ABSTRACT
Virtually all aspects of the physical world that humans interact with have been materially affected by human action. There are, of course, the obvious human artifacts (the houses, fields, clothes, hammers, pots, computers, guns, and the like). But there are also more indirect material effects, such as the prevalence, distribution, and extinction histories of animal and plant species, and the levels of pollutants, flood frequencies, and erosion speeds. Human material effects are the domain of archaeologists, in their roles as the social scientists that look at human behavior through the lens of artifacts and other material effects, past and present. Since few other social scientists are working with such data, there is no good reason why archaeologists should confine their study to the past (as they usually have done), particularly since many societies today are so crassly materialist. There needs to be a science that keeps the sum total of human material interactions, past and present, in its (and our) field of vision, and archaeology fills that niche (Holtorf and Piccini 2009; Shanks 2009; Wobst 1983, 2006).
