Funding cuts to U.S. Archaeology Could Imperil Discipline’s Future

An analysis of cancelled and curtailed federal grants reveals hits to research, collections, and training (Taylor Mitchell Brown, 'Funding cuts to U.S. archaeology could imperil field’s future', Science [ Vol 388, Issue 6753] 18 Jun 2025O). In the US:

archaeology has always survived on a trickle of federal funding. But it has not escaped cuts by the administration of President Donald Trump, which has halted or slowed research on past cultures and human origins and choked off spending on training and scholarship, jeopardizing the future of the field in the United States, researchers say.

Some of the excuses offered by the US officials sound pretty dystopian. One piece of research was cut because in the view of MAGA policy-makers it "advanced “woke DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) objectives". Another aiming to reconstruct the social and political networks of the Classic Maya kingdoms was said to "represent neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda” (what's the betting by somebody who has not the slightest inkling of what Marx actually wrote as it turns out many MAGAmericans bandying the M-term about actually do not).

Ari Caramanica, an archaeologist at Vanderbilt University[...] says the cuts represent “an event that will mark ‘before’ and ‘after’ times; it’s existential, and it’s a completely novel disruption to our work with no foreseeable remedy”.