If I decide that I want to excavate your late grandmother to study her grave offerings, you will probably want to have something to say about it. If it is your great-great-great-great grandmother’s body I want to exhume, you may be less concerned, but this is not certain; you may feel just as strongly about your distant ancestors as you do about your proximate ones. Descendant communities typically want to exercise a considerable amount of control over their ancestors’ bones, artifacts, and places of residence, worship, and burial, and their interests may differ considerably from the information-driven interests of archaeologists.
Descendant communities are not the only ones who may wish to protect the bones and relics of past societies from the attentions of archaeologists. Some communities are strongly protective of the dead on religious or other spiritual grounds, regardless of the putative ancestral relationships between the dead and any person living today. Such groups simply hold that the dead should not be disturbed, and to varying extents this belief may extend to the artifacts produced and used by the dead as well. Such protective interests may be just as deeply felt as those of people who trace their own lines of descent back to the people in the ground.
There was a time when archaeologists could largely ignore the concerns of such communities - at least they could as long as those communities were indigenous groups, people of color, and other relatively powerless parties. Ignoring such concerns did not seem unethical because the core ethic of archaeology - obtaining data to satisfy human curiosity and bring the past back to life - was taken to be unequivocally good. Most archaeologists still feel that our motives in conducting research are essentially pure; we are hurt when descendant and protective communities call us ghouls and grave robbers, but that is what we are to them, and explaining the importance of our research has little impact on their perceptions.
As colonial power structures have given way to postcolonial ones, hitherto powerless communities - both those who have actually been colonies and those who simply feel colonized by virtue of being parts of a social and economic underclass - have become increasingly critical of archaeology and archaeologists. Since such communities often arguably occupy the moral high ground, and because their causes can generate strong public and political support, archaeologists have had to find ways to accommodate and respect their interests.
Some archaeologists and archaeological organizations try to distinguish between ‘real’ descendants - that is, people who can demonstrate descent using sciences like genetics and anthropology - and people who merely think themselves descended from long-ago cultures, or feel that they are responsible for the well-being of the dead. The former, it is argued, are entitled to respect; the latter are not. This sort of science-based distinction is embedded in some legislation, like the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in the United States, which mandates the repatriation of bones and artifacts to descendants or otherwise ‘affiliated’ groups, but only upon a showing of ethnic or cultural affiliation. This sort of distinction infuriates communities that regard science itself as a colonialist, imperialist activity; once again the dominant society is imposing its values on them. From the perspective of many indigenous communities, a distinction based on affiliation also misses the point. Many such groups feel strong responsibility for the dead, regardless of their relationships to anyone living today. It is, they feel, their responsibility to the dead themselves, or to spiritual powers, to ensure that the dead can continue their journey to the afterlife. Demanding that affiliation be demonstrated is doubly offensive to such groups. Not only does it impose the dominant society’s scientism on a community whose beliefs lie elsewhere, it also implies that one human being can ‘own’ another - a notion that carries widely troubling connotations.
Archaeologists - particularly those trained in anthropology - can empathize with such perceptions, but often have trouble embracing ethical codes based on such empathy. The core ethic of a descendant or spiritually protective community is usually entirely different from that of archaeology; the past is something to be protected, to be left alone, to be respected, not to be exhumed, scrutinized, and studied. Returning ancestral remains and artifacts to a nonscientific group usually makes them unavailable for research, and may even result in their destruction (from the archaeologist’s perspective). Collaborating with such a community when excavating an ancestral site usually places restrictions on what can be excavated, or on the kinds of analysis that can be performed.
Nevertheless, whether out of empathetic desire or political and legal necessity, archaeologists the world over have developed ethical codes supporting collaboration with, and often acceding to the wishes of, descendant and protective communities - particularly those indigenous to the area where an archaeologist works, such as American-Indians and Aboriginal-Australians, and those with access to local, national, or international political power. Many of us square these new ethics with our central research ethic by believing (rightly, I think) that we gain more in terms of understanding and preservation of the past through partnerships with such communities than we would from running roughshod over their interests - even if doing the latter were still legally and politically possible.
World History
