The Role of Ancient DNA Research in Archaeology
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The Role of Ancient DNA Research in Archaeology Stephen M. Downes1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract In this paper I briefly introduce work on ancient-DNA (aDNA) and give some examples of the impact this work has had on responses to questions in archaeology. Next, I spell out David Reich’s reasons for his optimism about the contribution aDNA research makes to archaeology. I then use Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie’s framework to offer an alternative to Reich’s view of relations between aDNA research and archaeology. Finally, I develop Steven Mithen’s point about the different questions archaeologists and geneticists ask, arguing that different disciplinary perspectives color researchers’ perceptions of “the most important questions” or the “central topics” in a field. I conclude that evidence from aDNA research cannot solve archaeological disputes without closer, mutually respectful collaboration between aDNA researchers and archaeologists. Ancient DNA data, like radiocarbon data, is not a silver bullet for problems in archaeology. Keywords Archaeology · Ancient DNA · Genetics
1 Introduction Since the first nuclear genome sequencing of ancient human DNA (Rasmussen et al. 2010), geneticists have been championing the importance of ancient-DNA work for archaeology. David Reich (2018) claims that the contribution of ancient-DNA work will be “far more revolutionary” for archaeology than the contribution of radiocarbon dating. Reich, among others, claims that ancient-DNA work has already resolved long standing disputes in archaeology and that it is only a matter of time before all archaeologists rely on ancient-DNA in their work. Some archaeologists are on board and share Reich’s optimism but others call for a careful, case by case approach to integrating ancient-DNA data into archaeology (see Callaway 2018 for an overview of this debate). Other archaeologists see the value in ancient-DNA evidence but doubt it has applicability to all archaeological questions (Callaway 2018). Steven Mithen, for example, says that Reich and others’ work does a good job of answering the question of how we got here but that “there remains a place after all for archaeology, anthropology and history in telling us who we are, and who we would like to * Stephen M. Downes [email protected] 1
Philosophy Department, University of Utah, 201 S. Central Campus Drive, #402, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA
be” (2018). Archaeologists are interested in who the ancient peoples they study were and what they were like. Given this, for many researchers non-aDNA archaeology continues to serve as an inferential window into past peoples. Further, archaeologists are also interested in how the peoples they study thought, which is not obviously accessed via aDNA techniques (see e.g. Currie and Killin 2019). There is always a rhetoric of optimism associated with the introduction of new technological resources into an existing established scientific practice. Archaeology is no stranger to this phenomenon; the introduction of radiocarbon dating was accompa
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