Opinion: Fostering synthesis in archaeology to advance science and benefit society.

In 1966 the US Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act. Its intent: to ensure that the values embedded in historic buildings, archaeological sites, and other important places of the past honored all Americans in ways that would inspire and motivate present and future generations. In the intervening 50 years, archaeologists have diligently discovered, documented, analyzed, and curated our collective past. However, this rich store of data has untapped potential beyond documenting long-term trajectories of numerous human societies. Archaeological data can be key to expanding scientific understandings of human social dynamics, redressing injustices of the past, empowering local and descendant communities, and aiding in the formulation of solutions to contemporary problems. Collaborative synthetic research, as practiced in ecology and other sciences, has been a powerful driver for advancing interdisciplinary science. But to utilize these advances, archaeologists, as a community, need a means to bring disparate datasets together and interpret them. This entails creating a vehicle by which collaborative synthetic research becomes a routine and institutionalized practice in archaeology—a budding effort we call the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis. It’s an initiative that will not only benefit the discipline but will also enable researchers to communicate to the public the richly detailed stories of humanity itself.