Introduction
Regardless of location, specialty, rank, heritage, gender, or age, ethics is an important part of the practice of every archaeologist. Archaeologists learn about, apply, and debate ethics in formal and informal contexts: college classrooms, staff meetings, publications, field-research sites, and at the bar (or metaphorical watercooler) during professional meetings. Long ago, the discipline of archaeology abandoned the idea that archaeologists practice in isolation a value-free science, free from interactions with modern peoples. Ethnic conflict, colonialism (and post-colonialism), globalization, structural inequalities, illicit markets, development, nationalism, imperialism, and terrorism – these realities of the world are all directly or indirectly connected to the global practice of archaeology.
Archaeology is the systematic study of past cultures and peoples based on analysis of recovered material evidence. Archaeologists reveal, interpret, and preserve parts of our...
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McGill, D. (2020). Ethics in Archaeology. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30018-0_283
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