Keywords

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Since their worldwide adoption some two decades ago, ethical principles/codes in archaeology have been subjected to a sustained critique. The main argument is that they have been naturalized. The moral good, always historical, has been reified, ignoring (or, perhaps, knowing full well) that what is good for a given society is context-dependent. For many archaeologists, ethical principles have frozen reflexivity and the will to change (if it ever existed). The preoccupation voiced by some (Tarlow 2001; Meskell and Pels 2005; Hamilakis 2007) about the reification of ethics (with the consequent elimination of any traces of historicity and happening) has now become a certainty.

To move beyond ethics as a reified set of principles history is needed. As a contribution to this end, the papers in this book seek to assess ethics in archaeology through praxis in the understanding that the two cannot (should not) be separated, ever. Ethics is not an absolute term. If considered as a set of principles of right conduct or a theory or a system of moral values, ethics entails a historical condition for it condenses the moral thinking of a society on specific times and places but not in others. Ethics is unavoidably nested in historical relations. Yet, it normally is reified, as if it were an anthropological universal. Restoring the historicity and plurality of archaeological ethics is a task to which this book is devoted; its emphasis on praxis mends the historical condition of ethics. In doing so, it shows that nowadays a multicultural (sometimes also called “public”) ethics looms large in the discipline. By engaging communities “differently,” archaeology has explicitly adopted an ethical outlook, purportedly striving to overcome its colonial ontology and metaphysics. In this new scenario, the respect for other historical systems/worldviews and social accountability appear to be prominent. Being and behaving ethically in archaeological terms in the multicultural context has become mandatory, so much that most professional, international and national archaeological associations have ethical principles as guiding forces behind their openness towards social sectors traditionally ignored or marginalized by their practices.

Ethical concerns in archaeology were rare a few decades ago but became frequent in the last 20 years. The emergence of ethics in the discipline—a common preoccupation turned professional proscription and prescription—may have occurred some 40 years ago, but its popularity (which, at the same time, is a symptom) ripened alongside the transformation of national societies into multicultural ones. The entangled relationship between archaeology and the recent course of the West created new conditions for the discipline, which in due course activated mechanisms of adaptation; amongst them ethical principles stand out. What demanded their appearance? I hold that they are disciplinary responses to global changes associated with multiculturalism. Yet, to avoid contextualism—which implies the modern division between facts, power, and discourse—it is necessary to describe the links that allows politics and society to influence knowledge and ideas and vice versa. This can be the task: not understanding archaeological ethics in its context neither showing the operation of political pressures over it but showing how “a science, a context, and a demarcation between the two” (Latour 1993:16) became not only possible but real. In doing so, perhaps the first issue that comes to the fore is the parochialism of archaeological ethics and, at the same time, its violent universalism.

The papers in this book are symptoms of what archaeological ethics is nowadays as seen from praxis. While some papers express disappointment, some others believe that two decades of ethical discussions (and principles) have done well to archaeology by turning it more sensitive to contemporary issues, more accountable for its actions, and more responsible to the demands of different publics. The different assessments expressed in the papers are expressions of the political and academic positioning of their writers. These telling differences not only point to issues already debated, such as the need to go political and the need to overcome reification, but to another issue as well: archaeological ethics are mostly self-contained, disciplinary, and self-serving; they engage the world from within disciplinary limits and from within the cosmology of modernity. These issues do not amount to a putative lag between ethics as theory and ethics as practice, as if what was established in principles were summarily violated in action. The point is how a global ethics (which I will call multicultural ethics) shapes what archaeologists do; and what they do is what an assessment of their praxis tells us they do.

Have ethics in archaeology changed the discipline or hardened it? Has it worked towards social justice, a rhetorical horizon to where the discipline seemed willing to go since it became conscious of its modern/colonial origins and effects? Further, can archaeology have ethical principles committed to social justice if, at the same time, it strengthens its relationship with the market and development? Is this coincidence just mere haphazard or it obeys more structural rules? The papers in this book try to answer these questions by examining praxis-based contexts in which archaeological ethics unfolds. The book is about archaeological ethics today. That means that the papers bring into the picture the principal elements/changes that have shaped such a contemporary ethics: the global multicultural rhetoric and its local adoptions; the public (broadly including the grass-roots challenge and opposition to academic, positivist archaeology); and the widespread interventions of development.

Archaeological ethics has also had another effect: the creation and/or delimitation of archaeological values that were formerly vague and undefined—and some of which didn’t even exist. Thus, commitment to a sound (fair, true) interpretation of the past, to sound disciplinary practices (swift publication, adequate curation of findings), to stewardship, to social responsibility, have emerged as the values the archaeologists must abide to. In this regard, two groups of (rarely interrelated) values have been formed: (a) disciplinary values, to which archaeologists seem to abide willingly (no wonder, since they strengthen and protect the profession); and (b) contextual values, which they address reluctantly because they have the potential to upset the discipline (as it has happened with repatriation, an unintended result of social accountability). For instance, the principles of archaeological ethics of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA 1996) are stewardship, accountability, commercialization, public education and outreach, intellectual property, public reporting and publication, records and preservation, and training and resources. Except for accountability, which expressly states the need to consult with affected groups in order to “establishing a working relationship that can be beneficial to all parties involved,” all other values are disciplinary, based on the reified, undisputed existence of the archaeological record—perhaps the main actor in all ethical principles (see Hamilakis 2007:23)—and on the Enlightened, humanistic, and universal nature of the archaeological endeavor. As I will show further down, both groups of values are modern (but also multicultural) and unveil the ontology of which archaeology partakes.

Ethics is a liberating force: as far as the archaeologists comply with their basic precepts (mostly disciplinary), they are free (politically and psychologically) to go on with their usual trade, which more often than not entails a great dose of self-isolation. Ethics is an important part of the postmodern turn in archaeology. It “modifies” the relationship with the Other (I will sketch further down what this “modification” is all about) but it helps to keep intact the modern/colonial structuring of archaeological thought. Further, it helps to avoid thinking and acting reflexively and hinders actual transformations. It hinders, specially, a true different relationship with Otherness. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003:28) noted about related events in anthropology:

This recurring refusal to pursue further the archaeological exercise obscures the asymmetrical position of the savage-other in the thematic field upon which anthropology was premised. It negates the specificity of otherness, subsuming the Other in the sameness of the text perceived as liberating cooperation.

In this case, the Other is subsumed in the sameness of the ethical code, premised as a liberating cooperation. In the absence of a thorough discussion about power, capitalism, multiculturalism, and inequalities, that is, about contextual conditions (including, as I mentioned before, the conditions that permit the separation of discipline and context in the first place), ethics is meaningless, especially if social justice is at stake.

Multiculturalism, Archaeology, and Ethics

Archaeological discourses related to the creation and functioning of national societies have lost momentum and significance given the emergence of multiculturalism, which has the main tenets of modern societies crumbling, especially the construction of unified collectivities (national societies) in terms of culture, language, and history. In the last two or three decades multiculturalism has set in motion profound changes, especially regarding the organization of society, which is now premised upon the coexistence of diverse constituencies—conventionally referred to as cultural diversity. The multicultural idea of diversity hides differences and inequalities by eliminating historical specificities, processes of othering, asymmetries, and power relations.

Archaeology has been so shaped by this social order that a multicultural archaeology has emerged. In order to keep up with multicultural changes (which, by the way, archaeology has not promoted but to which it has to accommodate, often unwillingly), profound as they are, archaeology has basically done four things: (a) it has opened its practice to local actors; (b) it has widened the circulation of it discourse; (c) it has included other historical horizons in its interpretations; and, (d) it has given up the exclusive control of some disputed issues. Let me examine those four things. Firstly, the open practice it champions has only allowed local actors to be members of research teams or, the most, to be trained in the discipline. Such openness has normally been framed under the heading “collaboration” but power relations are rarely at stake. Most archaeologists are content to offer cultural crumbs to the communities (a local museum, a video, a booklet) while preserving the control of key issues (research designs, destination of findings, production and dissemination of narratives). Secondly, a widened circulation of archaeological discourses—which, along with collaboration, forms the backbone of public archaeology, part and parcel of a more comprehensive entity that I have chosen to call multicultural archaeology—has had two results: it reproduces the archaeological canon more widely and it furthers the reification and objectification of the past, such as in the case of local museums, which have sprouted everywhere. Thirdly, an expanded archaeological hermeneutics, achieved by incorporating non-Western conceptions (of the past, time, etc.), has doubtlessly enriched the explanatory potential of the discipline but has not engaged intercultural understandings. Such an interpretative expansion, many times resorting to alien cosmologies that produce curious argumentative hybrids (for instance: live objects, with agency, amidst rigid functional frames), deepens the logocentric gaze but does not aim to forge non-hierarchical relationships. And fourthly, relinquishing control over certain issues means precisely that: certain issues and under certain circumstances. This characteristic has been more commonly achieved through the selective repatriation of biological and cultural remains. Thus, a “reformed” archaeology is happy to share what it cherishes most with previously marginalized parties: disciplinary epistemic coherence. All in all, however, archaeology keeps spreading the fruits of Enlightenment and gets other (local) actors to participate in institutional spaces created to control the definition and management of disciplinary principles.

In line with multiculturalism (with its promotion of diversity alongside its condemnation of difference; with its promotion of political correctness); in line with what Moshenska (2008:160) called “neo-liberal self-congratulation,” ethical preoccupations flourish in the discipline. A powerful, new multicultural ethics emanates from metropolitan centers, only to be adopted elsewhere. Although such an adoption is selective to suit local needs, a global ethical canon has been in place for quite a number of years. In this regard, two issues have not received due attention: (a) how that canon has been responded at local levels; and (b) how it articulates with the cultural logic of late capitalism, with development, and with the market. An answer to the former question must account for the fact that the discipline (along with its ethical principles) has not just been adopted widely (even by former contradictors) but has also been contested by grass-roots organizations, social movements, and academic militants. An answer to the latter must account for a temporal coincidence: at the same time that ethical codes were enacted in archaeology, the discipline tuned up its philosophical gear to accommodate to multicultural changes and to the growing needs of capitalist expansions—which usually engulf the frontiers where ethnic Others still live. In short, an answer to both questions cannot elude to record that a multicultural ethics does not destabilizes but strengthens archaeological tenets by providing the moral means by which they can accommodate to contextual transformations while remaining basically unchanged. In this accommodation the relationship with Otherness is salient. The contextual concerns of archaeological ethics aim to bring Others to share the benefits of the discipline while striving to banish confrontational dichotomies—such as indigenous peoples vs. archaeologists. Good intentions notwithstanding, banishing those dichotomies mostly serves to unify and solidify archaeology by making it more democratic.Footnote 1

Accepting archaeology as is, especially through its promotion of a multicultural ethics, amounts to veiling conflicting views about history, the past, the ancestors, knowing. In a conspiring mood I could say that veiling differences and making discrepancies invisible has been a fulfilled aim of ethical principles; but given that so many good intentions are at stake, I could say that they were unintended consequences which, in the long run, only served disciplinary concerns—and thus, the modern cosmology. Indeed, archaeological ethics is modern and the promise of inclusion it delivers is also modern. The problem is that such an inclusion is violent and logocentric; further, it coexists with the utmost complicity with development and the market. These issues, and others, are addressed by the papers in this book.

About the Arguments Set Forth in This Volume

The book is divided in two complementary sections, one devoted to address the first question posed above (how the global ethical canon has been received and responded locally) and the second to address the second question (how such a canon articulates with the postmodern, development, and the market). The first section (Is there a global archaeological ethics? Canonical conditions for discursive legitimacy and local responses) includes six papers, whose authors were asked to consider how a global (multicultural) ethical discourse affects their specific praxis, as seen from their situated, local perspectives. The results are disparate and show how their authors position themselves in the academic and militant arenas. The paper by Joe Watkins is truly emblematic in this regard. Ten years ago he wrote a paper for a volume on ethics (Watkins 2003), in which he reflected on the effects, that he deemed mostly positive, the new ethical principles could have on the relationship between archaeologists and Indigenous peoples. His tone was optimistic—in spite on some doubts regarding polarization and widening gulfs in some areas. Watkins (2003:132) even labeled some codes of ethics as “praiseworthy,” specifically the SAA Code of Ethics and WAC’s Vermillion Accord. In less than a decade that optimism has vanished:

This is where North American archaeology falls short. Praxis—putting theoretical knowledge to work—should be part of the active cycle in the development of ethics in North American archaeology, but it has not been so. Perhaps there hasn’t been an active movement to exclude Indigenous or “minority” populations from an active involvement with archaeology, but there has also not been an active welcoming of archaeology to those populations other than on individual cases until recently… the ability to change the ethical structures of North American practitioners seems unlikely (Chap. 2).

What has happened in the intervening years? Even a rapid glance will show reification and disciplinary hardening as the two main events that have occurred, one acting upon ethics and the other as its more profound consequence. And then we come to extant power structures, to privileges whose holders are not willing to relinquish:

In the Principles, “interested publics” are considered to have relatively equal interest in the archaeological record, but in reality that interest does not equate to power, control, or ownership. It is highly unlikely that the members of the Society for American Archaeology who are currently privileged in the process will freely turn over control to non-academic communities, regardless of the intentions of those communities (Chap. 2).

Rafael Curtoni expresses similar concerns, especially as the current ethics arises from a conception of archaeology which is modern and thus disembodied, detached and instrumental. An ethics arising from a modern discipline could not be but modern—bringing along epistemic violence, distance and a fearful relationship with politics. Curtoni is specially critic of multivocality, with its neutralization of difference and its disdain of power structures. It is not surprising that both come from the geopolitical south, Watkins as a member of a subaltern minority in the USA and Curtoni as a citizen of country occupying a subaltern position vis-à-vis the metropolitan centers. Their subaltern perspectives, from which they fustigate current archaeological ethics, contrast with the positions of the other four contributors to this section—two from the Anglo world (Ferris/Welch and Phillips/Ross) and two from southern and eastern Europe (Fernández and Marciniak)—for whom ethics has pitfalls but is also promising. While Caroline Phillips and Annie Ross acknowledge ethics-related improvements in the relationship between archaeology and indigenous peoples in Australia and New Zealand (incorporation of indigenous knowledge into legislation, participation in community-based research and in decision-making) they also think that

…there is still a considerable distance for archaeological practice to travel to overcome the barriers of the imposed rationale for investigation, the underlying understandings of the past, and interpretations of the results of archaeological research, that remain almost solely with the archaeologists and administrators of heritage management in both countries (Chap. 3).

Ethical concerns in Central-Eastern Europe, a Arek Marciniak shows, are basically limited to disciplinary issues, especially as archaeology entered an unprecedented expansion in the contract arena in the current post-communist epoch; such concerns translate into ethical codes and regulations. Indeed, ethics is mostly geared to ensure the academic quality of contract-related archaeological products, as well as fostering what archaeologists consider an important duty, that is, targeting “illegal” practices (especially trade and looting of archaeological materials). Yet, unlike most preoccupations with contract or applied archaeology (generally expressed in terms of poor academic standards), Neal Ferris and John Welch think that it is a privileged field in which to put to test the concerns an ethics-led activist practice has positioned in the last two decades (multivocality, collaboration, commitment, authority decentring, and the like), especially as applied archaeologists vastly outnumber academic practitioners:

The accumulated consequence of this trend, occurring across North America continually in applied contexts, is a re-alignment of archaeological ethics from being about advancing archaeological values and harvesting the material record before development impact, to being about servicing broad societal values that get variably asserted for the material past when encountered in the intersection of economic growth, capitalist endeavour, and community interest (Chap. 7).

Lastly, Víctor Fernández, writing from Spain but reflecting on what is going on in Western Europe ethics-wise, also shows that disciplinary preoccupations have taken the stage, not unlike the events accruing worldwide. Yet, he moves beyond describing what is currently happening to speak from a different morality, one that is still inexistent or fairly marginal. His call for taking seriously different publics and worldviews (not just those identified as “European” in mainstream parlance) articulates with his critique of modern archaeology:

It is not an issue of undemanding tolerance from a superiority stand but of true equal rights to all parts, being well aware that the real danger to archaeology and heritage does not come today from different cultures and conceptions but from the same core of our western rationality, represented by the capitalist system.

These six different perspectives, situated as they are, see the glass half full or half empty regarding ethics. Mostly, they underscore that positioning and situatedness are key for understanding ethics through praxis; otherwise, reification will linger on unabatedly.

The second section (Archaeological ethics in the global arena: emergences, transformations and accommodations) includes eight papers also dealing with ethics and praxis. Yet, instead of writing from the places from which they work and write, the authors were asked to write from the specific topics in which they research and militate. The first paper, by Alejandro Haber, sets the tone of the section by addressing what it means to be an archaeologist doing archaeology (a modern discipline) within a modern matrix (the cultural logic of capitalism). The word ethics is almost absent from his paper, underscoring that the morality of archaeologists does not have to be mentioned in order to make it evident. It is just out there, waiting to be engaged. Once that occurs, archaeological ethics easily renders that it has been forged in the entanglement with modernity and capitalism. Development, Alejandro shows, is the master trope guiding the relationship, especially as its absent plenitude (taken as a natural given supported by universal laws) even dictates disciplinary agendas—such as the provision of epistemic arguments to suit its demands. Prominent in this regard is the role of contract archaeology, explored by Jaime Almansa and Nicolas Zorzin. Contract archaeology is not a minor thing: (a) it employs more than 90 % of acting archaeologists worldwide; (b) it has promoted profound curricular transformations (something achieved by no other event in the history of the discipline, not even by the advent of the scientific program in the 1960s)Footnote 2; (c) it has abated the critical stance of archaeology towards the global order by an uncritical functionality with capitalism, agreeing with development projects that are negatively impacting human populations as well as the rights of nature; in doing so, it has led the discipline to an uncritical, unreflecting cul-de-sac, where social and political responsibilities are rare, to say the least; and (d) it has diminished the possibility for the discipline to rebuild its metaphysical and ontological apparatus, already clearly hierarchical and neocolonial. In contract archaeology the relationship of the discipline with development appears as an innocent instrumentality, as a mere technical service.

If we are to define what a multicultural ethics in archaeology looks like, no better place to look at that so-called public archaeology. In this point, McDavid and Brock (Chap. 11) are outright correct: “Over the course of the past century, public archaeology (however defined) and archaeological ethics have been mutually constituted.” Public archaeology is the arena where archaeological ethics have been more clearly deployed. For them, “four of the most prominent approaches used in contemporary public archaeology practice” define what an ethical archaeology practice is today in contextual terms: activism, multivocality, collaboration, and community engagement. But as ethics, public archaeology is context-dependent and can have many readings.Footnote 3

Archaeologists attach a great value to publishing, not only because it is the ace in career building but because ethical principles link a responsible relationship with the record to timely and accessible publications, as discussed by Mitch Allen. Yet, if this disciplinary value were considered in relation to contextual values, the possibility of archaeological research and practice not mediated by publication emerges. Publication may be a must for academic archaeology but that is not the case for other kinds of practice, especially those challenging the discipline’s modernity. The urge of other archaeologies is not publication, which may or may not happen as a research result. But even if it happens, the material published (a booklet, for instance) bears no specific names, invisible behind the anonymous face of the collectivity.

Michael Di Giovine’s discussion of ethics and heritage brings to the fore an important issue, usually overlooked: ethical concerns function in contested fields (“a clash of moralities”) in which power and hegemonies are at stake, no matter how disguise they are by a naturalized professional morality. Conflict is bypassed through reification, especially as it unfolds in the hegemony of modernity. He also points out that “multicultural ethics, while frequently well-intentioned, create or perpetuate the very tensions it seeks to resolve.” For that reason he proposes a patrimonial ethics centered “on a more robust understanding of the totality” of stakeholders as well as in the heritage object itself through its historicity, “pregnant as it is with myriad meanings.”

The paper by Lesley Green describes “a participatory research ethic” which calls into question the extended multicultural goal of getting different worldviews to coexist without really trying to understand and respect each otherFootnote 4; it also questions the self-designated knowledge privileges of archaeology and anthropology. Her on-the-ground ethics takes Palikur ontology seriously. Her ethics is not modern-modeled and thus not archaeology-enforcing (excavation, for instance, was not even considered in the research she describes; and artifacts were not taken as givens but as “emerging in relation to particular interests and narratives and technologies”). At last, she posits that “The challenge is to move beyond matching perspectives, theirs to ours, to an engagement with the real challenges that are the challenges of ‘the real’: the possibility of different empiricisms; different ‘cogitos’.”

Once enacted, ethical mandates seem to establish themselves as unquestioned and ahistorical truths. They may be refined, amended, but their historicity is hidden. It is so for most professional archaeologists—for whom ethical principles are destined, after all, and who can be held accountable for their infringement. For others, however, ethics is a day-to-day matter more than a set of abstractions and can have lasting effects on different archaeologies. For Eldon Yellowhorn an ethical archaeology is tantamount to an archaeology serving indigenous needs and expectations. He feels that “I am doing a service to my community by appropriating the methods I need to pursue internally defined objectives.”

The set of papers comprising the two sections of the book revolves around similar topics, two of which are the relationship of ethics with capitalism and politics. Indeed, a main actor portrayed in most papers in this collection is capitalism: they refer to it in one way or another; they assess its ultimate impact in the course archaeology has taken in the last three decades. Fredric Jameson (1984) noted that postmodern times were characterized by the capitalist assault on two realms untouched by modernity: mind and nature. The past has to be added to the list. Capitalism and the past have had a close and intimate, centuries-old relationship (especially as the latter provided the means for legitimating the former). Yet, the last decades have witnessed a significant shift: the past has become a commodity. Likewise, although the relationship of archaeology with capitalism may be as old as the discipline itself, it has changed in the last three decades: from being instrumental in the provision of empirical data for supporting a progressive temporality and a sense of identity (however defined) it has become “a commoditized form of practice, where material, knowledge, and heritage value are all translated into economic value” (Chap. 7).

The multiculturalism the discipline has come to embrace does not collide with the market but feeds it in several ways: transforming curricula to produce technical archaeologists eager to engage CRM/CHM projects; teaming up with the heritage business, either as a provider of cultural commodities (sites, contexts, exhibits) or by legitimizing market-controlled historical discourses; and helping to naturalize capitalist categories, such as development. The arising of ethical concerns in this scenario is not a fortuity: while the first ethical discussions in archaeology date from the 1960s, most date from the 1980s (including the principles adopted by main organizations), when the multicultural rhetoric had already transformed constitutions and legal systems worldwide.

And then there is politics. Ethical principles have become the way the discipline engages wider, non-disciplinary changes (especially multiculturalism), adopting corporate policies—such as social responsibility—while remaining at one side of politics. Indeed, talking politics while talking archaeology is a relatively recent practice that has been solved in several ways. One, the most widespread and common, is the multicultural way talked by academic archeology: it has turned to political correctness and the public arena to feel close to the others (and to the histories) that objectified and placed in the past, but without mixing too much, preserving privileges and the modern gaze. The multicultural policies adopted by archaeology has discovered the perfect recipe (add local communities and stir) to continue doing what the discipline has always done (esoteric academic research, usually with no relationship whatsoever with social needs in the present) but pretending that everything has changedFootnote 5 and that its changes turned it plural and open. To put it another way: archaeology has entered politics remaining strictly outside of it—its public turn satisfies its need to be political without questioning its disciplinary integrity. But politics are indeed needed if we really want transformations and if we really want to engage social justice and alternative social/historical worldviews. In the introduction to the book he edited with Philip Duke, Yannis Hamilakis (2007:15) stated:

What makes this book different is its aim and ambition to reframe the discussion on ethics in archaeology by shifting the debate into the field of politics, showing that the ethical and sociopolitical arenas should not be treated as separate, as is often the case, and proposing that conundrums such as the tension between universal and context-specific ethics can be only dealt with through political praxis.

But after assessing what has happened in the last two decades Hamilakis (2007:20) was disappointed to find “bureaucratization and instrumentalisation of ethics, and these transformations have resulted in the depoliticisation of ethical debate in archaeology.” This situation has not changed lately. To the contrary, it has hardened: instead of addressing pressing issues, such as social justice, ethical concerns in archaeology have locked themselves in a disciplinary agenda. A notorious absence in this utter disregard for wider issues is the relationship of archaeology qua modern discipline with other worldviews; this is surprising, though, because archaeologists are well aware of the colonial burden of their discipline. But, as Mario Blaser (2009:880) puts it:

Because the contest with the non-modern manifests as ontological conflicts there is a strong tendency to misrecognize even the existence of this contest. In other words, the non-modern manifests itself as something that escapes the “radar screen” of modern categories.

If different ontologies are misrecognized and obliterated, there is not recognition of conflict either. As a result, hegemonies act in a power vacuum and disguise their violent character to become naturalized realities. Yet, if Hamilakis (2007:23) is right in that “ethics become the decoy that can rescue us from politics”; if ethics is the way archaeology armored itself against politics, then the price it has paid is excessively high for it has gone astray from engaging the very global issues that a anticolonial move coming from outside forced it to tackle. Instead of engaging politics head-on, an ethics-mediated archaeology is content with the de-politicization of its practice, especially as potential and ongoing conflicts with local communities (Indigenous and otherwise) are routinely attenuated by multicultural concessions (consultation, controlled participation, and the like).Footnote 6 But, as Pels (1999:103) noted, “ethics, with its impossible conceit of impartiality, only masks politics—the struggle between culturally specific and historically embedded interests.” This masking of politics, this explicit de-politicization of ethics, is “built around the discursive oscillation between the absolute denial of politics that is implied by ethical standards and the absolute affirmation of politics that the necessarily partial use of these ethical standards brings with it” (Pels 1999:103).

Ethics and the Future of Archaeology

Morality is constitutive of human actions (it is the horizon to where they go, so to speak), whether or not codified into ethical prescriptions. So, ignoring or bypassing moral/ethics in gauging the future of archaeology (not to say its very present) is pointless, if not irresponsible. Addressing them directly, as many have done, usually involves a good deal of historicization as a way of countering reification (that is, precisely, what most papers in this volume have done). It also involves re-placing them in the center of power struggles as a way of avoiding their masking of politics. It involves, at last, not opposing politics and ethics but reconciling them. It now seems clear that their re-entanglement requires that universal, naturalist pretensions are abandoned—indeed, it is naturalization that hinders any possible reconciliation.

At this important juncture in which archaeological ethics have become bureaucratized and instrumentalized by a brutal process of reification it is worth moving them into the political arena, as Hamilakis (2007) pleaded for, but we may also need a fresh bath of de-modernization. The ethical duplexity of archaeology—paraphrasing Pels (1999:102),—its oscillation between ethics and politics, is firmly entrenched by the modern matrix to which it clinchesFootnote 7 and which posits two strict separations: between knowledge and power, and between nature and culture. It also posits the past as a nature to be known through highly ritualized disciplinary protocols (scientific and otherwise); the past as encrypted/codified in buried things; the archaeological record as an immanent nature; and the archaeologist and the knowledge she/he produces as neutral intermediaries for the appearance of the past in the present. This underscores that current archaeological ethics has not only been reified through principles but also that it builds up from reified “things” (stewardship, the record, excavation, the field, artifacts, just to name a few in a long list).Footnote 8 This process of double reification haunts archaeology and its ethics.

Yet, in spite of its obvious modernity, disciplinary practice usually proceeds by ignoring it. The disciplinary pretension that research procedures have become autonomous by technical means helps to hide that they are linked to the pervasive and powerful cosmology of modernity. It portrays them as just mere technical operations in a cultural vacuum. In this process, the archaeologist has lost any traces of ontological status by becoming a neutral intermediary instead of a creative mediator. However, no matter how much purification runs through archaeology and how skillful it is in getting round its relationship with modernity, the discipline and its practitioners have not escaped its ontology—it suffices to take even a glance at most ethical principles to understand that they basically protect and enforce the modern tenets in which archaeology thrives. Indeed, an ethical perspective within the confines of one’s ontology is, at the end, a reproduction of that ontology. But the appeal of some contextual (purportedly anticolonial) ethical principles—especially WAC’s Code of Ethics and the Vermillion Accord—for disenfranchised groups is, justly, their potential to reach out to other ontologies (a move through which social justice can be finally realized), that is, their potential to hold modernity in abeyance in order to gauge and counter its intervention and its consequences. For that to happen we need more than simple ethical declarations. We need ethical bridges that account for and engage what Marisol de la Cadena (2008) called multi-ontologies, in which the negotiation and resolution of conflict is outstanding; a bridging that “focuses on the conflicts that ensue as different worlds or ontologies strive to sustain their own existence as they interact and mingle with each other” (Blaser 2009:877).

The “participatory research ethic” Lesley Green writes about in her paper in this volume is “an ethics of multiple perspectives.” It is a relational ethics capable of taking archaeological morality out of political correctness, that invention that allows contemporary liberalism to have peace of mind, a cosmopolitan mood and a certain discursive coherence while feeding the old hierarchies of modernity. It is a relational perspective capable not of deparochializing current archaeological ethics but of rediscovering its parochialism, the violence of its universal operation. It is an alternative morality, a step beyond naturalized principles which have hardened archaeology qua modern discipline instead of promoting change and openness in an intercultural mood. It is a morality where the complicity of archaeology with capitalism and development can be challenged and alternatives can be offered.

An alternative archaeological morality is not only possible but ongoing. It emerges from genuinely engaging multiple perspectives, multiple ontologies, networking with those who have always been in an external condition, not in a place untouched by modernity (an ontological outside) but in an outside “that is, precisely, constituted as difference by the hegemonic discourse. With the appeal from the externality in which it is located, the Other becomes the original source of ethical discourse vis-à-vis a hegemonic totality” (Escobar 2005:36). Some archaeologists work to reunite knowledge and power (separated since the nineteenth century in the West, except in Marxism) and have turned political their disciplinary interventions. They have not framed their militancy in multicultural terms, from which they take distance, but have opened it up to different voices and ontologies. They are still marginal (for an apparatus that refuses to relax its monopolistic locks) but cannot be denied, despite the intolerance of the archaeologists who still believe in the benefits of modern knowledge and overlook the anti-systemic activism of a militancy that seeks allies on the people rather than objects of study. These archaeologies do not conceive of history as a linear chronological and teleological process but as a multi-temporal heterogeneity (García 1989) from where to talk about networks of local histories rather than to speak of grand narratives. (This change brings cultural differences to the field of colonial differences: it turns political the multicultural asepsis that seeks to deracialize and drain of power colonial relations through culturalism.) In sum, the relational morality they predicate is about freedom. If we are to be free, “If we want to recover the capacity to sort that appears essential to our morality and defines the human, it is essential that no coherent temporal flow comes to limit our freedom of choice” (Latour 1993:141). That “coherent temporal flow” is what modernity imposed upon us and which the dominant archaeological ethics has so diligently served.

A relational ethics, an ethics of multiple perspectives, moves beyond critique and reflexivity and tackles the issue of (un)communication. Critical accounts of modernity, such as those espoused by some brands of activist archaeology and which some ethical principles imply, have established a one-way utterance (indeed, a one-way understanding). By only discussing the concepts that modernity created and mobilized, and by locking themselves in such a discussion, they have failed to open communicative and transformative understanding. Is this a natural consequence of the incommensurability of different perspectives? Not so. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2004:9) called equivocation “a type of communicative disjuncture where the interlocutors are not talking about the same thing, and know this.” This would not be a problemFootnote 9 but the interlocutors often disregard this fact knowingly, especially when hegemonic positions are at stake—a colonial arrogance that repeats itself in the epistemic privileges academic knowledge so stubbornly holds to. Current ethical principles are not meant to reach out to incommensurable worldviews; they are meant to address commensurable things, concepts, and horizons. As a result, this kind of “communicative disjuncture” leads to blind alleys whereby intercultural understanding is curtailed—along with emancipation and freedom outside the walls of modernity. Indeed, (un)communication permeates the operation of most activist archaeologies and the ethics they promote. Concepts such as freedom, emancipation, openness, even democracy are all premised within the limits of modernity, that is, within its knowledge, its activism, and its subjectivity. Yet, those concepts are not explored (not to say enacted) in the terms of non-modern cosmologies, where radical transformations may occur. In the other hand, an alternative morality engages those issues from multiple perspectives. If archaeology is a liberation force for those who want and need change, it is worth considering the discipline as a locus where ontological struggles occur (only one of which revolves around change). While activist archaeologies do indeed foster collaboration and are open and respectful, building upon what contextual ethical principles propose, we cannot get round the predicament in which one of its related fields, public archaeology, has trapped itself (and which is a lesson all other related fields can learn from). As Richard Handler (2008:97) so aptly noted:

Indeed, we might say that a concern for “public archaeology,” while ostensibly a concern to “do the right thing,” has become a new disciplining routine within anthropological archaeology. And as a routine that professionals adopt as part of their disciplinary identity, the practicing of public archaeology may lead away from the critical reflexivity (concerning both epistemological and political issues) it was intended to facilitate.

This timely assessment of what disciplining and reification can do to even the most engaged archaeologies brings to the fore the asymmetries that linger in a practice that is still hegemonic—even more so after its acceptance by “alternative” accounts, by virtue of which the ethnic other is no longer a nemesis but an ally. A good deal of such hegemony arises from one-way utterances and understandings, confusing the place where conflict unfolds: “These are conflicts that fester under the assumption that parties to the conflict agree on what is at stake, when actually that is not the case. In other words, what is at stake in these conflicts is precisely the differing ‘things’ that are at stake” (Blaser 2009:879). These “differing things” are, precisely, the loci from where an alternative archaeological ethics grows.

Can we be happy with what ethical principles have accomplished so far? It depends where you answer from. From the vantage point of mainstream, academic archaeology they have indeed been highly productive, especially as archaeologists are now more responsible to their professional duties than before. Public/community archaeologists would say that ethical principles have been instrumental in reaching out to the public and in forging a wide sense of accountability, formerly inexistent. Yet, from the point of view of radical transformations (including the struggle for social justice) they have done little else than solidifying archaeology’s modern outlook. Further, there is a growing feeling that ethics has become a disciplinary routine that has numbed reflexivity. Indeed, the risk of ethical codes stifling ethical discussions should not be underestimated. If we couple the appearance of ethical codes in archaeology with its accommodation to multicultural changes, the possibility of ethics acting to mask, defer or ignore radical transformations should be considered seriously. As Pels (1999:101) suggested regarding his own discipline, ethical codes can be just “prophylactic against the uncertainties of questioning the anthropological self-image.” More often than not, taking ethical codes for granted solidifies a discipline instead of getting it to change. Ethics becomes a deliberate violence when appealing to a universal definition that, by definition, cannot be universal because ethics refer to specific moral values and, thus, is always historically determined.

Before so many critiques the wary archaeologist asks: can archaeological ethics survive? But that is the wrong question because it universalizes ethics once more and implies that actions may exist without morality—a philosophical and political nullity. The question should be phrased differently: can a multicultural ethics in archaeology survive? My answer is that it won’t—that it shouldn’t. The answer of many others is not only that it will but also that it will help the discipline thrive. Obviously, these differing answers are function of the kind of archaeology they envision. Those content with current ethical principles are also content with an archaeology mostly devoted to address academic preoccupations (still linked to an enduring culture-historical agenda and still treating the past as past), basically disdainful of the contextual milieu—the networks of relationships in which the discipline is entangled. They are happy with archaeology confined within disciplinary limits and are unmindful of the events occurring outside the excavation trench. Those contesting the current ethical order do so thinking and acting contextually—which includes a rejection of contextualism,Footnote 10 that is, a rejection of the separation of ethics and context. The archaeology they envision engage other ontologies not for gaining hermeneutical power but for relating with them in a learning and transformative way. Theirs is a different archaeology with a different morality, whose current greatest challenge is to break free from the multicultural appeals to cultural diversity whereby differences (ontological and otherwise) are subdued by negating their specificities as mere cultural perspectives and whereby inequalities are veiled. Its greatest challenge is, at last, establishing a distance with diversity—which multiculturalism promotes: quiet and safe, exotic, organized, commoditized—while engaging differences in their occurrence and being.

This is, thus, the current situation in which the future of archaeology unfolds. An ethical struggle around ethics.

A matter of choice.