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This volume examines the distinctive and highly problematic ethical questions surrounding conflict archaeology. By bringing together sophisticated analyses and pertinent case studies from around the world it aims to address the problems facing archaeologists working in areas of violent conflict, past and present. Of all the contentious issues within archaeology and heritage, the study of conflict and work within conflict zones are undoubtedly the most highly charged and hotly debated, both within and outside the discipline. Ranging across the conflict zones of the world past and present, this book attempts to raise the level of these often fractious debates by locating them within ethical frameworks. The issues and debates in this book range across a range of ethical models, including deontological, teleological and virtue ethics. The chapters address real-world ethical conundrums that confront archaeologists in a diversity of countries, including Israel/Palestine, Iran, Uruguay, Argentina, Rwanda, Germany and Spain. They all have in common recent, traumatic experiences of war and dictatorship. The chapters provide carefully argued, thought-provoking analyses and examples that will be of real practical use to archaeologists in formulating and addressing ethical dilemmas in a confident and constructive manner.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: the only way is ethics.- Chapter 2: Ethics in action: a viewpoint from Israel/Palestine.- Chapter 3: Archaeological ethics and violence in post-genocide Rwanda.- Chapter 4: All our findings are under their boots! The monologue of violence in Iranian archaeology.- Chapter 5: Archaeology of historic conflicts, colonial oppression and political violence in Uruguay.- Chapter 6: "Everything is kept in memory." Reflections on the memory sites of the dictatorship in Buenos Aires (Argentina).- Chapter 7: Archaeology, anthropology and civil conflict. The case of Spain.- Chapter 8: A gate to a darker world: excavating at the Tempelhof airport (Berlin).- Chapter 9: Archaeology, National Socialism and rehabilitation: the case of Herbert Jankuhn (1905-1990).- Chapter 10: The ethics of public engagement in the archaeology of modern conflict.- Chapter 11: Military advocacy of peaceful approaches for cultural property protection.- Chapter 12: Cognitive dissonance and the military-archaeology complex.- Chapter 13: Working as a forensic archaeologist and/or anthropologist in post-conflict contexts: a consideration of professional responsibilities to the missing, the dead and their relatives.- Chapter 14: Virtues impracticable and extremely difficult: The human rights of subsistence diggers.
