 Thank you for inviting us and letting us participate in this session. I'm going to talk a little bit at a more abstract or at least a different level than we've been talking about. And I'm going to talk about an initiative that we're starting, and we hope that I can convince some of you to join in and to help us out. About 50 years ago, I'm going to start about 50 years ago, because I spent my career in cultural heritage in what's known as contract archaeology. And that started in the United States in 1966. It started in Europe about the same time a little bit later. And essentially, it evolved around the world to where it is now the dominant form in which the practice of archaeology is conducted. And it's regardless of the law, it seems to me that there are two assumptions embedded into all these practices by these various countries. Why were we interested in archaeology and preserving the past? And it seemed to me that there were a couple of things. That we said or countries said that we'll support cultural heritage if you do two things. One was to find and document places of importance to us, to the public. And then the other thing was to share that knowledge more broadly with not just archaeologists, but with society. And so the question is, how did we do? Well, there are several different ways to measure it. We did very well at finding those. We have found hundreds of thousands of sites, millions of things. We've excavated tens of thousands of sites. We have put probably more than a billion things into museums. We have done a really good job of documenting the past. And we have produced lots and lots of reports, just so in case you didn't know. And we spent a lot of money. We spent a lot of public's money at this. In the United States, we spend about a billion dollars in cultural resource management a year. Europe spends considerable amounts worldwide. It's a fairly big industry. So what did the public get out of that? Well, we have found lots of things about the past, though what, where, and when of the past. We know for specific regions pretty much what the cultural sequence is, who was here, what happened to them, who came next, that kind of thing. And we're good at filling in the dots. That's really where cultural resource management works. It lives in cultural history. We fill in those things. So when I started my career more than 30 years ago, we talked about 100-year segments in the American Southwest. We now talk about 10 to 15-year segments. And we know more about what people ate and where they slept and what they did. But the question is, have we really done much more than that? Have we given the public a better understanding of who they are and how they came to be and how they can use that information to envision a future? And I think that's where, for myself and for a lot of my colleagues, that's sort of where we feel we haven't kept up our bargain quite as well. Well, synthesis, creation of that kind of knowledge is a long history in archeology. And it probably started in the beginning of the dawn of the discipline. The Gordon Child is probably the most famous synthesizer, worked throughout the pre-war, post-war period. And about Marxist, he had a theory in which he was able to place data into a scheme that made sense. And he worked at a time where he could command the entire literature. In his office in Edinburgh, he probably had almost all of the published and unpublished archaeological literature on Europe. Today, it is doubtful that you could feel that that office would hold the records of the cultural heritage reports from Edinburgh. So that's a big difference. He worked at a time when you could do that. Brian Pagan's a very different kind of synthesizer. Brian writes about things that the public, specific questions the public's interested in. And when I asked Brian about how he did that, he said he was really good at reading indices and reading fast. And I'm not being honest, he was really good at reading indices and reading fast. I'm not being flippant here. That's how he worked. He was able to go through reports very quickly, looking for specific things. And that's his creative process. But it is limited to one person. And then there's Jared Diamond. So I should back up. Brian does synthesizes. And he doesn't go back to the original data. That's the point. He summarizes syntheses, or he's synthesizing summaries. He's not actually synthesizing data in a different format. So he's accepting what people are saying. Jared Diamond is probably the most famous, or at least the most popular. Jared Diamond is an ornithologist, not an archeologist. But he probably, among the public, is the best known person today that writes about archeology in ways that impact the public. And he has a very decided, like a child, he has decided theoretical outlook. We would call it cultural ecology. There are times when it verges on environmental determinism, when you have no agency involved. But he has an idea of how things are supposed to work, how human behavior works in a complex environment. And the thing about Diamond is, to me, when I read him, makes great sense until he comes to someplace I know something about. Then it's sort of like, well, wait a second. So he reads about the American Southwest. It's like, well, that's really interesting. He may be right about it, but he's wrong on the data. I mean, he doesn't command it. And when you look at it, he is reading two or three articles, and he's cherry picking that data to fit his theory, which is not necessarily bad, but it's not synthesis in any serious way. So the long way of saying, there's an argument to be made if we've done too good a job. We are literally drowning in the data we have created. And one might argue that we have so much data now that we are not able to synthesize it. And indeed, if you look at someone like myself or my company, our reports are getting much smaller. We are writing about smaller and smaller geography because we can't get that. We can't command that much literature. Well, is there a way out? Yes, of course there's a way out. Otherwise I wouldn't be here. Ecologists in the United States face the same problem about 25 years ago. And they said, we think ecology is critically important to the human species going forward. We have lots of issues that are critical to how we adapt as a modern society, but we can't get to them because we have too much data. And so they lobbied and created a national center of ecological analysis and synthesis. And it was in Santa Barbara. It's now migrated to the other side of the United States. But essentially it is based on a model in which they believe very strongly in face-to-face interaction. They believe very strongly in a small group and they believe strongly in diversity. So you have senior scientists, you have junior scientists, and they work on a problem. And the goal is in 18 months or 24 months to make substantive progress on that problem. So their goal is to speed up science, if you were to ask them. And so the deal is, and some of what we were talking about earlier, the infrastructure. How do you get access to this data? Well, that's a big deal. So that's part of the center's responsibility. The cyber infrastructure, having informatics people that will help on ontologies and having data sets talk to each other. And then communicating. It's not just writing articles for science or nature. It's writing white papers to legislators that might actually do something to affect a problem. And then addressing the right questions, which is, what are the questions the public has about the past and about archaeology? So we started something called the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis. Do I get a few more minutes? Is that it? Is this it? And the goal is basically to take the ecology model. It's actually been taken by a variety of sciences. Biological, the Earth Sciences, the Forensic folks, all have created the synthesis center. So frankly, as a business person, I went to NSF and said, we want one too. And they said, we're not funding those things. So do it on your own. And so that's where we're at. And so we have decided to create a Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis. And its goal, as you can see, there is to advance knowledge. It's to provide informatics or cyber infrastructure to allow groups of archaeologists. I think the other thing that's left unsaid, we have projects that do synthesis. But they're projects like the one on the Driftwood and others. And they're often done at major research universities because they have the money to do this. And they don't empower archaeologists as a group, nor do they empower stakeholders who are not at those research institutes. So that was important to me. This is our conceptual design. I'll quit pretty quick here. The goal is to have a coalition of NGOs, universities, cultural heritage consultancies, anybody and everybody that's interested, Native Americans, elder groups, anyone interested in the past. And using archaeology as an evidence-based means of understanding the past is invited in the coalition. And we'll have a board of directors. And it will call for proposals. So we have two proposals, like Alton, come up with a great idea, get eight to 15 of your closest friends and colleagues. But the deal is it's not a project-based. People could be working on climate change, but on their own projects and then have a synthetic overview of it. How do humans adapt to those kinds of conditions? And yes, their projects are part of it, but they're part of a larger statement. The National Center, just so that's clear, is this is going to we're going to there's a group called the SRI Foundation, which is a private foundation that will move to a university and become the National Center. And that is essentially a administrative function. It is to provide TAs or research assistants in informatics. It is to provide the cyber infrastructure. It's to provide a variety of administrative functions that will allow the coalition to work. And the deal is to have both, yes, there will be science products, but for me, a big part of this is to make sure we have public products. And while the review committee will evaluate proposals, the review committee also will have non-archaeologists on it. And most of the teams are not just archaeologists. They have to have the allied sciences that are part of it, and they have to have other voices that are interested in this. I'm going to skip the example, because I think I'm out of time. But essentially, we have an RFP that's coming out in September. Please, of course, we have a website. And you can go visit it and find out exactly what the elements are. And we have a time frame. As you can see, I have a white beard, so I don't have a lot of time. And my goal is to get this thing up and running within a few years. And so what can you do? You can express interest. You can find us and find me. We need institutions. We need individuals. This is like riding the bicycle while you're building it. You're trying to demonstrate to, frankly, the funding groups, funding agencies that it's a viable concept and that archaeologists are behind it. Because frankly, if archaeologists aren't behind us, this isn't going very far. So please stop and check me out. Send me an email. If you have questions, I'm sure you do. This is a brief presentation. Let me know. And we have a couple of publications, both academic archaeological publications and then a more general one in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which is aimed at a non-archaeological or broader scientific audience. So thank you. I appreciate it.