪或几千年——它们的影响在当今或历史上的观测中往往无法检测到。因为考古学经常是关于人类社会及其环境的长期科学数据的唯一来源，我们必须利用考古学所能提供的独特信息。事实上，重建的考古序列可以被看作是在不同的社会和自然环境中进行的社会和环境过程的长期运作中完成的“实验”。系统的考古研究已经进行了一个多世纪。仅在美国，每年就有数千个考古现场项目进行。这些项目记录了大量的考古和环境数据，除了出版的文章和书籍外，还产生了冗长的报告。然而，绝大多数情况下，这些信息并不容易获得学者。即使它是可访问的，数据的复杂性——很大程度上是由于它记录的人类行为的巨大多样性——使得在社会和环境动态的综合研究背景下使用它极其困难。为了推进这一重要的研究议程，必须极大地扩大考古数据的可用性，开发和实施计算方法，使综合研究能够有效地利用这一巨大的数据和文件库。该项目的目标是制定一项计划，详细说明国家科学基金会在考古信息基础设施方面的主要投资如何能最好地提高科学界在社会和环境动态综合研究中使用考古数据的能力，从而更广泛地服务于当代社会的需求。这一目标将通过由指导委员会协调的连续两次小型会议来实现，指导委员会将选择会议参与者并制定议程。根据会议结果，指导委员会将编写一份报告，详细说明考古领域大量基础设施投资的需求和预期收益，并描述和提供拟议投资的预算概算。

A fundamental challenge of science is to understand the processes that shape how human societies interact with one another and that explain how societies are, at once, constrained by and change the natural environments in which they are situated. Because of the complexity of the interactions, achieving these understandings must be seen as a shared enterprise that broadly engages social, behavioral, and economic sciences, as well as a range of natural sciences. Some of these processes are strongly influenced by events that can be readily observed over periods of days, months, or years. Other important processes operate slowly - over centuries or millennia - and their effects often cannot be detected in present-day or historical observations. Because archaeology is frequently the only source of long-term scientific data on human societies and their environments, it is essential that we take advantage of the unique information that archaeology can provide. Indeed, reconstructed archaeological sequences can be seen as completed "experiments" in the long-term operation of social and environmental processes played out in diverse social and natural environments. Systematic archaeological research has been conducted for more than a century. In the US alone, thousands of archaeological field projects are now conducted each year. These projects record large amounts of archaeological and environmental data and produce lengthy reports, in addition to published articles and books. However, overwhelmingly, this information is not readily accessible to scholars. Even if it were accessible, the complexity of the data - due in large part to the enormous diversity of the human behavior it documents - make it extremely difficult to use in the context of synthetic research on social and environmental dynamics. To move forward on this important research agenda, the availability of archaeological data must be enormously expanded and computational methods developed and implemented that make it possible for synthetic research to effectively exploit this huge reservoir of data and documents.The goal of this project is to develop a plan that would detail how major investments by NSF in the information infrastructure of archaeology could best improve the scientific community's ability to use archaeological data in synthetic research on social and environmental dynamics and thereby serve the needs of contemporary society more broadly. This goal will be achieved by a sequence of two small conferences coordinated by a steering committee that will select the conference participants and set the agendas. Based on the conference outcomes, the steering committee will produce a report that details the needs for and expected benefits of substantial infrastructure investments in archaeology and that describes and provides budget estimates for the proposed investments.