When Sonya Atalay conducted her doctoral research, she studied pottery in Çatalhöyük, a remarkable ancient site in Turkey. It’s one of the world’s earliest known urban settlements, flourishing by at least 7000 B.C.E.

Yet even as Atalay was conducting field research and writing her doctoral thesis, she was scrutinizing standard archaeological practices, believing the discipline to be in need of an update. Indeed, it’s an issue she had been grappling with going back to her undergraduate days, when she first went to a dig site near Rome.