Local and community action with global scope: a response to Davies & Lunn-Rockliffe

Davies and Lunn-Rockliffe (2026) acknowledge that many archaeologists feel they have something valuable to contribute to the major global challenges of the twenty-first century but often fail to achieve a space, or a stable influence, at the policymaking table.In addition, there is an awareness that little action stems from the collaborations with policymakers that do take place.The suggestion of reversed historical directionality is compelling and here I discuss implementing this idea with a firmer focus on local communities rather than policymakers.While archaeologists excel at producing robust datasets, deep-time reconstructions and past case studies, these outputs do not always connect in a grounded way with contemporary stakeholders.The relevance and practical impact for policy, community priorities and socioecological outcomes have therefore been limited.To address this, Davies and Lunn-Rockliffe argue that we must reverse the discipline's temporal directionality.The crux of this idea being transdisciplinary archaeological research that starts not with past data alone but with present and future challenges, with community-defined priorities, and then tracing backwards through temporal processes to understand how we got here.What this may mean in practice includes an expanded understanding of contemporary structure and how policymakers respond to unfolding crises.The authors set out that this could foster a dynamic, future-facing dialogue capable of generating actionable insight.As Davies and Lunn-Rockliffe point out, there have been many calls for greater integration of archaeological work within policy that approaches global challenges such as climate change, sustainable development, biodiversity loss, inequality and more, including by this author (Kerr 2020).Where many earlier appeals have fallen flat is in the lack of actionable details.The reasons for this limitation are clear.Our discipline is inherently multi-and interdisciplinary; indeed, my own research is very different from Davies and Lunn-Rockliffe in terms of geographic region, temporal focus, methodological approach and theoretical framing.Therefore, putting forward concrete ways for archaeology at large to do something as ambitious as tackle global challenges may simply not make sense to vast numbers of colleagues.However, a strength of Davies and Lunn-Rockliffe's contribution is their offering of a research design that is actionable and