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Anthropological archaeologists are committed to achieving scientific understandings of complex social processes that operate on centennial or millennial scales, notably including segments of societies that are absent from or underreported in recorded history. Many, including us, also believe that this research on the past should also have the potential to inform social action in the present for the future.
Recent articles in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and American Antiquity (Kintigh et al. 2014a, 2014b) propose a set of 25 grand challenges for archaeology intended to represent the most compelling questions facing our discipline. The challenges include, for example, “Why and how do social inequalities emerge, grow, persist, and diminish, and with what consequences?” and “How do humans perceive and react to changes in climate and the natural environment over short and long terms?” The challenges do not focus on new discoveries, nor are they peculiarly archaeological; rather, they address major issues in the social sciences. Answers to these challenges will not and cannot emerge through intensive study of individual cases. Instead, they require research that synthesizes data and information—from a region, a hemisphere, or even the globe—to achieve knowledge that includes novel understandings of fundamentally important social processes (Kintigh et al. 2014a:5). Other scholars working at regional and macroregional scales have similarly recognized the need to integrate diverse sources of data (e.g., Arbuckle et al. 2014; McKechnie et al. 2014; Manning et al. 2016; Mills et al. 2013).
WHAT SYNTHESIS REQUIRES
Achieving the kinds of synthesis envisioned here requires the resolution of both technical and social problems (explored initially in Kintigh 2006 and Kintigh et al. 2015 and in more detail in Altschul et al. 2017, nd). This article focuses on one particular problem, achieving effective integration of data across multiple datasets. By data integration, we mean the process of transforming datasets that were recorded in different ways into a single, unified dataset with analytically comparable observations.
The Need to Integrate Primary Data
Synthetic research on the scale that grand challenges require entails deriving and comparing data-driven interpretations of primary data recovered by other archaeological projects. Today, syntheses are too often based on the data summaries and conclusions drawn by the original researchers. While this mode of synthesis...