This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology’s most important scientific challenges? Starting with a crowd-sourced query directed broadly to the professional community of archaeologists, the authors augmented, prioritized, and refined the responses during a two-day workshop focused specifically on this question. The resulting 25 “grand challenges” focus on dynamic cultural processes and the operation of coupled human and natural systems. We organize these challenges into five topics: (1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behavior, and identity; and (5) human-environment interactions. A discussion and a brief list of references accompany each question. An important goal in identifying these challenges is to inform decisions on infrastructure investments for archaeology. Our premise is that the highest priority investments should enable us to address the most important questions. Addressing many of these challenges will require both sophisticated modeling and large-scale synthetic research that are only now becoming possible. Although new archaeological fieldwork will be essential, the greatest pay off will derive from investments that provide sophisticated research access to the explosion in systematically collected archaeological data that has occurred over the last several decades.

The American Northwest Coast, famously rich as an environment for hunter-gatherers, is not an easy landscape to inhabit. Field survey of the Tebenkof Bay region, Kuiu Island, southeast Alaska, identifies the pattern of site positions. Mathematical modelling explores which considerations directed the placing of settlements in that landscape.

It has been apparent for some time that the overbearingly rich ethnographic record from the west coast has had an almost numbing effect on thinking about later prehistory from Alaska to the Mexican border. ‘The tyranny of the ethnographic record’ has been a war-cry in archaeology for some time, so there is nothing new in this observation. ‘I hear very little about olden times’, said Franz Boas of the Kwakiutl as long ago as the 1880s, but the archaeologists that followed in his footsteps seem to have forgotten his remark. There has been a tendency to think of the ethnographic record of the 17th-19th centuries AD as a true record of the state of native American society along the west coast before European contact. As Maschner and Ames point out in their papers, nothing could be further from the truth. Ann Ramenovsky (1984), among others, has pointed out that indigenous populations were decimated by smallpox and other infectious diseases very soon after contact, and sometimes even before actual physical meetings with the newcomers. Some of the elaborate cultures observed by Boas and others were, in themselves, responses to changing conditions. The elaboration of the Northwest potlatch is, of course, a well known example of this phenomenon. Here, Ames and Maschner point out that populations may already have been in decline prior to Columbus.

The northern Northwest Coast supported some of the most socially complex hunting and gathering societies on the Pacific Coast. The Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian of this region share a rich ethnographic history that reveals hereditary social ranking, sedentary villages, intensive warfare, part-time craft specialization and dense populations. Models developed to explain the origins of social and political complexity among these groups have covered the gamut of theories presented for the rise of complexity in state level societies. As will be demonstrated, not only have archaeologists failed to present a theory that explains the rangeof variability in the data, but on the northern Northwest Coast, the actual timing of the origins of political complexity is suspect.