Relevance and the Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly agreed 17 ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifying 2030 as the year by which they should be achieved. As we begin 2022—halfway to that deadline—how have archaeologists engaged with the SDGs to date and how might these activities develop in the future? The recent International Co-Sponsored Meeting on Culture, Heritage and Climate Change, jointly convened by UNESCO, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), held in December 2021, provides a good starting point for consideration. Focused on the themes of Knowledge Systems, Impacts and Solutions, the meeting's mission was to “undertake shared inquiry into fully integrating culture and heritage with global climate science and response”.Footnote ¹ The discussions of the 154 invited delegates—policymakers, practitioners and academics—inevitably referenced the UN's SDGs but, despite the broad heritage remit of the meeting, only 16 of the participants flagged archaeological expertise on their personal profiles. This depressingly low number reflects a broader reality observed by a growing number of archaeologists that the discipline has yet to communicate to the wider world its full relevance in the tackling of pressing global challenges.Footnote ²

Antiquity's own pages have recently featured contributions by two of the small group of archaeologists who participated in that December 2021 UNESCO-ICOMOS-IPCC meeting: Michael E. Smith and Shadreck Chirikure. Instigating an Antiquity debate on the relevance of archaeology, the former argued that “We cannot be content to keep telling ourselves, in journals only read by other archaeologists, that our results are relevant to global challenges”, going on to remark that archaeology's “relevance will not be realised until we do the hard work of producing scientific results—including transdisciplinary research—and making sure that they reach the relevant social and natural scientists”.Footnote ³ In one of several invited responses, Chirikure concurred that studies of culture-histories, ceramic designs and stone-tool typologies were unlikely to “earn archaeologists invitations to the Global Challenges agenda-setting table at the UN and other fora”. What is needed, he argued, is an even more fundamental overhaul of the discipline, including greater clarity about our target audiences, among which must be decision-makers at governmental and inter-governmental levels. If archaeology is to come anywhere near what is required to address global challenges in Africa or elsewhere, the discipline “must go beyond the self-interested concerns of individual researchers to align with societal needs and expectations in both research and teaching.”Footnote ⁴ The SDGs provide one framework through which archaeologists might engage with these calls for action.

The 17 SDGs have been adopted by all 193 member states of the UN and are enshrined within the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. They address issues as diverse and fundamental as ending poverty and gender inequality, combatting climate change and promoting access to energy and education (Figure 1). Each of the SDGs is linked to a series of targets—169 in total—with the stated ambition to “mobilize the means required to implement this Agenda through a revitalised Global Partnership for Sustainable Development, based on a spirit of strengthened global solidarity, focussed in particular on the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable and with the participation of all countries, all stakeholders and all people”.Footnote ⁵ Archaeology is not directly mentioned in relation to any of the goals, or their associated targets, though cultural heritage more broadly is embedded within Target 11.4, which aims to “strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world's cultural and natural heritage”.⁵ The potential and significance of cultural heritage in this context is summarised by Joyti Hasngarahar, Deputy Director of UNESCO's World Heritage Centre: “Cultural heritage—both tangible and intangible—and creativity are resources that need to be protected and carefully managed. They can serve both as drivers for achieving the SDGs as well as enablers, when culture-forward solutions can ensure the success of interventions to achieve the SDGs”.Footnote ⁶

Figure 1.

The UN's Sustainable Development Goals (https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/news/communications-material/).

The SDGs are intended to be universal but many state parties and regional organisations have developed their own specific strategies to contribute towards them. The African Union's ‘Agenda 2063’, for example, maps some of its own goals and priority areas against the SDGs, including the role of heritage in Africa's cultural renaissance.Footnote ⁷ In relation to research funding, the EU's Horizon Europe scheme seeks to link the SDGs and in the UK, between 2016 and 2021, the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) sought to prioritise funding of programmes intended to:

• • promote challenge-led (inter)disciplinary research, encouraging researchers who may not previously have considered the relevance of their work for sustainable development;

• • strengthen capacity for research, innovation and knowledge exchange in the UK and developing countries through partnership; and

• • provide an agile response to emergencies with urgent research needs.Footnote ⁸

In connection with the establishment of the GCRF, the British Academy released a report, Reflections on archaeology, which built on a series of roundtables with the following prompts: ‘What archaeology is, what it does and how it tackles global challenges and global questions’, ‘The educational landscape of archaeology across the life course’ and ‘Speaking for the discipline’. With reference to the potential contribution of archaeology to achieving the UK government's global challenges, and the potential for archaeologists to apply for GCRF funding, the authors concluded that “Archaeological research is transforming our understanding of the human past and in the process contributing to addressing global challenges such as health problems, clean energy, sustainable agriculture, conflict and humanitarian action, and foundations for inclusive growth” (Figure 2).Footnote ⁹

Figure 2.

Archaeologists, geoarchaeologists, architects, Sanskritists and structural engineers collaborate to reveal the structural history of the Kasthamandap, in Kathmandu, following its collapse during the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake; work to record the structure's seismic adaptation techniques contributes to SDG11. Funded by the British Academy's GCRF Cities and Infrastructure Programme (CI170241), National Geographic Society Conservation Award (#C333-16), AHRC-GCRF (AH/P006256/1) and UNESCO (contracts #4500283215 & #4500318125) (photograph ©Durham UNESCO Chair).

In view of this early and positive assessment of archaeology and SDGs, it is instructive to review the footprint of the discipline in the 2021 Heritage for Global Challenges report, prepared by PRAXIS: Arts and Humanities for Global Development Group of the University of Leeds.Footnote ¹⁰ The authors identify 87 heritage-related awards by the main GCRF funders for the period 2014–2021. Of these, only 26 list archaeology as a research theme and only 21 of these have an archaeologist as Principal Investigator. Archaeologists have been even less successful at attracting awards from the British Academy's ‘Humanities and Social Sciences Tackling Global Challenges’ programme. Designed to “support research projects that bring original interdisciplinary research ideas from the humanities and social sciences to bear on our understanding of the challenges and opportunities that people, cultures, societies and economies face in the Global South”,Footnote ¹¹ only one team from the portfolio of 49 awards made in 2021 includes UK-based archaeologists.

How do we explain UK archaeology's low profile within heritage-related programmes, given the great potential identified by so many archaeological commentators? Is it possible that some researchers were deterred from applying for GCRF funding, as it was, in fact, Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) monies diverted from other aid programmes? Indeed, to apply for such funding, the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) required applicants to submit ODA compliance statements covering three areas:

• • Which country/countries on the DACFootnote ¹² list will directly benefit from this proposal?

• • How is your proposal relevant to the development challenges of these countries?

• • How do you expect that the outcome of your proposed activities will promote the economic development and welfare of these countries?

• • What approaches will you use to deliver development impact within the lifetime of the project and in the longer-term?Footnote ¹³

These are sobering prompts, rightly reflecting the ODA origins of the funding, but perhaps reinforcing the difficulties of applicants mapping their archaeological research against unfamiliar and ambitious global goals. Certainly, the ethical reticence of some researchers to engage with the re-direction of ODA funding finds traction in the conclusions of a critical review of the GCRF-aligned Newton Fund, prepared by the Independent Commission for Aid. The review found, for example, that “development impact was often seen as an add-on” and that 90 per cent of the ODA-compliant funding was actually spent within the UK.Footnote ¹⁴

The limited engagement of UK archaeologists with GCRF reflects a broader picture whereby the SDGs are rarely referenced by name in international archaeological publications. While Antiquity has hosted a recent debate on ‘Sustainable archaeology’,Footnote ¹⁵ for example, none of the contributors mentioned the SDGs, let alone specific goals. Recent issues of the European Journal of Archaeology and American Antiquity demonstrate a similar lack of reference.Footnote ¹⁶ Hence, although without doubt, many archaeologists are directly engaged with a range of sustainable development research,Footnote ¹⁷ it is much less common for them to articulate this work in relation to the SDGs, either generally or specifically (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Living goddess Kumari sanctifies timber columns prior to their installation during the reconstruction of the Kasthamandap. Community, artisans and specialists combine the results of archaeological excavation and structural analysis with local knowledge systems to contribute to SDG17. https://unesco.org.uk/heritage-disaster-response-and-resilience-brief-report/ (photograph ©Kai Weise).

Of the sustainable development-related research undertaken to date, much concerns environmental archaeology and hence issues of food production and landscape management.Footnote ¹⁸ Other archaeological projects have focused on community engagement and income generation through cultural tourism, although in practice the success of such projects may be jeopardised by political instability or sudden funding cuts (such as those made by the UK government in 2021 to the GCRF, with active projects left unfunded mid-award); often the benefits are drained away from local populations.Footnote ¹⁹

The question remains: what can or should we do as archaeologists to advance the SDG agenda? A 2020 report by the British Council, The missing pillar: culture's contribution to the UN Sustainable Development Goals makes some specific suggestions. Even if archaeology is notable by its absence from this report—other than in the form of photographs—its authors offer recommendations which are as applicable to archaeologists as to others working within the heritage sector. The following recommendations are intended to ensure that cultural contributions towards sustainable development can be more effectively recognised and encouraged:

• • Adopt the language of the SDGs;

• • Develop training programmes that highlight the role of arts and culture in the SDGs;

• • Work with community members and partners in developing, delivering and evaluating cultural initiatives;

• • Advocate for specific outcomes that respond to individual SDGs through arts and culture;

• • Select key targets and indicators to prioritise throughout projects;

• • Collect baseline data to better monitor impact and recognise the need for longitudinal evaluations;

• • Monitor stakeholder, media and digital engagement;

• • Leverage digital technologies to increase engagement with the SDGs; and

• • Address climate change as a cross-cutting theme.Footnote ²⁰

For many archaeologists, the feasibility of co-designing potentially fundable projects that address all of these requirements, at the same time as engaging with specific SDGs, delivering effective engagement with stakeholders and decision makers, and satisfying the changing requirements of funding bodies, may appear remote. They are, however, possible, as demonstrated by the archaeological case studies highlighted by the British Academy, the UK National Commission for UNESCO and PRAXIS.

While it may be tempting for many archaeologists to maintain their distance from the SDGs and any linked funding schemes, such as the GCRF, in practice, they now form a key part of the world in which we find ourselves working. In July 2021, for example, the UK Government announced that it “is committed to the delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals. The most effective way to do this is by ensuring that the Goals are fully embedded in planned activity of each Government department”.Footnote ²¹ Meanwhile, the Times Higher Education has started publishing SDG Impact Rankings for global universitiesFootnote ²² and many institutions now look to map their education, research and wider student experience against the SDGs. It is through all of the initiatives and incentives outlined here that archaeology can move beyond the assertion of its relevance, in order to realise its full potential to contribute to some of the most pressing global issues through its teaching, research and practice.

Project Gallery at 20

Regular Antiquity readers will be familiar with our Project Gallery and its short, online-only article format. The origins of the Project Gallery can be traced to the ‘Notes and News’ contributions that featured in the very first issue of Antiquity in 1927. Originally scattered through each issue as typesetting allowed, these short articles were later consolidated into a section of their own. By 2000, with the addition of colour figures, these contributions began to resemble the current format. The real transformation, however, came in 2003 when editor Martin Carver renamed the feature the ‘Project Gallery’ and moved publication from the printed journal to the Antiquity website (www.antiquity.ac.uk). These changes provided the opportunity for faster publication and for experimentation with new digital formats, such as video and audio. As these online articles were, from the outset, made free to access, the Project Gallery also greatly increased the availability of Antiquity content, including for those without access to a subscription. Perhaps, not coincidentally, this format played an important role in attracting more submissions from scholars based in Africa, Asia and South America, allowing Antiquity to feature a wider range of archaeological research from a broader group of authors. In more recent years, the Project Gallery has continued to evolve. With our October 2016 issue, publication of Project Gallery articles moved from our own website to Cambridge Core, the online platform of our publishing partner Cambridge University Press (www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity). This provides a long-term home for new Project Gallery articles, which now once again appear alongside the rest of the journal's content. Other developments include the allocation of DOI numbers to aid both discoverability and citation, an extended word count (1500 words) to allow authors to elaborate on their research, and a more formal, external peer-review process to ensure the rigour and quality of content.

With all new Project Gallery articles now appearing on Cambridge Core, there remains an archive of more than 500 Project Gallery articles published between 2003 and 2016 in an HTML format on the Antiquity website. During that time, as technologies developed and the website evolved, inevitably some hyperlinks were broken and some content lost in the virtual world. In 2017, we therefore undertook work to relocate missing content and restore hyperlinks, taking the opportunity to create a more consistent page layout and provide guidance on how to cite each article. In 2022, our next step will be to transfer all this Project Gallery content from www.antiquity.ac.uk to www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity, bringing together in one place the complete 20-year Project Gallery archive alongside all of our other content. We hope this move will not only provide a long-term home for this huge collection of material but also encourage further use of the rich and diverse research it contains. To mark the twentieth anniversary of the Project Gallery, and to highlight the integral role that it now serves, this year we will also feature new Project Gallery articles in the print journal, alongside longer-format research articles and book reviews. As well as showcasing the varied research featured in the Project Gallery, we also aim to emphasise the multiple functions that its short article format has come to offer authors and readers alike—whether rapid communication of new initiatives or discoveries, updates on previously published results or, for some authors, their first opportunity to publish in an international, peer-reviewed journal.

In this issue: Project Gallery

The six new Project Gallery articles in the current issue well demonstrate the variety of research on offer. Milevski et al. report results from a Polish-Israeli project at Tel Erani. Here, the authors report on recent rescue and research excavations that give insight into the earliest phases of activity at this long-lived site, including a succession of defensive mudbrick walls and associated structures of the late fourth millennium BC. The presence of possible public buildings, or ‘proto palaces’, hints at emergent social stratification in the context of the broad cultural network that underpinned the development of Early Bronze Age urbanism in the Southern Levant.

Three of the other Project Gallery articles in this issue also deal with cities. Vidale, Berlioz & Mohammed report on Hatra and the ongoing work to repair damage inflicted by Daesh/ISIS. The ancient city became wealthy through its control of the caravan trade along the Silk Roads, flourishing in the second century AD before its destruction by the Parthians in the following century. The article focuses on iconography from a temple dedicated to the Arabian goddess Allat. One carved relief features eight camels and a crowned human head, possibly that of King Sanatruq I. Six of the animals are single-humped dromedaries—a species originating from the Arabian Peninsula and perhaps linked with Allat; the two animals closest to the royal figure, however, each appear to have two humps and have therefore long been assumed to be Bactrian camels hailing from Central Asia. Here, the authors argue that the detailed representation of these two animals suggests their reinterpretation as Bactrian-dromedary hybrids. These larger, cross-bred animals are capable of carrying heavier cargoes and are attested by contemporaneous zooarchaeological remains from elsewhere in the Middle East. Another well-known caravan city of similar date, Palmyra in Syria, is the subject of the Project Gallery article by Miranda & Raja. Also responding in part to the damage inflicted by Daesh/ISIS, the authors outline work to make available previously unpublished archives of Palmyrene funerary sculpture recorded during the early twentieth-century excavations of Harald Ingholt. As part of wider efforts to strengthen the protection and restitution of the site's cultural heritage, including the identification of lost or looted objects, the project is making available online Ingholt's detailed notes, sketches and photographs.

Moving to medieval Sudan, Drzewiecki et al. present new research on Soba, the capital of the Kingdom of Alwa between the mid-first and mid-second millennia AD. Located within the expanding suburbs of modern Khartoum, Soba was a large, multicultural city and can perhaps be understood within the same cosmopolitan framework explored by Timothy Insoll and colleagues in a recent Antiquity special section on neighbouring Ethiopia.Footnote ²³ In their contribution, Drzewiecki et al. combine geophysics and excavation with community work. Following the city's abandonment in the sixteenth century AD, the site was largely forgotten, becoming a quarry for building materials. As Sudan's modern capital city encroaches across the site, there are new threats to its preservation, but also opportunities to promote awareness of Soba's history among the local community.

Of the two other Project Gallery articles presented here, one connects back to an archaeological site that has featured in the pages of Antiquity since 1940;Footnote ²⁴ the other captures several elements that may well characterise the discipline over the coming decades. Gjermund Kolltveit takes us back to Sutton Hoo by way of Kazakhstan. A recent reappraisal of wooden objects recovered during Soviet-era excavations in the Kyzylorda region, to the east of the Aral Sea, has identified a lyre of first-millennium AD date. Detailing close similarities with musical instruments from north-western Europe, including the high-status burials at Sutton Hoo and Prittlewell in eastern England, Kollveit argues that the Kazakh lyre should be seen as part of a wider early medieval network of cultural—and musical—connections. Evidence for the movement of people, goods and ideas across the 4000km that separate southern Kazakhstan from north-western Europe is increasingly well attested.Footnote ²⁵ Building on Kolltveit's reinterpretation of the Kazakh lyre, future research may well also document the mobility of music. Finally, the Project Gallery article by Brandt et al. presents a new collaboration that seeks to advance understanding of medieval urbanism in Denmark through a citizen-science model. Commercial archaeology can generate vast quantities of material that often exceed the capacity to process and publish it all. A project based at the Natural History Museum of Denmark invites high school students to engage with a variety of archaeological science techniques, including peptide mass fingerprinting (ZooMS), and to help process morphologically unidentifiable fragments of leather and animal bone recovered from commercial excavations in Copenhagen, Odense and other Danish cities. In bringing together commercial and state archaeology units, research institutions, museums and schools in a citizen-science model, and promoting use of a suite of new archaeological techniques, the ‘Next Generation Lab’ presents a model for how various strands of the discipline can collaborate to solve practical problems, to advance research and to engage effectively with the public. We hope that you find these Project Gallery articles, and the others that we will feature in the 2022 volume, of interest and relevance.

Elsewhere in this issue

Alongside the Project Gallery, we also have our usual longer-format research articles. In this issue, we feature research spanning geographically from Peru to Mongolia and, chronologically, from the spread of agriculture through the Balkans to an ethnographic perspective on farming, and its cessation, in the Argentinian Andes. Two articles explore the long human history of alcohol consumption. Trifonov et al. re-examine a set of gold and silver tubes recovered in 1879 from the Bronze Age Maikop kurgan on the steppe edge of the northern Caucasus. These intriguing objects have attracted various interpretations, for example, as sceptres. Here, the authors reinterpret them as drinking tubes used for the communal consumption of beer. Drawing on iconography from the ancient Near East, the authors contend that the tubes—fitted with integral filters to remove impurities from the brew—formed part of collective feasts associated with the burial of high-status individuals.

Biwer et al. continue the theme of alcohol and power—with the addition of hallucinogenic substances for good measure. In the Andean Formative period, hallucinogens such as vilca (extracted from seeds of the Anadenanthera colubrina tree) were used by elites to journey to the spiritual realm, creating and maintaining social status through exclusive practices. Conversely, two millennia later, Inca leaders encouraged the mass consumption of maize beer as part of corporate strategies of control. How was this long-term transition from exclusive to inclusive social power achieved? The authors present archaeobotanical evidence from a Middle Horizon site documenting the consumption of a heady mix of molle fruit beer spiked with vilca. Consumption of this cocktail likely—health and safety regulations prevent the authors from actually confirming!—resulted in a mild psychotropic experience, which the authors argue formed an intermediate strategy between the earlier exclusive and later inclusive routes to social power. Alcohol can bring people together—the impetus to consume collectively has even been suggested as a driving force behind plant domestication and the construction of monuments.Footnote ²⁶ As these two new articles demonstrate, however, the regulation of alcohol consumption is intimately connected with the exercise of social power.

Among the other articles on offer are a long-term perspective on a one-time rival of ancient Rome, the city of Gabii, and a survey of Karakorum, the thirteenth-century AD capital of the Mongol Empire—two very different expressions of urban form and history. We also feature contributions exploring the long-distance exchange of lithic objects across Russian Karelia, Chacolithic salt production in the Balkans, a chaîne opératoire perspective on Egyptian wall reliefs, and the role of volcanic eruptions in the timing of the Neolithic Transition in the Southwest USA.

If you would like to see your own research featured in the pages of Antiquity, we warmly invite the submission of Research articles of up to 6000 words and 10 colour figures, as well as Project Gallery articles of 1500 words and six colour figures. Manuscripts should be submitted online at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/aqy. We also welcome informal enquiries about potential papers and any other suggestions for archaeological topics that we might cover in future issues; feel free to email editor@antiquity.ac.uk. Why not make 2022 the year to bring your own research to Antiquity's global audience?