10 Heated Controversies Shaking Up Ancient History (2026)

Scholars who study the ancient world are very good at disagreeing with one another. Publish a bold new argument, and it's not going to be long before someone else starts pulling it apart. And this is what this video is about. Ten debates that flared up in ancient history scholarship over this past year. In every case, somebody made a claim, and then somebody else said, Not so fast. So if you enjoy watching educated people argue about the ancient world, you've come to the right place. Let's begin with number 10. Stonehenge's astronomical prehistory. This one concerns a proposal that people marked the solstices near Stonehenge 500 years before its famous Great Stones went up. Wessex Archaeology says, They excavated Bulford between 2015 and 2017, and the team found 48 late Neolithic pits containing grooved ware pottery, animal bones, charcoal, worked flint, and objects that appeared to have been deliberately deposited there. In June 2026, Phil Harding and his colleagues proposed that two of the larger features once held substantial wooden posts. The post holes lie about 120 meters, or 394 feet, apart. Draw a line through them, and it points toward the midsummer sunrise in one direction and the midwinter sunset in the other. Fabio Silva reconstructed the ancient sky and the local horizon. According to the team, the axis through the features matches the midsummer sunrise and reciprocal midwinter sunset to within about one degree. They also pointed to a rare disc-shaped flint knife in another pit reported on or near the axis. Perhaps they suggested its circular shape had solar meaning. Bulford is roughly contemporary with Stonehenge's earliest earthwork phase, around 2950 BC, but it comes about five centuries before the great sandstone blocks, the sarsens, were erected at Stonehenge, so it has raised some eyebrows. Archaeologists like Jim Leary are not persuaded. Leary says that a deliberate alignment ought to have more than two posts. Vince Gaffney regards the idea as possible but unproven. Their objection is that a meaningful-looking line through two selected holes doesn't demonstrate design. At a site with 48 pits, why were these two chosen? Are they securely contemporary? Do they belong together? The full technical publication has still not come out. When it does, we will see if the robustness of the evidence and argumentation tips the scale in favor of this new theory. Number nine, the secret drink of Eleusis. Did the sacred drink of the Eleusinian Mysteries contain a psychedelic drug made from ergot? The Eleusinian Mysteries, as you may know, were annual initiation rites held at Eleusis, just outside of Athens, in honor of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. Initiation offered participants hope for happiness after death. For centuries, the initiates fasted, walked in procession, bathed, sacrificed, and drank a beverage called kykeion, and underwent an experience they were forbidden to reveal. The secrecy has invited plenty of speculation. One practical objection to the ergot hypothesis is that ergot can cause severe poisoning and death. A 2026 experiment says the dangerous fungus could have been treated with materials available in antiquity, removing several of the principal toxins while leaving the psychoactive compounds. Ergot is a fungus that grows on grain. Its hardened fungal bodies contain several alkaloids, some with psychoactive potential and others associated with severe poisoning. The team ground ergot into powder and treated it with lye made from wood ash, which was available in antiquity. They tested 48 preparations, and they found that a mixture containing 5% ergot left for two hours in a lye solution, with an initial pH of 12.5, no longer contained detectable amounts of the principal toxic ergot peptides they were tracking. It still contained LSA and iso-LSA, compounds with psychoactive potential. The researchers also argue that carbon dioxide and the fungal material could reduce the initial caustic alkalinity before anyone drank it. But critics of the psychedelic theory say that a possible recipe in a modern laboratory doesn't show that the sacred officials at Eleusis ever used it. Religious studies scholar Shardeh Majurinjan told LiveScience that chemical feasibility is not historical proof. The experiment did not show that the sacred officials at Eleusis used this processing method or that initiates consumed psychoactive doses during the mysteries. Majurinjan and Richard Ascoff have criticized the psychedelic Eleusis theory in general for building probability out of possibility. The new experiment has no historical underpinning. No vessel from Eleusis has yielded ergot residue. No ancient recipe exists. And no experiment has established a safe dose, tested the complete toxicology, or shown what an initiate would have experienced. That being said, ergot has appeared in a ritual context at Mas Castellar de Pontos in Spain, at a sanctuary associated with Demeter and Corey. Supporters can point to that as evidence that ergot was not a stranger to this religious world. But Spain is not exactly Greece. The experimental team notes the criticism and limits its claim to a possible ancient method. Does solving the chemical problem make ergot kikion historically credible? Or does the absence of other direct evidence leave the psychedelic Eleusis where it was before? Number 8. The Lost Temple of Elagabal. Modern Homs in Syria was in ancient times called Emessa. Emessa was known for being the birthplace and the center of worship for the god Elagabal. Elagabal was represented by a sacred stone and his cult was served by a hereditary priesthood. In 218 CE, one of those young priests became the Roman emperor we call Elagabalus. He later brought the god's worship, including the sacred stone, to Rome. Ancient texts and coins tell us that Elagabal had a monumental temple in Emessa. What they do not give us is the exact location, and archaeologists have never securely identified the building. But an archaeologist named Mamoun Abdelkarim says the temple stood beneath or near the Great Mosque of El Nouri in central Homs. Abdelkarim's case begins with restoration work at the Great Mosque in 2016. Researchers found a Greek inscription at one end of a granite column base built into the mosque. Another Greek inscription was already known on the same base. He combines those inscriptions with Roman architectural remains and the long religious history of the location, and his proposal is that a pagan sanctuary was followed at that site by a Christian church and then eventually by the mosque. But ancient building stones, including the inscriptions, could have been moved. Later builders routinely stripped columns and capitals and carved blocks from older monuments and reused them. They could have put them somewhere else. Archaeologists call this material spolia. The granite base proves that Roman monumental stone ended up in the mosque, but it doesn't tell us how, and neither inscription actually names the temple of Elagabal. Archaeologist Alex Hodge used geographical information systems and comparisons with other ancient sites to test possible locations. And the evidence from Emessa is sparse, but his analysis favors the Citadel Mount. Even Hodge calls that result provisional and says excavation would have to verify it. So, Abdul Karim has Roman remains and a possible sequence of religious rebuilding at the mosque site, and Hodge has a spatial analysis pointing to the Citadel. The argument will remain split between them until somebody finds temple foundations or cult material in its original context and connects it securely with the worship of Elagabal. I'll be curious to see where this goes. Number seven, the weapons of Egypt's princesses. Nearly 4,000 years ago, Egyptian princesses were buried with bows, arrows, daggers, and maces. Did they actually train with those weapons? A study published in July 2026 claims that some of them probably did. Other scholars disagree. Archaeologist Zainab Hashesh and Ahmed Gaber, along with bioarchaeologist Roxy Walker, examined the incomplete remains of six people from the royal court at Dahshur, dating to about 1850 to 1700 BCE. The group included King Hor, four named princesses, and an unidentified woman who may have been another princess. These remains are challenging to interpretation. They were excavated in 1894 and 1895, later separated into boxes, and then re-identified in 2020. Only about 22 to 58 percent of each skeleton survives, and all of the women's skulls are missing. The researchers looked at the places where muscles and ligaments attach to bone. Repeated strain can change the size and form of these attachment sites, and differences between the right and left arms may preserve habitual movement. Nubhotep is their strongest case. Her forearms were robust, several markers were more pronounced on the right side, and one bone of her right hand was bowed. Arrows were found in her burial. The authors say that combination is consistent with right-handed archery. Ita, another princess, had pronounced changes connected with gripping and upper arm activity, and she was buried with a dagger. Other women had strongly developed attachment sites in the shoulders and forearms that the researchers had also associated with drawing a bow. Bioarchaeologist Sonia Zakrzewski objects that the bones record repeated muscular activity without identifying what caused it. Biological anthropologist Sebastien Villotte calls the weapon interpretation plausible but speculative. Only six incomplete skeletons were studied. They differed in age and health, and there was no comparison group of Egyptian women and men from the same period and region. Some changes also appear on both sides of the body, although archery normally places different demands on the two arms. Egyptologist Wolfram Garayetzky raises a separate problem. Egyptian tomb objects were not necessarily inventories of what a person did in life. A bow or dagger could serve a ritual purpose, whether or not its owner ever practiced with it. So, on the one hand, we have those saying muscular stress helps identify weapon use, while the weapons help identify the activity behind the stress. And on the other hand, we have critics who say that nonspecific physical activity and symbolic grave goods are insufficient to identify the princesses as archers. Number six, Hannibal's route through the Alps. Which Alpine pass did the great Carthaginian general Hannibal use when he invaded Italy in 218 BCE? A new energy model says the Col de la Traversette gave his army the cheapest crossing. But a major review published months earlier had already warned that attractive route arguments outrun the evidence that could identify which pass Hannibal's army took. Scholars have been fighting over this for more than 200 years. They have enlisted ancient texts, maps, rockfalls, soil, bacteria, and even experimental elephant crossings. In September 2025, historian William Bainbridge and cultural historian Stefano Cracolici reviewed the competing claims. They described the route as, quote, a question that only archaeology and its allied sciences can definitively answer. None of the proposed routes has produced evidence securely identifying Hannibal's army. Their 2026 paper compared four passes, Traversette, Montgenèvre, Clapier, and Montsigny. The model combined distance, slope, estimated body mass, and the energetic cost of locomotion for soldiers, horses, and elephants. Ancient evidence reports that Hannibal crossed the Alps in 15 days. So the authors assigned that same 15-day total to every candidate route and divide each route's length by 15. This produces daily rates of roughly 25 to 31 kilometers or 16 to 19 miles. Those figures are simply the speeds the army would have needed to maintain if every proposed route took exactly 15 days. Well, Traversette came out with the lowest energy cost at 5.42 terajoules. Montgenèvre required 6.02, Clapier 6.28, and Montsigny 6.45. In the model, Clapier cost about 16% more than Traversette. Even the cheapest route required roughly 233 metric tons, about 257 US tons, of carbohydrate-equivalent supplies for the men alone. So Traversette had an advantage over the others. If Hannibal and his guides understood the relative burden of the routes, and if minimizing direct energy was one of their chief concerns, the model points toward Traversette. But there are two big ifs in that sentence. The calculation also leaves out the work of acquiring and distributing food, along with handlers and other non-combatants. Not fully capture road conditions, the sudden weather, hostile groups, local guides, tactical deception, or where Hannibal entered and left the mountains. A general might accept a higher calorie cost for a route that was safer, better supplied, or less expected. So Berti and Vollrath have supplied a new reason to favor Traversette. But Bainbridge and Crocolici's larger challenge still hangs over it. What, besides archaeology, could connect any calculated path to this particular army? I don't think the debate will be decided any time soon. Number five, DNA and the meaning of family. Can researchers use ancient DNA to identify an ancient family? A special issue of the Cambridge Archaeological Journal called Kinship Trouble contains a sharp argument over that question. Geneticists Carlos Eduardo Amorim and Jennifer Rath call biological relatedness an essential part of studying ancient kinship. Three other specialists in ancient DNA and genomics, Hannah Mutz, Christel Tzossi, and Mehmet Somel, say kinship research needs a fundamental rethinking that does not rely on DNA to legitimize social relationships. Amorim and Rath point to a 2025 study of Moche burials at Huaca Cao Viejo on the north coast of Peru. Around 500 CE, the Moche buried an elite woman, known as the Señora de Cao, inside a painted pyramid-like temple. Four nearby tombs contained six people. Their remains were poorly preserved, but researchers used five analytical methods to estimate biological relatedness from their ancient DNA. The results indicated that all six were biological relatives and allowed the researchers to propose relationships spanning at least four generations. The Señora de Cao was buried with a sacrificed juvenile who may have been her niece. At least one and possibly two of the other adults were her siblings. Another person was one of her grandparents. One male sibling was buried with his son, who had also been sacrificed. But the researchers did not stop with the pedigree. They used radiocarbon dates, the locations and contents of the tombs, and isotopes that preserve evidence of diet and childhood origin. Most of the group ate diets rich in maize and animal protein and grew up in or near the Chicama Valley. The juvenile beside the Señora had a different diet and probably grew up in the highlands. From all this evidence, the research team argues that biological relationships helped determine who was buried in these tombs, and that status and authority may have passed between relatives. For Amarim and Raff, this is how ancient DNA research should work. They acknowledge that privileging genetics over archaeology, anthropology, and community knowledge has been condemned as molecular chauvinism, but they do not retreat from DNA. They argue that researchers need it to identify or rule out biological relationships. When genetic research is feasible and ethical, they call paleogenomics the most appropriate and powerful tool available for that job. Graves, diet, movement, artifacts, and chronology can then show what those biological connections may have meant socially. They present the Moche study as a robust example of this combined approach. In their paper called The Tie That Binds Us, Mutz, Tsosie, and Sommel argue that even this solution gives DNA too much authority. This is interesting considering that Mutz is an archaeogeneticist, Tsosie is an indigenous geneticist and bioethicist, and Sommel is an evolutionary geneticist. They argue that the current focus on DNA may be making matters worse. Researchers should not make a genetic pedigree the starting point or the most authoritative evidence. They should consider archaeology, oral history, community, knowledge, and non-biological relationships on equal terms with genetic evidence. Once researchers call biological relatives a family, a dynasty, or community, then adoption, fostering, marriage, care, and ritual relationships have already been pushed to the edges of the story because none of them has to leave a genetic trace. They point to Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. A 2017 study used ancient DNA to describe people buried at Pueblo Bonito as members of a matrilineal dynasty. The research proceeded without consulting Pueblo and DNA communities that maintain historical, cultural, and spiritual connections to Chaco. Another genomic study involved one affiliated Pueblo community, but Nature magazine announced that genomes have confirmed that community's ancestral history. Mutz, Tsosie, and Sommel object that oral history and community knowledge appear to count for something only after geneticists confirm them. So we've got Amarim and Rath advocating for cautious conclusions about kinship, status, and authority by starting with a genetic pedigree and joining that with archaeological and other supporting evidence to draw larger conclusions. But Mutz, Tsosie, and Sommel warn that beginning with DNA is allowing biology to control the categories. Is a genetic pedigree an essential foundation for reconstructing kinship, or just one kind of evidence that should have no automatic priority over archaeology, oral history, and community knowledge? Behind all of this is the big question of who or what gets to decide what counts as a family or community. Number four, Zendaya's ancient earrings. On July 5th, 2026, Zendaya appeared at a London photo call wearing two circular gold plaques mounted in diamond and gold earrings. Baron London, the London gallery and antiquities dealer that owns the earrings, identified them as ancient Iranian objects from Zewia, more than 2,000 years old. Jeweler Glenn Spiro made them by mounting two circular gold plaques in modern diamonds and gold. The Forensic Archive of Iran replied that archaeological objects are not merely decorative materials. Should ancient artifacts be worn as jewelry? Baron London says they can be, provided they are legally owned, safely mounted, and used to encourage appreciation of the culture that produced them. Baron says a simple, non-invasive claw system holds the plaques without altering the ancient gold. The company said the earrings celebrated the remarkable artistry of ancient Persian goldsmiths and encourage a wider appreciation of one of the world's great artistic traditions. The critics object to using the plaques as adornment in the first place. After Zendaya's appearance, the Forensic Archive launched a public online petition addressed to Baron London, Glenn Spiro, and anyone who owns or controls the plaques, and it asked them to stop promoting or using the plaques as wearable jewelry while their provenance and legal status are independently investigated. The petition calls the problem the transformation of archaeological material into a luxury commodity. Romina Frojar, the Archive's founder, makes the objection apply even to legally owned objects. Legal possession alone does not extinguish the cultural claims of the people whose history the object embodies. The uncertain history of Zendaya's plaques adds another problem. Baron attributes them to Zewia, where gold, ivory, and other objects reportedly appeared in 1947 without a controlled archaeological excavation. The finds were dispersed through the antiquities market. An archaeologist, Oscar White Muscarella, argued that dealers have used Zewia as a convenient origin location for unrelated and sometimes questionable objects. No complete ownership and export history for these two plaques has been made public. But a complete set of ownership records would settle only part of the controversy. Baron argues that careful mounting can place an ancient object before a large public without physically altering it. The critics argue that it shows disrespect to an archaeological object. Is an ancient artifact responsibly displayed when a celebrity wears it before millions of people? Or is using it as an accessory ethically wrong? Number three, Scythian women and Greek Amazons. Were the Greek Amazons inspired by real ancient armed women from the Eurasian steppe? Classicist David Braund gives a forceful answer in his book, Amazons the History Behind the Legend. No, he thinks the connection between the Scythians and the Amazons is overstated. Braund's point is that Amazons were Greek creations, and their stories have to be explained through Greek literature, art, religion, politics, and their ideas about gender. The Amazons have queens, cities, horses, bows, and spears. They fight Heracles and Achilles. Greek traditions often connect them with Thrace, or place them at Athamskira on the southern Black Sea coast. Braund therefore argues that the Amazon traditions tell us about Greek ideas rather than Scythian society. Braund's main chronological argument concerns the date of the earliest Amazon traditions. Amazons appear in Greek poetry and art by about 700 BCE. Braund maintains that substantial Greek contact with Scythian societies north of the Black Sea was only beginning then. If the myth was already established before substantial Greek contact with the Scythians, then Scythian women could not have inspired its creation. But archaeologist Marion Ockelman challenged that conclusion in a review for Antiquity. She agrees that archaeologists would be wasting their time trying to identify a historical nation of Amazons, but the dating of the earliest Greek knowledge of Scythians remains disputed and may reach farther back than Braund allows. That, she says, makes it premature to exclude armed steppe women as an influence. You may already be aware that archaeologists have excavated burials of steppe women accompanied by weapons. Elena Fialko's synthesis catalogued more than 270 European Scythian burials classified as female and accompanied by weapons. Her later book register contains 302 such burials. Bows and arrows appear often along with spears, horse equipment, and sometimes injuries compatible with violence. As we discussed in the case of the Egyptian princesses, a weapon alone does not prove that its owner fought with it, nor even alongside skeletal trauma. But the case that a woman actually used weapons is stronger when other grave goods point in the direction that we are looking at warriors here. The European female weapon burials begin mainly in the second half of the 7th century BCE after the earliest Greek Amazon evidence appears. Braund sees that as a serious obstacle to a Scythian origin. Ockelman answers that the early chronology and routes of contact remain too uncertain to exclude Scythian influence. Stepwomen need not have inspired the first Amazon stories in order to influence later Greek versions. Greek artists increasingly gave Amazons clothing and horses and weapons associated with peoples north and east of Greece. Herodotus later connected captured Amazons with the ancestors of the Saromacians. Was that later imagery shaped by knowledge of armed women beyond the Black Sea? Or did Greek artists simply add step clothing and equipment to an older Greek myth? We're going to need more information to settle this one. Number two, are the ancient dead still people? An Egyptian mummy lies in a museum case. Is it an artifact, or is it a dead person? Museum historian Angela Stein has spent years arguing that we should begin with the second answer. Her Mummy Stories project challenges the way museums have turned mummified people into familiar objects, things to be collected, catalogued, and stared at. These were human beings. According to Stein, the fact that they have been dead for thousands of years does not necessarily release us from the obligation to treat them with dignity. But archaeologists do treat ancient bodies as a particular kind of evidence. They excavate them, assign them numbers, place them in collections, and sometimes use part of them up in testing. A body can reveal disease, diet, violence, migration, and family relationships that no surviving text records can do. So, does a dead person eventually become archaeological material that the living are entitled to use? In March 2026, Rita Peroteo Schurna and Mari Tor said no, or at least not entirely. They argue that human remains do not lose their connection to the person simply because scientists transformed them. Take a tooth from an ancient skeleton. The tooth becomes powder. The powder becomes an extract in a vial. The extract becomes a genomic sequence copied into databases around the world. It looks less and less like a human body at every step. But Peroteo Schurna and Tor argue that it remains ethically inseparable from the individual whose body produced it. Wow, that would extend the obligation to treat the dead with dignity far beyond a skeleton or a mummy. It could include DNA extracts and collagen and proteins, isotope measurements and digital sequences. Human information can even survive in dental calculus, caprolites, burial shrouds, and soil. Lisa Marie Charito argues that some of these materials have been dismissed as waste even though they preserve intimate traces of a person. Other archaeologists think this approach goes too far. At a professional meeting in Paris in January 2026, they argued about the same underlying issue. Anne Le Roif noted that leaving a burial unexcavated doesn't necessarily protect it. Construction may destroy the remains before anything can be learned. Jean-Paul Damoul lamented that the Ancient One, formerly called the Kennewick Man, was lost to science when he was reburied. Paul Salmona called the prevention of research at some medieval Jewish cemeteries a scientific crime because restricting work on poorly documented cemeteries can erase the histories of the communities those rules are intended to respect. Religion certainly enters this argument. Some religious traditions place great importance on bodily integrity and undisturbed burial. But the division is not simply between religious believers and secular scientists. Secular scholars also defend dignity after death. Nobody in this argument says that human remains deserve no respect or that destructive sampling needs no justification. And at the same Paris meeting, Chief Rabbi Claude Maman said belief in the resurrection of the body does not prevent scientific study before reburial. There are positions between person and artifact. Legal scholar Ila Leshem describes dead bodies as quasi-persons. They're not living people with a complete set of rights, but neither are they ordinary property. Nancy Odegaard offered a middle course. Research can continue, but affected communities should help decide which questions researchers ask. That still leaves the central argument untouched. Scientists can copy a sequence endlessly. Can communities then withdraw that evidence? Whether our obligations follow a person from skeleton to vial to database remains very much in dispute. That approach is easier when a body has a clear connection to a living community. It's much harder when an ancient Egyptian mummy has no identifiable descendants or when different members of a community disagree. New technology also complicates repatriation. A museum can return a skeleton to a community for reburial. But researchers may still possess samples taken from the body while the person's genetic data may have been copied into several databases. If the bones are returned, but the samples and data remain in scientific collections, has the person really been repatriated? So where does that leave the ancient dead? As persons? As archaeological artifacts? Or in some category between the two? And number one, archaeology and the fight for relevance. Does archaeology have to help solve problems of the modern world in order to justify itself? Or is it worth doing simply because the human past is worth understanding? Archaeologists themselves disagree on this. In a March 2026 antiquity paper, John Schofield argues that archaeology has a duty of care to help confront what he calls the polycrisis, the tangled combination of climate change, poverty, food insecurity, and other world problems. And he does not limit that duty to a few specially designed projects. He says it should form the basis of all archaeological work, wherever and however it is done. Schofield wants archaeologists to be more activist, work across disciplines, and communicate more effectively with the public and policymakers. Because these problems may never be completely solved, he recommends aiming for small wins. Archaeology might recover knowledge of neglected crops, such as millet, reveal farming practices that survived earlier climatic shifts, or show how power and inequality helped create food shortages in the first place. But other archaeologists draw the line somewhere else. Matthew Davies and Samuel Lund Rockliffe say that most archaeology has very little to contribute to today's grand challenges and should not be obliged to pretend otherwise. Their rejoinder puts it unusually plainly, most practitioners should feel free to produce new knowledge They say it's becoming routine in the UK for journal articles, fellowship applications, and grant proposals to gesture toward contemporary impact. The pressure falls especially heavily on early career researchers who may feel that they must promise modern relevance in order to publish, or to win funding, or justify studying the past at all. This happens in the US too. A doctoral archaeology proposal to the US National Science Foundation must include a broader impact section and explain how these effects will be achieved. Davies and Lund Rockliffe are especially suspicious of what happens when a project designed to understand the past adds a heroic sentence about solving a modern crisis. If archaeologists choose to promise practical impact, they argue, the project should identify who can use the research, what those people can do with it, and what success would look like. Elgeo Marakwet in Kenya is their example of this narrower kind of relevance. Davies and his colleagues did not complete an archaeological study and then afterwards search for a modern problem to attach to it. The archaeologists worked with small farmers on an existing problem. Outside irrigation schemes intended to improve food security were repeatedly producing disappointing results. So, the researchers examined the land and its material traces archaeologically. They followed fields and irrigation channels, aqueducts, broken pipes, and abandoned tanks to reconstruct how farming and development had changed over seasons and the decades and the centuries. Their work revealed more than 300 kilometers, about 186 miles, of irrigation channels maintained by local farmers. But also there were traces of more than 80 years of outside development schemes, including damaged piping from a defunct Red Cross funded project and an abandoned government water tank. Here, archaeology was able to show why projects imposed from outside could fail when planners ignored the history of the land. The archaeological team then put that finding before the county government in a policy brief. Davies and Lund-Rodcliffe point out that Marakwet worked because the research began with an identified problem, involved the people affected, traced that problem backward through time, and delivered findings to officials who could act on them. It shows that archaeology can sometimes help solve a modern problem. It doesn't show that every project has to do that, or that archaeologists should be forced to invent a solution to a modern problem for the work to be valuable. Christian Isendal does not think every contribution must produce an immediate change in government policy, but he does argue that archaeologists must keep making the case that knowledge of the past can help address current problems. If they do, this will change how students are trained, what kinds of research archaeologists design, and whether archaeology is included in work on climate change or food security. Isendal regards that as a genuine result. But whether there is a clear connection between the research and an actual decision or practice outside archaeology is not clear. Sarah Kerr questions Davies and Lund-Rodcliffe's emphasis on reaching policymakers. Kerr argues that archaeologists should work primarily with local communities, providing evidence and stories that help those communities make their own decisions and press officials for action. As you can see, archaeologists do not have a consensus. Some are saying that a duty to confront modern crises should run through all archaeology. Others are saying most archaeology should be allowed to remain as mere historical research, because that has value. But that there is a place for archaeology that can work at directly solving pressing modern problems. And even scholars who choose applied work disagree over how much it really helps. Does archaeology owe the present anything beyond truthful knowledge of the past? And if it does, how much? So there you have them, my picks for 10 of the most interesting scholarly debates about ancient history from the past year. Where do you stand on these controversies? And is there another scholarly disagreement that should have made the list? Let me know in the comments section below. If you enjoyed the video, please give it a thumbs up. You might like my little e-booklet, Why Ancient History Matters. It's designed to persuade people that the subject is important, even in the modern world. You might also wish to use it to help spread the word. So feel free to share it with someone you know. It's free for anyone who wants it. I've left a link in the description box below the video for you to grab a copy. Catch you later.